Balancing Learning & Safety with Web 2.0 in schools

Welcome to the first issue of School Network Advisor, the new monthly newsletter from Lightspeed Systems. We are excited to bring you news about important school networking issues and technologies!

It seems like talk about Web 2.0 technologies is everywhere you turn these days. From social networking to video sharing and blogging, Web 2.0 has transformed the Internet, and has the power to transform education.

On his web site Tim O’Reilly defines Web 2.0 as:

Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform. Chief among those rules is this: Build applications that harness network effects to get better the more people use them.

By definition, Web 2.0 technologies are collaborative and social. They encourage discussion and sharing. All of these things make them well-suited to an active, rather than passive, learning environment. But while the use of Web 2.0 technologies in schools can enhance learning and help students develop essential 21st-century skills, concerns about safety, security, bandwidth, and more prevent many schools from utilizing these resources.

Lightspeed is committed to helping schools balance learning and safety in a Web 2.0 environment.

> Learn about the new Educational Video Library (part of Web Access Manager), which lets teachers safely share approved YouTube videos with students
> Check out the Web 2.0 resources in the Lightspeed Wiki for more information, including results from a recent survey on Web 2.0 in schools, a Tech & Learning webinar, blogs, and more.

(Joel Heinrichs, CEO, Lightspeed Systems)

EU: INTEL to pay $1.45 Billion fine in Anti-Trust Case

The EU has decided to fine chip giant Intel a massive $1.45 billion (€1.06 billion for the Europeans out there) for allegedly locking AMD out of the chip market by giving large OEMs discounts on chips.

The EU ruled that Intel had illegally used hidden rebates to lock rivals out of the CPU market. In a statement issued by European Union Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes she said:

Intel has harmed millions of European consumers by deliberately acting to keep competitors out of the market for computer chips for many years.

Intel has been ordered to cease the illegal practices and the company has three months to pay.

Intel has already issued a statement that indicates that the company plans to appeal the decision:

Intel takes strong exception to this decision. We believe the decision is wrong and ignores the reality of a highly competitive microprocessor marketplace – characterized by constant innovation, improved product performance and lower prices. There has been absolutely zero harm to consumers. Intel will appeal.

The record fine dwarfs the €497 million that was initially levied against Microsoft by the EU. Intel can count itself lucky as it could have faced a file of as much as 10% of its global turnover – which would have added up to a whopping $3.7 billion.

(Source: Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, ZD-net)

Homepage Redesign to Improve Customer Response

SUMMARY: The most relevant marketing content speaks directly to your prospects’ needs. But does your website give target industries an instant connection to the content that matters to them?

See how an IT consulting firm redesigned its homepage to give special attention to their top target industries. They used big buttons to lure clicks from key prospects, and drove traffic with a vertical-focused direct mail campaign. As a result, they’ve seen a huge jump in Web metrics, such as a 100%+ increases in time on site and pageviews per visit, and are arranging sales meetings at a faster rate.

CHALLENGE

Zaphyr Technologies provides IT consulting and services for the small-medium business sector. But that horizontal focus made it difficult for Shawn Butt, CEO, and his team to create marketing campaigns that resonated with specific types of businesses.

“When you say ‘We’re a one-stop shop that does it all,’ it doesn’t connect with people in a certain vertical or industry,” says Butt. “We realized we had to start to define which verticals we are interested in, and which we have expertise in.”

The team embarked on a process to identify its top industry targets, and then refine their marketing strategy to immediately connect with the needs of prospects in those industries.

CAMPAIGN

Butt and his team developed a new Web design and a direct mail campaign that clearly identified their target verticals. They also created content that spoke directly to the needs of those audiences.

Here are five steps they took in the process:

Step #1. Identify target verticals

The team examined their current client list to find industries in which they had a large concentration of customers. Their top three industries were:
o Law enforcement
o Accounting
o Insurance

The team then asked themselves whether those three fields were indeed the best markets to target. Several factors made them comfortable focusing on those industries:

- Despite the recession, accounting and insurance were the types of services that customers always need.

- Their New York/Northern New Jersey service area supported a large number of insurance and accounting small businesses.

- Although law enforcement was a smaller market, the company started as a niche IT provider for that sector. As a result, they already had a strong customer base within the regional law enforcement market.

“We had a third, fourth, and fifth option, but we didn’t want to spread our energy,” says Butt. “We decided these were the verticals we needed to focus on.”

Step #2. Redesign homepage with entry points for specific industries

The team redesigned its home page to communicate their new vertical focus to prospects. The also wanted to highlight their managed IT offering, which provides remote monitoring and management of IT infrastructure for a flat monthly rate.

The goal was to help prospects from their target industries immediately find a click path into the website.

- They added two large buttons (270 x 135 pixels) in a billboard located in center-right of the home page, which was dedicated to managed IT services. The buttons were labeled for their two target audiences.

Text on the buttons read:
o Managed IT Services for ACCOUNTING FIRMS. Click here for details.
o Managed IT Services for INSURANCE AGENCY. Click here for details.

- One button was colored gray, the other blue, to stand out from each other and from the white background.

- The team did not create a large button for law enforcement prospects, because security rules prevent police departments from using remote IT monitoring services.

Instead, they created a separate homepage for law enforcement prospects, www.policeitsupport.org. They added a link to that site in their homepage’s left navigation bar.

Step #3. Tweak standard Web copy for industry targets

Despite targeting specific verticals, the core message about the company’s services was largely the same.

The team wanted to convey details about their pricing plan, technology capabilities, and the benefits of using a remote monitoring service. But they also wanted to make it seem like that message was unique to the target audience.

The solution was to write standard Web copy, but to tweak it slightly for the accounting and insurance sections of their site.

Both audiences saw copy that included:

- A focus on three benefits.
o Reduced IT spending
o Increased productivity
o Advantages of managed IT service

- References to the importance of controlling costs and having stable IT infrastructure during a recession.

- Bullet points describing key aspects of the managed service plan.

That basic copy was then tweaked for the two audiences, using techniques such as:

- Adding references to industry pain points, such as “crunch time” during the tax-filing deadline.

- Using a different layout for each section. That way, a prospect who clicks on both buttons doesn’t see exactly the same formatting and assume the team just pasted boilerplate copy.

Step #4. Launch direct mail campaign to target industries

With a new website ready, the team conducted a direct mail campaign to reach prospects in their target industries.

- Working with a local printer, the identified a list of accounting firms based on criteria that included:
o ZIP code (North/central New Jersey and Manhattan)
o Number of employees
o Annual revenue

- They created a postcard that conveyed core messages about their managed IT services, such as:
o Lower IT expenses
o Predictable budget

- Cover image featured a man’s arm clutching a handful of dollars. Headline:
o “Get a Grip on Your IT Expenses”

- The call-to-action encouraged prospects to call or email the company’s sales manager to receive a free evaluation of their computing environment to determine whether managed IT could lower their costs.

Step #5. Make follow-up calls to postcard recipients

After sending the postcards, the team began placing follow-up calls to recipients. The goal of the call was to conduct a free evaluation of their IT needs, and to schedule an on-site visit with a sales manager.

“It’s part of our qualification process,” says Butt. “We’re really trying to find out in all sincerity if our managed services can bring down their costs.”

- Calls were placed 3-4 days after sending the post cards.

- The calling team was prepared to discuss the major software applications and IT infrastructure used by accounting firms, as well as their typical challenges.

“When you have a focus based on insurance and accounting verticals, you know the major types of software they use,” says Butt. “When you’re broadly focused on the SMB sector, you might call up a company that produces ribbons and have no idea what their computing environment is like.”

- Prospects who didn’t qualify for managed IT services could also be directed to other services, such as pre-paid IT support.


RESULTS

The vertical focus of the team’s new website has caught the attention of their target audiences.

After the redesign:
o Unique visitors increased 125%
o Average time on site increased 106%
o Average page views per visit increased 153%
o Average monthly email newsletter signups increased 117%

“We see that once they click the entry points of these two buttons, visitors stay longer and navigate more pages,” says Butt. “Once we get their attention they can see that, yes, we do understand where [they] come from.”

Likewise, the targeted focus of the direct mail campaign is outperforming previous post card campaigns that weren’t aimed at specific industry verticals. Although the team is less than halfway through its mailing process, so far they’ve been able to:
o Conduct a telephone qualification assessment with 15.9% of the prospects they’ve called.
o Arrange on-site meetings with 7.9% of the prospects they’ve qualified.

“When we’re talking to them we are talking their language, and we have them on phone for slightly longer period of time,” says Butt.

Thanks to the initial success, the team plans to produce more marketing content aimed at their target verticals. They’re currently working on a white paper that describes how outsourced IT services can lower costs for accounting firms, which they’ll place on their website with a registration form to capture new leads.
(Source: http://www.marketingsherpa.com/cs/zaphyr/study.html )

Wimax is the new LTE.

May 04, 2009
By John C. Tanner
telecomasia.net

The Wimax Forum held its second annual Asia-Pac conference and exhibition in Singapore last week. Here’s what we learned.

1. Wimax works … even on a slow-moving bus!

The day before the show, Malaysian Wimax operator PacketOne went out of its way to show off its network in Johor Bahru, shipping three busloads of journalists, analysts and delegates across the strait for a live network driving demo.

With a downlink running to the bus at 5.8 Mbps, the P1 team demoed YouTube, gaming, VoIP and video surveillance, which performed fine, although it would have been nice for the audience to be allowed to select their own sites. Worth noting is P1’s Wimax/Wi-Fi handover capability which leverages MobileIP to handoff sessions between the two access links for best-connection speeds. That all of this was done on a moving vehicle would be more impressive if the bus hadn’t been caught up in afternoon traffic jam. But who am I to be critical?

2. Economy failing? Wimax can save you!

Taking a page from the GSM Association playbook, Wimax Forum president Ron Resnick said that Wimax is essential to economic stability. For one thing, he said, the Wimax sector is still growing despite the recession, which shows its potential to weather the economic downturn. He also pointed to a McKinsey report showing that broadband overall is worth investing in because every 10% of penetration equals 0.7% growth in your GDP. And people use the Internet more during hard economic times anyway as they look for cheaper forms of entertainment (or at least job-hunting sites).

Zhao Songpu, GM for Wimax products at ZTE made a similar point, noting that people keep their mobiles and their Internet when the economy slumps, so selling them mobile Internet is a no-brainer.

3. The exaflood is coming!

Well, not literally. But several speakers made the point that dongles, laptops and smartphones are going to push mobile Internet usage levels into the stratosphere, especially video. Frank Perthel, head of Wimax business development at Nokia Siemens Networks, claimed that one laptop consumes the same amount of mobile data as ten iPhones or 100 standard 3G phones. Ali Tabbasi, senior VP for global ecosystem and standards at US-based Clearwire, put that figure at 450 handsets.

Which may not be a useful statistic, but Tabbasi did add that the Internet has reached the point where using up 1 GB of data a month isn’t all that hard – three hours of web browsing and email, a few CD downloads from iTunes, one or two Facebook sessions and you’re done. Cellcos still entertaining the idea of data usage caps might keep this in mind.

4. Embedded devices still rule!

Wimax players, Cannistra said, need to work harder to make Wimax compelling enough for the CE manufacturers to go forward.

5. Roaming: it’s hard!

There are lots of options for enabling Wimax to roam, from operator alliances a’la Bridge and Conexus to central bodies like the Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA), but the ease of roaming depends on just what you want to roam seamlessly. Straight Web access? Relatively easy, says John Dubois, global roaming director for the Wimax Forum, as long as you drop volume-based billing. Content-based services like video and music? Much harder.

Frequency fragmentation will also be an issue until Wimax devices go multiband, though WBA chief Shrikant Shenwai says that technical issues are the easiest barriers to remove. “The real problem will be cooperation on the business front and the commercial dynamics,” he says.

6. Simplicity sells!

Magnus Johansson, group director for Broadband Digicel in Jamaica, described the impact of Digicel’s marketing strategy – which was that customers could buy their Wimax CPE, take it home and be up and running in three minutes. Result: within six months, Digicel took 25% of the incumbent’s broadband access market share.

7. Wimax is LTE have a lot more in common besides OFDMA

All right, no one actually said that. But it’s striking that all of the above points are not unique to Wimax. They could be applied to HSPA/LTE as well. LTE works, is claimed to be an economic growth engine, can handle the massive data loads that new devices will generate, and will rely on things like embedded devices, roaming and über-simplicity to realize its potential.

Web Grows without Profit in Developing Countries

April 27, 2009

By BRAD STONE and MIGUEL HELFT

Facebook is booming in Turkey and Indonesia. YouTube’s audience has nearly doubled in India and Brazil.

That may seem like good news. But it is also a major reason these and other Web companies with big global audiences and renowned brands struggle to turn even a tiny profit.

Call it the International Paradox.

Web companies that rely on advertising are enjoying some of their most vibrant growth in developing countries. But those are also the same places where it can be the most expensive to operate, since Web companies often need more servers to make content available to parts of the world with limited bandwidth. And in those countries, online display advertising is least likely to translate into results.

This intractable contradiction has become a serious drag on the bottom lines of photo-sharing sites, social networks and video distributors like YouTube. It is also threatening the fervent idealism of Internet entrepreneurs, who hoped to unite the world in a single online village but are increasingly finding that the economics of that vision just do not work.

Last year, Veoh, a video-sharing site operated from San Diego, decided to block its service from users in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe, citing the dim prospects of making money and the high cost of delivering video there.

“I believe in free, open communications,” Dmitry Shapiro, the company’s chief executive, said. “But these people are so hungry for this content. They sit and they watch and watch and watch. The problem is they are eating up bandwidth, and it’s very difficult to derive revenue from it.”

Internet start-ups that came of age during the Web 2.0 era, roughly from 2004 to the beginning of the recession at the end of 2007, generally subscribed to a widely accepted blueprint: build huge global audiences with a free service, and let advertising pay the bills.

But many of them ran smack into global economic reality. There may be 1.6 billion people in the world with Internet access, but fewer than half of them have incomes high enough to interest major advertisers.

“It’s a problem every Internet company has,” said Michelangelo Volpi, chief executive of Joost, a video site with half its audience outside the United States.

“Whenever you have a lot of user-generated material, your bandwidth gets utilized in Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, where bandwidth is expensive and ad rates are ridiculously low,” Mr. Volpi said. If Web companies “really want to make money, they would shut off all those countries.”

Few Internet companies have taken that drastic step, but many are exploring other ways to increase revenue or cut costs in developing countries.

MySpace — the News Corporation’s social network with 130 million members, about 45 percent of them overseas — is testing a feature for countries with slower Internet connections called Profile Lite. It is a stripped-down version of the site that is less expensive to display because it requires less bandwidth.

MySpace says it may make Profile Lite the primary version for its members in India, where it has 760,000 users, although people there could click on a link to switch to the richer version of the site.

Perhaps no company is more in the grip of the international paradox than YouTube, which a Credit Suisse analyst, Spencer Wang, recently estimated could lose $470 million in 2009, in part because of the high cost of delivering billions of videos each month. Google, which owns YouTube, disputed the analysis but offered no details on the site’s financial situation.

Tom Pickett, director of online sales and operations at YouTube, says the company still hews to its vision of bringing online video to the entire globe. In the last two years, it has pushed to create local versions of its site in countries like India, Brazil and Poland.

But Mr. Pickett also says that YouTube has slowed the creation of new international hubs and shifted its focus to making money. He says that does not rule out restricting bandwidth in certain countries as a way to control costs — essentially making YouTube a slower, lower-quality viewing experience in the developing world.

“We may choose to set a limit to how much we are willing to pay in bandwidth cost,” Mr. Pickett said. In some countries, he said, “there may be particular peak times where instead of high definition, we might decrease the resolution.”

The Facebook social network is also considering lowering the quality of videos and photographs delivered to some regions in an effort to reduce expenses.

“We can decide, either on a country by country or user by user basis, to engineer the quality of the service for that cohort of users,” said Jonathan Heiliger, the executive who oversees Facebook’s computing infrastructure.

Facebook is in a particularly difficult predicament. Seventy percent of its 200 million members live outside the United States, many in regions that do not contribute much to Facebook’s bottom line. At the same time, the company faces the expensive prospect of storing 850 million photos and eight million videos uploaded to the site each month.

Facebook, which says it favors membership growth over profitability for now, is trying to increase revenue overseas by hiring advertising sales staff in countries like Britain, Australia and France.

In other parts of the world, Microsoft serves ads on the site and Facebook offers self-service tools to advertisers. But those ads are far less lucrative than the ones Facebook itself sells in the United States and Western Europe.

As a result, speculation has swirled about Facebook’s finances. Industry analysts wonder aloud how fast the company is losing money and whether it needs to solicit another round of investment.

Facebook said last month that it was on track to become profitable next year. But as it did, Gideon Yu, Facebook’s experienced chief financial officer, left the company. Three people familiar with the internal maneuverings at Facebook said Mr. Yu objected to such a rosy projection as the company was struggling to finance its expensive global growth.

Web entrepreneurs like Mr. Shapiro of Veoh, still struggling with his decision to restrict his site from much of the world, might have to find a way to soothe their battered consciences.

“The part of me that wants to change the world says, ‘This is unfair, it shouldn’t be like this,’ ” Mr. Shapiro said. “On the other hand, from the business side of things, serving videos to the entire world is just not supportable at this time.”

Future of Internet: Can it be Stopped?

The Sunday Times review by Tom Standage

The internet is falling! You may recently have read that it could soon be overwhelmed by an “exaflood” of streaming video, as people flock to YouTube and the BBC's iPlayer.

This is just the latest version of an idea that keeps reappearing in different guises. In 1995 Robert Metcalfe, an American networking guru, predicted that the internet would soon collapse. It didn't, and Metcalfe duly ate his words, after liquidising them in a blender. More recently there have been claims that spam and viruses will bring down the internet.

This doesn't worry Jonathan Zittrain. In The Future of the Internet he claims that it is in danger in a more subtle way: its culture of innovation is under threat and we will all be the poorer for it. What makes the internet so valuable, says Zittrain, a professor of internet governance at Oxford University, is its “generative” nature - a handy term that encapsulates its open, anarchic and innovative essence.

He contrasts the modern, vibrant internet with the sterile corporate networks and online services (such as AOL and CompuServe) that came before it. These generative properties have given rise to new kinds of software (such as file-sharing and internet-telephony programs), and new websites and online communities (from Wikipedia to Facebook). But generativity has drawbacks. In particular, the creative anarchy of the internet has led to security problems such as spam and viruses. And some people just want to take advantage of the new things it can offer (music downloads and cheap phone calls, say) without messing around.

The result is the rise of “appliances” that are designed to do one thing well, but are limited compared with PCs. These include video-games consoles, internet-phone handsets, iPods, smartphones and locked-down web terminals. They can all connect to the internet and do things that could be previously done only on PCs. They are not prone to viruses. But, Zittrain worries, the spread of such “tethered appliances” endangers the internet's innovative culture.

For one thing, it is not always possible to load new software onto them. That is what makes them secure. But they can often be remotely updated by the companies that make them, who can add and remove features as they see fit. This concentration indirectly grants greater power to governments, Zittrain warns, who may be lured by the prospect of “perfect enforcement” of copyright and other laws through technological means. Rather than switching from flexible but complex and insecure PCs to inflexible but simple and secure appliances, he says, we need to work out how to address the internet's drawbacks. He holds up Wikipedia, the free online encyclopaedia that anyone can edit, as a model.

The very fact that this triumph of positive generativity has not descended into anarchy suggests that there are ways to control negative generativity. He suggests various means by which Wikipedia-like approaches can be transplanted to the internet's technical layers.

“The puzzle of PC security is fundamentally the same as the puzzle of keeping Wikipedia honest and true,” he observes.

The trouble is that although the notion of generativity is elegant, Zittrain overstates the case that the internet is in peril. None of his examples of harm is terribly convincing. Just because I have an iPod and an Xbox does not mean I no longer use a PC; there are still just as many PCs out there to provide a platform for new ideas. It is not a clear-cut choice between PCs and tethered appliances; many will use both. Another objection is that generativity at the code level is not the only kind, as the success of Wikipedia, blogs and eBay demonstrates (and as Zittrain himself concedes). The internet is a wonderful way to spread new ideas, and not just in the form of new software. New content, communities and marketplaces have evolved, and none requires you to download insecure new software to your PC.

Zittrain insists that generativity at the code level is the most important kind, but it is not clear that this is really under threat. In the early days of home-computing, most enthusiasts learnt the essentials of programming. (Remember Basic?) As other uses such as word-processing and e-mail came along, computers became general-purpose tools, and sales went up. Did it matter that the proportion of users who actually learnt how to program declined? Of course not. As long as some people know how, most do not have to. And as long as there are hundreds of millions of PCs out there, innovation on the internet will continue. Despite Zittrain's concerns, the emergence of other, simpler internet-access devices alongside PCs seems unlikely to change that.

Copps: FCC Following "Ill-Advised" Internet Policy

By Roy Mark

October 10, 2003

Michael Copps, one of two Democrats on the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and frequently at odds with FCC Chairman Michael K. Powell, said Thursday the agency is pursuing an "ill-advised" policy for the future of the Internet, favoring closed networks over its traditional open nature.

According to Copps, "This Internet may be dying. It may be dying because entrenched interests are positioning themselves to control the Internet's choke-points and they are lobbying the FCC to aid and abet them."

Speaking at the New American Foundation in Washington, Copps said the Internet's success has been built on freedom, access and wide dispersal of power, but that policy framework is being threatened by the FCC's "warped vision" that open networks should be replaced by the power to dictate who controls the Internet.

"From its inception, the Internet was designed, as those present during the course of its creation will tell you, to prevent government or a corporation or anyone else from controlling it. It was designed to defeat discrimination against users, ideas and technologies," Copps said. "This freedom has always been at the heart of what the Internet community and its creators celebrate. Anyone can access the Internet, with any kind of computer, for any type of application, and read or say pretty much what they want. No one can corner control of the Internet for their own limited purposes."

But, Copps added, "The founders' vision of the Internet is being exchanged for a constricted and distorted view of technology development, entrepreneurship and consumer preferences. For its part, the Commission has already made serious regulatory miscalculations that could endanger the freedom and lifeblood of the Internet sooner rather than later."

Copps has opposed a number of Powell initiatives, including FCC decisions to not force cable operators to open their Internet systems to competitors and the recent Triennial Report and Order that allows incumbent telecoms to keep competitors out of the broadband market.

On Monday, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled the FCC should not have exempted cable Internet service providers from the FCC's competition rules, a decision hailed by Internet service providers (ISPS) and consumer groups, who have long argued that open cable networks would increase competition.

"Some argue that because of the ruling the FCC will not rush forward in other areas until the issue is resolved in the courts. I have no such expectation," Copps said. "(The decision) does not go, because it could not go, beyond cable to encompass DSL and any other technology that could act as a choke-point and give a few people too much control over the Internet."

Saying the FCC is "short changing" its public interest responsibilities, Copps said a "tectonic" policy shift is underway at the agency.

"The Commission strikes me as on course to replace open networks with closed systems. It is permitting, even encouraging, competition to wither in the face of centralization," he said.

If the FCC continues on this policy path, Copps said, "We will end by undermining the basic end-to-end principle that made the Internet great. Control will have been wrested away from Internet users and given back to those interests that control the bottlenecks, just like AT&T controlled them not so long ago. Broadband should be another step in the path of Internet growth. It may fall far short of its transformative potential."

Copps' remarks brought immediate praise from the the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), an industry trade group.

"ITAA shares Commissioner Copps' concern that this FCC is moving towards adopting a 'network gatekeeper' Internet broadband business model, limiting the ability of Internet consumers to freely connect with content and services of their own choosing. The Copps speech is an important statement on the future of the Internet," said ITAA President Harris Miller.