It’s time for our weekly financial summary. The Fed’s move in QE2 is being criticized internationally, though we think the criticism right now is pro forma. Countries with large trading surpluses with the US have been upset by the US move to effectively devalue its currency, and that includes Germany, Brazil, and of course China. …
Broadband continues to be in the news, both in terms of policy and in terms of business model. The two, of course, should have some relation to each other, but it’s increasingly clear that’s not going to be the case in many world markets. The US elections and the announcement by Clearwire that they’d be…
One of the prime areas of focus for tech recently has been the tablet space. Tablets are far from new, and in fact some of the “new” models are more like reprises of earlier tablets in that they’re little more than a keyboard-less notebook. The iPad, of course, created an alternative vision of a tablet as…
In some ways, we’ve witnessed a historic election. The margin of victory in the House for Republicans hasn’t been seen since Roosevelt’s time, after all. But in a very important way we saw nothing but business as usual. For the last three elections, US voters have turned out the party in power. We’re never happy…
The IT world has provided us with a number of interesting developments this week, starting with a Google suit filed over a proposed Department of the Interior messaging system award to Microsoft. Google feels that its own Apps could have been used for this, and that they should have been given the opportunity to demonstrate…
Economically speaking it would be hard to characterize last week as great, and yet it was better than expected and certainly better than many had feared. The critical number, the 3Q GDP, came in above last quarter’s level, and that pretty much laid the double-dip recession theory to rest. Far from showing wild swings of…
This week saw what’s become the usual push and pull of supply- and demand-side issues, and perhaps a bit more than the usual confusion in the markets (financial, enterprise, and consumer) about the net outcome. It’s not been the wild week of stock swings that could have happened had economic news been bad, but at…
Anyone who’s followed my writing knows that I’m no fan of the National Broadband Plan. My main issue is with the data that’s been presented to back that plan, and some recent work I’ve been doing is making me even more skeptical—if that’s possible. What started me off was a comment by a White House…
Speaking yesterday at BBWF, Alcatel-Lucent’s CMO Stephen Carter talked about the need for creating a “European approach” to 4G broadband. Some of the specific points in the talk weren’t new; we need to move beyond all-you-can-eat pricing, we need to add some specific partnership and settlement processes, and we need to recognize the intrinsic differences…
Juniper announced a mobile security suite, building on its Junos Pulse agent/client software that operates across a wide variety of mobile and PC platforms. The elements of the suite (the anti-virus, firewall, etc. that are common to most PC suites) are less news than the framework in which it’s being provided. What Juniper is doing…