Author: Serkadis

CenturyLink, the nation’s third-largest telephone company, has decided to get join Google, AT&T and several municipalities and get gigabit fever as well. The company will offer a fiber-to-the-home, gigabit network in Omaha, Neb. beginning next week, with service to reach all of the Omaha CenturyLink subscribers in October.

CenturyLink is upgrading its existing fiber architecture in west Omaha using GPON and will serve homes and businesses. Residential customers can bundle the gigabit speeds with existing video and voice service for $79.95 or subscribe to standalone service for $149.95. CenturyLink competes against Cox Cable in Omaha, which offers a 150 Mbps service.

This is a pilot project for the telco, and will cover its 48,000 customers in Omaha. When I asked CenturyLink why it was upgrading to a gigabit, a spokeswoman emailed the following:

CenturyLink needed to upgrade its existing fiber architecture in Omaha and wanted to create a more robust network that delivers fiber optic cable directly to homes and businesses. …We will evaluate our 1 Gbps offer to determine further deployment of this advanced technology.

Better broadband = More innovation

As a broadband reporter with a passionate belief that more broadband is better for our society and our ability to innovate, I’m thrilled to see more and more companies testing the waters on speed upgrades.

When Google launched its roll-out plans to build out a gigabit network in Kansas City, it showed that it was willing to enter a capital-intensive business in order to protect its access to the consumer. At that time, ISPs were implementing caps and making a lot of noise about bandwidth hogs and the cost to upgrade networks for people watching video over the top.

Yet, after Google announced Austin, Texas in April as its second location for Google Fiber, AT&T issued a press release saying it too wanted to use Google’s tactics to lay fiber to the home in Austin. It remains to be seen if AT&T takes those steps, but it’s great to see AT&T considering it. A week after Austin, Google said it purchased the fiber network in Provo, Utah (it apparently cost Google $1) and planned to turn on a gigabit network later this year. In Kansas City, Google charges $70 for gigabit-only service and $120 for a gigabit plus TV.

Municipalities and smaller telcos are also getting in the game. Last Friday I covered Vermont’s telco, VTel, and its existing gigabit network that residents can connect to for $35 a month. In a talk with the CEO of VTel, he told me that the he thinks that gigabit fiber is the only way to bring residents and his business into the future. But his $151 million investment costs were offset by $94 million in government loans and grants.

Meanwhile, Century Link isn’t totally throwing its conservative talking points to the wind. In the release announcing the gigabit construction it added a note of caution:

The company will evaluate its Omaha 1 Gbps offer before determining further deployment of this advanced technology, considering such factors as positive community support, competitive parity in the marketplace and the ability to earn a reasonable return on its investment.

I’m curious about all of those things myself. If a traditional telco can invest in gigabit networks and charge a fair rate for them, then I’ll expect to see them pop up in more places. And not just in places targeted by Google.

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Mars: War Logs aims to be something that gaming rarely sees these days: a solid mid-budget video game with good mechanics, an interesting story and graphics good enough to keep players engaged in the long term.

The title largely succeeds it its attempt and the development team at Spiders and publisher Focus Home Interactive deserve some praise for this Xbox … (read more)

Google may face bigger tax bills in the UK, according to a report from Reuters, which says that Google executives and the company’s auditor Ernst & Young, will be called to a British parliament committee to testify, after Reuters’ own investigation highlighted “inconsistencies” in Google’s portrayal of its activities.

At issue is whether or not Google makes sales to UK customers from the UK itself. According to Reuters, Google’s Matt Brittin has said that it does not, but some Google staff and UK customers believe otherwise. In light of this, the Public Accounts Committee is calling upon Google representatives to explain themselves. Reuters’ Tom Bergin writes:

Lawyers and academics say that if UK staff did sell to UK customers, that could have implications for Google’s tax status in Britain, opening the possibility of much bigger tax bills.

Brittin, Google’s Vice President for Northern and Central Europe, told the PAC in November that “Nobody (in the UK) is selling.” He said Google employs “a couple of hundred” staff at its European headquarters in Dublin who are responsible for selling to UK clients.

Ernst & Young has refused to comment on Google’s activities, for confidentiality purposes.

Google’s tax practices have been the center of controversy in Europe time and time again, perhaps most notably in France.

Bike sharing service Social Bicycles has raised $1.1 million to expand the reach of their social bike sharing service to new markets. The company, led by Ryan Rzepecki, reported the funding this morning.

The round was led by David Rose on behalf of New York Angels as well as Esther Dyson, Amol Sarva, and Karl Ulrich. David Rose and Brad Higgins will be on the company board.

The company, founded in 2011, began as a Kickstarter project and then turned into a solid rental product with a pilot launch at the San Francisco airport in December and another pilot at the University of Buffalo in March.

The company is helping launch a bike share in Hoboken, New Jersey and St. Petersburg, Florida is on track to buy 300 bikes.

The bikes have built-in GPS systems and can be unlocked via your cellphone. Users can leave bikes almost anywhere and then find and unlock them anywhere using the app. This allows bike sharing services to exist without central hubs that take up valuable sidewalk space.

Samsung has a new smart, connected camera, the NX2000: the $650 device was introduced on Wednesday with a 20 to 50mm lens. This 20.3 megapixel camera has interchangeable lenses like a DSLR camera and both integrated Wi-Fi and NFC communications like a smartphone. The back of the camera uses a 3.7-inch touchscreen and the NX2000 can shoot 3D video with a special lens. I wasn’t a fan of the company’s recent Galaxy Camera with LTE at $549 plus data fees, but I like the NX2000, even with its $100 price premium over the older models.

Why? This is more a traditional camera that has integrated connectivity. The older Galaxy Camera with LTE seemed more like an Android device with camera capabilities bolted on. You won’t find Android on the NX2000, although I suspect the user interface is similar to the camera app on Samsung’s Galaxy S 4: Company representatives told me that Samsung is trying to use the same interface across phones and cameras.

Forgetting the interface and connectivity for a second, the NX2000 offers some impressive capabilities that you won’t find on a smartphone: shutter speeds up to 1/4000th of a second, a wide ISO range from 100 to 25800, and a large ASP-C sensor that is typically found on DSLRs. The NX2000 has a burst mode of 8 frames per second, which can certainly be useful, but we are starting to see high-end smartphones rival that.

Aside from taking advantage of a common user interface, Samsung is also cleverly using its own brand of Wi-Fi sharing. What used to be called AllPlay on Samsung phones and tablets is now Samsung Link. With it, you can wirelessly share photos from the NX2000 to Samsung mobile devices and smart televisions. The camera also supports the standard Wi-Fi Direct for sharing images and videos to other Wi-Fi devices. And connecting the camera to a phone or tablet should be easy with integrated NFC.

I spent a limited amount of time with the older Galaxy Camera and found the image quality to be slightly better than a smartphone, but not even that close to what I can get from a $700 DSLR. That’s the problem with grafting a point-and-shoot camera onto an Android-based Wi-Fi device: You get instant and simple connectivity but at the cost of image quality.

I suspect that won’t be the case with the NX2000, which looks like a camera with interchangeable lenses from the ground up, with the added benefits of Wi-Fi and NFC technology.

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Back in March, the Wall Street Journal reported that Yahoo was about to buy a controlling stake in French video site Dailymotion. The company was in said to be in for as much as 75% of the company.

The Journal is now reporting that this is not happening, though the companies were evidently in talks. Sam Schechner and Amir Efrati report:

At an April 12 meeting in Mr. Montebourg’s Paris office, the minister told Yahoo’s chief operating officer, Henrique de Castro, and France Télécom’s chief financial officer, Gervais Pellissier, that he didn’t want 75% of a rare French Internet success story to be sold to an American Web giant, according to people briefed on the meeting.

“I won’t let you sell one of France’s best startups,” Mr. Montebourg told Mr. Pelissier, his voice raised, according to people briefed on the meeting. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

Both Yahoo and Dailymotion are keeping quiet on the whole thing.

This could have been a major acquisition for Yahoo, which has not been shy about acquiring companies since Marissa Mayer took over. Perhaps the most important acquisition so far has been that of Summly, which Yahoo quickly integrated into its new apps for iOS and Android.

Image: Google Talks Archive (YouTube)

This week’s Chrome podcast kicks off with news that Google is testing Chrome OS on Intel’s fourth-generation chips, which aren’t due out until June. That opens the possibility for more high-end Chromebooks that will have much better battery life. Chris shares his experiences with Chrome OS so far and we answer a few listener questions including one about rolling back to prior software versions.

We have three tips for Chrome OS users while this week’s showcase extension is for the Chrome browser on Windows and Mac computers. Plus: more about that Skype version for the web you might have heard about.

Show notes

Hosts: Chris Albrecht and Kevin C. Tofel

• Shout out to the Reddit Chrome OS community: http://www.reddit.com/r/chromeos
• Chrome OS code points to Intel’s Haswell chips
• Skype for web arrives, but only through Outlook.com for now
• ‘n00b’ Chris shares his new Chromebook experiences
• Does anyone want a Chrome tablet? How might it work?
• A pair of handy Chrome OS flags: Immersive mode and contact integration
• Question from Max: How do I revert back to an older version of Chrome OS?
• Extension of the week: Chrome Office Viewer
• Pixel owners: looking for a case or sleeve? Try the Apple Store!

Got questions, tips or tricks for an upcoming GigaOM Chrome Show? Find Kevin on Google+, Twitter (@kevinctofel) or via e-mail ([email protected])

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T-Mobile USA and MetroPCS are no more. In their place we now find T-Mobile US, the merged entity set to begin trading as TMUS. The Associated Press reported that the acquisition was set to be completed after the closing bell on Tuesday, and the deal is now done; the newly formed entity enters the fray with a market capitalization of about $17 billion. T-Mobile also added 9 million subscribers to its coffers with the deal, so its customer count has now climbed to 43 million — which still makes it the No.4 carrier in the United States. MetroPCS investors are netting $4.08 per share from the deal, and they will also receive half a share of T-Mobile US for each share of MetroPCS common stock they had owned, resulting in a combined 26% stake in the new company.

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