Author: Om Malik

Nearly 4.1 million new subscribers signed up for broadband from the 19 largest cable and telephone providers in the U.S. in 2009, according to Durham, N.H.-based Leichtman Research Group. These 19 service providers account for about 93 percent (about 71.8 million subscribers) of the total U.S. market. Annual net broadband additions in 2009 were 75 percent of the 2008 total, when these same carriers added about 5.4 million subscribers.

Here are excerpts from the report:

• The top cable companies netted 57 percent of the broadband additions in 2009 and added 2.3 million broadband subscribers.
• The top telephone providers added over 1.7 million broadband subscribers.
• In the fourth quarter of 2009, cable and telephone providers added 890,000 broadband subscribers -– with cable companies adding about 580,000 subscribers and phone companies adding about 310,000 subscribers.

Rupert Murdoch, the legendary founder of News Corp., has always had a love-hate relationship with the digital world. Sometimes (read: during the bubbles) he loves it. Sometimes (read: during advertising recessions) he hates it. His recent moves – whether it be getting rid of some of News Corp’s digital holdings or shuffling the chairs at MySpace — are a continuation of that love-hate relationship. (Watch the video below the fold.)

And as we all know (and have read), he is not so enamored with Google, the so-called content stealer. (Never mind that he was OK taking Google’s $900 million when the search giant wanted to run ads on MySpace.) In an interview with Fox Business Network in Abu Dhabi, Murdoch said:

“Well Fox is now paid for. People when they pay their cable bills some of it comes to Fox. Cable television is paid television. But search on the Internet whether it be Bing or Google, whatever, it’s free and they simply take all our expensive and we think very good content such as Wall Street Journal or whatever and what they call they scrape it and they use it for search, it gives them their raw material for nothing and then they have this very clever business model of charging for searching it, we don’t get any of that. And they are technologically brilliant, they are a long way ahead but they do not have the right to do it if we want to stop them.”

In contrast to Google, it seems he loves Apple’s iPad and what it can do for the publisher.

Now that Apple is coming out with the Ipad that will be a very interesting way, more media is going to go into the Ipad…And they’ll get better and better and you’ll be able to do more tricks with it…And particularly with advertising and you see an advisement and you touch it and it becomes a 30 second commercial it’ll be these sort of things will happen not this year perhaps.”

Betaworks, a New York City-based Internet company, has raised $20 million in new venture funding, according to company executives. Intel Capital and previous investor RRE Ventures led the current round, which included Softbank, Founders Collective, DFJ Growth, AOL Ventures and the New York Times. The company had previously raised $8 million.

Betaworks, the brainchild of former AOL executives John Borthwick and Andrew Weisman, views itself as a holding company that both invests in and operates Internet and digital media companies.

In some ways for its investors, Betaworks is a bet on the newly emergent sector amorphously described as the real-time web. It is best known for its bets on the Twitter ecosystem.

The company first tasted success when it sold Summize, an early entrant into the real-time search market, to Twitter in July 2008 for a reportedly big stake in the San Francisco-based company. Since then Betaworks has launched and subsequently spun out URL-shortener Bit.ly, which ended up raising $2 million from the likes of Mitch Kapor and Jeff Clavier of Softech VC. It also created social media analytics company, Chartbeat, a company that emerged from the ashes of a failed Betaworks startup, Firefly.

In comparison to Bit.ly and Chartbeat, Betaworks is purely an investor in Tweetdeck, a very popular Twitter reader. “We have stakes in 24 companies –- some small and some large stakes,” says co-founder Borthwick. It owns a big chunk of five companies -– Bit.ly, Chartbeat, Tweetdeck, Twitterfeed and another startup currently in stealth.

Borthwick explains that the company will use the new funds to do two things: be more aggressive in investing in more startups while at the same time, do follow-on investments as their companies scale up.

Borthwick bristles at the idea of being equated to an incubator.  He views Betaworks as a holding company in the mold of, say, Liberty Media and Barry Diller’s IAC. Of course, on the other end of the spectrum are disgraced names from another era, like CMGI.

P.S.: If you want to get a better idea of how Betaworks thinks about the world of Internet and digital media, check out this  post from Betaworks’ Josh Auerbach.

Digg, the San Francisco-based social media company, is dropping MySQL and instead betting its future on Cassandra, an open-source data store. It’s just the latest sign of the growing popularity of the software, which was developed (and open sourced) by Facebook to search through its inbox. While Facebook has since backed off Cassandra, Digg plans to open source all its work on Cassandra and champion the software’s development and adoption.

In a blog post on the Digg blog, John Quinn, Digg’s VP of engineering, writes:

Perhaps our most significant infrastructure change is abandoning MySQL in favor of a NoSQL alternative. To someone like me who’s been building systems almost exclusively on relational databases for almost 20 years, this feels like a bold move.

What’s Wrong with MySQL?

Our primary motivation for moving away from MySQL is the increasing difficulty of building a high performance, write intensive, application on a data set that is growing quickly, with no end in sight. This growth has forced us into horizontal and vertical partitioning strategies that have eliminated most of the value of a relational database, while still incurring all the overhead.

Digg is just the latest high-profile convert to the NoSQL world. Instead of using databases such as MySQL, many of the companies that deal in near-real-time information are opting for new kind of data stores — most of them open source, such as Cassandra and CouchDB.

Cassandra is roughly the open-source equivalent of Google’s Big Table. It was intended by Facebook to solve the problem of inbox search; the company needed something that was fast, reliable and had the ability to handle read and write requests at the same time. Messaging in an environment as heavily used as Facebook requires a system that can not only store data but also provide results for search queries at blazing fast speeds.

Stu Hood, the technical lead for the search team in the Email & Apps division of Rackspace, recently said:

I think that distributed databases solve a problem that a lot of companies with large datasets have had to solve independently in the past…Cassandra has an approach that hybridizes the Bigtable and Dynamo models, where a lot of its competitors chose to take one path or the other. Over the Bigtable clones, Cassandra has huge high-availability advantages, and no single point of failure (possible because of the eventually consistent approach). When compared to the Dynamo adherents, Cassandra has the advantage of a more advanced datamodel, allowing for a single “row” to contain billions of column/value pairs: enough to fill a machine. You also get efficient range queries for the top level key, and even within your values.

In a post last year, contributing writer Gary Orenstein pointed out that thanks to these attributes, Cassandra has potential applications beyond inbox search that include “recommendation engines, targeted advertising, and content search, particularly when you combine many concurrent inputs and output requests to the same data set.”

Digg is a prototypical application. The company tells me that it gets:

• 40 million visitors a month, who in turn account for roughly 500 million page views a month.
• 20,000 daily submissions

It also generates:

• 170,000 daily Diggs
• 19,000 comments

As these numbers suggest, there is a high amount of interaction between the system and its users. No wonder Digg digs Cassandra!

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

What Cloud Computing Can Learn From NoSQL.

Updated: Faced with declining revenues and increasingly dismal prospects, some  mainstream media outlets are adopting questionable tactics, specifically dead-end web pages stuffed with outbound links and pay-per-click ads. A liberally funded LA startup is only too quick to help them. The story starts with San Francisco-based sex writer Violet Blue. She used to be a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, the SF daily with ever-declining circulation.

Recently, while writing a column, she did a search through the archives of SFGate.com, the online presence of the Chron. She discovered that the web site was “copying” and “distorting” her column archives. (Here’s the link– Warning: Not Safe for Work) Here’s how she describes what she saw:

The column had been stripped of all links, and divided across several pages. My bio was missing, as were all the comments. Freakishly, all the commas were gone. And the URL had been changed. The address was comprised of words; to my horror the URL had been keyworded to say “ashamed porn star” — the exact opposite of the article’s content. There is a much bigger story here. It’s all in what’s going on with archive duplication and the nation’s old media newspapers online. I think that the work done to the duped content is done for the purpose of SEO (Search Engine Optimization). The idea here seems to be stripping content, duplicating it, make SEO’d content that is a dead end for readers, and drive up results with cost per click ads.

The San Francisco Chronicle, it seems, like the Los Angeles Times, is using the technology of an LA-based startup, Perfect Market, which has raised $20 million from Trinity Ventures, Rustic Canyon Ventures and others. Tim Oren, a venture capitalist at The Pacifica Fund, on his blog, Due Diligence, points out that while there’s nothing illegal about what the newspapers are doing, it does border on scraping. Typically, spammers scrape web sites, then set up shadow blogs and fill them with pay-per-click ads. As Oren writes:

The keyword and ad-stuffed dead end pages apparently produced by Perfect Markets’s technology are isomorphic, from a search company’s point of view, to those created by more questionable tactics such as scraping. The intent is the same: to spam the index. This is the behavior that routinely gets questionable sites shoved to Google’s back pages, or banished altogether. One has to wonder just how long this type of abuse will be tolerated, simply because it’s being practiced by a recognized media outlet.

I couldn’t agree more. Nor could I help but notice the irony, considering how quick the mainstream media is to lament the traffic-stealer that is Google. It wouldn’t surprise me if more newspapers adopted these kind of strategies.

Update #1: A reader after some sleuthing points out that Perfect Market may also be working with LA Times, Baltimore Sun, Orlando Sentinal, South Florida Sun Sentinal, Hartford Courant, Allentown Morning Call, Virginia Daily Press and the New York Daily News.

Update #2: Julie Schoenfeld, Perfect Market CEO Responds:

Perfect Market has been working over the past year to increase revenue for newspapers through search and social media and we have had wonderful success. We are actively working with our partners to delight our customers and users with innovative new content experiences.  In the meantime, there are factual errors being perpetuated about our services that we would be remiss to leave unaddressed.

Here are the facts:

* Perfect Market serves up professionally produced news articles on the major search engines and only works with high-quality publishers.  Our pages contain highly professional editorial content, representing decades of careful work by journalists and writers who work for publishers to produce quality content.  We are held to a high standard by our publishers to preserve the integrity and quality of content we publish online, and we hold ourselves to a high standard.

* We are not ‘scraping’ ‘spamming’ ‘keyword-stuffing’ or ‘duplicating content’.  While spammers attempt to surface pages with little meaningful content.  Perfect Market simply manages the search experience for publishers.  We provide contextual navigation to relevant related content and topics so the user can browse the publishers vast content library rather than creating dead ends. Content is not unreadable.  Quite the contrary, it is out in the open and accessible to all, and often times, more accessible than ever before.

* We know how traffic from search engines and properly targeted CPC ads can generate big revenues.  We are bringing those learning’s to high quality publishers so they can more fully participate in the vibrant internet ecosystem.

From new data stores to large-scale databases to cloud-based storage services, it seems VC dollars these days are primarily flowing into two important (if somewhat unsexy) technology sectors: storage and big data. Which make sense, given that the continuous digitization of everything is resulting in a proverbial explosion of structured and unstructured data, in turn placing the systems under new kinds of stress. Here are some of the recent fundings that bring this trend into focus:

• Scale Computing just raised $9 million in funding in its second round that was led by by Benchmark Capital.

• Pivot3, a company that provides virtualized servers and storage, raised $25 million from Focus Ventures and other investors.

• RainStor, a structured data software company, today raised $7.5 million in Series B funding from Storm Ventures and Informatica.

We’ve been keeping track of this trend for nearly two years. So in order to get more context, check out these posts from our archives:

• Storage Startups Turn Cache Into Cash
• Who Will Cache in on Cloud Storage
• The Future Is Big Data in the Cloud
• Why Big Data & Real-time Web Are Made for Each Other.
• How Yahoo, Facebook, Amazon & Google Think About Big Data

It goes without saying that Google has gigantic ambitions. We hear a lot about its various products but it’s hard to contextualize those efforts. A new video from Australian weekly news show, Hungry Beast, is a graphical representation of Google’s grand ambitions. It’s also a lot of fun. Especially when you see former Intel CEO Andy Grove call Google a “company on steroids, with a finger in every industry.” The folks from Consumer Watchdog have embedded the video on Vimeo, as it is impossible to watch the video on the Hungry Beast web site outside of Australia.

THE BEAST FILE: GOOGLE from Hungry Beast on Vimeo.

A few days ago, Jay Adelson, chief executive officer of San Francisco-based social media company, Digg, told me that his company now has hundreds of servers. And that the size of its infrastructure was continuing to grow with its usage. And that’s after the company started to maximize its CPU usage after tapping the power of open source software such as Cassandra and Hadoop for data analytics and data mining.

And it’s not just Digg, but most mid-sized web companies like them are beginning to see the demands on their infrastructure increase, especially as they start to cater to more and more visitors, including those accessing them from smart mobile devices. Add to this the demand for enterprises, and it’s clear that we could soon see a bump in the sales of servers and by extension, the chips that power them.

These strong trends are already visible in the sales of AMD and Intel. While AMD saw the sales of its server unit go up 21 percent during the fourth quarter of 2009, Intel’s data center group posted a 21 percent gain in revenues for that same period. Semiconductor sector analyst Doug Freedman of Broadpoint AmTech thinks that people are underestimating server demand. He expects strong demand for Intel’s Nehalem EX – Westmere and AMD’s Maranello line-up of server chips and for both firms to materially benefit from a contemporaneous recovery in enterprise spending.

In a note to his clients this morning, Freedman wrote that he expects that there will be 14.1 million server chips sold during 2010, up from his previous estimate of 13.9 million. Of the 14.1 million MPUs, he expects Intel to sell 12.4 million with an average selling price of $519. He expects Intel to bring in about $6.45 billion in 2010 revenues. In comparison, AMD will sell 1.68 million units at an average price of $411, he predicts.

This growth is coming at a time when large web companies such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft are choosing to build their own finely tuned servers and use them in increasingly large volumes. The growth in demand and the sheer size of the revenues is one of the main reasons we are seeing many startups such as SeaMicro start to tinker and come up with alternative server architectures.

Stacey has pointed out in several posts that the increasingly ARM-based processors are looking to take on Intel and AMD in the server chip business and change the economics of the server business. But for now Intel and AMD can continue to party, thanks to demand for servers from guys like Digg.

The recently concluded Winter Olympics that were held in Vancouver, Canada are latest sign that user behavior is increasingly shifting towards online video. Akamai, a Cambridge, Mass.-based content delivery network with a global footprint, helped collect some of the stats about the Vancouver Olympics and they are truly mind-boggling.

I had previously noted that NBCOlympics.com clocked 710 million page views and 46 million unique visits. In addition, NBC Olympics Mobile served up 82 million page views and 1.9 million mobile video streams. But those numbers were a small part of the overall picture.

• Akamai delivered more than 5,000 hours of live and on-demand video over 17 days and at peak, served more than 30 concurrent live-streaming events.
• At its peak, Akamai was streaming close to 374 Gbps of video.
• The company delivered more than 12 Petabytes  (12,000 TBs) across its Olympics customers. To put that in perspective, the Internet archive has over 3 petabytes of data.
• On Feb. 28, at its peak, Akamai served up about 2.4 million pages per second, with the majority of traffic coming from North America, followed by Europe. This could be explained by the USA v. Canada ice hockey finals and the closing ceremony.
• Other continents had a passing interest in the events of the day.

These numbers are for the content delivered by Akamai on behalf of a dozen of its customers and not the entire Akamai network.

For more data and information on Olympics, follow our sister blog NewTeeVee’s Olympics coverage. They have covered the event extensively including all the problems with the event and frustration among the actual users.

NBC clearly skimped on the online coverage, much to annoyance of the consumers.

Barak Berkowitz, a veteran of Silicon Valley, has joined Wolfram Alpha, an intelligent search engine by Wolfram Research, a Champaign, Ill.-based company founded by scientist Stephen Wolfram. He joins as the managing director, a position that is roughly equivalent to the title of chief executive officer. Wolfram, who is English by birth, prefers the British corporate titles, it seems.

I ran into Berkowitz at an industry event earlier today and learned about his new gig. Berkowitz left as the chairman and CEO of Six Apart, San Francisco-based software startup, in September 2007. I first met Berkowitz in the late 1990s. He had just co-founded Omnisky, a wireless Internet access provider. I loved Omnisky and it was with that device that my obsession with the wireless Internet began. It’s good to see Berkowit back in action after a nearly three-year hiatus from the hustle and bustle of Silicon Valley.

Photo courtesy of a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/joi/3120270963/”>Joi Ito via Flickr.

There will be 288 million users of Voice-over-Internet Protocol (VoIP) by 2013, according to market research firm In-Stat. While so far, VoIP has been driven largely by the likes of cable companies that want to disrupt the incumbent phone companies, the next big VoIP boost is going to come from mobile.

In-Stat believes over half of those 288 million subscribers “will be associated with online mobile VoIP providers, under one-third will utilize mobile VoIP with 3G MVNOs or mobile operators, and 11 % with WiMAX/LTE operators.” Thanks to the increased availability of dual-mode phones, VoIP is becoming especially popular in the Asia-Pacific region, nudging the current market leader, Europe, aside. In the meantime, this move to mobile VoIP has prompted some to ask if we’re getting closer to an all-VoIP phone. I think so!

The carriers themselves are reluctantly embracing mobile VoIP, as we’ve previously noted. Today, Truphone teamed up with Australian mobile network operator Optus, for its Truphone Local Anywhere service. These kind of deals are going to become increasingly commonplace, taking annual sales of mobile VoIP applications to $35.2 billion by 2013, according to In-Stat. I wonder how that number would change if you included Skype.

Despite the big numbers, I bet making money isn’t going to be easy for mobile VoIP providers.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

AT&T, Verizon Grudgingly Move Toward Openness

Google for the past three years has been trying to upend the enterprise market’s leading software suite, Microsoft Office, with its cloud-based Google Apps. With cloud services now being widely adopted in the enterprise, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company’s offering is starting to pull ahead.

Google currently claims some 2 million entities as Google Apps users, from small businesses to large corporations such as Motorola and Genentech to cities such as Los Angeles and educational institutions such as Yale University. “Google Apps are growing quite rapidly, especially in the educational sector,” Rajen Sheth, Google Apps senior product manager, told me. The number of people actively using Google Apps now tops 20 million.

The primary driver of Google Apps is no doubt Google Mail. Based on the extremely popular and excellent Gmail service, Google Mail is gaining popularity because it works with established products such as Microsoft Outlook and the BlackBerry Enterprise Server. When I asked Sheth if Google was going to announce Google Buzz for the enterprise, he said: “We are planning to roll it out for businesses but with requisite policy and privacy controls.” Though when that’s likely to happen he wouldn’t say.

Google has seen a marked change in people’s attitudes towards cloud-based services such as Google Apps, which has resulted in it signing on dozens of large companies as customers in the last year alone. “Three years ago people said no way, and now more and more organizations see the benefits of cloud-based services,” said Ben Lutch, director of engineering for Google Apps. As he and Sheth explained, Google Apps’ biggest advantages are its availability and its disaster recovery features, the result of its ability to do “synchronous replication” very quickly and very cheaply.

All Google Apps are written on top of the Google File System, which gives the company the unique ability to not only write data to multiple locations insider a specific data center, but also across the multiple data center locations that make up the global Google infrastructure. Since these globally dispersed locations are connected to each other with very high-speed fiber connections, Google can literally save bits of your information across the globe. (Related: Google’s Infrastructure Is Its Strategic Advantage.)

“Because we are using a vertically integrated set of hardware and software, that essentially frees us from being dependent on third parties, where as other companies are dependent on these third parties,” Lutch said. “We do this to ensure that we are front and center of our infrastructure needs and we don’t have to wait for others to really help us.” Google has developed its own hardware — both computing- and communications-oriented — to work with its own software, which is essentially the Google File System.

“Software is our secret sauce,” boasted Lutch. “Our infrastructure is built on the assumption that there is and will be a failure somewhere so we have put an emphasis on working around those failures. We have done so by focusing primarily on software.”

A post on the Google Enterprise Blog offers additional detail:

In larger businesses, companies will add a storage area network (SAN), which is a consolidated place for all storage. SANs are expensive, and even then, you’re out of luck if your data center goes down. So the largest enterprises will build an entirely new data center somewhere else…..But if, heaven forbid, disaster strikes both your data centers, you’re toast.

How do you know if your disaster recovery solution is as strong as you need it to be? It’s usually measured in two ways: RPO (Recovery Point Objective) and RTO (Recovery Time Objective). RPO is how much data you’re willing to lose when things go wrong, and RTO is how long you’re willing to go without service after a disaster.

Enterprises without SANs may be literally trucking tapes back and forth between data centers, so as you can imagine their RPOs and RTOs can stretch into days. As for small businesses, often they just have to start over….For Google Apps customers, our RPO design target is zero, and our RTO design target is instant failover.

To backup 25GB of data with synchronous replication a business may easily pay from $150 to $500+ in storage and maintenance costs- and that’s per employee. That doesn’t even include the cost of the applications. The exact price depends on a number of factors such as the number of times the data is replicated and the choice of service provider. We also replicate all the data multiple times, and the 25GB per employee for Gmail is backed up for free.

Feature image courtesy of Flickr user OmarCaf, in-post image courtesy of Flickr user Andy Ciordia

Gift cards, as far as my friend Barry Ritholz is concerned, represent the end of civility, as with them the giver says: I put very little thought into buying this for you. But for me, lack of time — or information about the recipient’s tastes — prompt me to buy them, and increasingly so.

Whatever the motivation, I’m not alone. The gift card business has nearly quintupled since 1999, to stand at some $100 billion. According to credit card-processing firm First Data, sales of merchant-branded gift cards were up 2.1 percent during the most recent (and economically challenging) holiday season. But along with the growth in the number of gift cards being purchased has come a unique problem: More and more people are forgetting to use them. According to some estimates, nearly $5 billion worth of cards go unclaimed every year.

In my case, I simply ignore some of these cards that I receive, mostly because they represent brands that don’t measure up to my sensibilities. Pottery Barn, The Gap and Macy’s are among the brands found in my unused gift card collection. I’ve often thought how great it would be if I could swap them for cards from retailers that I do patronize, like Amazon or iTunes.

Anson Tsai and Tim Wong had the same thought, and to that end have created Cardpool, a San Francisco-based startup that offers a platform to buy or sell (and eventually trade) unused gift cards. This tiny little company has raised about $130,000 in angel funding from the likes of Mitch Kapor and Y Combinator. Tsai’s MIT classmate and close friend, Xobni co-founder Adam Smith, is another angel investor in the company that launched last week.

“If you look at it, many of the systems in the financial industry are totally broken and consumers are the ones who are taken advantage of,” Tsai said. “Gift cards are a broken industry.” It is said nearly $30 billion in gift cards have gone unclaimed over the years.

Tsai plan for generating revenue for Cardpool involves building a black box that marries gift card trade data (buying and selling information) with machine learning and analytics and using the system to make money off the arbitrage. The problem is that in order to do that, the company needs to have very high trading volume on its platform.

And there is also a very crowded marketplace to consider. Several small startups, such as Gift Card Rescue, Rackup, Swap A Gift, Plastic Jungle and Gift Card Buy Back are also looking to profit off the unused gift card market.  Frankly, it’s hard for me to tell one service from another as they’re all remarkably similar.

Tsai believes that the sheer simplicity of his service is what’s going to help Cardpool stand out amongst the sea of competitors. He’s also confident that the automated back end is going to help the company get a leg up. That said, Tsai and Wong clearly have their work cut out for them.

They are going to have to figure out a way to get more users to their platform. For now, the early signs are encouraging — Cardpool saw about 100 transactions in its first week. If they can grow that number to a few thousand transactions a day, they might have a big enough business.

Last week, when I met with Tim Brown, chief executive officer of IDEO, the Palo Alto-based design powerhouse, we marveled at Mint, the finance startup that was recently acquired by Intuit for a whopping $170 million. We talked about why it was a breath of fresh air because it removed the complexity surrounding financial services, cheating the system, in a way, in order to make consumers’ lives a little bit easier. In other words, Tsai and Wong are right that this act of simplifying and demystifying financial services is a wide-open opportunity –- one that is ripe for the taking.

This week I read some interesting, some bizarre, some funny but mostly mind stimulating articles. Here is a short selection that includes a must read post about the rise of narrative in social networks and a fascinating presentation by graphic designer Nicholas Felton.

• The Future of Social Networks. It is storytelling – or narrative based services such as Foursquare and GoWalla. This should be at the top of your reading lists.
• Tapping the network to facilitate innovation: Venessa Miemis argues that since “humans weren’t designed for mechanization” and we “designed to create” the rise of the social tools are bringing about a new co-creation ethic.
• A Brief Overview of Silicon Valley BS: Ivan Gaviria, an attorney with the law firm of Gunderson Dettmer, decodes some of the valley’s top cliches. Caution: colorful language.
• When it comes to privacy, Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus. Or something like that, in this New York Times dissection of Google’s current legal troubles in Italy.
• Pentagon Ignores the Warnings of Splice and Jurassic Park in Breeding Artificial Life: Forget Robots, the Pentagon is more keen on developing artificial life forms, writes Christine Fall for AMC TV.
• America, the fragile empire: Niall Ferguson writes a somewhat scary prognosis on the state of America.

Lastly, watch this video of graphic designer Nicholas Felton, the creator of The Feltron Annual Report. At PopTech 2009, he showed snapshot of The New York Times‘ front pages and what it means about America. Worthy of your time. And if you are interested in collecting personal data, check out Felton’s Daytum, a tool.

A few weeks ago, GigaOM contributor and veteran entrepreneur Allan Leinwand wrote a post entitled Cisco vs. All Comers. Well let’s add Google to that list of all comers. The Financial Times reported today that Cisco is developing a new “ultra-high-speed system for internet access in partnership with a number of U.S. service providers, according to people close to the company.”

Cisco, it seems, is trying to counter the unease caused by Google’s recent announcement that it will build Google Fiber, a fiber-based network that would connect homes at speeds of 1 Gbps. That’s despite the fact that Google executives dismiss the idea that the company would become a service provider, and characterize their proposed network as an experiment.

Regardless, the carriers are scared. Just like they were scared when Google said that it would start investing in wireless broadband by participating in wireless spectrum auctions. Earlier today we held our most recent Bunker Series Event where we discussed the broadband buildout ( GigaOM Pro, sub req’d), and I was pretty explicit in making the point that Google Fiber is a good thing, because incumbent carriers have been dragging their feet for too long.

When I emailed Cisco PR earlier today to get a comment on Google’s fiber plans and a clarification on the FT story, a company spokesperson wrote back:

Cisco is committed to continuing to partner very closely with service providers to enable advanced new telecommunications services. Cisco does not typically comment on other companies’ plans or products. With that said, Cisco believes that a next generation Internet will enable economic growth and job creation, as well as improve the delivery of health care, education and energy.

The spokesperson went on to note that:

In order to reap these benefits, the U.S. needs high-speed, future proof broadband networks that are accessible and affordable to all. Those networks will be predominantly built by the private sector, including new and existing operations using fixed and wireless technologies, various business models and partnerships and industry structures to create the next generation Internet. We believe the market will decide the best combination of those elements and that government policy should promote the most viable options.

And lo and behold, Cisco later emailed us an invite for an event on March 9, where the company “will make a significant announcement that will forever change the Internet and its impact on consumers, businesses and governments.”

Put two and two together and you can tell that something’s up. Ah, nothing like threat of Google to get technology companies re-energerized.

Updated: Since some of you asked in the comments, here are some of my previous posts about Google and Cisco and their looming competition. The competiton between Cisco and Google is going to manifest itself in many ways. The most obvious one will be in the emerging collaboration space.

Will Collaboration Pit Cisco against Microsoft, Google? & Cisco versus the World.

Google’s real impact will not be that obvious to the naked eye. I am going to write a longer, more elaborate post sometime this weekend and share it with you.