Category: News

A couple of days ago, Google Keep was leaked and now it’s an official app in the Play Store. The tag line is “save what’s on your mind.” Google Keep allows you to quickly jot down a note or idea to be saved in your Google Drive account and synced across all your devices. You can even add a checklist or photo. If you can’t type it out, you can say it out loud, and Google will transcribe it. You can prioritize you notes and color code them via the home screen widget, and if you’re running Android 4.2+, you can see your notes via the lock screen widget.

You can access, edit, and create new notes on your desktop by going to http://drive.google.com/keep, and Google will allow you to do this directly from Google Drive in the coming weeks. Google Keep is available now in the Play Store for devices running Android 4.0 and higher. Hit the break for the video demo and download links.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Play Store Download Link

Come comment on this article: Google Keep now available in the Play Store

James Bond fans may not have to wait long for the next installment in the storied movie franchise.

Reuters is reporting that MGM teased Bond fans with talk of a new movie during its investor conference call on March 19. During the call, MGM CEO Gary Barber reportedly stated that MGM “hopes” a new Bond movie will be released within three years.

Barber went on to state that the studio is developing a screenplay for the new Bond movie and that a director for the next Bond movie could be revealed “soon.”

MGM also revealed in its 2012 fiscal results that last year’s Skyfall was the “biggest” release of a James Bond film ever. The studio reported that its theatrical revenues increased $661 million over its 2011 revenues, in part because of the success of Skyfall and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.

Bond fans have never had to wait too long for a new installment in the franchise. The longest time gap between Bond movies was between 1989′s Licence to Kill and 1995′s GoldenEye.

The video below splices together scenes from each Bond movie into a single “movie.” It provides a look at the evolving visual style of the movies, as well as the different writing and directing choices that defined each era of Bond movies.

There’s a new kid in town, and it’s racking up video views: Zurich-based online video startup Viewster is set to announce Thursday that it managed to break into comScore’s list of the Top 50 U.S. video properties for the first time in February, attracting more unique viewers than Sony’s Crackle and the video sites of both ABC and Fox.

Altogether, Viewster attracted 8.3 million unique U.S.-based viewers in February, who viewed close to 200 million videos on the site. That’s pretty impressive for a site that lists titles like Mother’s Day Massacre and Saving Flipper as its most popular titles.

“Clearly, we don’t have the depths of content of a Hulu,” admitted Viewster CEO Kai Henniges during an interview Wednesday. But that hasn’t stopped his company from making inroads with audiences worldwide, thanks to an offering that combines free content with a presence on a wide variety of platforms.

However, Viewster’s business plan wasn’t always about free content. The company, which was founded in 2008, initially looked to make money with B2B services for other publishers. In 2010, it switched to a consumer-facing offering, with the plan to charge consumers for VOD content. Except, no one wanted to pay.

Looking back, Henniges says that paid VOD was “a horrible experience for users.” That’s why the company decided to give everything away for free for six months, just to see what happened. Unsurprisingly, consumers loved it. Surprisingly, content owners were up for experimenting with free as well, as long as they still got paid. “We almost stumbled upon the free model,” said Henniges.

These days, Viewster is still offering paid views for consumers who want to view movies offline on mobile devices, but roughly 90 percent of the company’s views and revenue comes from free, ad-supported content. Viewster offers a total of 6000 titles across its different markets, including fare from Warner Bros. that it licensed last summer for Europe, the Middle East and South-East Asia.

In a way, Viewsters model is similar to that of companies like Viki that utilize content arbitrage to cheaply license movies and TV shows for out-of market viewing. In the U.S., Viewster is starting to focus on Telenovelas, Japanese Anime and other populate niche content. “Internationally, we can be more bold,” explained Henniges, adding that his company was “in the import-export business of content.”

Viewster’s special advantage is that it has a very large device footprint, with apps on 20 connected TV platforms as well as Android and iOS. However, getting the viewers to find and actually use these apps has proven to be a challenge. Social discovery simply doesn’t work on a connected TV, where there’s often no way to discover content without browsing through an app. “They are all like islands, these apps,” said Henniges.

Getting viewers to install mobile apps can be challenging as well, but also very rewarding: Henniges told me that his company is seeing a lot of growth and engagement particularly on tablets. Currently, Viewster gets about 25 percent of its views from mobile, he explained, with only five percent coming from connected devices. But the web is still king, with 70 percent of all views.

That’s why Viewster plans to double down on its web audience through more curation and personalization this year. The company, which currently employs 35 people, also plans for some moderate headcount increase, but Henniges made it clear that he doesn’t want to go crazy. Viewster raised around $3M in funding from Germany’s Creathor Ventures and used that money conservatively. “We can’t spend our money into the market,” acknowledged Henniges. And, judging from the latest audience numbers, it doesn’t have to.

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TEDGlobal has been held in Oxford, England; Arusha, Tanzania; Mysore, India; and Edinburgh, Scotland — with speakers from a wide range of other countries. In other words, it’s a global affair. As we prepare for TEDGlobal 2013: “Think Again,” kicking off on June 10, we thought we’d take a closer look.

Here, go around the world in less than 180 minutes with TEDGlobal talks.

George Ayittey on Cheetahs vs. Hippos Continent: Africa George Ayittey on Cheetahs vs. Hippos It’s an often-told story: corruption is rampant in Africa. But there’s another story happening too.  In this talk from TEDGlobal 2007, economist George Ayittey introduces us to the “cheetah generation,” the movers and shakers who are effecting change. He predicts that they will soon overtake the “hippo generation,” those in power now.

Lee Hotz: Inside an Antarctic time machine Continent: Antarctica Lee Hotz: Inside an Antarctic time machine How can we get data on how the global climate has changed over the centuries? In this talk from TEDGlobal 2010, Lee Hotz describes a project to drill into 10,000-year-old Antarctic ice to find out more.

Leslie T. Chang: The voices of China's workers Continent: Asia Leslie T. Chang: The voices of China’s workers Over the past 30 years, a large portion of China’s population lifted out of poverty — in part thanks to jobs in booming factory towns serving new global markets. But journalist Leslie T. Chang finds one voice oddly missing from the debate about globalization. In this talk from TEDGlobal 2012, she shares words from factory workers themselves.

Elizabeth Murchison: Fighting a contagious cancer Continent: Australia Elizabeth Murchison: Fighting a contagious cancer The Tasmanian devil is an animal only found on the Australian island of Tasmania, and a virulent cancer is killing thousands of them. In this talk from TEDGlobal 2011, Elizabeth Murchison shares with his her fight to save the Taz from this unusual, contagious cancer.

Mark Pagel: How language transformed humanity Continent: Europe Mark Pagel: How language transformed humanity Mark Pagel is a biologist, and he has a fascinating theory about language — that it’s a technology that evolved to allow for cooperation. As he shares at TEDGlobal 2011, he looks at the example of the European Union—whose 27 members speak 23 languages, requiring translation costs in the excess of $1.45 billion a year.

Sheena Iyengar: The art of choosing Continent: North America Sheena Iyengar: The art of choosing Coke versus Pepsi. It’s a classic choice consumers in the United States and the rest of North America make on a daily basis. In this talk from TEDGlobal 2010, Sheena Iyengar shares her research on the assumptions Americans make about choices and how they are shaped by background.

Phil Borges on endangered cultures Continent: South America Phil Borges on endangered cultures Photographer Phil Borges documents cultures in the world that are in danger of disappearing. In this talk, he shares stunning images of the people living in the jungles of the Ecuadorean Amazon — a part of South America changing quickly following oil discovery in the 1970s.

Want to attend TEDGlobal 2013? Find out more here »

Google on Wednesday launched Google Keep, an Android and web app designed to help users remember things and jot down ideas.

Keep appears to be Google’s answer to Apple’s Notes feature, which rolled out a web version last year. It could also serve as a basic, mobile to-do-list service for people who generally make notes on more complex services like Evernote and Workflowy.

According to a post on the Google blog:

With Keep you can quickly jot ideas down when you think of them and even include checklists and photos to keep track of what’s important to you. Your notes are safely stored in Google Drive and synced to all your devices so you can always have them at hand.

Users can also record voice memos. Those who don’t have Android phones can “access, edit and create new notes on the web at http://drive.google.com/keep and in the coming weeks you’ll be able to do the same directly from Google Drive.”

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Earlier this week, Google Keep was spotted in the wild, and was quickly pulled down from view by the company. Today, Google announced the product.

“Every day we all see, hear or think of things we need to remember,” says Google software engineer Katherine Kuan. “Usually we grab a pad of sticky-notes, scribble a reminder and put it on the desk, the fridge or the relevant page of a magazine. Unfortunately, if you’re like me you probably often discover that the desk, fridge or magazine wasn’t such a clever place to leave the note after all…it’s rarely where you need it when you need it.”

“To solve this problem we’ve created Google Keep,” adds Kuan. “With Keep you can quickly jot ideas down when you think of them and even include checklists and photos to keep track of what’s important to you. Your notes are safely stored in Google Drive and synced to all your devices so you can always have them at hand.”

The app transcribes voice memos for you, and the search is “super-fast” according to the company.

It’s available in Google Play for devices running Android 4.0 and up. Notes can also be accessed, edited and created from drive.google/keep.

A larger picture is emerging about an online advertising scam that is reportedly soaking major brands like McDonald’s and Disney for $6 million a month. The scam, which has rattled publishers and the ad industry, came to light on Tuesday after a London analytics firm revealed that a network of zombie computers tricked the brands into paying to show their ads to robots.

It has also resulted in “toothbrushing.net,” a little-known site with oral hygiene news, likely racking up more visitors than famous publishers like The Economist.

Here are some more details, based on sources close to the investigation and other reports, about who is affected  and the scale of the botnet.

Millions of “readers” for a toothbrush news site

The “about” section of Toothbrushing.net says the site is dedicated to “toothbrush enthusiasts” and promises the “latest on dental news.” According to a source, the site is displaying 20 million to 25 million ad impressions a month. Since the site shows four ad slots on every webpage, this loosely translates to at least 5 million visitors. Nearly all of these visitors were bots not people but, for marketers, the effect is the same — they pay either way. (The ad slots were empty when I checked today  – see the screenshot at right).

To put the traffic of the toothbrush news site in perspective, consider that a site like the Economist had 1.7 million unique visitors in December and the New Yorker had 3.1 million. These figures refer to unique visitors so it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison but, using this crude calculation, there’s a good chance Toothbrushing.net did better than both of them.

And it’s not just the toothbrush site. Other obscure sites touched by the bot network, including Sodabottle.com and Techrockstar.com, likewise served up 20 million to 25 million ads in a month. According to Spider, the analytics firm that discovered the scam, there are at least 202 such sites tied to the bot network. Nearly all consist of little more than a smattering of cheap content you could pay a high-school student to write.

There is also the egregious example of Directorslive.com, an obscure movie site that AdWeek reports enjoys 326 million monthly pageviews. According to a source, the only site on the web to sell more ad impressions is Facebook.

Who is affected and who is responsible

The list of advertisers that paid to appear on botnet sites include dozens of major brands, and cover a wide range of sectors such as: retail (Snickers, Ziploc, Petco); finance (Citi, Chase, Amex); telecom (AT&T, Time Warner, Sprint); automotive: (Dodge, Ford, Jaguar); services (Zipcar, Seamless).

While advertisers are the direct victims of the botnet, major web publishers are also harmed because marketers lose confidence in the integrity of display advertising and prices drop accordingly.

So who is to blame? An advertising source provided six ad networks it regarded as among those it believed to be “problematic” because their sites received significant traffic from the botnet. Here are their names along with an example of a suspect websites they control:  Alphabird (Driverswhoknow.com); Digimogul (USBuildingDigest.com); Forward Health (Womenshealthbase.com); Precision Media (Toothbrushing.net); HiFi network (Dailyfreshies.com); Relevad Corporation (FFog.net).

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Klout announced the launch of Klout for Business on Thursday with the tagline, “Find the influencers in your audience.”

Klout for Business is a set of tools including Klout Perks and audience insights to help businesses get influencers to share stuff about their brands.

“Initially, Klout for Business will give businesses a complimentary set of analytics with pointed insights into how and where influencers are engaging with their brands in social media,” says Klout’s Matthew Thomson. “Businesses will be able to look at an easy-to-read dashboard that tells you, at-a-glance, whether you are engaging your influencers on the networks where they are most actively exerting their influence and on which Klout Score ranges you could stand to amp up your efforts. Most importantly, Klout can tell you which topics your audience influences others on, helping you maximize your content efforts to drive consideration for your brand.”

“Klout reaches over 70% of today’s digital influencers and attracts new users every day,” he says. “Klout for Business will continue to develop into a portal where we intend to help brands and agencies streamline their understanding, management and engagement with this important segment of the digital population. Our goal is to help brands and influencers build relationships that transcend the current advertiser-consumer dynamic.”

You can check out the product here.

Xbox Live is generally seen as pretty secure – at least more so than others. The service has never been taken down by hackers, but it has seen its fair share of account hacks.

Ars Technica reports that Xbox Live accounts belonging to former and current Microsoft employees have been hijacked by hackers. It’s suspected that those responsible may belong to a group of hackers going by the name of Team Hype. The group reportedly has a history of obtaining Xbox Live accounts and selling them to other players.

To Microsoft’s credit, the company confirmed the hijacking with Ars Techinca, and said it is working on a solution:

“We are aware that a group of attackers are using several stringed social engineering techniques to compromise the accounts of a handful of high-profile Xbox LIVE accounts held by current and former Microsoft employees. We are actively working with law enforcement and other affected companies to disable this current method of attack and prevent its further use.”

Unfortunately, there may be more account hacks on the horizon as a Microsoft Entertainment Awards Facebook app accidentally revealed account information for nearly 3,000 Xbox Live members. No passwords or other critical information was leaked, but the information that was revealed could be enough to obtain more through social engineering.

In this case, the best thing you can do is change your Xbox Live account password if you happened to use the Xbox Entertainment Awards app earlier this week. You should also be wary of any messages sent over Xbox Live asking for your password of other personally identifiable information.

Your Facebook wall might be filled with photos of Lil Bub and Grumpy Cat, but underneath the hood, social networks actually do a lot of work. And there’s a growing class of social networks being used by companies and organizations that are tapping into machine learning to solve problems, explained Jeffrey Davitz, CEO of social data startup Solariat, and GigaOM’s Structure:Data event in New York on Wednesday.

These types of networks, called active networks, crunch piles of user data and use artificial intelligence to augment human tasks and goals. In contrast to other AI systems where humans augment algorithms, active networks use machine learning to augment human decisions. “It’s the flip of Watson,” said Davtiz.

Both Davitz, and fellow panelist David Gutelius, the Chief Social Scientist at Jive Software, previously worked on active networks developed for military applications through the CALO project (Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes), which was one of the largest AI projects in history backed by DARPA. The teams built cyber assistants as part of military social networks that could use data on social interactions to give recommendations, like areas to avoid in a conflict zone, or more effective strategies.

Active networks could be used for other applications, too, like fending off cyber security threats, and making working groups within a company work more effectively together. The “collective capability” of the digital assistant and humans is new, and the industry is just getting started, said Gutelius. Apple’s Siri was a spinoff of the CALO effort.

The challenge of designing and building these types of networks is figuring out where the machine learning agent leaves off and the human social networks takes up, said Gutelius. The key to the design is making the technology recede into the background, and make it unobtrusive, said Gutelius, who says he spent six months trying to get a particular social network interface for military offers work.

While using machine learning over large data sets to serve up ads inside social networks isn’t new, Gutelius and Davitz see an era where social network data can be used to help people and solve important problems.

Check out the rest of our Structure:Data 2013 coverage here, and a video embed of the session follows below:

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There’s no telling who’s going to be left standing in a couple weeks when the NCAA tournament comes to a close. This season has been a showcase of true parity, with a bunch of good teams but no standout dominating presence. This could lead to one of the more exciting tournaments in recent memory.

We hope.

Since it’s all up in the air anyway, we might as well look at some alternative methods of choosing our winners. Earlier this week, we told you that LinkedIn had picked its national champion based on a ‘dedication score.’ They chose Gonzaga.

Now it’s Facebook’s turn. Their bracket is based on they buzz each team received in the weeks leading up to Selection Sunday.

In the Final Four, Facebook has Duke, Notre Dame, Michigan, and Indiana. From that, Duke and Michigan advance. In the end, the Puke Blue Devils end up taking the title.

As a UK fan, this whole notion that Duke may win the NCAA tournament can go straight to hell. Anyway, here’s Facebook’s data:

Those crazy Googlers are at it again.

Two of the company’s engineers created a way to control a lawn irrigation system using a number of technologies, including Android, Ardiuno, Python, Dart and Google App Engine. J.J Barrons and Joe Fernandez demo their custom solution in this brief video, showing the simple Android app that’s used to control the system, along with the hardware required to make it all work.

The two took things a step further with a web-based, fun interface to sprinkle the lawn; that’s the part that uses Python, Dart and Google App Engine. Best of all: If you have the inclination to put a similar “Irrduino” system together yourself, the two engineers are sharing the source code at the aptly-named web address of http://bit.ly/waterjoeslawn.

As impressed as I am by the project, I’d love to see the Googlers take it one step further. Perhaps my first addition would be a tie-in to the local weather that automatically disables the sprinkler system in the event of rain or other precipitation.

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Dachis Group said Wednesday it closed $7.5 million in Series C funding led by Austin Ventures. Dachis Group, of New York, provides a big data social marketing analytics platform in market.

PRESS RELEASE

Dachis Group, a leader in data-driven social marketing solutions, today announced the completion of $7.5 million in Series C funding led by Austin Ventures.

Brand marketers and agencies worldwide have quickly come to understand the explosive power of social marketing and the promise of engaging with their key constituents at scale. However, optimizing investments in social and measuring concrete ROI has proven difficult.

Dachis Group offers the most advanced big data social marketing analytics platform in market, meeting the increasingly complex measurement and amplification needs of global brands.

“There is no doubt in our minds that social engagement is driving more effective brand marketing,” said Chris Pacitti, General Partner, Austin Ventures. “Given the enormous market for brand spend globally, we are a big believer in Jeff’s vision and approach. With an ever-expanding set of social engagement currencies, it is our continued belief that the disruptive platform the team at Dachis Group has built has the opportunity to become the ‘de facto’ standard in social measurement. We are delighted to continue to partner with Jeff and his team.”

Building on a successful 2012, which saw the company launch its social analytics software, Dachis Group will use this investment to accelerate the development of its core big data social analytics platform, and meet the dramatic increase in market demand for its social marketing solutions.
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it, and we have the most powerful enterprise class social analytics platform in market today to help brands measure and manage social engagement programs across all social engagement touch points,” said Jeffrey Dachis, Founder, CEO and Chairman of Dachis Group. “This additional funding will enable us to better meet the growing needs of our customers who all share our belief that data driven social marketing is modern marketing’s future.”

Over the last 12 months, Dachis Group has seen significant traction and rapid growth for its software platform and data-driven marketing software solutions customer base:

· In less than one year, across its product suite, Dachis Group has sold over 100 enterprise licenses into large global brands including Nokia, New York Life, Starwood, Bloomberg, Bank of America, Estée Lauder, Juniper, Acer, and AT&T.

· The Dachis Group platform currently analyzes the social engagement of over 35,000 brands and several hundred million social actions every day.

· The Dachis Group platform currently analyzes the social engagement of over one million passionate brand power advocates, who in turn drive over 20% of all earned brand impressions for the brands the company tracks.

· This data represents over 850 trillion permutations of data and the analysis of almost three million brand relevant social signals a day and the effectiveness and brand impact of almost 20 billion earned brand impressions daily.

For more information, visit www.dachisgroup.com.

About Austin Ventures

Austin Ventures has worked with talented entrepreneurs to build valuable companies for over 25 years. With $3.9 billion under management, Austin Ventures is the most active venture capital and growth equity firm in Texas and one of the most established in the nation. With an investment focus on business services and supply chain, financial services, new media, Internet, and information services, Austin Ventures invests at all stages of company development. Austin Ventures’ strategy is to partner with talented executives and entrepreneurs through its CEO-in-Residence and Entrepreneur-in-Residence programs. Visit austinventures.com for more information.

About Dachis Group

Dachis Group is the global leader in data-driven social marketing solutions. Built on a proprietary big data analytics platform, Dachis Group’s social performance measurement and amplification software applications, collaborative insights and reporting capabilities, and world leading data-driven social marketing solutions group help the world’s largest brands engage@scale with their customers.

Every day, Dachis Group’s big data social analytics platform monitors over 10 billion social behaviors and 50 million+ social signals in real-time.  Dachis Group delivers powerful insights by tracking, monitoring and helping manage conversations and content across 35,000 brands, 100 million social accounts, and an aggregate audience of 7 billion followers, fans, subscribers and contributors from 233 countries across dozens of the largest social platforms.

The company serves many of the world’s largest brand marketers and their agencies including Disney, Estée Lauder, US Cellular, Hewlett Packard, Nestlé, and Nokia.

Dachis Group Social Marketing Software and Solutions – Engagement@Scale

Performance Measurement
Campaign Performance Monitor – Dachis Group’s Campaign Performance Monitor measures the value of social campaigns by providing detailed isolation of campaign specific engagement metrics around the content, conversation, advocates and campaign relevant social signals needed for optimizing social marketing campaign performance while they are executing.

Social Performance Monitor – Dachis Group’s Social Performance Monitor is a powerful brand-based social performance benchmarking, measurement, insights, and optimization solution for measuring social marketing’s impact on brand performance.

Amplification
Advocate Insight – The world’s largest global brands have large numbers of passionate fans.  How do you identify them and maximize their earned media value? Dachis Group’s Advocate Insight offers advanced advocate identification, management, and activation capabilities.

Employee Insight – Employee advocates are an untapped resource for most of the world’s brands. Dachis Group’s Employee Insight offers advanced employee advocate recruitment, management, and activation capabilities including a configurable online portal to mobilize employees with workflows and messaging to accelerate participation and authentically echo and amplify a brand’s social efforts.

Collaborative Insights and Reporting
All Dachis Group solutions come with collaborative insights capabilities enabling social teams, agencies, and brand management to easily collaborate on driving insights from social engagement data, and deliver out of the box gorgeous “Boss Ready” reporting with just one click.

Data-driven Social Marketing Solutions
To help brands or their agencies drive engagement at scale and social marketing success, Dachis Group offers a set of packaged, managed and custom social marketing engagement programs around the optimization of earned vs. owned vs. paid media investments, content, conversation, advocacy, community, and campaigns, and ongoing solutions for reporting, benchmarking, analysis, and insights.

Engage@Scale with Dachis Group

Social Business Index
Dachis Group develops and maintains the Social Business Index, providing ongoing real-time ranking, analysis, and benchmarking of social business performance for over 25,000 companies and over 35,000 brands tracking their conversations and activity across a social business graph of 100 million social accounts and 233 countries.

Social Business Summit Series
To provide ongoing support to customers that want to engage@scale, Dachis Group hosts an ongoing series of annual Social Business Summits around the globe, exploring the most current ideas in social business thought leadership, fostering ongoing dialog among participants, and engaging other social business practitioners in real-time, in-person, day-long events.

Social Business Council
Dachis Group operates and manages the Social Business Council, the largest peer-to-peer knowledge-sharing community for social marketers and social business practitioners to share ideas, best practices, and learnings from a community.

Social Business Journal
Dachis Group publishes a quarterly journal with in-depth coverage and analysis of the most relevant topics related to social marketing in both print and digital format.

Dachis Group is hiring the best people to join the world’s most advanced big data social analytics team and to work on the most sophisticated data-driven social marketing solutions.  Review job opportunities at http://www.dachisgroup.com/careers/ and contact [email protected] to introduce yourself.

The post Austin Ventures Leads $7.5 Mln Series C for Dachis Group appeared first on peHUB.

Thanks to the folks from Mediacom for sending me this update.

Digital Families Gain Faster, 50-meg Internet Speeds; Broadband Boost for Carlton, Lake, Itasca, Pine and St. Louis Counties

GRAND RAPIDS, MN – March 19, 2013 — Mediacom Communications announced today that it has more than doubled the speeds of its broadband Internet service to provide homes and businesses throughout its Northern Minnesota service areas with download speeds of 50 mega-bits-per-second (Mbps) and upload speeds of 5 Mbps. The higher-speed Internet service, Ultra 50, is 150-percent faster than the 20 Mbps service many customers have been using.

Mediacom’s Ultra 50 broadband service became available in recent weeks after upgrades to the company’s fiber-optic communications network were completed in Cloquet, Eveleth, Hibbing and Two Harbors. Ultra 50 is the result of the cable industry’s innovative channel bonding technology known as DOCSIS 3.0 that uses a cable modem to deliver faster Internet speeds used for bandwidth-intensive applications such as movie downloads, file sharing, and online gaming.  The 50-meg service is ideal for homes and businesses where multiple devices or multiple Internet connections are used to send or receive data.

“From the largest cities to the smallest towns, Americans are consuming more bandwidth and demanding a faster Internet,” Jensen said.  “With recent launches, Mediacom delivers the high speeds of Ultra 50 broadband service through an extensive area of Minnesota, from Worthington to Litchfield in the southern and central areas of the state, and now extending north to include communities in Itasca, St. Louis, Carlton, Pine and Lake Counties.”

The DOCSIS technology of Mediacom Ultra 50 allows a consumer to download a high-definition (HD) movie (6 gigabytes) in just 16 minutes.  That compares to the 4.4 hours it would take to download the same movie using a common 3 Mbps DSL service from a traditional phone company, according to Mediacom Regional Vice President Bill Jensen.

“This broadband boost demonstrates Mediacom’s commitment to continually invest in technology and expand our fiber network to ensure that consumers in all of our service areas can connect to reliably fast broadband service,” Jensen said.

Jensen explained that new Internet applications have rapidly developed and changed how today’s consumers use the Internet.  “We watch news, sports and movies online; we frequently check updates for weather or sports scores, find recipes, play games, share digital photos with friends and family.  The list goes on and on.”

Mediacom was among the earliest cable companies to offer the new-generation broadband service of DOCSIS 3.0, which it makes available to both residential and business customers.  Each Mediacom Ultra 50 customer is equipped with a new, more powerful modem configured for the higher Internet speeds.

“The broadband speed of Mediacom Ultra 50 is in greater demand today than even just 12 months ago,” Jensen said. “It has become essential for families using multiple devices that connect to the Internet — tablets, laptops, smart phones or gaming consoles.  With the dramatic changes in the way today’s families and businesses use the Internet, the need for more bandwidth has never been greater.  The speed of Ultra 50 delivers a reliably better experience for the whole family or office.”

Mediacom Communications is the nation’s eighth largest cable television company and one of the leading cable operators focused on serving the smaller cities in the United States, with a significant concentration in the Midwestern and Southeastern regions. Mediacom Communications offers a wide array of broadband products and services, including traditional and advanced video services such as digital television, video-on-demand, digital video recorders, high-definition television, as well as high-speed Internet access and phone service. Through Mediacom Business, the Company offers affordable broadband communications solutions that can be tailored to any size business.

# # #

IMPACT AREA:  higher-speed broadband service, Mediacom Ultra 50, is available to residents and businesses in the areas listed below.

Carlton County:  Cloquet, Esko, Carlton, Moose Lake, Moose Lake Township, Thomson, Windemere

Itasca County: Calumet, Cohasset, Coleraine, Grand Rapids, Harris Township, Keewatin, La Prairie, Marble, Nashwauk, Taconite

Lake County:  Beaver Bay, Silver Bay, Two Harbors

Pine County:  Sturgeon Lake

St. Louis County:  Hibbing, Chisholm, Buhl, Kinney, Mt. Iron, Virginia, Fayal, Eveleth, Gilbert, McKinley, Biwabik, Aurora, Hoyt Lakes, White Township, Proctor, Midway Township, Hermantown

It sounds as if there are tiers of service available beyond their standard Mediacom Prime which is 15 Mbps; they offer Prime Plus speed at 30 Mbps (down) x 2 Mbps (up). They mentioned to me that more and more people are starting to take advantage of the higher level services, which I think helps indicate that while build and they will come may not work for minimum speeds – folks will upgrade with less coaxing once great bandwidth is available.

Farrah Abraham, one of the starts of the reality TV show Teen Mom, has been arrested for driving under the influence.

TMZ is reporting that Abraham was pulled over in Omaha, Nebraska after making a wide turn. The police later determined that she had a blood alcohol level twice the legal limit.

Abraham began starring in the MTV reality series Teen Mom in 2009. The show has chronicled Abraham’s family problems and her difficulties raising her four-year-old daughter, Sophia Abraham. Police have stated that Sophia was not in the car with Abraham when she was arrested.

Abraham has not directly addressed the incident, but did post a reference to it to her Twitter feed:

Follow @F1abraham

Farrah Abraham
@F1abraham

It’s Amazing what people believe & makeup (LOVE MY LIFE) #Thank#God#I‘mSuccessful & I don’t care about drama! #HaveAGreatDay

 Reply  ·  Retweet  ·  Favorite
4 hours ago via Twitter for iPhone · powered by @socialditto

Abraham is not the first Teen Mom star to run into trouble with the law. Last summer, Amber Portwood was sentenced to five years in prison for domestic battery charges.

Abraham also made headlines in January, when video surfaced showing her forcibly waxing Sophia’s eyebrows:

A company that holds many patents to digital rights management (DRM) software is suing Apple over 15 patents. Intertrust Technologies, which is based near Apple headquarters in California, says the iPod, iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, iCloud and iTunes and other Apple software infringe on its security-related and distributed computing patents, according to papers filed in federal court.

The Wall Street Journal first reported the suit on Wednesday, and noted that Intertrust is not some fly-by-night operation or random patent troll. It has two big backers who are also consumer electronics companies: Sony and Philips.

Intertrust has 250 patents related to digital copy protection software security and and has licensed them to plenty of Apple’s peers — HTC, Samsung, Nokia,, Huawei — but Apple is apparently refusing to pay up, which resulted in the filing of the suit.

In a statement, Intertrust CEO Talal Shamoon said:

“Apple makes many great products that use Intertrust’s inventions. Our patents are foundational to modern Internet security and trusted computing, and result from years of internal research and development. We are proud of our record of peaceful and constructive licensing with industry leaders. We find it regrettable that we are forced to seek Court assistance to resolve this matter.”

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