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Google announced the launch of the new Google Admin app for Android today, making it easier for Google Apps administrators to control things on the go.

“The Admin app makes it easy for admins to use their Android phone or tablet to accomplish the most common tasks—such as quickly adding or suspending users, resetting passwords, managing group memberships, and directly calling or emailing specific users,” explains Google Apps Product Manager Muzammil Esmail.

Here are the features listed in the documentation:

• Create and manage users, reset passwords, edit profiles, upload profile photos, and suspend users
• Manage groups, add users to groups, edit user roles, list group members
• Contact Support for Google Apps for Business with Customer and Support PINs
• Review account activities in the audit log, and filter events by event type or admin/date ranges

The Admin app comes on the heels of the recently redesigned Admin Console, as well as the launch of a new Admin SDK Google made available to developers.

The new app is available in Google Play. It requires API access to be enabled.

Major data center tax incentives are expected to become law in Texas, and the state’s data center operators are excited about it. The Lonestar state is already a central data center and hosting hub, but the tax breaks are designed to bring in new technology firms and capital investment. In recent years, other states have begun offering aggressive tax cuts, and the new incentives will help Texas defend its prominent position.

The Texas Legislature has approved legislation to create a temporary sales tax exemption intended to attract major data center projects to Texas.This exemption will apply to data centers with single occupants only. It now comes down to Governor Rick Perry, who has 20 days to sign, veto, or allow the bill to become a law without his signature.

“We are a very competitive state for large data centers in terms of our economy, geography and climate, but we haven’t been in terms of our tax code,” said Rep. Harvey Hilderbran, R-Kerrville, who authored House Bill 1223 creating the incentives.

Data Center Providers Express Their Support

Stream Data Centers, which has facilities in Dallas, Houston and San Antonio, and Companies like CAPSTAR, who own a large property in the Dallas market, are notably excited.

“Large data center users consider these economic incentives as part of their total cost analysis, and Texas was being priced out of the market,” said John Patterson, who works with CAPSTAR Real Estate Advisors and has a partnership in the 3000 Skyline Dallas data center building. “These tax incentives benefit the technology firms, but they also have a huge economic impact on the state and the communities where they are located.”

If signed, effective September 1, 2013, the sales and use tax exemption applies to  personal property that is necessary and essential to operate a qualified data center, including electricity; an electrical system; a cooling system; an emergency generator; hardware or a distributed mainframe computer or server; a data storage device; network connectivity equipment; a rack, cabinet, and raised floor system; a peripheral component or system; software; and any other equipment or system necessary to operate qualified property, including a fixture; and a component part of any qualified property.

Senate Adds its 2 cents

House Bill 1223 passed last Friday, and House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Harvey Hilderbran told the House he was willing to accept two important changes that the Senate made to the Bill:

• The Senate increased the minimum capital investment required to qualify for exemption. Projects involving a capital investment of $200 million qualify for a ten year sales tax exemption. Those with $250 million investment qualify for 15 year exemption
• The Senate defined a qualifying data center to require that the center be used by a single tenant.

How to Qualify

The significant thresholds are:

• $200 million investment over the first five years following certification in infrastructure, hardware, software, electricity, etc.
• 20 new full time jobs, which pay 120% of the existing county pay rate
• 100,000 SF building and larger
• Dollars spent on or after September 1^st 2013.

“This bill is significant because it isn’t location-specific,” said Todd Kercheval, a government affairs consultant who has lobbied for data center tax incentives. “These incentives are truly going to benefit enterprise companies, technology firms, and many communities all across Texas.”

To qualify, data center owner, operator or occupants must jointly or independently meet required capital investment, create 20 full time permanent jobs that pay at least 120% of the average weekly wage of the given county, with these jobs maintained for five years.

No investments made or jobs created prior to September 1, 2013 will count. The Comptroller of Public Accounts must pre-approveand will issue registration numbers.

What the exemption doesn’t apply to: office equipment or supplies, maintenance or janitorial supplies or equipment, equipment or supplies used primarily in sales activities or transportation activities, property on which the purchaser has received or has a pending application for an enterprise zone refund, personal property not otherwise exempted that becomes an improvement to real property, equipment rented or leased for a year or less, or a taxable service that is performed on property exempted by the bill.

“Data centers benefit communities by increasing real estate values in areas that are often underutilized,” Hilderbran said. “Higher real estate values mean more tax dollars for schools.”

The wall that broadcasters and cable companies have built around their services is not long for this world, according to Barry Diller, chairman of IAC. It’s not clear who will tear it down, and it’s not clear when it will actually happen, but the “centricity” of the video world is going to shift from cable and satellite to the internet, he said at D11 Wednesday.

Diller, of course, is doing all he can to help that along by investing in projects like Aereo, which has the established broadcasters running to the courtroom in an effort to get it shut down. Aereo allows people to purchase a digital antenna and receive over-the-air television shows, and as we’ve covered extensively, broadcasters are not happy that Aereo isn’t paying them for that right.

“Cable is a great closed system where the masses, now 100 million subscribers of cable, support ESPN that is only watched by 10 percent. That’s a great little plot so long as you can keep everybody inside the closed circle,” Diller said. “We’re out to get the centricity moved to the internet.”

CNN’s Jeff Zucker, who was billed as a joint speaker alongside Diller but wound up playing second fiddle to questions for Diller, agreed that a shift will take place but wasn’t totally sure, as might be expected given the company that pays his bills, that it would happen all that quickly. Still, “at the end of the day we don’t care which platform you get your information from,” he said, emphasizing CNN’s digital products.

Younger folks are the ones who are going to make this happen, according to Diller. “I think that young people that don’t now subscribe to cable are maybe going to think of Aereo as an alternative because they don’t want to pay 100 bucks a month for cable,” he said.

Which tech companies will make this happen? Diller listed Apple (“I don’t think it’s some big secret that they’ve been working for years on trying to solve television”), Amazon and Microsoft.

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Windows Blue is now officially Windows 8.1. It will enter into a public beta in June. It’s rumored that the start button and a boot to desktop mode will be offered alongside numerous other updates. Thanks to a leaked screenshot, we can seemingly confirm one of those rumors.

Paul Thurrot’s Supersite for Windows shared the following screenshot today that shows the Start button is back in Windows 8.1, and it’s looking better than ever:

The start button will behave mostly as it did in Windows 7 with a few key Windows 8 eccentricities. For starters, hovering over the Start button changes it color in much the same way the Start charm changes color in the current build of Windows 8. It’s also impossible to turn off the Start button, at least for now. That should ensure that newcomers to Windows 8 won’t be confused by the lack of a start button.

Thurrot also reveals two more really interesting tidbits about Windows 8.1. The first is that you can use your own wallpapers now as backgrounds in the Start menu. Previously, you could only use a small number of Microsoft-designed illustrations and colors. Secondly, a boot to desktop mode is indeed present, but it is turned off by default. It’s understandable as Microsoft is still trying to sell consumers on the walled garden Start screen experience.

Microsoft will presumably make all of this and more official later in June when it releases the Windows 8.1 public preview on June 26.

A yearbook prank by a Missouri girl could now bring federal charges.

According to an Columbia Daily Tribune report, 17-year-old Kaitlyn Booth (pictured), a junior at Hickman High School in Columbia, Missouri, could now be facing a felony charge after changing a classmate’s name in the school yearbook. The girl allegedly changed a classmate’s last name to “masturbate” instead of Mastain. According to the Daily Tribune story, Booth could be charged with first-degree property damage and harassment.

The yearbooks had already been printed when the prank was discovered, and the school declined to reprint some 700 yearbooks at a cost of more than $41,000. Instead, stickers were printed with the student’s real name and placed into each yearbook.

The girl whose name was changed, Raigan Mastain, told the newspaper that she wasn’t friends with the arrested girl and “hardly knew her at all,” though both worked on the yearbook. Mastain stated that the girl’s action was inappropriate and disappointing, but that she was “shocked” to learn that Booth had been arrested. Mastain also stuck up for Booth, saying that she doesn’t think the prank should affect Booth for the rest of her life.

Google announced bulk uploads for ads and ad groups in AdWords today.

“Imagine you download a report from the Ads tab and want to test different creatives in ad groups that are underperforming,” writes AdWords Product Manager Prashant Baheti. ” You might also want to turn off certain ad groups, or change the budget for others. Instead of toggling back and forth between AdWords and your spreadsheets, you can now download reports from the Ads and Ad Groups tabs, make changes directly in your spreadsheet, and upload them directly to your account.”

“Uploading changes to your ads and ad groups is simple,” adds Baheti. “Just like with keywords, when you download a report you will be prompted to make the report ‘editable.’”

After making changes, you can save in CSV, TSV and Excel formats. To upload ,click Reports and Uploads on the left side, and then select Uploads. From there, you will see the Upload Type column. You can only upload one report type at a time. If you want to make bulk changes to both keywords and ad creatives, this must be done separately.

Once you bulk upload, there’s no way to cancel the automatically reverse the changes. Something to keep in mind.

The $1 million TED Prize is a way for a passionate, motivated dreamer to put a world-changing plan into action. With nominations for the prize open through June 16, so many great ideas are circulating around the TED community — and one of them could become the 2014 winner.

We want you — yes, you — to nominate a dynamic, passionate leader for the prize. It could be yourself, someone you know or someone whose work you admire. Need some inspiration? We started a TED Conversation, “What’s your million-dollar idea to change the world?” to get TEDsters’ brainstorming out in the open about the kinds of wishes they’d like to see enacted. Below are some of our favorite wishes that users offered on TED.com and through Facebook:

“With one million dollars, I would endow a scholarship in perpetuity to introduce arts education to underserved communities. The arts are a powerful way to communicate complex feelings, reactions and emotions. They are also a means of relieving stress.” —Patrij Baroch

“Inexpensive sleep pods in downtown areas to get homeless out of the elements.” —Capers Hammond

“Require all members of the United Nations to donate an amount equal to what they spend annually on military budgets to a worldwide relief fund, to be administered publically on the web, with 100 percent clarity and accountability of how all funds are spent. Goal of the fund will be to foster health and education worldwide on an as needed basis.” — Ron Bouffard

“To stop corruptions in my country Nigeria and make the citizens believe in democracy.” —Jude Ben

“The way we choose employment is largely based on herd mentality. Someone posts a job vacancy, puts up a bunch of ‘skills’ necessary for the job. A few hundred respond with padded resumes that are keyword-rich to ensure HR finds them suitable. I find this system terribly outdated and broken. We need a better way to measure ourselves and measure what a job requires. A more comprehensive match between employer and employee and one that scales up so we can spot work that fits us like a glove without getting lost in the maze.” – Arun Jose

“Select positive statements only from all religious texts and combine them into one bible for one purely positive religion for all Earthlings.” — Rhona Pavis

“Make all schools teach a class on business. A class on how the core subjects relate to the current world today.” —Thaddea Thompson

“Stop human trafficking. Period. No one’s life has a price tag.” —Jennifer Valenti

“End homelessness and poverty by opening up unused fed and state lands for building small off-grid homesteads that include garden space and space for raising animals, and link it to a homestead education program.” — LaMar Alexander

Do you know someone who’s right for the 2014 TED Prize? Or do you have a wish idea that you would like to be considered? Make sure to fill out an official nomination form by June 16 »

Get lots more information at Tedprize.org »

Netflix has been helping cord-cutters save money for years, offering unlimited movie and TV show streaming for just $7.99 per month. Just because the service is affordable doesn’t mean it is immune to digital piracy, however, and newly available data shows that the service took a pretty big hit earlier this week. Early on Sunday morning, Netflix released the complete fourth season of cult comedy “Arrested Development,” the latest show in Netflix’s original programming lineup. Netflix has begun to develop its own shows in an effort to attract new subscribers of course, but according to paidContent, around 100,000 people downloaded season 4 illegally within the first 24 hours alone. Many of the downloads are said to have come from markets where Netflix is currently unavailable, though firm geographical data is not available.

Clooney can have any woman he wants, but can he get two at the same time?

That’s what some news outlets are reporting, and the actor says it’s just not true.

The ladies’ man was allegedly spotted at a London nightclub recently, dancing and holding hands with Monika Jakisic–his ex–even though he’s been dating Stacy Keibler for three years. But he says that’s a big fat lie, although he has been in London to film “The Monuments Men”.

“I wasn’t holding anybody’s hand. Stop trying to sell magazines by creating scandal that isn’t there,” he said.

A source says he wasn’t concerned about hiding his affection for Jakisic, however:

“They seemed to be having a great old time together,” a source said. “He didn’t seem to care who saw them. He was being openly affectionate. Lots of people were going up and saying hi to George — he didn’t leave Monika’s side. The place was packed but he didn’t seem to care who saw them inside the club. They were laughing and looked very comfortable together and were there ‘til very late.”

Clooney and Jakisic dated in 2007.

A woolly mammoth was recently found preserved in Siberia with its blood intact. The find renews hopes that scientists may be able to bring the long-extinct species back with cloning.

North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk reports that members of a paleontological expedition found a preserved female Woolly Mammoth on the Lyakhovsky Islands off the Novosibirsk archipelago. What made this particular find amazing is that mammoth’s muscle tissue was well preserved. Even more amazing, the team found that the creature’s blood was intact and frozen in the ice.

“The fragments of muscle tissues, which we’ve found out of the body, have a natural red color of fresh meat. The reason for such preservation is that the lower part of the body was underlying in pure ice, and the upper part was found in the middle of tundra. We found a trunk separately from the body, which is the worst-preserved part,” said Semyon Grigoriev, the head of the expedition, the chairman of the Mammoth Museum named after P.A. Lazarev of NEFU Institute of Applied Ecology of the North. “The researchers collected the samples of the animal’s blood in tubes with a special preservative agent. The blood is very dark, it was found in ice cavities bellow the belly and when we broke these cavities with a poll pick, the blood came running out. Interestingly, the temperature at the time of excavation was -7 to – 10ºC. It may be assumed that the blood of mammoths had some cryoprotective properties”.

So, what’s next for our frozen friend from the past? The researchers will take the mammoth back to Yakutsk for further examination to ensure that the tissue isn’t harboring some ancient deadly disease. After that, researchers from all around the world will convene on Siberia to study the remains. Those of us who have dreamed of one day cloning mammoths are no doubt excited by the possibilities that this latest find presents.

[h/t: CNET] [Image: North-Eastern Federal University]

Amanda Bynes is at it again.

After several months of odd behavior and legal troubles, the former child actress is now in a bit of a Twitter feud with model Chrissy Teigen. Teigen, who is engaged to singer John Legend, posted her opinion on Bynes’ behavior recently and Bynes was having none of it.

“The fact that Amanda Bynes has any ‘support’ to retweet is really unsettling. Support people with mental illness, yes. But don’t condone/enable scary and poor behavior,” Teigen tweeted.

Bynes promptly shot back with, “Ur not a pretty model compared to me. I signed to Ford models @ age 13. I don’t look up to u beauty wise. I’m far prettier than u! I’m offended that you’re saying I have a mental illness when I show no sign of it, but thankfully not one man that wants me wants you and you are an old ugly model compared to me! You look 45! You’re not pretty so I’m not intimidated by you! I think you’re jealous that you’re just an ugly model whos career is uninspiring! I don’t respect you! You’re no beauty queen! I’m a beauty queen!”

Teigen took the high road afterwards, tweeting, “Nope. Not going to indulge. Wish the best for her, truly.”

The young star has had a rough year, getting arrested for alleged DUIs and hit-and-runs before exhibiting odd behavior in public, such as locking herself in restaurant bathrooms and walking around naked in a gym. She was also arrested last week for smoking marijuana in the lobby of her building and then throwing a bong out the window. She claims it was a “vase”. She then showed up to court wearing a long, stringy blonde wig.

Bynes has continually repeated through public statements on social media that she is innocent and doesn’t drink or do drugs. However, the more outbursts she has, the less anyone is going to believe her.

It was a long time ago when I started my love affair with optical networks and broadband. It started with covering long-forgotten companies such as UUNet Technologies and PSINet. It involved long-forgotten names such as Northern Telecom long before it become Nortel. So perhaps, you can’t fault me for feeling excited about reading the news that Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs identified an optical networking breakthrough that would theoretically allow sending 400 gigabits of data over a distance of 7,900 miles.

While the news of 400G didn’t excite me as much, the distance over which they could send the data impressed me, as it had implications that go beyond the oohs-and-aahs of raw speed. And what more, if this breakthrough can be commercialized — say in five to 10 years (considering companies like JDS Uniphase would have to make components) — we could see a big improvement in not only our long-haul networks, giving them more oomph and making them more efficient, but it could also have a profound impact on our cloud future.

We certainly have come a long way

Back in 1995, I remember the excitement around Ciena’s DWDM system. That same year, Nortel, the Canadian giant that at the time ruled the optical landscape, came out with a 10 Gbps offering. And then the bubble burst. Things slowed a little and we kept waiting for the long promised 40 Gbps technologies. In 2006, we saw the 40 Gbps speeds come to market, and by 2008 it was getting traction. In 2009, 100 Gbps gear came to market from Ciena.

To recap, here is the timeline of progress with optical networking technologies

• 1990: The first commercial 2.5G optical system was deployed.
• 1995: The first 10G optical system was introduced.
• 2006: The first 40G solution was introduced to the market.
• 2008: The first coherent 40G solution for plug-and-play, four-fold increase of traffic was introduced
• 2009: And, the first operational 100G solution was introduced.

400G and beyond

Since then, the attention has focused on the 400G systems. A lot has to do with marketing, but as my friend Andrew Schmitt, research analyst at Infonetics, points out: Anytime we have a 4x improvement in networking gear, things get interesting.

And so there’s no surprise why that is where all the attention is focused. In 2012 we saw a new software-programmable approach to network that upped the speeds to 400 Gbps. British Telecom and Ciena recently showed off an experimental 800 Gbps network. Alcatel-Lucent and Telefonica have been working on their own high-capacity network experiments as well.

The latest development at Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs is yet another example of continuous progress in the optical fiber technologies, especially over long distances. This improvement is one of the reasons we have seen an explosion in the bandwidth on the long-haul networks. According to Telegeography, a market research firm, the world saw an addition of 54 Tbps of capacity last year alone.

The irony of optics

But after my initial excitement had worn off, I was left asking myself the question: How much should we care about these breakthroughs? I mean it is not that we are bandwidth limited on these backhaul networks. We are doing really well in terms of transmission rates and have steadily boosted our ability to send signals over long distances. Sure, most optical networks in operation are either at 10 Gbps or 40 Gbps, but we are only a couple years from getting 100 Gbps everywhere. What is most amazing is that this 40x improvement on optical networks has resulted in sharp declines in bandwidth prices on the networks that connect data centers, office buildings, cities and countries.

A good proxy for the long haul and metro networking business is Cogent Communications, which operates one of the biggest networks on the Internet. The company claims that about 18 percent of the Internet traffic runs over Cogent’s pipes and that it has 28 percent of the market by bits and 12 percent of the market in terms of dollars.

At a Merrill Lynch conference, Cogent Communication CEO David Schaeffer pointed out that the “average price per megabit in the market has fallen at a rate of about 40% per year for a dozen years” even as the number of players has gone from 200 to 12. The prices on Cogent’s network during “period has fallen from $10 a megabit to the most recent quarter at $3.05 a megabit.”

He is not alone. Here is a little chart from 2012 about IP Transit prices that tells the story of falling prices.

Schaeffer estimates that the core internet transit business is about 400 petabytes a day of bandwidth and is “purchased at the core of the internet out of the 650 data centers is a $1.5 billion addressable market and it’s been flat at that level for a dozen years.”

I am guessing David won’t be struggling for business in coming years. The state of connectedness is going to create much stronger demand for a much beefier cloud-based infrastructure. And as everything in the world is digitized through sensors and embedded compute devices, we are going to see an explosion in ambient data that would travel between machines. These machines that sit in data centers will need big fat pipes.

We are in the early innings here but the idea of distributed processing and storage over these big fat pipes is something that should provide an exciting prospect for companies with big fiber pipes. Infonetics’ Schmitt argued that as optical bandwidth at the non-consumer level starts to become even more plentiful and prices start to stumble, we can start to learn to waste it. Instead of networks that use routers to shuttle data, we could start to build point-to-point connections, which are certainly more useful when doing high-level distributed computing.

The financial industry has already shown us the way — many hedge funds use special low-latency networks to process data and stay competitive. I wouldn’t be surprised if that becomes standard practice with all major businesses.

Last mile conundrum

Maybe I am being child-like in my thinking, but when I see the long-haul networks, I see technology and the free market trying to figure things out and in the end bringing bandwidth online at an unprecedented scale. And sure we are all benefiting from the dumb, crooked and complete craziness that went on during the boom that led to overbuilding of fiber networks, but it has been more than a decade and the dark fiber is being put to good use. (Just ask Google!)

In comparison to the long-haul and intra-city networks, the world of last-mile connections has moved at a somewhat glacial speed. Here in the U.S., while we have seen rapid improvements in speeds (from a 1 Mbps connection at the turn of the century to about 25 Mbps (average) from cable and phone companies,) they are not as astounding. A lot of that is due to the lack of competition in our access networks — controlled primarily by oligopolies such as AT&T, Verizon and Comcast.

Across the world things are different. The Chinese are starting afresh. The Japanese and the Koreans went for the fiber early and Europeans have the advantage of the short loops, which allows them to milk the copper and make 100 Mbps connections a reality. The European competitive landscape is such that fiber to the home is becoming less of a rarity.

But let’s just face it, when it comes to the U.S., the last mile is less about the technology and more about politics and lack of competition. Whenever there is competition — Chattanooga (TN), Kansas City (KS), Austin (TX) and Vermont — things start to change. Speeds go up. Service improves and incumbents are hustling for business. Unfortunately those pockets of competition are way too rare.

In the U.S., we have never had real competition — the 1996 Telecommunication Act was a mirage and faulty from the outset. It never allowed anyone with a real chance to compete and disrupt. Thankfully, it is a distant memory, and a reminder of how Washington really works (by not working.) And that’s our broadband future — held hostage by a political and regulatory system that is in bed with those it is supposed to regulate.

That sense of disillusionment, however isn’t going to stop me from getting excited about the new optical breakthroughs. Who knows…!

P.S.: My colleague Stacey Higginbotham wrote about the need for different thinking from ISPs. Hope you get a chance to read it.

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Although many were disappointed that no new hardware debuted at Google I/O — unless you count the Samsung Galaxy S 4 “Google Edition” — there’s more evidence that a new Nexus 7 is on the way. Liliputing notes that the Bluetooth SIG certified a device on May 27 and the corresponding data indicates it is a refreshed Google tablet.

There isn’t much to go on outside of the tested device, but it has a product design name of ME370T — the same as the original Nexus 7 tablet built by Asus. Another key clue? The software build for the certification is JWR11, which is similar to the JWR42 build spotted last week on a Nexus 4 device running Android 4.3. Based on that information, I wouldn’t expect a refresh to the Nexus 7 until Google officially introduces the next version of Android, rumored to be in June or July. Prior to the back-to-school season sounds about right to me.

The Bluetooth SIG data indicates that the certified tablet will still use Bluetooth 3.0, so it doesn’t appear that a new Nexus will gain Bluetooth 4.0 or be Bluetooth Smart Ready. So what might the new tablet gain? I’m still standing behind most of my thoughts from earlier this year:

• The same 7-inch screen size, but a higher-resolution panel of 1920 x 1080 for a pixel density of 315 pixels per inch (ppi). The current device uses a 1280 x 800 resolution display at 216 ppi.
• It’s possible that Google keeps an improved 1280 x 800 model at $199 and offers the higher-resolution panel as a more expensive option; say $249.
• Google opts for Qualcomm’s new quad-core Snapdragon 600 chipset. The company often switches hardware components between manufacturing partners on Nexus devices, but if this happens, it’s certainly not good for Nvidia and its Tegra 4 chip.
• With a Qualcomm chip inside, it’s highly likely the Nexus 7 gets an LTE option due to the chipmaker’s solid modem integration on its silicon.
• The new Nexus 7 will get a memory boost: 2 GB of RAM up from the current 1 GB.
• A rear camera is added, but it won’t be a top-of-the-line sensor: Just good enough for Google+ photos and such.
• I expect the current metal pins to be in the same place on a new tablet model; this would keep the new device compatible with the Nexus 7 dock which only arrived on the market recently.

I’d keep an eye on the retailers that sell Nexus 7 tablets: WalMart, RadioShack and the like. If you see price drops across all of them at once, it’s a tell-tale sign that a new and improved Nexus 7 is on the way.

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Bigfoot sightings are a perennial sideshow in the U.S. Vague claims invariably turn out to be regular animal hair, gorilla suits, hoaxes, or nothing at all.

This week, a man in Pennsylvania kicked off the latest Bigfoot mania with a bizarre call to 911. According to a report from a CBS affiliate in central Pennsylvania, John Winesickle of Altoona, Pennsylvania this week called police claiming to have evidence for the elusive creature.

Police humored the man, sending out an officer to investigate what Winesickle claimed were Bigfoot tracks. The officer followed the man into the woods, investigated the prints, and concluded that the tracks were left by a bear.

It appears that Winesickle was not trying to pull one over on police, but was generally mistaken about the animal prints. In fact, the man still believes that the tracks he found were left by Bigfoot.

“No, no, no, no, no,” said Winesickle. “See, a bear can’t go down a steep bank on all twos. That’s proven this is a Bigfoot.”

Winesickle also claims that he has heard Bigfoot calls while out in the woods, saying, “The voice is so deep. “I’ve heard bass singers on television – they can’t even come close to the bass sound that it made towards me.”

I like to at least try to offer a balanced view on broadband policies. So I’ve been hoping to see something positive about the change in Minnesota’s telecommunications equipment sales tax but haven’t seen anything. In fairness, I suspect that the people who are intended to benefit aren’t keeping an eye on the issue. It will mean more money for the State in terms of tax revenue; I guess the question is will the tax prevent revenue by pricing projects out of budget?

The Minnesota Telecom Alliance has been keeping an eye on the issue – as obviously their members are on the frontlines of such purchases. They posted the following in a recent newsletter…

For many years Central Office Equipment has been exempt from State sales tax.  This is no longer the case.  While the legislation expanded sales tax exemptions for other items, it removed this important tool for telcos.  Repealing the COE sales tax exemption was originally proposed by the Governor in his first budget in February.  It was taken out of his revised budget later in the session.  As a result, it was taken out of the House’s tax bill but not the Senate’s bill.  As the bill went through the conference committee process, the MTA and other industry segments lobbied hard to keep the exemption.  A special thank you to Gene Wenstrom (Hanson Communications) and Dave Schornack (Arvig) for their many calls and text messages to Senators Skoe and Koenen.  It should be noted that repealing this sales tax exemption is completely opposite of the Governor’s own Broadband Task Force, which had recommended expanding the exemption to include all Broadband equipment purchases.

David C. Olson, president of the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce followed up the sentiment in a recent letter to the editor in the Duluth News Tribune…

The telecommunications equipment sales tax will make it more expensive to supply broadband and technology that is critical for rural areas in Northeastern Minnesota and elsewhere in the state to compete and thrive. The tax on storage and warehousing could devastate this industry’s ability to compete in Minnesota and will result in sales tax on storage of agricultural inputs, too.

Somehow, Facebook is just getting round to this, but today, the company announced that it is launching verified Pages and Profiles.

“Today we’re launching verified Pages to help people find the authentic accounts of celebrities and other high-profile people and businesses on Facebook,” the company says. “Verified Pages have a small, blue check mark beside their name on timelines, in search results, and elsewhere on Facebook.”

Specifically, the badges will appear next to the name of a Page, when hovering over the name of Page, in Graph Search queries, in stories about people liking a page, and in News Feed ads on a Page.

It looks pretty similar to Twitter’s version.

Facebook is offering the feature to “a small group” of prominent public figures, including celebrities, journalists, government officials, popular brands and businesses, who have large audiences.

Facebook says it proactively verifies authentic Pages and profiles, but if you believe you’re being impersonated, you can report a fake account.

No action by Page admins is needed to obtain a verification badge. Facebook is simply verifying the largest Pages on the social network, and is not accepting requests. At least not for now.