In the business world, “adapt or die” is a truism. The ubiquity of the Internet is altering—in some cases, radically upending—the models for all sorts of industries. Exhibit A: the current turmoil in print journalism.
Most Cox Communications fiber customers in Baton Rouge experienced an outage of their phone and Internet services Monday for about an hour and a half, says Cox spokeswoman Sharon Bethea. The outage was specifically in Baton Rouge and affected no other areas of the Capital Region, she says. The first reports of it were made at 6 a.m., and full services were restored to customers by 3:45 p.m. About 90% of Cox's customers in Baton Rouge lost service at some point. "The outage was related to an issue with a circuit that we worked to repair," Bethea says. "We also performed maintenance on our fiber network last night to make sure everything is working properly." On Feb. 11, Cox customers in Baton Rouge experienced intermittent phone outages that began around 6 a.m. and were fixed around noon. An AT&T spokesperson says she was not aware of any Baton Rouge customers experiencing service disruptions Monday. —Adam Pearson
If you've been getting pesky busy signals or "no circuits available" messages today when you pick up the landline to call out, you're not alone. Thousands of Cox Communications telephone customers have had only intermittent phone service for much of the day. A company spokesman tells Daily Report the company is experiencing a telephone outage "somewhere in its network" that is affecting an undetermined number of residential and business subscribers throughout the greater Baton Rouge area, though as of 2 p.m. the company was making progress restoring phone service. "The majority of customers should now be able to place and receive calls," says David Deliman, regional public affairs director for Cox Communications, adding that Internet and cable TV services are not affected. "We are continuing to monitor and address any remaining reported issues." Deliman says Internet and cable TV services were not affected, nor was 911 service. No word on what caused the problem or when phone...
Most AT&T U-verse subscribers in Baton Rouge and other southeast Louisiana areas who went without phone, TV and Internet for the past few days had their service restored around 8 a.m. today, says AT&T Louisiana spokeswoman Sue Sperry. "They worked on this overnight," Sperry says. "It affected less than 1% of the customers in this region." However, "for competitive reasons," Sperry won't divulge how many of AT&T U-verse's nationwide 7.4 million customers are in Louisiana. Sperry adds that U-verse went down during an ordinary software upgrade that didn't initially work with some of AT&T's servers. The outage affected a number of Southern states. She says AT&T customers who went without service since 8 a.m. Tuesday will receive credit for the outage on their bills. "There might be a pocket here and there" of customers still without U-verse service, Sperry says, adding that, in most cases, they may be able to solve the problem by rebooting their Internet routers and cable boxes.
An unknown number of AT&T U-verse subscribers in Baton Rouge and other southeast Louisiana areas are without phone, TV and Internet service, which went out sometime early Tuesday in the area, says AT&T Louisiana spokeswoman Sue Sperry. "It's a server issue affecting a number of states," says Sperry, adding that less than 1% of the company's 7.4 million total U-verse subscribers are without service in areas of the southern United States. "It's a complex issue, and unfortunately right now we don't know when the service will be restored to everyone," she says. The outage is not affecting all U-verse customers in the area, Sperry notes, and service will be gradually restored to those affected. AT&T provides U-verse service in areas of southeast Louisiana including Houma/Thibodeaux and New Orleans in addition to Baton Rouge. Some customers in Georgia and Florida tell local media outlets they've been without service for as many as three days. "Even with less than 1% of our customers...
Technology is supposed to make our lives easier—and our businesses more efficient. But if you're a small business owner, you may feel more overwhelmed than enlightened by the rapidly expanding number of mobile devices, apps and so-called business solutions proffered online and peddled by traditional telecommunications and IT companies.
With approximately 30 million members streaming over 1 billion hours of movies and TV shows on its website each month, Netflix says it has "very reliable data for consumers to compare ISPs in terms of real world performance." Now it's beginning to put that data to public use in the form of monthly rankings, Netflix says in blog post today. The rankings are based on how fast the ISPs stream Netflix movies. Google Fiber is ranked No. 1, followed by Verizon FiOS, Comcast and Charter. Cox, which is a popular Internet provider in the Baton Rouge area, is ranked No. 9. AT&T U-verse, which is also available locally, ranks at No. 11. "The average performance [of each ISP] is well below the peak performance due to a variety of factors including home Wi-Fi, a variety of devices and a variety of encodes," Netflix says. "The relative ranking, however, should be an accurate indicator of relative bandwidth typically experienced across all users, homes, and applications." You can check out the...
More than 500 years of video footage is viewed through Facebook alone every single day. Baton Rouge native Rosalind Rubin, now a Los Angeles-based actress, joined that Pantheon of viral video sensations this week when her clip “How to Pick Up a Girl at the Gym” racked up nearly 11 million views and caught the attention of the blogosphere, The Huffington Post and NBC's The Today Show.
Anyone can start a wildly creative business in Baton Rouge, Jay Adelson says. All it takes is capital, talent, real estate and the Internet. "Last I checked, all that was here," says Adelson, the founder of successful Internet startups such as Equinix, SimpleGEO, and Revision 3, who also famously launched one of the first social media, news aggregator sites—Digg. Adelson, a Detroit native who makes his home in Silicon Valley, was the keynote speaker of the Louisiana Technology & Innovation Breakfast this morning, which kicks off the Louisiana Business Symposium and will continue with Business Report's Top 100 Luncheon this afternoon. Adelson says too many startups today suffer from a mob mentality, thinking erroneously that they must move to Menlo Park, Calif., to be successful, and fail. Their first error is building a company from the ground up where the cost of living is insane, Adelson says. "It's the people you're with who will inspire you, not the location," says...
Verizon Wireless announced Thursday it will expand its 4G LTE network to Baker, Denham Springs and Walker. The Baton Rouge market is one of 32 across the country expanding its 4G LTE network. Verizon announced Lafayette is receiving the 4G LTE network. "With the new and expanded markets, customers will be able to enjoy the best experience in wireless data usage when they stream video, share music and photos, download files and surf the Web with speeds up to 10 times faster than before," says Krista Bourne, president of Verizon's Houston/Gulf Coast Region. Local respondents to a recent survey on Baton Rouge cell service named Verizon and AT&T as nearly tied for having the overall best service, with Verizon having a slight edge. Read more about the survey here. AT&T announced today it will follow Verizon's lead in introducing wireless plans that let subscribers connect up to 10 phones or...
Yahoo says it's investigating reports of a security breach this morning that may have exposed nearly half a million users' email addresses and passwords. The company says it has been looking into "claims of a compromise of Yahoo! user IDs" but did not disclose the size of the reported breach or how it may have happened. Yahoo spokeswoman Caroline MacLeod-Smith says that she couldn't immediately provide more detail on the breach "as we are still investigating it." Technology news websites are citing hackers—who call themselves the D33D Company—as those claiming responsibility for the attack, adding that data posted to the group's website carried more than 453,000 login credentials from an unidentified Yahoo subdomain. The little-known group has been quoted as saying that it had stolen the passwords using an SQL injection—the name given to a common attack method in which hackers use rogue commands to extract data from vulnerable websites.
Facebook and Yahoo have agreed to settle a dispute over patents, according to an unnamed person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the deal has not been officially announced by the tech giants. The deal would end lawsuits the companies filed against each other without any money exchanged, according to the person. The technology site AllThingsD.com initially reported on the deal earlier today. AllThingsD reports the deal includes a joint advertising sales effort and cross-licensing of patents between the companies. Yahoo first sued Facebook in March, saying the online social networking company infringed on 10 of its patents covering advertising, privacy controls and social networks. Shortly after that, Facebook bought 750 patents from IBM and filed its own lawsuit against Yahoo claiming patent infringement. Then,...
The warnings about the Internet problem have been splashed across Facebook and Google. Internet service providers have sent notices, and the FBI has now set up a special website. But tens of thousands of Americans may still lose their Internet service Monday unless they do a quick check of their computers for malware that could have taken over their machines more than a year ago. Despite repeated alerts, the number of computers that probably are infected is more than 277,000 worldwide, down from about 360,000 in April. Of those still infected, the FBI believes that about 64,000 are in the United States. Users whose computers are still infected Monday will lose their ability to go online, and they will have to call their service providers for help deleting the malware and reconnecting to the Internet. The problem began last year, when the FBI went in to take down international hackers running an online advertising scam to take control of more than 570,000 infected computers around the...
When California's “Governor Moonbeam” Jerry Brown of the 1970s defeated former eBay CEO Meg Whitman and her record-shattering $140 million in personal campaign expenses with a social-networking onslaught for state governor in 2010, Anthony “Buddy” Amoroso took note of the political watershed moment.
Facebook is signing on to an effort from California Attorney General Kamala Harris to make app makers more accountable for how they handle consumers' personal information, The Los Angeles Times reports. All apps in Facebook's new App Center are required to have a written privacy policy that sheds light on what information the app collects and shares, according to an agreement that Harris has reached with the giant social network. With the meteoric rise in the use of mobile devices, the state's top lawyer is looking to extend privacy protections that are commonplace on the Web to smartphones and tablets. With Facebook, Harris notched another win in her effort to get industry players to abide by voluntary guidelines. Even though the mandate currently extends only to apps that collect personal information from Californians, Harris' efforts are expected to have far-reaching consequences. "If we can strengthen privacy protections here, we can benefit consumers around the world,"...
Facebook is allowing app developers to charge subscription fees, in addition to existing onetime payments, for games and other applications on its site. Facebook says the subscription feature will be available next month. The changes open up a new revenue stream for developers as well as for Facebook, which takes a 30% cut from all payments on its site. People will still able to make payments on a onetime basis. Facebook also announced it's replacing its own Credits currency with users' local currency—meaning, for example, that U.S. users can now pay for virtual items in dollars, and those in Japan can pay in yen—a move Facebook says will streamline operations and eliminate any currency exchange-rate confusion. Sales of virtual items accounted for 17% of Facebook's revenue in the first quarter. After a disappointing initial public stock offering, Facebook hit a milestone of sorts in its brief history as a public company on Tuesday, when its shares rose for the fourth...
U.S. authorities are leading the charge as governments around the world pepper Google with more demands to remove online content and turn over information about people using its Internet search engine, YouTube video site and other services. Google provided a glimpse of the onslaught of government requests in a summary posted on its website late Sunday. The breakdown covers the final six months of last year. It's the fifth time that Google has released a six-month snapshot of government requests since the company engaged in a high-profile battle over online censorship with China's communist leadership in 2010. The country-by-country capsule illustrates the pressure Google faces as it tries to obey the disparate laws in various countries while also upholding its commitment to free expression and to protecting the sanctity of its more than 1 billion users' personal information. Many of the requests are...
In the new, Internet-dominated digital age, once wildly successful models in private business (think Kodak and Encyclopedia Britannica), government institutions (little red school houses and post offices) and even entire industries (media and banking) are quickly fading into obscurity, says Business Report Publisher Rolfe McCollister. "Much of that was due to old union contracts that had grown out of control and choked the life out of the very companies the unions helped build," McCollister says in his latest column. "The same is happening now in government, with union benefits and pensions at unsustainable levels and no relief in sight." Collective bargaining was the big issue in Wisconsin, where Gov. Scott Walker asked for state employees to contribute more to their health care and retirement costs. Angry unions petitioned to recall him, but Walker easily won at the polls last week—which McCollister says shows unions are weakened and voters "are ready to put an end to...
The organization overseeing a major expansion of Internet addresses has reopened its system for letting companies and organizations submit proposals. The Web-based system had been shut down since April 12 because of a software glitch that exposed some private data. At the time of closure, the system was supposed to reopen within four business days, but it took longer to fix the problem and to notify affected applicants. Up to 1,000 domain name suffixes—the ".com" part of an Internet address—could be added each year in the most sweeping change to the domain name system since its creation in the 1980s. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, has extended the deadline for submitting proposals to May 30. Each application costs $185,000.
Brave new world
In the business world, “adapt or die” is a truism. The ubiquity of the Internet is altering—in some cases, radically upending—the models for all sorts of industries. Exhibit A: the current turmoil in print journalism.
Cox outages Monday due to faulty circuit
Most Cox Communications fiber customers in Baton Rouge experienced an outage of their phone and Internet services Monday for about an hour and a half, says Cox spokeswoman Sharon Bethea. The outage was specifically in Baton Rouge and affected no other areas of the Capital Region, she says. The first reports of it were made at 6 a.m., and full services were restored to customers by 3:45 p.m. About 90% of Cox's customers in Baton Rouge lost service at some point. "The outage was related to an issue with a circuit that we worked to repair," Bethea says. "We also performed maintenance on our fiber network last night to make sure everything is working properly." On Feb. 11, Cox customers in Baton Rouge experienced intermittent phone outages that began around 6 a.m. and were fixed around noon. An AT&T spokesperson says she was not aware of any Baton Rouge customers experiencing service disruptions Monday. —Adam Pearson
Cox working to restore phone service to thousands in Capital Region
If you've been getting pesky busy signals or "no circuits available" messages today when you pick up the landline to call out, you're not alone. Thousands of Cox Communications telephone customers have had only intermittent phone service for much of the day. A company spokesman tells Daily Report the company is experiencing a telephone outage "somewhere in its network" that is affecting an undetermined number of residential and business subscribers throughout the greater Baton Rouge area, though as of 2 p.m. the company was making progress restoring phone service. "The majority of customers should now be able to place and receive calls," says David Deliman, regional public affairs director for Cox Communications, adding that Internet and cable TV services are not affected. "We are continuing to monitor and address any remaining reported issues." Deliman says Internet and cable TV services were not affected, nor was 911 service. No word on what caused the problem or when phone...
AT&T U-verse restored in the region after 2-day outage
Most AT&T U-verse subscribers in Baton Rouge and other southeast Louisiana areas who went without phone, TV and Internet for the past few days had their service restored around 8 a.m. today, says AT&T Louisiana spokeswoman Sue Sperry. "They worked on this overnight," Sperry says. "It affected less than 1% of the customers in this region." However, "for competitive reasons," Sperry won't divulge how many of AT&T U-verse's nationwide 7.4 million customers are in Louisiana. Sperry adds that U-verse went down during an ordinary software upgrade that didn't initially work with some of AT&T's servers. The outage affected a number of Southern states. She says AT&T customers who went without service since 8 a.m. Tuesday will receive credit for the outage on their bills. "There might be a pocket here and there" of customers still without U-verse service, Sperry says, adding that, in most cases, they may be able to solve the problem by rebooting their Internet routers and cable boxes.
AT&T U-verse outage affecting some B.R. customers
An unknown number of AT&T U-verse subscribers in Baton Rouge and other southeast Louisiana areas are without phone, TV and Internet service, which went out sometime early Tuesday in the area, says AT&T Louisiana spokeswoman Sue Sperry. "It's a server issue affecting a number of states," says Sperry, adding that less than 1% of the company's 7.4 million total U-verse subscribers are without service in areas of the southern United States. "It's a complex issue, and unfortunately right now we don't know when the service will be restored to everyone," she says. The outage is not affecting all U-verse customers in the area, Sperry notes, and service will be gradually restored to those affected. AT&T provides U-verse service in areas of southeast Louisiana including Houma/Thibodeaux and New Orleans in addition to Baton Rouge. Some customers in Georgia and Florida tell local media outlets they've been without service for as many as three days. "Even with less than 1% of our customers...
Is there an app for that?
Technology is supposed to make our lives easier—and our businesses more efficient. But if you're a small business owner, you may feel more overwhelmed than enlightened by the rapidly expanding number of mobile devices, apps and so-called business solutions proffered online and peddled by traditional telecommunications and IT companies.
Netflix begins ranking 'real world' ISP speeds
With approximately 30 million members streaming over 1 billion hours of movies and TV shows on its website each month, Netflix says it has "very reliable data for consumers to compare ISPs in terms of real world performance." Now it's beginning to put that data to public use in the form of monthly rankings, Netflix says in blog post today. The rankings are based on how fast the ISPs stream Netflix movies. Google Fiber is ranked No. 1, followed by Verizon FiOS, Comcast and Charter. Cox, which is a popular Internet provider in the Baton Rouge area, is ranked No. 9. AT&T U-verse, which is also available locally, ranks at No. 11. "The average performance [of each ISP] is well below the peak performance due to a variety of factors including home Wi-Fi, a variety of devices and a variety of encodes," Netflix says. "The relative ranking, however, should be an accurate indicator of relative bandwidth typically experienced across all users, homes, and applications." You can check out the...
Getting a lift
More than 500 years of video footage is viewed through Facebook alone every single day. Baton Rouge native Rosalind Rubin, now a Los Angeles-based actress, joined that Pantheon of viral video sensations this week when her clip “How to Pick Up a Girl at the Gym” racked up nearly 11 million views and caught the attention of the blogosphere, The Huffington Post and NBC's The Today Show.
Adelson: Starting a business takes talent, real estate and the Internet
Anyone can start a wildly creative business in Baton Rouge, Jay Adelson says. All it takes is capital, talent, real estate and the Internet. "Last I checked, all that was here," says Adelson, the founder of successful Internet startups such as Equinix, SimpleGEO, and Revision 3, who also famously launched one of the first social media, news aggregator sites—Digg. Adelson, a Detroit native who makes his home in Silicon Valley, was the keynote speaker of the Louisiana Technology & Innovation Breakfast this morning, which kicks off the Louisiana Business Symposium and will continue with Business Report's Top 100 Luncheon this afternoon. Adelson says too many startups today suffer from a mob mentality, thinking erroneously that they must move to Menlo Park, Calif., to be successful, and fail. Their first error is building a company from the ground up where the cost of living is insane, Adelson says. "It's the people you're with who will inspire you, not the location," says...
Verizon expands 4G LTE network in B.R. area
Verizon Wireless announced Thursday it will expand its 4G LTE network to Baker, Denham Springs and Walker. The Baton Rouge market is one of 32 across the country expanding its 4G LTE network. Verizon announced Lafayette is receiving the 4G LTE network. "With the new and expanded markets, customers will be able to enjoy the best experience in wireless data usage when they stream video, share music and photos, download files and surf the Web with speeds up to 10 times faster than before," says Krista Bourne, president of Verizon's Houston/Gulf Coast Region. Local respondents to a recent survey on Baton Rouge cell service named Verizon and AT&T as nearly tied for having the overall best service, with Verizon having a slight edge. Read more about the survey here. AT&T announced today it will follow Verizon's lead in introducing wireless plans that let subscribers connect up to 10 phones or...
Yahoo investigating reported mass password breach
Yahoo says it's investigating reports of a security breach this morning that may have exposed nearly half a million users' email addresses and passwords. The company says it has been looking into "claims of a compromise of Yahoo! user IDs" but did not disclose the size of the reported breach or how it may have happened. Yahoo spokeswoman Caroline MacLeod-Smith says that she couldn't immediately provide more detail on the breach "as we are still investigating it." Technology news websites are citing hackers—who call themselves the D33D Company—as those claiming responsibility for the attack, adding that data posted to the group's website carried more than 453,000 login credentials from an unidentified Yahoo subdomain. The little-known group has been quoted as saying that it had stolen the passwords using an SQL injection—the name given to a common attack method in which hackers use rogue commands to extract data from vulnerable websites.
Source: Yahoo, Facebook have settled patent fight
Facebook and Yahoo have agreed to settle a dispute over patents, according to an unnamed person familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the deal has not been officially announced by the tech giants. The deal would end lawsuits the companies filed against each other without any money exchanged, according to the person. The technology site AllThingsD.com initially reported on the deal earlier today. AllThingsD reports the deal includes a joint advertising sales effort and cross-licensing of patents between the companies. Yahoo first sued Facebook in March, saying the online social networking company infringed on 10 of its patents covering advertising, privacy controls and social networks. Shortly after that, Facebook bought 750 patents from IBM and filed its own lawsuit against Yahoo claiming patent infringement. Then,...
Malware may knock thousands off the Internet on Monday
The warnings about the Internet problem have been splashed across Facebook and Google. Internet service providers have sent notices, and the FBI has now set up a special website. But tens of thousands of Americans may still lose their Internet service Monday unless they do a quick check of their computers for malware that could have taken over their machines more than a year ago. Despite repeated alerts, the number of computers that probably are infected is more than 277,000 worldwide, down from about 360,000 in April. Of those still infected, the FBI believes that about 64,000 are in the United States. Users whose computers are still infected Monday will lose their ability to go online, and they will have to call their service providers for help deleting the malware and reconnecting to the Internet. The problem began last year, when the FBI went in to take down international hackers running an online advertising scam to take control of more than 570,000 infected computers around the...
The digital campaign
When California's “Governor Moonbeam” Jerry Brown of the 1970s defeated former eBay CEO Meg Whitman and her record-shattering $140 million in personal campaign expenses with a social-networking onslaught for state governor in 2010, Anthony “Buddy” Amoroso took note of the political watershed moment.
Calif. AG scores privacy win against Facebook that may be expanded
Facebook is signing on to an effort from California Attorney General Kamala Harris to make app makers more accountable for how they handle consumers' personal information, The Los Angeles Times reports. All apps in Facebook's new App Center are required to have a written privacy policy that sheds light on what information the app collects and shares, according to an agreement that Harris has reached with the giant social network. With the meteoric rise in the use of mobile devices, the state's top lawyer is looking to extend privacy protections that are commonplace on the Web to smartphones and tablets. With Facebook, Harris notched another win in her effort to get industry players to abide by voluntary guidelines. Even though the mandate currently extends only to apps that collect personal information from Californians, Harris' efforts are expected to have far-reaching consequences. "If we can strengthen privacy protections here, we can benefit consumers around the world,"...
Facebook to let developers charge subscriptions
Facebook is allowing app developers to charge subscription fees, in addition to existing onetime payments, for games and other applications on its site. Facebook says the subscription feature will be available next month. The changes open up a new revenue stream for developers as well as for Facebook, which takes a 30% cut from all payments on its site. People will still able to make payments on a onetime basis. Facebook also announced it's replacing its own Credits currency with users' local currency—meaning, for example, that U.S. users can now pay for virtual items in dollars, and those in Japan can pay in yen—a move Facebook says will streamline operations and eliminate any currency exchange-rate confusion. Sales of virtual items accounted for 17% of Facebook's revenue in the first quarter. After a disappointing initial public stock offering, Facebook hit a milestone of sorts in its brief history as a public company on Tuesday, when its shares rose for the fourth...
Governments asking Google to remove more content
U.S. authorities are leading the charge as governments around the world pepper Google with more demands to remove online content and turn over information about people using its Internet search engine, YouTube video site and other services. Google provided a glimpse of the onslaught of government requests in a summary posted on its website late Sunday. The breakdown covers the final six months of last year. It's the fifth time that Google has released a six-month snapshot of government requests since the company engaged in a high-profile battle over online censorship with China's communist leadership in 2010. The country-by-country capsule illustrates the pressure Google faces as it tries to obey the disparate laws in various countries while also upholding its commitment to free expression and to protecting the sanctity of its more than 1 billion users' personal information. Many of the requests are...
Publisher: Digital age demands new approaches to old problems
In the new, Internet-dominated digital age, once wildly successful models in private business (think Kodak and Encyclopedia Britannica), government institutions (little red school houses and post offices) and even entire industries (media and banking) are quickly fading into obscurity, says Business Report Publisher Rolfe McCollister. "Much of that was due to old union contracts that had grown out of control and choked the life out of the very companies the unions helped build," McCollister says in his latest column. "The same is happening now in government, with union benefits and pensions at unsustainable levels and no relief in sight." Collective bargaining was the big issue in Wisconsin, where Gov. Scott Walker asked for state employees to contribute more to their health care and retirement costs. Angry unions petitioned to recall him, but Walker easily won at the polls last week—which McCollister says shows unions are weakened and voters "are ready to put an end to...
ICANN resumes taking bids for new Internet suffixes
The organization overseeing a major expansion of Internet addresses has reopened its system for letting companies and organizations submit proposals. The Web-based system had been shut down since April 12 because of a software glitch that exposed some private data. At the time of closure, the system was supposed to reopen within four business days, but it took longer to fix the problem and to notify affected applicants. Up to 1,000 domain name suffixes—the ".com" part of an Internet address—could be added each year in the most sweeping change to the domain name system since its creation in the 1980s. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, has extended the deadline for submitting proposals to May 30. Each application costs $185,000.