Details about Google TV are still scarce, as Bilton dind’t get any of the companies involved to go on the record. However, it looks like Google TV will be open to third-party app developers in much the same way the company’s Android operating system is today. From the article:

“The companies appear to be hiring for Android-related jobs. Intel, for example, has listed jobs for senior application engineers with Android programming experience who can help extend Intel’s technology ‘from PC screen to mobile screen and TV screen.’”

Google TV will apparently be based on Intel’s Atom processor, and the interface will essentially be based on a version of Chrome, which should open the door for web app developers as well as content platforms to get a foothold on the product. In fact, Bilton reports that a prototype set-top box built by Google is capable of playing back content from Hulu.com — a feature that could cause for some tension within the industry, as Hulu’s owners in the past have tried to block similar technology from Boxee.

Speculations about an Android-based TV product most recently surfaced when the Wall Street Journal reported that Google teamed up with DISH to test a new, Android-like software on the satellite provider’s set-top box. It’s unclear, however, if the two products are related.

Still, given the fact that many indicators point to Google gearing up for a TV platform launch, we’re interested to hear from you: What would you like to see on Google TV? Are there any specific Android apps that you’d think would work really well on the big screen? Anything missing from the Boxee Box that only Google could deliver? Or do you want to keep Google out of your living room altogether? Let us know in the comments!

Related content on GigaOm Pro: With TV Apps, Over-the-Top Video Gets New Backers (subscription required)

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Infographic by Column Five Media

There are many consumer-friendly aspects of the plan, such as opening up set-top boxes (GigaOM Pro, sub req’d) and creating an easy-to-understand label that shows people what their broadband connections are capable of (see image). But the FCC has clearly decided against a plan that requires a new infrastructure buildout when the current infrastructure will suffice. If only the agency had moved to tackle this issue back in 2002, when the telecommunications providers were thinking about how their fiber rollouts were going to occur, and implemented policies that could have resulted in a shared nationwide fiber network.

When Life Gives You Lemons …

But now that Verizon is spending $19 billion to push fiber to the home for 80 percent of its footprint (although that push may be slowing) and cable providers have pushed fiber out closer to the home in their networks and are deploying DOCSIS 3.0 upgrades, the FCC needs to work with what ISPs have in the field. So the bulk of the wireline reform coming out of the plan consists of regulatory tweaks to address predatory special access charges, inter-carrier compensation rules, set rates for access to underground conduits and utility poles, and in-depth proposals for universal service fund reform.

Yes, the FCC is proposing that wireline networks will be faster if the 2020 goal of 100 Mbps speeds down and 50 Mbps speeds up are met, but that’s a goal, not something I’m sure the FCC can and will enforce. Another goal is 1-gigabit connections to community centers and schools, which depending on how it’s implemented could help drive faster networks as well. But again, those are 2020 goals.When it comes to ensuring competition between the duopoly in the short term, the FCC will rely on data. The plan proposes changes to both the type and amount of data the FCC collects, and also asks the Bureau of Labor Statistics to collect information on how people use broadband.

The FCC says it will watch for price discrepancies and inequalities as newer networks are deployed and the types of services available to consumers diverge in speeds from wireless broadband’s 1 Mbps downstream speeds to fiber’s 100 Mbps downlink speeds. However, it doesn’t lay out how such inequalities — if they do emerge — will be addressed. Rather, mobile broadband is the star of the plan, both because it offers hope of a third broadband competitor in many areas, and also because of the potential for future growth and innovation of the U.S. economy.

Airwaves Are The Key

I’ll write more in the coming weeks on the spectrum aspects of the plan. The details as to how the FCC plans to go from having 50 MHz available for mobile broadband today to 500 MHz in 10 years will result in a pretty big legislative battle as the FCC tries to nab broadcaster spectrum and incumbents and tech firms position to own large chunks of those valuable airwaves.

But the real benefit of mobile broadband as a competitive stick is threefold: it can cover the entire country relatively cheaply, existing operators are already moving to all-IP networks that the FCC sees as the future of its regulatory jurisdiction (the airwaves will always be part of the FCC oversight even if Internet applications and services are not), and the infrastructure is easily upgradable without tearing up streets and installing gear into people’s homes.

So to push the mobile broadband envelope the FCC wants to take actions to free up 300 MHz by 2015. The chart lays out the spectrum bands and the timing for this FCC airwave grab, and I offer a bit more context below.

WCS — This spectrum is contentious because Sirius Satellite is worried about interference from any cellular operators deploying service in this band. The plan proposes to resolve that issue this year.

AWS 2 and 3: These 60 MHz should be relatively easy to get to auction or to allocate for mobile broadband once the government makes some decisions. At issue with some of this spectrum is whether it will be paired with spectrum the FCC will have to carve out from other federal holdings. The agency hopes to figure this pairing issue out with the National Telecommunications and Information Administration by Oct. 1. Paired spectrum is useful for deploying the more common, forward division multiplexing-type of networks.

D Block: These 10 MHz were too much trouble during the last spectrum auction because they were burdened with huge public safety network rules. The goal, to which the plan dedicates an entire chapter and $6.5 billion, is to build out a nationwide public safety network so all local, state and federal first responders can communicate in case of an emergency. These 10 MHz will have to connect with spectrum set aside for the National Public Safety network, and will have to be deployed to work with commercial handsets using LTE network technology. This makes such spectrum a good bet as a safety valve or a backup chunk of spectrum for an existing provider.

MSS: Mobile satellite service providers such as Terrestar, SkyTerra, and Inmarsat own spectrum in this band because they’ve promised to build a combination satellite-and-terrestrial network. So far they’ve failed to make good on that promise, and I have huge doubts that they ever will. The FCC appears to be relaxing some of the more stringent requirements on satellite providers to see if they can deliver a credible mobile broadband service with devices consumers will buy. If the FCC eliminates some of the satellite requirements, the MSS spectrum holders hope their spectrum becomes more valuable.

Broadcast TV: The FCC hopes to pry 120 MHz away from broadcasters in urban areas, where cellular providers have the most need for spectrum, which will pit the FCC and carriers against big broadcasters and over-the-air television watchers in big cities. Oh. My. God. It’s going to be a showdown. But I’m glad the FCC isn’t going for a token spectrum grab from rural broadcasters, which would be easy but wouldn’t alleviate network congestion.

The FCC isn’t making friends in Congress (or with over-the-air television buffs) with this plan, but as the final arbiter on how televisions have to send out their signals, it has the ability to squish some channels together and dictate how broadcasters use their 6MHz channels. To ease the pain of the FCC flexing this power over broadcaster’s spectrum allotments, it’s asking Congress to change the way spectrum auction proceeds are shared so as to let broadcasters have a piece of the pie. To bolster its controversial move, the FCC points out that cellular companies have valued each megahertz of spectrum per person covered at $1.28 while the television spectrum is currently valued at 11-15 cents. Why? Because mobile broadband is the future and over-the-air television is on its way out. Heck, the FCC even notes that poor consumers could get their broadcast through subsidized IPTV instead.

Getting more spectrum is the biggest aspect of expanding mobile broadband, but rules to make it easier to deploy microwave backhaul are also in the queue for 2010. And the FCC pledges to allocate a band for unlicensed wireless, although it doesn’t specify where this band might be. It also touches on the white spaces broadband the FCC approved in 2008, basically saying it wants to see devices and networks using white spaces broadband soon. We do, too. We thought we’d have more than a few trial networks by now. For folks watching and waiting for this flood of spectrum, the FCC and the NTIA set a deadline of Oct. 1 of this year to identify additional spectrum for use.

Since mobile broadband is the lynchpin of our federal broadband plan, we’d better get this right.

My city of Alameda, Calif.? We’re passing a city council resolution!

Heaven knows I want a 1 gigabit-per-second connection, too — so why isn’t my mayor wrestling an octopus (or sharktopus)? Is Sarasota (or Duluth, or Topeka) on to something?

“We don’t have a burgeoning tech and creative industry,” explained Richard Swier (see disclosure below), who is spearheading Sarasota’s attempt to get Google fiber. And without such an industry, he felt his town had to do something “crazy” in order to get on Google’s radar. In addition to the shark tank, Sarasota declared one of its islands “Google Island,” and its I Want Google Fiber in Sarasota page on Facebook claims some 5,300 fans.

Alameda’s more sober approach certainly lacks flair, but that, too, is by design, according to Deputy City Manager Jennifer Ott. She believes the message Google sent out in its call for participation was that the company wanted speed, efficiency and regulatory assistance, which the city council’s resolution, with its task force and one point of contact for the entire project, was specifically designed to do.

Jim Meyer, who founded the non-profit WireAlameda.org, echoed Ott’s all-business approach. “We have a strong application,” he assured me.

Since an active community behind the project was another one of the criteria set by Google, I asked Meyer about our paltry number of Facebook fans and the dearth of big, showy community events. Meyer pointed out that Facebook is a competitor to Google, so the group didn’t want a big presence there, and in terms of big events, WireAlameda is organizing a community chalk-drawing event this weekend. Chalk drawing certainly won’t attract mainstream media attention (unless it’s laser chalk), but it’s not meant to — the point is to showcase townsfolk that come out in order to pitch in.

In the meantime, an unexpected benefit has emerged: The actions of Swier’s group, WireAlameda and others around the country have become a rallying point for towns beaten down by tough economic times. Amidst the constant news of layoffs and general bad times, Google’s gambit is giving people something they haven’t seen in awhile — hope.

**Disclosure: I went to high school with and played 9th grade basketball with Swier. We haven’t talked really at all since high school, but his relentless efforts and recruiting on Facebook clogged up my news feed and provided inspiration for this story.

Image courtesy of Flickr user RRaiderstyle

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The debate, which could influence smart grid policies across the country, underscores an important difference between the two things Google wants utilities to provide — energy “usage” data versus “pricing information.” Electricity usage is a real thing that can be measured in real time with magnets and wires, either by a smart meter or lots of other devices. Electricity prices, on the other hand, are contrived, during or after the fact, by a convoluted market that has to keep demand and supply perfectly balanced at all times. Delivering pricing data in real time will be challenging for smart meter networks as they’re currently being deployed. So in other words, for utilities, delivering power comes first, figuring out who pays for it (and how much) comes later.

Most utility customers pay steady, regulated rates, and don’t get to see these complex price fluctuations — at least, not yet. But even getting slightly more complex tiered or time-of-use prices to customers through their smart meters could be problematic for current utility networks, given that most smart meter deployments today aren’t set up to handle that. As Lee Krevat, director of smart grid initiatives at San Diego Gas & Electric, put it in an interview this week, “We didn’t put in an Internet to each meter, or broadband to each meter — and ‘real time’ really implies broadband to give near real time pricing data.”

Most smart meter networks, including those being deployed by California’s big utilities, are lower-bandwidth and designed to be read every 15 minutes or hourly, not in real time. While there are ways to get faster or more current price information to homeowners, Krevat doesn’t see such a network being the best, or most cost-effective, way, to do it.

After all, “The rates exist on our Web site. The rate schedule doesn’t change very often,” he said. “Do you want to spend your bandwidth transmitting something that could be figured out at a customer end point based on their consumption data?”

Or, to put it another way, would utility customers support paying for the ability to see pricing data? The customers are the ones who pay for utilities’ smart meter system upgrades through increased rates. That certainly differentiates the utilities’ incentives from Google, which wants usage and pricing data opened to third party systems like its PowerMeter home energy management platform. Google promises PowerMeter will be free, but building a system that can provide it with data may still cost customers in one way or another.

SDG&E is working with Google’s PowerMeter and has about 125 customers testing it out — but right now they’re using day-old energy usage information, and currently PowerMeter doesn’t deliver any real-time pricing information. Eventually, California’s three big utilities plan to turn on their smart meters’ home area network (HAN) connections, but they’re doing a lot of testing first. Krevat said that’s an important first step in designing a system that’s both cheap and effective — “Understanding the model for how the customer wants to use it is the first step,” he said. “Then you can decide the technical solution.”

Ted Reguly, SDG&E’s smart meter program director, said customers mainly want some kind of current bill calculation, as well as some kind of pre-set alert when that monthly tally gets too high. Someday people will want to hook up smart appliances and other in-home energy controls to the smart meter via the HAN. But as SDG&E noted in its comments to the CPUC filed in March, “the Smart Meter system as currently designed requires more than HAN to provide customer access to near real time information on prices.”

Beyond these issues, it will be important to clarify what Google means by “pricing information,” Reguly said. Does Google mean the flat rates homeowners are scheduled to pay, or the actual prices that they end up paying after the bill is finalized? “You might think the cost of electricity is X, but it’s really Y because of bill settlement two or three days later,” he said — and getting the more accurate figures to customers in real time would require utilities to completely overhaul the batch processing-based back-office billing systems they now use.

Andy Tang, PG&E’s smart grid chief, said during a recent energy symposium in Berkeley, Calif. that asking utilities to replace their batch-based systems with real-time systems was “impossible” in such a short timeframe, at least not at costs that regulators would be willing to pass on to customers. Tang also expressed some frustration with Google’s push for deadlines for delivering real-time pricing, given that the federal government is still working on standards for all the smart grid systems to make this possible, he said. As PG&E wrote in its comments to the CPUC, “No amount of cajoling or wishing by one vendor or another that it happen by an arbitrary date can change the need for development of such uniform standards.”

Emerging Standards

Just how those standards will emerge remains to be seen. ZigBee, the wireless technology that’s taken a lead in smart meter-HAN connectivity, is working on a second iteration of its Smart Energy Profile specification for energy data that will include some pricing information, Reguly said. For commercial and industrial customers, open demand response technologies like Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s OpenADR or EnerNOC’s PowerTalk, are expected to embed price signals as part of an automated system to turn down devices to help utilities reduce peak loads.

Perhaps broadband could be the solution. The National Institute of Standards and Technology, the federal entity setting smart grid standards, has asked the smart grid industry to comment on whether some or all of the customer’s smart grid connections should come through broadband connections independent of the smart meter. There’s a long list of companies looking at selling energy monitoring gear directly to consumers, either as stand-alone products or bundled with home broadband offerings or security systems. Google is working with utilities and smart meter maker Itron, but is also partnering with in-home energy devices from Energy Inc. and AlertMe with its PowerMeter.

All three California utilities have asked CPUC to avoid any hard deadlines in favor of looser policy guidance. But the issue COULD comE to every state. The Federal Communications Commission’s new U.S. National Broadband Plan includes some strong words for state utility regulators to encourage utilities to deliver real time pricing data to consumers. To wit:

“States should require electric utilities to provide consumers access to, and control of, their own digital energy information, including real-time information from smart meters and historical consumption, price and bill data over the Internet. If states fail to develop reasonable policies over the next 18 months, Congress should consider national legislation to cover consumer privacy and the accessibility of energy data.”

Just how the CPUC decides to take up Google’s deadline — as well as how it comes to define pricing data in the process — will be closely watched topics in the smart grid industry. Stay tuned for more details later this week.

Kvamme, whose experience in advertising dates back to the 1980s, when he led advertising agency CKS Group, justified his argument using Neil Borden’s “Marketing Mix” theory. He said Borden’s elements of promotion — advertising, direct marketing, PR, point of sale and word of mouth — are still valid for marketers today, just in different ways.

The biggest difference can be found in the word of mouth category, said Kvamme, who subsequently called it a tremendous — and cheap — opportunity. “If you take what’s going on on Facebook, on LinkedIn, on Twitter, on Digg, the masses are starting to make their own media, and it’s basically free,” he noted. “So if you can figure out how to work in this world, you can get your message out very quickly.”

Funny or Die’s (one of Kvamme’s Sequoia investments) recent Presidential Reunion, which brought together actors who’d portrayed U.S. presidents throughout the years on “Saturday Night Live” at a cost of $20,000 (primarily flying all the participants in), according to Kvamme, yielded some 3 million views.

Presidential Reunion was a bit of a passion project for Funny or Die co-founder Will Ferrell, but Kvamme also pointed to last summer’s relatively unsuccessful movie “The Goods” starring Jeremy Piven (and produced by Funny or Die co-founder Adam McKay), the expected box office returns for which were lifted 15 percent through a Funny or Die campaign including prizes for retweets on Twitter (which led to the movie becoming a Twitter trending topic), featuring on the front page of Funny or Die and its Facebook fan page, two appearances on the front-page of Digg for custom Funny or Die content, live-tweeting from the premiere and a live conversation with McKay on Ustream. It generated “several million dollars in sales for something [the studio] probably didn’t pay Funny or Die enough for,” said Kvamme.

But the next big opportunity is in mobile, said Kvamme, using AdMob to illustrate (again, another Sequoia company, but at least one that’s had a successful exit, with Google beating out Apple to buy it for $750 million). With more than twice the global penetration of the Internet, mobile — especially smartphones — represent an opportunity to harken back to that “Marketing Mix” theory, because they can encapsulate all the elements of promotion from one single screen that’s attached to its owner at all times. An AdMob campaign for the movie “Wolfman” had ads on mobile media sites ad within applications that users could click on in order to get more information, share it with their friends, buy tickets directly and set up a mobile calendar alert.

Sure, Kvamme is pitching his own investments here, but to his credit he said that one of his favorite and most-visited sites is search.twitter.com, for keeping up with what people are talking about online. He also talked about Facebook’s opportunity to become the new mass media — with half its 400 million users logging in every day, “that’s almost like what broadcast television was 20 or 30 years ago” — and to dominate and grow the market if it ever does launch its own payment platform inside its trusted environment, just as PayPal revolutionized eBay.

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Here’s what happened: The other day I was looking for a decent long-term lot at San Jose Airport; Yelp’s recommendation page was near the top of Google, so I clicked over to check it out. As usual, I scanned the top 3-4 results, then read through the reviews of the most likely suspects. Quick Park SJC, ranked No. 1, seemed to have everything I needed -– a rating of over 3, pretty decent reviews and a nearby location.

But then I started looking more closely at those reviews -– and noticed an interesting pattern: There were a few from the last month or so, then nothing for nearly a year. And the last of that group was complaining about how the lot had recently raised prices and had a bit of a surly shuttle driver problem.

So why the gap? I didn’t know, but suddenly I wasn’t so sure this was such a great place to park. So I clicked over to TripAdvisor to look for airport parking information there. Since I couldn’t find any — and I was admittedly in a hurry — I ended up selecting Quik Park SJC after all. But I was far less sanguine about my choice. Yelp, alas, was no longer in my inner circle of trust.

Which leads me to three key trust rules:

Got a Problem? Deal With It Quickly: I learned that the hard way during my early years running the test lab at PC Week in the 90s. We had a columnist, Will Zachman, who was an ardent proponent of an early Windows competitor from IBM called OS/2. Microsoft, in those days, advertised incessantly in tech magazines, and Zachman felt that his editor was shaping his OS/2 diatribes to please Microsoft. So he publicly declared independence from the magazine on July 4th, accusing members of the business side of leaping over the “wall” and smacking down the EIC until he censored Zachman’s opinions to appease their biggest advertiser. Zachman had been kvetching about his supposed “censoring” for some time leading up to his Independence Day action, but the editorial team just ignored him — until it was too late.

Notably, I never saw any evidence supporting his accusations. Which leads me to my second tip:

Manage Not Just the Facts, But the Perception: Lack of evidence aside, just the merest whiff of perceived bias was enough to tar us with a wide brush. It took us a long time to cast off that perception. And that’s why, about a year later, I immediately fired a junior lab staffer who falsified test results, and not for money or influence, but because he was being run ragged by an overbearing manager. He was young. Impressionable. He probably only deserved a warning. But he violated a trust, one that, had it become public, would have been harmed us even more. I had to take quick action to preserve the trust that our readers had in our reviews.

Trust has to be carefully nurtured and ruthlessly defended. It’s why TechCrunch fired the intern who asked for a MacBook in exchange for covering a new company. It’s why IDG moved quickly to cut off any association with Randall Kennedy and why Facebook has such a big problem on its hands with the hacking allegations against CEO and Co-founder Mark Zuckerberg. It’s because:

If You Trade in Trust, Everything You Do or Say Is Relevant: At our live Diggnation show last weekend at SXSW in Austin, the wacky folks at URDB.Com convinced the crowd of 3,000-plus people to perpetrate a huge hoax — that Conan O’Brien was onstage and coming over to Revision3. Hundreds of partygoers tweeted out the “news,” and it quickly became the biggest Twitter hoax ever.

It was all fun and games, up to a point. Some pretty influential and trusted people tweeted and retweeted the hoax to their followers. Unfortunately, more than a few journalists saw tweets from people they had come to trust and were subsequently convinced that they had to be true. And once they discovered they’d been punk’d, they lashed out. In the end, more than one social media “expert” damaged their credibility by engaging in a little bit of pranksterism.

In Yelp’s case, that delicate tissue of trust has already been perforated — perhaps fatally. For even those of us that have willfully ignored the allegations against the site are ready to go elsewhere.

Jim Louderback is CEO of Revision3. He was previously vice president of Ziff Davis Media and Editor-in-Chief of PC Magazine and PCMag.com.

Indeed, there are plenty of empty trays at the all-you-can-eat music buffet, though some will leave you hungrier than others. Use one for awhile, and the gaps in its catalog soon become apparent. Try two or more, and the inconsistencies among them become downright baffling.

Most of the services claim to provide access to the full digital catalogs of all four major labels and a slew of independently distributed recordings, most delivered via aggregators such as IODA and the Orchard. But why is MOG missing the first two Tom Petty albums, while Thumbplay has them all? Why does Spotify – at least the preview version I’m testing here in the U.S. – have only two or three Bob Dylan albums, when its competitors have dozens? Why is Rhapsody the only one that has Grizzly Bear’s “Veckatimest,” an acclaimed independent-label album that entered the Billboard chart at No. 8 last June?

As I’ve learned from conversations with subscription providers, obtaining a complete and stable catalog of music is hardly as simple as working out a contract with a label or distributor. Songs and albums are constantly blinking in and out of view as ownership rights change hands, reissues are prepared, and songwriters and performers change their minds as to where they want their songs to be heard. Some labels handle their own distribution rather than going through aggregators, meaning that individual deals have to be struck in order to make their catalogs available. Geography can be a factor, as licenses vary from country to country. What’s more, a glitch in something as simple and unsexy as the file metadata that identifies a song –- a missing capital letter here, a misspelling there –- can render a track invisible to the consumer, even if it’s properly licensed by the subscription service.

Filling holes in the catalog is time-consuming and labor-intensive. (As MOG’s director of content licensing, Buzzy Cohen, told me, “Finding the holes is harder than filling them in.”) Companies with deeper financial resources and more personnel will have the upper hand when it come to chasing down rights holders one at a time in an effort to maintain a more complete catalog, so it makes sense that the older companies are more successful at it than the new ones — and explains why Rhapsody’s service, which has been around for more than eight years, satisfies my searches more consistently than any of its upstart rivals.

Though the causes are manifold and the companies’ efforts to fill the gaps are admirable, it’s frustrating to music fans when our searches aren’t satisfied, and even more irritating when songs in a playlist disappear without warning. And as consumers choose from among several services — or choose not to subscribe at all — holes in the catalog can ultimately be a dealbreaker.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user samsmith

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In the same spirit as Google’s November 2007 proclamation to develop one gigawatt of energy cheaper than coal, Bell Labs has launched an initiative it’s calling Green Touch™, which consists of a consortium of experts working together to make communications networks 1,000 times more energy efficient than they are today. The initiative has a time frame of five years, and if successful would mean an annual savings of 200 million tons of carbon emissions.

While there are many energy reduction initiatives already in play, they only promise small cuts to power consumption. Even if each one met their goals, total power consumption would remain flat given the usage forecasts laid out in the Smart 2020 report. What’s needed is a more radical rethinking of our consumption and a complete reworking of the communications grid.

To learn more, watch a summary of the challenge; to get involved, head over to greentouch.org.

Green:Net 2010 is the GigaOM Network’s conference where green and IT meet — the Startup Launchpad is where we unveil 10 hot startups that we think have the coolest applications for leveraging IT to fight climate change. The Launchpad winners will receive a lot of visibility — and likely interest from investors. Check out last year’s Judge’s Winner, Wattbot.

Our fearless judges this years are:

• Steve Vassallo, Venture Partner, Foundation Capital
• Navin Chaddha, Managing Director, Mayfield Fund
• Tom Blaisdell, Partner, Doll Capital Management

Apart from the Launchpad we have a packed day of great content and world-class speakers. So put the date in your planner: April 29th, at the Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco. Visit our web site for further details. And you can take $75 off the ticket price if you register with this link:

http://greennet2010.eventbrite.com/?discount=GIGAOM75

Green:Net is also a great way to address an audience of greentech influencers. For Exhibit opportunities call Mike Sly at (415) 235-0358 or email events at gigaom dot com. See you there!

However, the total volume of traffic is just one measure of how big a web presence a company has — the other is how it can leverage that scale to cut its costs and boost its ability to better serve customers. For Google, which has long seen its infrastructure as a competitive advantage, the ability to keep its mighty web traffic on its own network rather than pay others to deliver it is a margin-boosting — and quality-boosting — advantage.

Arbor notes that Google has consistently increased its direct peering, and through the use of its own content caching appliances located at ISPs around the world, it has cut out middlemen like Level 3 or Bandwidth.com. Are Yahoo and Microsoft taking notes?

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Both Stacey and I are wading through the 400-odd pages of documents and will be offering our impressions after we’re done. Up until that point, you can watch this video. And if you need to learn more, check out these posts to get a better understanding of the National Broadband Plan.

• FCC’s Broadband Plan: The Role of Competition.
• Is Cheap Wireless Broadband for Real This Time?
• What You Need to Know About the National Broadband Plan

In addition, you can follow our coverage of FCC.

“Qualcomm has a history of participating in spectrum auctions to expedite the commercialization of new wireless technologies. By participating in India’s BWA spectrum auction, Qualcomm can foster the accelerated deployment of TD-LTE.”

If the chip firm wins a chunk of spectrum in the 2.3 GHz band, it will want to promote TD-LTE, a version of the fourth-generation wireless standard that uses less total spectrum in deployment. Qualcomm is also making the bet that India will want to skip quickly from a 3G to a 4G service, a bet China Mobile is also making with its upcoming TD-LTE deployment.

Each generation of mobile broadband technology adds more capabilities for data, which we here in the U.S. are already consuming at a network-crushing pace. Bringing in LTE networks with more capacity will help with both speed and the total amount of data that can be transferred over the air. For cell-phone users in India, which has seen its 3G spectrum auctions delayed for years, there had been talk of skipping 3G and hopping right to 4G services that could handle current and future demand.

Qualcomm is also aiming to jump-start market demand for its chips in end devices in India and China (the two most populous countries), especially as its 3G royalties begin a decline in coming years. Qualcomm has to be worried by the increasing deployment of WiMAX-based services, which don’t really require the company’s technology and thus will fail to line its pockets.

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The addition of a parallel web site is a wise move that should give users a more immersive, detailed experience than can be delivered on a handset. And it could give Where one more place to deliver the ads that are the foundation of its business. The company last week launched a hyper-local advertising network to deliver highly targeted, location-specific pitches and scrap support for ads for generic content and services like ringtones and chat offerings.

The app is available for the iPhone, Android devices and more than 100 other handsets. Where claims that so far it’s seen more than 10 million downloads.

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Location: The Epicenter of Mobile Innovation

Image courtesy Where

The 19-page document, which was commissioned by the UK app retailer GetJar, found that Asia was the top worldwide market for overall download share in 2009, while North American users accounted for more than 50 percent of total global mobile app revenues. That will change in the next several years, however, as the region comprised of the Middle East and Africa overtake North America to become the world’s largest market for mobile app revenues by 2012.

But unlike North America, where users with high-end smartphones are happy to plunk down a few dollars for a time-killing casual game, growth in emerging markets will lean more heavily on productivity apps used by consumers who don’t have regular fixed-line Internet service. And app developers and distributors will be tasked with finding ways to monetize their wares beyond simple one-off purchases.

“The thing you have to keep in mind when talking about emerging markets is that in places like India, 90-95 percent of consumers are on prepaid cards,” so the concept of paying for mobile content over the phone is nonexistent, Patrick Mork, who heads up marketing for GetJar, told me last week. “But in India (the market for mobile applications is completely different. Some of the social networking brands are still big, but apps there are much more focused on productivity — things like Opera Mini and things to protect your phone like anti-virus apps.”

So while jiggling body parts and fart simulators can be quick money-makers in the West, developers and retailers in other markets would do well to offer apps similar to the stuff we use on PCs. They’d also do well to experiment with advertising and other ways to monetize those apps.

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LikeCube was co-founded by a semantic web technologist and an anthropologist four years ago, and funded by the UK’s National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts. It combines metadata, user activity and personalization to help clients recommend locations on a per-user basis (watch the video for more specifics). The service works around the idea that the wisdom of the crowds is too general to make recommendations for everyone. Of course nobody would disagree with that idea when it comes to music or movies, but the principle probably applies to restaurants and hotels too.

The company powers recommendations for Qype, which is a European version of Yelp, and is working to secure other such deals in categories such as travel. LikeCube charges a licensing fee and also splits revenue with its white-label clients.

Marchal pointed out that on TripAdvisor, the single worst dirty U.S. hotel is a place in San Francisco. If you check out the hotel’s reviews, 80 percent of reviewers said they wouldn’t recommend it to a friend, which necessarily means that 20 percent of reviewers would recommend it. Perhaps those folks just aren’t very kind to their friends, but Marchal’s point is that people’s tastes differ; for some, this hotel would be the right value for the price.

Here’s the interview: