Katie Fehrenbacher, a newbie at GigaOm (Om is spending his venture capital wisely), has what seems to be a scoop on yet another cable industry-related bidder in the upcoming wireless spectrum auctions. Bend Cable Communications, a company backed by Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen and his Vulcan Spectrum and Charter Communications, has filed to compete for broadband wireless spectrum via an Oregon company called Bend Broadband.
This rounds out a big list of cable-related companies looking to buy spectrum — a group of cable companies, including Comcast, Time Warner, Cox and Cablevision, has joined hands to get a hold of the spectrum. These companies, along with partner Sprint-Nextel, want to develop new wireless services that extend beyond merely mobile voice applications.
Cablevision has also separately applied for spectrum, as has Washington Post-owned CableOne.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 2:02 PM | Print | Comments (1)The New York Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin was at Herb Allen’s storied Sun Valley media mogul retreat last week (he has great photos on his blog) and has this piece about how the mix of attendees this year has shifted to financiers, hedge fund guys and other unusual attendees.
“I walked into dinner last night and didn’t recognize three-quarters of the people there,” said the chief executive of one of the world’s largest media companies, who refused to speak on the record for fear of upsetting Herbert A. Allen of Allen & Company, who frowns on attendees talking publicly about the invitation-only conference, which ended yesterday. “It was all these hedge fund and finance guys I had never met before. The balance of power is shifting.”
Why, all of a sudden, are the money-men at this famed conference? They’re flush with cash and they smell growth opportunity in the profusion of new web-based and technology-driven media businesses, not to mention the prospects of mergers ahead.
What are all these money men looking for? “Any opportunity to put our money to work — financing movies, new technologies, special projects and buyouts,” said one hedge fund/quasi-private equity fund manager.Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 12:59 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Jonathan Richards of The Times of London has this great piece on IPv6, a new Internet protocol developed to make more room for new IP addresses. It seems that that IPv4, which allowed for four billion IP addresses, is already running out of room.
“Currently there’s four billion addresses available and there are six billion humans on Earth, so there’s obviously an issue there,” said David Kessens, chairman of the IPv6 working group at RIPE, one of five regional internet registries in charge of rolling it out.
What’s very cool about Richards’ article is that it contains a very large number, not one ordinarily seen in news articles: 340,282,366,920,938,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. That’s the number of spaces made available in IPv6, which is based on 32-bit numbers rather than the 16-bit digits in IPv4.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 12:49 PM | Print | Comments (0)
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