GigaOm

At first glance, few technologies feel as unsexy as voice. From a user’s perspective, little has changed since the days of Alexander Graham Bell. Most see voice as a mature technology that simply connects people in real-time across a distance.

But voice is experiencing a wave of innovation that will fundamentally alter this definition. Jae-woan Byun, the CTO of SK Telecom, condemned current voice offerings as “boring for users” but promised a “second tsunami” that could change everything. The first tsunami was about messaging. Thanks to the elimination of the historical limitations that telephony placed on voice, we are already sensing the shockwaves of the next tectonic shift. Voice will be:

• Available every “wear.” Voice is fast becoming a primary interface for wearable technology.
• Private and secure. Encryption of voice will become the default, not the exception.
• Smartphone-native. Today, the dialer application on a smartphone replicates 1970s touchtone telephony.
• Application-embedded features. Beyond caller ID, inbound voice calls carry little context today.
• Beyond the “call.” Future voice communication will mirror the more fluid activity streams on Facebook, Yammer or Google Hangouts. We will invite others into a call as needed, allowing them to jump in and out of conversations seamlessly. Outside calls or cold calls will come with a “conversation request,” where the caller pitches the receiver on why he or she should answer and invest their time.
• Augmented memory & total recall.
• Your intelligent voice assistant.
• Accessible to all. The next generation of voice services will not only have high-definition audio, but also customized acoustic profiles to us individually and our environment. We don’t all speak the same languages or dialects, so automated real-time subtitles and translation will become commonplace.

[Geddes co-founder and executive director of the Hypervoice Consortium]

[Commentary] Comcast will file an application with the Federal Communications Commission for a formal review of the proposed Time Warner Cable transaction.

And once that happens, the Federal Communications Commission will have an excellent opportunity to get some of the data it will need to decide if it should regulate interconnection agreements between last-mile ISPs such as Comcast and other companies selling bandwidth or content over IP.

The problem appears to be congestion between online video providers like Netflix and bandwidth providers like Comcast that causes packets to drop and the end user experience to degrade. Basically, are last-mile ISPs acting as rent-seeking opportunists because they can or is this a legitimate business fight over who pays for the interconnections between networks? To decide the FCC will need data on both the actual congestion at these interconnection points and on the pricing that ISPs are charging. And the sense in Washington, as articulated by Public Knowledge SVP Harold Feld, is that the Comcast acquisition of Time Warner Cable is the right venue to force access to this data and start this debate.

So even as Netflix and Level 3 confuse the issue, equating it with paying for better access, the FCC is going to stand its ground and look at peering as an interconnection issue. That is part of FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler’s beloved network compact that is governing how he’s thinking about moving from the analog to the IP age in communications. And the logical place to start this review will be as part of the Comcast-Time Warner merger review.

The discussion about the changing nature of work -- specifically with regard to the shift away from full-time employment to a freelancer-dominated, gig economy -- has been growing.

A number of items crossed my radar screen, including a number of financing announcements that demonstrate that employment has become increasingly precarious for most people.

A new report has been released by the UK Commission for Employment and Skills (UKES), and it makes for scary reading. The report collates a great deal of data about the state of work in the UK and other countries, and casts a futures approach toward trends analysis. The skinny is that things are bad in the UK, with a marketplace and workforce that is the least educated in the EU after Spain, and with low growth projected. But the scenarios they concoct for the future all seem to converge into a dystopic future, where several trends prevail:

• The only group that has any hope of stable employment are the well-trained and well-educated, but even they have modest hopes for increased pay.
• The middle-skilled tier of workers are being pushed out by a number of trends: use of freelancers, migration of work to other countries (notably Asia), and automation.
• Those in the bottom-skilled tier of workers are increasingly likely to be working as freelancers: part-time, ‘zero hours’ contract positions, which lack the benefits and stability of full-time employment.

[Commentary] What will become of the humble cookie? The tiny data files sent from websites to browsers have come under much scrutiny recently, particularly from privacy advocates and policy makers.

Even advertisers agree that the web needs a viable alternative that balances privacy concerns with marketers’ desire to target users effectively. Many industry leaders have grimly declared “the death of the cookie” sometime within the next few years. What’s the cause of their cynicism? Here are some of the most common critiques:

• Privacy concerns: Critics argue that third-parties collect and store excessive data on consumers, often without their knowledge. Consumers agree -- 57 percent of Internet users are either “concerned” or “very concerned” about their online privacy, according to a recent study by analytics firm Annalect. Law makers are concerned as well, and have tasked industry and consumer groups with defining a browser-based “Do Not Track” standard that would allow users to easily opt out of tracking.
• Limited reach: Cookies aren’t effective in mobile environments (third-party cookies are blocked by default on iOS devices, for instance). This can be limiting for advertisers, given that we spend more time on mobile devices than we do laptops and PCs.
• Poor cross-device tracking: Cookies can’t provide cross-device targeting capabilities (i.e. targeting the same user across mobile and desktop devices).

[Wedlake is an analyst at Thomvest Ventures, focusing on advertising technology]

Visitors to the New York Public Library’s website will have a new way to decide what to read next: The library is partnering with New York-based startup Zola Books to offer algorithm-based recommendations to readers.

The technology comes from Bookish, the book discovery site that Zola acquired in early 2014. With the Bookish partnership, the recommendations will be based on the content of a book itself.

[Commentary] News that Apple is talking to Comcast about building a joint TV service offering took the Internet by storm. But details and timing of the story seem just too good to be true.

I don’t believe that we will see a service like the one painted by the Wall Street Journal anytime soon. Now, I’m sure the two companies have discussed this, just like they have probably discussed a whole range of other options. But that this one surfaces right now seems just a little too convenient.

The gloves are coming off in the fight to prevent Internet service providers (ISPs) from charging content providers and middle mile transit companies a fee to deliver web content to the end consumer.

Level 3 Communications, a transit provider, along with Netflix, filed formal comments to the Federal Communications Commission, and both give examples of what they see as ISPs trying to collect tolls in the middle of the network. Level 3 has proposed that the FCC should require ISPs to interconnect on “commercially reasonable terms, without the payment of an access charge.” Level 3 wants the FCC to say that access charges, where an ISP charges those it exchanges traffic with for the privilege of reaching its users, are not commercially reasonable. It then suggests some basics on how the FCC should think about “commercially reasonable terms.”

Basically, Level 3 wants an ISP to add more capacity at congested areas at no charge or offer another point of interconnection in the geographic area where it will provide interconnection without charge. It’s unclear if Level 3′s definition of no charge, means that Level 3 won’t help offset the cost of the gear to provide more capacity. As a way of mitigating the burden such rules would lay on ISPs, Level 3 suggests that ISPs would only have to interconnect with large networks. It also notes that the FCC could implement this rule without imposing common carrier rules on ISPs, which the agency is clearly unwilling to do.

A federal judge sided with Internet radio service Pandora over the music industry in a bitter fight over songwriting royalties, after concluding that Pandora is more akin to regular radio than other music services like iTunes Radio and Spotify.

In a decision published in New York, US District Judge Denise Cote concluded that Pandora should continue paying a royalty rate of 1.85 percent of its annual revenues, and that the 3 percent music publishers had sought was not “reasonable.” According to the court, the fair rate for Pandora should not be determined by referring to what interactive music service, Spotify, pays to license songs from ASCAP. The reason is that: “on-demand streaming services like Spotify are widely considered cannibalistic and are licensed at a higher rate accordingly.”

The court also rejected the music companies attempt to use Apple, which launched a radio service of its own, as a royalty model. While Apple is rumored to be paying ASCAP a 10 percent royalty rate, Judge Cote ruled that this amounts to an apples-to-oranges comparison, in part because the service is new and because Apple is using it promote its hardware products. The ruling in favor of Pandora may further embitter certain songwriters who blame digital musical services for undercutting artists’ ability to make a living.

The bottom line is that the ruling puts Pandora on about equal footing with other radio stations when it comes to paying ASCAP, but the music royalty system still appears deeply distressed and uneven.

The Federal Trade Commission has its eye on the privacy practices of a wide variety of data-collecting players, the deputy director of the agency’s Bureau of Consumer Protection said.

Daniel Kaufman said the rise of mobile ecosystems and the Internet of things, with the myriad companies and devices they involve, required a broad view. For example, Kaufman said, the FTC targeted HTC over privacy-busting security flaws and Android flashlight app maker Goldenshores over its deceptive privacy policy. The agency even has a “mobile lab” staffed with technologists and attorneys who check out where devices and apps send users’ data, and how that squares with their claimed privacy policies.

“For us we have to look at the entire ecosystem and make sure all the players are doing what they should be doing and what the law allows,” Kaufman said.

The European Parliament’s industry committee has passed Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes’s big telecoms legislation package, including a contentious section covering network neutrality.

The legislation is ostensibly supposed to entrench the principles of net neutrality in European law for the first time, guaranteeing that broadband and mobile providers treat all Internet services equally. However, part of the wording refers to “specialized services” that can be exempted from this principle, and the wording of the package as passed defines these services quite broadly.