Just a short gripe. I hate April Fools and the Internet. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the humour–it’s that the humour, after 10+ years, gets a little trite and overused. Every year I am reminded at how this functionally becomes (with the exception of stodgy traditional media) a day off, on which, if anything catastrophic did happen, we wouldn’t even believe it. A smart terrorist would strike on April Fools Day. If 9/11 had happened on 4/1/2001, it would have been October before we actually realized it wasn’t a hoax reporting job.
Still, gripes aside, the Pirate Bay did have a good fake blog post.
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OK, so this post is already past its expiration date. Still, interesting move. Best Buy grabs Speakeasy for $97 million to help boost their business consulting services.
It is a smart move on Best Buy’s part. Having a consistent bandwidth provider allows them to bundle services for more aggressive and profitable pricing structure. It also gives them the ability to expand into hosted applications, including voice over IP and so forth. Nevertheless, Best Buy could use to invest a little more time in improving their quality of service and customer relationships–a quick Google search for “Geek Squad” revealed the first three pages of entries (with the exception of 2 official Geek Squad homepages) consisting of negative posts about Geek Squad service and billing. Given that Speakeasy has built its reputation on customer satisfaction, Best Buy has a tough and discerning crowd to market their services to.
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A few weeks ago, I posted some statistics on international Internet usage. These numbers are always fascinating and serve, to people who actually read them, as sort of an Internet usage myth buster. For example, the infamous bandwidth crunch (link omitted deliberately) seems a lot less ominous (the tubes are getting clogged!) when we realize that less than 10% of fiber capacity is actually lit, let alone used to capacity.
Well, apparently some investors got alarmed by the “bandwidth crunch” and ponied up some cash for additional underseas cabling; up to four new projects are underway in the Pacific region alone to bring total potential capacity up to 40 Tb/s. Given that current traffic is around a 1Tb/s, I agree with Om’s analysis that this is a bubble reminiscent of the 90s fiber build out. Still, while it’s not a project I plan on investing in anytime soon, I can’t say that I’m sad to see a capacity glut out there.
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