It happens every three months in corporate America: Senior management officials from publicly held companies gather ’round the conference table, fire up the conferencing system, and hold court with analysts and (sometimes) thousands of listeners to discuss the company’s performance and outlook. But the quarterly earnings call, a ritual of public companies and a wellspring […]
Memory Lane: Will the circle be unbroken?
If you slice through the snake of black cable that connects to your TV set and peer directly into the exposed innards, you’ll see a circle. Inside it, at the center, is a conductor, which in turn is shielded by insulating material and surrounded by a concentric outer conductor. You’re staring at an essential enabler […]
Memory Lane: Highway star
In the summer of 1919, a convoy of 81 U.S. Army vehicles began a cross-country journey from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco. Traveling at an average speed of 6 miles an hour, 24 officers and 258 soldiers lurched across parts of Pennsylvania, Ohio, the open plains of the Midwest and over the Rocky Mountains before […]
Amdocs forum illuminates new era of service modernization
A cable-broadband customer is almost to the halfway point of the latest sci-fi feature film when a message pops up on his tablet indicating he’s approaching the monthly data cap tied to his broadband subscription. The pop-up offers three solutions: Upgrade to a monthly unlimited plan on the spot for $29.99 per month; pay 4 […]
Memory Lane: Homage to protocol past
Even if his moniker doesn’t ring a bell immediately, you might notice something familiar about the name of 19th century French engineer Jean-Maurice-Émile Baudot. It’s that surname, isn’t it? Baudot. Ever wonder where the term “baud” originated? Now you know. Baud expresses the number of pulses (or voltage changes) that can be transmitted over a […]
Memory Lane: When the sky was the limit
On Dec. 13, 1975, RCA gave the cable industry a pre-Christmas gift to remember when the first of RCA’s Satcom series of geostationary satellites was launched by NASA from a Delta 3000 rocket. Satcom 1 was to the cable programming industry what a Beverly Hills ZIP code is to an entertainment lawyer: the most desirable […]
Memory Lane – Mix message
It’d be easy to dismiss the mix tape as a passing fad among pre-digital college kids were it not for the revolution we now know it foreshadowed. The legendary singer Bing Crosby died in 1977, the same year YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley was born. But through the lineage of media technology, the two are practically […]
Memory Lane – A Remote Opportunity
Maybe the impetus for TV set replacement is resolving a visceral human need: Eliminating the remote. During World War I, the German Navy unleashed an inventive weapon designed to compromise enemy firepower while avoiding casualties. Naval officers steered motorboats loaded with explosives toward enemy ships using a novel remote control technology that operated via radio […]