Broadband at Home

For many of us, we grew up knowing that beeping and wailing sound of the computer connecting to the internet. No, I do not miss it and if I ever hear it again, that computer is going out the window. Many people actually do not have internet at home so the internet from their phone services is the next go to, thanks in part to affordable pay-as-you-go packages with data plans. Pew found that 10% of Americans have a smartphone but not a home broadband connection, meaning their phone is their primary means of accessing the Internet. When you look at young people versus older people and you add smartphones in, it actually makes that gap worse because so many 18-to-29-year-olds have a smartphone and so few people 65 and older have them that when you include them in the calculation, the gap between young people and old people actually gets bigger than when you didn’t have smartphones in the equation at all.

What is Your Name?

"According to several studies, the number of women who keep their names after marriage peaked in the 1990s, falling from 23 percent to roughly 18 percent a decade later. Women are marrying, at older ages, on average five years into their postcollegiate careers. They’ve already established professional reputations and networks of contacts who know them by their given names. Setting aside the shoulds and the whys behind which name to pick, the obvious answer for the ambivalent is to use both."

This is definitely an interesting issue that women are encountering. Technically, the official documents have to match in order to not run into problems with taxes and traveling. Other problems that come up are not so much legal but can still cause an unnecessary headache. Questions such as when building security guards often usher people in to work appointments with a married name emblazoned on a temporary-ID card, or calls up and leaves a voicemail to whomever I’m meeting asking if they’re expecting a person they’ve never heard of. What are your thoughts?

Mobile Gaming

New PC games often require fairly high-end graphics cards in order to play at high settings, and every year the envelope gets pushed further and further. You simply can't play many games at acceptable settings with integrated graphics or low-end cards, forcing serious gamers to spend hundreds of dollars to upgrade to an extremely powerful high-margin GPU. But right now the mobile gaming world is different. Basically any game downloaded on an Android device can be played, regardless of the underlying hardware. The best part about mobile gaming is that mobile applications lead the market instead of the hardware that is usually associated with PC gaming. More people are able to play, no matter the level. Also with mobile gaming, the people are not tethered in a certain place. This is of course not to say that PC gaming is going anywhere anytime soon. The bottom line is that it comes down to the actual game and if it is good, there will be players.

Cable Going Down

How often are you frustrated with you cable? How about your cable bundle that include the phone service as well as internet? The cable companies will single handedly bring more business to the heart doctors and increase stress levels. They are charging astronomical prices for packages where most of the channels are not watched. The worst part of it is that the bill is always changing so you never know what you are going to get charged next month. Well consumers are finally taking a stand and cutting the cord. Many people do not have home phone services or landlines anymore. Most of them have cell phones and use internet phones to talk long distance. Even with Netflix and Roku, there are more competition coming to the market. Aereo is accelerating the expansion of its $8-a-month service providing broadcast television over the Internet. The service started in New York last year and expanded to Boston and Atlanta this spring. It has announced plans to expand to Utah on Aug. 19 and Chicago on Sept. 13. On Thursday, Aereo announced plans for three additional markets – Miami on Sept. 2, Houston on Sept. 16 and Dallas on Sept. 23.