Already, they’re calling him ‘Tech President,’ President 2.0., and the first social media president. As Barack Obama took office at noon EST today, one of his first official acts at 12:01 was to switch over to a new Whitehouse.gov and introduce the new White House Blog. His director of New Media for the White House, Macon Phillips, welcomed readers in “Change has come to WhiteHouse.gov”: (more…)

DARPA, or the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the agency that eventually morphed into the Internet, is celebrating its 50th birthday tonight in Washington, D.C.

In Monday’s Washington Post, Stephen Barr writes that DARPA “pulled together researchers who created the blueprint for the Internet.” The organization also “sponsored the inventor of the computer mouse (the first was carved from wood and had one button).”

DARPA is a part of the U.S. Department of Defense, created way back in 1958 as a technological solutions group prodded into action by the Soviet Union’s surprise launch of Sputnik, history’s first satellite. Since then, DARPA has been responsible for pioneering much of the forward-thinking technology that the military has needed over the past decades. And, not surprisingly, much of that technology has found its way into the lives of everyday Americans in recent years.

Of course, the history of all the events and people that came together to create the Internet is much more detailed than this one organization, but it is true that it provided the foundation, without which the World Wide Web would not exist as it does today. DARPA created the concept of computer networking, which of course is the very foundation of today’s Internet.

Mr. Barr tells us more about the organization:

Unlike most federal agencies, DARPA operates with little red tape. It has only two management layers, encouraging the rapid flow of ideas and decisions.

About 240 people work at DARPA, and 120 of them are program managers and office directors on appointments of four to six years. The agency does not own or operate labs, but sponsors research carried out by industry and universities.

By rotating technical professionals every few years, DARPA has “a constant freshness of people and energy,” Tether said. “Everything else we do stems from that.”

One of those short-term managers returning for Thursday’s anniversary dinner is Lawrence G. Roberts, who led a DARPA team that designed a network that evolved into the Internet. He made some of the key decisions in 1967, when he was 30. As Roberts described it, “Putting A and B together and getting Z. Taking obscure things and seeing there is an intersection there.”

He hopes that DARPA will always be able to focus on innovation — “working on something that should change the country and generate the economy shift that the Internet did.”

Read the entire article here.

According to today’s New York Times, Intel plans to announce tomorrow its plans to bring the world the next stage of the World Wide Web: the “Internet in your pocket.”

At a developer event in China, the company, based in Santa Clara, Calif., will display a range of wireless Internet devices that Intel believes will fill a gap between smartphones and laptops. The company is hoping to capitalize on the success that Apple has had with its iPhone, which is one of the most popular mobile Web smartphones.

Intel is calling the new computers Mobile Internet Devices, or MIDs, and claims that it will have a significant advantage over makers of chips for cellphones because the Intel version will be highly compatible with the company’s laptop and desktop processors for which most Web software is written today.

The first generation of Intel’s MID technology will be aimed at data, not voice communications, leaving the company out of the market for smartphones. That has not damped the enthusiasm of Intel executives who foresee a proliferation of devices ranging from advanced ultracompact laptops to small, tablet-size devices that will be used for browsing the Web, navigation and Internet chat, rather than voice communications.

“What enables the innovation is the ability to bring over all the existing PC applications,” said Anand Chandrasekher, general manager of the company’s Ultra Mobility Group.

… Intel’s strategy is moving the company toward a direct confrontation with Qualcomm, the San Diego-based chip maker that is also trying to deliver the wireless Internet on hand-held devices. The company, which refers to its strategy as “pocketable computing,” is offering a competing chip that offers lower power consumption and which is aimed for devices that blend voice and Internet data.

“We need to deliver an Internet experience that is like the desktop,” said Sanjay Jha, Qualcomm’s chief operating officer. “People are used to the Internet, and you can’t shortchange them.”

The new Intel mobile Internet strategy takes advantage of the company’s Atom microprocessor, which was announced in early March. The Atom will have performance roughly equivalent to laptop computers introduced four years ago, but will use little more than a half-a-watt to two-and-a-half watts of battery power. That is significantly lower than the 35 watts of power consumed by the company’s state-of-the-art microprocessors in today’s laptops.

Click here to read the original story.

Today is April 1 — that’s right, April Fool’s Day, the holiday where everybody gets to be a comedian. As you’ve probably noticed, pranks can get a little carried away today, especially on the Internet, where it’s often hard to tell what’s real or not on a normal day.

So, today we’re taking a little break from the world of online business to highlight the best of today’s annual pranks.

Virgle: Virgin and Google are going to the moon! Do you have what it takes to be a space pioneer? Click here to find out!

Wish email could do even more for you? Now it can! Google’s Gmail system announced “Custom Time” – a way to send emails into the past and future! Click here to read about it.

Is your flight overbooked? No problem! Fly WestJet and ride in the overhead compartment!

The Microsoft - Yahoo merger has already happened, according to this fake report from InfoWorld.

Lastly, Pizza Hut had some glitches in their attempt to fool the world into thinking they’ve changed their name to Pasta Hut. Click here to read more, or here to check it the website, but do it quickly — April Fool’s Day is almost over.

For months there has been a rising chorus of alarm about the surging growth in the amount of data flying across the Internet. The threat, according to some industry groups, analysts and researchers, stems mainly from the increasing visual richness of online communications and entertainment — video clips and movies, social networks and multiplayer games.

So begins a recent article in the New York Times about the growing concern amongst some industry observers that the Internet is reaching the limits of its capacity, thanks to the huge increase in streaming video and other media-heavy content we’ve seen in recent years.

Moving images, far more than words or sounds, are hefty rivers of digital bits as they traverse the Internet’s pipes and gateways, requiring, in industry parlance, more bandwidth. Last year, by one estimate, the video site YouTube, owned by Google, consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet did in 2000.

In a widely cited report published last November, a research firm projected that user demand for the Internet could outpace network capacity by 2011. The title of a debate scheduled next month at a technology conference in Boston sums up the angst: “The End of the Internet?”

Tempting as it is to dismiss such overly dramatic generalizations as “The End of the Internet,” and despite the questionable nature of making this kind of sweeping prediction in such an ever-changing form of media, the article does raise a very valid point: We’re using a lot more bandwidth and resources now than we ever did before, and that rate is increasing at a very alarming rate.

The article doesn’t claim that the “end” will be a total crash of web services, but rather, an “Internet clogging in the form of sluggish download speeds and frustration with data-heavy services that become much less useful or enjoyable.”

And perhaps most significant is how this issue will affect the heated debate in America about governmental policies on broadband structure — “a matter that is expected to attract political attention after a new administration takes over in Washington.”

While experts debate the immediacy of the challenge, they agree that it points to a larger issue. In the Internet era, they say, high-speed networks are increasingly the economic and scientific petri dishes of innovation, spawning new businesses, markets and jobs. If American investment lags behind, they warn, the nation risks losing competitiveness to countries that are making the move to higher-speed Internet access a priority.

… The Internet, though a global network, is in many ways surprisingly local. It is a vast amalgam of smaller networks, all linked together. The worries about digital traffic congestion are not really about the Internet’s main trunk lines, the equivalent of network superhighways. Instead, the problem is close to home — the capacity of neighborhood switches, routers and pipes into a house. The cost of stringing high-speed optical fiber to a home, analysts estimate, can be $1,000 or more.

That is why Internet access speeds vary so much country by country. They depend on local patterns of corporate investment and government subsidy. Frederick J. Baker, a research fellow at Cisco, was attending a professional conference last month in Taiwan where Internet access is more than twice as fast and costs far less than his premium “high speed” service in California.

… In the United States, the investment required to cope with rising Internet traffic will need to be made at several levels, not just cable and telecommunications carriers. Tim Pozar, an engineer and a co-owner of the Internet services company UnitedLayer in San Francisco, said a number of forces were combining: the surge in bandwidth-hungry video applications on Web sites, the need to handle traffic from more Internet-enabled devices like cellphones, and shortages of electrical power for data centers in places like San Francisco.

“We’re running out of horsepower to accommodate the demand,” said Mr. Pozar, whose company’s data centers support Web sites for customers ranging from museums to social networks. “And upgrades needed in data centers are going to be a lot more expensive than in the past, now that all the excess capacity left over after the dot-com bubble burst has been gobbled up.” The pace of future demand is the big uncertainty surrounding the Internet traffic challenge, and how fast people will adopt emerging technologies is notoriously difficult to foresee.

Some observers think all this might be pointing to a fragmentation of the Internet, where several other webs are utilized to meet varying needs. At any rate, this is all probably connected with such recent news as TiVo’s announcement that they’re bringing YouTube to consumers’ TV sets.

We can confidently disagree with the report that the Internet will face some kind of crippling crisis in the year 2011. But it’s harder to state that no other problems will happen between now and then. As the Internet continues to evolve, it’ll no doubt take new directions that we can’t even predict yet. That’s one of the reasons why it continues to fascinate, and why it’s essential to get the best Internet partner you can find now, before things get even more chaotic.