The earthquake which struck Haiti on Tuesday has wrought an unimaginable human toll. As the devastation is made plain on our TV screens — and in our browsers — our charitable instincts are awakened and long for an outlet.

Text HAITI to 90999 and a donation of $10 will be given to the Red Cross to help with relief efforts in #Haiti.

So tweeted @mGive on Tuesday evening, and so began a sea change in digital fund raising.

Quick and easy: Text HAITI to 90999 to donate $10

In the three days since, more than one million such text messages have been sent, bringing in over $10 million to help Haiti’s earthquake victims. Haitian musician Wyclef Jean’s YELE/501501 campaign had collected over $1 million in $5 donations by Thursday. Similar SMS campaigns are underway by International Medical Corps, International Rescue, the Salvation Army, and the William J. Clinton foundation, but it is the “HAITI/90999″ campaign which caught the attention of the Obama administration and was promoted on the White House blog on Wednesday.

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Today we announced our “CIO’s Guide to Cost Cutting” series of reports which Steve Hilton and I have been working on for the past few weeks. In this series we demonstrate that businesses can achieve major cost savings by embracing Yankee Group’s vision of Anywhere IT. And by using Yankee Group’s legacy IT environment as a starting point for our cost modeling, we are able to quantify these savings for a typical SMB:

• Get a corporate wireless plan and save half. Stop reimbursing individual-liable cell phone bills and move everyone to a single, corporate plan. Apply a fair standard to qualify employees, adopt a common platform (like BlackBerry), and leverage your concentrated spend to provide better and more consistent support to more employees than you do today. Our test SMB saved $96,000, or 47 percent in the first year alone — and eliminated dozens of paper expense reports each month.
• Ditch your mail server(s) and save over 80%. Moving from traditional Lotus or Microsoft premises-based e-mail application to a cloud-based messaging solution like Google Apps Premier Edition saved our model SMB a staggering 83 percent (about $64,000) in the first year. The three-year savings approached 90% (more than $200,000).

“Less” and “worse” all too commonly follow budget tightening, but “different” gives “better” and “more” a fighting chance.

In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, our equine-challenged heroes come upon the Rabbit of Caerbannog, which appears to be an ordinary, harmless rabbit until it starts killing people.

Outdated, obsolete -- but useful again with DTV

With the transition to broadcast digital TV (DTV) in the U.S. — whenever it’s going to happen — outdated, obsolete “rabbit ears” indoor antennas are poised to become a viable threat to cable and satellite TV providers, especially as consumers become increasingly budget-conscious.

My eyes were opened to this threat recently when my parents asked me to connect a digital converter box to the small, 5 year old LCD TV my mother uses in the kitchen. I was naturally concerned that they had (1) attempted a technology purchase without seeking my advice and (2) had gone to Radio Shack to do it.

But what a pleasant surprise the Zenith DTT901 digital converter box turned out to be! (The Shack took care of them — thanks, guys.)  For about $20 (after coupon), that little TV suddenly had the best picture in the house:

• Digital-perfect reception of all of Boston’s network affiliates (and then some), and several new sub-channels to boot
• Automatic scaling, zooming, and cropping of HD and SD programming
• An on-screen program guide

And since all of Boston’s DTV stations are currently UHF, they don’t even need the VHF “ears” extended (only channel 7 is currently scheduled to return to its old VHF frequency after the transition’s analog shutdown).

Clearly, this is not the broadcast TV of my youth.

Broadcast TV then

Back then, living 25.5 miles southeast of Boston’s primary broadcast towers in Needham, MA (thanks, AntennaWeb!) meant that we had a VHF/UHF antenna on our chimney, just like everyone else.  Ours rotated, though, controlled by an unapologetically analog dial which made a satisfyingly mechanical “thunk” as it stepped the mast from NW to SSW to try for Providence stations too.

Broadcast TV now

Picture quality was mediocre at best. Snow, static, ghosts, waves, whatever, whenever.  We signed up for cable as soon as it became available in our town and never looked back.  We switched to digital in the early 1990’s as soon as DirecTV receivers hit the magic $99 mark.

But with DTV so easily available, of such high quality, and with such advanced features — for free — why would anyone in the city or suburbs ever pay a $9 or $10 monthly fee for a barebones “local TV” package again?

For cable and satellite providers feeling pressure on the high-end as consumers respond to the economy by shedding premium channels, this new threat to the low-end is unwelcome indeed. Multi-play packages and other retention efforts (such as Cablevision’s Optimum WiFi deployment) become all the more important, but must be targeted carefully, like the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, not haphazardly like Jimmy Carter’s boat oars.

Last week the incoming Obama administration announced their desire to delay the digital TV transition, possibly until the summer.  Why?

1. Nielsen Media Research estimates that 7.8 million households were still unprepared for the transition as of December
2. funding to support the change is “woefully inadequate” — the converter box coupon program ran out of money early last week
3. insufficient funding and education will hurt “the most vulnerable Americans”: the elderly, the poor, and the rural

Allow me to translate:

1. People procrastinate.  And somehow the cure for this is for the government to procrastinate for them.  A real concern is that the sudden economic slowdown has interfered with people’s plans to upgrade their televisions.  But you don’t need a new television — or even a converter box — if you already subscribe to basic cable (or satellite).  And study after study reveal that the cable bill is one of the last bills people stop paying during times of financial hardship; premium channels and pay-per-view add-ons may be among the first to go, but basic cable (or satellite) is here to stay.
2. Congress underestimated the demand for free money.  This is especially surprising as they have so much practice, but fortunately the fix is easy: simply appropriate more funds to the existing program (starting by recapturing funds for already-expired coupons) or change the coupon program into a rebate program.
3. If you’re old, poor, and/or live in the sticks, messing with your TV is just piling on.  Pardon me, but when politicians speak of “the most vulnerable Americans,” is it unreasonable to expect the topic at hand be more weighty than a daily dose of Dr. Phil?  We’re not talking about access to healthcare, education (sorry PBS), or the court system.  Furthermore, Nielsen’s same transition readiness survey from December found households led by adults aged 55 and older to be prepared at twice the rate of those led by adults under 35.  And as someone who used to drive through West Virginia, trust me — rural America is quite aware of satellite TV.

But what’s the harm?

There are many moving parts to the digital TV transition, with the February 17 analog cutoff mandated in the Digital Television Transition and Public Safety Act of 2005.  In preparation for this transition, television stations have been broadcasting digitally on temporary frequency assignments, mostly in the UHF band.  A delay would require these broadcasters to continue to operate and maintain their analog facilities.

700MHz bandwidth auctioned = UHF Channels 52-69

At the same time, the FCC has already sold UHF channels 52-69 to wireless carriers (primarily Verizon Wireless and AT&T) in last year’s much-publicized 700MHz. auction for their 4G deployments.  ”Falcon_77″ on the AV Science (AVS) Forum has done an amazing job compiling a complete database of U.S. TV frequency assignments including these transitional assignments.  Currently there are 335 stations broadcasting in this 700MHz block.  Of these, 141 are transitional digital stations; the other 194 are legacy existing analog stations.

We are very late in the game to throw a monkey wrench into this bandwidth handover. For not only is the auction concluded — and nearly $20 billion collected from the winners — but on January 6, the FCC even granted the licenses to use these frequencies.  And these licenses all expire on February 17, 2019, so the $20 billion dollar clock is about to start ticking.

So soon after this fall’s economic shocks, so firmly in the midst of general economic uncertainty, and so close to such an historic transition of power, now is not the time for government to erode further our confidence in its ability to provide a stable, fair, and transparent regulatory environment. With so many comparisons to the Great Depression being thrown around so casually, read The Forgotten Man by Amity Shlaes for a reminder of the grave ramifications when businesses lose faith in the government’s ability to apply regulations consistently.

Carl Howe, Chris Collins and Josh Martin from Yankee Group’s Anywhere Consumer research team join Yankee Group’s Chief Technology Officer Jeffrey Breen to start the countdown of Yankee Group’s Top 10 predictions for 2009:

10. Twitter is the new Facebook
9. AT&T/Verizon/IPTV subscribers will exceed 7 million in U.S.
8. Mobile becomes the key to quad-play success

Top 10 Consumer Predictions for 2009: #10-#8 podcast (mp3 / 11MB / 11:59)

I had my first virtualization “a-ha” moment about five years ago when I first ran a copy of VMware Workstation on my laptop. The window flashed black, and as I watched the familiar BIOS boot sequence, I figured out just about all I have needed to know about how virtualization systems work: it makes a little computer in there, complete with memory, BIOS, and what looks like regular devices.

It’s that latter bit — the ability to share physical devices and substitute disk files for CD-ROMs and hard drives — that quickly led to my second “a-ha” moment: hey, that “hard drive” I added to that vm is just a big file on my computer.

As you know, everything that makes a computer unique is stored on disk: the operating system, applications, configuration settings, even the dreaded Windows registry — usually in hundreds or thousands of files scattered (and hidden) all over your disk. But when that “disk” is just one big file on a physical volume, suddenly it doesn’t seem so hard to back up, copy, clone — even version control — whole computers at once.

Virtualization, SAN, and software vendors offer a lot of bells and whistles — snapshots, real-time replication, volume mirroring, differential backups, etc. — but it is the “atomic” nature of virtual machines which make them so easy to back up and restore. And that sounds like the beginning of a disaster recovery strategy, doesn’t it?

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T-Mobile this week released a new twist on the digital picture frame. Listen to Yankee Group Chief Technology Officer Jeffrey Breen and Senior Analyst Josh Martin discuss it in this podcast.

T-Mobile picture frame podcast (mp3 / 3.2MB / 06:53)

No, not those results…

Yesterday the FCC voted unanimously to resolve three issues which have been hanging like so many chads before the commission:

• the merger of Sprint and Clearwire to clear the way for the new, WiMAX Clearwire
• Alltel’s acquisition by Verizon Wireless
• the unlicensed use of “white spaces” between TV channels

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