Massachusetts
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Massachusetts will tax ridesharing services to compensate taxis
State and city governments have been trying to protect the taxi industry from ridesharing services for a while, but Massachusetts is taking an unusual route. Its governor recently enacted a law (the first known in the US) that will charge ridesharing services a 20-cent fee for subsidizing transportation infrastructure, 5 cents of which will go to the taxi industry. Yes, every Lyft or Uber you hail will directly fund the taxis they're competing against. Officials still have to hash out the finer details, such as how they'll collect the fee and spend it, but the legislation prevents companies from tacking it on to your fare.
Uber will pay $100 million to settle lawsuits in two states
Uber announced tonight that it has settled a pair of class-action lawsuits from drivers in California and Massachusetts. The settlement will pay $84 million to the plaintiffs, plus an extra $16 million if the company goes public and its valuation exceeds a set amount. Key for Uber is an agreement that it will continue to classify its drivers as independent contractors instead of employees. According to the company, it will provide more info to drivers about their ratings and how they compare to other drivers, and explain what can get drivers banned in a newly published policy. Finally, it will also form a driver's association in these two states, and meet with the group quarterly to discuss issues.
Politician rallying against SWATting falls victim herself
Writing about SWATting victims is as depressing as writing about data breaches, but this is the future we live in. In regards to the former, the politician who's come out strongest against the potentially deadly prank found herself on the receiving end of it recently. As her Boston local CBS station reports, Congresswoman Katherine Clark had a smattering of police officers with "long guns" on her front lawn Sunday night. What'd she do, broadcast some Counter-Strike? No, She's rallying behind the Interstate Swatting Hoax Act, a bill that'd make prank calling the SWAT team on someone a federal offense. Currently, the law states that faking a bomb threat or terrorist attack via telecommunications and across state lines is illegal; SWATting is not.
Daily fantasy sports to stay in Massachusetts with new regulations
As the likes of DraftKings, FanDuel and Yahoo fight to keep their daily fantasy sites open in New York, they'll be able to do so in Massachusetts. Attorney General Maura Healey announced the first set of guidelines for a state to regulate the fantasy sports games rather than outright banning them. According to the new rules, players in Massachusetts must be 21 years of age and companies who run the games are prohibited from advertising on school or college campuses. What's more, professional athletes or folks with ties to a professional sport (agents, employees, etc.) won't be able to play games that focus on that particular sport. For example, an NFL player couldn't participate in pro football daily fantasy games, but could do so for NBA or basketball-related activities. The regulations won't go into effect immediately, though, as Healey asked for a public comment period and a court hearing before making the new rules official. However, daily fantasy companies could be proactive in establishing the new rules, which Healey said she hopes they would do. [Image credit: Bloomberg via Getty Images]
Massachusetts grills Uber and Lyft over disability access
Ridesharing outfits make some effort to accommodate disabled passengers, but Massachusetts isn't sure that they go far enough. Reuters has learned that the state's Attorney General is grilling Uber and Lyft over the levels of disability access they provide. There aren't any official actions under way, but this is the first time that any US attorney general's office has given accessibility a look. That's bound to make the two companies nervous when both of them are facing lawsuits over their support for guide dogs and wheelchairs.
22 Massachusetts towns will build their own gigabit internet service
The FCC made it clear that towns should have the freedom to build their own broadband services, and one cooperative group is determined to take advantage of that liberty. WiredWest has gained the support of 22 Massachusetts towns for a municipal broadband effort that will give them all fiber optic service. It won't be the cheapest option, but it'll be much faster than the pokey DSL, fixed wireless and satellite data that residents have had to settle for in the past. It'll start at $49 per month for 25Mbps speeds and no caps, with 100Mbps and a lightning-quick 1Gbps respectively available for $79 and $109 per month.
Massachusetts town lifts 32-year ban on arcade games
Residents in Marshfield, Massachusetts, overturned a 32-year ban on arcade games this week, allowing public venues to set up coin-operated arcade cabinets. It was a close vote, 203-175. The ban entered the Marshfield books in 1982, and in 1983, it was upheld by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court. The town attempted to overturn it in 1994 and 2011, but both votes were unsuccessful. An article in the Christian Science Monitor in 1983 outlined proponents' reasoning: "The games are said to be addictive to youth, who will skip school and spend unreasonable sums of money to play them at a quarter – and sometimes 50 cents – a pop, says Thomas R. Jackson, a retired narcotics agent and the resident who proposed the ban. Further, he says, gambling and drug activity are connected to the video game locations where youth congregate unsupervised." Marshfield resident Craig Rondeau led the successful petition to overturn the ban. Rondeau told the Patriot Ledger that video games help children hone problem-solving and social skills, and they encourage creativity. Rondeau found six businesses to sign on to overturn the ban. "They want the opportunity to choose," he said. "Let's give them back their right to choose."
Mass. removes violent games from turnpike rest stops
In response to a complaint and the events in Newtown, Connecticut, the state of Massachusetts has removed nine violent games from rest plazas controlled by the state. The service plazas affected were in Charlton, Ludlow, Lee and Beverly.If you're curious, the Mass. towns of Charlton, Ludlow, Lee and Beverly are 100 miles, 83 miles, 80 miles and 170 miles away from Newtown, respectively."Bottom line is I think there isn't a person who doesn't believe that there isn't too much violence in our society, and games can glorify that," Mass. Transportation Secretary Richard Davey told The Boston Globe. "A video game in a public space could be used by anybody of any age."Meanwhile, Mayor Robert Dolan of Melrose, Mass. (158 miles), is starting an initiative to persuade families to dispose of their violent video games, movies and toys by offering deals at local businesses and maybe even "get out of homework free" coupons.Representatives from the games industry met with Vice President Joe Biden today to discuss the role of violent video games in regards to gun violence.
Sprint brings LTE to parts of Kansas, Illinois and Massachusetts
Has anyone else noticed a surge in locations getting newly-minted LTE of late? Sprint has, and it's joining the bandwagon with a further five areas from today. Users in Lawrence, Topeka and Wichita in Kansas, Waukegan-Lake in Illinois and Barnstable-Hyannis in Massachusetts will be able to slurp down Big Yellow's new service soon, if they can't already. The company has also revealed that Chicagoans, Angelenos and New Yorkers will be getting 3G service thanks to the company's Network Vision program, as it continues to swap out its aging Nextel hardware for something a little more futuristic.
LG Display's new five-inch 1080p smartphone display: it's real, and we've got video
We stopped by The Society for Information Display's (SID) 2012 convention in not-so-sunny Boston, Massachusetts to feast our eyes upon LG Display's latest creation: a five-inch display panel with Retina-smashing specs. We're talking about a screen that sports a 1920 x 1080 full HD (FHD) resolution, 16:9 aspect ratio and 440ppi density -- not to mention the Advanced High Performance In-Plane Switching (AH-IPS) technology. The Life's Good arm states that the window, which has not yet been paired with a smartphone, will provide "Full HDTV quality" on a phone for the first time. Seeing is believing, though, so have a look at our gallery then saunter past the break to read what the company's VP of IT and Mobile Development had to say about the future of screens. %Gallery-157218%
Mass. Lt. Gov. wants game tax credits tied to job creation
Massachusetts is the fifth largest state for game industry employment in spite of better developer incentives in other states. Nearly 1,300 industry jobs exist in the Commonwealth, but a recent profile of Irrational Games by The Improper Bostonian covers how the state's grip on gaming could slip if it doesn't step up studio stimulus.A bill for game developer incentives has been floating around the Mass. legislature for about a year, but hasn't gained traction with lawmakers. The state currently provides heavy cuts for the movie industry, despite the game industry pumping more cash into local economies."It's ironic," Irrational Games' director of product development Tim Gerritsen said. "If you look at it, where do you want to put your money? We've got 120 permanent employees. They spend all their money here. They pay their rent here. They pay their taxes here. Do you want Dane Cook? He's here for two weeks doing a film, and he's gone.""When you talk about tax incentives, that's less revenue that you're receiving, so I think any kind of incentive would have to be linked to hard commitments from the private sector," said Lieutenant Governor Timothy Murray, who is coming off a win by keeping PAX East in Boston until 2023. The convention will also make donations totaling $325,000 over the next 11 years to MassDiGI.The state did lose a major studio last year when former Red Sox player Curt Schilling's 38 Studios moved to neighboring Rhode Island for a $75 million loan. The state isn't likely to lose established studios like Harmonix, Demiurge and Turbine. The problem comes founding or incubating new studios without concessions.
MIT builds camera that can capture at the speed of light (video)
A team from the MIT media lab has created a camera with a "shutter speed" of one trillion exposures per second -- enabling it to record light itself traveling from one point to another. Using a heavily modified Streak Tube (which is normally used to intensify photons into electron streams), the team could snap a single image of a laser as it passed through a soda bottle. In order to create the slow-motion film in the video we've got after the break, the team had to replicate the experiment hundreds of times. The stop-motion footage shows how light bounces through the bottle, collecting inside the opaque cap before dispersing. The revolutionary snapper may have a fast shutter but the long time it takes to process the images have earned it the nickname of the "the world's slowest fastest camera." [Image courtesy of MIT / M. Scott Brauer]
Inefficient? MIT's new chip software doesn't know the meaning of the word
Would you rather have a power-hungry cellphone that could software-decode hundreds of video codecs, or a hyper-efficient system-on-chip that only processes H.264? These are the tough decisions mobile designers have to make, but perhaps not for much longer. MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory has developed a solution that could spell the end for inefficient devices. Myron King and Nirav Dave have expanded Arvind's BlueSpec software so engineers can tell it what outcomes they need and it'll decide on the most efficient design -- printing out hardware schematics in Verilog and software in C++. If this outcome-oriented system becomes widely adopted, we may never need worry about daily recharging again: good because we'll need that extra power to juice our sporty EV. [Image courtesy of MIT / Melanie Gonick]
Massachusetts Attorney General investigating iTunes scams
We get several emails every week from readers claiming to have been hit with fraudulent charges on their iTunes accounts. It seems as though scammers have found a neatly exploitable hole in iTunes accounts, but they may have bitten off more than they can chew with their latest victim. Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley said her stolen credit card info was recently used to make fraudulent purchases on iTunes, and she wants answers from Cupertino. According to Threat Post, after having her credit card info stolen during a New Hampshire skiing trip, the thieves tried to purchase a laptop from Dell, who noted the transaction was fraudulent and contacted Coakley about it. Apple was not so diligent; thieves quickly emptied Coakley's account via iTunes transactions. While Coakley's response (seeking answers from Apple) may seem a bit reactionary at first, the slow trickle of reports we've received over the months concerning fraudulent iTunes purchases signifies that this problem is far greater in scope than one person's stolen credit card. We keep hearing the same stories again and again: "Purchases showed up on my account that I had nothing to do with. Apple hasn't gotten back to me. What do I do?" It's been happening often enough that there's clearly a real issue, and it's something that Apple, as operator of one of the world's largest repositories of credit card info, has a responsibility to address.
142 electric vehicle charging stations head to Massachusetts, Nantucket and MV not included
Things are lookin' up in New England -- particularly for those who crisscross Yawkey Way with an electric vehicle. A grand total of 142 EV charging stations are slated to hit The Bay State in the coming months, with 25 communities across the commonwealth to get gifted. Boston reports that the majority of 'em will be in "common commuter or traveler spots," places like downtown parking garages, MBTA lots, shopping malls, etc. The bulk of the boxes will be part of the ChargePoint network, and we're told that the rates for recharging will be set by "municipalities on public land and by property owners on private land," depending on where each box is planted. So, is the charging station rollout between NY and MA the new Yankees vs. Red Sox? Nah, but a techie can dream.
Mass. bill proposes stepping up state's game dev incentives
With EA set to break ground for a new facility at LSU, and Gameloft considering similar "endeavors" in New Orleans, Louisiana legislatures have got to be feeling good about the allure of the state's Digital Interactive Media Credit. 1500 miles to the northeast, Massachusetts is considering enacting similar tax incentives for game developers through a bill filed earlier this year by Rep. Vincent Pedone. As the bill, affectionately known as "H03301," continues to kick around the Mass. Legislature, representatives of specialty tax services provider Alliantgroup take a look at its proposed "rewards" on Develop. While subject to alteration, the current draft of the bill proposes significant tax credits for both labor- and production-based costs incurred by large and small game-related companies alike, including a potential credit for a "promotional logo of the commonwealth of Massachusetts" placed on a game. In other words, stamp a game with a "Made in Massachusetts" logo (as Alliantgroup dubs it) and a company could earn up to a $75,000 annual credit under the bill's current stipulations. Of course, the bill has yet to be put to a vote by state lawmakers, who can ill afford to sleep on it for long if they want to keep pace in the "quest" to win over the game industry. In addition to Louisiana, Alliantgroup identifies 16 other "game-friendly" states, including neighboring Rhode Island, which last year lured away Curt Shilling's 38 Studios from Mass. ["Made in Massachusetts" logo source: Massachusetts Bay Trading Co, Inc.]
Mass. town to consider lifting 29-year ban on coin-op games
In 1982, sensing that its quaint, coastal way of life was being threatened by the coin-operated craze sweeping the nation's youth, Marshfield, Massachusetts banned arcade games from public establishments. The local law was upheld by the state's Supreme Court the following year and has remained in place ever since. Three decades later, residents are starting to wonder if "the whole hysteria back in 1982," as current Marshfield Selectmen chair Patricia Reilly put it to WCBV Boston, had misguided their good intentions. After all, state law permits Keno to be allowed in bars and other public buildings in town. What could be so wrong about a little Big Buck Hunter edged up against the far corner of the local watering hole? The video game ban will be challenged at next week's town meeting when voters can overturn the seemingly archaic decree. Of course, there are still those who fear such change could forever alter the character of this South Shore Shangri-La. "We're a coastal town," insists former selectwoman Faith Jean, who helped pass the law back in '82, to CBS Boston. "Now are we an amusement coastal town or are we fishing and swimming and sailing?" "We are not talking about little video games that kids play or pinball machines. We are talking about slot machines, gambling machines," adds Jean in the WCBV Boston report. "Coin-operated devices are one more thing your kids will be asking money for. What kind of town do we want Marshfield to be?" For the record, Reilly expects the repeal to pass. [Image credit: drsparc]
Rhode Island politicians speak out against 38 Studios deal
Though 38 Studios hasn't yet released a video game, it's already bringing together a particular community of people: Rhode Island politicians. The state's Economic Development Corporation (EDC) recently lured the studio over from its current home in Massachusetts with the promise of a $75 million loan -- a sum which just about every Gubernatorial candidate from the state has taken to publicly criticizing since it was first announced. For instance, Independent candidate Lincoln Chafee called for "the Board to suspend the commitment to 38 Studios," and to reconsider whether its the best way for Rhode Island to spend the loan. Moderate candidate Ken Block released a statement saying "seventy-five million dollars could go a long way to help many small businesses here in Rhode Island," also calling for the deal to be halted. Don't these guys realize that their campaigning might just be imperiling the stability of 450 futurejobs? Cut it out!
38 Studios moves next door to Rhode Island for 75 million smackers
Two weeks ago we reported that Rhode Island was attempting to woo 38 Studios away from Massachusetts with a tempting $75 million loan guarantee. Today we've gotten word that Curt Schilling's company has indeed taken the bait, and will be relocating to The Ocean State due to this sweet incentive. While there's no definite timetable on the move, Mass High Tech reports that this loan guarantee comes with a few strings attached: 38 Studios will receive partial loan payments only upon meeting certain milestones, and the company has to put all of its assets up for collateral. The loan comes from a special $125 million program to create high-tech jobs in Rhode Island, and the state hopes that 38 Studios will account for up to 450 new jobs once it arrives. Curt Schilling promised to "protect the loan guarantee that's been given by the state with the same passion and interest that I'm protecting my own investment in this company." 38 Studios recently announced that its single-player RPG, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, will be published by EA next year, with its MMO -- code-named "Copernicus" -- to follow.
38 Studios meeting with Rhode Island reps regarding studio move
A week before 38 Studios is finally set to reveal its EA-published title, "Project Mercury," former baseball player Curt Schilling's Massachusetts-based studio is playing hardball for tax breaks. The Boston Globe reports studio heads are set to meet with Rhode Island reps on Thursday to discuss, in part, up to $75 million in loan guarantees in exchange for moving the company down south (about a 90-minute drive from its current location). Representatives from the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation state that 38 Studios approached them about the potential move. According to the Globe, Schilling has said the studio plans to hire over 300 workers over the next couple years at 38 Studios and Maryland-based Big Huge Games, which the company acquired last year.
