From Texas Statehouse to YouTube, a Filibuster Is a Hit

But her abortion rights advocacy and her pink sneakers might have never gained national attention had she been in a state without a reliable live stream of the Legislature. Ms. Davis’s 11-hour filibuster inadvertently illuminated the stark technological differences that exist from state to state when it comes to broadcasting the public’s business.

In nearly a dozen states, there is no live video of legislative proceedings, only audio; in some other states that purport to provide video, the Web streams barely work. Even the audio, though, is of value to reporters, activists and ordinary citizens.

As journalism organizations continue to cut back on the number of reporters stationed at statehouses across the country, state-level equivalents to C-Span on television and online are supplying new ways to bear witness to the machinations of state and local government.

Some of Ms. Davis’s supporters and detractors will surely be watching on Monday when the Texas Legislature reconvenes and takes up the bill again. In Texas last week, The Texas Tribune made up for the state Senate’s digital shortcomings. Months before Ms. Davis’s vivid protest, the nonprofit news organization, based a few blocks from the state Capitol building in Austin, had gained access to the stream provided by state-controlled cameras there and set up a live YouTube channel for the legislative session.

While the same stream was also accessible through the Senate’s own Web site, that site looked almost comically old-fashioned compared with YouTube. Thus it was through YouTube that Ms. Davis’s filibuster was widely seen and shared.

“It’s great to see a channel like The Texas Tribune using YouTube to take a local story national — and probably won’t be the only time we’ll see this happen,” said Kevin Allocca, a trends manager at YouTube.

Online videos have been going viral for almost a decade, but what came out of the filibuster in Texas was something distinct: viral live video. Whether from a statehouse balcony or an activist’s smartphone, scenes that were once edited and distilled for television are increasingly being streamed live to an audience that spreads the news, or at least the pictures, themselves.

Streams from independent journalists at Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011 sometimes drew tens of thousands of viewers. More recently, links to live streaming video of mass protests in Turkey, Brazil and, as late as Sunday, Egypt, have been popular on social networks like Facebook and Twitter.

When the Texas Senate stream on YouTube peaked in popularity shortly after midnight Wednesday, as the end of the legislative session dissolved into chaos, 182,000 people were tuned in, about the same number watching MSNBC, one of the cable news channels that was mercilessly criticized for not broadcasting the Texas debate live.

People didn’t necessarily need MSNBC, though, because they had YouTube.

The theatrical aspects of Ms. Davis’s filibuster and the seriousness of what was at stake “all resulted in people saying to their friends, ‘You have to look at this!’ ” said Andrew Lih, a professor of journalism and director of new media at the University of Southern California Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism.

Many, probably most, of the online viewers wanted to see the Senate bill fail. They organized around Twitter hashtags like #StandWithWendy. But some anti-abortion campaigners followed the filibuster too, along with the politically minded who simply enjoyed watching what The Dallas Morning News called a “knife-fight within the confines of Robert’s Rules of Order.”

The heavy online viewership helped to prompt television networks and other news outlets to follow up the next morning and subsequently. On “Meet the Press” on Sunday, Ms. Davis said she and other state Democrats would keep battling against the abortion bill and said even if it passes, as many analysts expect, “obviously there will be challenges to it going forward.”

Thanks to the heightened interest in the bill, The Texas Tribune Web site had “far and away the highest traffic day in our history,” said Evan Smith, its editor in chief. Visitors have pledged about $37,000 to the nonprofit organization, from a total of 37 states, reflecting the nationwide scope of the sudden attention.

Mr. Lih said that The Tribune had done something significant “by getting the Senate video, which existed already, into a portal where the people hang out,” that is, YouTube. “That is pretty simple but powerful,” he said. (The Texas Tribune has a partnership with The New York Times to provide expanded coverage of the state.)

Data from the National Conference of State Legislatures indicates that all 50 states stream live audio of floor proceedings. Most also stream video, but the quality and accessibility varies widely. In some states, lack of funds has caused hardware and software upgrades to be postponed.

In Texas and in most other states the productions are handled in-house, raising concerns about potential interference. (At several points during the abortion bill debate last Tuesday, the stream was muted while private discussions took place, much to the consternation of viewers who were unaware that this was standard procedure.)

But in eight states, there are nonprofit groups that produce gavel-to-gavel coverage of all three state branches of government, according to Paul Giguere, the head of the Connecticut Public Affairs Network and a national association of ones like it.

“Ordinary citizens have an inherent right to watch their state government in action if they choose to,” Mr. Giguere said.

His association is piecing together a national strategy with the hope that it can convert more states to a more independent model. “We can’t replace reporters. What reporters do is critical,” he said. “But we can be a primary source.”

Bits Blog: Motorola Plans to Make Smartphone in Texas

Spencer Platt/Getty Images Dennis Woodside, chief executive of Motorola Mobility.

2:07 p.m. | Updated to add more detail about the workers hired at the factory in Texas.

Just like Apple, Google has caught the “Made in America” bug. Motorola Mobility, the handset maker acquired by Google, says its next phone, called Moto X, will be manufactured in the United States.

Speaking at the All Things D conference in Southern California on Wednesday, Dennis Woodside, the head of Motorola, said that the company would build its first new flagship phone under Google ownership at a factory outside Fort Worth. He said that the Texas location would allow Motorola to “iterate and innovate much faster.”

Google has tried making hardware in the United States before. Last year, it planned to assemble the Nexus Q, a home media player, in California. But the company postponed the device after it received poor reviews and then quietly killed it.

Mr. Woodside said Motorola and Google were taking over an old Nokia manufacturing plant that had employed 16,000 workers when it was last in use 15 years ago. He said around 2,000 employees would be hired to work at the 500,000-square-foot building. The plant will be up and running by August, he said.

The new workers will be employed by Flextronics, a manufacturing company Motorola hires for its work worldwide. They will be hired by August in jobs ranging from entry level roles to engineering, said Danielle McNally, a Motorola spokeswoman. The new jobs are “different and separate” from the more than 4,000 positions that Motorola eliminated last year, she said.

Mr. Woodside acknowledged that while the Moto X will be built in the United States, not all of its parts would necessarily come from American manufacturers.

“The components will come all over the world,” he said. Display parts will be built in South Korea, for example, and processors will be made in Taiwan, he said.

Google executives have given clues about what a Motorola phone would do. It would have batteries that last longer than a day, they have said, would not break when dropped and would include features like a better camera, artificial intelligence and sensors that recognize people’s voices in a room, for example.

“Think about your device — battery life is a problem, if a kid spills a drink on your tablet screen it shouldn’t die, if you drop your phone it shouldn’t shatter,” Larry Page, the chief executive of Google, told analysts last month. “There’s real potential to invent new and better experiences, ones that are much faster and more intuitive. So having just seen Motorola’s upcoming products myself, I’m really excited about the potential there.”

Mr. Woodside said Wednesday, though, that phones with unbreakable screens would not be included in this year’s Motorola phones.

Mr. Woodside said the Moto X phone was in his pocket — but coyly shook his head when asked to show it off.

Claire Cain Miller contributed reporting.

Cellphone Records, Officer? In Texas, You May Soon Need a Warrant

Last month, Representative Bryan Hughes, Republican of Mineola, filed House Bill 1608, which would require law enforcement agencies throughout the state to obtain warrants and prove to a judge there was a probable cause of illegal activity before obtaining cellphone records in their investigations. It would also lift the seals on court orders for the data after 180 days. A companion bill has been filed in the Senate by Juan Hinojosa, Democrat of McAllen, and others have signed on.

Privacy advocates like the A.C.L.U. say the bill is necessary because cellphone companies are now able to determine and transmit customers’ specific locations. But some police officers and prosecutors say that the higher standard of proof would make it harder to catch criminals in certain long-term investigations. In response to a Congressional request last year, wireless carriers reported that they received thousands of requests a day from law enforcement agencies for cellphone information, including text messages and caller locations. Privacy advocates in Texas said they were startled at how common the practice is.

“Right now we’re just guessing on the numbers,” said Matt Simpson, a policy strategist with the Texas branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, “but they seem very high.”Current technology has eroded “traditional conceptions of privacy,” said Scott Henson, the writer of the criminal justice blog Grits for Breakfast, who shopped the bill around to lawmakers. “This bill ensures that government can’t track your daily movements without a good reason.” In certain situations, said Mr. Simpson, the police might track an individual simply for going to an Islamic mosque. That would be a violation of the right to freedom of worship, he said, but under current laws no judge would need to consider the issue before the cellphone records were obtained.

Steve Baldassano, a Harris County prosecutor, said that although the policy change would affect only “historical” investigations — the police already need to establish probable cause in “real time” situations involving kidnappings and chases — it could make it harder to catch certain criminals. Mr. Baldassano said that cellphone data might be the only evidence supporting or disproving an alibi at an early stage of an investigation. With this new barrier, he said, “you’d just have to let it go.”

Donald Baker, a commander with the Austin Police Department, took issue with Mr. Hughes’s requirement that the court seal be lifted after 180 days, because many investigations last longer than that.

“You don’t want that information out there,” he said.

Mr. Henson said prosecutors and the police could still keep records sealed under public information laws, which allow for information to be kept from public disclosure if “release of the information would interfere with the detection, investigation or prosecution of crime.”

Texas Instruments Cuts 1,700 Jobs and Winds Down Tablet Chips

Texas Instruments said in September it would halt costly investments in the increasingly competitive smartphone and tablet chip business, leading Wall Street to speculate that part of the company's processor unit, called OMAP, could be sold.

The layoffs are equivalent to nearly 5 percent of the Austin, Texas-based company's global workforce.

"A sale would have been better than a restructuring but a restructuring is certainly better than nothing," Sanford Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon said.

TI has been under pressure in mobile processors, where it has lost ground to rival Qualcomm Inc. Leading smartphone makers Apple Inc and Samsung Electronics Co Ltd have been developing their own chips instead of buying them from suppliers like TI.

Instead of competing in phones and tablets, TI wants to sell its OMAP processors in markets that require less investment, like industrial clients like carmakers.

TI is expected to continue selling existing tablet and phone processors for products like Amazon.Com Inc's Kindle tablets for as long as demand remains, but stop developing new chips.

"This year, the Kindle runs on the OMAP 4 and next year's Kindle is slated, we believe, for OMAP 5. We believe that program is well along to completion and do not expect that the termination of OMAP will disrupt those plans," said Longbow Research analyst JoAnne Feeney.

Amazon had reportedly been in talks to buy the mobile part of OMAP.

TI said it expects to take charges of about $325 million related to the job cuts and other cost reduction measures, most of which will be accounted for in the current quarter. Its previously announced financial targets for the fourth quarter do not include these costs, TI said.

The company, which has 35,000 employees around the world, expects annualized savings of about $450 million by the end of 2013 from the action.

TI shares rose to $29 in after-hours trading after closing at $28.76, down 2 percent on Nasdaq.

(Reporting By Sinead Carew in New York and Noel Randewich in San Francisco; editing by Carol Bishopric)

Texas Instruments Forecasts Slowing Earnings

Texas Instruments reported Monday that its quarterly revenue fell 2.3 percent as demand for its chips slipped on economic concerns, and the company forecast more weakness this quarter.

The chip maker has been under pressure from a weak global economy and a wavering personal computer industry and is struggling to fill manufacturing capacity it bought for pennies on the dollar after the global credit crisis.

“Across the board, we’re seeing customers being extremely cautious, very careful about the level of inventory that they hold so giving us very low levels of visibility as to what they’ll want to order for the quarter,” Texas Instruments’ chief financial officer, Kevin March, said in an interview.

Texas Instruments, which makes chips used in products ranging from consumer electronics to industrial equipment, reported a profit of $784 million, or 67 cents a share, up 30.4 percent from $601 million, or 51 cents a share, in the year-ago quarter.

Revenue declined to $3.39 billion from $3.47 billion in the year-earlier quarter.

The company forecast fourth-quarter earnings of 23 cents to 31 cents a share on revenue of $2.83 billion to $3.07 billion.

Analysts on average had been expecting Texas Instruments’ revenue in the current quarter to be $3.24 billion, according to Thomson Reuters.

“It’s definitely light,” said Stacy Rasgon, an analyst at Bernstein Research. “But I don’t know how surprising that is given what we’ve seen in semiconductors and tech recently.”

The company’s inability to fully use its fabrication plants has investors worried about its profitability.

“With the macroeconomic slowdown we’re experiencing, and T.I.’s excess capacity — they’re only using about 75 percent of their capacity right now — they’re going to be under some longer-term pressure to try to fill those fabs,” said JoAnne Feeney, an analyst at Longbow Research.

Man Shooting At 2 College Students In Texas

Gunman opens fire at 2 college students a car behind a Wendy's restaurant near 6th street in Austin, Texas. Update: Two UT college students in the car that drove got into an accident with the gang members in the silver honda.They both stopped to exchange insurance infomation. The gang member punched one of the students in the gold chrysler, grabbed a gun and start shooting as the UT students drove away fearing for their life. The police found him the next day arrested him and confiscated his gun.

Texas Instruments Lowers Revenue Expectations

The company said that orders for its semiconductors, which are used in products like cellphones and industrial equipment, started to weaken in June and that orders for shipments due in September were also lighter than expected.

“Although we believe customers and distributors have low inventory levels, the global economic environment is causing both to become increasingly cautious in placing new orders,” the company’s chief executive, Rich Templeton, said in a statement.

Texas Instruments forecast a third-quarter revenue range of $3.21 billion to $3.47 billion, the midpoint of which equals its second-quarter revenue.

This compares with the company’s five-year average for third-quarter sequential growth of 6 percent.

“It’s a little different to draw a concrete conclusion but what we do know is that it’s unusual,” the chief financial officer, Kevin March, told Reuters.

“As we look at our customers, our opinion is that their inventories are very lean. That tells us that if in fact we’ve normal seasonal demand it’s a good thing we’ve built a lot of inventory,” he said.

Texas Instruments reported earnings of $446 million, or 38 cents a share, compared with $672 million, or 56 cents a share, in the year-earlier quarter. Excluding certain items, earnings would have been 44 cents a share compared with Wall Street’s expectations of 41 cents, according to Thomson Reuters.

Revenue fell to $3.34 billion from $3.46 billion a year ago. Analysts’ average expectation was $3.35 billion.