Samsung Advances Toward 5G Networks

Lapses of security were negligible compared with errors that let terrorists thrive.

Room for Debate looks at whether a court rejection of race preferences could create a more progressive future.

What I learned about being a writer from composing thank-you notes.

Hotel Guests Turn Away From TV and Toward Streaming Media

Mr. Markidan, who spends 40 percent of his time traveling on business and is an elite participant in the Hilton and Hyatt loyalty programs, takes his MacBook Pro and iPad with him on the road and watches all television programs by streaming them on his laptop, using a portable router to extend the Wi-Fi signal in his hotel room.

“For a lot of people my age and a lot of people in general, the way we consume entertainment at home is changing,” he said. “I no longer have a cable subscription — the way I watch entertainment at home is the same way I watch it on the road. I have a Hulu subscription, Amazon Prime and Netflix.”

Guest-room entertainment “is not an amenity that will drive my decision to stay at a hotel,” he said, adding, “I’m a lot more concerned with loyalty program perks.”

James Lingle of Highlands Ranch, Colo., a consultant to hotel companies and guest-room entertainment service providers like LodgeNet’s competitor iBahn, observed: “If you look back, typically the first thing a guest would do when they walked into the door of a hotel room would be to turn on the TV. Now people bring their entertainment with them, tablet-based devices like an iPad, accounts and memberships like Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu Plus, and they want to be able to use them.”

LodgeNet’s decline directly reflects these changes. According to its bankruptcy filing, the number of hotel rooms it served globally dropped to 1.5 million in 2011 from 2 million in 2009. It provided guest-room entertainment services to most major hotel chains, usually by installing and maintaining free televisions and offering video-on-demand entertainment, for which it and the hotels received fees. LodgeNet’s sales in 2011 were $421.3 million, a 21 percent drop from a high of $533.9 million in 2008.

Colony Capital, a real estate and hotel investment firm in Los Angeles, led a group that invested $70 million in a controlling interest in LodgeNet, based in Sioux Falls, S.D., and brought in a management team of former Starwood, Fairmont and Hilton executives. LodgeNet, which emerged from bankruptcy in late March, also signed an agreement with DirecTV to jointly offer entertainment to hotels and hospitals.

The revamped LodgeNet faces strong competition from companies including Swisscom Hospitality Services, based in Geneva; iBahn, based in Salt Lake City; Guest-Tek, of Calgary, Alberta; and Roomlinx, based in Broomfield, Colo. All are developing systems that let travelers consume entertainment the way Mr. Markidan does — via the Internet, frequently through subscriptions they already have and use at home, either through Wi-Fi or a direct cable connection between their laptop or tablet and the guest-room television set.

Different types of hotels have different policies regarding Internet access. Many less expensive hotels offer it free, while more expensive ones often charge for it. What’s expected to happen next, speaking broadly, is that using the Internet for e-mail will be free, while many hotels will charge for uses requiring a lot of bandwidth, like  downloading or streaming videos, with the cost tied to the amount of bandwidth required.

“We will give customers more short-form content at very attractive prices, affinity packages of sports channels, just-missed TV, video games, as well as movies currently in theaters,” said Michael Ribero, Lodgenet’s new chief executive. “We want to give them the opportunity to watch what they want, even if it’s through Netflix and Amazon Prime.” He said LodgeNet will no longer provide television equipment in hotel guest rooms in exchange for video-on-demand fees. Instead, DirecTV will offer hotel owners lease financing for TVs, freeing capital that LodgeNet can invest in product and service improvements.

The Boss: SolarCity’s Chief, on a Turn Toward the Sun

By age 12, I was teaching ballroom dancing at my aunt’s dance studio. Jazz was my favorite music. When I was 17, I began my first business, which distributed homeopathic medications, and spent a fair amount of time on the road visiting communities to sell them. I almost got expelled from school because I was attending so few classes. But I did graduate, thanks to the good graces of the principal.

In June 1998, I traveled to San Jose, Calif., to play for South Africa’s national team competing in the underwater hockey world championships. In underwater hockey, players wear a mask, fins and a snorkel, and dive to the bottom of the pool and compete to pass the puck. I became interested in the sport, which is fast-moving and great fun, because my brother Peter also played.

I liked California so much that I decided to move to the United States to start a technology business. Together with my older brother Russell, who had been working in Silicon Valley, we started a company called Everdream that provided software for companies to maintain their computers remotely.

At first, the two of us ran the company from our rented house in Santa Cruz, Calif., and the next year, in 1999, we secured our first funding. Soon after that, our brother Peter, a software engineer, joined the business. Eventually, we realized that our stand-alone business model was not feasible for the long term. In 2007, the company was acquired by one of our corporate partners, Dell Inc.

Even before the sale, we had been working on an idea for a solar business. Our cousin, Elon Musk (our mothers are twins), who founded PayPal, suggested that we investigate clean energy. We started SolarCity on July 4, 2006, to symbolize our commitment to becoming independent of fossil fuels. Elon, who is the chief executive of SpaceX (the Space Exploration Technologies Corporation), and of the all-electric car company Tesla Motors, is chairman of SolarCity.

We decided to build on our expertise in providing remote services and to focus on distributing solar energy. We install solar panels free, then sell the energy they generate to customers, often at a lower rate than they pay their utility providers. We have more than $1.7 billion in backing from investors including banks and companies like Honda North America and Google. We have grown to more than 2,800 employees in 14 states. Last December, SolarCity began trading publicly.

We also provide solar services to large companies, including eBay, Walgreen and Wal-Mart Stores, to more than 300 schools and universities and to more than two dozen home builders. We recently helped a school district in the Central Valley of California convert to solar power, and save enough on its energy bills to be able to resuscitate its music program.

But we still have a long way to go, because solar energy supplies less than 1 percent of America’s energy needs. Tax incentives, just as they have for most energy sources of the past century, have helped make solar energy affordable and attract investors needed to expand operations.

My other job is being the father to two young boys, 4 and 5. Their mother is my wife, Madeleine, who was my high school sweetheart. In my spare time, I still love to play underwater hockey, but my mission is to change the way people get their electricity and provide more affordable clean energy.

Google and European Commission Move Toward Antitrust Settlement

Europe’s competition commissioner, Joaquín Almunia, had asked Google in May to make concessions in four areas or face formal antitrust charges, which could mean years of costly litigation and hefty penalties if it lost.

“The commission considers Google’s proposals as a good basis for further talks and has now reached a good level of understanding,” said a commission spokesman, Antoine Colombani. He added that meetings on a more technical level would now be held to reach a settlement.

It was unclear what concessions Google had offered. A spokesman in Brussels, Al Verney, said only, “We continue to work cooperatively with the European Commission.”

The commission found after a nearly two-year inquiry that Google might have given its own products an edge over those of others while maintaining that it offered neutral results.

Google’s search engine has a 90 percent market share in many big European markets, compared with less than 70 percent in the United States, where it is also under investigation.

In May, Mr. Almunia took the rare step of going public with his demand that Google change its business practices, an indication that he was looking to settle rather than go through the time-consuming process of filing charges and making a case — after which the remedies won are often irrelevant in the rapidly changing technology industry.

“These fast-moving markets would particularly benefit from a quick resolution of the competition issues identified,” Mr. Almunia said then, calling this preferable to “lengthy proceedings.”

Nicolas Petit, a law professor at the University of Liège in Belgium, said that he did not believe the commission had a strong case against Google, and that this might have contributed to Mr. Almunia’s unusual offer. “It could have been a bluff, like a poker game,” he said.

On the other hand, Mr. Petit said, Google has a reputation for pushing the boundaries of the law and then backing off when it faces legal challenges, as it did when it began scanning books without seeking permission and then agreed to pay $125 million to settle charges of copyright infringement — a deal later rejected by an American judge.

“Its image is extremely important in its success,” Mr. Petit said, “and that’s why they like settlements — because they can be presented as win-win situations for consumers and the company alike.”

The commission’s investigation began after smaller Web businesses complained that Google had downgraded their sites in its search results or discriminated against them in other ways. Microsoft — itself the target of a decade-long antitrust battle with the commission that resulted in fines and penalties of 1.7 billion euros, or $2.06 billion at the current exchange rate — filed a complaint in March 2011.

The four practices Mr. Almunia listed in May included the way Google displayed links to its services differently from links to competitors’ services, and its use of restaurant and travel reviews from competitors’ Web sites.