sandy

How Verizon kept wireless service going after Sandy hit

With Hurricane Sandy due to hit the East Coast in a couple of days, Verizon Wireless executive Mike Haberman tested his house's back-up generator and ended up finding a faulty circuit that he quickly fixed. So when the outage hit his house in Morristown, N.J., he was able to get enough power to his laptop and phone to work from home last week.

That's a good thing, because Haberman was one of the key people coordinating the carrier's efforts to keep service going at a time when massive power outages wreaked havoc on the East Coast. … Read more

Beyond hashtags: Instagram's next challenge is tackling big data

SAN FRANCISCO -- Instagram CEO Kevin Systrom said his company's big hurdle is knowing how to mine the constant stream of photos being uploaded each day to the popular network.

"Instagram isn't necessarily a photo company, or a communications company as I like to say, we're also going to be a big data company," he said today at the GigaOm Road Map conference in San Francisco.

Systrom said the company, recently purchased by Facebook, needs to find better ways to organize the billions of photos shared on Instagram. That means looking beyond hashtags for looking … Read more

With lights back on, cell service returns for many Sandy victims

The power is back on for some lucky people in regions devastated by superstorm Sandy. And that also means cell-phone service has returned.

As of Saturday morning, Con Edison, the power company providing service in New York City, reported that it had restored power to more than 645,000 customers, or approximately 70 percent of all those who lost power since Sandy slammed through New York. Power restoration to a large part of New York City also means wireless phone service that relies on this commercial power could also get back up and running.

On Saturday morning, AT&T … Read more

Seafaring robot sails through Sandy unscathed

Hurricane Sandy has destroyed houses, cars, and boats, and caused some $20 billion in property damage, but one robot rode out the storm at sea without a scratch, as far as its maker can tell.

Liquid Robotics said one of its Wave Glider marine robots named Mercury was 100 miles east of Toms River, N.J., when Sandy hit, but the machine continued to function.

It withstood winds of up to 70 knots and continued to transmit real-time weather data about the storm. … Read more

See Hurricane Sandy's impact on the Internet

When Superstorm Sandy struck the northeastern U.S. coast earlier this week, it brought a swath of destruction that harmed people, places, and even Internet connectivity.

Check out a fascinating video by research firm Renesys that shows Sandy's impact on New England Internet routing networks during the hurricane's landfall on October 29. The clip reveals the tremendous damage inflicted upon servers that direct Internet traffic in the area, with the greatest losses seen along the heavily flooded New York and New Jersey coastlines.… Read more

iPad Mini launches with mini lines

While CNET's New York office waits for power to come back after the storm, we're bringing you the Update show from our San Francisco office. Friday's top tech stories include:

- iPad Mini launch day: Lines were smaller compared to a typical iPhone or iPad launch, but there were still some crowds. New York saw a long lines at the 5th Avenue store, which was sold out of iPad Minis two hours after it opened. One analyst estimates Apple might sell as many as 1.5 million iPad Minis over the weekend.

- Apple released its first … Read more

Twitter: Over 20M tweets sent about Hurricane Sandy

More than 20 million tweets were sent about Hurricane Sandy between Saturday and yesterday, according to Twitter, and the site says that's probably a conservative estimate as it only tracked certain keywords.

The site, which followed the terms and hash tags for "Sandy" and "hurricane," also said it saw a peak at about 9 p.m. Monday in the number of times users in New York accessed their home timeline from a mobile device. That coincides with the approximate time much of the city lost power.

Also Monday, search queries related to Sandy peaked at … Read more

Superstorm Sandy 'hurricane hackers' gather to help

A new kind of digital activist has emerged from the devastation of Superstorm Sandy this week -- the hurricane hacker.

This weekend, an in-person "Sandy CrisisCamp" will take place in Boston, cities on the West Coast, and even New Zealand. The events are basically set up as cross between a hack-a-thon and a workshop where geeks come together to design and code projects that can help local communities prepare for and cope with crisis.

Among some of the projects CrisisCampers will be working on are crowdsourcing tools to categorize images for building damage, allowing FEMA to prioritize its efforts, and a simple Google doc that attempts to keep track of all the sources of Sandy recovery data in a single place.… Read more

Verizon: Land-line, cable repairs could take two weeks

Verizon warned that some homes may not get service for another two weeks as the company scrambles to get Internet, phone, and television up and running for customers devastated by Hurricane Sandy.

A company representative warned that the two-week figure represents a "worst-case scenario," and that some customers may get service back up in a few days. On Thursday, it was still working to pump water out of its central offices, according to Reuters.

The service outage isn't related to Verizon's wireless arm, which has held up relatively well in the aftermath of the storm.

Sandy … Read more