Under a beautiful blue sky in the Rose Garden this morning, President Obama laid out the three key questions that drove the priorities in his just-released Fiscal Year (FY) 2014 budget: “How do we make America a magnet for new jobs?  How do we give our workers the skills they need to do those jobs?  And how do we make sure that hard work leads to a decent living?” Some of the key initiatives put forward [...]

Dateline Beijing:  The United States and China have more to gain from cooperation and dialogue than they do through confrontation and diatribes.  That was the overarching message that ITI’s Dean Garfield brought today to the 7th Annual U.S.-China Internet Industry Forum being held here in Beijing.  Dean focused his keynote remarks at the conference on a number of critical issues facing the tech community [...]

Dateline Beijing:  Each day, it seems headlines in China and the United States raise the temperature on rhetoric and lower the opportunity for dialogue.  Tensions are higher than they should be, and much is at stake.  In Beijing this week, ITI hopes to reverse that trend and open new channels of communications with Chinese government leaders and industry officials.  ITI CEO & President Dean Garfield [...]

Open, balanced and transparent standards are a critical part of the electronics industry, allowing manufacturers to develop parts that easily connect and interact with each other; better manage materials information in the supply chain; use uniform testing methods to determine regulatory compliance, and even develop the best way to display electronic pictures and videos.  More recently, standards have [...]

In October 1986, then-Los Angeles Lakers Coach Pat Riley confronted a major challenge:  How to restore a talented basketball team to dominance in a highly competitive league.  His response proved to be the most pivotal strategic decision of his career:  He made his most innovative playmaker, Earvin “Magic” Johnson, the focal point of the team’s offense. Riley believed Magic had not reached his full [...]

As we’ve talked about this week, ITI and a broad coalition of technology and business organizations on Thursday urged Congress and the White House to revisit a provision buried in the recently enacted government funding bill.  The provision would force several federal agencies buying IT systems manufactured in China to have those systems first be reviewed and approved by the FBI.  It was buried in [...]

Back in 1990, the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) embarked on an ambitious plan to map the human genome (HGP).  The project had a number of technical questions it hoped to solve, but the basic premise was to glean greater insight into human DNA.  While the federal government was the key driver in the project, it was very much a public-private partnership in that [...]

Sound cybersecurity policy in the United States drifted off course late last month with passage and approval of the Consolidated and Further Continuing Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2013 (Continuing Resolution).  While we all, of course, support continued funding for our government, the tech industry was none too thrilled with a provision tucked in the resolution that bars several U.S. government [...]

Almost 10 years ago, members of the technology industry joined with colleagues from U.S. EPA, the business and government purchasing community, and environmental non-profits to develop a consistent way to measure sustainability attributes of computers and monitors.  The results of that work were twofold:  the IEEE 1680 standard, which established product criteria, and the related EPEAT program, which [...]

Dateline Geneva:  We have just concluded a very productive set of meetings with roughly 20 WTO delegations here this week to press for expansion of the Information Technology Agreement (ITA).  Our U.S. industry group, comprised of seven business associations and a number representatives from tech companies, delivered two key messages. First, we stated unequivocally that these talks need to be completed [...]