Better late than never. Here’s the best from Christmas and New Years’ week:

1. An excellent interview of TSA Chief John Pistole on how they are approaching airport security. This is a much more nuanced point of view than what one would expect from the TSA in light of enhanced pat-down protocols that seem more suited to “Cinemax After Dark” than an airport in broad daylight. Great stuff on risk mitigation v. elimination, proportionality of response, scalability of approach, and profiling.
2. Will Google be your next wireless carrier? Forget handsets, Google may be looking for more, and they certainly have helped themselves if they do go down that route with their lobbying efforts to put more holes in wireless net neutrality rules than in Swiss cheese.
3. It’s not $6B in cash, nor is it a $6B valuation, but Groupon finally got their money – and importantly retained control of their own destiny – with a $950M funding round.
4. And on a related note…while many companies have tried to copy the Groupon model, perhaps TravelZoo is better positioned than others to succeed.
5. Well now that Skype is available on iOS, is T-Mobile going to take all those Facetime/WiFi ads off TV? They are pretty annoying anyway.
6. Wither WiMAX? Clearwire, the leading provider of WiMAX services looks to be in financial trouble. Om Malik wonders whether Sprint can afford to…or not to…buy Clearwire if it looks like Clearwire will fail. Sprint CEO Dan Hesse has bet the company’s 4G strategy on Clearwire (I made my own much, much smaller bet on Sprint 4G), so he probably has little option than to push all his chips in the middle of the table.
7. Yapta, which provides price tracking for hotel and air, is more than half-way to completing its $6.4M funding round.
8. There were a number of articles written after a report in Fortune declared that $100 unsubsidized Android smartphones were on their way, with some declaring that this will be the end of the iPhone.  Except for one thing…there are already Android smartphones close to $100 on the market today and the specs touted by Broadcom describe products that seem closer to the iPhone 3G/3GS than the iPhone 4 or the iPhone 5 that will be shipping by the time these products will. Anyway, Daring Fireball’s John Gruber provides an excellent perspective.
9. One of the better, detailed reviews of what the FCC ruling on Net Neutrality really means.
10. Kinda cool, kinda scary, but iPads are in the cockpit.

Good news for me and my local Rhode Island peeps. Clearwire has rolled out 4G service to the Providence, RI area — covering as far south as East Greenwich, RI and as far north as Attleboro, MA — so i’m covered…at least I’m supposed to be.

The rollout of 4G is an important development for the mobile industry as smartphones are poised to finally overtake feature phones next year (see graphic below) and smartphones are driving much greater use of the mobile web, streaming of video, etc. — all of which requires the higher bandwidth that 4G is supposed to deliver.

Clearwire is the technology that underpins Sprint’s 4G network.  I’m pretty happy about the announcment as I’m already an owner of a Sprint Overdrive 4G-capable MiFi device. We had bought that to power the WiFi Apple iPad we got rather than buying a 3G iPad.  I figured that 4G was coming and the Overdrive gave us the flexibility to benefit from 4G when and were available, rather than be limited to 3G…especially AT&T 3G.  Plus the Overdrive can and has also provided connections to our notebooks and other devices.  So my strategy worked…almost. Unfortunately, I’m only getting 3G coverage in my home, even though I’m in the supposed coverage area. Hopefully that will resolve itself at some point.

Now they cover Boston too and that’s great, I just wish they covered the BOS-NYC Amtrak route. I think anyone will tell you that while there is now WiFi on Acela, the service itself is actually abysmal.  Of course they’ll probably have to get coverage in NYC first before they take that on. But I know many travelers would appreciate it.

Clearwire’s 4G technology, branded as CLEAR 4G is based on WiMAX technology, not traditional cellular. According to Clearwire, their 4G service offers average mobile download speeds of 3 to 6 mbps with bursts over 10 mbps.* Outside the CLEAR 4G service area, dual-mode 4G/3G modems keep users continually connected by leveraging Sprint’s 3G data network.  I was going to try to verify the download speeds, but as mentioned above, I can’t get the 4G coverage in my house.  I have used the 4G network while in Seattle and while the speeds were definitely faster than 3G, I didn’t experience the speeds that the press release suggests.

Now Clearwire and Sprint are continuing to roll out 4G to a number of cities. You can see a detailed coverage map of CLEAR 4G service here.

If you’re interested, view the the full press release.

One other thing before I end. When the press release was sent to me, so was a link to a YouTube video describing the benefits of 4G. Of course this uses cute-looking animation now favored by many marketing departments. But I didn’t think this gave realistic use cases of the service and unfortunately included a segment where the “Dad” in the family accessed the 4G network from a public men’s room. Now I’ve seen this use case in action, but I’m pretty sure that I wouldn’t have included it. The perils of trying be “cute and edgy”. See for yourself and make your own judgement.

I just got the Pre on Sprint and am pretty happy with it. Definitely think the value package ($20/unlimited data + email + text) Sprint put together is better and less expensive than what is available from AT&T or Verizon for the Blackberry (both effectively require $50/month to enable the phones) and after all the griping I hear about coverage, I took the plunge.  On top of that, I think the Pre has some great features, particularly multi-tasking, layered calendars and Palm Synergy which seamlessly consolidates contact information across multiple address books (e.g. Outlook, Gmail and Yahoo).

Much has been written about the sure-to-fail marriage between 2 also rans in Sprint and Palm (see here and here), but I don’t think it has to do with the viability or scale of the companies themselves. The real concern about the success or failure of the Pre in my mind is tied to the number of apps available for the platform. In many ways I think the device itself has advantages over the iPhone, but 250 apps v. 100,000 isn’t much of a competition. If Palm is able to get more apps out quickly, at least to the point that it approaches the 10,000 that’s available for Android, it could actually compete more effectively.

Would you consider the Pre versus the iPhone, Droid or Blackberry?