Technology Futures

Community portals should be clean, simple, and easy to use. Jakob Nielsen, one of the top Web usability experts in the country, has a new column out on the importance of good, usable Web sites.

I see too many community portals that make the same mistakes Nielsen outlines.

• Flash animations and splash pages that provide little or no information about what is on the site. Who wants to sit and wait while a pretty picture downloads over a dial-up line, only to have to click to a second page just to do anything? You may love that picture with the panoramic view of the mountains, but it's the wrong thing to put on your home page.
• Overly complex menus and toolbars that offer too many choices to visitors. If you try to list every single thing in your town and every single organization on your home page, it overwhelms people and they often just move to another site.
• Using Web designers who just want to use your money to design a "portfolio" site to help them get their next job. These sites are easy to spot because they are visually busy with lots of widgets, gimmicks, too many drop down and pop up menus, and other eye candy that makes it difficult to navigate.
• Nielsen does not mention this, but I see this all the time--hiring novices to build the community portal. You would never have a junior in high school or a part time hobbyist design a fifty page, color book about your town, but when it comes to Web sites, it happens all the time, with predictable results. We saw the same thing in the early days of Pagemaker--suddenly everyone with a copy of Pagemaker was doing the company newsletter, with predictably ugly results. It's even worse with the Web, since you don't even need a copy of Pagemaker to claim you are an expert. When it comes to qualifications, "I did the site for Cub Scout Pack 238" is not adequate.

Your community portal is how the rest of the world learns about your community. You want to put your best foot forward, so that you attract Knowledge Economy businesses and entrepreneurs who will want your broadband and your great quality of life. If your community Web sites are the very best they can be, you are missing a lot of economic development prospects. Disclaimer: Design Nine helps communities design and develop high quality community and local government portals.

The news is full of stories about USAir's financial woes, which they blame on the airline pilots. Their labor costs are probably too high. But I think there are other contributing factors. I just had to book a flight to Pittsburgh (round trip from Roanoke, Virginia). USAir has a hub there, and direct flights from Roanoke. The other three Roanoke airlines fly you through one of their hubs before getting to Pittsburgh.

You would think USAir would have a natural advantage, since businesspeople don't want to waste time in airports--a nonstop flight is always preferrable to one that requires a stop. Except when the nonstop flight costs two-thirds more! USAir is going broke because they are charging $800 for a single flight segment when all their competitors will fly two legs for under $500. Not only that, the times of the USAir flights are lousy, so I don't really lose that much time with the extra hop.

Another airline got my business, and USAir lost out because of absurd pricing coughed up by hideously complex pricing schemes generated by computer programs that only a bean counter could love. It's obvious that NO human being has ever looked at the Roanoke-Pittsburg pricing and asked, "Does this make sense?" If they had, the prices would be different, and USAir would be making money instead of losing it. Applied over their whole flight network, it's a wonder they have lasted this long. And it explains why the pilots are reluctant to make concessions--why should they if the real problem is not being fixed. Your costs could be zero, but if your prices drive your customers to another airline, it won't make any difference.

In part, this is a natural consequence of the Knowledge Economy. In the old days, travel agents worked mysteriously and invisibly to come up with ticket prices. They had special access to airline fee schedules, and we did not. So we took pricing more or less for granted. We had no information with which to make an informed decision. Today, I can hop onto Orbitz or Expedia and see every price from four or five airlines, and the pricing insanity that USAir calls a "business" is patently obvious.

FCC Chairman Michael Powell is on the side of businesses and consumers when he declared:

“This is about ensuring that high-speed Internet connections aren’t treated like what they’re not: telephones. A successful appeal of this case would ultimately mean lower prices and better service for American consumers. Applying taxes, regulations and concepts from a century ago to today’s cutting-edge services will only stifle innovation and competition.”

USA Today wrote an article about a month ago that I just stumbled across that's worth a read if you live in a rural area. The article details some of the new breed of rural wireless ISPs (WISPs) that are changing the way broadband is delivered in rural communities.

I am constantly surprised at the number of people who believe rural farmers don't want or don't need broadband. It's a myth, pure and simple. An ag agent told me over a year ago that half the cattle in Virginia are sold over the Internet. I met a farmer in southern Illinois last year that had built his own WiFi network to connect up weather and moisture sensors on his three farms. As we sat in his 150 year old farmhouse, he pulled up real time weather information from his sensors; he checks moisture levels every day without having to waste time riding around--he is using technology on a family farm to be more efficient and increase production.

The USA Today articles chronicles the work of big and small wireless firms, with an emphasis on the small outfits. One used an old farm silo to mount the antennas that supplies broadband to his customers. Another got into the wireless business to sell off expensive excess bandwidth he needed to run his own business.

As you read this article, one thing you notice is that these are not typical Manufacturing Economy businesses. They are not building manufacturing plants and office buildings. They are not renting space in business or industrial parks. They are not even renting space in the local business incubator. Many are home-based.

Does your economic development strategy include: a) Identifying these businesses (clue: they aren't relocating to your area and are not in your business park), and b) Providing capital, business planning and management, and marketing assistance?

These are "classic" Knowledge Economy businesses; they don't fit any of the old business stereotypes.

The Register reports on a new process to extract hydrogen from sunflower oil. It's potentially a breakthrough technology, because one of the drawbacks of hydrogen-powered cars is the difficulty of storing hydrogen. Using sunflower oil, scientists envision extracting hydrogen in real time from the oil while you drive your car.

Dave Winer points out that the TA Travel Centers have provided easy Web access to their car/truck stops with WiFi.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Winer is on a cross country road trip, and is choosing his evening stops based largely on the availability of WiFi, like so many other travelers these days.

There is a mildly partisan op-ed piece in yesterday's USA Today about how jobs are and are not being counted in the U.S. Whichever side of the political fence you happen to be on, it's well worth a read. It does a nice job of summarizing the differences between the Payroll Survey (the traditional measure of jobs growth) and the Household Survey.

Today, HP put their iPod on sale. This long awaited product is licensed from Apple, and is very similar in appearance to the current, 4th generation iPod. HP has also released "Tattoos," which is an ink jet media that you can print on and then apply as a cover to your iPod.

Dave Winer, who in many ways invented blogging, is on a coast to coast road trip. Guess what his number one complaint is? How hard it is to find hotspots at night so that he can get online and take care of work.

Everyone I've talked to in the past couple of months has laughingly agreed that they no longer care about hotel chains, frequent traveler points, or the quality of the breakfast buffet. One road warrior summed it up this way: "I'll sleep on the floor in a sleeping bag, but I want broadband."

Hotels are catching on, and many chains now advertise their broadband access heavily. But others don't, and Winer's complaint is that it is too hard to find public hotspots. He wants local and regional maps he can pull up on the Web that identify where WiFi is available.

How does your community portal measure up? Can visitors quickly determine where the hotspots are in your community? How about your economic development Web site? Can your out of town relocation prospects find broadband access locations easily on your Web site?

A robust community portal, designed to meet the needs of visitors and economic development prospects, sends a strong message that your community "gets it." I still visit too many communities complaining about their lack of jobs and lack of economic development activity, but a quick check of the Web often reveals the following: no county Web site or a very limited one that looks like it was last updated in 1998; no community portal or a mediocre "tourist brochure" approach that is mostly pretty pictures and little information. Or the worst of all--dueling Web sites that all claim to be the "official" community portal. The latter situation is a clear signal that the community lacks leadership and direction.

The community portal is the world's window into your community. How your community portal portrays your schools, your civic organizations, your recreational activities, and the business life of your community counts.

Daily Wireless discusses a new NetGear home router product that has voice phone ports built in. NetGear is one of the biggest manufacturers of those cheap WiFi router/hubs that have been selling like hotcakes.

This article [link no longer available] suggests I was write a couple of months ago when I said that AT&T still planned to offer consumer dialtone, despite their announcement that they were getting out of the consumer local and long distance market.

I suggested that this masked a push by AT&T to become a major VoIP player. AT&T is helping consumers who don't yet have a broadband connection to get one, using CableLabs' Web-based tool. This is a shrewd move, and VoIP may yet save AT&T, which over the past twenty years has made a whole series of poor business moves.

Om Malik points to a story in the Tri-City Herald about the benefits reaped by a local small business that is using VoIP. A local florist with stores in both Washington and Oregon estimates that he is saving $100/month by using VoIP instead of traditional long distance services.

The New York Times (registration required) has an article this morning on the FCC's decision to require VoIP service providers to implement phonetapping equipment. There will be public hearings before a final decision is made, but if the Federal government proceeds with this, it will burden the nascent industry with large costs and it will be mostly for naught.

A New York Times article (registration required) talks about the growth in the worldwide market for ringtones (alternate ring sounds for mobile phones).

Most new cellphones have the ability to download alternate ringtones, which typically sell for $2-3 each. I've never understood the appeal of them--it's a phone, for crying out loud--all I want to know is that it is ringing. I don't need a long, noisy dirge to let me know that.

Nonetheless, I'm clearly a curmudgeon when it comes to this particular little piece of IT gadgetry. Worldwide, ringtones are now a $3 billion dollar market, and growing fast as more phones are bought with this capability. In a small bit of good news, perhaps Americans are a bit more sane than the rest of the world when it comes to this stuff, as the U.S. market for ringtones lags behind Europe and Asia.

The ringtone industry is in a major lather right now because the newest cellphones have polyphonic capability (meaning they can play snippets of real songs, rather than a tinny melody of the song). The music industry is gearing up to license huge chunks of their music archives as ringtones, including some downright foul and/or insulting recordings.

There is a larger issue behind all this. Who could have predicted even three years ago that a major, multi-billion dollar market would have emerged around ringtones? As dumb as they may be, the ringtone industry is creating jobs and revenue streams across whole industries.

It's creative destruction at work. Yes, some of our factory and low level office jobs are being outsourced to low wage countries. But whole new industries are replacing them. Would you rather work in the music industry as a ringtone and license manager or work in a satellite TV call center making cold calls? Which kind of job would be better for your region?

Trying to preserve the jobs and economic development strategies of the past is an exercise in futility. Communities need to be looking ahead, and planning in a futures context, instead of the context of what worked well in 1970.

If you use Windows, here is some scary information for you. Wired reports on a study that shows an unprotected Windows computer becomes infected with some kind of malignant virus or malware just 20 minutes after being connected to a broadband connection (e.g. cable modem or DSL).

Wired wryly notes that that is not even enough time to download a typical set of patches from Microsoft.

Design Nine outgrew our old office space, and over the past week we moved into new, larger quarters--we're still in Blacksburg, Virginia, though.

I had to completely disassemble my desktop computer, something I have not had to do in over two years, when this machine was brand new. I ended up with a box of some 30+ cables for a computer and office phone, which on the face of it seems absurd for an otherwise entirely straightforward desktop machine used primarily for email and writing. In part, much of the problem has been the extraordinary success of the USB protocol as a peripheral connectivity solution.

In the "old" days, about three years ago, you typically had a couple of serial ports and two or three SCSI devices. You had a limited number of peripherals you could have hooked up at one time, and your ambitions for connected gagdets was low.

With the advent of USB, you could stick a hub on and fill it with as many things as you liked, and they would all actually work very well (most of the time). I have a seven port USB hub, and six ports are in use. Combine those USB cables with phone cables, Firewire cables, and power cables for all the devices, and you end up with a mess. It is incredibly ugly, difficult if not impossible to keep neat, and amazing that it works at all.

Firewire, in theory, should solve many of these problems. Firewire devices can be daisy-chained, so you don't have the multiple cable problem of USB, and Firewire is capable of providing more power than USB, so you can actually eliminate the AC/DC voltage converters entirely. Apple's iPod is a perfect example of this. You connect the iPod to your laptop or desktop with a single, thin Firewire cable that recharges the battery and transfers data several times faster than USB.

But Firewire has yet to reach its potential. Many PCs still do not come with Firewire (it's standard on all Macs), and even on the Mac, it does not always work as expected. My Firewire video camera (no power cable, thank you) does not get along with my Firewire hard drive (big AC power cable), and I have to unplug the camera when I back up files to the external Firewire hard drive.

Millions of people now have Paypal accounts, online access to bank accounts, and other online access to financial transactions, typically protected only by the passwords they pick themselves.

If you are still using your dog's name or some other simple four or five letter word for your password, you may want to read this short article on the various ways bad people are using to steal passwords.

An article from the July 19th issue of Newsweek talks about recent studies that indicate young adults (between 18 and 34) are now reading less than any other group. Even worse, this used to be the group that read the most.

Even worse, instead of reading, this group has become largely "passive consumers of electronic entertainment." Video games, entertainment Web sites, and TV are taking the place of exercising our brains.

Telstra, the Australian phone company, is putting WiFi hotspots in phone booths.

It's a good idea. The phone booths are underused, with so many cellphones now in use. The booths are already in public places where people tend to gather, and they have the one thing that often makes placing a hotspot costly--a wired connection. Telstra can use the existing cable to deliver a DSL line to the WiFi equipment in the booth, and the booth itself can be used to mount an antenna.

Congressman Rick Boucher (D, Virginia) represents southwest Virginia, including Blacksburg. Boucher is guest-hosting law professor Lawrence Lessig's blog this week, and there is a cogent and fascinating discussion of the Induce Act. The Induce Act would build on the already questionable DCMA law to make it more difficult (in theory) to pirate digital media.