Technology Futures

Facebook rolled out an updated interface and a bunch of new features yesterday, and I spent some time yesterday evening looking at what they had did. There is much buzz about a new music-sharing service, but to me, the most significant change is the addition of "lists," which is the equivalent of Google+ "circles." The concept is identical: you can group your friends and contacts into sets, and you can look at only what is going on in that set of contacts, rather than having to plow through every item that gets posted to your wall.

Executives at Coca-Cola headquarters in Atlanta are probably breaking out the bubbly (2 liter bottles of Coke) and toasting themselves. No longer will the New Coke be considered the dumbest, most asinine product roll out in history. Netflix will now be a source of business case studies in MBA programs for the foreseeable future.

I'm tweeting the Net-Workshop (9/19/11) in real time if you want to follow it (@designnine). Net-Workshop is a one day meeting of community broadband leaders from around the country.

This infographic highlights the huge current and future impact that broadband is having and will continue to have on job creation and economic development. This should be sent to every elected leader.

The San Diego power outage may be responsible for the Microsoft Office 365 service (a "cloud computing" offering) being down. Other Microsoft cloud services like Hotmail and Live were also affected. The company is not saying what actually caused the problem, but the article notes that as many as 365 million users were affected.

Rich Swier of Startup Florida has a nice short article on Google+ and why he thinks it is a big improvement over Facebook. Google+ is still mostly a geek/early adopter phenomenon, but is probably the only competing service that has any chance of unseating Facebook.

I was driving to work this morning, listening to the news on the car radio. The local station used the CBS syndicated news feed, and during the news break, there was an ad for the CBS iPhone/iPad app that "delivered all the breaking news from CBS," or something like that.

If I can get news feeds and programming directly on my computer or mobile device, why do I need an overpriced cable TV subscription. Netflix and Hulu provide virtually all of the movie and TV show programming, and a few iPad apps fill out the requirement for breaking news.

I had a conversation last week with a new college grad who had just started a new job and had moved into a new apartment. The young woman had a couple of questions about her Internet connection, which she had purchased from the local phone company (DSL). I asked if she had considered a cable TV/cable modem package.

She said, "No, I never watch TV. I can get whatever I need from the Internet."

In a nutshell, the customer base of the cable TV industry is getting old and dying, and they don't have a plan to attract younger customers.

The National Security Agency has released a very nice set of tips for managing desktop computers and home and small office network devices like routers and wireless base stations. Here is the link, and I have attached it to this article.

"Oh, what a tangled web we weave."
Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook

No, wait, that was William Shakespeare. I'm trying to take a little vacation this week, and so I set an auto-responder on my business email account that automatically sends out an email to anyone who emails me, noting that I won't be in the office until next Monday. But I forgot that my only lightly used Facebook account has my business email address.

What do Lowe's, Home Depot, PacSun, and Nordstrom all have in common? All these major retailers are starting to deploy iPads in place of cash registers. The firms are finding that putting iPads in the hands of customer sales reps roaming the floors of the store increases both the average size of a sale and increases the number of sales processed per day per employee.

From the always funny xkcd....the whole East Coast was shaking from an earthquake centered in Virginia. Here is a picture of some of the damage in D.C.

Design Nine has been working for the 47 towns that make up the WiredWest region of western Massachusetts since early 2010. Last week, 22 of those towns officially formed a municipal coop, as allowed by state law. This is the first step towards the WiredWest vision of fiber everywhere in western Massachusetts.

Design Nine helped the WiredWest steering committee with financial planning, organizational and governance planning, network architecture, and funding strategies.

United Airlines is replacing paper-based pilot flight manuals and charts with iPads. Each iPad will replace 38 pounds of paper distributed to each pilot over the course of year, amounting to some 16 million pieces of paper.

Back in 2006, with the help of Design Nine, the City of Danville made the decision to open their city-owned fiber for commercial use. The first customers were connected in 2007. The self-funded project has grown slowly, has spent carefully, and manages more than one hundred and fifty miles of fiber with just two dedicated staff. The City had an early advantage because Danville is an electric city--they own many of the utility poles, and electric utility line crews have done much of the construction and maintenance work.

The Harvard Business Review says that Groupon is failing. The half price coupon service has apparently burned through nearly a billion dollars in venture capital and needs just a measly three-quarters of a billion to keep going. Apparently there were some VC folks and business managers who learned nothing during the dot-com era. Groupon apparently spent on growth without attending to a fundamental business requirement: you actually have to make money.

Business Insider reports that the HP TouchPad is a dud. Best Buy has more than 200,000 unsold tablets from Hewlett-Packard, and they want to return them. Meanwhile, Best Buy can't keep Apple iPads in stock. In our local Best Buy, I chatted up one of the sales people, who said they don't even bother to keep a demo unit on the floor. He told me the stores get a weekly allocation of usually an unknown but small quantity, and they sell out within hours.

Skype has rolled out HD videoconferencing for Macs--it's been available on the Windows platform for a while. Here at Design Nine, we just upgraded our own business videoconferencing software to include multi-party video. We use Skype videoconferencing daily for internal communications in our three geographically distant locations, which saves us money on our landline phone bill. We use Go To Meeting for client meetings, and find the screen-sharing particularly productive when trying to discuss something like a spreadsheet financial model.

Here in Virginia, Roanoke County and the City of Salem are struggling with the same problem that many other localities in the country have: cable companies that won't renew franchise agreements. Comcast purchased an aging cable system from Adelphia a few years ago when Adelphia went bankrupt. At the time, Comcast promised the localities it would upgrade the old system so it could support improved Internet access.

Eldo Telecom has an excellent critique of the proposed USF reform. My concern with any USF reform is that it should allow community-owned broadband efforts access to USF funds. There is no reason why a community that builds its own open access infrastructure should be forced to channel their portion of USF funds to legacy networks.