Technology Futures

ISUS (Improved Solutions for Urban Strategies) has an innovative alternative high school education program that helps high risk youths get a high school diploma while giving them a heavy dose of on the job construction training and high tech manufacturing skills.

The program provides proficiency-based high school classes that are integrated with work training in the construction industry. But the effort has a real high tech twist, and takes vo-tech to a whole new level by building and selling houses at market prices in distressed neighborhoods.

I am at the Ohio Community Development, Innovation, & Technology Conference in Columbus, Ohio, and I'll be posting highlights from the meeting for the next day or so. The conference is sponsored by the Ohio Community Development Corporation Association.

This article about grass roots television programming illustrates the perfect storm developing that has the potential to wreck the Hollywood-based entertainment corporations. Since the days of Milton Berle's live broadcasts, television content has been generated largely by Hollywood. It's been a tight knit cartel of writers, directors, producers, and production companies that have kept video content locked up pretty tightly, in large part because of the cozy relationship with the broadcast networks. Cable has been chipping away at that, but innovation in cable has meant largely following the same old model, but just doing everything as cheaply as possible.

The limitation has always been the same, whether you were delivering a television program over the air, by cable, or by satellite--you have only twenty-four hours per day per channel, so everything is a trade-off of demand versus air time.

Like nearly everything else it touches, the Internet just plain breaks that apart. On the Internet, content is not bound by the delivery mechanism, so we are seeing the end of CDs, the end of DVDs, the end of radio "channels," and the end of TV "channels." Channels were a construct based on the scarcity of bandwidth, and there is no scarcity on the Internet.

So for $1.99, you can download and watch a 45 minute video on how to barbecue a whole pig. But that's not even the interesting part. DaveTV, which is offering the video service, has a BBQ "channel" with more than 1000 video segments, just on barbecuing. Try doing that using the traditional television programming system. You can't. But the Internet makes it simple.

So here's the thing--Hollywood no longer has an edge--none at all. What about your region? Do you have some of the pieces in place to start some Internet TV video production companies? Is your town on a major fiber backbone that could be used to pump video to the rest of the country? Do you have some program assets that could be the basis of a channel like the BBQ channel?

If your community is looking at Broadband Over Powerlines (BPL) as a cheap way to get broadband out to neighborhoods or rural areas, you should read this article over at NewsForge, which says BPL still has some issues that have to be worked out.

Among the problems this article raises are relatively high costs, the need to deploy a fiber backbone to support neighborhood level BPL, and radio interference in frequencies used by public safety (fire, police, rescue).

Loma Linda, California, a community of 20,000 people, may be the first town in the country to require broadband infrastructure in new housing.

Instant messaging (IM) is not just a social networking tool for bored teenagers. A British study shows that while some abuse of IM is occuring in the workplace (no different than the telephone, the Web, or email), IM has some solid business benefits, including improved communications, faster decisionmaking, and better information gathering.

The article says that 62% of British businesses do not use the technology at all, suggesting that most firms lag well behind the curve in making good use of technology.

New Zealand, which is a country smaller than most U.S. states, is investing heavily in broadband, with a budget in the tens of millions of dollars. While too many state legislators (14 states at last count) are trying to limit broadband, we've got countries that are going in the opposite direction.

I've been writing for a while about the Energy Economy and the Space Economy as emerging trends. But there is yet another emerging trend--the Diamond Age. Diamonds are fascinating stuff--the hardest substance in the world, with brilliant clarity and appearance, yet made from the cheapest of materials--carbon.

Natural diamonds are scarce, and hence, valuable. Industrial, manmade diamonds have been around for a while, but have usually been small and of poor quality. More recently, a Russian process for creating diamonds has been transported to the U.S. with some success, but the diamonds are yellow in color, limiting their appeal for both jewelry and certain kinds of industrial and optical applications.

Inexpensive diamonds, of sufficient size that they can be formed or machined into usable shapes, is a kind of holy grail for manufacturing and science. In an age of cheap diamond materials, the effects would be far reaching. Industrial processes that involve machining would become much faster and more efficient as diamond tool heads would replace carbide, which breaks and/or wears out fast compared to diamonds. Cheaper manufacturing processes would lower the cost of many items, and make other items available for the first time. Even in our homes, a diamond knife would never wear out and would never lose its edge.

Now Carnegie-Mellon researchers (hat tip to SlashDot) have developed a new process to produce optical quality , large diamonds. The process is producing much larger diamonds than anyone has ever been able to make, suggesting that "the Diamond Age is upon us."

What is the effect on communities? The most plentiful source of carbon on the planet is coal. If your region used to have a booming coal economy, start thinking (as a long term strategy) about the effect of cheap diamonds on your region. How about heavy industry? Would machine shops and equipment manufacturers benefit from improved efficiencies? This is still a few years away, but the ripple effects of cheap diamonds will be extensive.

Microsoft has announced its new, 2nd generation XBox. It's a lot more than a game console, and can do many things that a home PC can do--play movies and CDs, surf the Web, and display photos on your television. Although Microsoft is being fairly quiet about these features, the new XBox has more capable hardware than most Wintel personal computers. And it's quite capable of doing anything a Dell or HP computer running Windows can do.

So Microsoft is now in direct competition with its two biggest customers, who buy millions of copies of Windows and Office per year. Why is Microsoft doing this? Because they are losing the battle, and they have to capture customers somehow. Apple totally dominates the music business, and Yahoo's new subscription service is likely to gather up what crumbs are left in that market. Industry pundits are pretty confident that Apple's next foray will be to do for movies what they have done for music (and I agree). Microsoft has no answer to that, either. Home entertainment is driving the computer business, and the market for spreadsheets and PowerPoint has been flat for years. Microsoft has very little to offer in the new and booming music/video/entertainment markets, where all the money will be for the next several years.

So the only way that Microsoft can see to get back and retain control of customers is to get into the hardware business. Even at the risk of alienating their biggest customers. But if Microsoft is in trouble, Dell and HP are in worse shape. They really have no alternative to selling Windows computers. Both sell a few computers with Linux, but it amounts to pocket change for the companies.

IBM saw this coming years ago, and made the switch to Linux as the core of its business. But HP and Dell don't have an exit strategy, so they will have to continue to buy from Microsoft even as the company tries to take customers away from them.

One last loser in this is Intel. IBM makes the PowerPC chips that power its own computers and servers, and is the primary supplier to Apple. Guess what chip is used in the XBox? That's right, it's a PowerPC chip. Microsoft has been at the mercy of Intel for the past twenty years, and has had to continually adapt Windows to run on Intel hardware. But Microsoft has freed itself of that problem (the PowerPC is available from several suppliers). So Apple's computers and servers run on the PowerPC, IBM computers use the PowerPC, and now the XBox runs on the PowerPC. Intel is in trouble with its highly profitable processor line.

The single biggest problem facing the transition from fossil fuel powered cars to hydrogen-powered cars is the storage of hydrogen. The energy density of hydrogen (normally a gas, not a liquid) is much lower than gasoline, so you have to compress it at very high pressures to be able to store enough of it in a tank small enough to fit in a car. In other circumstances, hydrogen stored at high pressure would be called a bomb, so how you store hydrogen in an vehicle subject to occasional violent crashes is important.

The emerging Energy Economy continues to evolve in unexpected ways. A Minnesota farmer and researchers from the University of Minnesota have developed a method to generate electric power from a fuel cell that uses cow manure as the feedstock.

This report [link no longer available] from a Utah resident highlights two of the best-known fiber projects in the country: iProvo and UTOPIA (hat tip to Dave Fletcher's weblog). The iProvo muni fiber is 100 times faster than cable modem and 250 times faster than DSL. In other words, it is world class service, of the kind that is common in lots of other countries.

A muni fiber system in Utah's Salt Lake Valley installed to manage traffic throughout the region had an installed cost of $51 million and an expected ANNUAL payback of $179 million in savings.

The Advanced Traffic Management System (ATMS) uses the fiber to manage more than 50 major traffic corridors, coordinate signal changes on more than 600 traffic lights, provide traffic monitoring via video cameras, and hook up truck scales.

Embarrassed, perhaps, by the success of garage entrepreneurs and visionaries like Bert Rutan, NASA has proposed a new two stage approach to getting to, from, and around space. Instead of trying to design complex one-size-fits-all vehicles like the now rattletrap Space Shuttle, NASA is proposing to partner with a whole group of private sector designers and firms to build two new space vehicles.

The City of Cleveland is addressing the issue of digital literacy. The program will offer training and certification to 30,000 low income workers over the next five years. This is an important program; so many areas of the country bemoan the loss of manufacturing jobs and the lack of opportunity for unemployed workers but fail to adjust economic development spending and job training programs to the realities of the global Knowledge Economy.

Apple quietly edged closer to a full-fledged video download strategy yesterday with a free upgrade to the company's iTunes software, which works on both Windows and the Mac. EnGadget and other sites are discussing the upgrade, which now allows users to store videos in the iTunes library along with music.

Apple is not saying much about the new feature, which means they aren't ready to lay all their cards on the table. But selling movies is the next logical step after the hugely successful iTunes music business.

I love a good gadget as much as the next, um, geek, but the current techie obsession with PVPs (Personal Video Players) baffles me. Engadget has a review of a new one from Mustek, which is kind of an iPod on steroids (it has a 40 gig hard drive, which will store several movies).

In a great victory for the rest of us, a Federal appellate court told the FCC to quit mucking with television receivers and to stop meddling in areas for which the Commission has no authorization. If that sounds harsh, it's mild compared to what the judge actually said:

You're out there in the whole world, regulating. Are washing machines next?" asked Judge Harry Edwards. Quipped Judge David Sentelle: "You can't regulate washing machines. You can't rule the world."

This article (via InstaPundit) says online advertising has passed the levels seen during the dot-com era. That's interesting, because advertisers want to see a return on their marketing expenditures--if ads don't turn into sales, they don't keep throwing more money into a particular medium.

Space Exploration Technologies, Inc., or SpaceX, has received a $100 million dollar Air Force contract to build and supply launch vehicles for the Defense Department. This could be a breakthrough for the emerging Space Economy, as the Department of Defense had apparently decided it can't keep all its launch eggs in the costly technology of the sixties (traditional booster rockets) and the now thirty year old Space Shuttle.