Technology Futures

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.

What you will rarely see in the mainstream media when they report on high gas prices is the booming new markets that are already emerging. This Wired article reports on the potential of ethanol as a fossil fuel replacement.

You can buy cars and trucks now that run on E85 fuel, which is 85% ethanol. In Illinois, where a lot of the corn that is used to produce ethanol is grown, the state is already buying E85 vehicles, and is about to start a statewide program to get more gas stations to install an E85 pump.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the New York Times is considering a new approach to providing access to its news articles. Currently, you can view any article less than a week old. After that, you have to pay an absurd $2.95 to see the article.

Under the new scheme, you would pay $50/year to get access to any article in the past 365 days. They are apparently also considering an alternate scheme that would give you full access to the whole NYT archive.

With newspaper circulation in free fall, the Times is only one of numerous papers that must be trying to figure out what to do. While "the Internet" is often blamed for the general decline in newspaper circulation, I think the problem is more basic. I travel a lot, and try to read local papers wherever I go. What I see is a general lack of innovation, creativity, and news. I see this as the ClearChannel problem (ClearChannel owns 1000+ radion stations in the U.S.). As large chains have bought out more and more papers, those papers look more and more alike. Bean counters at the corporate level cut local staffs and budgets, force papers to use more syndicated content, and the result is dull newspapers with all the same (word for word) stories you can find on the Internet.

Newspapers don't look that different than they did one hundred years ago--the big innovation of the last twenty years is color pictures. I'm actually bullish on the future of newspapers; we still need someone to edit the news for us. In fact, I would argue that the role of newspapers--editing the news and providing quality control--is more important now with so many alternate sources available to us. Who has time to check dozens of Web sites daily? Papers condense many news sources and help us sort out the important issues. Newspapers and TV news will never again be primary sources of information, but I see the editorial function as still very relevant.

Dave Hughes, one of the true pioneers of community broadband, has a hard-hitting article about the "Qwest Monopoly Protection Act" that is close to being passed in Colorado. Like a similar and very bad Pennsylvania law, it would bar communities from investing in their own future. The most sobering part of the article is Hughes' point that some communities in Nepal have better broadband services than some rural communities in Colorado.

Oakland County, Michigan (via Muni Wireless) has issued an RFQ for wireless services to provide broadband throughout the region. It's a public/private partnership, which is the right way to go--government provides leadership and helps ensure universal (or nearly universal service) and the private sector creates jobs and pays taxes. Here's an excerpt from the County's Web site, which shows these county leaders "get it."

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal (print edition, p. B8) had an article by Brian Steinberg about broadband and its effect on people's habits. According to Steinberg, broadband connections are now used by 48% of Internet users, the same number of people on dialup. This is a big jump from last fall, when data was suggesting that about 35% of Internet users were on broadband (the other 4% are probably using non-standard connections like satellite, cellphones, etc.).

As broadband use increases, traditional analog television is the big loser. Here's an interesting quote from Jeffery Godsick, the executive VP of 20th Century Fox:

"...TV is not their [the broadband users] primary way of finding out about movies or anything."

In a move that must frighten the pants off TV execs, movie studios are planning to release full screen movie trailers over the Internet. Now, you might ask what the big deal is; movie trailers have been available on the Internet for years. But these have been smaller files that play in small to medium size windows on your monitor. What's new is that these upcoming movie trailers are going to be close to DVD quality--massive files that are ready for viewing on big screen and HD monitors.

It's a test of the network, and of viewers--the movie studios, using the trailers, can study the distribution and performance costs of making these big files available, and they can see how many people make the effort to download them. The next step will be to make movies available for download, streaming, and/or sale.

The movie industry is slowing adapting to the new all digital, all IP converged model of entertainment. Apple has shown that you can make money with legal file downloads, and Apple has also shown that most people, when presented with a reasonable DRM (Digital Rights Management) system and fair prices, will download legally.

Within the next twelve months, we are going to see a breakout IP "TV" show become available only on the Internet.

CNet has an article that provides a good summary of some of the current issues surrounding community-financed broadband. On one side, you have the cable companies and telcos, determined to prevent communities from controlling their own destiny. On the other side, you have communities getting limited or no access to broadband services, with those towns and cities at a serious disadvantage in the global economy as 15 other countries have better broadband than the United States.

Frank Maguire is the cofounder of FedEx, and this article reports on a recent speech he gave about passion, success, and the determination to make things work. Among his comments was this statement.

"There's a light in each one of you and it's bigger than you ever thought and it's on your side," he said. "Turn on your light. You can do it, regardless of your circumstances."