Technology Futures

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."

The Register reports on a new law enacted in Holland that can charitably only be described as "stupid." In a misguided effort to prop up the ailing music industry, the Netherlands has decided to impose a per megabyte tax on all hard drive-based music players, with the proceeds going to the music industry.

This means, according to the article, that the 60 gigabyte model of the iPod would have a tax of $235! According to the Register, Germany also has a tax on computer hard drives, and as they get bigger, the hard drive tax could exceed the base cost of the computer (that is, the tax will be several thousand dollars).

There are so many things wrong with this approach that it is hard to know where to begin. In the first place, the Holland law assumes that all music stored on portable music players is stolen, when in fact only a very small percentage is. So music lovers have to pay royalties twice--once when they buy the music, and again when they buy the music player. It's a windfall for the music industry, since only a small part of royalties actually go to the artist. It forces the music player retailers to become tax collectors, which is always a bad idea. And it will simply drive the purchase of music players out of the country. Holland is an easy drive from a half dozen other countries, and it's barely an afternoon trip to take the train to France, pick up an iPod, and go home.

The music industry does not have a "right" to make money. As markets and technologies change, businesses have to change too. This business of using laws to protect monopolies hurts communities and whole countries, as innovation and new products are simply driven elsewhere. It's a global economy, and Dutch lawmakers are naive in extreme to believe this law will work. It will only hurt the country's economic development as businesses see their customers go elsewhere, and not just for iPods. While they are across the border, they are likely to shop for other items as well.

I'm a big fan of microduct and blown fiber, and Emtelle is one of the world leaders in the technology. I think it is an ideal solution for community and neighborhood fiber projects, as it works with both passive and active optical network equipment, it's easy to install, and easy to repair--essential qualities for community-managed systems. But it's always been hard to explain without actually seeing it. This movie on the Emtelle site is short and illustrates how it works end to end (you need a Flash player plug-in for your browser).

Wired reports that a San Francisco AM radio station is going to an all-podcast format. The station is inviting people to create their own content and send it to the station, which will screen it and then make it available for download.

On another mailing list, I heard about a T-Mobile Web page that would tell you what kind of signal you are likely to get at a given street address in the U.S. Because U.S. Cellular offers nothing but bottom of the bin cellphones (they are not big enough to get deals to sell phones like the Treo 650), I thought I'd check T-Mobile.

The company has never had coverage in Blacksburg, but I thought I'd try again, since I have not checked with them lately. So I went to the page, typed in my street address, city, state, and zip code, pressed the button, and voila.

I got back a message saying "Input zip code is invalid."

Wow. That's interesting. Either T-Mobile is trying to tell me I live in an "invalid" place, or there is a bug in their code, or it's a really awful way of saying they have no coverage in my area.

Pick any one of those three choices, and you get to the same conclusion--somebody screwed up, either by not testing it adequately and/or by failing utterly to do a basic software ergonomics review to make sure the "error" messages made sense.

My guess: This little app was outsourced to a software shop in India, which did a bang up job of banging out the code cheaply and producing a slick little application. But you get what you pay for. Outsourced contractors rarely care much about little details like this; they are under the gun to get the work done quickly and cheaply for the client, and so they don't have the luxury of dotting the i's and crossing the t's.

At the same time that we see big companies getting bigger by relentless costcutting and globalization of production, why is there a parallel rise in small, entreprenuerial enterprises? Because the small entrepreneur has more skin in the game--he or she has to produce high quality stuff to be competitive. A two hundred person coding shop in India just has to get the next job. It's not either/or here....both have their place, and both can provide useful services.

Xerox wins some kind of special prize for the worst telephone support I've ever encountered. How bad is it?

It's worse than Verizon! (Note--not any more--see my updated note at the end of this article. Verizon, on the other hand, still has terrible customer service)

I have a Xerox printer/copier, and the hinge on the cover broke a few days ago. I bought a Xerox in part because I was assured that I could get service for it. I was tired of having to discard cheap printers because you could not get minor repairs.

GovTech has an article on Missouri's new CIO (Chief Information Officer), who was given the daunting task of improving state government IT services, in part by consolidating 16 separate IT fiefdoms. IT folks are notoriously resistant to service aggregation, because it usually means smaller staffs and smaller budgets. Some IT folks like big, complicated, hard to use systems because it justifies big IT staffs and budgets.

After I got horribly lost in rural New Hampshire (the day after a blizzard, with six inches of snow still on some roads), I swore off Mapquest forever. I've never been fond of their directions, which always have too many directions. You know the ones....drive .1 miles and veer to the left...continue for .05 miles and bear left....and so on. It takes longer to read the directions than it does to travel a tenth of mile, and a more accurate instruction would be something like "take the left fork."

The straw that broke this camel's back in New Hampshire was when I found myself in some picturesque little New England town and stopped in the local quick stop for directions. I told them where I was going, and everyone in the store burst out laughing. I asked them what the joke was, and they said, "You must have Mapquest directions." I said, "Yea," and there was another round of laughter. They finally explained that for some reason, the Mapquest directions from Manchester to Conway (my destination) were backwards (left turns were right turns, and so on) for part of the trip, and everyone ended up at this store. I finally got where I was going, and discovered that Mapquest's 18 separate instructions could have been boiled down to three if written out by a human being.

But, like steak knives, there's more! I had to go to Reston last week to the Digital Cities conferences, and I'd never been to that particular hotel before. I did not want to use Mapquest, so I decided to use the new Google Maps feature (part of Google's quest to dominate the universe).

That also turned out to be a really bad idea. Google has much better maps on the screen than Mapquest, but they print out horribly fuzzy. Their directions were much like Mapquest's, but I gave it the old college try.

They were horribly wrong. They dumped me off the highway two exits before the correct one, and the last five or six instructions were, as I found out, quite garbled. Like my previous Mapquest adventure, a human would have produced instructions that were no more than three lines.

Anne Byers, of the Nebraska Information Technology Commission, and one of the most knowledgeable people in the country on rural technology issues, has written an excellent article that not only summarizes some of the anti-muni legislation pending in that state, but also provides some very useful analysis of other projects around the country.

Among Anne's cogent analysis is the point that whether a community broadband project has "failed" or "succeeded" depends on who you talk to, with some projects being ranked by different organizations as both a success and a failure.

Apple's new Tiger operating system will debut this Friday, and details are beginning to leak out. One of the most talked about features is called Spotlight, a new search engine built into the operating system. Spotlight will index and search virtually your entire hard drive--emails, PDF files, all word processing files, and "knows" about the file formats of things like images, which can have keywords and subject descriptors attached to them, but could rarely be searched.

New York City has announced an ambitious plan to boost fiber capacity in the city and to make all public facilities "wireless friendly."

Google's founders are fond of their corporate slogan, "Do nothing evil," but the lady doth protest too much, to borrow an old phrase.

I've written about Google's Gmail service, in which the company happily stores every email you have ever sent or received, mainly so they can snoop through your mail and figure out what ads to show you (e.g. correspond with a friend about an upcoming hiking trip, and you'll start seeing ads for outdoor gear).

Ray Buzzard, of Dalton Utilities, spoke about the Dalton, Georgia community broadband project. Dalton's community fiber project, only about two years old, has already had very positive economic development effects by keeping hundreds of manufacturing jobs in the community. The high performance, low cost network persuaded some local manufacturers to stay in the community rather than moving elsewhere.

Local government was a key anchor tenant by making an early commitment to use the system.

Clark McLeod, the CEO of FiberUtilities of Iowa and the head of OpportunityIowa, gave a stunning keynote address at the Digital Cities conference on Tuesday. What follows is a summary of his remarks.

The incumbent telephone and cable companies have monopolized both infrastructure and services, and they will do anything--ANYTHING--to stop threats to those monopolies. Nonetheless, the incumbents are not the enemy. The enemy is the complacency of American communities, who are letting the incumbents win the battle.

OpportunityIowa is a statewide effort to educate citizens and elected leaders about the importance of broadband to the future of the community, and it is trying to address the urgent need to help those citizens and elected leaders understand that broadband is tightly tied to economic development. The project has made over 1000 presentations across the state to educate communities about the issues.

OpportunityIowa has a simple answer to the question of why communities should invest in broadband: To reverse the downward economic trends (fewer and fewer jobs year after year); to build 21st century community infrastructure; and because community broadband is primarily a local problem. One of Iowa's main exports are college graduates, who leave the state and never come back because of the lack of opportunity.

McCleod says that education is the core problem (or the lack of it).

Communities need a fiber utility; it will drive the cost of telecom down. Creating a fiber utility (just the legal entity, not building anything) gets the attention of the incumbents and often has immediate positive results because communities that create these fiber utility entities often get better service quickly, even if they have not spent any money to build out a network. The first step for any community is to create the legal entity that could and would own and manage a community fiber network.

McLeod suggests that the legal entity be created without any commitment to actually spending any money or building any infrastructure. The mistake many communities make is to rush to build something without having an appropriate community legal entity in place.