Technology Futures

What in the world is Google up to? Sitting on a huge pile of cash, with more coming in every month from the successful Google AdWords service, one has to wonder if the company would be content.

This article from the Times in the UK suggests Google has something big up it's sleeve, with a possible foray into a worldwide Voice over IP phone service.

The 'net is buzzing over an article called What You'll Wish You'd Known by computer scientist and dot-com success Paul Graham. The article is interesting, but I don't think most kids will take the time to read it--by their standards, it's way too long (a topic for another discussion).

But you can always rely on the geeks that inhabit SlashDot to not only read this stuff, but critique it extensively, and one comment jumped right off the page at me:

The Wall Street Journal reports that FCC Chairman Michael Powell has stepped down as head of that agency.

The past four years for the FCC have been rocky ones. The FCC has lurched from one decision to another, sometimes favoring users of telecom services, but too often seeming to coddle the corporate dinosaurs of telecom. Trying to walk a line between the two is probably the worst job in Washington, and that has to be factored in when evaluating Powell's performance.

The bigger and more important issue for me has been this: What is the national policy on broadband? Powell, the FCC, and the Bush administration have never answered that beyond pablum that can be boiled down to "Broadband is good."

It's hard to imagine why we would even need an FCC ten years from now, and the new head of the FCC would do great good by announcing that his job is to shut the agency down over an appropriate period of time. Doing so would unleash a great wave of investment and entreprneurship because companies would finally know that they would not be hampered in the future by capricious regulations from Washington.

If the Federal government has a role, and I think it does, it's a simple one. Instead of the piecemeal approach to trying to help communities with broadband, the Federal government should simply fund very high bandwidth, interstate, long haul fiber routes, exactly the way it does with interstate highway projects.

And like the interstate highway system, it would have profound, and mostly positive effects on the economy, because unlike the highway system, small communities everywhere would have a chance to hook up to a world class Internet backbone. If you are interested in the how this might look at a local, state, and national level, take a look at my paper on this topic--Connecting the Dots fo

Podcasting started a few months ago among a small group of geeks who cobbled together some software that makes it easy to download sound files from the Web and squirt them right into an iPod or other portable music player.

The best description I've seen for it is in this article, which calls it "Tivo for radio." Podcasting allows you to download audio content and listen to it whenever you like, as opposed to listening to radio live.

Here is a very readable article that explains some of the differences between the popular but still more expensive LCD panels and the older but now very cheap CRT-based monitors. LCD prices have fallen dramatically, and CRTs are now dirt cheap--just a few years ago, a 17" CRT was $600 or more, and you can now find them for $100 if you shop around. One nice advantage of LCDs is that they are easier on the eyes, as they do not flicker like CRTs, and they don't produce ionizing radiation like CRTs.

The northern region of New Hamphsire is taking control of it's economic future by developing a technology master plan for the region, as reported by the AP.

One of the drivers of the project is the need to be competitive from an economic development perspective. Design Nine is providing the coordination and guidance for the effort.

SpaceShipOne won the $10 million X Prize by being the first private space vehicle to make a round trip to suborbital space twice in two weeks. But more money has been put up by hotel mogul Robert Bigelow. Fifty million is the next prize, for the first private spaceship to take five people to orbit twice in two weeks.

If you want to see what it will be like when WiFi hotspots can be found almost anywhere, just check in for a night to any of the low end motels (e.g. Holiday Inn Express) that offer "free" WiFi.

What most of these places are doing are buying a cheap DSL line, sticking an access point on each floor, and hanging a banner out front (High speed Internet!). It's not high speed when every other guest in the hotel fires up their laptop at the same time and tries to download movie trailers.

The City Council of St. Paul, Minnesota has approved a study to consider the feasibility of citywide wireless broadband.

The three month study will look for "the common good" that might be gained from community-managed telecom infrastructure. This is, as far as I know, the first time the common good has been explicity acknowledged in this kind of study. It has been implicitly part of many other community telecom projects, but it's about time we started this particular conversation in more earnest.

Texas has a foot in the emerging Space Economy with the announcement that Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon, is planning a spaceport facility in southwest Texas.

Bezos is from nearby New Mexico, and has been working on this project from Seattle for several years. The most interesting part of this story is that the Bezos ranch, near El Paso, is not really that far from southern New Mexico's spaceport. The two locations are likely to form a "space tech" corridor that will fuel growth in the region for decades.

Griffin, one of the most innovative hardware companies out there, has just released a neat little $40 gadget that takes audio from your computer and broadcasts it to any nearby FM radios. This solves the problem of how to distribute the music from all those CDs you have ripped to your hard drive. It also means you can rebroadcast Internet radio stations to other locations in your house. RocketFM plugs into a USB port, and works with both Windows and Macs--a perfect complement to iTunes.

In yet another egregious example of an organization being hijacked by the IT folks, the FBI may have to scrap a brand new $170 million computer system because, get this, it doesn't work.

When these things happen, there is plenty of blame to go around. There are always at least three guilty parties.

There was an article in yesterday's Roanoke Times in the Business section about a new firm in Roanoke that is selling late model used cars with a "new car showroom" approach. The owner is trying to overcome the stigma associated with the stereotyped used car salesman by offering only late model cars in excellent condition, and using a high quality presentation.

USA Today has an article about Lafayette, Louisiana, which has been trying to put together a community fiber project for the past year. The southern Louisiana community has apparently been beaten down by BellSouth, which has vigorously opposed the deal.

BellSouth has claimed it is "unfair" for communities to offer a service the company could offer, even though it provides only DSL in the community, a pale shadow of the robust fiber network the city was planning.

At the risk of boring my regular readers, there are two ways to approach community telecom projects. One is to regard telecom infrastructure just like roads. Communities build the roads, but private companies (like BellSouth) deliver services (like dialtone or TV programming) to customers. The other approach is to regard telecom infrastructure like the municipal water or electric system, in which the city itself provides the customer services.

The latter is certainly more efficient, but given that many of our elected leaders still don't take any of this very seriously and given that we have a ridiculously complex regulatory environment, I think the former approach (a public/private partnership) is the only alternative.

Rightly or wrongly, communities that are trying to create public monopolies in this area are losing. The telecoms are outspending them and are buying whatever laws are needed to prevent community investments. But communities must invest to stay viable in the global economy, and Lafayette knows that. From the article:

"The future of Lafayette shouldn't be left to the whim of the big telecommunications companies, insists City Parish President Joey Durel. Installing fiber-optic cable, he credibly argues, is no different from laying down sidewalks or sewer lines.

In fact, the "triple play" plan mirrors the action Lafayette's city fathers took a century ago when they realized the private power companies were passing them by in favor of larger, more lucrative markets in Baton Rouge and New Orleans. To survive, they built their own municipal power system.

An article in the Roanoke Times yesterday (a NY Times reprint) discussed the phenomenal rise of SMS, or Short Message System. SMS, more often called "text messaging," is the cellphone service that lets you send short text messages on your cellphone.

The article was irritating because it implied that because most SMS users are twenty-something or younger, there must be something wrong with older people. The article, without any data to support the conclusion, said that older people were "more comfortable" with the telephone, implying we old geezers just could not get with the new technology.

I've seen a lot of dumb technology reporting, but this article was one of the dumbest. In conversations I've had with "youngsters" who are SMS fanatics, the only they could tell me they used it for was when they were bored. One twenty-something businessperson told me how great it was because when he was in meetings, he could send messages to his friends. The article also said that SMS was popular because you could use it when you were bored.

So here is the "old geezer," "not comfortable with technology" take on this: when I'm in a meeting, I'm trying to pay attention and contribute to the discussion, rather than text messaging about what I plan to have for lunch. That's not "uncomfortable with technology," that's called being mature and responsible.

The article implied that using the phone was somehow a quaint and old-fashioned mode of communication. No, it's fast and efficient. When I have something to say to someone, it's a lot quicker to pick up the phone than to try to type on a 12 button keyboard the size of my thumb. That's not old-fashioned, it's just sensible.

One unfortunate aspect of this technology revolution we are in is that there is this unsubstantiated belief that youth know more about technology than anyone else. I hear it almost every day. While it is true most young people have a higher comfort level with some of this stuff, the fact that a nineteen year old uses it does not inherently make it good or mean that everyone should use it. Let's not throw commonsense out the window with the crank telephones and VCRs.

A colleague sent me a link to another up and coming search engine called Vivisimo. It's a bit different than Snap, which I wrote about yesterday, but like Snap, it handles search results in a way that is genuinely useful, as compared to the typical "jillions of hits" Google result.

The Redwood Technology Consortium has won a grant to collect data on the best practices of community networks around the country. The RTC represents technology interests for the North Coast region of California, centered in the Eureka area.

Consumer's Union, the publisher of Consumer Reports, has a site called Hear Us Now that has some useful information on policy and regulatory telecom issues that affect consumers. Among the topics on the home page are cell phone lockdowns, which is the scam used by cellphone companies to force you to buy new phones even if you have a perfectly good one already. CU estimates 100 million cellphones are discarded each year just in the U.S., which is an appalling waste of resources.

In a brilliant marriage of a free Open Source piece of software and the iPod, medical radiologists around the world are using iPods to store the huge image files generated by CT and other kinds of scans and x-rays. Eweek has the story of a frustrated radiologist who helped develop the free OsiriX software that allows radiologists to store and manipulate the images on the iPod.

Can anyone imagine life without Google? More than any other Internet service, with the possible exception of email, the availability of Google has become a kind of icon for the changes the Internet has brought over the past ten years. It's even become a verb.