Future trends

Microsoft has officially blessed IPTV by announcing that the next XBox revision would be able to act as an IPTV set top box. Content will be provided by certain broadband providers like AT&T and BellSouth. If this sounds like a marriage made in heck, it probably is. The most likely reason Microsoft has made this announcement is to try to counter the buzz that will likely emerge on Tuesday (January 9th) when Apple announces its own set top box.

The popular social networking site MySpace is beginning to have problems with spam, phishing, porn, and other kinds of unfriendly and malicious content. At the root of much of this is the anonymity of the sites. Anyone can register as a MySpace user, which has delighted sexual predators who use the site to find vulnerable underage children.

Much is being made in the media over the rising price of copper. It is apparently now cost effective to melt down pennies and nickels for the copper content, although the Federal government is about to outlaw that.

Old minds (communities) think: If it didn't work last year, let's do MORE of it this year.

New minds (communities) think: If it didn't work last year, let's do something ELSE this year.

Old minds (communities) think: How do we stop these bad things from happening?

New minds (communities) think: How do we make things the way we want them to be?

Quoted from "Beyond Civilization: Humanity's Next Great Adventure" by Daniel Quinn (of 'Ishmael' fame)

A government study in Britain recommends Faraday cages for examination rooms. A Faraday cage is basically a metal-lined room that blocks all radio frequency signals. In other words, test takers won't be able to use their cellphones to text message friends for exam answers. The study also recommends scanners to detect MP3 players and other devices. It seems that some students are recording notes on their iPod and playing the content back during the exam.

In a recent set of broadband workshops, I talked at length about the increasing demand for bandwidth, and that it is necessary to set not the upper limit on our bandwidth needs, but only a lower limit--which I think is 100 megabits/second to homes and businesses.

What was interesting is that the skeptics were not business people, who were actually nodding their heads in agreement; they understand that they do not want their ability to grow their businesses and to create jobs limited by bandwidth.

It must be the rise in the stock market, and/or the trusty old adage that there is a sucker born every minute. This article on Web 3.0 is dense and wordy, so you may not want to spend much time actually reading it, but consider yourself warned that the "next big thing" (tongue firmly in cheek here) is Web 3.0.

According to Kevin Maney, in USA Today (page 3B), Walmart is shocked--shocked--that downloads of movies from the iTunes store are being sold for less money than the old-fashioned DVDs that use enormous energy to make and transport. Walmart is upset that they might be losing sales to digital downloads, and they apparently want someone to do something about it.

Network backup services are going to become big business, as everyone--businesses and consumers alike, figure out it is cheaper and easier to pay someone to store all your stuff. And the stuff is growing like crazy, as we buy songs online, download videos, and put thousands of digital pictures on our hard drives.

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that anyone can create an entry for, now has a cousin: Citizendium. Citizendium (most easily pronounced 'City-zendium') differs from Wikipedia in the way that content will be developed.

Amazon is offering an eBook. Dozens of companies lost their shirts with ebooks in the late nineties. Back then, laptops were expensive and PDAs had tiny screens and were hard to read (Apple's Newton was the exception). So many thought that ebooks--light, portable readers--would catch on. But the number of titles available for any given platform were limited, and too many manufacturers opted for proprietary book formats that made publishing a nightmare.

David Strom has a great article about the challenges of keeping up with all our gadgets and communications channels. I have to agree with him...we have so many ways to communicate....email, phone, cellphone, instant messaging, SMS, blogs, RSS, the Web, Skype and other free VoIP services that it is hard to get any work done.

Here is a story about a woman who the the Director of R&D for a high tech multimedia firm. She lives in Winthrop, Washington, and sleeps in a teepee. Now I know many of you will probably stop reading right there, but this article highlights a growing trend and the power of fiber to change rural communities. From the article, here is a description of Winthrop:

Ireland's research and higher education network, HEAnet, is getting configurable lightpaths. What are configurable lightpaths? It means that ordinary network users can configure a single wavelength of light on a fiber network from their computer or server to another computer or server on the same network (the computers could be hundreds or thousands of miles apart).

Many a science fiction novel has included a device that can spit out any kind of product automagically simply by feeding in design specs for it. Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age is just one example with that kind of technology. But in this case, gee whiz scifi ideas are fast becoming ho-hum reality.

Here is an interesting article on the rise of the Web hermit, which is a person who may be socially isolated because he or she makes Web activities the main focus of their life, rather than the real world. As a simple example, you can now do all of your banking and bill paying online, so that you never have to go to a bank and interact with a human bank teller.

A robotic surgical machine just completed the world's first unassisted heart surgery. There were surgeons standing by in case something went wrong, but nothing did. The machine was programmed with the data from more than 10,000 similar operations. It's an interesting concept, and could have the potential to change the way health care is delivered in poor areas of the world, where doctors are few.

Buy electric power when the cost is low, store it in your home or business, and use it when the price of power is high. Many electric utilities are moving toward differential pricing; during peak use hours (typically daytime and early evening), they charge more for electricity, and charge less in the middle of the night, when they have excess generating capacity.

With the proposed sale of Lucent to the French firm Alcatel, the twenty-two year deconstruction of AT&T is complete. Although SBC has kept the AT&T name, the "new" AT&T is really a different beast than the "old" AT&T.

I think the laptop is a dying device. They will not disappear entirely, but ten years from now, you won't see them very often.

On the desktop, most of us will have something that looks a lot like the Mac mini--a very small, quiet, fast, and unobtrusive device. Or we will have something like the iMac, where there is no box at all. Windows versions of the mini are already appearing.