Exploring the impact of broadband and technology on our lives, our businesses, and our communities.

Your watch is ringing

I have become pretty jaded about new gadgets. Most of them represent technology in search of a problem, and I just don't need anything else that requires batteries, a charger, a dock, and that weighs me down in airports. But a new Bluetooth watch is actually pretty interesting. The watch will talk wirelessly to some models of cellphones. If you get a phone call, instead of having to fish your phone out of your pocket or bag, this watch will vibrate, and it will show the Caller ID information on the watch display. A button on the side of the watch will let you silence the call and send the caller to your voicemail. This would be particularly nice during meetings, where you may not want to appear rude by fumbling with the phone.

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SpaceShipTwo is booking passengers

As I wrote recently, a lot of my readers just think that the whole Space Economy thing is a litte goofy. But Virgin Galactic has rolled out images of its new sub-orbital space ship, and is already booking seats. Two hundred thousand dollars gets you a two and one half hour trip to the edge of space--about 68 miles above the earth. Pasengers will be weightless long enough to get queasy and/or enjoy the view; the ship will have plenty of windows. Test flights of the system will begin in 2008, and passengers will be lifting off in 2009. And New Mexico's Space Economy is roaring along, and the whole state's economy is being lifted--no pun intended.

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Cellphone sports is a dead ball

Just as the cellphone companies are about to start marketing Web sites with the .mobi domain name, ESPN announces that they are dumping their mobile phone service, which came bundled with lots of sports content. It turns out that few people are interested in watching sports on a two inch screen. That's the problem with cellphones; they are phones, not televisions, and just taking content that works with other devices and shrinking the picture does not always work. And it begs the question: What on earth are the cellphone companies thinking with the .mobi domain? Don't they read the news?

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New Mexico SpacePort blasts off

When I first began writing about spaceports two years ago, I got a lot of eyerolling in response. Some economic developers really questioned whether this was something to take seriously. But in just two short years, New Mexico is well on the way to turning the entire economy of the state around.

New Mexico's first commercial space launch will take place this week. Big deal, you say? Nine more are already scheduled for the next year, and the Space Economy is already pumping millions into the state economy. Virgin Galactic plans to use the spaceport for commercial flights that will provide space tourism opportunities in comfortable spaceplanes built by Bert Rutan.

The space stuff is fun, but it is not really the point. A few years ago, by nearly every measure, New Mexico was one of the poorest states in the country. By taking a look at their assets, they determined the one thing they had plenty of--wide open, flat spaces--was good for space industries. They then picked up the ball and ran with it, investing consistently and staying on track, even though a lot of people doubted them. And it is now beginning to pay off.

How about your region? Have you identified your strategic assets and built a plan around a *future* economy--space, energy, knowledge, agriculture? Are you executing consistently, with thoughtful, year after year investments to make the right things happen? If not, why not?

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More top level domains not an improvement

Demonstrating that the big telecom companies have not learned much over the past decade, they have successfully gotten a new top level domain called 'mobi,' as in cingular.mobi. In theory, this is supposed to make it easier for people to find content customized for cellphones, but this is a non-problem. It is straightforward now to design Web sites for cellphones, and you don't need a new domain to do it--there is no value add here.

All this is is a clumsy attempt to create more walled gardens for content, and of course, in a walled garden, there is a gatekeeper collecting fees. From a user perspective, it makes things worse, as you now have to make an extra decision....do you go to cingular.com to find what you are looking for, or do you have to search on cingular.mobi? Since it is very expensive to duplicate the content of Web sites, most companies using the mobi domain won't keep everything on their 'normal' site and the mobi site, so you may have to check in both places. Which takes time--make that *wastes* time and will irritate everyone.

The telecoms are still pursuing a 1950s era business model of "owning the customer," and they continue to try to do so in the Knowledge Economy, where you can't "own" the customer anymore. Every scheme to try to create special content for cellphones has failed...remember WAP? Neither does anyone else, because it was a complete failure.

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Mythbusters crack technology with copy machine and spit

The popular TV show Mythbusters tackled the challenge of cracking locks that use fingerprint scanning technology, and quickly discovered three easy ways to fool a fingerprint scanner. One them involved nothing more than a copy machine and warm spit.

Regrettably, some hardware vendors do better on the marketing and sales side than on the product side, and buyers have to beware. This is much like the Diebold voting machine scandal, where supposedly "high security" voting machines can be easily tampered with right inside the voting booth to change votes invisibly. The irony in both situations is that long established mechanical technology (mechanical locks have been around for at least two thousand years, and mechanical voting machines have decades of use) is probably more resistant to tampering than the newer, more expensive, and more maintenance and failure prone electronic devices. Adding a microchip and an display screen to a device does not automatically make it better, and as we have seen with these locks and voting machines, adding electronics can make things worse....much worse.

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Rural Telecon '06 in October

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has confirmed the participation of Dr. Carol Cain in this year’s Rural Telecommunications Congress Conference, October 22-25, 2006, at the Wyndham Riverfront Hotel in North Little Rock, AR. For those who might be unfamiliar with AHRQ they are the lead agency managing the Federal inventory of projects for the Department of Health and Human Services related to the transformation of the national healthcare system. In 2007 they will help disburse approximately $130 million in health information technology projects as well as another $300 million in other research areas that focus on health services, quality, patient safety, sustainability, etc. AHRQ's web site: http://www.ahrq.gov/

Rural Telecon '06 is exciting because it will help answer a critical question about community broadband:

How do we pay for it?

Participants will be able to return home being able to motivate change in economic/community development, healthcare, education, and telecommunications infrastructure. Open Access Service Provider community broadband initiatives are, in my opinion, the most exciting thing that has happened in telecom for communities since the early 90s.

For the first time ever, it is possible to develop a comprehensive cost and operations model for a community broadband system and show exactly what it will cost and how much revenue potential exists--and most importantly, to show how to pay for both initial investments and ongoing operational costs. Most importantly, open access networks energize the private sector and get government out of the telecom business, while maintaining community control of the infrastructure.

What is probably most exciting about Rural Telecon '06 is that it will present solutions that are just as valuable to urban settings as rural. Rural communities will have a chance to establish a leadership role in identifying how this future reliance on broadband telecommunications will play out.

More information about the conference is at the Rural Telecommunications Congress.

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Wikpedia, meet Citizendium

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. Citizendium will not allow anonymous entries, and there will be some form of expert review and editorial oversight to help avoid Wikipedia's issues with slanderous material, outright fabrication, and distortion of facts.

A long term structural weakness of many Internet services has been lack of authentication, or to put it another way, too much anonymity. Anonymity is appropriate and important for certain kinds of things and services, but for popular online resources like an encyclopedia, it just doesn't work. We'll see more and more services offered that require some knowledge and identification of the author of the material, because not to do so creates too many problems.

IP TV as the new dot-com bubble

AlGore's Current TV, a cable channel with limited distribution, has announced a partnership with Yahoo to create four new broadband channels.

More than half of U.S. Internet users now have broadband connections, so the marketplace is big enough to support investments in broadband video programming. But my prediction is that IP TV ventures of various kinds will become the new dot-com bubble, with thousands of get-rich-quick video producers coming up with a million programming schemes, all predicated on the shaky notion that they are going to siphon off 1% of Google's ad revenue.

Like the original dot-com bubble, if you have ten thousand schemers all claiming to be going after 1% of the market, the math does not add up. A great strength of the Internet is the low barrier to entry if you have a neat idea. A great weakness of the Internet is a low barrier to entry if you have a neat idea and otherwise poorly-conceived plans and financing. We're going to see hundreds and hundreds of announcements of new broadband "channels," and most of them will die a quick death. In the long run, quality always wins, if you can stay in the race long enough to let the weak drop by the wayside.

Levi blue jeans are now iPod ready

If you like blue jeans and have a spare $250, you might want to pick up a pair of Levi Redwire (TM) jeans. They have a built in docking cradle for iPods that lets you pull the iPod out of a special pocket while it is playing. Why a cradle? The jeans also have an integrated iPod controller that sits outside the pocket, so that you can have your iPod safely tucking inside the pants but still access the controls. It also comes with a retractable headphone unit to help keep your headphone cord from becoming tangled.

Presumably all of the electronics in these pants are removable so that you can wash them. And these pants will likely spur a thousand variants of the very old joke, "Is that an iPod in your pocket or are you just glad to see me?"

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