Exploring the impact of broadband and technology on our lives, our businesses, and our communities.
Cheap electric cars are just what we need
DaimlerChrysler has been late to the hybrid electric car game, but the perennially third place firm may end up winning the game over the long run. DaimlerChrysler recently bought Global Electric Motorcars, which makes the street legal GEM e4.
The GEM e4 is just the opposite of cars like the Prius, which are expensive to buy and expensive to own when you look at total life cycle costs (replacement batteries, needed every 3-4 years, cost thousands of dollars). The e4 seats 4, is street legal, and is fully weatherized. The car achieves it's low cost of operation by using less expensive car batteries, and has a range of about 30 miles, with a top speed of 25 mph--plenty of speed for around town driving. They are charged by plugging them into any 120 VAC outlet for a few hours.
The car is not legal on highways, but much of our driving is short trips just a few miles from home. The GEM vehicles start with prices as low as $7,000, and a well-equipped four seat model is under $10,000. They are much more practical than electric and gas scooters, the Segway, and other "open air" vehicles. Most people don't want to be caught out in a rainstorm or go to work with their hair and clothes flying in the breeze (me included). Alternative vehicles, to be popular, have to be able to get us from point A to point B with a minimum disruption of our appearance--you just can't show up for a business meeting soaked to the skin or covered with snow.
These NEVs (Neighborhood Electric Vehicles) wont' replace our highway driving cars, but they can cut the cost of getting around town dramatically.
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Economic development news
If you have not already made EDPro part of your regular blog news network, you should. Ed Morrison, an economic development professional in Ohio, has the best roundup of Knowledge Economy news and information, bar none. He is also promoting the notion of Open Source Economic Development, which stresses the importance of regional collaboration and a strong focus on innovation. It's great reading.
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Just skip the phone
Someone asked me this morning why Apple had not come out with a cellphone (we'll ignore the awful Motorola phone that had some iTunes support). The cellphone marketplace is extremely crowded and highly competitive; Apple would not have any real advantage in marketing an Apple-branded cellphone, and phones need more than the gorgeously simple iPod interface.
But my other guess is that Apple has plans to skip over the phone completely. Take a look at this mysterious patent over at Engadget. The patent is listed by Apple, but it refers to the iPod constantly and seems to be some kind of videoconferencing add-on to an iPod. The illustration shows an external camera, but that's not likely. Here's my guess (and this is just speculation).
Apple already has miniaturized its iSight camera; they are built into the lids of all Apple laptops now. The same camera could easily be added to an iPod with any difficulty at all. Apple has been a pioneer in WiFi, and could easily add wireless Internet connectivity to an iPod. Finally, Apple has superb videoconference software with iChat, a mature product that comes with every Mac.
So the next generation iPod comes with a built in camera, WiFi connectivity, and iChat software. Walk into any WiFi hotspot, pick someone off your buddy list, and call them via iChat. When they answer, you have a full duplex, two way videoconference with a high quality Internet protocol. In fact, you can talk to anyone with a similarly equipped iPod, but also anyone connected to the Internet who uses the same platform independent chat protocols that iChat uses.
With the iPod more popular than beer with college students, an iPod with video chat capabilities would fly off the shelves and deepen the iPod's lock on the youth market for portable gadgets.
With an iPod, why bother with a phone?
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Roanoke tries to attract youth
Roanoke is a city near Blacksburg, and the city's demographics are skewed, like many rural towns and cities, toward older people. The City recently decided to stop wringing its hands about the paucity of young people and actually do something. First they hired someone whose primary job responsibility is to solve the problem, and then gave him free rein. Stuart Meese, who landed the job, has both a blog and a city-sponsored online database of young people looking for work in the area.
With over 450 young people in the database after just a few months, the database is fast becoming a valuable resource for area businesses looking for talent. A hat tip to Roanoke and Stuart Meese for putting resources behind the problem and doing something other than just complaining. And while you might ask, "What about Monster.com?" I'd say, "What about it?" They are two different tools, and employers searching the Roanoke database can do so with a reasonable certainty they are looking at motivated potential employees who really want to work in the area. You can't say that with any certainty when you pull up a bunch of Monster.com listings.
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iPods more popular than beer
A new study of college students suggests that iPods are more popular with that age group than beer, which normally occupies the top slot among the things that college students prefer most. In recent years, more and more technology-related items and activities have been the top ten list, including instant messaging and Facebook. Facebook, the popular Web site for young adults, actually tied with beer for second place. So perhaps these gadgets do have some redeeming social value--they appear to be cutting down on drinking.
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Citywide WiFi projects are expensive experiments
Citywide WiFi projects in Sacramento, California and St. Cloud, Florida are both having problems, supporting my long-standing contention that these efforts are risky. MobilePro, the company that got a city government contract to blanket the city with WiFi, is pulling out of the project entirely after the company and the city could not agree on how to finance the project. What's mind-boggling is how the company and the city agreed to move forward without a clear understanding of how the system would be paid for. Unfortunately, this is typical of "knee jerk" broadband projects that are promoted vigorously to local leaders who don't really understand enough about how community broadband should be operated. And very few vendors do, either. Wireless vendors just want to sell hardware, and so they don't really care very much if a business model is weak or nonexistent.
In St. Cloud, Florida, which got a lot of publicity when their citywide wireless effort was announced, is now having problems because they are finding out what some of us have known for a long time--WiFi is at best a bridge technology, not a long term solution. And you have to understand its limitations to make best use of it. The St. Cloud problems are largely technical ones at this time, with many residents not able to get a strong enough signal to use the free service. Residents are being advised by the City to buy a $170 signal booster. But many say they are going to stick with DSL.
One of the problems with WiFi is that it is can be lumped in the same category as DSL and cable modem services--that is too say, not exactly a bridge to the future. If you already have DSL or cable modem service, switching to WiFi is not likely to bring any real improvement to throughput, and it might even be less capable. Consumers are price sensitive to a point, but at this time, many people already understand the value of broadband, and are willing to pay for it in return for adequate performance. What St. Cloud is finding out is that residents won't necessarily switch to a free service that does not perform up to their expectations. So the city's money may have been wasted.
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Google spreadsheets
Google has announced it will offer an online spreadsheet application, which sounds terrific in theory. How many times have you wished you could have several people on a phone call all look at the same spreadsheet at the same time, and even make live updates while talking. And a spreadsheet stored online means you don't have to keep emailing copy after copy of the same spreadsheet to people just because you updated a single cell.
So what's not to like about the Google app?
For starters, how about losing control over all the information in your spreadsheet? Google's sample page shows a spreadsheet that has information about a Little League baseball team. Great. Put the phone numbers, names, email, and addresses of minors in a spreadsheet and give it to a company that is very likely to mine all that information and sell it to advertisers, to say nothing of the security problems of having all that fall into the hands of sexual predators.
And any business that uses this to save a few bucks on software is crazy. You have no control over what Google does with this information, and why would you let Google have access to all your financial information, customers names and addresses, and all the other sorts of critical business information that routinely gets put into spreadsheets.
I'll pass on this one.
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Apple vs. Dell-to outsource or not to outsource
In an interesting tale of two companies, Apple has dumped its experiment in offshoring telephone support to India after just one month. Meanwhile, Dell is rapidly expanding its offshore tech support. What's going on? Apple, while not perfect, consistently gets high ratings from consumers for support. Dell, on the other hand, has been receiving a steady stream of criticism lately for poor customer support.
I attribute the difference to finances. Apple is extremely profitable, and seems to have figured out that taking good care of customers pays off over the long term. Dell, on the other hand, is on the ropes financially and appears to be trying to save its way out of a money hole. In my experience, cost-cutting at the expense of highly visible parts of the company like customer service never works out well. Dell's slide will likely continue.
Personally, I have rarely had a good experience with offshore customer support. I've observed two chronic problems. First, the heavy accents, even with someone who might speak English as a first language, often makes conversations quite difficult. And second, offshore staff seem to be often stuck following a script when trying to figure out what the customer wants. If the problem doesn't match the script, they can't adapt. I find that less so with American-based customer support (though not always).
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The work from home movement
When I talk to communities about the need to view residential neighborhoods as business districts because of the growth in home-based workers and businesses, economic developers often get upset. They get upset because having lots of small businesses driving a local economy does not fit the old Manufacturing Economy model of just trying to attract businesses from other regions.
This article from Fortune (hat tip to Slashdot) illustrates an increasingly common business--one with a majority of its employees working from home. MySQL AB is a major tech firm with 320 employees in 25 countries, and 70 percent of those employees work from home.
What that means is marketing industrial and business parks with great water and sewer offers nothing to a company like this one. Instead of the company relocating, it is employees and business owners that are relocating, and they want two things: great quality of life and affordable broadband. And the affordable broadband has to be in residential neighborhoods, not the local industrial park.
It's not that you give up on your business and industrial parks--far from it. But it does mean that you have to expand your economic development strategy to include new kinds of businesses, new kinds of workers, and new kinds of infrastructure, like fiber to the home. One interesting tidbit from the article is that MySQL relies heavily on Voice over IP (VoIP) telephone services to keep things working smoothing--and that means, once again, that broadband service in worker homes is critical.
How does your community rate in this new global economy? Do you have programs and strategies in place to attract work from businesses and employees? If not, why not? Why ignore the double digit job growth increases from work at home businesses?
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Where is my electric car?
Segway, the company that makes the two wheel electric scooter, has a new loan program so that you can purchase a Segway just like a car, with a loan. It turns out very few people want to pay $5000 in cash for one.
With the rist in fuel prices, these kinds of lower cost transportation devices are looking more attractive, but the Segway and similar electric scooters of more conventional design are not really practical for business people, who don't want to arrive at work windswept, with clothes askew, and even wet from riding something with no protection from wind and rain.
What we need is a street legal, slightly faster, weather resistant version of a golf cart. For many people who commute under ten miles to work or to shop, it would be just fine. In Blacksburg, most of my in town trips are under two miles. It's crazy to be driving a 3000 pound automobile capable of driving long distances at 80 mph just to go pick up milk and a loaf of bread. These would not replace cars, they would complement them. Most households should have a third vehicle--all electric, limited range, and cheap.
The Prius and other hybrids are not really practical, as they try to replace combustion powered vehicles but do so poorly, and at great expense. For much less than the cost of a replacement Prius battery (about $10,000), we ought to be able to buy something that is designed just for all those short trips.
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