Technology Futures

In what has to be one of the worst advertising concepts ever, an apparently blind drunk group of French ad execs came up with the idea that billboards should be able to call you on your mobile phone. As you pass by a billboard, the billboard will send your phone a video ad that you can watch later. It is designed for urban environments where people are traveling on foot and on public transit.

This is designed as an opt-in service, meaning you have to sign up for it. Which of course begs the question, "Who in their right mind would ever agree to such a thing?" I can see it now...."Gosh, I am not yet barraged enough with ads on every surface and every medium I watch or listen to. I think I need more ads--more video ads that I will watch in my spare time."

Uh huh.

This is utterly incomprehensible. Who wants their phone filled up automatically with huge video files that they are going to sit down and watch later? In an average day traveling around a place like Paris or New York, even if the ads are targeted somewhat, you'd be flattened with the things. Here is the most scary part of this.

"...the means to interact with the world will be your mobile phone..."

I have an idea: Let's interact with the world with our eyes and ears and mouth. Let's put down the cellphones and the iPods and actually pay attention to the real world, not the made up world of crazed advertising execs who think everything worth watching or reading should be crammed onto a 2" fuzzy mobile phone screen.

Lauren Weinstein, an expert on privacy issues, has written an open letter to Google asking the company to create the Google Privacy Institute. The new organization would not only advise Google on how best to protect the privacy of individuals and organizations using Google services, but also serve as a think tank and example for how to manage privacy in an Internet-connected world.

Like me, Weinstein appreciates the extraordinary power and utility of Google while also being concerned that the company could, in the future, mis-use and abuse the massive data sets that firm collects. It's a good read.

USA Today has an article today on the front page of the Life section about Microsoft's bid to sink its tentacles into every kind of digital entertainment. There is a quote in the article from an analyst at at Morgan Wedbush Securities, and he said:

"Microsoft...recognize[s] their software needs to be the gatekeeper to that kind of commerce."

Huh? This is complete rubbish. Microsoft may WANT to be the gatekeeper, but there is certainly no NEED for Microsoft to be the gatekeeper. Why should Microsoft get some of my money every time I buy some music or a video over the Internet?

And to be fair, Apple is trying to position itself the same way, and whether you are talking about Apple or Microsoft or some other company, it is never good for consumers when you have a single company with monopoly or near monopoly marketshare. I hate Digital Rights Management (DRM), and I still buy most of my music the old fashioned way, on CDs. I'll have to give that up eventually, since CDs are going the way of the dodo, but in the meantime, I'm going to try to avoid DRM schemes.

Apple actually is mostly on the side of consumers. It recently won a battle with record companies, who wanted to introduce variable pricing in the iTunes music store. What this meant was that record companies wanted to charge more for new music ($2 to $3 a song), and less for old music (perhaps fifty or seventy-five cents).

While the music companies touted the benefits of "cheaper" music (the older songs), what it really meant was massive profits for the record companies if they were able to double or triple the cost of new releases. Apple barely breaks even on the iTunes store; the record companies get most of the price of a song, and the artists get no more than they do when a CD is sold.

The entertainment industry is desperately trying to prop up prices for things like music and videos even while their distribution costs have essentially dropped to zero. It's crazy. And the idea that Micrsoft "needs" to get their hands into our wallets is even more goofy. Don't fall for it.

I'm on location this week, planning a major fiber build for a region of eight communities that have decided they can't wait any longer for world class connectivity and services. It's a rural area with lots of two lane roads. One of the things Design Nine is doing is surveying right of way and existing pole infrastructure.

It's a gloomy picture. The phone company has not invested much here, ever, and as new capacity was needed, they just lashed more copper cables to the poles, rather than running fiber closer to customers and using remote switches to provide better services, like DSL. In many locations, we have picture of poles with 4 phone cables lashed to them, meaning there is no pole space left for community fiber. We also have pictures where the phone cable sag is more than three feet, meaning that even if there is space on the pole itself to add another cable, the sag would have to be corrected first. That is very costly.

A bill called COPE (HR 5252) is currently being debated in Congress, and it is a mixed bag for communities, with mostly negative consequences. COPE would allow video providers to obtain national franchises for video services, which would open up competition; basically, it would enable the phone companies to quickly get start offering the equivalent of CATV/satellite TV in many places, and would provide alternatives in both rural and urban areas. That's the good part of the bill.

The bad part of the bill is that communities would lost most control over their own rights of way. The FCC would become the arbiter, and the big companies could come into any community and demand right of way access. Some of the national franchise fees would be returned to the community, but arbitration and disputes would be handled by the FCC, which would be a nightmare for smaller communities that don't have big budgets for extended legal battles in Washington, D.C.

Local elected and appointed officials need to get on the phone and talk to their Federal congressmen and Senators and tell them to protect the rights of communities before giving the store to the phone companies. In the next 3 to 5 years, the telecom battle, as I have been warning communities since the late nineties, is going to be over real estate (right of way), and not whether WiMax is going to be better than fiber. Don't let hardware vendors sell your community a bill of goods (literally) while ignoring the more important and broader telecom planning issues like right of way and economic development strategies.