Technology Futures

Georgia has created Entrepreneur Friendly communities (hat tip to the excellent EDPro blog).

It takes about a year for a rural community to qualify for the award, which is managed by the Georgia Dept. of Economic Development. In order to qualify, local leaders have to take leadership training, receive training on entrepreneurship needs, and work with local businesses (often a new concept for economic developers). Some communities are already reporting that they are seeing results.

If you are not familiar with the phrase "network neutrality," it is time to start learning more about it, as the issue is moving front and center in the debate about the future of the Internet.

The current Internet is "network neutral," meaning that there is a gentleman's agreement among all network managers that they will allow anyone else's data to cross their network. If you send an email to someone in California, it might traverse several privately owned networks along the way. Network neutrality is what makes the Internet work.

But as I've been writing for some time, the Internet was never designed for video, and the crushing data load of video (hundreds or thousands of times more data than emails and Web pages) is forcing network managers to start considering alternatives to network neutrality.

It is the low end broadband providers (telcos and cable companies) that are suffering. As their customers now routinely download or stream audio and video from sources outside their own network, they have to carry all that traffic, raising their costs and affecting network performance (everything gets slower).

This BBC commentary is a good introduction to some of the issues (I don't agree with everything the author recommends), and here is a critical and important quote from the article:

The phone and cable companies want to be free to charge for new services and make more money, and they argue that it's not up to the government what they do with their networks.

I have to side with the broadband providers in this case. I don't agree with the author that the solution is to re-regulate telecom and turn these companies into de facto arms of the government. We've already tried that, and as the technology changed, it was less and less efficient.

The author talks about the undesirability of having two roads in every town--a well maintained private road (owned by the telcos and cable companies) and a "dirt road" for public use. But in trying to convince us of the correctness of his position, he fails to mention an alternative--that communities build and maintain roads that can be used by everyone, including the cable and telephone companies.

This model already works really well--with vehicular roads, on which an amazing variety of public and private vehicles share that road and its costs and everyone benefits from a single, publicly maintained community road system.

The author's alternative is to have the Federal government deciding for local communities what kind of broadband they need. That's not likely to work well, any more than it is to let the cable or telephone company decide what kind of broadband we need (where we are right now).

Think I'm wrong about relying of the Feds? Ten years after the 1996 Telecom Deregulation Act, the Federal government is still stubbornly insisting that "broadband" is 200 kilobits per second. That's about four times faster than dial up, about two to four times slower than what most of us have via cable and DSL, and about 500 times slower than what the rest of the world thinks is an acceptable broadband speed (100 megabits per second).

So communities have three choices:

• You can let the Federal government decide what is best for your community. And we already have plenty of information about how that is likely to work out.
• You can let a private company with headquarters many states away decide what is best for you community. And we have plenty of information about how that is working out.
• The community can set its own direction for the future, make its own investments, and make decisions locally about what is best for the community.

Which fork in the road is the right one for the economic future of your community?

NASA has announced a series of new cash prizes for companies that are able to introduce new space systems that meet the agency's specification. Like the popular X Prize that led to the creation of several private spaceship firms and the successful flight of Bert Rutan's SpaceShipOne, these new awards are designed to encourage the development of new space systems developed without the red tape and overhead of government research.

Among the new technology that NASA seeks is cheaper space suits, small reentry vehicles, lunar vehicles, and power generators that can produce power for the 14 day lunar night. But one of the most interesting requests is for new orbital fueling stations that would be able to fuel spacecraft going to and from the moon.

NASA has finally figured out, perhaps, that it can more done, quicker and faster, by leveraging the private sector. Outsourcing research, development, and production also creates new private sector jobs, and lets more states and regions get a toehold in the Space Economy. In the past, Florida and Texas have had a lock on space work.

Google's new version of its Desktop toolbar will copy the files on your computer to its servers, where you can search them. Ostensibly, this free service is designed to make life easier for people that have multiple computers (like a desktop machine and a laptop). By letting Google index all the files on both computers, you can find any file on either machine simply by searching Google.

Google promises it won't really peek at the files (although they must be read to be indexed), and that it will delete the files after thirty days if you are not using the service. And I've got swamp land in Florida I'd like to sell you.

Google may promise it will keep your files private, but I bet it is not keeping the indexes generated by the files private. It will use the indexes to better target advertising to you. So if you like fly fishing and have numerous files on your computer about fishing, Google will notice your index has many references to fishing and you will start seeing more ads about fishing tackle popping up.

Without careful configuration, the software will happily grab your income tax records, your business and accounting files, your love letters, and just about anything else on your computer.

Once Google has them, it becomes much easier for law enforcement or a civil suit to subpoena the records if someone decides they want to know more about you. A disgruntled employee or an angry neighbor could wreak havoc with your private life.

I would not touch this service, period. It's just too risky. And there are plenty of programs that will index all the files on your computer already--and they don't require turning over all your entire electronic data files to a third party.