Exploring the impact of broadband and technology on our lives, our businesses, and our communities.
The death of TV, Part 2
Yahoo! reports on a study that shows broadband users are watching less old-fashioned TV. The data is welcome, but this has been a trend since the early days of the Internet, more than ten years ago.
It's not hard to figure out why: you get to choose what you look at, instead of being forced into the ancient "channel" system where you have to watch something at a certain time (and Tivo, successful as it is, has a limited lifespan, since it just props up old-style TV). You also don't have to sit through 12 minutes of commercials to watch 18 minutes of tepid cable programming.
What's more, IP TV is booming, with recent hits like Live Aid and the shuttle launch drawing hundreds of thousands of watchers.
What's really sad is that Congress and the FCC are still trying to regulate old-fashioned TV, as if anyone really cares about it. The squabble over the best way to transition to broadcast HD TV would be humorous if it was not holding back the more intelligent use of that broadcast spectrum.
In the future, we'll get our TV over broadband or by satellite. The notion of putting up broadcast towers and beaming a signal will seem quaint. And our lawmakers should stop fooling around and do something useful, like abolishing the FCC entirely--which will happen right after pigs fly.
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Singapore mainstreams VoIP
While our FCC dithers about the best way to preserve legacy telephone and cable services, Singapore has pushed VoIP into the mainstream by creating a system for managing telephone numbers assigned to VoIP service providers. Singapore is not requiring VoIP providers to give subscribers access to emergency systems (911 services), but is offering incentives to those companies that do make the effort. This is much more sensible than the confusing and potentially punitive policy the FCC is trying to enforce.
And the FCC is not really the main problem. Our Congress just passed a huge roads appropriation bill, which is terrific. We're trying to fix our twentieth century highway system, while other countries are building twenty-first century highway systems.
Once again, communities can't wait for the Federal government to ride in and fix things; if you want your community and region to be competitive in the global economy, your local leaders and economic developers should be doing all they can to compete globally. And that means paying attention to what countries like Singapore are doing, and why.
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Community news and projects:
A question for your economic developers
Lately, I've found a very simple way to find out if the economic developers in a community or region are staying current with job and employment trends. I ask them just two very simple questions.
Question one: How many people in the United States make a full time living from eBay?
Question two: How many people in your region make a full time living from eBay.
The answer to the first question is easy. Currently, about 724,000 people make a full time living from eBay, up from a half million last year.
If your economic developers don't know the answer to the first question, your region is in trouble, because it says your economic developers are not keeping their eye on microenterprise trends and the ability of microenterprises to contribute significantly to the local economy.
Few economic developers know the answer to the second question, but they should. Some regions are surveying local business owners on a regular basis, and others are surveying households to find out if there are self-employed people in the home. That's the right thing to be doing--as a first step. The second step is to make sure you have lots and lots of small business support and training programs in place to help those microenterprises grow. Small businesses need all the help they can get, and it may be the cheapest and easiest way to grow new jobs in your region (hint: small busines owners don't expect tax breaks and multimillion dollar handouts), and you don't have to compete with six other states to get them to start a business--they are already right where you want them.
Technology News:
Nanotechnology fights cancer
Like the emerging Energy and Space economies, the Nano Economy is also picking up steam. It's been about twenty years since scientists first began producing nanostructures, but practical applications are beginning to emerge.
Medical researchers have found ways to cause carbon nanotubes to attach to cancer tumors. Using infrared lasers, they can then heat the nanotubes up without harming healthy tissue. The heat absorbed by the nanotubes kills the cancer cells. It appears to be very effective.
Space technology, energy systems, nano systems: has your region surveyed its current businesses to find out if you have linkages to these emerging business trends?
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Blogs--the best is yet to come
There is much conversation in the blogger world about the latest Technorati announcement that the blog-tracking service monitors 14 million blogs, or about double the number tracked at the beginning of the year.
Technorati has a built in incentive to promote the growth of blogs, since they are trying to build traffic to their site. What is more revealing is that only about half of the blogs have been updated in the past three months, and only 13% are updated more than once a week. So the "real" number of active blogs is something under 2 million, which is a more realistic figure.
Blogs have already begun to change the news world, and perhaps one of the very best uses of blogs is to disseminate news quickly during a crisis, like the tsunami or the London bombings. Blogs are also changing politics, with opinion writers of all parties using blogs to disseminate ideas that are not typicaly covered in the Mainstream Media (MSM).
But I think we have barely scratched the potential of blogs as an information organizing and work tool. Blogs are slowly finding their way into the business environment, and one frontier I am interested in is the use of blogs in K12 schools as a writing and publishing tool. I'm currently working on just such a project in a rural Louisiana town, where we have the grade school, middle school, high school, and the town government all using blog-style Web sites. It's too early to draw any definitive conclusions, but the town site (Vivian, Louisiana) has been so popular that a local church has begun using the same platform, and the local historical society is also planning to use it.
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Knowledge Democracy:
Rural Telecom Congress annual conference
The Rural Telecommunications Congress and Connect Kentucky, the host of Rural Telecon ‘05’, are pleased to announce that on-line registration for the conference is now open. The conference is scheduled from October 9 – 12. Some conference features include:
- Keynote Speaker – Dr. Dena Puskin, Office for the Advancement of Telehealth, U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services
- Keynote Speaker – Kentucky Governor Ernie Fletcher
- Keynote Speaker – Ann Pope, Appalachian Regional Commission
- Community of Interest Roundtable Discussions
- Over 35 experts presenting the latest information on broadband, community development, and new fiber and wireless technology.
- FCC Panel Discussion on broadband policy and how it affects communities.
- Vendor Exhibits, with vendors offering a wide range of broadband services and technology.
This year’s conference will be held at the Lexington Center with accommodations at the adjacent Radisson Hotel. I'll be a speaker at the conference (talking about the economic development value of community Web portals), but that's not the only reason to attend. The RTC conferences have been among the best community technology meetings I've been to over the years. They are consistently information-rich, and the RTC board works hard to get knowledgeable speakers and to keep out thinly veiled sales pitches.
Technology News:
Corn replaces oil
The emerging Energy Economy marches on, with another potential breakthrough from a partnership between Dow Chemical and Cargill, the big ag company.
The two firms have figured out how to make plastic from corn. Most plastic is made from oil, with the exception of polypropylene, which is made from castor beans. As an interesting aside, in the oil crisis of 1973, the only plastic that did not suffer from huge price increases was polypropylene.
The new form of plastic is so similar to petroleum-based plastic that it is apparently hard to tell the difference. What's interesting is that among other things, the product is biodegradable. It also only takes a few months to create new raw material (i.e. corn) as opposed to millions of years to produce oil.
If the product is successful, it will be a boon to agricultural areas, as it will help keep the price of corn up, and will help to keep the cost of oil down.
Technology News:
Cable companies want to sell you wireless
The cable companies, according to a Wired article, have decided to add wireless services to their current mix of wired offerings, which include TV, Internet access, and voice telephony.
It makes sense, and the cable companies are more likely to get it right than companies like Verizon, which are betting on hybrid systems like EVDO to deliver data to cellphones.
But I'm skeptical about how fast this "new" concept will move. The cable company vision of a very capable PDA/phone/TV thingie is where things are going, but to sell them, you have to have a compelling mix of services and content AND a wireless delivery system that covers whole markets.
That is easier said than done, and the whole thing sounds a lot like some of the more giddy dot-com concepts that deflated rather quickly once the money ran out.
The other "little" problem the cable companies have is that they are deeply in debt, so they don't have much money to invest in grand ventures like this. But all this talk probably scares the heck out of the phone companies.
Technology News:
Space trumps pop
In a widely reported AP report, NASA set new IP TV records with the launch of the space shuttle. Almost a half a million people watched via a Webcast, which is much higher than the record AOL broke just a few weeks ago with the Live Aid concert.
It demonstrates two things. First, there is a strong and continuing interest in space, and it's encouraging that there is more interest in space than in aging rock stars. We'll avoid the very serious U.S. problem of not graduating enough scientists and engineers for the time being.
Second, it shows the continuing rapid advance of IP TV. Half a million viewers is more than many cable shows have at any given time, so the Internet is well positioned to displace the old Manufacturing Economy television distribution system.
It won't happen all at once, but I think it is going to happen faster than many people think. And the exciting thing is all the opportunities it will create.
Technology News:
Municipal broadband: The other side of the story
The incumbent telecom providers have been flooding the public arena with relentlessly negative (and often very misleading) information about public broadband projects.
The American Public Power Association (APPA) interviewed the managers of two municipal utilities to get their perspective on communities getting into cable television and broadband services. It's an eyeopening article that provides a lot of information you don't usually get to hear.
One interesting bit of information: one of the cities has two Fortune 500 company headquarters, and only one cable route out of the community. If that cable was cut with a backhoe, the company would come to a dead stop for as long as the cable was damaged. When the telecom company which owned the cable was asked if they planned to provide an alternate cable route into the community, they said, "No."
So we are talking about keeping jobs and companies in rural communities, and a single cable path is just not acceptable any more. But if the private sector is not willing to make the investment (for perfectly good business reasons, from their perspective), then it is entirely appropriate for the community to step in and get involved in providing that service--just as so many rural communities around the country had to step in to get telephone and electric service decades ago.
The article also addresses the issues of "fairness," franchise fees, and taxes. It is well worth a read.
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