Technology Futures

Some things don't change at all. When I was a kid, people had home movie cameras that were used to make movies that no one watched. In the seventies, when I studied filmmaking, we used the latest technology--Super 8 cameras, which had the 8 mm film in an easy to load cartridge. These cameras were quite popular because of the relative simplicity, and many people used them to make movies that no one watched.

Then we got camcorders, which were at first quite big and heavy, and we made home videos on full size video cartrdridges--movies that no one watched. Then in the nineties, we got digital video cameras, which are now very affordable; the tiny digital tape cartridges won't even play on anyone's VCR, so we've actually gone backwards. For a while, you could tape a home movie and pop it right into the VCR and watch it. It beat setting up the 8 mm film projector by a mile.

But the new, tiny digital video cameras took us right back to the dark ages. Speaking from firsthand experience, it's a lengthy and tedious process to digitally edit raw video footage, even using great software like iMovie. So I've got a big stack of digital video cartridges. Every once in a great while, when the family is really bored, we do fire up the video camera, plug it into the TV, and watch a bit. But like every previous incarnation of the home movie, you quickly get tired of watching from beginning to end and/or constantly fast forwarding.

Now, we have a company called Pure Digital Technologies that is selling disposable video cameras through the CVS drug store chain. There are several things that are remarkable about this.

• First, it's amazing that the technology has become so inexpensive that you can manufacture and distribute a throw away camera for $29.95, although it is designed for several uses. You shoot your video footage, drop the camera off at CVS, and come back in a couple of hours and get a DVD, ready to play. CVS returns the used camera to Pure Digital, which repackages it for another sale. The company expects to be able to recycle them several times.
• The neat thing is getting the movie on a DVD, which allows you to jump around, fast forward very quickly, and in general is a huge improvement over tapes of any kind. And the company does all the tedious work of transferring the movie clips to the DVD.
• Finally, who could have predicted, even two or three years ago, that a company could make money selling throw away video cameras. Even at the height of the dot-com madness, this idea would have been considered laughable.

The point of this is that as we move farther and farther into the Knowledge Economy and get farther away from the Manufacturing Economy, new opportunities continue to emerge consistently that are creating jobs and work opportunities that a Manufacturing Economy mindset could never predict. Communities and regions have to have economic development strategies in place that are flexible, futures oriented, and can be changed and modified quickly to sieze new opportunities. Wouldn't your community like to have the recycling and repackaging center that will process all those cameras? Somewhere in the U.S., a community just got a great mix of entry level and management jobs, and I bet they had a technology plan that let them sieze the opportunity.

James Carlini, who writes in ePrairie, an Midwestern online business and technology magazine, has a terrific article taking Illinois leaders to task for shirking their responsibilities to the the public at large and to businesses and communities in the state.

It's hard to improve on Carlini's thoughts, so I'll include just one item from the article. You can read the entire piece here.

" The big breakthrough that some people are touting is getting DSL for $14.95 a month. I no longer consider that as broadband capability. If DSL was at $14.95 five years ago, I would have said that was something. This is now a fire sale that’s five years too late.

While this is to keep interest in antiquated copper-based services, it’s not giving real bandwidth to the average consumer. Compare it with what’s being offered in other countries. We should be getting one gigabit for $14.95. Now that would be something.

Gigabit technology is based off fiber-optic infrastructure. No incumbent telephone company wants to install that to the house when they can keep milking copper, which has been paid for many times over across the decades.

Until the leaders of states get more up to speed with what’s really viable for securing their state’s global economic position, we will be stuck with half measures and the equivalent of eight-track tapes in an age of MP3 players."

I wrote recently about Seattle's plan to invest heavily in fiber. The work that the city has done now seems even more timely because a list of "Most Unwired Cities" came out recently, and Seattle holds the number one slot, just as the city has identified "wired" technologies like fiber as critical. One of the things everyone forgets is that "unwired" hot spots still have to get access back to the wired network, and fiber is usually the most desirable way to do this.

Their task force has recommended a communitywide digital transport system based on fiber, which the task force notes has a 40+ year life span and the lowest cost per megabyte of capacity of any system (e.g. DSL, cable modem, wireless, satellite). The city has a summary of the issues and a link to the plan online. Here is what the Chairman of the Task Force said about broadband:

"The task force believes Seattle must act now to foster the development of advanced broadband facilities and services for our community. Seattle cannot afford to dawdle. Broadband networks will soon become what roads, electric systems and telephone networks are today: core infrastructure of society. Lacking advanced broadband, Seattle is unlikely to maintain a competitive economy, a vibrant culture, quality schools and efficient government."

I'm not the only one concerned about Google's policy of storing everything you and I do on their servers--forever. This New Zealand article [link no longer available] also expresses concerns about the way Google keeps tabs on everything we do.

Google hides behind the polite fiction that keeping everything is a "service" they perform for us, but we don't get access to the data. The "service" they perform is to mine our searches, our email, and the newsgroups we browse and use them to sell advertising space.

One might argue that in fact, Google's ads pay for all the free services Google provides. Fair enough, and as a business, Google does provide useful tools and is making money with the strategy. The rub comes in when you look at how long Google retains personal data--forever. That repository, subject to government subpoenas, becomes a convenient way for the government and others to snoop in our affairs long after the fact.

Twenty years out of college, involved in a civil lawsuit, would you want the opposing side to enter into evidence all the Web sites and searches you performed in college, where the opposing side uses the data to establish that you have certain character faults, as evidenced by what you looked at twenty years ago.

The data itself may be innocuous, but it can and will be used in ways that will damage people's reputations and may cause harm. To protect yourself, it's a good idea to open up the cookies window in your browser every two or three months and delete most if not all of the cookies--especially the Google cookies and any URL with 'ad' in the domain name.