Technology Futures

James Carlini has a must-read article that has some solid data on the value of municipal investments in broadband, as well as some fascinating historical data that shows community investments in "new" infrastructure pay off.

Carlini has new data on the Waterloo, Iowa and Cedar Falls, Iowa comparison (here is a one page summary--look for the handout titled Case Studies). Waterloo, Iowa decided to let the cable and telelphone company decide what kind of broadband the community had. Twenty-five miles away, Cedar Falls, with less developable land and some other economic development disadvantages, invested in community fiber. Five years later, Cedar Falls lowered taxes slightly, and Waterloo had to raise taxes. Why? Because business investment in Cedar Falls boomed because of the community fiber, and economic development in Waterloo stalled.

Carlini also provides some historical data on St. Louis and Chicago. At the end of the Civil War, St. Louis was the major gateway to the West because it dominated water-based trade. Chicago was much less prosperous, and decided to really push railroads. St. Louis decided to pass laws that discouraged railroad development, and tried to protect water routes by discouraged railroad bridges across the Mississippi. The result--Chicago's population boomed from the economic development the railroads brought, while St. Louis barely grew at all.

We're at the same place today. The telephone and cable companies are trying to get our legislators to hold back the railroads to protect canal barge traffic. Does your community want to be St. Louis or Chicago? Waterloo or Cedar Falls?

A lot of phones are beginning to look a lot like iPods, and I don't think that is a coincidence. By some estimates, Apple has as much as 80% of the portable music player market, and the latest entry, the iPod Shuffle, which is incredibly small, is enormously popular, despite a lot of naysaying from competitors who claim it lacks features. Apparently they don't read the reviews of their own products, in which a frequent criticism is that there are too many controls and widgets that are too hard to figure out.

Sony (invented walk around music with the Walkman) Ericsson have released several new phones that all have iPod form factors, play music, take pictures, and oh, yes, make phone calls too.

The problem with cellphones generally is that you can't pick a phone indepdendent of the service. The cellular companies have a lock on the marketplace and try to control marketshare by obtaining exclusive rights to certain phones. Hence, as a U.S. Cellular customer, I can't get a Treo, period. Cingular has a contract with Treo, and U.S. Cellular does not.

This is a bad thing for consumers, who are being whipsawed by (surprise) phone companies trying to keep customers by manipulating the market rather than on the quality of their service.

Google has wads of cash, and has to spend it on something. So the company has been experimenting with Orkut, a "social software" platform similar to other services like LinkedIn. It has also started offering Google Maps, which now works with more browsers. Unlike Mapquest and some other similar services, Google Maps is fast and produces legible maps. I've always found Mapquest an exercise in frustration; not only are the maps fuzzy and hard to read, the zooming feature is extremely slow.

Google has also rolled out a Local feature that tries to compensate for the otherwise completely useless search for local information. It's nicely done, and seems to be borrowing from Snap and other search engines that actually return inbound link information, and of course, it's tied to Google's map feature. But it seems to aggregate from a rather large area, and many of the inbound links seem to come from link farms, meaning the value of the ranking is suspect. But my guess is that Google has larger fish to fry. By providing customized local searches, Google can continue to vacuum up ad dollars from smaller and smaller companies who know they will get better placement because of the local feature. Will it be worth it? Time will tell.

Another little know Google feature which is potentially a privacy problem is Google's phone number lookup. Type in your phone number on the Google search page, and Google will return your street address. Handy, or great for stalkers and psychopaths who want to find out where you live? Note that you can opt out that.

It will be interesting to see where Google will be in five years. Google is starting to look an awful lot like Microsoft--the market leader with a huge audience, and so much money it can offer virtually any online service quicker and better than competitors. But Microsoft's day has passed, and Google may wane much more quickly.

There are many advantages to working out of the home, but snow days are not one of them.

Normally, the neighborhood cable network is reasonably responsive during the day, because kids and parents are at work. I can get done what I need to do without waiting.

But with six inches of snow on the ground and more falling, schools and many businesses are closed, and apparently many people have headed for the Internet, completely bogging down the cable modem service. It's very pokey, with long waits for simple things like loading a Web page.

And that's a perfect example of why cable and DSL, over the long term, simply don't have what it takes to deliver broadband. If one snow day makes my neighborhood broadband service slow to a crawl, imagine what will happen as more and more users get on and do more and more high bandwidth stuff like Voice over IP and IP television.

We're thirteenth in the world in terms of broadband cacpacity and deployment, behind places like Finland, Norway, and South Korea. And here is where I remind you of my favorite suggestion for a community economic development slogan: "Our town--almost as good as South Korea." It is a pretty sad situation when it comes to that, and it has.