Exploring the impact of broadband and technology on our lives, our businesses, and our communities.
Consumer's Union jumps into broadband, cellphone issues
Consumer's Union, the publisher of Consumer Reports, has a site called Hear Us Now that has some useful information on policy and regulatory telecom issues that affect consumers. Among the topics on the home page are cell phone lockdowns, which is the scam used by cellphone companies to force you to buy new phones even if you have a perfectly good one already. CU estimates 100 million cellphones are discarded each year just in the U.S., which is an appalling waste of resources.
They also have information on what states are trying to block the ability of communities to invest in telecom infrastructure. Unfortunately, they also have form letters you can send to legislators expressing your "concerns." Good concept, bad implementation, as doing it this way is really little better than spam. Nonetheless, the site overall is quite useful.
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Open Source software and the iPod
In a brilliant marriage of a free Open Source piece of software and the iPod, medical radiologists around the world are using iPods to store the huge image files generated by CT and other kinds of scans and x-rays. Eweek has the story of a frustrated radiologist who helped develop the free OsiriX software that allows radiologists to store and manipulate the images on the iPod.
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Life without Google
Can anyone imagine life without Google? More than any other Internet service, with the possible exception of email, the availability of Google has become a kind of icon for the changes the Internet has brought over the past ten years. It's even become a verb.
But Google has not changed much since it's start. And over the past year, I've become frustrated with Google results. Too often, a query returns tens or even hundreds of thousands of results. After the second page, you realize most of them have nothing to do with your query. Many other queries return junk starting on the first page; enter the name and state of virtually any town in the U.S., and what you usually get on the first couple of pages is mostly junk--bargain basement hotel room resellers running link farms so that they show up first.
Google as a company, as far as I can tell, has done only two things: they developed a pretty good search engine about six years ago, and figured out how to make Internet ads work. But on the search engine side, they don't seem to have done much since the company started.
I've looked a a bunch of competitors, and as frustrating as Google is much of the time, it's always been better than most of the alternatives. Until now. You might want to bookmark this site and try it a few times:
Snap is doing things entirely differently than Google. Snap queries that I've compared with Google results look very promising. Snap, in my limited trials, has typically returned many fewer results that are much more relevant. Snap also offers you easy ways to resort the results according to different criteria, including what other people have been looking at, which can be both interesting and useful.
Snap is the first search engine that I've thought could dethrone Google. And it could happen quickly. Give it a try.
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Music sales up
The NY Times (reg. required) has a short story on the music industry. Music sales are up 1.6% this past year, for the first time in four years.
What happened? Apple legitimized the online music market with it's highly successful iTunes Music Store, and a horde of competing online music services rushed in to give consumers a wide array of choices. Music sales went up.
The music industry, which fought online music sales for years, and still is, actually, has been dead wrong. The music conglomerates have claimed that illegal online music sales were ruining the business, and instead of innovating, the music business ran to Congress to halt innovation with awful legislation like the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act).
But Apple and other innovative companies weren't buying it, and found a way to give consumers what they wanted--affordable and convenient online music stores.
The music industry still has massive problems; artists still get too little of the royalty payments, and record companies are still charging the online stores the same fees they charged distributors for CDs, even though record company costs are now essentially zero.
But ordinary consumers have won, in a small way. Broadband (music downloads really don't work over dialup) brought music lovers increased choice in the marketplace, and allowed a host of new music companies to enter the marketplace and increase competition and choice.
Broadband is working.
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Cities should chart their own destiny
Here is an excellent multi-page opinion article that discusses the plight of towns and cities in light of the recent Pennsylvania legislation that forces communities to ask Verizon's permission to develop broadband systems.
As you read this, it is important to remember that we still have a "seven blind men and an elephant" problem when talking about broadband. It means different things to almost everyone, which is part of the problem. As I've been saying for years, "It's not about the technology." What communities need to spend more time on is education--of businesspeople, of elected leaders, and of local government officials. If you can get most thoughtful people and leaders in the community using the same language to describe the same things (in the context of broadband), you've accomplished something very significant, and greatly simplified the challenge of getting an appropriate telecom infrastructure for the community.
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Rio Rancho, NM provides a model for citywide wireless
Here is an excellent article full of details about the citywide wireless project in Rio Rancho, New Mexico. Rio Rancho is a fast-growing suburb of Albequerque. Here is the quote that shows that Rio Rancho leaders "get it."
"We see it as an economic development tool—today's business needs good quality access, Palenick said [the city administrator].
That's exactly right. It's an economic development tool, just as water and sewer were (and still are) economic development tools in the Manufacturing Economy of 40 years ago. It's not some esoteric luxury for a few privileged residents, WiFi is part of a package of services that can both bring businesses to a community and/or help existing businesses lower costs and expand services and markets. It can also help fuel the growth of home-based entreprenueurial businesses and startups.
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Online buying jumps 25% over holidays
Jewelry, flowers, clothing, and computer stuff fueled a 25% increase in online buying during the holiday season. This article describes the surge in spending in more detail.
In my own experience, I've seen a dramatic improvement in the quality of many online shopping sites. Even some smaller businesses have excellent and easy to use Web sites that make it quick and easy to find what you want, order it quickly, and get confirmation of the order via email. It sames time and money to be able to shop online, especially if you live in a rural area like I do, where shopping options are pretty limited.
Broadband is a key requirement, though. I'd do a lot less buying online if I had to use a dialup connection, which is just too slow to wade through a graphics-rich catalogue site. Broadband is not only an economic development issue, it's a quality of life issue. Who wants to move to an otherwise beautiful rural area far from big city shopping opportunities if broadband is not available to help mitigate that?
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Indian state builds fiber to every town
Yet another former third world country has broadband projects underway that leave U.S. efforts in the dust. Andra Pradesh, a state of India, has embarked on an ambitious but entirely doable project to build a statewide network consisting of a 10 gigabit per second backbone, 1 gigabit Ethernet trunks to a thousand locations, and 100 megabit fiber connections to every town in the state. More than 40,000 government offices will get fiber connections, and will be able to deliver government services via town kiosks and other public Internet locations.
Even more interesting, the official tourism site offers 24 hour chat service to online visitors and potential tourists. What about your community? Unfortunately, in the United States, we have the telcos busily trying to usurp the right of communities to develop community infrastructure, with the legislation in Pennsylvania as a perfect example--PA towns now have to ask Verizon's permission to chart their own destiny.
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Quizno's offers free WiFi
According to Dave Winer, Quizno's has free WiFi at their 3300 U.S. stores. When companies like this are making the substantial investment needed to deliver the service, it's passed from the realm of a nice amenity for a few techno-geeks and has entered the realm of the ordinary.
But to make WiFi really work for a community, a community approach is needed so that it is widely available, not just at one store out by the main road. What is your community doing?
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Pocket-size projectors are coming
A UK startup called Light Blue Optics has announced they are developing a pocket-size digital projector, using breakthrough holographic techniques that allow using just a few small components, compared to the relatively bulky LCD projectors, which are still too big to carry around conveniently and still too expensive.
The long promised technology revolution in K12 classrooms has never delivered for a variety of reasons, but chief among them is that virtually no teachers have an LCD projector. It's pretty tough to use the Internet to change the way you teach if you can't project what it is you are teaching on the wall so students can see it. Small, inexpensive projectors would have large and mostly unanticipated impacts.
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