Technology Futures

The Register reports on a new process to extract hydrogen from sunflower oil. It's potentially a breakthrough technology, because one of the drawbacks of hydrogen-powered cars is the difficulty of storing hydrogen. Using sunflower oil, scientists envision extracting hydrogen in real time from the oil while you drive your car.

The process is still expensive, but now that scientists understand the potential, it's likely that they will find ways to drop the price. It's just one more piece of the hydrogen economy, falling into place. Good news for northern Iowa, among other places (they grow sunflowers there). So rural Iowa may become an important part of the emerging Energy Economy. Who would have predicted that?

There is a mildly partisan op-ed piece in yesterday's USA Today about how jobs are and are not being counted in the U.S. Whichever side of the political fence you happen to be on, it's well worth a read. It does a nice job of summarizing the differences between the Payroll Survey (the traditional measure of jobs growth) and the Household Survey.

Briefly, the growing problem with the Payroll Survey is that it measures Manufacturing Economy growth (or lack of it). It measures only payroll changes. But in the Knowledge Economy, more and more workers are self-employed, and have little or no payroll. Many of these self-employed, if they expand, hire other self-employed workers on a project by project basis. This means that while they are providing employment for others, they are not adding to the Payroll Survey.

The Household Survey tries to take these other employment measures into account. Contrast the results of the two surveys in July of this year. The Payroll Survey reported an anemic 62,000 jobs added to the economy. The Household Survey reported a stunning 629,000 jobs added to the economy.

For communities, it is critical to understand the difference between the two and to adjust your economic development strategies appropriately. These numbers are nonpartisan statistics gathered by the Department of Labor. If you are measuring the success of your economic development program by the local growth of payroll jobs, you are missing (potentially) some 90% of the new jobs being created, based on the July numbers.

Are your economic developers shifting course and reallocating resources to better foster growth locally of self-employed workers, microenterprise businesses, and small business? If not, your region is at a major disadvantage--just look at the numbers.

Dave Winer, who in many ways invented blogging, is on a coast to coast road trip. Guess what his number one complaint is? How hard it is to find hotspots at night so that he can get online and take care of work.

Everyone I've talked to in the past couple of months has laughingly agreed that they no longer care about hotel chains, frequent traveler points, or the quality of the breakfast buffet. One road warrior summed it up this way: "I'll sleep on the floor in a sleeping bag, but I want broadband."

Hotels are catching on, and many chains now advertise their broadband access heavily. But others don't, and Winer's complaint is that it is too hard to find public hotspots. He wants local and regional maps he can pull up on the Web that identify where WiFi is available.

How does your community portal measure up? Can visitors quickly determine where the hotspots are in your community? How about your economic development Web site? Can your out of town relocation prospects find broadband access locations easily on your Web site?

A robust community portal, designed to meet the needs of visitors and economic development prospects, sends a strong message that your community "gets it." I still visit too many communities complaining about their lack of jobs and lack of economic development activity, but a quick check of the Web often reveals the following: no county Web site or a very limited one that looks like it was last updated in 1998; no community portal or a mediocre "tourist brochure" approach that is mostly pretty pictures and little information. Or the worst of all--dueling Web sites that all claim to be the "official" community portal. The latter situation is a clear signal that the community lacks leadership and direction.

The community portal is the world's window into your community. How your community portal portrays your schools, your civic organizations, your recreational activities, and the business life of your community counts. Disclaimer: Design Nine helps communities design and implement community portals.

This article [link no longer available] suggests I was write a couple of months ago when I said that AT&T still planned to offer consumer dialtone, despite their announcement that they were getting out of the consumer local and long distance market.

I suggested that this masked a push by AT&T to become a major VoIP player. AT&T is helping consumers who don't yet have a broadband connection to get one, using CableLabs' Web-based tool. This is a shrewd move, and VoIP may yet save AT&T, which over the past twenty years has made a whole series of poor business moves.