Technology Futures

Daily Wireless discusses a new NetGear home router product that has voice phone ports built in. NetGear is one of the biggest manufacturers of those cheap WiFi router/hubs that have been selling like hotcakes.

What's important about this is that it reduces the box count (and thereby the complexity) of the network in our homes and small offices. Stuff this like must strike fear into the hearts of the telcos; expect that two years from now, virtually every home router/hub will have phone jacks built in. Homeowners will be able to switch their entire set of home phones by simply unplugging the jack in the NIU (Network Interface Unit--the grey box on the side of your house) and simply plugging that wire into this NetGear box.

So we now have a sub-$100 box that provides broadband data and voice telephony. What's next? In a couple of years, we'll have the same kind of box with a coax connector on it to distribute television programming throughout the home.

Om Malik points to a story in the Tri-City Herald about the benefits reaped by a local small business that is using VoIP. A local florist with stores in both Washington and Oregon estimates that he is saving $100/month by using VoIP instead of traditional long distance services.

Economic developers can help small businesses grow and add jobs by helping them understand the benefits of VoIP and how to pick a VoIP provider. With existing small businesses creating most jobs, one of the best job creation activities ED folks can engage in is saving existing businesses money on overhead like telephone service. The savings can be ploughed into business expansion. How does your region rate on helping existing businesses expand? What programs are in place to educate and train busy small businesspeople in new technologies?

A New York Times article (registration required) talks about the growth in the worldwide market for ringtones (alternate ring sounds for mobile phones).

Most new cellphones have the ability to download alternate ringtones, which typically sell for $2-3 each. I've never understood the appeal of them--it's a phone, for crying out loud--all I want to know is that it is ringing. I don't need a long, noisy dirge to let me know that.

Nonetheless, I'm clearly a curmudgeon when it comes to this particular little piece of IT gadgetry. Worldwide, ringtones are now a $3 billion dollar market, and growing fast as more phones are bought with this capability. In a small bit of good news, perhaps Americans are a bit more sane than the rest of the world when it comes to this stuff, as the U.S. market for ringtones lags behind Europe and Asia.

The ringtone industry is in a major lather right now because the newest cellphones have polyphonic capability (meaning they can play snippets of real songs, rather than a tinny melody of the song). The music industry is gearing up to license huge chunks of their music archives as ringtones, including some downright foul and/or insulting recordings.

There is a larger issue behind all this. Who could have predicted even three years ago that a major, multi-billion dollar market would have emerged around ringtones? As dumb as they may be, the ringtone industry is creating jobs and revenue streams across whole industries.

It's creative destruction at work. Yes, some of our factory and low level office jobs are being outsourced to low wage countries. But whole new industries are replacing them. Would you rather work in the music industry as a ringtone and license manager or work in a satellite TV call center making cold calls? Which kind of job would be better for your region?

Trying to preserve the jobs and economic development strategies of the past is an exercise in futility. Communities need to be looking ahead, and planning in a futures context, instead of the context of what worked well in 1970.

Design Nine outgrew our old office space, and over the past week we moved into new, larger quarters--we're still in Blacksburg, Virginia, though.

I had to completely disassemble my desktop computer, something I have not had to do in over two years, when this machine was brand new. I ended up with a box of some 30+ cables for a computer and office phone, which on the face of it seems absurd for an otherwise entirely straightforward desktop machine used primarily for email and writing. In part, much of the problem has been the extraordinary success of the USB protocol as a peripheral connectivity solution.

In the "old" days, about three years ago, you typically had a couple of serial ports and two or three SCSI devices. You had a limited number of peripherals you could have hooked up at one time, and your ambitions for connected gagdets was low.

With the advent of USB, you could stick a hub on and fill it with as many things as you liked, and they would all actually work very well (most of the time). I have a seven port USB hub, and six ports are in use. Combine those USB cables with phone cables, Firewire cables, and power cables for all the devices, and you end up with a mess. It is incredibly ugly, difficult if not impossible to keep neat, and amazing that it works at all.

Firewire, in theory, should solve many of these problems. Firewire devices can be daisy-chained, so you don't have the multiple cable problem of USB, and Firewire is capable of providing more power than USB, so you can actually eliminate the AC/DC voltage converters entirely. Apple's iPod is a perfect example of this. You connect the iPod to your laptop or desktop with a single, thin Firewire cable that recharges the battery and transfers data several times faster than USB.

But Firewire has yet to reach its potential. Many PCs still do not come with Firewire (it's standard on all Macs), and even on the Mac, it does not always work as expected. My Firewire video camera (no power cable, thank you) does not get along with my Firewire hard drive (big AC power cable), and I have to unplug the camera when I back up files to the external Firewire hard drive.

But I did finally decide I can put my "old" 250 meg Zip drive in a drawer for emergency use. It had been sitting on my desk gathering dust, and the move made me realize I have not used it in well over a year. File exchange with others is now done via attachments and email....like the cable snarls, another special kind of hell the IT industry has refused to address.