Technology Futures

Schlotzky's, the popular deli chain with hundreds of stores across the country, has been rolling out their free WiFi offering with great success, apparently. The original plan had been to provide it only to the company-owned stores (95% of the stores are owned by franchisees), but the popularity of the WiFi offering has attracted the attention of the franchise owners, who want it for their stores as well.

Part of Schlotzky's marketing campaign has included "warchalking," which the WiFi user community has adapted from the old markings hobos used during the Depression to indicate where a good place to get food was, or places to avoid. There is a simple set of symbols that are literally drawn in chalk on the sidewalks in front of locations where there is free WiFi.

South Korea has announced a new initiative called Ubiquitous Korea that has a very simple vision for the country:

To transform the country into a more modern and technology-oriented society, which has been nicknamed U-Korea for Ubiquitous Korea, the government is envisioning a future that allows people to have uninterrupted access to the Internet, via fixed lines or mobile networks, any time, anywhere.

Korea has already committed $80 billion over the next five to seven years to run fiber by every home and business in the country. This vision for the citizens and businesses of South Korea is crystal clear, specifies no particular kind of transport system, protocols, or technology, and and provides a measureable benchmark for knowing when they are done.

Is it ambitious? You bet? Can it be done in a year or two? No, and they know that. But is the right stake to plant in the ground? Absolutely. How about your region? What's the vision for technology and telecommunications?

A New York Times article (registration required) details a new service from Tivo, the makers of the wildly popular DVR (digital video recorder) that records programming on a hard drive so you can watch it later.

Tivo will add a new feature to its products that will allow the recorders to download and store TV programs that come straight off the Internet--completely bypassing traditional broadcast, cable TV, and satellite providers. Because the Tivo recorder can store programs for later viewing, the company anticipates that users with DSL or cable modem broadband services will download programs overnight and watch them later.

In the future, when we all have very fast fiber connections, we won't do that very much, because it will be easier and more convenient just to watch a program in real time. But DSL and cable modems don't have the bandwidth to do that.

Tivo has identified a sweet spot that is likely to be very lucrative for the company for a number of years but also marks the beginning of the end of traditional television. The Tivo recorder is matched perfectly with the limitations of current broadband offerings, and gives consumers more choice--which is what we all want.

As Tivo builds a marketplace, content producers (of TV-based programming) will fill it, and as the product offerings develop, consumers will be able to think about just dropping cable TV or satellite services.

How will it work? Here's a business: license the reruns of "I Love Lucy" for Internet distribution, buy a fat Internet pipe, format them for Tivo, and then sit back and collect, oh, say, fifteen cents every time someone wants to watch an episode.

This is going to be fun, and some non-traditional "media" companies that aren't located in Hollywood are likely to make a lot of money. As factory jobs move offshore, whole new industries are being created.

What about the global economy, you say? Suppose you took those "I Love Lucy" reruns and dubbed them into Chinese, Spanish, and French? Buy server space in those countries and start selling. Payments will all be automated, via Paypal or some sort of Tivo mechanism, so the biggest chore of the day would be log on to your bank account every morning and see that another half million people worldwide watched your programming last night. At fifteen cents a pop, that's $150,000/day to run a server and an Internet feed.

Declan McCullagh, the chief political correspondent for Cnet, has an excellent article that questions the need for the FCC.

The article is well worth a read just to review the long list of head-shaking mistakes and blunders that the FCC has made dating back more than fifty years. Among the FCC initiatives McCullagh lists as problematic is the 1956 decision by the FCC to keep Americans from owning their own telephones, apparently believing that it was better to have customers pay AT&T a monthly lease fee for years after the cost of the phone had been amortized.

Like so many government initiatives that were started with the best of intentions but never seem to "finish" the job, the FCC is now trying to regulate things that don't seem to need any regulation, like Voice over IP services. In general, the FCC has seemed to favor the large incumbent providers. If there is any sense in that approach, I think the FCC thinking seems to be to avoid turbulence in the market place and to avoid disruption of services to consumers.

But at some point, as technologies change, disruption is impossible to avoid without permanently vesting obsolete systems and technologies. Currently, the FCC seems to be trying very hard to prop up the incumbent telephone and cable providers. This keeps the marketplace stable, but at what cost? That kind of policy makes it more difficult for low cost competitive providers to enter the marketplace, and denies to consumers the choice to trade stable service for lower prices and/or access to more and different kinds of services.

At worst, the FCC is taking a dim view of consumers and businesses and their ability to sort out these issues. Why not assume that customers, over time, have the capacity to figure this out on their own, and give local communities and governments more flexibility to invest appropriately to ensure that their citizens and businesses have teh right kinds of services available at affordable prices.