Exploring the impact of broadband and technology on our lives, our businesses, and our communities.
Google Glass: pushback on privacy issues
The U.K. MailOnline has an excellent article about privacy concerns swirling around Google's new spectacles with a built in camera and screen. While the ability to get information in real time about where you and what you are doing is interesting and possibly quite useful, the problem many see with Google Glass is the fact that you cannot tell if someone is taking pictures of you and/or recording you on video. So you never know if someone is silently making a record of your statements or activities.
There is no avoiding this new technology. The glasses are expected to cost about $1,500 when they become available for sale later this year, but as the price comes down, they will become more popular. Expect to see jamming devices offered to try to thwart unauthorized recording with these devices and other small, portable recording devices. In related news, try doing a search on "drone jamming" or "drone jammers." There are already companies claiming that they will offer devices that will prevent drones from spying on you in your backyard. I am reminded of Hunter S. Thompson's prophetic statement: "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." We are living in very weird times indeed, and when companies begin to see business opportunities created by this weirdness, they are indeed "going pro."
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Google Glass: Cage match with the Apple Watch?
Google Glass is the new wearable computer from Google that can be used with smartphones. The video shows some of the things it can do via voice command, and it's certainly interesting, but it is not clear to me that the heads up display adds a lot to the experience. Most of the video examples show using the gadget to record POV (point of view) video. One problem I see right away: I already wear glasses....will there be something for me that clips onto my existing frames?
I'm inclined to think that the widely rumored Apple Watch will be more functional, less obtrusive, and easier to use. But it's nice to see that there is a lot more disruptive stuff in the technology pipeline.
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Can we wait 20 years?
Here is a great article from an analyst in Australia. He correctly identifies that high speed broadband needs to be both available and affordable. Exactly. The incumbents are fond of playing a game of "Look,there's a squirrel!" with legislators by telling them that they (the incumbents) can provide high speed broadband anywhere. But what they always leave out is that the cost of those connections is usually prohibitive, and only large corporate and institutional customers can afford the cost of such fiber circuits.
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Who needs Gigabit Nationwide?
The FCC has just released a new challenge to create Gigabit Cities throughout the nation. One might wonder why do we really need Gigabit fiber connections at our homes and businesses.
Here's a very specific example. On Sunday morning, I started to back up a measly 7 Gig of photos from my phone to my Dropbox account in the cloud. Forty-eight hours later, the upload is still going, and it's barely half finished. When the average home upload speed is often 1 megabit/second or even much less, it becomes a monumental task to back up our music, pictures, videos, and files to a remote back up service.
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Death of TV: Part XXXVII: Apple TV still in the game
Apple has announced a modest upgrade to its underrated Apple TV box. The thing that caught my interest is that Apple TV now supports wireless Bluetooth keyboards. Why is this important? With the proliferation of special purpose boxes like the Apple TV, users are stuck entering things like userids, passwords, and other information using the extremely tedious and clumsy right/left/up/down arrows on the remote control. That gets old quickly. Being able to enter that information with a keyboard is a major change for the better in user experience. Despite that fact that I really like my Logitech Skype cam, I use it less than I would otherwise just to avoid the data entry. And once you attach a keyboard and mouse to something like Apple TV, well, you have a computer, as we once called them. Suddenly you can handle email, correspondence, light bookkeeping, and other "PC" chores on a box that costs $99 instead of $599. And you can watch what we used to call "TV" on the same $99 box.
Who loses? The cable companies, despite the fact that they have crushed the telephone companies' feeble DSL offerings, are about to collapse. IPTV via inexpensive boxes like Apple TV are about to destroy the cable TV industry.
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Knowledge Democracy:
The spammers have beaten me
I have turned off comments on this site. I'm being deluged with spammer requests for userids, and I simply don't have the time to even delete them, much less try to identify the occasional legitimate reader who really wants to post something. Commenting has always been light, so I don't think the quality of the site will suffer much. For those of you that have contributed in the past, my thanks.
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Utopia network success story
Here is a short news item on how Utopia, the community-owned fiber network in Utah, helped one business cut costs.
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U.S. Broadband: Someday it will be as good as China is now....
The China Ministry of Industry and Information Technology has said that all new residences will be connected to fiber if an existing network is available, starting this spring, and the fiber will be operated on an open access basis, with residents able to choose from several providers.
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The death of telephone: Part II
Facebook is about to roll out voice calling between Facebook users, directly from its smartphone apps. Hmmm...lemme see...back of the envelope calculations here.....Facebook has, roughly, one BILLION users. If Facebook enables voice calling, Facebook is about to become the largest phone company in the world.
What does this mean for communities? It means that one more service is moving very quickly to an all-IP platform and away from the antiquated landline network. Telephone is dying, and dying perhaps even faster than TV. Fast, cheap broadband is going to be the community economic development engine, and communities that can't support the emerging array of thousands of new IP-enabled niche services are going to wither. It's a replay of the interstate build out, except that every community can have an exist on the interstate, because broadband is cheaper than roads. It's cheaper than water lines. It's cheaper than sewer systems. And there is plenty of money for broadband; it's just that in communities today, all that money is being stuffed in envelopes every month as payments to the cable and telephone companies, and the money is being carried by the Postal Service out of the community and typically out of the state.
Link: http://www.macrumors.com/2013/01/03/facebook-updates-ios-app-with-voice-messages-testing-voip-calling-in-canada/
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Fiber brings a $600 million data center
From the always excellent MuniNetworks, the story of how a tiny community out in the middle of nowhere attracted a $600 million data center. If you have never been to The Dalles, it really is an extremely isolated place. It's a beautiful town on the edge of the Columbia River. Fed up with lousy broadband, the community built its own fiber ring, and coupled with reliable electric power, that brought Google and its $600 million data center to the community.
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