Exploring the impact of broadband and technology on our lives, our businesses, and our communities.
Broadband and the walkable city
This short article on the weak housing market has big implications for "big broadband," which few of us have right now. A major economist is predicting that the housing market may not recover for years, but coupled with high gas prices, walkable communities will be in high demand.
This has significant implications for city and community planners, but it is extremely difficult to ensure that everyone, or even a majority of workers, can walk to work. A better option would be to get "big broadband" to most homes so that more workers can work from home. Even the ability to work productively from home one or two days a week could cut the cost of commuting by 20% to 40%...nothing to sneeze at when gas is $4 a gallon.
Technology News:
Design Nine is part of Virginia's Blue Ridge
Design Nine, located in Blacksburg, is part of Virginia's Blue Ridge. The Roanoke Valley Convention and Visitor's Bureau announced a new branding for our region: Virginia's Blue Ridge. We like it....it fits, and the region needs a recognizable brand. We're proud to live and work here...in Virginia's Blue Ridge.
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Walmart joins the cloud
Walmart has announced a partnership with Vudu. You can take your DVDs and Blu-ray movie discs to Walmart, and pay $2 to have them "converted" and stored in the cloud. If you want an HD (Blu-ray) version, you pay $5. Walmart does not actually read your discs; instead, they verify that you actually have a physical copy, then just enable that movie for your account from a previously stored digital master. Walmart also apparently stamps your physical disk with some mark so that you can just give it to a friend who takes it in a week later. The Walmart/Vudu site has remarkably little information; you have to create a Vudu account to figure out how it works and what the restrictions are.
Of course, if you want to stream your HD movies from the cloud, you better have good broadband at your house.
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Knowledge Democracy:
North Carolina called a "tech turkey"
The Institute for Self Reliance has put out an interesting infographic highlighting the mis-match in North Carolina between the City of Salisbury's tiny fiber network and TimeWarner. State legislators passed a bill last year that essentially outlaws any community investments in fiber on the theory that TimeWarner needs to be protected against the supposed unfair advantage of local governments. My guess is that all the North Carolina legislators accomplished is to send entrepreneurs contemplating relocation to another state.
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Rotary trencher ideal for residential fiber drop installation
We have not seen this rotary trenching machine in action, but this short video illustrates that you don't have to spend a lot of time and money installing fiber drops--this machine looks like it is ideally suited for "last mile" (first mile) residential fiber installation. This pull-along machine is lightweight, can be carried in a van or pickup, is narrow enough to go through typical fence gates, and cuts a 7" deep slot for a fiber drop cable.
Technology News:
It's not triple play, it's "century play"
In Sweden, home security offerings have been an important service on their open access networks, and start up companies have very successfully taken business away from the "big" security companies, which were slow to adapt using an IP network rather than phone lines. The network owner (e.g. the community broadband network owner) may only get a couple of bucks a month from provisioning a circuit for a home security customer, but add that to other supplemental $1-2 per month services like meter reading and you can quickly see 50% to 100% increases over the average revenue per user (ARPU) compared to triple play.
I'm still looking for the right term to replace triple play. It's definitely not quadruple play...it is more like "century play"....open access networks are rapidly evolving towards a model not unlike the Apple and Android app stores, where you will be able to buy services from hundreds of providers. We won't all buying 100+ services, but we will have hundreds of choices. Five years from now, most open access networks will probably have at least twenty or thirty providers offering various kinds of computer and data backup services because it is so cheap and easy to offer that kind of service on an open access, high performance network.
Technology News:
The scourge of phishing
A lot of new phishing schemes are popping up....a family member mentioned that she got an email "from US Airways" telling her to check in for a flight....I've gotten hundreds of those in the past week.
I've gotten very official-looking messages from the IRS, from the Better Business Bureau, from AT&T, from Verizon, and other well known companies....all sent by automated bot-nets...Russian, eastern European, and Chinese gangs are using these phishing schemes to try to trick you to log in to a bogus "official" site and capture your user id, validate your email address, get passwords, and to try to trick you into entering your credit card info.
You can check these easily by rolling the mouse pointer over the links in the email. If you wait a second, your computer will pop up a little box with the actual URL of the link. You can usually tell by inspection that it is not an official link. But they are very clever....for example:
I have received a bunch of phony LinkedIn messages.
The correct URL for LinkedIn is www.linkedin.com
the phony URLs have been things like
www.linked.in
www.linkedln.com (the second 'i' is an 'l')
you can also look at the FROM email address. I just got a US Airways spam sent from an IRS.GOV account. I'm pretty sure US Air does not use IRS computers to send out their email.
The lost productivity costs of phishing are enormous. Many of these messages are getting through two layers of spam filtering here, and that means sifting through your IN box, checking each one to make sure it is not legitimate, and then deleting it. It may only be a few extra minutes a day, but multiply that by the millions of people getting these, and it adds up.
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Knowledge Democracy:
What, me worry? Mad Magazine goes digital
In what has to be one of the most important publishing and content stories of the decade, Mad Magazine has announced you will be able to read the magazine on the iPad, beginning April 1st.
Really. April 1st.
The magazine goes to the trouble of assuring readers it is NOT an April Fool's joke.
I, for one, welcome our new Mad Magazine overlords to the digital world.
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Knowledge Democracy:
Broadband Communities Summit: Bigger and Better
If you are planning to attend the Broadband Communities Summit in Dallas next month, make your hotel reservations now, as the hotel is selling out. The conference was able to secure an additional block of rooms for the conference, but these are expected to be all gone next week. The conference is going to have a strong focus on community broadband, with tracks on rural broadband initiatives and open access broadband.
Newsletter:
Is Chattanooga the next great place for venture capital and entrepreneurs?
Here is a brief video produced by Alcatel-Lucent on Chattanooga's fiber initiative. One of the people interviewed is a venture capitalist who has settled in Chattanooga, which is worthy of some notice--lack of capital is one of the biggest problems that many regions face when trying to jump start economic development. Most new jobs are created by small business START UPS, not existing small businesses, and start up businesses need angel and VC capital to create those jobs.
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