Exploring the impact of broadband and technology on our lives, our businesses, and our communities.
Happy Birthday, iPod!
The iPod is ten years old today. The iPod was the brainchild of Steve Jobs. There were plenty of other MP3 music players at the time; most of them were much less expensive and smaller than the iPod, but the iPod was easy to use, both from the interface of the iPod itself, but key to the music player's success was the way the iPod synced with iTunes on your computer--a layer of complexity was completely eliminated, and that made all the difference.
The emergence of the iPod was also the death of the music store, but it was neither Jobs nor Apple that was the death of that anachronism, it was the inevitable march of history, or as Schumpeter calls it, "creative destruction." Ancient Greeks decried written language as the ruination of memorization. In the Middle Ages, the printing press was seen by some as a loss of control over knowledge. Time and technology move on. As we speak, tablet-based devices like the iPad are completing the creative destruction of most paper-based materials, especially magazines and newspapers. I think there will always be a place for some paper-based books, but really, paying less than ten bucks for the latest best seller in ebook format is much better than chopping down trees, making energy-intensive paper, and then engaging in the energy-intensive process of printing and hauling millions of tons of those books around. That's also true of music--music used to require enormous amounts of energy to deliver to the buyer, because music was heavy; it had weight. Today, we buy music as a stream of weightless photons.
What else has changed? In the old days, ten years ago, when music was still heavy, you needed a well-designed road system for the trucks and cars that hauled music around. Today, you need a well-designed digital road system to haul music, books, magazines, movies, TV, health care, business services, and hundreds of other emerging services. Is your community building those digital roads?
Technology News:
Knowledge Democracy:
Daily Yonder: Will revised USF rules benefit rural communities?
The Daily Yonder has a great piece on the challenges rural communities face in getting adequate broadband services. It is a fairly long article, but worth a complete read because there are really two stories in it. The first is how a locally owned service provider was forced out of business by an incumbent, to the detriment of the community and local economic development. The second part of the story is the proposed new rules for the Universal Service Fund (USF). The USF money can be tapped by incumbent phone companies to expand service, but many of them are writing off, selling off, or limiting investment in rural parts of their service territories. The USF money ought to be available to both incumbents and communities that want to make broadband infrastructure investments. Citizens and businesses pay, via taxes, for the USF, and to deny communities the right to use their own money to improve their economic circumstances is troubling. Let's hope the new rules level the playing field for access to those funds.
Technology News:
Apple iPhone 4S breaks all records
The pundits wailed and moaned that the iPhone 4S was a big disappointment, that it did not have enough new features to interest users, that Apple had a flop on its hands, and that perhaps the company was losing its ability to execute since it was not able to deliver an iPhone 5.
Uh huh.
Apple announced that it sold 4 million iPhone 4S models in the first three days of sales. That is more than double the 1.7 million iPhone 4 sales in the same time period. In other news, Apple stock hit an all time high.
Technology News:
Siri is another Apple game changer
I had a chance to try out an iPhone 4S over the weekend, and I think Siri, the voice recognition service built into the phone, is potentially another Apple game changer, just as the touch interface on the original iPhone was a game changer.
While playing around with the iPhone, I discovered that the little pop up keyboard used to input text in virtually every application on the iPhone has a Siri button. If you tap it, the phone goes into voice dictation mode. Instead of laboriously tapping away on the virtual keyboard, you can just talk. I was able to try only a few sentences, but some of them were quite long, and the transcription was perfect--no mistakes.
Oddly, even Apple is not highlighting this feature. Instead, the ads for the iPhone 4S show the ability of Siri to answer queries like, "What time is it?" or "What is the weather in New York City?" This feature worked, but I was underwhelmed by it, as there is a slight lag while Siri goes to look for the information, and for things like the time or the weather, you can get it faster with a couple of taps. But the dictation is magical, and I can't wait to see Siri available on Macs.
Technology News:
Netflix kills Qwikster
Netflix has announced that it has abandoned plans to split its business in two and make customers to two different sites, depending on whether they want to rent a DVD or watch something instantly via the Internet. It was actually much worse than that, as they were also going to make customers have two different and separate billing accounts. The invisible hand of the market, when left alone, usually fixes stupidity like this, and it did. The aborted Netflix split will be the fodder of business school case studies for a long time, ranking right behind the "New Coke" introduction as one of the dumbest business decisions ever.
Technology News:
Knowledge Democracy:
iPhone 4S breaks sales records again
CNet reports that the new iPhone 4S has broken sales records again, with more than a million pre-orders on the first day. The previous best was 600,000 iPhone 4 orders on day one. This is a bit amusing, because when Apple unveiled the new phone last week, a lot of pundits panned the device, complaining that Apple had fumbled, that it should have been an iPhone 5, that the 4S model did not have enough new features, and basically, that Apple had screwed up. Uh huh. No company has ever sold one million phones in one day. Ever. Some screw up.
Technology News:
Job growth demands business class broadband
If you look at the jobs report released today, it underscores what I have been saying for a decade: neighborhoods are the new business district. CNBC summarizes the September jobs data; the manufacturing sector LOST jobs, but if you go to the household survey, job creation was in the black (modestly).
What does this mean? It means more people are working from home, and that means they need business class broadband, not an "entertainment service," as my cable company quaintly calls our home Internet service.
Rinse and repeat as needed until elected officials get the message:
Neighborhoods are business districts, and business districts need competitive and affordable telecom service options.
Technology News:
Death of TV: Part XXXII -- "Okay"
True story. I discussed the possibility of eliminating our family cable TV subscription and just sticking with Internet. The response was, and I quote exactly, "Okay. Can we get Hulu Plus?" That's the state of cable TV today. It doesn't even merit a 30 second discussion of its value.
Technology News:
Why broadband still matters
Now that the broadband stimulus money has been distributed, and the Google fiber initiative has taken root in the two Kansas Cities, a lot of communities seem to have lost interest in broadband initiatives. The cable companies have done a fairly good job of keeping up with demand, and the telephone companies continue to cling to their share of the broadband market by competing on price rather than on bandwidth.
But this apparent "Remain calm! All is well" approach is the calm before the storm. And the storm is coming to us in a huge cloud. In the past week, Amazon and Apple have rolled out new cloud-based initiatives that will stream content everywhere, all the time. If cloud storage seems like a gimmick, it is not. It is the answer to the utter uselessness of trying to keep all our media content, personal and business, on local hard drives. Music, pictures, movies, and what we used to quaintly call "TV" are driving this problem. Even though you can buy a two terabyte hard drive for $150, you can fill it faster than lickety-split with purchased video. And then you have to figure out how to back it up. Backing it up with a second drive is a good start, but suppose your house or business burns down? Both drives are gone, as is all your data.
Add to that the fact that everyone now wants everything available on every computing device they own, which typically comprises, for many people, FOUR devices: a smartphone, a laptop, a tablet, and a desktop computer. And the portable devices will never have enough storage to keep everything on the device itself. So the cloud is not a typical IT solution in search of a question. We know what the question is, and the cloud is the answer. But streaming everything to everyone all the time is going to create, over the next several years, exponential increases in demand for bandwidth. And that's when the copper-based DSL and cable modem networks will run out of steam.
Communities that have not made plans to ensure a modern fiber-based infrastructure that also supports ubiquitous wireless mobility access will be at a severe disadvantage from an economic development perspective.
Oh, and one more thing. There is another sleeper in the battle for streaming content....Rhapsody (the music service) just bought Napster to try to fight Spotify. Spotify is a streaming music service that is huge in Europe but only recently began operations in the U.S. So the music industry is still undergoing a massive reorganization that is focused on streaming any song ever recorded to anyone, at any time, anywhere. And it is going to be a battle of Titans, with Apple, Amazon, Rhapsody, Spotify, and even tiny Microsoft with its Zune music service all going head to head.
Technology News:
Knowledge Democracy:
Pages
