Technology Futures

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.

According to the LA Times, eighteen years after the commercialization of the Internet, folks in Hollywood have determined that their might actually be something to that InterTubes things.

What brought about that revelation? A 40% decline in the sale of DVDs, a Hollywood cash cow, caught their attention, many many years after I and probably hundreds of other people predicted that Blockbuster was not going to turn out well. But after I read the article in its entirety, I came to the conclusion that the Hollywood moguls probably still don't really get it. The article goes on in some length to describe the horribly complicated schemes for trying to extract every last dollar from a movie. Boiled down, it tends to go something like this:

• First we'll charge too much for the movie in the theatre.
• Then we'll rely on HBO to charge too much to watch in on the premium cable channels (which are also doomed).
• Then we'll charge too much to watch it on demand for those who are desperate.
• Then we'll charge too much for the DVD/Blu-Ray version in that dying market.
• Eventually we'll get around to making it available via Netflix and other streaming services.

Nothing like a lack of respect for the customer. Here's an idea: Two months after the theatre run, make it available for 5 bucks on every streaming service on the planet. And watch the cash roll in.

Facebook rolled out an updated interface and a bunch of new features yesterday, and I spent some time yesterday evening looking at what they had did. There is much buzz about a new music-sharing service, but to me, the most significant change is the addition of "lists," which is the equivalent of Google+ "circles." The concept is identical: you can group your friends and contacts into sets, and you can look at only what is going on in that set of contacts, rather than having to plow through every item that gets posted to your wall.

If you have lots of friends, this is a major improvement in usability. And it probably would not have happened if Google+ had not built a better mousetrap. Facebook was forced to respond, and they did. I have seen some grousing about how long it took Facebook to add the new feature, but as an old applications programmer, I'm impressed that Facebook rolled it out in just about three months, to 750 million users. That's good software and version control management.

Facebook has also changed the way you set your privacy options, and to me, it is also a big improvement--it's much easier to understand now who can see what.

I'm tweeting the Net-Workshop (9/19/11) in real time if you want to follow it (@designnine). Net-Workshop is a one day meeting of community broadband leaders from around the country.