Technology Futures

It was inevitable that someone would see a business opportunity by providing private search. Starting Page is a search engine that promises to keep your searches private, unlike Google, Bing, and others that build dossiers on what you search for. The search data is sold to third parties and is also used to target ads. I've written recently about how an hour of searching for camping items resulted in weeks of ads about camping stuff.

We are still in the Model T era of the Internet, with lots of evolution and innovation still to come. Starting Page is not the first search engine to challenge Google, and it won't be the last. But Internet time passes quickly, and if people decide they have had enough of Google, "enough is enough" will come quickly.

A few experiments with search phrases seems to deliver just a couple of pages of very relevant results, and those results are refreshingly free of link farms and "shopping" sites, which Google now seems to favor. That's my beef with the bigger search engines (Bing also favors link farms, although not quite to the extent of Google, in my experience). Most of these "make money on the Internet" schemes are focused on building sites on specialized topics that have a broad interest (e.g. "camping and hiking"), adding a thin veneer of content (frequently stolen from legitimate sites), and then larding up the site with ads and links to bigger shopping sites. In theory, you could make some money with this approach and provide some useful content, but most of the sites are rubbish. Nonetheless, since they are hawking ads, the search engines happily put them right at the top of the search results. What gets lost are the legitimate blogs and topical sites, which end up far down in the search results. So good luck to StartingPage; I hope it does well. We need it.

I wrote about this little device a while back, but it is now available for order. I'm thinking about getting a couple for the house, to replace existing wall sockets where we tend to drop our iPhones and iPods at the end of the day. This USB wall socket has two standard 120 volt AC outlets and two powered USB outlets. So you don't need chargers cluttering up your sockets. And of course, it can charge any device that has a USB charging option.

The Evoke Flow is a new take on what a radio ought to be. While it's nice to have fifteen thousand songs on your home computer, it is not always handy or convenient. Even if you have some of the gadgets that let you stream the music around the house, many of those still require fussing at your computer (some need more fussing, some need less). The Evoke Flow looks like an old sixties AM radio; the form factor includes a handle to encourage you to carry it around the house. It supports three kinds of content: traditional FM radio, Internet radio stations, and streamed content from local computers (e.g. iTunes music libraries). It has a mono speaker, so it's not designed to provide room-filling stereo. Instead, the emphasis is on portability--listen in the kitchen, on the deck outside, in the den, in the bedroom. It's a neat idea, and based on this review, the product still has a few rough edges. For example, it seems odd not to include AM radio, and it would not have been expensive to add a second cheap speaker and provide low fidelity stereo. And it would appear the attempt to provide a simplified "retro" look created some difficulties using the controls effectively. I think we will see more products like this, and the maker of the Evoke is a firm called Pure, which has several other similar products.

This article illustrates perfectly everything that is wrong with wireless broadband, and in particular with cellular wireless. As Verizon rolls out the iPhone on its older and slower CDMA network, it is also taking a page from the AT&T playbook of three years ago. At that time, AT&T touted its "superfast" 3G network for the iPhone, even though it was not widely available at the time; most early iPhone users found themselves accessing AT&T's slower Edge network, which is closer in performance to Verizon's CDMA network.

So today, Verizon is touting its "superfast" LTE network for the iPhone, even though it is not widely available. And of course, all these "superfast" speeds being touted are modified with the infamous "...up to...," meaning you won't get anything like the advertised speed, because lots of other cellphone users will be trying to access the same radio on the same celltower. So if LTE offers speeds "up to" 12 megabits/second, and you and nineteen other people happen to be accessing the same radio on the same cell tower, what you really get, on average, is something like 600 kilobits/second. Not at all bad for casual data use on a cellphone, but you won't be streaming a Netflix movie over that connection. And if some is trying to stream a Netflix movie over that radio on that tower, expect your speed to be more like dial up.

The cellular voice/data wireless network is an amazing technological tour de force, and its continued expansion and availability are critical to supporting our desire for ubiquitous mobile access. You can argue about the cost, but it works amazing well. But it is not a replacement for fiber connectivity to the home and business. In some areas, particularly some rural areas that need four to six years to get fiber to most residents, cellular wireless will be an important interim option to get folks off dial up. But communities that have fiber will have an important economic development and jobs development tool that communities betting on wireless won't have.