Technology Futures

Design Nine has its corporate headquarters at the Corporate Research Center here in Blacksburg. The CRC recently added a new amenity for its tenants: a state of the art videoconferencing meeting room. We've used the room to save money on travel, and it is something every business park should have. The system the CRC installed is very high quality, with a high quality remote control camera and a very large, wall-mounted flat panel TV. The combination of the high quality camera and large screen gives you a "you are there" experience that is well beyond the typical Skype or iChat software. And the CRC has excellent bandwidth out to the Internet, meaning a clean, crisp image. In a recent meeting, the party on the other side had very limited upstream bandwidth, and it was obvious--what we saw on our end was a very poor image with heavy pixelation.

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Facebook has announced a "modern" messaging system that will integrate email, text messaging, and Facebook messaging. Google's dominance, all of a sudden, is being challenged simultaneously on multiple fronts. And behind the scenes, it is often Microsoft that is leading the charge. Facebook's email service will draw some users away from Gmail, and Facebook has already announced a partnership with Microsoft to use Microsoft's Bing search engine for social search. And Yahoo! recently announced a plan to move to using Bing to power Yahoo!'s search services. Meanwhile, Apple is not standing still, with it's Ping music-oriented social network pushing both Google and Facebook. And Apple has some big plans that are still largely under wraps to challenge Google's Gdoc services.

If Apple and Facebook can provide better and more believable privacy policies than Google, which basically has the attitude that all your personal data belongs to them (check the EULA for Gdocs, which gives them a license for everything you create using Gdocs), the two firms will slowly chip away at Google's dominance.

Appitalism.com is an interesting new site that combines elements of the iTunes store, Amazon customer reviews, and tight links with social media. This might actually turn out to be a winner, as many of the "shopping" sites tend to lack enough traffic to produce reliable reviews, and in my experience, many listed products on those sites have no reviews. Finally, a lot of those shopping sites are basically just link farms for advertisers. Appitalism puts the control in the hands of users, rather than advertisers, and so I think it is likely the site will get more and better reviews overall.

Netflix had an outage of several hours that prevented their customers from accessing any streaming content. This article discusses whether Netflix is spending enough on infrastructure, but what has also emerged is that Netflix customers using the company's streaming services are now consuming 20% of all the bandwidth in the U.S. during peak evening hours. As I and many others have been predicting for years, video in all its forms is now driving use of the Internet.

Economic developers who dismiss the Netflix bandwidth trend as "not our problem" do so at their peril (and at their community's peril), as business use of videoconferencing is already routine. A year ago, Design Nine staff were rarely asked to make use of videoconferencing by our clients, but over the past several months, it has become commonplace for us to augment on-site meetings with video-enabled distance meetings. Internally, we coordinate the activities of staff in remote locations via video instead of the phone, and some days my videoconference use is probably higher than my use of the phone.

Meanwhile, communities that ignore the bandwidth tsunami and let their local businesses try to buy overpriced bandwidth via fifty year old copper infrastructure are putting their existing businesses at a competitive disadvantage (essentially inviting them to leave for a community with better infrastructure) and driving away new businesses. Design Nine's bandwidth costs have doubled in the past year, largely because of lack of competition. We have good service, but costs are increasing because in our business park, there is essentially a monopoly. I've spoken to one business owner down the street who has looked seriously at moving his entire business to Northern Virginia because of the lack of competitive fiber services here.