Technology Futures

Although hardly anyone knows it, Barnes and Noble has a tablet-based book reader. Amazon's Kindle was dominating the market for tablet book readers until the iPad was announced, and Barnes and Noble and Sony were running far behind Amazon. Even so, the market for book readers was relatively small because they cost several hundred dollars--less than the iPad, but not that much less. Once Apple unleashed the iPad, most potential buyers began comparing the one trick book readers (and the Kindle is only black and white) with the high resolution, color iPad with tens of thousands of applications, not just one.

Barnes and Noble is fighting back, not only against Apple but more directly with Amazon and Sony. They just lowered the price of the B&N Nook WiFi version to $149, and the 3G Nook model is only $199. The lower prices probably move the Nook out of direct competition with the iPad and make it more attractive as a second table device. Time will tell, but this looks like smart move.

Update: Apparently Amazon has dropped the price of the Kindle to $189. Some pundits are predicting the book readers will drop to around $50. Sounds about right to me. B&N and Amazon can make up the difference easily by selling books; it's the old "give away the razor and make it up on over-priced razor blades" model.

Twenty-two senators have sent a letter to the FCC asking the agency to set the bar higher for broadband in rural areas. The senators pointed out the target of 4 megabits/second bandwidth for rural areas but a much higher target of 100 megabits/second for urban areas of the country.

Given that rural projects like Utopia and The Wired Road are already delivering 100 megabit fiber connections, this seems like a reasonable request.

Jeff Daily of App-Rising makes an important point in this article that I have been writing about for some time: "broadband" and "the Internet" are not the same thing. Broadband is the network, the transport system, the road. The Internet is just one of many services that can be transported over that road. Unfortunately, legislators don't always understand the distinction, and many incumbents are happy to feed the confusion to get state and Federal rules designed to prop up their monopolies.

Dallas County, Texas lost its IT systems for three days when a broken water main flooded the basement of the building where all the county's servers are housed. The servers were fine--they are located on the fifth floor. But the UPS and other electrical equipment supplying power to those fifty floor servers were located in the basement, where water flooded in from the broken main.

This was a huge problem in New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. Many data centers were on upper floors of the flood-prone area, so the data equipment was fine. But what knocked out a lot of telecom centers was the fact that the back-up generators were all on the ground, or in other words, under water. When the power went off, the generators were not able to keep things running because they were flooded. Some may remember that one small ISP with its generators on an upper floor kept its Internet connection up during the entire flood. The intrepid group had spouses and wives bringing food in, and other friends and helpers were bringing diesel fuel to their building in fifty-five gallon drums.