Technology Futures

A sure sign that interest in TV is waning is the fact that major media firms like Disney, Viacom, CBS, and Time Warner have announced a partnership with some of the biggest advertisers in the country (Proctor & Gamble, AT&T, Unilever) to create a new ratings system that will more accurately measure viewer habits. The current Nielsen system is decades old, and the complaint is that it does not accurately measure the effect that DVRs and broadband are having on viewing habits.

People are not watching less "TV." In fact, they may be watching more when you add in video on demand services like Netflix, YouTube, and Hulu. But content developers and advertisers can't really tell from the antiquated Nielsen ratings system.

Design Nine is already working with some of the most innovative and technologically advanced IP TV service providers in the country. Firms like Cisco are building sophisticated new video on demand head end platforms for providers. Over the next ten years, TV as we know it is going to morph into a much richer, interactive, on-demand service that will blend access to "TV" shows, movies, live performances (e.g. NASCAR races, concerts, etc.), gaming, reality shows, and audience participation format shows like American Idol.

Where will this be available first? Communities with high performance open access broadband networks will have it first, because they have the business model to accommodate these new IP TV providers and the open access networks will have the bandwidth to make them work.

Here is an interesting article about a study of current "cloud" computing services, which "seem to come up short. This really should not be a surprise. Businesses that think cloud computing services are going to be a panacea for their IT problems are going to be very disappointed.

First, cloud computing is just the latest IT industry buzz phrase, and is the latest in what is now a forty year history of selling old wine in new bottles. In this case, we are talking about very old wine indeed. Cloud computing is just the mainframe. And the mainframe was redefined in the early eighties as the mini-computer. And the mini-computer was redefined in the early nineties as client-server computing. And client-server computing became Web applications. And Web applications became Web 2.0. And Web 2.0 became cloud computing.

But all of those buzz phrases were and still are architecturally quite similar. The user is connected at a distance to a central repository of data. However, as the distances between the user and the data have grown, network latency, or how long it takes data to travel across the network between user and repository, has become a big problem. The Internet offers virtually no control over latency, for a whole variety of reasons, including the fact that the Internet was never, in its original design, intended for real-time transaction-based processing (cloud computing).

The answer is robust local, high performance open access broadband networks, which allow two things to happen--you can move the cloud closer to the user, and you can control and limit latency. Distributed cloud computing improves performance and reduces or eliminates the single point of failure that is being designed into some cloud environments. Apple, for example, is building a giant data center in North Carolina. But what happens if that facility loses power in a major storm? Apple and other cloud competitors like Amazon and Google do create redundant data centers, but a few massive data centers can't solve the latency problem the way putting cloud servers on local open access networks can.

This Scientific American article discusses something I and others have been saying for years--the 100 year old electric grid we use for residential and business power was not designed for electric cars, which have extremely high amperage power draws. It is not so much that the grid can't handle one or two electric cars in a neighborhood; it can, and the load is not much different than things like welders or potter's kilns. But the grid was not designed for say 35% of residential homes plugging in their electric cars every evening at 5:30, at the very same time that residential electric use already peaks.

Part of the solution is broadband. Resilient, reliable fiber broadband connections to every home will enable electric providers to talk to home power controllers. The home power controllers will have enough smarts to turn the car charging on and off at the direction of the power company so that the load is balanced throughout the night, when electricity costs the least to generate.

That's right--broadband is part of the energy independence solution.

Nikon has released its new Coolpix S1000pj camera. The device has a built-in projector that will display up to a 40 inch image on a wall or screen. As far as I know, this is the first pocket projector device that is actually available for purchase. I've been writing about these for at least two years, but all the earlier products were essential vaporware, with "in development" as the operative phrase. Nikon has apparently succeeded in getting one out the door, and at a reasonable price. You get a 12 megapixel camera and projector for $430.

Nikon says the throw distance is a maximum of six feet, with "VGA equivalent" resolution. What I could not determine is whether or not you could hook a laptop up to it for an impromptu presentation. Since that is not mentioned anywhere on the Specification page, it probably won't do that. And that's what a lot of business people want. I'm not sure the camera will be particularly popular unless the price comes down; adding the projector to the camera makes it about $200 more than an equivalent camera without the projector. Since most people are moving photos to their computer and managing photos on the computer, the projector seems to be of limited value.