Technology Futures

In a break with the past, Benjamin Media's Digital City Expo is going online. The entire two day conference will be conducted via the Web, using webinars, chat, and live two way audio to put speakers and the audience in direct contact. It is a bold and interesting experiment, and potentially will give a much broader audience access to the conference and the information provided by presenters. Digital City Expo is the only broadband conference that focuses exclusively on community and municipal broadband, and with many new projects coming online, this year should bring a lot of good information to the conference Design Nine is a sponsor, and we will have a session on the economic development benefits of looking at broadband and energy as a way of attracting and retaining businesses.

Broadband Reports says that two states, Pennsylvania and North Carolina, are considering legislation to make it more difficult for communities and regions to invest in broadband infrastructure. As usual, the legislators sponsoring such bills seem to be saying, incorrectly, that such efforts are "anti-competitive." Oddly enough, they are right in the wrong way. It is not community broadband efforts that are anti-competitive, it is the legislation--which simply seeks to make it impossible for any other entity to compete with the incumbent provider. Good for the incumbent, but bad for any other other private sector firm that wants to lease public telecom infrastructure to deliver services.

It is entirely possible to create good, financially strong public/private partnerships that actually create private sector business opportunities, and it is already being done:

• The Wired Road
• nDanville
• Eastern Shore of Virginia Broadband Authority

  Want help getting your community started? Call Design Nine or drop us a note.

The Kindle (version 2) is getting rave reviews, and Amazon has released a version for the iPhone. It suggests that we may be seeing the beginning of the end of the era of the book. Unlike music, videos, and newspapers, I don't think books will disappear entirely. Think of art and architecture books, how to books with lots of pictures and illustrations, certain kinds of specialty topic books.... but the Kindle hints that printing books on paper is about to become much less common.

The Internet is a transport system that is making many other information transport systems obsolete. First it was music; vinyl records and CDs are not about the music itself, they are simply a transport system to get the music to the buyer. Video stores are on the way out, as Netflix and Blockbuster, by using the Internet, are making the video cassette and DVD transport system obsolete. Newspapers are beginning to collapse, as the news-PAPER is just a transport system for reporting the news itself. The news and journalism business, like the music and movie business, will survive and even prosper, but the underlying business models are collapsing because we don't need four different transport systems: one for music, one for movies, one for news, and one for books. And let's not forget the phone and TV transport systems; we don't need those either. So there is a total of six separate transport systems we no longer need. The 'net handles all of those quite nicely.

And that's why every home and every business needs a high performance broadband connection; without it, you might as well be living in 1400--before books, before newspapers, before any information distribution systems existed.

Now, here's one more question. If every source of information is delivered efficiently over a single network, who should be in charge of that network? Do you want a private corporation, which answers only to its stockholders, do decide what information your community can access, or should the community or region have some control? We're not talking about doing away with private sector providers--we need and want them to continue providing the services they already offer--telephone, video, news, etc. We're talking about managing the underlying transport system differently. What if all the roads in your region were owned by s single out of state firm? Would that firm always be able to act in the best interests of your community? Again, the private sector is critically important to the long term health of communities, but we need to manage the information transport system differently.

A new study of smartphone Web browsing shows the iPhone positively crushing the competition. The Apple iPhone accounts for 33% of all the Web browsing being done by smartphones. The nearest competitor is a Nokia phone, the N70, with a measly 7.1%. After that, it goes downhill even more rapidly, with most of the other phones in the top ten barely breaking 3%. The iPhone has a good, fast Web browser, a large readable screen, and a touch interface; the combination is unbeatable at this time.