Exploring the impact of broadband and technology on our lives, our businesses, and our communities.
Walmart may sell cars
This just might work. Walmart may sell an inexpensive electric car. The company already has a car parts department and a car repair department with garages and lifts, so taking on service and maintenance of one or two cheap electric cars would not be a stretch. I think that over the next five or six years, as older second cars in families wear out, many will opt for a cheap electric for around town errands. Electrics may be good for families with teen drivers--the slower, low performance vehicles will get them back and forth to after school jobs and friend's homes, but the cars won't be taking curves on back roads at ninety.
Hat tip: Ed Dreistadt
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Will the Kindle rekindle the newspaper?
Amazon has released its updated version of the Kindle, the portable book reader. The original Kindle was ugly, heavy, and had too many sharp edges. The updated Kindle has been slimmed down and smoothed. It has longer battery life, and much better graphics (still black and white, though). This new version may actually catch on.
The Kindle comes with 2 Gig of memory, enough to store over 1,000 books, and new books can be added via Kindle's wireless interface to the Sprint cellphone network. This new Kindle seems to be right in the ballpark for technical manuals that change quickly and for one time reads like most best-selling books. But I think this could also be the future of newspapers. I could see sitting down to breakfast with a cup of coffee and the Kindle and browsing the local news. It might even be worth paying a subscription fee to get the news formatted nicely to work on the Kindle.
If Amazon wants to win in the bookreader game, it should study all the early missteps Adobe made with the PDF file format back in the early nineties. It should be easy to get all kinds of common formats on the Kindle, especially PDFs, and it needs to be dead simple for content owners to transfer files and documents to the Kindle.
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Lafayette's Third Pipe goes live
Lafayette, Louisiana's "third pipe" community broadband network has started signing up customers. Lafayette fought and won a difficult battle against an incumbent lawsuit that tried to stop the community broadband effort, but the city ultimately prevailed in court. The most significant part of the community broadband network is that it offers much higher bandwidth and symmetric bandwidth, which will enable and support small business telecom services and a wide array of work from home and home-based businesses.
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$2 billion for broadband cut from stimulus bill
Regardless of what you think about the stimulus spending, cutting funds for broadband seems not well thought out. The U.S. is behind many other countries in part because government subsidies have been used heavily in other countries to accelerate availability of broadband. If jobs creation is a primary goal of the spending plan, then it seems like almost any infrastructure investment--roads, sewer, water, bridges, broadband--would be a good way to get things going, as private sector firms usually do most of the work.
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10 meg for a deli
In one of our planning efforts in a small city of 75,000, I met with a deli/restaurant owner about his broadband needs. He currently has a 3 meg connection and four phone lines, and he complained bitterly about the lack of broadband options and the slow speed. He processes all his credit card transactions over his Internet connection (less expensive than maintaining a separate phone line, and faster). His credit card processing company will not let him use cable modem service because of security problems, and although I did not ask him about wireless, I suspect that would not be allowed either for the same reason.
He said his current 3 meg connection causes delays of several seconds when processing credit cards, and that at lunch time, adding ten to twelve seconds to every sandwich order slows things down and irritates customers. He thought that a 5 meg connection would be an improvement, but would really prefer to have a 10 meg connection. Why? In part because he owns several stores, and he has IP-based surveillance cameras in each store. When he is home at night and on weekends, he can monitor his stores in real time for problems. He said the higher capacity connection would enable him to push higher quality video--he could feel in more control.
So this is a perfect example of a small bricks and mortar store with state of the art technology that is driving the business--without the credit card transactions, he would lose business, and long lines because of slow transaction processing affects his business today. Broadband is not a luxury for big businesses and "high tech" firms--every business today is high tech, including the neighborhood deli.
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The newspaper really is dead
Here is a clever analysis of the financial woes of the New York Times. It turns out the Times, which is mired in red ink, would do much better financially if they gave most of their subscribers an ebook and let their readers download the paper every day.
The newspaper has had a long and important run, but we don't hand write books on sheepskin anymore either, and no one seems to mind that. Things change. Hardly anyone under thirty subscribes to newspapers anymore. Where do the papers think their customers are going to come from?
I still think the news reporting and editing function is an important one, but the little exercise in thinking differently about distributing the efforts of reporters and editors suggests papers can survive if they let go of, well, the paper.
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Will AT&T sell computers again?
AT&T may be headed back into the computer business. Back in the early eighties, AT&T was selling some of the best personal computers available, made by Olivetti in Italy under contract. The group I supervised at AT&T did site inspections at the Olivetti factories. AT&T also was selling the first Unix-based PC, made by Convergent Technologies. That little one piece desktop computer was one of the most brilliant early PC designs, and it was far more powerful and capable than the DOS-based boxes at the time. But AT&T made a lot of mistakes, which is fodder for another article, and eventually got out of the PC business.
AT&T's success with the iPhone has some folks wondering if they might not be getting ready to roll out a netbook, a small, lightweight laptop. If it comes with a built in cellular modem, all of a sudden, you can carry around a laptop that has a 'net connection almost everywhere, just like an iPhone.
And what if this netbook was made by Apple, and ran the same operating system that runs the iPhone and Apple's bigger laptops? And what if AT&T sold these little beasts for $99 with a two year cellular data contract?
All of a sudden, every other cellular company is in very deep trouble...
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Google may damage your computer?
If you are in the mood for a chuckle, take a look at the screen shot here, where someone discovered that Googling Google gives you a search results page warning you that every single Google service may damage your computer. Note: By the time I wrote this, Google had apparently fixed the problem.
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Wind jobs overtake coal jobs
A new report says more workers are employed in the wind-based power generation business than in the coal industry. Bad news for coal? Not necessarily, as coal will continue to be an important alternative to imported fossil fuels. Coal and nuclear will be important to support base load electric generating capacity, as wind and solar can't provide reliable 24/7 power.
The wind energy business is creating new manufacturing jobs in the midwest, west, and south, and the article notes that wind generation is adding a significant percentage of the new generating capacity right now. But wind still only supplies about 3% of the U.S. electric power, compared to coal's 43%, and some of the comments question the article's statistics, noting that it seems to be comparing coal mining jobs to wind manufacturing jobs.
Hat tip: Ed Dreistadt
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Will Google GDrive change the way we use the computer?
Google's rumored GDrive would allow you to access your computer files from any Internet connection, and would be tightly coupled with Google's online applications. Users should be aware of potential content ownership issues. The user agreement for such a service would likely mirror other Google terms of use, which basically gives the company complete and full access to every bit of information stored in the Google "cloud computing" environment.
The Web 2.0 trend has spawned hundreds of online data services, but taking advantage of them can quickly become a major headache, as each service strives to tether you to their online service. Each one has a userid and password which you have to set and remember, each one often installs a desktop and smartphone helper applications, and each one takes a chunk of your data (e.g. calendar, to do list, contacts, email, documents, spreadsheets, etc.) and stores it out in the "cloud" somewhere, well beyond your control.
For all the supposed problems that these applications and service avoid (mostly blaming your local hard drive), if everything is on your hard drive, it is also in your complete control and can be easily backed up. There is no free lunch here, and many of these Web 2.0 services are going to fail because there are too many services chasing customers, and when they close their doors, your data may be gone forever. Customers of the these services should make sure to keep backups of important documents, in case there are problems.
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