Technology Futures

Ford has announced that parental controls will be available on some of their new cars, beginning with selected 2010 models. The controls will allow parents to set the top speed of the car, limit how loud the radio can be played, and the car will beep continuously if the front seat belts are not in use.

Now if only they could also include a parental control that forces teenagers into the car at 11 PM and drives them straight home--that is a feature a lot of parents would be pay for.

The Blue Ridge Crossroads region in southwest Virginia may be the best place to start a business in the United States, if the results they rolled out this week are any indication. Three years ago, the region's leaders started an aggressive program to diversify their economic development strategy to include more focus on entrepreneurs and business start ups.

In less than three years, Carroll and Grayson counties and the City of Galax (the three local governments that comprise the Blue Ridge Crossroads region) have helped start 85 new businesses. Those businesses have created 391 new jobs, and there has been more than $19 million in direct capital investment, with an estimated total economic impact of nearly $80 million.

The EDA is building a regional high speed fiber and wireless network that will eventually provide service to every home and business in the region, so that entrepreneurs can start businesses from home and have access to high performance, business class telecom services, including VoIP phone service and Internet access. In 2009, as part of that effort, fiber will be installed at the three existing business parks in the region.

The EDA is also building a major new business park close to two of the busiest interstates on the East Coast (the intersection of I-81 and I-77), and planning is already underway to have fiber and wireless services at that location.

A key success factor in spurring new business development has been Crossroads Institute, which took an old, empty big box building and converted it to a world class business incubation and higher education facility. The facility is home to dozens of public and private entities, and the availability of high speed Internet access has been important for attracting jobs and businesses.

Verizon and AT&T deserve congratulations for endorsing an opt-in approach to tracking online behavior. This means they won't try to build dossiers of where you go online unless they get your permission. The online dossier information can be valuable, as data can be mined and sold to advertisers.

Back in 1995, I foolishly proposed a project for the Blacksburg Electronic Village that would have us partner with the local public radio station to begin broadcasting over the new Internet thingy that was just beginning to take off. It was very modest, and involved streaming audio news reports over the Internet--5 to 10 minutes of mostly local news a day, but in four languages, because of the large international population in Blacksburg.

No one believed anyone would ever be interested in listening to audio over the Internet.

A few years later, streaming radio and podcasting took off in a big way. But streaming radio got knocked down almost immediately by huge increases in royalties that made it financially impossible for small start-up Internet radio stations to develop a market, and even for bigger operations, the cost of royalties was difficult.

A tentative agreement has been reached between the RIAA, which controls music royalty, and the radio industry. For Internet radio operations, they will pay 10.5% of annual revenue instead of a per song fee. This makes perfect sense, as it will allow small niche Internet radio operations grow without high royalty fees that are not linked to actual income. And musicians and songwriters will still get compensated in some indirect proportion to the number of people actually listening (radio stations with a large audience will have more revenue, and will so the royalty revenue will be higher).

This approach is identical to the revenue sharing models adopted by broadband projects like nDanville and The Wired Road. Revenue share models allow many new and innovative services to start up inexpensively because the fees to content owners or the network are paid in proportion to success.