Technology Futures

Scaled Composite's SpaceShipOne successful suborbital space flight today is a record for the history books, and as time passes, will likely mark the beginning of the Space Economy.

The always thoughtful Dan Gillmor has an article about Sprint's move to make the popular Treo handheld phone/PDA without a camera. Apparently corporate buyers don't want their employees using them to steal company secrets.

December 17th, 1903 was one of the most significant dates of the twentieth century. It was, of course, the day the Wright Brothers flew their airplane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The event made the otherwise obscure Kitty Hawk become one of the best known places in the country.

Here is just one of several new phones that are WiFi only. These wireless Internet phones allow you to make voice phone calls anytime you are in a WiFi hotspot--yet another reason to sprinkle WiFi hotspots around your community.

An attack yesterday on Akamai servers disrupted service for some of the biggest sites on the Internet, including Yahoo!, Microsoft, and Google.

Akamai servers are located throughout the US and overseas and help speed up major Web sites by locating some of the content closer to users. According to the article, an Akamai representative characterized the attack as a "large scale international attack on the Internet infrastructure."

If there were not already enough to worry about, we now have cellphone viruses. A UK Web site has a story on a cellphone virus spread by the wireless Bluetooth protocol, which some newer phones have built in. Bluetooth is a short range wireless protocol intended to make it easier to sync cellphone data with your computer, among other uses.

I am beginning to wonder if many of us are beginning to suffer from Internet fatigue. Over the past few months, I have observed the activity and discussion on most of the mailing lists I am on dwindle to near zero. Some of the Web sites and blogs I visit seem to have fewer and fewer comments and discussion.

This is in contrast to the late nineties and even a couple of years ago, when most of the mailing lists I was on were active, and I felt like it was difficult to keep up with the often rich and interesting discussions.

I think there are several things going on.

• First, the novelty of the Internet has worn off. The Internet as a community, work, and civic phenomenon is now a decade old, and if you measure the real start of online community with the BBSes and FreeNets of the eighties, it is twenty years old. For most of us, it's now just a part of life. We don't feel the need to discuss it, anymore than we discuss other routine technologies that we use (e.g. the telephone, the microwave). We have successfully integrated the Internet and its communications services into what we do.
• Second, we're busier than ever, and we have less time for activities that are not directly related to whatever it is we have to do today, tomorrow, or by the end of the week. The Internet has contributed, for better or for worse, to this common feeling of life being uncomfortably speeded up. By dropping out of peripheral activities like online discussions and mailing lists, we are taking back some control over a bit of our time.
• Finally, we are worn out from spam, viruses, upgrades, bugs, glitches, printer jams, blue screens of death, reboots, and all the other timestealers that technology has brought to us over the past two decades. We want our lives back.

In a way, I see this as a good thing. We are putting technology into proper perspective. We are making more time for face to face relationships and spending a little less time chatting with, well, strangers.

As far back as 1998, I was telling folks to pay attention to business park amenities like bike/hiking trails. I usually got blank stares. More recently, I've had a slide in most of my presentations about the importance of marketing to businesspeople who have mountain bikes strapped to the top of their cars on the weekend. I still get a lot of blank stares--not as many, but a lot of economic developers seem to have trouble relating.

This morning, the Roanoke Times has a major feature on the glacial pace of trying to develop a more coherent and connected set of hiking/biking trails around the city. The article relates that recently, a Colorado high tech company was considering relocating to Roanoke.

Did they ask about business parks and incubator buildings? No. Were they interested in water and sewer capacity? No. What they wanted to know about was the biking trails, and here are some of their questions.

• Was there a fully interconnected trail between two major biking spots--Carvins Cove and Explore Park? (no)
• Was there a connection from downtown to Mill Mountain biking trails? (no)

The paper notes that the company was willing to give up skiing to move to southwest Virginia, but ultimately decided to stay in Colorado.

That particular company was making a relocation decision, at least in part, based on quality of life, lifestyle options (like good biking trails), and a regional approach to recreation. Don't be tempted to think that bikers, hikers, and other small businesspeople with interests in recreation are all in their twenties. One of the leading bike trail advocates in Roanoke cheerfully admits to grey hair. In Blacksburg, the local cycling groups have large numbers of members over 40.

I find that many rural areas take their recreational amenities for granted--not only do they not market them as part of a comprehensive approach to economic development, many communities fail to fund and develop them at levels high enough to make them effective drivers of economic development.

According to a report on the [telecom-cities] mailing list, fewer than 1% of South Koreans are still using dial-up to access the Internet; DSL, cable modem, and fiber have captured the market.

In the United States, despite a 42% increase in broadband users from 2002 to 2003, nearly half of Internet users, according to a recent Pew study, are still on dial-up. Once again, here is my favorite (tongue in cheek) marketing slogan for economic development: "Our region--almost as good as South Korea!"

Schlotzky's, the popular deli chain with hundreds of stores across the country, has been rolling out their free WiFi offering with great success, apparently. The original plan had been to provide it only to the company-owned stores (95% of the stores are owned by franchisees), but the popularity of the WiFi offering has attracted the attention of the franchise owners, who want it for their stores as well.

A press release from the Texas Dept. of Transportation announces that they are going to put WiFi in all state-managed rest stops in Texas.

They have an interesting rationale. DOT believes it will help get people off the roads more frequently to take a break and rest. It makes sense to me. I drive a lot, and the ability to stop and check my business mail conveniently has a lot of appeal. WiFi marches on.

South Korea has announced a new initiative called Ubiquitous Korea that has a very simple vision for the country:

To transform the country into a more modern and technology-oriented society, which has been nicknamed U-Korea for Ubiquitous Korea, the government is envisioning a future that allows people to have uninterrupted access to the Internet, via fixed lines or mobile networks, any time, anywhere.

I've talked in the past about the importance of the Hydrogen Economy and the potential it has to create new economic development opportunities, but I think a better term is the Energy Economy. As the price of gasoline, diesel fuel, and home heating oil rises, I don't think we're all going to end up shivering in the dark.

A New York Times article (registration required) details a new service from Tivo, the makers of the wildly popular DVR (digital video recorder) that records programming on a hard drive so you can watch it later.

Tivo will add a new feature to its products that will allow the recorders to download and store TV programs that come straight off the Internet--completely bypassing traditional broadcast, cable TV, and satellite providers. Because the Tivo recorder can store programs for later viewing, the company anticipates that users with DSL or cable modem broadband services will download programs overnight and watch them later.

In the future, when we all have very fast fiber connections, we won't do that very much, because it will be easier and more convenient just to watch a program in real time. But DSL and cable modems don't have the bandwidth to do that.

Tivo has identified a sweet spot that is likely to be very lucrative for the company for a number of years but also marks the beginning of the end of traditional television. The Tivo recorder is matched perfectly with the limitations of current broadband offerings, and gives consumers more choice--which is what we all want.

As Tivo builds a marketplace, content producers (of TV-based programming) will fill it, and as the product offerings develop, consumers will be able to think about just dropping cable TV or satellite services.

How will it work? Here's a business: license the reruns of "I Love Lucy" for Internet distribution, buy a fat Internet pipe, format them for Tivo, and then sit back and collect, oh, say, fifteen cents every time someone wants to watch an episode.

This is going to be fun, and some non-traditional "media" companies that aren't located in Hollywood are likely to make a lot of money. As factory jobs move offshore, whole new industries are being created.

SBC has inked a deal to sell WiFi at 6000 McDonald's fast food restaurants. Daily access will cost $7.95, and monthly access will cost $19.95.

The daily access cost is a bit silly. Who is going to buy a $5 meal and pay $8 to surf the Web while you drip special sauce on your keyboard?

Declan McCullagh, the chief political correspondent for Cnet, has an excellent article that questions the need for the FCC.

The article is well worth a read just to review the long list of head-shaking mistakes and blunders that the FCC has made dating back more than fifty years. Among the FCC initiatives McCullagh lists as problematic is the 1956 decision by the FCC to keep Americans from owning their own telephones, apparently believing that it was better to have customers pay AT&T a monthly lease fee for years after the cost of the phone had been amortized.

Like so many government initiatives that were started with the best of intentions but never seem to "finish" the job, the FCC is now trying to regulate things that don't seem to need any regulation, like Voice over IP services. In general, the FCC has seemed to favor the large incumbent providers. If there is any sense in that approach, I think the FCC thinking seems to be to avoid turbulence in the market place and to avoid disruption of services to consumers.

But at some point, as technologies change, disruption is impossible to avoid without permanently vesting obsolete systems and technologies. Currently, the FCC seems to be trying very hard to prop up the incumbent telephone and cable providers. This keeps the marketplace stable, but at what cost? That kind of policy makes it more difficult for low cost competitive providers to enter the marketplace, and denies to consumers the choice to trade stable service for lower prices and/or access to more and different kinds of services.

At worst, the FCC is taking a dim view of consumers and businesses and their ability to sort out these issues. Why not assume that customers, over time, have the capacity to figure this out on their own, and give local communities and governments more flexibility to invest appropriately to ensure that

Apple once again proves it is far ahead of other computer manufacturers with its just announced Airport Express.

Apple, which really pioneered consumer and casual use of WiFi, contrary to the ads Intel runs, has created a new wireless gadget that is Swiss Army knife-like in the features it has in a little box barely the size of a pack of cards.

An AP article in the Sunday Roanoke Times discussed China's growing influence on the IT industry. What caught my eye was the fact that China is promoting an alternative to the DVD format called "EVD." China wants to avoid paying royalties to the Japanese developers of the DVD format.

But wait, there's more. China is also pushing a new and different cellphone protocol that they claim is better than the GSM and CDMA standards used in the rest of the world.

The Space Economy pops up in the most unlikely places. For years, I drove by an office building in Blacksburg with a sign out front for a company called Phoenix Integration. I knew that they were some kind of software company, but never gave it much thought.

This is a long article, but if you, like the author, find yourself rebooting your Windows computer and suffering through hung programs, viruses, and worms more than you care to, you may want to read why this former Microsoft employee is bullish on Open Source products and why he made what turned out to be an easy switch to Apple.