Technology Futures

I stayed in a Comfort Suites last night, and it wins hands down as a Knowledge Economy hotel.

Some of the amenities include wireless in meeting rooms and public areas, wired broadband in the rooms, a full service work area off the lobby that includes an Internet-connected pc, a fax machine, laser printer, and copy machine.

In the rooms, the Ethernet jack is above the level of the desk, as are four convenient AC outlets--no crawling on hands and knees under desks or behind beds to get a connection.

Howard Rheingold is one of the best observers and commentators on how technology is affecting us. Not from a technical or "geek" perspective--Rheingold is interested in what is happening in our social, civic, and business relationships.

This book is easy to read; you can dive into in bits and pieces, and is meticulously researched and referenced. It's our pick for Book of the Month.

A firm has developed a household appliance they are calling an "ironing robot." It follows on the heels of the wildly successful Roomba vacuum cleaner, which uses software that enables the "robot" to learn where things are in rooms and to successfully clean floors and carpets independently.

If you are a business, you may love it. If you are a Web user, you may hate it.

Take a look at this page (only works well on a broadband connection) and see the new future of ads on the Web. It's a remarkably crisp, clear, video that begins playing on it's own, including the audio, so you are distracted by it even if it is in a hidden or tabbed window.

Where I stay when I travel is now determined largely by the availability of Internet access, and I'm sure I'm not the only one making buying decisions differently. Twice recently I have had to stay overnight in a city because of bad weather and delayed flights. Both times, I picked hotels that offered free broadband access.

California is following New Mexico in preparing a commercial spaceport. An article on Space.com describes the effort in the Mojave Desert, down in southern California.

At least four space transportation companies are located at the spaceport or are planning to use it, including Bert Rutan's Scaled Composites. Rutan's company is expected to win the $10 million dollar X prize for the first commercial sub-orbitals flights.

Lucent, the manufacturing arm of AT&T, just bought Telica, a manufacturer of VoIP equipment. As I've written recently, AT&T seems to understand the potential of VoIP to revive the companies fortunes. AT&T has floundered ever since the breakup in the mid-eighties.

The most recent mess was at AT&T Wireless, which was apparently run by a hapless and arrogant group of what former AT&T folks call "Bellheads," which are company people that can't step outside the traditional boundaries of the the "old" telephone business.

Cnet discusses a Gartner Group report that says all those computers purchased in 1999-2000 are going to be replaced soon, and that the number of new machines going out the doors of manufacturers will actually exceed the number sold to fix Y2K problems.

Nintendo's new DS handheld will include WiFi. The successor to the wildly successful GameBoy will allow DS owners to play games with other nearby DS users and/or access the Internet via a WiFi hotspot.

That may sound ho-hum, but kids with WiFi devices will change the way we think about WiFi. Kids will want it at the candy store, at the gas station (download some new games while Dad is gassing up), at parks and recreation centers--in short, everywhere.

Here is an interesting little report on where email spam originates, and where all those Web sites in the spam are located.

As it turns out, most email spam originates in the United States, but most of the Web server links that the spammers want you to click on are in....China.

CNN reports that cellphone number portability is about to reach rural and less populous areas of the country. The introduction of the service has been phased in, with the 100 most populous parts of the country getting it first. Customers will be able to move their cellphone number from one company to another, and will also be able to move a landline number to a cellphone, with certain restrictions on area codes.

Cometa, a startup national WiFi hotspot firm, has shut down. Cometa was bankrolled by Intel, AT&T, and IBM, and planned to create 20,000 hotspots nationwide and wholesale them to other companies who would actually provide the end user service.

It was a good plan, but apparently poorly executed. No doubt the company was stuffed with execs from Intel, AT&T, and IBM, who apparently acted arrogantly and spent too much money too soon.

The problem with all of the firms planning national networks is twofold. First, WiFi will not take off, really take off, until there are widespread roaming agreements in place. Right now, if I'm at O'Hare in Chicago and want to check my mail via WiFi, I probably have to spend $10 for 15 minutes of access. Two hours later, in Omaha, some other company will want $10 for another 15 minutes. Even dumber, T-Mobile thinks I'll happily pay yet another $10 two days later as I pass back through o'Hare.

That's the state of WiFi right now. National roaming agreements, just the way cellphones can roam, where you pay a fixed monthly subscription, is the only thing that makes sense. Why are so many firms in the market despite the lack of roaming? Because WiFi is in a growth phase; for every customer who stops paying T-Mobile $10/day, two new ones pop up. It's exactly like the early days of dial-up modem access. But it won't last. Cometa is the first of many firms that will go out of business after wasting a lot of investor funds.

But I said there were two problems. The second is local, rather than national. Communities need ubiquitous WiFi to make it really useful, and just putting hotspots in hotels and McDonald's is not enough. Rural communities are especially unlikely to get much attention from the big national firms. The sensible approach is for communities to get involved in identifying appropriate antenna locations, mapping out a hotspot grid so that everyone in the community can get service, and in that fashion creating the incentives that will attract local and regional wireless providers to come into the market and sell services.

Forbes reports that Vonage, the start-up Voice over IP company, has dropped prices while adding new customers at a furious rate.

Forbes speculates that pressure from AT&T's VoIP offering (six months of unlimited local and long distance service for $20) has forced Vonage to adjust their prices. Competition is a wonderful thing. Vonage now has 155,000 customers and is adding new ones at a rate of 666 per day.

The Thursday New York Times had a fascinating article on the op-ed page (page A27) that is worth chasing down if you can snag a copy. It's a graphic and a couple of paragraphs on data from the Federal Reserve Bank about where the jobs are and are not. The bar graph really helps clarify and make understandable the changes we have been seeing in the job market over the past several years. It's no surprise that in the "Manual Dexterity," "Muscle Power," and "Formulaic Intelligence" categories, steep declines are being registered (Formulaic Intelligence includes jobs like bookkeepers, clerks, and typists--work that technology is shifting).

Steep increases have been registered in "People Skills and Emotional Intelligence" (financial services sales, nurses, recreation workers, lawyers), "Imagination and Creativity" (actors, architects, designers, photographers, cosmetologists), and "Analytic Reasoning" (legal assistants, scientists, engineers).

The authors, who include the chief economist at the Federal Reserve, note that Americans have, many times in the past, adjusted to changing economic conditions and have learned new skills. They also note that whenever these shifts take place, in the long run, people end up with better jobs that pay more. Finally, they note that "trying to preserve existing jobs will prove futile."

Communities need to learn what the jobs of the future are and make sure the training is available for them. The best thing about this--many of these jobs do NOT require four years of college. Two year colleges and trade institutes can pro

If you had read our recent book of the month Adventure Capitalist, you would not have been surprised by the market crash and unrest in India following elections. The author, Jim Rogers, predicted that India's rise in economic status would be bumpy because of the huge disparity between the rising middle class that has been fueling the economic development there and the desperately poor in rural areas, who represent a majority.

An article in the business section of the Sunday Roanoke Times talks about cable TV and the growing clamor for a la carte rates--in other words, instead of paying for 60,70, or 200 channels at a flat rate, you could pick and choose which channels you want to watch, and pay only for those.

A small, privately held company in Blacksburg called NanoSonic has begun marketing what it calls "metal rubber." An article in the Roanoke Times indicated the nanomaterials company has been developing the product for several years. The material has the ability to conduct electricty while being stretched, and has been mentioned as a possible new material for use in "morphing" aircraft wings which could change shape during flight.

Om Malik reports that AT&T has saved more than $250 million dollars in the past four years by routing phone calls over the Internet instead of the switched telephone network. In a classic counter-attack, the phone companies that did not get to switch AT&T's calls are suing the company for lost revenue--apparently they think they have a "right" to make other companies use their antiquated systems.

Following Nokia's initial foray into dual mode cellular/WiFi phones, phone giant Motorola is entering the marketplace. Motorola's phone automatically switches to WiFi mode if you enter a WiFi hotspot, meaning that you save your cellular minutes and your cost of calling will be lower overall.

The Southwest Regional Spaceport in New Mexico has been chosen to host the two week long X Cup competition. The X Cup is a $10 million prize that will given to the team that successfully launches a suborbital spacecraft twice in two weeks.