Technology Futures

Here is a lengthy article, but if you are interested in cloud storage services, it is an excellent primer on the advantages and risks. Cloud services, in many ways, is no different than the old mainframe computing environment, gussied up with a snazzy interface. Here are my own thoughts on the topic.

Is "Facebook depression" really a problem? Or is just an excuse for media outlets to scrounge up some news on a slow news day? I'm reminded of all those teasers for the local 11 PM news: "Your local news at 11--The dangers of dryer lint! Could it be causing the heartbreak of psoriasis? Tune in to find out!"

Uh, huh.

I'm not going to lose a lot of sleep over Facebook depression.

Just when you thought you had heard it all, North Carolina legislators are about to pass a law declaring the state a broadband-free zone. An amendment to a very bad broadband bill will declare that "broadband" is any service that is "occasionally capable of achieving 768kbps downstream and 200kbps upstream." This is 1/5 of the feeble national goal of 4 megabits downstream and 1 megabit upstream.

Ars Technica has an article on problems with WiMax and cellular wireless networks. As customers increase their use of high bandwidth services, the wireless networks can't keep up, and the result is that companies like Verizon and Clearwire have started reducing the amount of bandwidth they make available to subscribers. Clearwire's much ballyhooed WiMax network, just a few years old, is already congested and inadequate.

AT&T wants to buy T-Mobile, which would make AT&T the biggest cellular provider in the U.S. Meanwhile, CenturyTel wants to buy Qwest. The 1984 breakup of Ma Bell and the 1996 telecom deregulation is slowly being undone as telecom in the United States is re-aggregated into enormous monopolies with antiquated business models based on maintaining a monopoly by any means possible.

Via Fred Pilot at Eldo Telecom, Geoff Daily makes the argument that "all broadband is fiber." Geoff has it exactly right. Just yesterday, I met with a community leader who asked, appropriately, "What if we spend all this money on fiber and wireless turns out to be cheaper and better?"

The old TV empires are crumbling fast, and Netflix is speeding their demise. It just outbid all the other networks for a new original, uh, "TV" series called , which will star Kevin Spacey. Since you can watch Netflix on just about any device on the planet, there is even less reason to keep around one of those old timey television doohickeys.

Someone asked me just today if we really will need all the bandwidth that fiber offers, with the unspoken inference that DSL and cable modem service seems to be working just fine.

Uh-huh.

For about a week now, there has been a thread running around the InnerTubes about how the ebook readers are changing publishing. The Kindle is slowly taking hold, and though I was an early skeptic, there does indeed seem to be a place for a dedicated book reader. Amazon has made it so easy for authors to self-publish that many new authors are skipping the traditional New York publishing house route and simply putting their books on Amazon as an ebook. And money follows.

We will probably not know the full story of the nuclear reactor problems in Japan for many months, but one news story I read over the weekend suggests that the the Japanese are re-learning the lessons of the Katrina disaster. Apparently the Japanese reactors survived the initial earthquake and tsunami without much damage--but whatever was damaged caused the primary cooling pumps to fail. No big deal, as nuclear power plants have extensive back up and redundant secondary cooling systems designed to take over if the primary cooling system fails.

Kiefer Sutherland of "24" fame is starring in a new series called "The Confession." It will debut on Hulu in March. I've been waiting for this to happen, and putting heavy hitters like Sutherland and John Hurt in the cast will draw the audience needed to make this a success. It will be interesting to see what happens in the first hours that this becomes available on Hulu. A lot of people trying to watch it right away could cause network congestion and slowdowns on a scale never seen before.

I don't what is in the water in North Carolina, but some legislators seem determined to cripple the prosperity of towns and cities in the state.

The North Carolina-based Mountain Area Information Network (MAIN) filed a public comment to the FCC calling for more attention to community-owned broadband networks. MAIN's executive director, Wally Bowen, has been involved in community broadband initiatives since the early nineties, and is one of the true pioneers of the community broadband movement. Read the whole article.

Does anyone watch TV any more? Now that Charlie Sheen (...Winning!) has caused the cancellation of Two and a Half Men, the world as we know has come to an end. Just for the record, I have never watched a single minute of that show, but others obviously have. As I have noted in the past, content is king, so content owners will remain standing after content distributors and their analog world business models have collapsed (read TV channels here). The Internet and the iPod killed the music distribution business.

Via Stop the Cap!, some North Carolina legislators seemed determined to kill jobs and economic growth in North Carolina's communities by banning community-owned broadband. The cable companies hope to succeed in getting this legislation passed in North Carolina. If they are successful there, they will surely move the same tactics to other states.

Via Jason Kottke, a rumor that the Kindle book reader will eventually be free. Amazon is doing better than I expected with the Kindle, both because the price has dropped sharply, which I viewed as an obstacle, but also because the Kindle itself has been improved. If Amazon eventually gives the Kindle away, a lot of paperback and hardback books will only appear in digital format.

The "cloud" took a hit over the weekend, when a problem with Gmail accounts apparently wiped out tens of thousands of email accounts. Google is vague about how many were affected, but some estimates suggest several hundred thousand account were affected. Here's the worrisome part: news reports are saying the accounts were "permanently" deleted, meaning the affected users can't get their data back.

Here is a study that indicates that smaller communities with the right broadband infrastructure are "...emerging as major economic centers." What about your community? Does it have the infrastructure to attract new businesses?

Amazon has jumped into the movie streaming game big-time with a new offer to Amazon Prime customers, who pay $79/year for free shipping. Now included in that Prime subscription is unlimited access to on-demand 5,000+ movies.

The first iteration of the National Broadband Map is now available. This effort has been part of the broadband stimulus effort, and it will be updated regularly over the next three to four years as individual states provide more data to NTIA. The map zooms nicely, so you can get a pretty good local picture of what technology is available, and you can select which technologies you want to look at (e.g. fiber to the home, cable modem, wireless, etc.). With the exception of mobile wireless (i.e.