Technology Futures

That quote is from Brian Depew with the Center for Rural Affairs, in Nebraska. The New York Times has an article today about how rural areas of the U.S. are being left behind with respect to broadband. Depew goes on to say:

Via Stop the Cap!, a bill has been introduced in the North Carolina legislature to make it extremely difficult for communities to invest in broadband infrastructure. The article is excellent, with a detailed analysis of the issues, so I'm not going to try to summarize it here--just read the whole thing.

Just ten years ago, surveillance cameras that were IP-addressable cost many hundreds or even thousands of dollars and generated massive amounts of data.

I'm only a light user of Facebook, and reserve it for family and close friends. It is interesting to watch the evolution of other social media sites like Twitter and LinkedIn, which month by month continually add features and interface tweaks to bring them closer to a Facebook look and feel. This is neither good nor bad, and makes a certain sense since what we are seeing is the evolution of a certain approach to interface design, in the context of social connectivity.

This jet-powered bicycle might be very handy in areas that still have no broadband, as hauling your data around by jet bike might be faster than dial-up. If we still don't have flying cars, a jet-powered bicycle seems like a pretty good consolation prize.

The City of Chattanooga, Tennessee was recently selected by the Intelligent Community Forum as one of the Top 7 Intelligent Communities worldwide for 2011. This article by Robert Bell of ICF provides some of the back story and the amazing success of Chattanooga over the past couple of decades.

There have been rumblings for a while now that the dot-com era is back. A few companies have indicated that they may be considering IPOs, which have been scarce for ten years. The reason the dot-com era is back is because someone has decided Zynga, the company that developed the Facebook game Farmville, is worth seven to nine billion dollars.

$7 to 9 billion...Really? Farmville?

Stop the Cap! has a great analysis of the slow but steady shift to usage-based charges for bandwidth. The wireless providers have been moving from unlimited data subscriptions to metered subscriptions for about a year.

The Camino Fiber Network Cooperative, located in a rural part of California, has filed an excellent brief with the California PUC. It does a superb job of providing short, concise answers to a whole range of questions regarding state and Federal utility policy and its effects on local and regional community broadband efforts. This should be distributed and read widely by any locality or community group that is engaged in developing community-owned broadband infrastructure.

On behalf of all the engineers and scientists that invented and then perfected all the technology on display at the Super Bowl half time, let me apologize. The fact that you CAN suit up several hundred people in radio-controlled LED light suits and send them prancing around a football field does not mean that you SHOULD. And the fact that you can put lampshades on the heads of some of those, uh, "dancers" and have them prance around behind Black Eyed Peas does not mean that you should.

SandMonkey, a prominent Egyptian blogger who was briefly detained by Egyptian security forces, advocates that opponents of repressive regimes should store all their documents, writing, and information (e.g. email addresses and data on compatriots) on a cloud-based service located in a different country. That way, if a laptop is confiscated, there are no incriminating documents on it.

It was inevitable that someone would see a business opportunity by providing private search. Starting Page is a search engine that promises to keep your searches private, unlike Google, Bing, and others that build dossiers on what you search for. The search data is sold to third parties and is also used to target ads. I've written recently about how an hour of searching for camping items resulted in weeks of ads about camping stuff.

The Roanoke Times ran an article yesterday (Sunday) in the business section on two stimulus projects building fiber in the Blacksburg-Roanoke region. The two middle mile projects are not linked to any comprehensive last mile efforts, which is also the challenge for many stimulus-funded middle mile projects in other areas.

I wrote about this little device a while back, but it is now available for order. I'm thinking about getting a couple for the house, to replace existing wall sockets where we tend to drop our iPhones and iPods at the end of the day. This USB wall socket has two standard 120 volt AC outlets and two powered USB outlets. So you don't need chargers cluttering up your sockets. And of course, it can charge any device that has a USB charging option.

The Daily is the new online newspaper that will be designed expressly for the iPad and other tablet devices. Developed by The News Corporation, the weekly subscription will be priced at 99 cents, or about $4 per month. By comparison, many newspaper subscriptions are closer to a dollar per day.

The Evoke Flow is a new take on what a radio ought to be. While it's nice to have fifteen thousand songs on your home computer, it is not always handy or convenient. Even if you have some of the gadgets that let you stream the music around the house, many of those still require fussing at your computer (some need more fussing, some need less). The Evoke Flow looks like an old sixties AM radio; the form factor includes a handle to encourage you to carry it around the house.

This article illustrates perfectly everything that is wrong with wireless broadband, and in particular with cellular wireless. As Verizon rolls out the iPhone on its older and slower CDMA network, it is also taking a page from the AT&T playbook of three years ago.

Virginia Tech has an excellent speed test. Try it and see how your connection rates.

Everyone else on the InterTubes is writing about the release of the Verizon iPhone, but I'm having a hard time working up much enthusiasm. Here's why: