Technology Futures

AT&T has indicated that the use of broadband data on its cellular wireless network has slowed. Over the past two years, the company has seen data usage increase by 3000 percent. In the past quarter, the rate of increase has "slowed" to just 30X, down substantially from the previous 50x increases.

Fiberevolution has a short article with a damning slide, showing what Verizon charges for a fiber connection in downtown Boston and what a start up firm is charging for a fiber connection. The start up is offering ten times the bandwidth (100 meg vs Verizon's 10 meg) for a measly 97% reduction in cost on a per megabit basis. Put another way, you can buy ten times the bandwidth for almost 75% less cost ($2700 vs $700). What's wrong with this picture? Well, two things.

Design Nine has its corporate headquarters at the Corporate Research Center here in Blacksburg. The CRC recently added a new amenity for its tenants: a state of the art videoconferencing meeting room. We've used the room to save money on travel, and it is something every business park should have. The system the CRC installed is very high quality, with a high quality remote control camera and a very large, wall-mounted flat panel TV.

The nDanville fiber network, owned and operated by the City of Danville as an open access network, has helped a local dentist practice expand services to new locations, and has created jobs doing so. The affordable, high performance fiber has allowed the four office practice to have all dental records available at all four locations, reducing costs and making it easier for patients and the dentists.

Facebook has announced a "modern" messaging system that will integrate email, text messaging, and Facebook messaging. Google's dominance, all of a sudden, is being challenged simultaneously on multiple fronts. And behind the scenes, it is often Microsoft that is leading the charge. Facebook's email service will draw some users away from Gmail, and Facebook has already announced a partnership with Microsoft to use Microsoft's Bing search engine for social search. And Yahoo!

Cisco has announced that its Cius tablet device will be available in March. The Cius is smaller than the iPad, with a 7" screen, but will include some business-oriented features that the iPad does not have, like integration with Cisco's very expensive TelePresence videoconferencing system.

Appitalism.com is an interesting new site that combines elements of the iTunes store, Amazon customer reviews, and tight links with social media. This might actually turn out to be a winner, as many of the "shopping" sites tend to lack enough traffic to produce reliable reviews, and in my experience, many listed products on those sites have no reviews. Finally, a lot of those shopping sites are basically just link farms for advertisers.

Ars Technica reports on a running fight that Time-Warner has picked with the town of Wilson, North Carolina.

Netflix had an outage of several hours that prevented their customers from accessing any streaming content. This article discusses whether Netflix is spending enough on infrastructure, but what has also emerged is that Netflix customers using the company's streaming services are now consuming 20% of all the bandwidth in the U.S. during peak evening hours. As I and many others have been predicting for years, video in all its forms is now driving use of the Internet.

A few months ago, a competitive telecom provider ran fiber down the main road near my home. Yesterday I figured out why; a crew was running a fiber drop to the bank branch on the corner. All over America, it is the dawn of Fiber 2.0. Fiber 1.0 took place in the late nineties, when an enormous amount of capital was spent on fiber too far in advance of the marketplace for demand. Along with the rest of the dot-com ventures, Fiber 1.0 was a bust.

Fred Pilot makes an excellent observation in his excellent blog: he says that getting fiber to homes and businesses requires a change in attitude on the part of those homeowners and businesses--a shift away from passively accepting whatever an incumbent monopoly provider offers and moving to an ownership attitude.

The Intelligent Community Forum announced the Smart21 cities for 2010 today. Danville, Virginia was among those cities chosen, and one of only six U.S. cities selected for the honor. Design Nine has assisted with the planning and development of nDanville since the project started in 2006.

Stop the Cap! has an article about the incumbent fight to kill the nation's most successful open access network: Utopia. Utopia's open access network has thousands of subscribers and fifteen providers on the network, including three TV providers. I've actually had the opportunity to see the Utopia TV provider offerings, and the picture quality of an all digital TV channel delivered via fiber is incredible.

The EPA and ICMA (International City/County Management Association) have issued a very useful and readable report on "smart growth" in rural communities. However, the word "broadband" does not appear once in the entire report, and there no mention at all of the need for access to affordable high performance broadband services. I used to say that broadband infrastructure is the current day equivalent of water and sewer with respect to economic development, but I have switched to "paved roads." Why?

Chris Mitchell has a short but pointed note about the fallacy of the "leave it to the private sector" policies that have received so much attention, mainly because the incumbents have pushed that approach vociferously over the past fifteen years. But Mitchell points out that it has largely failed, with many fewer ISPs than in the late nineties, and overall, fewer telephone and cable companies as the big telecom giants gobble up the smaller ones.

A new piece of software for the iPad demonstrates the innovation taking place within the Apple App Store software universe. SoundNote lets an iPad user take text notes that are automatically synced with an accompanying audio recording. Who would want this? Students....take your notes in class on your iPad while your iPad records the audio from the entire lecture. When you go back later to read your notes, click to hear the audio starting from wherever you are in your written notes. And it costs $5. That's right, five dollars.

The Wall Street Journal has an article about issues with the way third party Facebook apps (e.g. FarmVille, HoldEm Poker, others) are grabbing personal information even though they are not supposed to be doing so. Facebook officials said they are clamping down to ensure that the 500 million Facebook users are protected.

Benoit Mandelbrot, who created the mathematics of chaos and complexity, has passed on. James Gleick's book Chaos: Making a New Science is, in my opinion, one of the best introductions to chaos theory, with a minimum of mathematics.

Four guys jammin' on a New York subway, with their, um, iPhones....better than you might think.

Newspapers and old media businesses may be going out of business, but entrepreneurs keep coming up with new businesses that don't rely on 200 year old business models. A UK company has come out with gloves designed for use with touchpad devices like smartphones and the iPad.