Technology Futures

I think we can all relate to this....

MediaMemo reports that Apple has quietly begun to talk to some TV networks about making all their content available on the iTunes Store for $30/month. This might not sound like a good deal for the TV networks, but in fact, it is very bad news for the cable TV and satellite providers.

An interesting fight is brewing between the movie studios and the movie rental outfits. And as usual, it is upstarts like Netflix and other Internet movies on demand outfits that are causing the problem.

We've been telling our clients for over a year that they need a plan for a pandemic in which people are told to stay away from the office and work from home. But the Internet was never designed for that--at least not the cheesy "entertainment" Internet that most of us have at home.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has proposed to the FCC that $5 to $10 billion be spent getting fiber to anchor institutions like schools, libraries, and health care facilities in communities. It's a worthy idea, but as policy, the unintended negative impact will be to make it more difficult to get fiber to homes and businesses in those communities.

The Design Nine-designed open access network nDanville has been selected by the Intelligent Community Forum as one of the Smart21 communities for 2010. This international award looks not only at technology but how communities integrate technology into their community and economic development plans.

Ski season is right around the corner in New England, and I just spent three days working with a group of communities in a very rural part of New England on broadband issues. Like many rural communities, large portions of this region are both unserved (still on dial up) and underserved (poor quality DSL or cable modem). Complicating the problem is a telephone infrastructure that is in poor condition, meaning erratic DSL service and extremely slow dial up.

In one of the strangest things to come out of government, the Federal Trade Commission has announced it intends to monitor and police.....blogs. That's right--there is apparently nothing more dangerous than a blogger who might be getting paid a few bucks to write a product review. So the FTC is setting rules for full disclosure on when a blogger might be getting paid directly or indirectly for writing a product review.

IBM has announced a new online service based on the popular Lotus Notes. The new service is called LotusLive iNotes, and the new service is aimed squarely at both Microsoft Exchange and Google's Apps Premier Edition. Regular readers know that I don't have much tolerance for the whole cloud computing buzz--it's a glorified mainframe, with less fault tolerance and much less data security. If I had to bet IBM's offering against Google, I'd go with IBM every time.

The next couple of years could be interesting. Google has been an advocate for network neutrality, which the FCC has indicated it intends to promote. But AT&T has just accused Google of blocking phone calls to rural areas for users of Google's Voice service.

A ComputerWorld article reports on a study that says social networking sites like Facebook are "leaking" personal information that allow third parties to tie Web browsing habits to specific individuals. The study looked at 12 different social networking sites and was able to determine that 11 of them were intentionally or unintentionally making it possible for third parties to tie your viewing habits to you personally.

Powell, Wyoming's community-owned citywide fiber network is up and running, and the town is starting to get phone calls from businesses interested in taking advantage of the affordable broadband and the fact that every home has a high performance fiber connection.

Powell community leaders report a Denver firm is visiting to discuss bringing 100 work from home jobs to the community. Here is the money quote:

"The citywide fiber optic network absolutely drove the decision...."

As I predicted many years ago, the video store is on the way out. Blockbuster has just announced it is closing more than 900 stores. Netflix and video on demand over the Internet has taken its toll. Blockbuster has added a Netflix-style ordering system with the supposed advantage of being able to drop movies off at the local store, but that's just a dumb idea that was always dead on arrival.

The latest Web phenomenon is Animals with Lightsabers, proving once again that no idea is too stupid for the Internet. This particular flash in the pan is not likely to last, as you can be amused by a squirrel with a lightsaber only so many times. The object lesson is that the Web and the Internet continue to dismantle traditional publishing.

If you have not tried Microsoft's Bing search service, you may be surprised. Bing seems to do a much better job of delivering relevant search results than Google. On a few queries I tried for topic areas I am familiar with, I found Bing producing fewer results of much higher quality, especially on the first couple of pages. Bing also is trying to integrate information from other Web sites and information sources in a thoughtful way, especially if you are trying to identify how to get to a business.

The BBC has an article asking what happened to public WiFi. The big WiFi projects that attracted so much attention in the U.S. five and six years ago (e.g. Philadelphia, San Francisco) failed miserably and were shut down or dramatically restructured. Some smaller municipal WiFi projects, like the one in St. Cloud, Florida, had some early rough spots but are still active. But local governments, by and large, found that free WiFi was expensive to support and often very lightly used.

Chris Mitchell at MuniNetworks has a great piece on the dilemma faced by the FCC, which is tasked with coming up with a national plan for broadband. The FCC has to balance the interests of the incumbent telephone and cable providers with the needs of the public. And the "public" includes an increasing number of home-based workers and businesses for whom the current "little broadband" services are grossly inadequate.

Diebold has thrown in the towel on its troubled voting machines business. It has sold the whole division to its competitor, ES&S. Diebold electronic voting machines have been plagued with problems, and the company says it is writing off tens of millions in losses, due primarily to lawsuits from disgruntled local governments who bought the machines only to find out they are a security nightmare.

I had eighteen emails in my inbox this morning, and sixteen of them were "legitimate" spam. By "legitimate" I mean each email was advertising a legitimate service, and their address, phone number, and valid email return address was included. Most of them come from businesses the company has ordered something from in the past, and the rest are probably harvesting the company "contact us" email address from legitimate sources or buying it from address list resellers. Of the sixteen emails, only two were anything I would have even the mildest interest in.

eBay has announced it is selling Skype. The auction giant bought the VoIP phone company several years ago for $2.6 billion, has already written off $1.4 billion and apparently hopes to get $2 billion in the sale--Meaning Skype never made eBay much money. In a related story, Skype has announced it is doubling its rates for international calls, where the firm makes most of its revenue.