Technology Futures

A story in the New York Times about the decline in blogging suggests the future of Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking tools. It turns out that only about 5% of all identifiable blogs have been updated in the past 120 days. Put another way, 95% of blogs have been abandoned for all intents and purposes. I have always maintained that blogging is about writing, not about publicity or fame. If you like to write, blogging is easier (though not necessarily easy).

I sat through a presentation by an electric utility on their BPL (Broadband Over Powerline) offering. The company is committed to being able to provide broadband connectivity to their rural customer base, which is terrific. They should be commended. But the service starts at 256 kilobits for $30 and ends at 3 megabits for $90. The system requires that the electric company install repeaters at least every 3500 feet, or about every half mile, throughout the entire service area--active electronics spaced more closely than DSL (another copper-based technology).

Google Squared is an odd little Google experiment that the company just released, probably to try to counter the even odder Wolfram Alpha search tool.

Each tool is different from each other, and each tool tries to apply analysis to search requests, as opposed to the "old fashioned" search that just dumps a list of unfiltered results in your lap.

The CrunchPad may be available soon, and it is likely to be just one of many competitors to the newly emerging tablet market. The Amazon Kindle will be remembered as the first, but like many first to market devices, it may not outlast the competition. The CrunchPad is an inexpensive (projected to sell for $299) tablet designed primarily for Web browsing, but it is likely it can or will do more over time.

I downloaded and installed Hulu Desktop this weekend, and I have seen the future of TV. The folks that designed this paid careful attention to the user interface, and the overall look and feel of this software is terrific. It is easy to browse, and you can drill down quickly into a specific area (e.g. Movie Trailers, TV Shows). I have a feeling the designers spent a lot of time looking at the iTunes Store and Apple's Cover Flow interface, because there are not only similarities, but improvements.

Sirius XM has released screen shots of its iPhone app for the radio service. The iPhone software will be free, but there will be a $3/month fee to listen to a select group of Sirius XM channels. In other words, for a very modest $36/year, you get Sirius XM on your phone.

Hulu continues to push the envelope. The popular streaming video site has a lot of TV shows on it, and it just released a Macintosh application so that you can watch TV shows on Hulu without the bother of using a Web browser. It means a better viewing experience with higher quality.

Here is a story about the state of North Carolina trying to entice Apple to place a 100 job server farm in the state. With unemployment in North Carolina nudging 11%, state officials are smart to try to attract Knowledge Economy businesses, and server farms are a growth industry. The massive amounts of data being stored "online" have to reside in a physical place, and the companies that are making a business out of this (e.g. Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and many smaller firms) have several requirements.

AT&T is going to in its phone stores. The mini laptops will be sharply discounted if you also buy a phone or data plan from the company. Rumors have been swirling for months of netbooks with 3G cellular modems built in, and for a lot of people, esepcially frequent travelers, the small light devices are just right.

Sprint's new mobile hotspot is cool. It is a little credit card size data only cellular data modem. Cellular modems have been around for awhile, but they typically have a USB port and you plug them into your laptop. This one has no ports. Instead, it creates a WiFi hotspot that can be used for Internet access by any WiFi device--your laptop, your iPhone, your iPod Touch, even your home network.

A grass roots effort in North Carolina to beat back an anti-broadband bill in the legislature has apparently had some effect, as the bill was sent back to a committee for more study. Opponents of the bill think that's good enough for now, although most of these bills continue to re-surface year after year.

I'm not holding my breath, but some scientists think the Star Trek "warp drive" could be possible. They make it sound so easy--instead of trying to accelerate a space ship to speeds faster than light, all you have to do is "move a chunk of space time" with the ship inside the space time bubble. Sounds good to me, but I suspect moving a chunk of space-time continuum takes a lot of energy. So next up: find a source of dilithium crystals.

The new Kindle DX by Amazon is out. It's a bigger version the older Kindles, and the main feature is a much bigger screen. The gadget cost $489, but some of that goes toward the free connectivity on the Sprint cellular network. You can download books and news via the wireless link, and recent novels start at $10.

From the good folks in Wilson, NC, an excerpt from a letter that fiber equipment manufacturer Alcatel wrote in support of the right of communities to improve broadband services. Good for Alcatel. In part, it is probably a business decision, which makes it even more interesting--the company must know that municipal broadband efforts are good business.

I am back from three days at the Broadband Properties annual conference. As more communities make investments in broadband infrastructure, we are beginning to get some interesting data back on the economic impact.

In Anson, Indiana, a developer is putting duct and fiber to 1790 homes and 9 million square feet of commercial and retail space--all part of a master planned community. The investment has brought an Amazon distribution center and 1200 jobs to the community.

From Beaumont, Texas, an interesting article with some good anecdotal data about newly emerging job opportunities where high performance, affordable broadband is available in rural areas. And where it is not, people are actually renting commercial office space to do jobs that could be done from home--a very sad state of affairs. Nationwide, millions of new jobs could open up in rural communities if the right kind of affordable broadband is available.

A new report by Nielsen says time spent watching video online has increased in the past five years by 2,000%. And the number of people watching video online is increasing by 10% per year, meaning in about seven years, everyone will be watching video on the Internet. TV is dead, dead, dead.

Wilson, North Carolina decided a couple of years ago to build it's own municipal fiber network after it got tired of begging incumbent providers for better services and getting turned down. Now the fight is being taken to the state legislature, where the incumbent providers are trying to get laws passed to prevent local governments from getting involved in telecom efforts but to also prevent local governments for applying for broadband stimulus funds. This is also happening in Pennsylvania.

Here is a nice little table that compares the price of broadband in various places around the world. Stockholm's municipal fiber network has the best pricing: $11 per month for 100/100 megabits (symmetric). Compare that to some U.S. offerings like one incumbent's 50/20 megabit (asymmetric, less than half the capacity) service for $145.

A recent report says YouTube is losing more than a million dollars a day. Even for Google, that eventually adds up to a lot of money. Since Google acquired YouTube, the advertising giant has begun including advertisements on YouTube pages as well as embedding ads in some videos. But the huge cost of dishing out video to the world is still much higher than the ad revenue earned.

I think there is a longer term problem that will eventually force YouTube to change direction or even fade away: YouTube fatigue.