Technology Futures

This misleading article suggests an astroturf effort to discredit community broadband projects.

Some incumbents may be fearful of the stimulus funding because it will enable many community projects to meet build out goals much more quickly than originally planned, and to show that they can be financially viable.

There is a mixture of disinformation and truth in the short article, combined skillfully to paint with a very broad brush.

This story about how some laid off sign manufacturing workers used technology like Facebook to help each other cope with job loss and job seeking has an interesting nugget in the middle of the story.

According to Broadband Reports, a bill is being considered by the Pennsylvania legislature that would make it virtually impossible for communities in that state to use stimulus funds for any kind of broadband infrastructure--even in areas that are unserved or underserved by incumbents.

Paul Graham has a short, cogent article about why TV has the lost the computer vs. TV wars. He has several reasons, but two key ones are that things like BitTorrent and YouTube have trained people to watch video on computers, and the social, interactive features of things like FaceBook, blogs, and email really do connect people in a way that is impossible with TV. A good read.

Ed Dreistadt reports on a New York Times article that says that TV is doing "fine," despite the fact that other old media like newspapers are dropping like flies. As Ed notes, some of us are not so sure. I'm regularly bumping into people that are telling me they hardly watch TV anymore. They get news online, and they can download most TV shows and watch them whenever they want. And of course, a lot of what we used to watch on TV can be accessed as short snippets on YouTube or the network sites.

Amelia Brazell tells the story of sending a Twitter message to someone about the curative effects of an over the counter cold remedy called Zicam. A bit later, she received via Twitter a coupon for Zicam.

It's an interesting example of how new communications tools are changing advertising. A simple Twitter search by the Zicam folks allowed them to identify an individual customer and then at virtually no cost, send that customer a coupon. Try that with TV, radio, or magazine advertising.

I will be conducting a webinar tomorrow on open networks. The sponsor is the Fiber To The Home Council, and the link to the program and additional information is here.

If you have been interested in open access and open service networks, I'll be providing a half hour overview of the business, financial, and technical issues related to making these a success, and there will be a thirty minute question and answer session.

The folks at Handshake 2.0 have reminded me that it was exactly thirteen years ago that Blacksburg made the cover of USA Weekend, a widely circulated Sunday supplement. The Blacksburg Electronic Village (BEV) project was just a little more than two years old. We had turned on Internet access in October, 1993, and became the first general purpose ISP in the world. Long lines at the BEV office were common for the next several years as people eagerly registered to get Internet access.

Broadband investments should be part of a larger set of community and economic development strategies. This handout describes what is needed to bring Main Street back to life, with a particular focus on attracting a broader mix of professional businesses, entrepreneurial start ups, and high tech firms.

This handout summarizes some basic policy principles that ought to guide local, state, and national broadband policy.

A British company called Reaction Engines has unveiled plans for a new unmanned, reusuable earth to orbit spacecraft. The ship will be able to carry 12 tons of cargo into orbit and then return to earth. The spacecraft uses a new kind of dual use rocket engine that is air-breathing for take off and then switches to liquid oxygen in the upper atmosphere. The company says it will take about ten years to get the design into space.

Ed Dreistadt sent me this link about using the iPhone as an in-vehicle interface for information like tire pressure and reminders about changing your oil. One key design feature of the iPhone is its interoperatbility--it has WiFi, so it can talk to any other WiFi device, it supports standard email and Web data, and it has an open software API so it is fast and easy to write custom applications for the iPhone.

Verizon gets a pat on the back for cracking down on spam. The company has announced that it will finally close Port 25 on its mail servers. Port 25 allows email be sent without any authentication, making it easy for spammers to use "zombie" PCs infected with spambot software to send spam email.

A Vietnamese researcher has cracked face recognition technology that has been built into some laptops. Built in or add-on cameras are designed to do facial recognition with the aim of making the laptop more secure. But the researcher found the software could be easily duped by displaying a picture of the owner, and a brute force attack (by showing the software many face images in succession) also worked.

Those of you that are using Twitter can now get my blog news via Twitter.

Via Broadband_Report's Twitter feed, here is an NPR story that shows the impact fiber can have in rural areas. An entrepreneurial start up business in tiny Ten Sleep, Wyoming (pop. 350) is on track to employ 700 home-based workers by the end of this year. The business? Teaching English to Koreans. Oh, and the 15,000 students are in Korea.

Danny Choo guestblogs at BoingBoing about getting a SECOND 100 megabit fiber connection at his home in Japan. Why get a second connection? He's using it run a server, and the cost is only $11/month for the first year of service. The second year, the price goes up to a whopping $52 per month.

A new study of mobile access to the Web indicates that in less than two years, Apple's share of that market has grown to 51%, with the popularity of the iPod Touch growing rapidly. The Blackberry is in second place with 19%, and most other portable devices with a Web browser have much smaller shares.

A section of a Colorado highway now has cashless toll booths. High resolution cameras take a picture of the license plate on each car passing through the toll plaza. If the car does not have an EasyPass, the license plate is matched with vehicle registration records and you get a bill at the end of the month.

Facebook has quietly changed its terms of service. Formerly, if you canceled your account, all your content was deleted and that was that. Under the new terms, Facebook retains an "irrevocable, perpetual" license allowing the company to do whatever it likes with whatever you have posted.