Technology Futures

This just might work. Walmart may sell an inexpensive electric car. The company already has a car parts department and a car repair department with garages and lifts, so taking on service and maintenance of one or two cheap electric cars would not be a stretch. I think that over the next five or six years, as older second cars in families wear out, many will opt for a cheap electric for around town errands.

Amazon has released its updated version of the Kindle, the portable book reader. The original Kindle was ugly, heavy, and had too many sharp edges. The updated Kindle has been slimmed down and smoothed. It has longer battery life, and much better graphics (still black and white, though). This new version may actually catch on.

Lafayette, Louisiana's "third pipe" community broadband network has started signing up customers. Lafayette fought and won a difficult battle against an incumbent lawsuit that tried to stop the community broadband effort, but the city ultimately prevailed in court.

Regardless of what you think about the stimulus spending, cutting funds for broadband seems not well thought out. The U.S. is behind many other countries in part because government subsidies have been used heavily in other countries to accelerate availability of broadband.

In one of our planning efforts in a small city of 75,000, I met with a deli/restaurant owner about his broadband needs. He currently has a 3 meg connection and four phone lines, and he complained bitterly about the lack of broadband options and the slow speed. He processes all his credit card transactions over his Internet connection (less expensive than maintaining a separate phone line, and faster).

Here is a clever analysis of the financial woes of the New York Times. It turns out the Times, which is mired in red ink, would do much better financially if they gave most of their subscribers an ebook and let their readers download the paper every day.

AT&T may be headed back into the computer business. Back in the early eighties, AT&T was selling some of the best personal computers available, made by Olivetti in Italy under contract. The group I supervised at AT&T did site inspections at the Olivetti factories. AT&T also was selling the first Unix-based PC, made by Convergent Technologies.

If you are in the mood for a chuckle, take a look at the screen shot here, where someone discovered that Googling Google gives you a search results page warning you that every single Google service may damage your computer. Note: By the time I wrote this, Google had apparently fixed the problem.

A new report says more workers are employed in the wind-based power generation business than in the coal industry. Bad news for coal? Not necessarily, as coal will continue to be an important alternative to imported fossil fuels. Coal and nuclear will be important to support base load electric generating capacity, as wind and solar can't provide reliable 24/7 power.

Google's rumored GDrive would allow you to access your computer files from any Internet connection, and would be tightly coupled with Google's online applications. Users should be aware of potential content ownership issues. The user agreement for such a service would likely mirror other Google terms of use, which basically gives the company complete and full access to every bit of information stored in the Google "cloud computing" environment.

Senator John McCain, on Fox News Sunday, said, "...some of the projects and others that you just mentioned, $6 billion for broadband and internet access. That will take years." He was being interviewed about the stimulus package. Given careful oversight and a sharp focus on communities that have already done planning work, a lot of homes could get high performance wireless and fiber connections in 2009 and 2010. Most of the work would be done by private sector firms, which would create jobs.

FCC Commissioner Michael Copps has been named Acting Chairman of the FCC. This is good news for communities; Copps supports competition and is likely to help communities do more by shifting FCC attention away from favoring incumbent carriers and more towards creating a level playing field for all public and private networks.

Ireland plans to spend hundreds of millions on 100% broadband access for the country. An extensive wireless network will be deployed to reach rural towns and homes that currently lack any broadband options.

Duke University researchers have developed a cloaking device that is actually, um, a cloak. They have designed a nanotechnology-based material that has the property of bending electromagnetic radiation, including visible and infrared light. The picture accompanying this article shows someone in a cloak with the background behind them clearly visible.

Here is a report from a northern California homeowner who installed a large array of solar panels on his home six months ago, and has been carefully tracking energy usage since then. Not surprisingly, the panels generated a lot of power during the summer months, and output has been much more variable as the angle of the sun has changed during the winter (meaning less power). More cloudy days in the winter also affects output.

This article will probably give you a headache if you read it all the way to the end. It discusses the proposed delay in the transition to DTV (Digital TV). Somehow, the Federal government underfunded the converter box coupon program, and now there is a large backlog of requests for coupons that can't be filled.

A blogger named Jason Scott, among other online writers and discussion groups, has been talking about a new problem--over-hyped Web services and Web sites that have failed financially and are shutting down without giving users of those services or sites an adequate opportunity to make copies of blogs, pictures, and other materials posted to those sites. It is likely to be a growing problem as the economy slumps and many poorly thought out "Web 2.0" business plans fail.

Smart economic developers should start advertising immediately....in California. Businesses, engineers, scientists, and other business professionals are packing up and leaving the state. Many of them will be looking for the good quality of life in small towns and fiber to the home, so they can work from home and/or run their newly relocated business from home. And fiber in your local businesses parks will help attract the bigger firms moving from California.

I want one of these, but you can't buy it yet--a pocket-size projector that uses three lasers instead of LCD panels to create the images. What is not at all clear is how useful it really is. The projection distance and image size don't correlate sensibly with the light output (only ten lumens, where even modest LCD projectors offer 1000 lumens). But this is yet another pocket size projector that has been announced in the past year, so we'll eventually see these in stores.

Wales has apparently been following what Nigeria has been doing with broadband--using post offices as anchor tenants to bring "big broadband" connections into small towns.