Technology Futures

Ars Technical has an article that reviews several signals that suggest the boomtown days of online advertising are about to come to an end. The sharp drop in the sales of high end electronics is bringing a related drop in advertising for those devices, but the article suggests the bigger driver in online ads is a maturing of the marketplace, where businesses are finally figuring out just what an online ad is worth with respect to click throughs and sales.

New Mexico's rise to dominance of the space industry in the U.S. may become the fodder of economic development case studies for decades. The State of New Mexico just announced that it has signed a twenty year lease of facilities at Spaceport America with Virgin Galactic. Virgin Galactic says it intends to locate its world headquarters at the facility, bringing with it jobs and tourism.

TGDaily reports that Microsoft's share of the Web browser market has fallen below 70% for the first time. The open source Firefox browser from the Mozilla organization now has over 20%, with other browsers like Safari and the iPhone Web browser picking up the rest. In a testament to the popularity of the iPhone, it's share of the Web browser market has tripled (but it is still very small).

2008 will likely be remembered as the year of the tipping point for newspapers. A new study by the Pew Foundation indicates that more people now get their news from the Internet than from newspapers, a sharp increase over 2007. 59% of young people (under 30) use the Internet as their main source of news and information, a figure that has doubled in the past year.

LED lights are slowly improving, and a new manufacturing process using silicon instead of more expensive sapphire may bring down the cost of LED "light bulbs" within two years. Like record players, CD players, and VCRs, light bulbs will seem quaint and horribly old-fashioned to the next generation of kids, who will have grown up with LED lighting as normal.

I have long advocated a revenue share model for community broadband, in which a single community-owned digital infrastructure is made available to private sector providers to deliver services like voice, video, and Internet access to customers. Service providers would pay a share of their revenue to the network to cover the cost of build out and maintenance.

Critics of this approach argue that it is too "risky," and "unproven," although it has worked successfully for years in other countries.

Wired has a thoughtful article about the potential (good and bad) for a broadband stimulus initiative. There is much speculation that the incoming adminstration will, among other spending initiatives, provide funds for broadband deployment.

A new report says that mobile phones are playing a bigger role in Web use, especially with social networking sites. Users are updating their social network information directly from their cellphones, adding commentary, pictures, and video with their phones. The iPhone and other iPhone competitors have much improved Web browsers, allowing fast and easy access to social networking Web sites, and the integrated cameras make it easy to upload multimedia content.

Here is a first person account from someone who just canceled their cable TV service (but kept the Internet connection). They have what is becoming the same old story, "Who needs it?" Almost any show you want to watch can be watched via a broadband Internet connection, so you can save yourself forty or fifty dollars a month by just skipping TV altogether.

This article discusses falling ad revenue for social networking sites. That probably explains why the ads on FaceBook seem sleazier lately. About every other time I log in, I get pummeled with an ad to meet "sexy singles in Blacksburg," along with what is supposed to be an example of a "sexy single" in a bikini. Bottom fishing ads like this one may be helping to pay the bills on these sites, but as the sleaze factor goes up, more parents are going to start declaring the sites off-limits to their kids.

WalMart is the latest company to build a special iPhone-compatible interface to its Web site. As the iPhone becomes more popular, more Web sites (news sites, particularly) are adding content designed to work well with the iPhone Web browser.

An October, 2008 study released by the Pew Internet and American Life Project supports other data showing that more and more people are not bothering with the TV anymore. Among all adults, Pew reports that TV viewing has declined 25% in the past year. Among 18-49 year olds, a slightly higher average of 28%. What this means is that if the trend continues at about the same rate, no one will be watching TV in less than a decade. What has replaced TV? The Internet.

As research into the feasibility of a space elevator continues, scientists are discovering it may be quite difficult to make the space elevator work, largely due to the Coriolis effect.

The New York Times is taking a mortgage on its office building in Manhattan because it can't pay its bills. The LA Times has filed for bankruptcy. Many local papers are quietly going out of business. The newspaper is a venerable icon, but smearing ink on dead trees is, well, dead. Newspapers have failed utterly to adapt to the Internet, largely because they have been unable to distinguish between their core competency and their historical distribution medium. Newspapers have stubbornly clung to the notion that it is their job to throw wads of paper in driveways every morning.

2008 may be the year that TV died. Lately, I have begun meeting and hearing about people that have simply disconnected their cable TV service. They can get whatever shows they want to watch off the Internet, fee or free, with less effort and with more convenience. If you are willing to pay a buck or two, you can watch a one hour TV show in forty minutes because the commercials have been removed--is twenty minutes of your time worth $2?

With the downturn in the economy, we are likely to see many more weak social networking business ventures fail. It Died is likely to do very well for the next year or so as it documents flops like People Connection, Flip.com, and Pownce. It's like the remake of an old horror movie--The Return of the Dot.Com Swamp Thing.

Outgoing FCC Chairman Kevin Martin has called for free Internet access nationwide, with adult content filters in place to prevent children from accessing porn. This would cost billions to implement, and it is not at all clear who would pay for it. "Free" to the user is not the same as "free" of all costs. Someone still has to fund the construction of the network and pay for the substantial ongoing support and maintenance.

ComputerWorld reports that Microsoft's share of the operating system marketplace continues to shrink, and has now fallen below 90% for the first time in more than a decade. The recent 2% drop in marketshare was made up primarily by Apple, and a much smaller gain in Linux-based computers. Microsoft's share of Web browsers has also been shrinking steadily, with FireFox, the free open source browser, taking most of the users away from Internet Explorer.

The provincial government of Ontario is spending millions to help rural communities get high speed broadband. They have a nice slogan: "Turning miles into milliseconds." And that is really what it is about; rural communities have traditionally been isolated because of distance--many miles to major population centers and jobs. Broadband is the 21st century equivalent of the interstate highway, getting people closer to jobs, businesses, and economic development opportunities.

Early reviewers of the RIM (Blackberry) Storm phone do not have many good things to say about the smartphone competitor to the Apple iPhone. The biggest criticism is the apparently clunky virtual QWERTY keypad. It must be bad, because I am not a big fan of the Apple "soft" keypad--I still make a lot of mistakes with it.