Technology Futures

We finally dumped our last analog phone line, which we had kept around in case we needed to send a fax. We decided to get rid of it because we've been using an efax service. We replaced it with an additional VoIP phone line, and our monthly charges for that phone went from an average of $100/month to $35/month.

Cisco has announced a new marketing effort to expand the availability of high quality videoconference facilities, or telepresence rooms. What is the difference between these rooms and older videoconference systems? Three things:

YouTube has inked deals to start offering full length TV shows. The Google-backed company intends to go head to head with Hulu, which has several deals with networks to carry TV shows.

Here is an absolutely spectacular picture of Mercury from a new NASA space probe. It pretty much confirms that Mercury is not a place anyone would want to live, and it is an amazing example of technology in action.

Google now has its own satellite, or at least exclusive access to one. The firm made a deal with the U.S. government to help finance a new image mapping satellite in return for exclusive commercial rights to the images. It was probably cheaper than paying for images from other commercial and government satellites.

The City of St. Paul is taking a serious look at fiber to the home as part of a community broadband effort for the city. A local group has started a Web site that has a lot of good information on it.

A lawsuit filed by the incumbent telephone company in Monticello, Minnesota sought to stop the city from building its own fiber to the home (FTTH) network. The project was designed as a public/private partnership, with Hiawatha Broadband Communications, another Minnesota telecom firm, signed up to operate the system and provide services.

Yesterday, the 10th District Court in Minnesota dismissed the case, finding that the city had the right to issue bonds for a telecom utility and that the city had the right to operate a telecom utility.

New Mexico continues to roar far ahead of the rest of the country with a wide ranging mix of game-changing economic development strategies. The state seems to be successfully attracting the brightest and best entrepreneurs and businesspeople in the country, and economic developers in the state are greasing the skids with investments in space, energy, and entertainment.

Ford has announced that parental controls will be available on some of their new cars, beginning with selected 2010 models. The controls will allow parents to set the top speed of the car, limit how loud the radio can be played, and the car will beep continuously if the front seat belts are not in use.

Now if only they could also include a parental control that forces teenagers into the car at 11 PM and drives them straight home--that is a feature a lot of parents would be pay for.

In the continuing saga of voting machines that simply don't work, here is perhaps the most alarming story to date. In a Washington, D.C. voting precinct during the primaries, a "static discharge" magically created an extra 1,500 votes on the memory cartridge that stores the vote tally. The only slightly good news is that someone did notice that the manual tally of voters at the precinct was only 326, but what if it had not been caught?

The Blue Ridge Crossroads region in southwest Virginia may be the best place to start a business in the United States, if the results they rolled out this week are any indication. Three years ago, the region's leaders started an aggressive program to diversify their economic development strategy to include more focus on entrepreneurs and business start ups.

SpaceX, the private rocket company, successfully launched a satellite size hunk of aluminum into orbit, making it the first private rocket to boost an object into earth orbit. Like Bert Rutan's SpaceShipOne (which only made a sub-orbital trip), the SpaceX accomplishment will continue to accelerate private investment in space. Rutan is busy building a fleet of space tourism vehicles for Virgin Galactic.

Verizon and AT&T deserve congratulations for endorsing an opt-in approach to tracking online behavior. This means they won't try to build dossiers of where you go online unless they get your permission. The online dossier information can be valuable, as data can be mined and sold to advertisers.

Nigeria is using a high performance network for the national post office (1,500 locations) to jumpstart community broadband connectivity. A new national backbone will be built, using the post office needs as an anchor tenant. But the high performance network will be designed to support other community broadband and service needs.

Back in 1995, I foolishly proposed a project for the Blacksburg Electronic Village that would have us partner with the local public radio station to begin broadcasting over the new Internet thingy that was just beginning to take off. It was very modest, and involved streaming audio news reports over the Internet--5 to 10 minutes of mostly local news a day, but in four languages, because of the large international population in Blacksburg.

No one believed anyone would ever be interested in listening to audio over the Internet.

Japanese scientists are developing plans for a space elevator. A couple of U.S. firms have also been working on the same concept, which does not require new scientific breakthroughs, but is instead requires solving a series of engineering and materials fabrication problems. The biggest one is developing a process to make a 62,000 mile ribbon of carbon nanotubes.

New research suggests that email, to hardly anyone's surprise, is a huge time waster. A UK scientist studying how we use email found that stopping to check your email imposes a big time loss on us as we switch back and forth mentally between tasks. For those who have their email set to check automatically on frequent intervals, the overhead of task switching can eat up an entire workday out of a five day work week.

Google's power hungry servers continue to send the company out to look for cheaper sources of electric power. According to this article, the search giant is studying the idea of putting massive banks of servers on giant barges tethered in the ocean, where wave energy would generate the power needed for the servers.

Perhaps the most frequently asked question we receive is, "How will broadband help our local economy?"

The answer is, "...in ways you can't even imagine."

Broadband and the expansion of connectivity via both fiber and wireless is creating entirely new businesses and jobs that simply don't appear in the strategic plans of most economic development agencies.

The IPSO Alliance (IP for Smart Objects) is mapping the future of appliances and gadgets. Many common household and industrial items will have an IP address in the near future, enabling them to connect to the Internet and perform functions like system diagnostics, power management, transmission of environmental information (temperature, light, motion, health status), and software upgrades.