Technology Futures

A new study of mobile Web browsers shows that the iPhone has captured the top spot, beating all other mobile phones and PDAs. The iPhone and the WiFi only iPod Touch not only have extraordinarily sharp and clear screens, they have big screens, and the touch interface makes browsing easy. Overall, the iPhone has a mix of features that makes it a very compelling device.

This article provides another example of the "no free lunch" principle as it applies to community wireless. Sprint is having trouble rolling out its WiMax service offering because of backhaul costs (you need fiber to the towers to provide adequate bandwidth) and subscribers are getting about 4 megabits of bandwidth--exactly what I was hearing years ago from knowledgeable wireless experts.

A study by a watchdog e-voting group in Maryland called SaveOurVotes found that in that state, the switch to electronic voting machines raised the cost of elections by 866%.

But wait, there's more! The counties are still paying off a $67 million dollar loan needed to purchase the machines, even though the machines were found to have serious security flaws and have had to abandoned in favor of the older and more secure optical scanning equipment--which is much less expensive.

Find Your Spot is an online relocation service that helps business owners and prospective employees find a place to live that matches personal preferences like the weather, arts & culture, recreation, education, the cost of living, health care, and the local economy.

Here is a key quote from the FAQ portion of the site:

In a just released Forbes survey, Blacksburg, Virginia is ranked tenth in the nation as one of the best small places to live and to work. If you live in a small community, it is worth spending some time reviewing the Forbes study. Of the nine factors they use to rank communities, four of the nine are related directly to quality of life. These factors are Culture and Leisure, Crime Rate, Educational Attainment, and Cost of Living.

Sprint is touting a new Samsung phone that is very similar to the iPhone. One of the most notable differences is that the new phone runs on Sprint's EVDO data network, giving it email and Web access speeds 4-5 times faster than AT&T's EDGE data network. Apple has always maintained that it used the slower network to provide better battery life.

Recently, when we have had people over to house for dinner or when at someone else's home, I notice that a common topic of discussion is what is showing on YouTube. Everyone has a story about some usually goofy thing they saw recently on the video site. Anecdotally, several people have shared that they often just spend a little time in the evening goofing off on YouTube. This is usually followed by the admission they don't turn on the TV much anymore.

Virgin Galactic, the space travel start up and spin off of Virgin Airlines, has teamed up with Google to start colonizing Mars. Google is supplying the financial muscle for the venture, and Virgin is contributing the work the firm has already done on their privately funded space vehicle. The two companies are already beginning to solicit team members willing to be part of the first Martian colony.

A lengthy discussion on SlashDot highlights a new tactic by Amazon. The book distribution giant is trying to muscle out other print on demand services by forcing authors who use print on demand to use Amazon's print on demand (POD) service or else--the "else" being Amazon won't list their book.

This New York Times article makes it clear that there is no free lunch for municipal wireless. There are still a lot of communities pursuing initiatives that cling to the idea that they can get a wireless provider to come in a build an extensive wireless network for free. These kinds of efforts have been and continue to fail, due to cost overruns, poor performance, and the lack of business-class services. Wireless is necessary as a mobile access technology, but it is not sufficient.

An Australian wireless ISP who has operated a WiMax network for more than a year unleashed a blistering attack on the protocol, calling it a "disaster" and that it "failed miserably." Unfortunately, the article provides little detail on exactly what frequencies were used (WiMax is a catch all term for the protocol, which can use several different chunks of frequency spectrum). The interesting thing about the comments is that the firm is planning to deploy more traditional WiFi as part of their wireless network.

Google has announced a new "search within a search" option that has online retailers worried that the search behemoth will steal customers. The new option lets you use Google to search only pages that are part of a single site. So if you want to buy a digital camera and go to Google to start the search, you get the usual search results page. If you click on a Best Buy site, as an example, Google will now do an extended search only on the Best Buy site.

The City of Seattle, which selected the open access, open services model as a general direction for its municipal broadband effort last year, is planning to issue an RFP to actually select a fiber to the home vendor. City officials continue to be dismayed with the service offerings from the incumbent telephone and cable companies.

According to a New York Times article, Europe is pulling far ahead of the United States in high performance broadband deployment. European countries, led by Sweden, Denmark, Holland, and Finland, are adding 50,000 broadband lines a day.

Christopher Mitchel of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance has written an article in the current issue of Broadband Properties.

There was widespread speculation last week, including a cover page article in USA Today, that the March Madness basketball tournament would create widespread Internet slowdowns. The NCAA decided to make all 65 games available on the Internet, leading to predictions of clogged networks and low productivity at work while employees sat at their desk and watched "TV" on their computers.

The IP TV basketball games are yet one more strong signal that there is a sea change underway as more and more people are tuning in to watch video via the Internet, rather than on "television."

Here is a handy gadget that Belkin is marketing towards travelers, but would also be very useful at home: it is a small surge protector with two USB charging ports. This can help reduce clutter at home where you need, for example, a surge protector for your laptop charger, a charger for your cellphone, and a charger for your MP3 player. Note that not all cellphones can be charged from a USB port, but in my opinion, that should be a mandatory feature.

With the announcement of the iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK) which allows software developers to write native applications for the iPhone, Apple has also changed another set of rules for the game.

Apple unveiled the long promised SDK (Software Development Kit) for the iphone, along with serious support for business enterprise applications and services, including Cisco VPN (Virtual Private Network) support and Microsoft Active Sync support. The latter is needed to make the iPhone work fully with businesses using Entourage and other Microsoft business applications. The SDK allows developers to write and distribute iPhone native software applications, including games.

Here is a short, two page paper that defines the characteristics of a modern community broadband infrastructure designed specifically to encourage economic development and jobs creation. The overall approach is focused on public/private partnerships that creates new business and market opportunities for services providers so that local government telecom investments are not seen as "competing" with the private sector.