Technology Futures

If there was not already enough to worry about, the CIA has indicated that the agency has credible evidence of terrorist cyber-attacks on electric power grids outside the U.S.

Bandwidth caps may finally get the light of day from broadband providers. The way we sell broadband is upside down from every other business. If you are an Internet service provider, you make the most money if your customer never uses your service. You make the least money if the customer uses your service a lot. This is why most of us have mediocre access to Internet-based services--selling broadband by the bucket is a lousy way to try to make a living if your customers expect you to refill the bucket a lot (and many customers do).

Hitachi is showing off a table top computer. It is a large, fifty inch display touch sensitive display screen driven by a standard personal computer. Installed in a table, it enables several people to work together comfortably, using the touch screen to interact with the current application--programs like Google Earth are apparently stunning in this format.

I had just finished up a meeting at a community interested in investing in telecom infrastructure, and before I left the building, I decided to take advantage of the local WiFi to send an email to someone who had been at the meeting but had already left; I wanted to confirm a follow up meeting.

HD quality streaming video has arrived on the Web. Pajamas Media, a conservative news blog, has posted HD quality video interviews with three of the Republican candidates. The large screen format requires a minimum bandwidth of 1.5 megabits (the equivalent of a T1 connection), compared to the 200-300 kilobits that a YouTube video might try to use.

You read the headline correctly: "Music sales plunge amid rising sales." Only the music industry, clinging desperately to Mr. Edison's gramaphone technology, could make a 14% growth spurt sound like doom and gloom.

The lead on a widely circulated story about music sales in 2007 is full of hand-wringing about the precipitous 9% decline for the "fast fading" music business.

As I have noted in the past, I could easily have an entire category devoted to nothing but iPod accessories. But there are entire blogs and news sites devoted to the topic. I try to pick out the items that have some broader implications.

This decade's format battle, largely ignored by everyone except the entertainment industry and unmarried nerds with lots of disposable income, has been the fight between the two HD disc formats--HD DVD and Blu-ray. In the past year, the movie studios have been releasing some movies in one format, the other, or both. Normal people have not been interested in buying movies in formats that could disappear in a year or two, so sales have been tepid.

The latest iPod accessory, as usual, is much bigger and more expensive than any of the current iPod models. It is a flat panel television. Manufacturer JVC is putting an iPod dock in some of its new television sets. Once an iPod has been plugged in, users will be able to use the TV remote control to play music, view photos, and watch videos from the iPod.

If you have not yet purchased a big, expensive, flat screen TV, you may want to wait a bit. Tiny, iPod-size projectors may finally be coming this year. Prototype small projectors have been promised for at least a couple of years, but the size of the image and the brightness were limiting factors. This new projector from a company called Microvison uses red, green, and blue lasers to generate an HD size picture on almost any surface.

I have been on the 'net since the late 1970s. In the seventies, what passed for the 'net was small groups of bulletin board systems, with the amazing FreeNet and the later FidoNet cobbling together small groups of mostly local users.

Walmart has killed its movie download business, which is not even a year old. There were many problems with it:

Following on the heels of Ohio, Colorado has de-certified the voting machines used in some of the most populous parts of the state. Diebold, Sequoia, and ES&S machines were among those found to have problems. The state found that the machines were easy to tamper with, and that the machines lacked any audit trail capabilities, meaning there would be no way to detect tampering if it happened.

A new report by the Kaufmann Foundation indicates that 465,000 new businesses are being created every month in the United States. This probably represents a million jobs or more being created by small businesses every single month. The growth in start ups demonstrates why a community or regional economic development strategy has to include not just business attraction as a strategy, but also business creation.

Here is an interesting analysis done by Stuart Mease, who works for the City of Roanoke, Virginia. Mease's job is trying to recruit young people to live and work in the Roanoke area. He has provided a cost of living comparison between Roanoke and some of the bigger towns and cities that are more likely to attract younger workers.

New studies of electronic voting machines in Ohio has led a top official there to call for a ban on the machines. The Ohio Secretary of State noted "critical security failures" on the machines that made it easy to tamper with vote counts.

There are numerous news reports on the "awful" sales figures coming on from online vendors--it looks like "only" 18% growth for the Christmas season, compared to last year's 27% growth.

Eighteen percent growth is pretty good by any measure, since most retailers would say a good year is one that averages 4-5% growth. Any other business in America would be delirious with 18% growth, but somehow the news media wants to spin this as the world coming to an end.

Microsoft and Google are each prepping for a fight to the death over ownership of users. This SlashDot article discusses the approach each is taking and what the consequences may be for both users and the two firms.

Google has a more clearly defined strategy; the company thinks most applications like email, word processing, spreadsheets, and graphics will be hosted by Google computers, and users will access the applications over an ever fast broadband network.

Down in southwest Virginia, in the heart of bluegrass country, right along the route of The Crooked Road, The Wired Road is under construction. The Wired Road is an integrated fiber and wireless, open, multi-service network that intends to bring high performance broadband services to Carroll and Grayson counties and the city of Galax.

The Energy Economy continues to generate some of the most innovative new ideas we've seen in a long time. University of Delaware researchers have proposed V2G technology (Vehicle to Grid). A home and automobile designed to support V2G would be able to send electric power stored in the battery of an electric vehicle back up the grid--making your electric meter spin backwards and reducing your electric bill.