Technology Futures

The community of Nuenen, Holland has great news for those interested in multi--service open networks. The community broadband project, which had hoped for a 35% take rate, has seen much, much better results:

"The 'pitch' in Nuenen is not about 'bandwidth' 'fibre' or anything techie. Nuenen has an elderly community, consequently Ons Net aimed to appeal to a 75 year old woman who does not own a computer nor used the internet," he explained.

Eliot Spitzer, the governor of New York, has called for universal access to broadband in the state. The text of his speech is here (note that you have to scroll down past the agriculture remarks to get to the broadband stuff).

Unlike the rest of the world, cellphones in the U.S. only work on the network for which they were originally purchased, and we have always had to buy the phones from the cellular provider. In Europe, for example, you can walk into almost any store and buy a cheap cellphone and then activate it for use on the network of your choice.

AT&T has announced it is dumping all its payphones. The "new" AT&T says they don't make any money. Payphone use has been declining dramatically as the use of cellphones has risen. Oddly enough, Verizon claims it still makes money from pay phones.

Even stranger: AT&T had more payphones in 1902 than it does today.

Those handy wireless keyboards are a security risk. Researchers have discovered that they easily monitor every keystroke sent from a wireless keyboard to the computer. The keyboards use a very weak form of encryption that can be easily monitored using an inexpensive radio receiver from as much as thirty feet away, and the encryption algorithm is easy to crack using virtually any computer--no special supercomputer required.

Here is an article about how Northrop Grumman is moving jobs to small towns and cities. The company reports that labor savings can be more than 40%--a substantial amount that pays off year after year, and more than covers the initial cost of moving facilities. One of the locations cited is the small Virginia town of Lebanon. Lebanon is a small town located deep in the heart of the Blue Ridge mountains, a good 30 minute drive from the interstate.

In yet another indication that quality of life is increasingly affecting economic development, a HUD newsletter had the following snippet:

Japan continues to rocket past the U.S. when it comes to fiber deployment. Japanese businesses and residents can get fiber broadband connections in more than a third of the country, compared to less than 2% of the U.S. Japanese broadband customers also pay much less; a 50 megabit fiber connection in Japan sells for under $30 a month.

The somewhat elderly Eagles rock band has given record companies the boot with the band's latest album. The Eagles simply skipped working with a record company at all, and went straight to Wal-mart to sell their new CD. The two CD set is priced at a very reasonable twelve bucks. The artists get a bigger share of the sales, and music lovers spend less and get more.

Even more interesting, the two CD set is priced low enough that some music stores are simply going to Wal-mart, buying a bunch of the CDs, and then marking them up and selling them in their own stores.

Here is yet another article proclaiming that the Internet will run out of bandwidth in two years. This article is not all that different than articles I read in 1997, 1999, 2001, 2003, and 2005. I would have to check, but I bet many of them were written around this time of year--the holiday season. Vendors save new product announcements for after the New Year, local projects slow down, and for the next six weeks or so, there is not a lot of technology news.

A California start up backed by the Google founders may have developed, finally, the break through that the solar energy business has been waiting for. Traditional solar cells have always required an expensive fabrication process that used silicon as a raw material. Nanosolar has developed a process that prints a nanotechnology based ink onto thin sheets that can be put on roofs of buildings, on top of cars and trucks, and anywhere that electric power is needed.

This article suggests that the iPod may be the new TV and radio. The writer talks about how she is regularly downloading radio and TV programs to her iPod and watching them on her train ride home every afternoon from the office.

Internet radio dropped off the radar years ago because of royalty issues. Start up Internet radio stations streaming music were not always paying royalties, and the record companies responded by imposing absurdly expensive royalties that put most Internet radio stations out of business.

Both houses of Congress have passed the Community Broadband Act of 2007. The bill fixes a defect in the 1996 Telecom act that says "any entity" may offer telecom services. The meaning of "any" was challenged repeatedly in state level lawsuits, and some misguided state legislatures went even farther and made it illegal for local governments to start telecom service offerings.

I was in another meeting with economic developers, and there was a growing recognition that broadband and power are the new water and sewer. In the Manufacturing Economy, it was water and sewer capacity that often made the difference when trying to attract manufacturing plants to a region.

I spent a good part of the day with a group of economic developers in a major northeastern state. We had some businesspeople in the meeting as well, and listened as two business owners described their frustration with the lack of connectivity outside of major metropolitan areas. In one case, the business owner had moved his staff and business headquarters from the New York metro area to a small city with a lower cost of living and great recreational opportunities near by (relocation based on quality of life issues, not water and sewer availability).

USA Today and many other papers and news outlets are carrying stories on Google's gPhone, which will be an open source software-powered cell phone. Sort of. The phone will use a variant of Linux, and users will be able to load non-Google software on it.

But the exact business model is still under wraps. It will probably be free or very low fee, but Google is in the business of making money. The company already intends to put many of its own applications and services on the phone, and one has to wonder if you will be able to remove them or use competing software.

The city of Minneapolis negotiated a deal with the wireless provider US Internet last year to provide a citywide wireless system. As part of that deal, the city is receiving about a half a million dollars a year for ten years. The funds will be used to support community portals for neighborhoods in the city. Planning for those portals is taking place right now. It is a great idea, but the city left a lot of money on the table.

The iPhone has broken all customer satisfaction records, with 82% of iPhone owners saying they are "Very satisfied" with the device. This is the highest rating that any cellphone has ever received, and an indication that Apple once again has raised the bar for a market.

Newsweek reports that Google search may be slipping. I have complained for a long time that Google searches tend to have too many results, and many of those results are not relevant. It turns out lots of other people have noticed that as well. More and more Internet searches are being performed by other search engines like Ask, Dogpile, Yahoo, and Microsoft.