Technology Futures

USA Today reports (page 3B) that FaceBook is planning to allow search engines to index the site. This means that what people thought was not searchable may become public, depending upon the rules FaceBook sets up for crawling by the search engines. At a minimum, FaceBook will allow indexing of names and photos unless users choose to opt out.

This article from the New York Times (registration required, link may disappear) is an excellent discussion of how quality of life is, more and more, driving relocation decisions not just of businesses but of workers, especially younger workers.

An ugly, smelly weed called jatropha may be another piece of the energy puzzle. According to a Slashdot article, the weed produces a seed that can have up to 40% oil content, which can be easily converted to a biofuel for diesel engines. Jatropha apparently grows easily, requires little water or fertilizer, and can be grown on marginal lands that would not support energy intensive crops like corn and soybeans.

Yet another muni WiFi project has foundered on the rocks of NoBusinessModel. WiFi vendors don't mind overselling the benefits of free WiFi, because their business model usually involves getting the local government to take all the risk. In some cases, local governments are putting up hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars for WiFi systems that have yet to prove themselves.

This article talks about Japan's investment in broadband networks, including a nationwide fiber deployment with speeds of 100 megabits. The country has a built in advantage because of its small size; short distances between telephone switches and homes means DSL can run faster over existing copper cables--at speeds higher than is possible in most parts of the U.S. But the country regards copper as obsolete and sees DSL as a stopgap measure until fiber connections are ubiquitous.

In a strange twist, PC World has found that a MacBook Pro 17" laptop runs Windows Vista faster than all the other Windows laptops it has tested.

The 'net is abuzz with discussions about the dramatic price cuts announced yesterday by Apple. The price of the pricey iPhone was cut by $200, and Apple also introduced an new iPod, called the iPod Touch, which is an iPhone without the phone function.

This article discusses the collapsing WiFi efforts in San Francisco, providing a real world data point that confirms what many of us have been saying for a long time: WiFi alone is not a complete solution for community broadband.

The European company (EADS) that builds the Ariane rockets used for commercial satellite launches has announced it has already completed the design for a combination jet/rocket plane that will provide tourists a brief ride into space.

The Energy Economy continues to churn away quietly. While oil prices bounce around like a barrel full of superballs, research in hydrogen, solar, and other alternative energy sources is setting the stage for a dramatic shift in how we obtain and store energy. The latest development involves a dramatic increase in the efficiency of solar cells--some 60% better.

Here is an interesting article that talks about what life might be like if the Federal Communications Commission was in charge of highways. It is not a pretty picture. The upcoming auction of 700 Mhz spectrum formerly used by TV stations is not likely to benefit communities or smaller, independent service providers.

Even as the newspaper industry struggles with the transition to what some are calling the "viewspaper," meaning viewing the news on the Web, at least one local newspaper delivery person is changing the way newspapers are delivered. In my neighborhood, the guy that delivers the paper has abandoned his Jeep Cherokee for a small electric cart. It is a street legal, oversize golf cart with enough room and power to haul the driver and two hundred or so newspapers.

A study by research firm Sophos indicates that Facebook users are very willing to give personal information to complete strangers. The firm set up a fake Facebook entry and then made "friend" requests to hundreds of other Facebook users. Most of them happily revealed enough personal information (family names, photos, etc) to make it easy to steal that person's identity, according to Sophos.

Galactic Suites, the space tourism venture, has a Web site with additional information about the space hotel it is building. Space-related businesses are already transforming the New Mexico economy, and states like Virginia and Texas are also beginning to reap benefits. Not every region will find a niche with space-related opportunities, but the success of New Mexico illustrates that boldness and determination pay when it comes to economic development.

In yet another Google flop, the company has announced it is closing its video store. Some thing work, some things don't. No problem there. But customers who downloaded videos from the Google store received a letter from Google notifying them that the videos they had "purchased" were going up in smoke. The movies have DRM (Digital Rights Management) attached to them, and once the store is closed, the movies are no longer watchable.

iPhone users are starting to get bills from AT&T (which is really SBC), and the bills are apparently stupefyingly detailed. This article describes 52 page, double-sided bills that include detail on billing items that cost $0.00. Apparently one of the problems is that even if you have an "unlimited" data plan (for using the Web and email features of the iPhone, AT&T provides billing line items for every time you access the 'net, even if there is no charge for such access.

Competition is a wonderful thing. As NetFlix and Blockbuster battle each other over customers for mail-based DVD movies, Blockbuster has purchased a company called MovieLink to compete with the NetFlix movie download service. The acquisition is particularly interesting because MovieLink has license agreements with several major movie studios, which are worth a lot more than any technology and systems the company might have in place.

For regular (and new) readers, we've updated the site and are going to try a new approach to comments. Spammers have been a chronic problem, but we are now using "captcha" validation of comments. We hope this will allow our readers to comment on articles and keep spammers at bay.

Registration is no longer required to post a comment or to ask a question, but you will have to correctly identify one of those squiggly strings of characters before hitting the submit button on your comment.

Best regards,
Andrew

If you are an economic developer and have not been paying much attention to the "old" utility service we call electricity, you may want to continue reading. A Samsung chip plant had a power outage that lasted only one day, but cost the company $43 million dollars in discarded product and lost revenue.

Mark Pryor (D-Ark) has decided that Congress and the Federal government should decide what we can and cannot see on our TVs, cellphones, and portable media devices. Pryor is sponsoring a bill that would require the FCC to develop a "super V-chip" that would have to be installed in every device that connects to any third party network, including the network.