Technology Futures

The Internet has not made travel obsolete. Despite the eventual ability to make high quality video "phone" calls as often as we make voice calls today, the need to travel for business is not going away.

Three trends are converging that could be very good news for rural regions that are far-sighted enough to take advantage of them.

Here is an interesting iPod gadget: a multimedia center designed for the kitchen. Not only can you plug in your iPod and listen to music, but it will also play video content from your iPod. It has a fold down LCD display, a TV tuner, an AM/FM radio, a clock, and a cooking timer. It is designed to mount under a cabinet, so it could replace a lot of stuff that takes up counter space.

I have heard from a couple of people that IE 7 does not display the pages correctly, so I have switched to a different theme. If you are having problems, please drop me a note and let me know what browser you are using.

Thanks,
Andrew

cohill -at- designnine.com

This article [link no longer available] speculates on whether or not Google has a mobile phone in the works. It would make sense for Google to do that, since Google now has a wide array of Web-enabled applications and services that would work nicely on a large screen mobile phone. The phone and its associated service might even be free or very low fee; if it was, Google would recover its costs by restricting what users can do on the phone and/or by interspersing ads with service access (you might have to view an ad to make a phone call or do a search).

Stuart Mease of the City of Roanoke and Roanoke Biz2Biz organized a terrific workshop on bloggers and blogging yesterday. I was invited to speak there, along with folks like Pat Matthews, Tom Markiewicz, and Keith Clinton.

I was at a regional bloggers conference yesterday, where several bloggers spoke about blogging and the value of bloggers to the community as well as the value of business-oriented blogs. One of the invited speakers was a local TV newsperson who has a fairly lightweight blog, and while this person started off talking about blogging, they quickly veered into a fingerpointing lecture about how "real" journalists have gone to journalism school and are trained in the ethics of reporting the news. It went downhill from there.

I am a member of several hotel frequent traveler programs, and all of them seem to have launched a new strategy of annoying their most important customers by bombarding them with surveys. Lately, every time I stay in a hotel (which is pretty often), a few days later I start getting email asking for my "valuable" input. I can delete the email without taking the survey, but some of the chains just keep sending you "reminders" that you have not yet filled out the survey. At that point, it is spam and nothing more than spam.

In what has to be the greatest use of technology ever, someone has developed a refrigerator that not only keeps cans of beer cold but also tosses them across the room to you so you don't have to get up off the couch. The remarkably simple system is highly accurate, and can be aimed remotely so that people sitting in different parts of the room can also get a beer with no more effort than moving an arm (to catch the beer).

Viacom is suing Google over unauthorized video clips on Google's recently acquired YouTube. YouTube fans record clips from their favorite shows (including many shows owned and produced by Viacom), and post them on YouTube for other people to watch. Part of what is going on is the fact that Viacom just bought into Joost, a YouTube competitor that will carry all of Viacom's content. So the lawsuit has two purposes: protect Viacom's intellectual property but also drive people to Joost.

Jimmy Wales, the guy behind Wikipedia, is developing an open source search engine that will be ready for testing later this year. It would be nice to see some competition to the commercial engines, some of which have a bit too much advertising. An open source search engine might still need ads to survive, as the cost of indexing a portion of the Web and then dishing out results without bogging down requires a lot of hardware and even more electricity, to say nothing of a massive connection to the Internet.

At lunch the other day, a group of us were trading horror stories of bad customer service--each story was worse than the previous one, and the whole table was groaning at the utter stupidity that was being described. The two common characteristics were big companies and highly automated customer service systems. Some of the examples include:

If the airlines are losing money, they have no one to blame but themselves. The systems they use to process their customers are so arcane and inefficient it is a wonder that they work at all. On Friday, I was in New England, which was having a typical bad weather day. I had a noon flight out of Manchester, New Hampshire, and discovered via email at 9 AM that Delta had rebooked me on a flight out of Boston instead, also leaving at noon.

I recently installed an 'ebook' reader on my Palm Treo. I went to the Palm Web site where they have lots of ebooks for sale, but the prices are quite silly. Recent releases--the books you are most likely to want to read on an airplane--are priced at about what you would pay for a paper copy on Amazon or some other big box book store. Some books are as little as five dollars, and many others are ten dollars or more. "Classic" books have even more baffling prices. Daniel Defoe's "A Journal of the Plague Year" cost ten dollars, while a much more recent book, H.

Last night, I got to see what I think may be one of the best high school technology programs in the country. Mike Kaylor, a teacher at Blacksburg High School, convinced the school to convert the old high school woodworking shop into a multimedia design space, set up for professional digital photography, digital movie making, 3D modeling, online game design, and movie special effects. Kaylor's classes are mobbed--student demand is three times higher than the capacity of his classes. His students are already working in high paying jobs in the movie and entertainment industry.

Joost, a video streaming start up long the lines of YouTube, may be poised for rapid growth. Frustrated with YouTube's lack of attention to copyright, media giant Viacom has signed a deal with Joost to host Viacom's extensive catalogue of music and TV shows (including MTV, among others). It is not so much the redistribution of copyrighted material that has been bugging Viacom--instead, the company just wants its fair share of the ad revenue.

The rising cost of energy is going to have strange side effects, like a black market in light bulbs. Australia has just announced that the country will force light bulb users to switch to fluorescent bulbs in a gradual switch over three years. Just as the U.S. requirement to use more efficient toilets led to bootlegging "old" toilets from Canada, Australians may end up resorting to smuggling light bulbs into the country--conjuring up images of rubber rafts coming ashore in the dead of night piled high with no-name three-ways and the always popular GE 'Reveal' 100 watt incandescent.

Second Life is an online virtual game/social networking environment--think multi-player Sims. As a Second Life player, you can buy real estate and open a business, among all sorts of other things to do. Some people have made a little money selling virtual "things" (an oxymoron of sorts) to other players. You can create your own stuff, but some people prefer to avoid the effort and sometimes substantial technical knowledge needed to do that and just buy stuff from other players.

Someone has finally found something good about playing video games for hours on end. Engadget reports that surgeons who relax by playing video games are better at what they do in the operating room. The improvement, unsurprisingly, is most noticeable when performong laproscopic surgery, where they manipulate tiny tools while watching a video screen. It is hardly worth getting excited about it though.

How about gasoline for seventy-five cents a gallon? Sound far-fetched? Not according to this article on plug in electric cars. The article states that the cost of recharging the battery of an electric vehicle using the electricity coming from the socket in the wall of your garage would be economical--equating to buying gas for seventy-five cents a gallon.

The impending merger of XM and Sirius satellite radio providers is a good example of why open access networks make sense. Sirius and XM have not grown as expected, largely because the two companies provide redundant and duplicative systems. Nobody cares about which satellite a radio station comes from, and people particularly do not care to spend hundreds of dollars on special radios that only work with one provider.