Technology Futures

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all my readers. I am deeply appreciative that I have so many people visiting this site, and I hope that my writing has been helpful. I have been blogging since early 2002, and each year, traffic has steadily increased. The number of visitors to the site on a daily basis has gone up by 50% or more every year since I started writing, and this year new records were set, with many days logging more than 1000 visitors per day.

"If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." --Henry Ford

Communities interested in broadband almost automatically decide that the first step is to ask residents what they want. But Henry Ford's comment from decades ago still rings true. If you are trying to prepare your community for the future, you need to remember that not everyone thinks much about it (the future).

Much is being made in the media over the rising price of copper. It is apparently now cost effective to melt down pennies and nickels for the copper content, although the Federal government is about to outlaw that.

Communities that worry about investing in fiber because it might not last long enough in terms of capacity need not worry. No one has yet found the upper limit of capacity. Siemens just set a new record for the amount of data pushed through a single channel of a fiber cable: 107 Gigabits, or about a thousand times faster than the "standard" 100 megabit off the shelf network gear used today.

I think there are some interesting new job opportunities that are going to emerge in the next ten years, and one would hope K12 schools and colleges start now with new and revised curriculums to meet demand.

Old minds (communities) think: If it didn't work last year, let's do MORE of it this year.

New minds (communities) think: If it didn't work last year, let's do something ELSE this year.

Old minds (communities) think: How do we stop these bad things from happening?

New minds (communities) think: How do we make things the way we want them to be?

Quoted from "Beyond Civilization: Humanity's Next Great Adventure" by Daniel Quinn (of 'Ishmael' fame)

AT&T is in fights with several communities over it's "U-verse" data service. It used to be called "Project Lightspeed," but the company dropped that name, probably when people noticed that the system actually delivered services over copper (speeded up DSL).

Community leaders are often concerned about whether or not their citizens and businesses would actually use a community broadband system, with some justification--we do not have a lot of good data on community broadband projects. In the last couple of weeks, I have had conversations with leaders in two different communities who were concerned that too few citizens used the Internet to make the investment worthwhile.

I probably need to start a whole new category of news items that just include iPod accessories. In fact, there are whole blogs devoted to just that topic. Here is the latest indication that the iPod continues to have continued influence on the whole economy. A company has designed winter gloves with special fingertips to make it easier to use iPod controls with the gloves on. The iGloves could be a perfect stocking stuffer.

According to this article, the state of California will make $460 million available for broadband in the state. $400 million is to speed up telemedicine uses, and will probably benefit hospitals the most, but the other $60 million is intended for accelerating broadband deployment. A broadband task force has been formed, but appears to be mostly industry insiders, who usually don't lobby for open service provider networks.

A recent analysis of credit card purchases suggests that music lovers hate digital rights management (DRM), the software that tries to limit what we can do with our music and videos. The study shows that sales of digitally-protected music is dropping while online sales of CDs is increasing by comparison--meaning that we are still buying music, but prefer CDs that we can rip without limitations.

BusinessWeek has an article on outsourcing that has some useful insights in it. The good: Outsourcing does not always save time or money. As many of knew when the outsourcing craze began to heat up, it is a lot of work to manage workers on the other side of the world who are 10 or 12 hours out of sync with your own office hours. In India, where IT outsourcing has helped fuel the economy, rapidly rising salaries and very high turnover (often above 50% a year) is driving U.S. businesses away.

This short article talks about the Google/Microsoft war, and suggests that Google may be winning. The theory is that Microsoft is way behind Google in being able to deliver Web-enabled applications. The author points to Google's still fledgling word processing and spreadsheet applications that run via the Web.

A Turkish company is about to release a device designed for home use that will monitor your heart. It has a USB interface so you can plug it in your computer to store the data and/or transmit it to your doctor. Small, inexpensive devices like this are going to revolutionize health care, and within ten years, I expect most homes will have an under $500 device that will provide most of the clinical tests you now have to go to a doctor's office for.

In a widely reported story, a Danish study indicates a no more than normal incidence of cancer among cell phone users. Unlike many other studies, this one involved hundreds of thousands of people--a number large enough to make it statistically reliable. Researchers caution that the we still don't have enough long term data to know for sure that cellphones are completely safe. There is widespread agreement that cellphone and cordless phone frequencies in the gigahertz range do cause measurable changes in cell activity. What we don't know is whether or not this causes health problems.

I have been unimpressed with the in car navigation systems I have tried, mostly in rentals. Aside from the highly distracting nature of the devices, they are only as good as the data that they have. A case in point is the London, England ambulance crew that was supposed to transfer a patient to a hospital about twenty miles away. The crew, which was apparently new to the job, relied on the in-vehicle GPS system, which took them on a 200 mile trip because the data in the device was faulty.

A government study in Britain recommends Faraday cages for examination rooms. A Faraday cage is basically a metal-lined room that blocks all radio frequency signals. In other words, test takers won't be able to use their cellphones to text message friends for exam answers. The study also recommends scanners to detect MP3 players and other devices. It seems that some students are recording notes on their iPod and playing the content back during the exam.

MySpace is the latest battleground for Universal, one of the world's biggest music publishers. The company is upset that MySpace users can post copies of music videos on their MySpace pages. Universal wants a piece of the action. The firm has already arm-twisted YouTube into sharing ad revenue because of grainy music videos posted on the popular video site.

Although I meet more economic developers these days who are beginning to understand the world is changing (a good thing), I usually find after a brief conversation with them that many of them are determined to keep doing the same old thing--they just expect different results now (one definition of insanity). Part of the problem is a belief that nothing much has really changed, but articles like this one in the Wall Street Journal suggest otherwise.

Would you pay $15 a month to be able to watch cheesy YouTube videos on your cellphone? Verizon is betting that you will. The company has licensed the rights to a selection of YouTube videos that Verizon subscribers will be able to download and watch on their cellphone. This represents, perhaps, the 457th attempt by a cellular company to get people to pay for content no one cares much about. ESPN recently gave up trying to get people to watch sports on cellphones, after burning through a few hundred million of someone's money.