Technology Futures

USA Today has an article on dairy farms that are becoming energy providers. Cows generate about 100 pounds of manure a day; in the old days, this manure sat and released methane directly into the air for a while, and then was typically spread onto nearby fields, which created a bit of an odor for a few days.

This article from mid-summer just came to my attention. It discusses some of the current municipal WiFi projects and the problems they are having. WiFi vendors tout the low cost of wireless and the "easy" installation--stick up a few towers and you are done. What they tend to leave out of the sales pitch is that current WiFi systems often have trouble penetrating trees with leaves on them, don't penetrate walls well, and the signal does not go around corners. Here is a portion of the article:

Universal Music, the world's largest music publisher, successfully arm-twisted Microsoft into paying UMG a dollar for every Zune Microsoft manufactures. UMG did so using the dubious theory that MP3 players are just "repositories for stolen music" (an actual quote from a UMG exec). Microsoft apparently gave in to the extortion because the company was desperate to get enough music to sell on its Zune music Web site. Excited over the successful effort to blackmail Microsoft, UMG is now ready to go after Apple to impose an iPod tax.

Microsoft's Zune music player is taking a drubbing from reviewers. The list of things that don't work or are awkward is so long that it is hard to imagine how it could have happened.

In a recent set of broadband workshops, I talked at length about the increasing demand for bandwidth, and that it is necessary to set not the upper limit on our bandwidth needs, but only a lower limit--which I think is 100 megabits/second to homes and businesses.

What was interesting is that the skeptics were not business people, who were actually nodding their heads in agreement; they understand that they do not want their ability to grow their businesses and to create jobs limited by bandwidth.

It must be the rise in the stock market, and/or the trusty old adage that there is a sucker born every minute. This article on Web 3.0 is dense and wordy, so you may not want to spend much time actually reading it, but consider yourself warned that the "next big thing" (tongue firmly in cheek here) is Web 3.0.

In one of the most disheartening and discouraging articles I have read in a long time, Robert Cresanti, the Undersecretary of Commerce for Technology, says, essentially, that Americans are stupid and that we need to import more foreign engineers and scientists.

Charleston, South Carolina's very successful Digital Corridor program is worth careful study. Ernest Andrade, the manager of the program, understands that economic development today is about making and nurturing relationships, not water and sewer. Here is a short excerpt from Andrade's article that summarizes where economic development should be focused today:

I was fortunate enough to have dinner the other night with a very gifted and smart county administrator, who told me this:

"Our job is to attract talent to our region, not businesses. If we have talented people, we can do anything. And to attract talented people, we have to have the amenities that they want and expect, like broadband."

Michael Copps, an FCC commissioner and consumer advocate, had an op-ed piece in the Washington Post last week. Copps says American broadband is too slow and too costly, and that it is going to cripple our economy and our ability to compete in the global economy. I could not agree more.

NetworkWorld reports that spam traffic has jumped substantially in the past month or two. Fueling the deluge of junk mail are two changes in the spam ecosphere. Spammers are using two new zombie programs that infect Windows computers, making ordinary desktop computers into spam machines that can send out hundreds of thousands of spam emails per day. Often, people don't even know their machine has been infected; the only hint that something may be wrong is sluggish performance.

Commercial airliners are about to become the biggest and most expensive iPod accessory yet. Several airlines are going to provide integrated iPod docks for both charging your iPod and for accessing content. Newer airplanes with LCD panels built into the seat backs will be able to display video content from your iPod.

For some time, I have been telling communities that quality of life and affordable broadband are the drivers of economic development in rural areas of the country. But over the past few months, I have come to believe that there is a third factor: reliable electric power. As we store more and more data and dish more of that data out to a global audience via our Web sites and businesses, reliable electric power is a critical resource that is needed to keep electricity-hungry servers humming.

The 2006 elections seemed to have passed without major problems with the electronic voting machines, but here is the problem: We'll never know. Because these machines could be tampered with invisibly, there is simply no way to know if they were or not, because there is no audit trail. We simply have no way to check to see if vote counts were altered. We may have dodged a bullet this time, but these machines are problematic, and a threat to our country.

In a victory for personal privacy, a German court has ruled that if a customer requests it, an Internet Service Provider (ISP) must delete the IP log data that shows what a customer has been doing on the Internet and when. In the U.S., unfortunately, we are headed in the other direction, with the Federal government anxious to make ISPs responsible for retaining such information--forever!

The Boston airport administration has tried for two years to force out every WiFi provider in the airport except the one with whom they signed a contract. This meant that travelers did not have a choice of providers, and that free WiFi in airline frequent traveler lounges had to be removed by the airlines. Logan Airport officials claimed the WiFi providers were causing radio interference with airport operations, thereby endangering safety. Right. Unlike the thousands of cellphones crowding the very same airwaves.

According to Kevin Maney, in USA Today (page 3B), Walmart is shocked--shocked--that downloads of movies from the iTunes store are being sold for less money than the old-fashioned DVDs that use enormous energy to make and transport. Walmart is upset that they might be losing sales to digital downloads, and they apparently want someone to do something about it.

Microsoft's new search engine, called Live Search, looks pretty good at first glance. It looks almost exactly like Google, which is probably a wise strategy. Many of the other search engines have interfaces that are quite different, and probably put some people off with all the options and choices. I tried a few test queries and compared them to what I get on Google, and Live Search appears to do a very good job of cutting down on non-relevant results.

This falls squarely into the "What were they thinking?" category. USA Today has an article in today's paper about the Hubble space telescope, which is now relatively old and needs upgrades and repairs. Yet NASA and its "high tech" contractors built many parts of the device in a way that makes it almost impossible to repair or upgrade in space!!

If there was one thing everyone was talking about at the annual Rural Telecommunications Congress conference, it was open service provider networks. My talk discussed why they work financially (demand aggregation, across a whole community or an entire region, really pays dividends--literally). But vendors were also talking OSPN systems, and it is great to see systems coming into the marketplace that have been designed specifically for communitywide broadband use.

There are some basic priniciples that define a true open access system: