Technology Futures

I now have the ability to access Google Maps from my Treo cellphone/PDA. I ran across a reference on the 'net about someone doing this, and in a couple of minutes I found the software; it is free. You also have to have Java installed on your PDA, and it turns out that IBM has a free Java distribution for Treos (IBM has really embraced the Free and Open Software movement).

The magazine Killer App has a must read article on how fiber infrastructure has turned the rust belt economy of Wales (abandoned coal mines and steel mills) into a global powerhouse. The key: a steady investment in fiber over a period of years turned into a magnet for Knowledge Economy businesses looking for a reliable workforce, reasonable cost of living, and affordable broadband.

Ken Pigg, from the University of Missouri, has been studying community use of technology for more than a decade, and is among a handful of truly informed experts about community technology issues. At his RTC session, he talked about communities and the challenges they are facing as they try to grapple with the issue of broadband.

I am attending the Rural Telecommunications Congress Annual Conference, and as usual, it is loaded with excellent speakers. The opening keynote was presented by two representatives of the EAST (Environmental and Spatial Technologies) education program. EAST may be the most innovative approach to K12 education in the country. Typically offered as a year long class in high school, EAST students are presented with real community problems and issues and are told to solve them.

If you needed proof that the US Patent and Trade Office (USPTO) has problems, look no further. The USPTO just granted Cisco a patent on the triple play, which means delivering voice, video, and data to the home. Cisco does not have much a presence in the Fiber To The Home (FTTH) market because their gear is designed for corporate and institutional networks, and is not really the first or even second choice for community broadband systems.

Network Computing has a short article with a headline that touts, "City governments are offering metro wireless services with speeds and latency that can't be beat." Sounds interesting, right? But if you read all the way to the end, where the article discusses the fabled WiMax, which will supposedly solve all the world's broadband problems, you find out that WiMax's multimegabit speeds drop to "1 to 2 megabits only at the outer edges."

Microsoft's MSN search and news site is trying to avoid Google's fate in Belgium, where a court told the search company to stop filching newspaper articles from the Web sites owned by the newspapers. Google would show the first few paragraphs of an article, and then provide a link to the rest of the article, claiming fair use. But of course, there were ads on the Google page and so Google was benefiting from someone else's copyrighted content. The Belgian courts told the company to cut it out.

I have written extensively on the need for communities to be able to market affordable broadband and great quality of life to businesses, but there may be a third leg that can be added: reliable electric power. We take this for granted, but as businesses are increasingly powered by computers and network equipment, their need for reliable and resilient electric power becomes far more important than water and sewer.

After days of rumors, Google has confirmed that it has paid $1.6 billion for YouTube, a tiny video startup that has never made a cent and that has only 67 employees. What is Google buying? In a word, eyeballs. Google's own video venture has been a huge flop, so the company had just two choices: abandon the lucrative advertising potential of free video, or buy the market, which is basically YouTube.

The Wall Street Journal reported today (page A18) that the U.S. Department of Labor has revised job figures for the period between March, 2005 and March, 2006. New jobs were undercounted, and Labor has added 810,000 more new jobs to the count to bring the three year total to 6.6 million new jobs. The Journal is calling this a "...whoops, we found a whole lot of jobs we missed."

A woman trying to sell shampoo on eBay has been told she cannot do so. She is apparently buying hair care products from a store or wholesaler and then selling the products on eBay, but the hair care firm Aquage says, "No." The firm is using the flimiest of pretexts, claiming copyright infringement because the woman took a picture of the shampoo and posted it as part of the eBay listing. They also claim she has violated distributor agreements, even though she has never signed any such agreements.

As an author, I was highly skeptical when Google announced a year ago that it would start scanning books and making them available for search. Along with many other groups and organizations, it seemed like an obvious violation of copyright. The main problem is that Google, of course, places ads on every scanned page that someone sees, and authors get no share of that ad income.

But a new report suggests that the Google "service" might be increasing book sales. That is good news for authors, if it applies across most scanned books.

The recent uproars--one at Hewlett-Packard over obtaining phone records illegally and the other with the instant messaging Congressman--are a sober reminder that almost everything we do leaves tracks these days. In both of these cases, someone other than the intended recipient of the electronic records ended up with the information, legally or illegally.

Just when you thought the problems with Diebold electronic voting machines could not get any worse, this Engadget story indicates that some Diebold machines have touchscreen problems--if you touch the touchscreen, the system panics and has to be restarted. Diebold is giving the State of Maryland more than 5000 mice to use with the voting machines so that no one touches the touchscreens.

Network backup services are going to become big business, as everyone--businesses and consumers alike, figure out it is cheaper and easier to pay someone to store all your stuff. And the stuff is growing like crazy, as we buy songs online, download videos, and put thousands of digital pictures on our hard drives.

As Design Nine does more and more financial analysis of the benefits of Open Service Provider Networks (OSPN) for our clients, the news continues to be very good. In an OSPN network, the local government does not sell any services. Instead, local government builds a digital road system that any service provider can use. In return for access to the road system, service providers pay a portion of their revenue back to the network owner. This revenue pays for both the initial build out and ongoing maintenance, support, and operations.

Here are some of the things we are finding:

Black Box Voting has a step by step explanation, with detailed pictures, of how to alter a Diebold electronic voting machine in four minutes flat, including defeating two "security" features. The process is undetectable, and you can easily alter vote counts in the machine, and it would be impossible to trace because the machine does not provide auditable paper records.

Your tax dollars at work. Hanging chads are starting to look pretty good, since you can at least see them.

I have become pretty jaded about new gadgets. Most of them represent technology in search of a problem, and I just don't need anything else that requires batteries, a charger, a dock, and that weighs me down in airports. But a new Bluetooth watch is actually pretty interesting. The watch will talk wirelessly to some models of cellphones. If you get a phone call, instead of having to fish your phone out of your pocket or bag, this watch will vibrate, and it will show the Caller ID information on the watch display.

As I wrote recently, a lot of my readers just think that the whole Space Economy thing is a litte goofy. But Virgin Galactic has rolled out images of its new sub-orbital space ship, and is already booking seats. Two hundred thousand dollars gets you a two and one half hour trip to the edge of space--about 68 miles above the earth. Pasengers will be weightless long enough to get queasy and/or enjoy the view; the ship will have plenty of windows.

Just as the cellphone companies are about to start marketing Web sites with the .mobi domain name, ESPN announces that they are dumping their mobile phone service, which came bundled with lots of sports content. It turns out that few people are interested in watching sports on a two inch screen. That's the problem with cellphones; they are phones, not televisions, and just taking content that works with other devices and shrinking the picture does not always work. And it begs the question: What on earth are the cellphone companies thinking with the .mobi domain?