Technology Futures

When I first began writing about spaceports two years ago, I got a lot of eyerolling in response. Some economic developers really questioned whether this was something to take seriously. But in just two short years, New Mexico is well on the way to turning the entire economy of the state around.

Demonstrating that the big telecom companies have not learned much over the past decade, they have successfully gotten a new top level domain called 'mobi,' as in cingular.mobi. In theory, this is supposed to make it easier for people to find content customized for cellphones, but this is a non-problem. It is straightforward now to design Web sites for cellphones, and you don't need a new domain to do it--there is no value add here.

The popular TV show Mythbusters tackled the challenge of cracking locks that use fingerprint scanning technology, and quickly discovered three easy ways to fool a fingerprint scanner. One them involved nothing more than a copy machine and warm spit.

The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) has confirmed the participation of Dr. Carol Cain in this year’s Rural Telecommunications Congress Conference, October 22-25, 2006, at the Wyndham Riverfront Hotel in North Little Rock, AR. For those who might be unfamiliar with AHRQ they are the lead agency managing the Federal inventory of projects for the Department of Health and Human Services related to the transformation of the national healthcare system.

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that anyone can create an entry for, now has a cousin: Citizendium. Citizendium (most easily pronounced 'City-zendium') differs from Wikipedia in the way that content will be developed.

AlGore's Current TV, a cable channel with limited distribution, has announced a partnership with Yahoo to create four new broadband channels.

If you like blue jeans and have a spare $250, you might want to pick up a pair of Levi Redwire (TM) jeans. They have a built in docking cradle for iPods that lets you pull the iPod out of a special pocket while it is playing. Why a cradle? The jeans also have an integrated iPod controller that sits outside the pocket, so that you can have your iPod safely tucking inside the pants but still access the controls.

One of the great things about the Internet is that it truly is creating all sorts of new economic and business activity that we never imagined just a few years ago. Amazon is one of those "new economy" businesses, and it is a good example of why the U.S. economy keeps humming along, despite a heavy loss of manufacturing jobs.

Just when you thought it could not get any worse with the Diebold voting machines, new information has come out indicating that the electronic voting machines can be opened with a minibar key, or in fact, almost any kind of cheap key that is often supplied with office desks and other types of furniture.

The media has numerous stories on the Maryland campaign aide who was fired for blogging on the job. The young woman's remarks, aside from being insensitive and rude, are incredibly naive. Not only was she making inappropriate remarks about her boss' opponent, she was also making inappropriate remarks about her boss' own associates--she was writing negative comments about her own boss.

Microsoft has released details of its long-awaited music player, and it is pretty interesting. It's called Zune, and is obviously trying to beat the iPod by adding stuff that the iPod does not have. Included extras are WiFi networking, a slightly bigger screen, and an FM receiver. It comes in three colors, including brown, and I have to say that from the pictures, brown seems like an awfully unattractive choice.

Three researchers at Princeton have written a detailed analysis of the many security problems with Diebold voting machines, and have included a video demonstrating how simple it is to tamper with the machine. Meanwhile, voters get the short end of the stick with both the potential for utterly compromised elections and the need to replace hundreds of millions of dollars worth of these machines with new ones, using our tax dollars.

eBay's purchase of Skype, the Internet phone service, appears to be reaping dividends in terms of new features for the phone service. Skype has been making more frequent upgrades to the software and service, and in the process, is redefining the telephone.

Glenn Harlan Reynolds has an article about problems with Amazon's brand new Unbox video download service, which serves as a contrast to Apple's new video service. The Unbox system only works on Windows (iTunes works on Windows and Macs), just for starters. But the gripes are apparently about a "phone home" feature (sometimes called spyware) of Unbox that seems to constantly want to connect to the Internet so that your computer can talk to Amazon's computers.

Apple unveiled its iTunes movie download service yesterday, which is very nicely done from a customer experience perspective. But many people are likely to be frustrated with download speeds. Apple talks about 30 minutes to download a feature length movie, but the company noted that is if you have a 5-6 megabit cable modem connection. About 60% of broadband users have cable modem connections, and many of them are supposed to be three megabits/second or more, but few actually deliver that.

Apple announced a slew of new and upgraded products yesterday that disappointed some Apple fans who had hoped for an iPod phone. Pundits have begun yet another "Apple is becoming obsolete" mantra, but beating up on Apple is nothing new, and for nearly thirty years, the pundits have almost always been wrong about Apple. With cellphones challenging the iPod as a music player and Microsoft's new music player about to be released, it is easy to see why you might think Apple's best music days are behind it.

A San Diego start up company has announced plans to sell broadband delivered by gas pipelines.

The free online encyclopedia Wikipedia has refused the Chinese government's request to remove certain material from the Wikipedia Web site, and in retaliation, the Chinese have blocked access to Wikipedia for everyone in China. Unlike other the leaders of other companies like Microsoft, Google and Yahoo!, who have collaborated with the Chinese government and agreed to assist with censorship, Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, has taken a principled stand and refused to participate in censorship.

Amazon is offering an eBook. Dozens of companies lost their shirts with ebooks in the late nineties. Back then, laptops were expensive and PDAs had tiny screens and were hard to read (Apple's Newton was the exception). So many thought that ebooks--light, portable readers--would catch on. But the number of titles available for any given platform were limited, and too many manufacturers opted for proprietary book formats that made publishing a nightmare.

This article argues that the age of the iPod may be over. For the last two quarters, iPod sales have fallen slightly, if you can call selling more than 8 million of the devices in each quarter "slow sales." The theory is that because so many people have iPods that youth no longer see them as cool. I guess it is pretty horrifying to discover that your grandfather has the same music player that you do.