Technology Futures

Roanoke is a city near Blacksburg, and the city's demographics are skewed, like many rural towns and cities, toward older people. The City recently decided to stop wringing its hands about the paucity of young people and actually do something. First they hired someone whose primary job responsibility is to solve the problem, and then gave him free rein.

A new study of college students suggests that iPods are more popular with that age group than beer, which normally occupies the top slot among the things that college students prefer most. In recent years, more and more technology-related items and activities have been the top ten list, including instant messaging and Facebook. Facebook, the popular Web site for young adults, actually tied with beer for second place.

Citywide WiFi projects in Sacramento, California and St. Cloud, Florida are both having problems, supporting my long-standing contention that these efforts are risky. MobilePro, the company that got a city government contract to blanket the city with WiFi, is pulling out of the project entirely after the company and the city could not agree on how to finance the project. What's mind-boggling is how the company and the city agreed to move forward without a clear understanding of how the system would be paid for.

Google has announced it will offer an online spreadsheet application, which sounds terrific in theory. How many times have you wished you could have several people on a phone call all look at the same spreadsheet at the same time, and even make live updates while talking. And a spreadsheet stored online means you don't have to keep emailing copy after copy of the same spreadsheet to people just because you updated a single cell.

So what's not to like about the Google app?

In an interesting tale of two companies, Apple has dumped its experiment in offshoring telephone support to India after just one month. Meanwhile, Dell is rapidly expanding its offshore tech support. What's going on? Apple, while not perfect, consistently gets high ratings from consumers for support. Dell, on the other hand, has been receiving a steady stream of criticism lately for poor customer support.

When I talk to communities about the need to view residential neighborhoods as business districts because of the growth in home-based workers and businesses, economic developers often get upset. They get upset because having lots of small businesses driving a local economy does not fit the old Manufacturing Economy model of just trying to attract businesses from other regions.

Segway, the company that makes the two wheel electric scooter, has a new loan program so that you can purchase a Segway just like a car, with a loan. It turns out very few people want to pay $5000 in cash for one.

Vonage may be the first big casualty of the "Web 2.0" craze. While Voice over IP is technically not a Web 2.0 application, we can use Web 2.0 as shorthand for the same kind of hysteria we saw in 1999 and 2000, when a lot of really bad ideas (from a business perspective) got way too much venture capital funding.

There is something strangely pleasureable about reading this article. PCWorld has compiled its list of what its editors think are the 25 worst tech products of all time. It's a bit like watching cable TV shows like "World's Worst Drivers." You know you should not take pleasure in other people's misfortune, but somehow, you just can't change the channel.

In what has to be one of the strangest, but potentially quite practical, iPod accessories, you can buy a tie designed to hold an iPod nano on the backside. If you have never seen a nano close up, they are extremely small and very light, so this would actually work pretty well. And it looks like the tie would match your Nike/iPod sneakers.

South Carolina legislators have passed a bill that creates statewide franchising. What distresses me is that two distinct issues have been mixed up together in this legislation. Franchise fees have been lumped together with right of way. Franchise fees, as originally conceived, no longer make sense when content providers don't have to have a physical presence in the community.

A school system in Illinois apparently does not have enough to do in the teaching our kids department, and is now going to start reading student blogs to make sure the kids don't write something "inappropriate."

Dell is going to start installing Google software on its new computers. While this is yet another shot across the bow of Microsoft, the more interesting part of this to me is that Dell will get paid to do this. While Dell will doubtless market this as a convenience to customers, I'll bet a lot of them won't appreciate the effort. Corporate buyers of Dell equipment will likely tell the company not to bother.

There are apparently still people in Congress that want to regulate blogs. This brief article says that blogs that spend more than $5000 a year on their operations could be regulated by the Federal Election Commission if they write about politics.

This is just one of several stories I have seen recently about K12 students who have their own blogs and get censured by K12 school officials. Student blogs are now common, and school systems have failed to adapt to the new reality. It clearly unnerves some school administrators that students now have a public forum completely independent of the school system. In the old days, students with a bent for writing worked on the school paper, which was monitored by a faculty member.

Once again, Apple has raised the bar with its Nike partnership. A coin-sized transponder that you stick inside specially-designed Nike sneakers sends exercise information to your iPod in realtime. It's a clever gagdet because it makes both Nike sneakers and the iPod more valuable (to some people) than either product individually. iPod watchers were initially in a frenzy because they thought the device used Bluetooth (a wireless protocol) to communicate, suggesting that Bluetooth wireless headphones might soon work with iPods.

Yet another report indicates the most common electronic voting machine is vulnerable to tampering. Get this:

"If Diebold had set out to build a system as insecure as they possibly could, this would be it," says Avi Rubin, a Johns Hopkins University computer-science professor and elections-security expert.

A robotic surgical machine just completed the world's first unassisted heart surgery. There were surgeons standing by in case something went wrong, but nothing did. The machine was programmed with the data from more than 10,000 similar operations. It's an interesting concept, and could have the potential to change the way health care is delivered in poor areas of the world, where doctors are few.

In what has to be one of the worst advertising concepts ever, an apparently blind drunk group of French ad execs came up with the idea that billboards should be able to call you on your mobile phone. As you pass by a billboard, the billboard will send your phone a video ad that you can watch later. It is designed for urban environments where people are traveling on foot and on public transit.

According to USA Today, XM Radio is being sued by the music industry for its new satellite radio, which has a record feature. XM's iPod-like recording functionality is actually pretty limited. Although it can store up to 50 hours of music, the service is essentially subscription-based. If you discontinue your XM radio subscription, your music disappears. The songs are also stored in a proprietary format, so there is no easy way to copy them to other devices, like your computer or to a CD.