Technology Futures

A founder of Greenpeace has endorsed nuclear power generation (registration required). The China Syndrome fears of environmentalists have never come to pass. The much cited Three Mile Island failure in fact showed that U.S. reactor designs work--the radioactivity remained within the containment dome. More people die every year from mining coal than have ever died from a nuclear reactor problem.

According to Jeff Jarvis, the TV industry has already dropped the notion of TV as a "broadcast" medium, and now sees TV as an entertainment category that spans several distribution mechanisms, including broadband.

ABC/Disney announced last week that it will begin distributing several of its major "TV" shows via broadband, complete with embedded commercials that won't be easy to skip over. Fair enough...someone has to pay for Desperate Housewives.

Chicago area small businesses are hurt by the lack of broadband. But that is a story that applies to small businesses everywhere in the U.S., but rural businesses suffer the most.

The entertainment industry, according to Jeff Jarvis, has dumped the notion of thinking about TV as primarily broadcast and cable. Jarvis says TV execs are redefining TV to include a variety of distribution mechanisms that includes broadband as another way to package and deliver content. And IP TV is going to spawn a whole new kind of ad-supported television programs.

Disney announced this week that they are going to begin distributing many of their television shows via broadband, with ads built in.

A new study confirms what most people already know intuitively, but it is always nice to have data to back it up: Most people stop looking at search results at page three, and many expect to find what they want on page one.

Broward County, in Florida (the Miami region), has been publishing all sorts of personal information on its citizens via the Web. They have been putting public documents online, but without redacting information like birth date and Social Security numbers.

The state of Kentucky is beginning to get the hang of a 21st century Knowledge Economy economic development strategy. From this article[link no longer available] (hat tip to EDPro), here is Kris Kimel, president of the Kentucky Science & Technology Corp:

In a perfect world, we would throw our cellular phones away and move as fast as possible to an all Internet wireless system, using VoIP to make phone calls and the same packet-based IP transport for all other kinds of data--one kind of transport system for everything--voice, video, Web, you name it.

South Korea continues to be far more visionary than the United States when thinking about broadband and how it should be used. The city of Seoul, South Korea's largest city, has committed $830 million to the u-Seoul project. The 'u' stands for 'ubiquitious.'

As I predicted a couple of weeks ago, Apple has officially announced that the company's new Intel-based Macintosh computers can run Windows. I thought it might take as long as a year for Apple to get around to offering this, but Apple often manages to surprise everyone.

With the proposed sale of Lucent to the French firm Alcatel, the twenty-two year deconstruction of AT&T is complete. Although SBC has kept the AT&T name, the "new" AT&T is really a different beast than the "old" AT&T.

Cupertino, CA (4/1/06)

On the 30th anniversary of the founding of Apple computer, the company unleashed a bombshell on the financial markets with the announcement that the company had inked an agreement to purchase General Motor's troubled Delphi unit. Delphi makes car radios for the entire GM product line, and also manufactures a wide variety of other automotive parts and accessories.

A new Swedish study, via the Drudge Report, says that cellphones appear to raise the risk of brain tumors. People who appear to be at risk are those who have used cellphones for more than 2000 hours in their life, so the risk accumulates the longer that you use a cellphone. The researchers recommended hands-free use of cellphones to get them away from the head.

Car maker Volkswagen has introduced a new user interface for its automobiles, called Gypsy. Some VW models have a large LCD screen in the center console, and will not only display the usual car information, but also knows how to talk to devices like an iPod or a Palm PDA.

This article notes that the only working telecom infrastructure left in New Orleans after the storm was cheap wireless. And even today, WiFi is playing a big role in the city's recovery. In areas prone to flooding, WiFi has an advantage because it is usually installed on something that is above the flood levels. If you can get power to it, it works. And there are some WiFi hotspots powered by batteries and solar power, making them even more resistant to power outages.

I generally get a cool reception when I tell communities that they need to promote community portals and local blogging. It just does not sound like something that is going to bring jobs and businesses into a region.

Teh Federal Election Commission has clarified rules for political and campaign activity by exempting virtually all kinds of political speech on the Internet from the onerous rules that cover how campaign funds can be spent.

The rules, which surfaced last year, seemed to require onerous reporting by citizen bloggers if they even wrote about political candidates, and if they accepted campaign ads on their Web sites, it was worse. But occasionally government does the right thing.

This blog entry from the always excellent David Strom describes the tools that a video production company is using these days to produce reality-based TV shows.

What was left of Bill Gates' headless body exploded in a puff of smoke after word was received that a Web-based word processing program compatible with Microsoft Word is being offered for free.

AJAX is a collection of software technologies that allow Web-based applications like word processors to have much better interfaces and to work much more smoothly. Ajaxwrite.com is a new Web-based venture that is offering a Web-based, Word-compatible word processor for free.

Bill Gates' head exploded yesterday in a tragic puff of smoke after reading that a Windows benchmarking study showed that the new Apple laptop with a dual core Intel processor was faster running Windows XP than, um, well, all the laptops designed for Windows.