Technology Futures

It only takes a small crack to break the dam. Universal Pictures and Lovefilm, an online movie rental company, have struck a deal to sell movies as downloads.

And unlike some previous trials where the movie had time limits on it or DRM (Digital Rights Management), these will be free of restrictions--you own it outright. Which is the way it is supposed to work.

Back in 2000, I began promoting the idea that one way communities should finance broadband was by selling shares in a stock ownership corporation. In this way, the entire community could participate in the ownership of a Knowledge Economy business. A stock ownership approach to community broadband has several advantages.

Samsung has announced a 32 gigabyte solid state flash memory device. This memory storage unit could completely replace the hard drive in a laptop, while allowing big reductions in weight and increasing speed. The weight savings come directly from the smaller size and weight of the device compared to a hard drive, but because this unit uses up to 95% less power, the battery in a laptop with this could be much smaller as well. And the laptop could be thinner, too.

New Hampshire state senators voted 22-1 in favor of HB 653, which gives local governments in the state the authority not only to create and own communitywide broadband networks, but also to use bonding authority to pay for such networks, just as communities use bonds to build other municipal infrastucture like roads, water, and sewer.

A recent story in the Washington Post (registration required, unfortunately) discusses how the lack of broadband is hurting business and employee recruitment in rural areas. Here is a key statement from the Telework Consortium, a group that helps businesses set up work from home programs.

"I think Loudoun County needs to look at broadband as being another utility as important as electricity and the telephone."

Jakob Nielsen, in his monthly AlertBox column, talks about what businesses need to do to have an effective Web site that helps customers find what they want. Nielsen is arguably the most knowledgeable Web usability expert on the planet, and this column is worth a careful read. Economic developers, businesspeople, and in fact, anyone with a Web site can pick up some useful tips.

The Federal government has reached a compromise with Google on the government's request to Google to turn over a chunk of search queries. The Feds claim they need to see what people are searching for so that they can design better child pornography laws.

A federal judge has ordered Google to turn over the URLs (Web addresses) of some of the sites Google indexes, but not the search queries that people type in on the search engine.

Bill Gates recently scoffed at the effort of MIT and other partners to build a $100 computer for emerging markets, mostly in the third world.

There is so much news about Google, I probably ought to add a category just for the company. Google's latest acquisition is a small firm that sells a relatively pricey 3D drawing and CAD package called >Sketch Up. It sells for $500.

It may seem like an odd choice, but apparently Google is going to find a way to incorporate the 3D drawing and visualization tools into Google Earth. You could sketch a new building and drop it into a Google Earth visualization of the actual site where it would be built.

The Christian Science Monitor has an article about the emerging two tier Internet. It is a good overview of the political and technical issues that are driving this problem. The big broadband access companies (e.g. the phone and cable firms) are determined to wrestle control of their customers away from the open Internet.

Just weeks after news that Google "respects" the Chinese government's efforts to censor free speech, the Chinese have rolled out their own search engine, meaning that Google's efforts to suck up to the communists was all for naught.

Following on the heels of New Mexico, which recently mandated that all voting systems in the state use an auditable paper ballot, Maryland has banned the faulty and insecure Diebold voting machines. The legislature has required that the company retro-fit the machines with a paper record of each vote, and also specified changes in security and machine set up to reduce the possibility of vote tampering by those with physical access to the machines.

As we move more and more of our financial transactions away from cash and toward end to end electronic transactions, our systems have to become more reliable and more secure.

But a lot of systems were designed and implemented prior to ubiquitous worldwide access via the Internet, and the security that worked okay then has to be regularly scrutinized and tested today.

I think the laptop is a dying device. They will not disappear entirely, but ten years from now, you won't see them very often.

On the desktop, most of us will have something that looks a lot like the Mac mini--a very small, quiet, fast, and unobtrusive device. Or we will have something like the iMac, where there is no box at all. Windows versions of the mini are already appearing.

Scientists at Sandia Labs have created temperatures of 3.6 billion degrees Fahrenheit. To put that in perspective, it is only about 15 million degrees Fahrenheit at the center of the sun.

You should read the whole article, but they have been able to duplicate the results consistently. Even more interesting, they don't understand how it is happening. They just know that they can do it over and over again, meaning it's not some one time fluke.

Apple has signed a contract with Comedy Central to sell a whole month's worth of The Daily Show (16 episodes) for $9.99. That works out to sixty-two cents per show. That's not a bad price, but I think that long term, we need to see the cost per half hour go below ten cents for things that you are not likely to watch more than once.

Google has chosen to pay advertisers a settlement of $90 million in return from protection from future lawsuits. Numerous advertisers have found competitors paying people to click on ads and/or using software 'bots to click through ads. Doing so brings more revenue to Google and can dramatically increase costs for advertisers.

I am not a big fan of me-too municipal wireless projects. Wireless technology remains in flux, with new equipment and systems coming online constantly. Interference and bandwidth issues have to be considered very carefully when designing these systems. And you have to know how you are going to pay for the network management and maintenance.

In other words, a community should not be planning a big wireless initiative just because "that's what they are doing in Philadelphia."

SpaceX, an American space technology firm, has decided to compete with Russia. Russia has been making a lot of money from the U.S. by hauling payloads and staff back and forth to the space station while NASA sorts out the flying foam problems of the Space Shuttle.

Cisco is the biggest network equipment company on the planet. They sell lots of the equipment that powers the Internet, and many of these boxes are called routers, which act as traffic lights for Internet data. Routers route, to coin a phrase. The boxes, often not very big, sit quietly in closets and data centers all over the world and look at every single data packet passing through the box and decide where to send it.