Technology Futures

I had a hard time figuring out where to put this item...I finally stuck it under "Future Trends." A UK study shows IT problems are the leading cause of stress in England, with a third of respondents reporting that their number one stressor was the computer. Some of those surveys admitted too much stress drove them to drink and smoke more.

The General Services Administration has signed a contract to use mySQL. The GSA manages bunches of government services and databases, and is only one of the latest Federal agencies to dump proprietary databases for the Open Source database system. The Department of Defense, NASA, the Census Bureau, and Los Alamos National Labs are among current users.

In yet another example that government is not usually the biggest threat to our privacy, a political blogger just bought the phone records of former presidential candidate Wesley Clark. For $90, the blogger got them from a company called Celltolls.com that has a business selling your phone records to anyone who wants them.

One of the problems with community investments in broadband is the lack of data showing the value of such investments. Community leaders are somewhat wary of spending public money on unproven infrastructure. A new study from Carnegia Mellon and MIT shows that communities that have invested in broadband infrastructure are doing better from an economic development perspective than communities that have not.

The research team used extensive government data to analyze these investments and to develop the conclusions--this is not some casual vendor report.

In yet another vivid demonstration of why scissors and other sharp objects should be kept away from members of Congress, our esteemed lawmakers have passed a bill that *seems* to make being annoying illegal. A bill passed to protect women from sexual harrassment has language in it that was apparently added to address online harrassment as well (e.g. repeated unsolicited email).

Google has announced that it will get into the video business. This was not really a surprise to anyone; the company has been trialing its video service for several months.

Jakob Nielsen probably knows more about the psychology of the Web (how people use it) than anybody else in the world. So when he says, "Search engines are leeches," it is a good idea to pay close attention.

Several business associates and I decided to try a Skype voice conference call the other day. I had not looked at the Mac Skype software since it was first announced; at that time, I was not impressed. The latest version has an excellent interface and features built in chat and file sharing.

Voice quality was superb--better than a Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) landline. The built in address book makes one click dialing dead simple.

The FAA continues to develop rules for space tourism, with a final set of recommendations expected in July. Virgin Galactic expects to begin regular commercial space flights in less than four years, and the FAA is trying to establish ground rules to safely manage commercial space flights.

This report says that Europe is starting to invest again in nuclear power [link no longer available]. Like the U.S., most of Europe stopped building nuclear power plants after the 1970s Three Mile Island disaster.

If you look strictly at deaths directly attributable to nuclear power and compare them to deaths from coal power, coal loses every time. There are mining disasters regularly, with the latest tragedy right here in Appalachia.

Another gadget from the Consumer Electronics Show that is intriguing is a pen size color scanner. I was pretty skeptical when I read about this; years ago I had a big, clunky, handheld black and white scanner that you could roll across a document. It was awful; no matter how hard you tried, you got blurry, uneven scans. It's main attribute was its price, which I think was a couple of hundred dollars, at a time when a flat bed scanner cost several thousand dollars. Nonetheless, the money was wasted.

A Marquette University dental student has had an expulsion reversed after the widespread publicity forced the university to back down.

The dental student foolishly made some short-tempered remarks about teachers and fellow students on his personal blog. The school responded like a three year old with a temper tantrum by kicking the student out and revoking a full scholarship.

But a local newspaper and radio station, along with bloggers, publicized the university's actions.

When companies start making real products for some other company's service, you know something is going on. Skype is beginning to make real inroads on the VoIP marketplace, and hardware manufacturers think there is money to be made.

XING is a conference phone made expressly to work with Skype and only Skype. Niche market? Yes, but apparently big enough to actually make stuff for it.

The annual Consumer Electronics Show is in full swing, and like past years, an incredible and often amusing array of new gadgets are on display. One company has combined the craze for those rubber wristbands with a USB memory stick. I wouldn't wear one because they don't match my loafers, but I suspect they may be popular with teenagers.

The state of Wisconsin has passed a law requiring that all software used in voting machines be open and accessible to the public. This is the right thing to do. Voting is the bedrock of a democratic republic, and how votes are tallied cannot be held close by a private company.

With a hat tip the excellent Connecting People blog, here is a link to what looks like a great new source of economic development ideas and concepts for the Knowledge Economy.

The "wearable computer" crowd typically lashes together wierd looking stuff that seems to have come from a bad sci fi movie--elaborate belt packs with wires hanging off them, strange goggles with built in displays--nothing you or I would ever get near.

What's the biggest "wearable computer" in the world? It's the iPod, which was designed with attention to both form and function, rather than as a technology demonstration.

The New York Times (registration required) has an article on the growth of online shopping during this holiday season.

Two numbers stand out: There was a 25% increase in Internet sales over last year, and about a third of all U.S. households bought something online. And L.L. Bean took more orders over the Web than over the phone, which is a watershed.

There is a tempest in a teapot over the National Security Agency's use of cookies on its Web site.

Let me say first that cookies can be and often are mis-used, and I routinely delete a lot of cookies left on my computer. And the NSA did use persistent cookies, which is against the Federal government's rules.

But having said that, the AP article being published almost everywhere is misleading, and perhaps intentionally so. Here is one example:

This new blog is a great example of the potential of local blogging to enhance economic development and to educate/inform local leaders and citizens. This new Blacksburg area blog has a nice mix of job opportunities, economic development news, and leadership issues. It is just what is needed in many local areas.