Technology Futures

I've added a new category called the "Agriculture Economy" to the Technology News section. For several years, I have encouraged rural regions to look closely at new models of agriculture that are entrepreneur-focused, rather than relying on traditional agriculture models where the farmer is basically just the factory floor--food products are "produced" and then put on trucks, hauled away, and sold by others, who also make most of the profit.

Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of Amazon.com, is funding a space start up with offices in Texas, and what is likely to become a spaceport in west Texas. Bezos is apparently building a rocket ship that takes off and lands vertically, unlike the space plane designed by Bert Rutan for Virgin Galactic.

I was looking for a CD the other day, and was surprised to find that it cost $19. The music industry has been crying in its beer for years now, claiming CD sales are down because of grandmothers and 10 year old girls downloading pirated copies of music.

Apple is apparently set to sell about 4 million iPods per month in the last quarter of 2005, breaking all records. The iPod has crushed the competition in Japan by capturing 60% of the marketplace, with Sony a huge loser. And more than 73 million cars will be manufactured in 2006 as "ready for iPod."

Engadget has some pictures from a design competition sponsored by Microsoft. The company wanted industrial designers to think about what personal and office computers might look like in the future.

Some of the designs are interesting, and suggest that what we call a "desk" may change dramatically as displays get larger and we spend more time (if that's possible) connected.

Two counties in Florida have decided to dump electronic voting machines manufactured by Diebold after it was shown how easy it was to alter voting results.

County and city supervisors and elections officials across the country have failed miserably to do due diligence on this issue. Millions in taxpayer funds have been spent on faulty machines. It is a national disgrace.

Real Networks president Rob Glaser stated in a recent interview, "Most users that are filling their iPods are still doing it through piracy."

This is the same line that the music industry uses. I have never understood the marketing value of claiming that all your existing and future customers are crooks. And these companies usually go farther and whine that these crook customers "...just don't get it." Where "get it" means they won't buy their stuff.

SpaceX is a start up space freight company going after the heavy lift market, as opposed to the passenger/tourism market being pursued by Virgin Galatic. SpaceX has a blog that is updated regularly and provides a wealth of information about ongoing company launches, technical details, and logistics.

Even more interesting is the opennness of the company in discussing problems. The company has had several problems that have delayed the December launch of a rocket, and the blog provides a lot of detail about what the problems are and why.

Actually, VoIP phones have been around for a while, but they have been relatively obscure and/or clunky. Vonage offers an adapter box that plugs into your computer, and then lets you plug any "normal" phone into it. An easy way to continue using a plain old telephone, but you end up with yet another box, power adapter, and cables to further clutter up your workspace.

In yet another interesting development of the Energy Economy, BMW has unveiled a hybrid gas/steam automobile. In a normal internal combustion engine, much of the energy goes right out of the tailpipe as heat. The BMW design captures up to 80% of the wasted energy, uses it to generate steam, which in turn helps drive the engine.

Down near the bottom of this interview with NBC Television Group president Jeff Zucker, he states that there are a half million downloads per week of just one NBC television show--Battlestar Galactica.

The last time I checked, there were four or five states (including my home state of Virginia) that were toying with the idea of a spaceport. But New Mexico may have won the first race (there will be more than one spaceport in the country).

There is speculation that a well-organized series of cyberattacks on sensitive U.S. government and government contractor sites may be organized by the Chinese army.

This article talks about the growing security problem but offers little firm evidence that the Chinese military is behind it. But given that China is a military dictatorship with rigid control over the country's Internet, it could be plausible.

BellSouth has somewhat humorously agreed that network neutrality is important in principle but the company then went on to say that no legislation is needed to ensure that because, "We're a big telecom company and would never do anything bad."

Okay, I made that last quote up--BellSouth did not actually say that in exactly that way, but read the article [link no longer available] and see what you think.

Researchers at Clarkson University have found it is trivially easy to spoof some of the current biometric security systems that use a finger or thumb print as an identification mechanism. They found that making a mold of a fingerprint using modeling clay (e.g. Play Doh) was effective 90% of the time in fooling the hardware.

SBC's Midwest Networking President, Kirk Brannock (currently serving on the Illinois Governor's Broadband Deployment Council) is getting his fifteen minutes of fame. He was captured on video at a public hearing stating that "fiber is an unproven technology."

It is an interesting assertion since SBC's networks would collapse without the tens of thousands of miles of fiber the company uses to run their entire phone and data system.

A wave of new search engines are coming. The business theory behind them is that peeling off just a small piece of Google's massive market domination is good money. Also driving things is the growing realization that Google has not done a darn thing to improve their search engine since they rolled it out (not as far as I can tell, anyway), making the company vulnerable to anyone who can provide a better mousetrap.

Apple has added more video content to the iTunes Music Store, which probably needs to be renamed as the video becomes a bigger piece of what is sold. Current shows added include The Office and Battlestar Galatica, as well as a bunch of older shows, ranging from Knight Rider to Alfred Hitchcock Presents. The deal is with NBC Studios.

Here is a report from Denmark about how one group is trying to nurture and promote the growth of microbusinesses. Stick with the article to the end, and you will find a useful list of activities and projects that would apply in any community or region. Does your economic development game plan include these kinds of activities?

This very short article discusses a new use for the video iPod. Real estate agents are making short video clips of homes for sale and making them available for download into a video iPod. Other agents can download the videos and to learn more about a property and/or show the videos to prospective home buyers.