Technology Futures

Toshiba has previewed a line of MP3 music players that run on fuel cells powered by alchohol. The players won't be available until 2007, but will have run times that greatly exceed any battery-powered player--run times of 35 hours and 60 hours are quoted.

The music industry continues to anger both customers and bands. The RIAA inexplicably continues to sue users for downloading music. Even though there is little evidence that downloading copyrighted music has contributed to the decline in sales, the industry takes a baffling approach to the lawsuits by apparently picking names out of a hat. The suits seem to lack even basic information or investigations that would support wrongdoing, and the defendants seem to be picked mostly on the basis of whether or not they have the resources to fight back.

The Liftport Group, which is a private company building a space elevator, has received FAA approval for preliminary testing. The company will use a ballon with a one mile high tether to run tests of the lifting mechanisms.

One of several space elevator efforts, the projects will use super-strength carbon nanotube cables that run from the ground to low earth orbit. Centripetal force and counterweights will keep the cable rigid and anchored in one spot. The space elevators will dramatically lower the cost of getting people and materials into orbit.

Christopher Miller points to an interesting survey that says 87% of Americans don't know what VoIP (Voice over IP) is. Ten percent thought it was a "low carb vodka," and another group thought it was some kind of European hybrid car.

Wired follows up on an AP report that more and more young people (an estimated 25%) have already sustained hearing loss that is not normally seen until decades later in life.

According to the article, too many people are listening to portable music players at ear-damaging volume levels. Particularly bad are the "ear buds" that are inserted directly into the ear canal, rather than external headphones that cover some or all of the outer ear.

Google has released a beta version of a new blog search tool.

Just a little playing around with it suggests they got it right: it is fast, and was able to find a lot of good stuff quickly. The advanced search is particularly useful, as you can search by author, by topic, by date, and by a bunch of other criteria unique to blogs.

The news outlets are all carrying the story of eBay paying $4 billion for Skype.

I do think Voice over IP telephony is going to replace analog phone service, and that the transition will happen faster than many think, but Skype is hardly workth $4 billion USD.

Here is the problem: The technology Skype has is nothing special. There are not only competing commercial products, but there are plenty of Open Source VoIP projects as well, like Gizmo. And Gizmo shows every sign of being a big hit.

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is considering a move away from Microsoft Office and toward Open Source products like Open Office.

Microsoft's proprietary XML formats that are being used in current and future versions of Office to store Word and Excel documents, among others, are licensed to users. What this means, basically, is that you have the right to open and use your own Word documents only as long as Microsoft allows you to.

The state government of Massachusetts is worried, and rightly so, that public documents may become inaccessible either legally (if in the future the state does not continue to renew MS software licenses) or may become incompatible and therefore unreadable because MS has changed document formats.

There is really no information at all about how it works, but some Danish scientists have received a patent for storing hydrogen in pill form.

Apparently, this new process is highly efficient, and can store enough hydrogen for a car to travel about 300 miles in the space of a normal 12 gallon tank. No other hydrogen storage system has come close to the same level of efficiency.

Questions still remain, like how much energy is required to produce the pill form of hydrogen, but it is one more sign that the Energy Economy is gearing up for some boom years.

In a disturbing development, Yahoo! provided information to the communist Chinese government that was used to convict and imprison a journalist.

The Chinese government was angry because the journalist had merely expressed views about restrictions on the press in China that the government disliked.

RUPRI (the Rural Policy Research Institute) has an editorial that hits the nail on the head with respect to the challenges emerging from the cable/telephone duopoly that is tying up broadband markets in the United States.

We need clear policies at the local, state, and national level that preserve the right of communities, organizations, and individuals to use broadband for public and private purposes, without third party control.

The state of Vermont is installing WiFi at every rest stop in the state. A grant is helping to fund the initial equipment expenditure, but fees will pay for the management and ongoing expense.

It looks like it has been well-thought out. Government is providing the initial infrastructure, the private sector manages it, which creates jobs, and the public that want to use it pay a modest fee.

This is a great example of a public/private partnership, and this is not "competing" with the private sector; it is creating private sector business opportunities. And tax dollars are not funding it; user fees are. And it is modest in scope. I'm very wary of big wireless projects that don't have well-identified markets. Rest stops have a ready and willing supply of truckers, tourists, and businesspeople who I think will be happy to pay a few bucks for access.

I have been talking to communities about the importance of redundant cable paths for years. If you don't have at least two entirely separate cable paths into your community for telecommunications, your community, and especially your businesses, are at risk.

The most mundane risk is having a cable cut by a contractor digging somewhere. But as a painful example of what can go wrong, one of the primary fiber cable routes into New Orleans was across the Pontchartrain bridge, which suffered enormous damage.

Telecom companies are trying to patch other routes together to get Internet and phone service back into the city, but it is a sober reminder that we have to plan for disasters--the routine ones, like a wayward backhoe, or something much worse.

Philadelphia's plan to deploy WiFi throughout the city has never made sense to me. I am never in favor of massive system deployments in advance of understanding the marketplace and making sure that you are offering something users want and will use. If a community is going to do WiFi, better to start with some modest hotspot deployments, watch usage, and adjust your plans accordingly. If the system is jammed with users--great! That is success. Now you have real justification for expanding your telecom investment.

But back to Philadelphia. This Wall Street Journal article reveals that there is method to the City's madness. What Philadelphia plans to do is to aggregate all their individual Internet connections and buy one large, "fat pipe" that will serve the entire set of city agencies, at a much reduced cost. And the wireless network will help distribute all that bandwidth to the appropriate city facilities.

Opportunity Iowa has an excellent Communications Utility FAQ that is worth a read. Although some of the information is specific to what is going on in Iowa, it provides a nice, short, clear summary of some key issues and what they mean for communities.

Buried in several different news stories are brief mentions that the only communications working in the storm-ravaged areas of Louisiana and Mississippi are satellite phones. In New Orleans, apparently the only working telecom facility is the phone company central office (colocation facility), which was designed specifically to withstand storms and flooding. But it does not help much since all landlines to and from the facility are out.

It is a sober reminder of the power of nature and the need to have disaster recovery plans in place. FEMA and other agencies have been designing "instant communications" trucks for these kinds of disasters, but there probably not nearly enough. Picture one of the mobile TV station trucks with one of those extendable booms that rise up out of the truck, but instead of TV broadcasting equipment, the truck can provide cellular phone service, can connect to a working landline to act as a local phone switch, and can provide an instant WiFi hotspot so that data can be exchanged between laptops, as well as use other wireless to try to connect to the Internet via other trucks or working wireless access points.

Catastrophes like Hurricane Katrina are often remembered by a few enduring images. One of them may well be the widely circulated photo of a New Orleans cop, wading through chest high water with an empty gas can, looking for fuel for an emergency generator.

It's unfortunate that we tend not to think very much about worst case scenarios unless we see one somewhere, but it is as good a time as any to review your region's disaster recovery plans, especially with respect to telecommunications.

With most of New Orleans flooded, wireline communications (phone, cable, Internet) are not working. Most wireless Internet systems (e.g. WiFi hotspots) are also out, because electric power and the wired Internet connections that feed them are out.

New Zealand Telecom has announced it will switch every phone in the country to the Internet-based VoIP system, starting in 2007. The company estimates it will take approximately five years to get every phone changed.

A laptop fuel cell will be available soon, as reported by Gizmodo.

The fuel cells are powered by methanol (alchohol), making them easy to charge--no hydrogen required. They will pack twice as much power as the lithium batteries that are currently used in laptop computers.

The methanol fuel source is interesting too, because methanol can be refined from corn--no fossil fuels required. As the technology matures, look for fuel cell vehicles powered by corn-derived methanol.

Pop quiz

In a major leap forward for the Energy Economy, Gizmodo reports that a fuel cell-powered motorbike will be offered for sale in 2006.

The bike is lightweight, can go as fast as 50 mph, and has up to four hours of running time--plenty for around town trips.

The timing of this offering is excellent, as sales of mopeds, electric scooters, and other unlicensed motorbikes is breaking records. High gas prices are getting Americans to look at alternative transportation seriously.

And that's why I'm not worried about gas prices.