Technology Futures

EVDO, or broadband for cellular telephones, may be the one chance cellular has to beat back the VoIP onslaught, which makes cellular irrelevant if you have access to a wireless Internet signal. Verizon, like most phone companies, likes to bet on technologies that are expensive and thereby easy to control--you can't just go out and start an EVDO business the same way you can start a wireless Internet business.

I'll be on vacation this week, and posting will be light. Have a great week, and I'll be back the first week of July.

Best regards,

Andrew Cohill

This is just a reminder that if you prefer to use an RSS reader to keep up with the news, the feed for this site is here.

I just had to upload a small ad to a magazine ftp site. The file was about 5 megabytes, which is very small for this sort of thing; a photo heavy full page ad could easily run 100 megabytes or more.

Are the phone companies wrecking the U.S. economy by spending hundreds of millions of dollars to buy legislation that prevents America's businesses from competing in the global marketplace?

The City of Orlando has pulled the plug on its ambitious free WiFi program. It was costing the city almost $2000/month, and only an average of 27 people a day were using the system. There are several things we can learn from this.

• As I've been saying for a long time, start small and make sure something works before pouring a lot of money into it. Orlando should have tried a few hotspots and kept the cost down to a few hundred dollars. If they had done this and monitored usage, it would have been a clue that usage was not what they expected.
• IT folks love big projects because it allows them to justify bigger budgets and more staff. Higher level managers (read elected officials, in this case) often allow themselves to get railroaded by their IT staff as IT folks throw around a lot of buzzwords and make everyone feel ignorant and behind the times. I don't know if this happened in this case, but think about the Philadelphia project, led by the city's IT director, that wanted to build a massive, multi-million dollar citywide WiFi system. It never made much sense to me--I don't ever recommend spending that much money in advance of understanding the market direction. And the market direction for WiFi has always been muddy.
• Beware of vendors promising big benefits. Vendors love muni projects because they can usually get muni IT staffs excited about buying a lot of stuff, and it is usually then easy to wow city leaders who are feeling some pressure to "do something about broadband." WiFi is only part of a comprehensive approach to broadband. Despite what vendors say, it does not solve the broadband "problem."

So what should communities be doing about WiFi? I think that muni WiFi makes sense only when you understand what the bigger community goals are. Are you trying to get tourists to pull off the interstate and visit your community? Then a free WiFi hotspot at the tourist center makes a lot of sense, and is easily justified.

I write a lot about what is happening in other countries, but some of my citations are just statistics--useful to a point, but sometimes you want more detail. Here is some great information about a single project in South Korea that probably dwarfs many other technology park efforts in the United States, and an indicator of how serious some other countries are about passing the U.S. in technology.

Google apparently plans to take on PayPal, which is owned by eBay. PayPal is the only online payment system that has been successful, despite dozens of schemes, some of which were very well-funded. PayPal has been successful in part because it is relatively simple--it bypasses credit cards completely and debits or credits your checking account. It is fast and simple, and the online reporting of transactions is excellent.

Even before I had a transistor radio as a kid, I got a small reel to reel tape recorder. It had the old 4" reels, used 1/4" tape, and recorded a single channel of mono sound. It was fun to use, and was my first technology gadget. We've made huge strides in recording technology since then, and the ultimate in magnetic tape technology was the analog portable video recorder. These devices, which are really only about fifteen years old yet seem quaint, were and still are, in my opinion, some of the most sophisticated mechanical devices ever designed. The recording technology was extremely complex but actually worked very well. By comparison, the newer generation of digital video cameras are much simpler (from the perspective of what you actually record on the tape).

I wrote recently about disposable video cameras. I think they are likely to be popular, but after last night, I've decided that magnetic tape is about to go the way of dodo bird and the VCR. I finally got around to trying the video mode on my Canon A85 digital camera. It turned out to be terrific. I've been playing with digital video since the dark ages (1995), and previous generations of video produced by digital cameras was pretty bad stuff--tiny pictures, very fuzzy images, and muffled sound. But the short clips I made last night were nothing like that. The images are crisp in a medium-sized window, and can be blown up for an audience without turning them into complete fuzz. The sound is superb, and I was pleased but not really suprised when I plugged my camera into my Mac and iPhoto happily grabbed the movies, dropped them into iPhoto, and I could immediately double-click and play them.

Oh, and there is one more thing. Now I know why Apple came out with the photo edition of the iPod--it was never really about still pictures--it's about video. If you run out of memory while taking videos, it's not always convenient to lug around a laptop (like a day at DisneyWorld) and transfer the movies. But with a tiny iPod Photo in your purse or backpack, you plug the camera in, squirt the videos on to the iPod, and keep shooting. On a 60 gig iPod, you could store more than two hours of video--more than enough for most things.

Although I think U.S. communities have to work much harder on their economic development because of overseas competition that simply did not exist even fifteen years ago, we still have a valuable edge. This blog reprints an op-ed piece on some of the problems businesspeople in India face. Red tape, bureaucratic foot-dragging, costly permits, intrusive rent control, and antiquated labor laws make it very difficult to start a business in India.

The Detroit News has a report on a Michigan legislator who has introduced a bill to ban local governments in the state from getting involved in wireless efforts. The article does not shed any light on what the motivation behind the bill is, but the wireless project in Oakland County which is described in the article is worth reviewing.

You should take a look at this article [link no longer available] if you operate a home or small business wireless network. It details how easy it is to crack the encryption, which then gives the hacker access to all your computer files. What is even more alarming is how many people don't configure the low cost wireless routers correctly and often leave the encryption turned off completely.

Regular readers may have noticed this site has been a target of spambots over the past week, which have been posting comments for online poker. Until I have a chance to check out some anti-spam software, I have turned moderation on for comments. This means you can still post comments, but they won't appear immediately. Thanks for your understanding.

Andrew

In one of the better uses I've seen for RFIDs (Radio Frequency ID), the power tool maker Bosch is going to put them in its line of portable power tools. Power tools are stolen frequently from construction sites, and with the purchase of a portable monitoring device, contractors would be able to keep better track of their tools. This is a sensible use of RFIDs that is much better than the creepy plans of some retailers who want to embed them in clothing so they can track us wherever we go (e.g.

It's hard to believe, but Microsoft's mainland China Web site scolds you if you type the words "freedom" or "democracy," or the phrase "human rights." The U.S. software company hosts a large Web site that provides free blogs to Chinese users, and software on the site monitors everything that is typed in. Offending words and phrases cause a window to pop up with a warning that the posting may be deleted if the user does not remove the "offending" words.

Business Week has an interesting and thoughtful article about how Internet-enabled voluntary collaboration is changing the rules of business, mostly for the better. It cites a wealth of examples, from the company that cut its $2000/month long distance bill by 90% to Proctor and Gamble, which is leveraging outside the company innovation to save money and develop new products.

The New York City Committee on Technology in Government has issued an excellent and extensive report [link no longer available] on the need for broadband throughout the city. It reaches many of the same conclusions that the City of Seattle reached in its study of broadband. Among the highlights:

The Pete Session bill (R-Texas) would create a Federal law prohibiting states and munipalities from offering broadband as a public service. Sessions has this to say:

I've added my keynote talk to the Ohio Community Development Corporation technology conference to the Library. This free paper looks at communities through the lens of broadband and the global Knowledge Economy. The paper is designed to give community leaders and decision makers an overview of technology and broadband without being overly technical.

Some things don't change at all. When I was a kid, people had home movie cameras that were used to make movies that no one watched. In the seventies, when I studied filmmaking, we used the latest technology--Super 8 cameras, which had the 8 mm film in an easy to load cartridge. These cameras were quite popular because of the relative simplicity, and many people used them to make movies that no one watched.

Then we got camcorders, which were at first quite big and heavy, and we made home videos on full size video cartrdridges--movies that no one watched. Then in the nineties, we got digital video cameras, which are now very affordable; the tiny digital tape cartridges won't even play on anyone's VCR, so we've actually gone backwards. For a while, you could tape a home movie and pop it right into the VCR and watch it. It beat setting up the 8 mm film projector by a mile.

But the new, tiny digital video cameras took us right back to the dark ages. Speaking from firsthand experience, it's a lengthy and tedious process to digitally edit raw video footage, even using great software like iMovie. So I've got a big stack of digital video cartridges. Every once in a great while, when the family is really bored, we do fire up the video camera, plug it into the TV, and watch a bit. But like every previous incarnation of the home movie, you quickly get tired of watching from beginning to end and/or constantly fast forwarding.

Now, we have a company called Pure Digital Technologies that is selling disposable video cameras through the CVS drug store chain. There are several things that are remarkable about this.

• First, it's amazing that the technology has become so inexpensive that you can manufacture and distribute a throw away camera for $29.95, although it is designed for several uses. You shoot your video footage, drop the camera off at CVS, and come back in a couple of hours and get a DVD, ready to play. CVS returns the used camera to Pure Digital, which repackages it for another sale. The company expects to be able to recycle them several times.