Technology Futures

Cnet has a story about how businesses are grabbing onto Skype, the free telephone service that works over the Internet.

We're just at the beginning of the biggest change in telecommunications since voice telephone service became available 100 years ago.

A Business Week story highlights the growing popularity of the Firefox browser. Business Week says the browser is easy to install and easy to use. Among Firefox's most popular features is tabbed browsing. If you have not used a tabbed browser, you are really missing out. Instead of having multiple browser windows open, you have a single browser window with a row of tabs along the top. Each tab represents an open Web page.

Take rate is an industry term for the number of customers that agree to buy a service. Take rates are notoriously hard to predict, and historically, take rates for services like telephone and cable service have been very low (e.g. 10%, 15%), meaning it takes years to get most households connected to a new service.

The town of Nuenen, Holland recently installed a blown fiber to the home, open access network, and had a remarkable 96% take rate. This means that essentially, every household that is likely to be a customer became one as soon as the service became available.

If we did not have enough to worry about, we now have cars infected with computer viruses. Cnet has the story about a security firm that reports it has been asked to debug several Lexus cars that had apparently been infected via a Bluetooth phone, which transmitted the virus wirelessly to the car navigation system.

Maybe my next car should be a nice, vintage, '66 Mustang 2+2--good, reliable transportation, classic look, and no onboard electronics.

Here is an excerpt from a brochure about a project in Southside Virginia, a rural area that has traditionally relied on tobacco as a primary engine of its economy. Furniture and textile manufacturing were also mainstays for jobs and development, but over the past twenty years, all three have declined sharply.

The low cost of living, combined with the proximity to Greensboro and the North Carolina Research Triangle, may make Southside one of the best places to work in America, once this infrastructure is in place.

Also included as a service will be MSAPs in some locations, which create very high performance community intranets that support next generation multimedia services. The MSAP concept was pioneered by me while I was Director of the Blacksburg Electronic Village. Blacksburg has had an MSAP in operation since 1999, and Danville, Virginia also has an MSAP.

Note the emphasis on leasing capacity to "all interested providers," which includes incumbents, who, if they are smart, will realize they can lower their costs by leasing instead of overbuilding.

The Mid-Atlantic Broadband Cooperative (MBC), a non-profit cooperative with funding from the Economic Development Authority (EDA) and the Virginia Tobacco Commission (VTC), has contracted to deploy an advanced open-access wholesale broadband network in Southside Virginia. The RBI is a 700-mile fiber-optic network with 48 strands of dedicated fiber backbone, Synchronous Optical Network (SONET) architecture, dual rings with 13 OC-192 backbone sites and 65 satellite locations providing low speed & high speed interconnect facilities (OC-3, OC-12, OC-48, STS, VT). In addition to the turn-key implementation of the RBI, MBC has invested in building a new state of the art Network Operations Control Center (NOCC) in South Boston, Virginia.

The RBI network will connect four cities, 20 counties and 56 industrial parks providing access to nearly 700,000 citizens and more than 19,000 businesses throughout Southside Virginia. The goal of this project is to promote economic development opportunities for the region, attracting technologybased business and industry. Network construction begins in January 2005 and will be turned-up in phases. MBC plans to have the entire network fully operational by December 2006. MBC will be selling/leasing fiber and services on a wholesale basis to all interested providers.

Northern Illinois, which is surprisingly rural in nature despite being a relatively easy drive to Chicago, has grabbed hold of the future. Below is a press release announcing an ambitious regional project to get affordable, high capacity broadband throughout that area. In announcing the effort, an official connected with the effort said, "The communication infrastructure we're talking about will be as important as electricity, water."

Northern Illinois Technology Triangle Unlocks New Opportunities for Northern Illinois Communities

Rochelle Municipal Utilities announces plans for a multi-gigabit capacity fiber optic ring to serve local rural communities

Rochelle, IL - Today, Rochelle Mayor Chet Olson unveiled plans for a superior fiber-optic telecommunications network labeled the Northern Illinois Technology Triangle (NITT). The network will provide multi-gigabit capacity to the Northern Illinois region, connecting communities across Northern Illinois and opening new opportunities for growth in education, research and business.

The NITT is a joint venture between Rochelle Municipal Utilities (RMU) and the Illinois Municipal Broadband Communications Association (IMBCA). It will provide a looped broadband fiber network in a triangle along I-88 from Rock Falls to Naperville, with a section north to St. Charles, and from St. Charles along I-90 to Rockford, and then along I-39 from Rockford to Rochelle. The physical infrastructure will be implemented in three parts. IMBCA has already leased existing fiber along I-88 from Naperville west to Rock Falls and is now negotiating leases for existing fiber on I-90. Rochelle Municipal Utilities plans on installing the remaining leg of the triangle, from Rochelle to Rockford, where no fiber exits. The NITT is the first municipal utility fiber optic network consortium in Illinois.

Chet Olson, Rochelle's Mayor, said, "We're pleased to play a part in bringing about the Northern Illinois Technology Triangle. NITT is the beginning of a new era, not only for Rochelle, but for all communities in this region that choose to access this network. For my community, it means an opportunity to expand our economic base from manufacturing and rail service to technology services and support." The network ring is based upon fiber optic cable and will offer 33 (or more) wavelengths, each with the capacity to carry data at a rate up to 40 Gigabits per second. With just one Gigabit connection, a family can download their favorite DVD movie in less than one (1) minute, something which would normally take 13 days to download using a telephone dial-up connection.

In my talks to community leaders, I talk about the ability to sell goods and services that are, literally, weightless, via the Internet. I get a lot of blank stares, as some folks still have trouble understanding the revolution in business.

The latest news comes from Apple, which reports it sells more than one million songs PER DAY from its online music store, or nearly half a billion songs per year.

What in the world is Google up to? Sitting on a huge pile of cash, with more coming in every month from the successful Google AdWords service, one has to wonder if the company would be content.

This article from the Times in the UK suggests Google has something big up it's sleeve, with a possible foray into a worldwide Voice over IP phone service.

The 'net is buzzing over an article called What You'll Wish You'd Known by computer scientist and dot-com success Paul Graham. The article is interesting, but I don't think most kids will take the time to read it--by their standards, it's way too long (a topic for another discussion).

But you can always rely on the geeks that inhabit SlashDot to not only read this stuff, but critique it extensively, and one comment jumped right off the page at me:

The Wall Street Journal reports that FCC Chairman Michael Powell has stepped down as head of that agency.

The past four years for the FCC have been rocky ones. The FCC has lurched from one decision to another, sometimes favoring users of telecom services, but too often seeming to coddle the corporate dinosaurs of telecom. Trying to walk a line between the two is probably the worst job in Washington, and that has to be factored in when evaluating Powell's performance.

The bigger and more important issue for me has been this: What is the national policy on broadband? Powell, the FCC, and the Bush administration have never answered that beyond pablum that can be boiled down to "Broadband is good."

It's hard to imagine why we would even need an FCC ten years from now, and the new head of the FCC would do great good by announcing that his job is to shut the agency down over an appropriate period of time. Doing so would unleash a great wave of investment and entreprneurship because companies would finally know that they would not be hampered in the future by capricious regulations from Washington.

If the Federal government has a role, and I think it does, it's a simple one. Instead of the piecemeal approach to trying to help communities with broadband, the Federal government should simply fund very high bandwidth, interstate, long haul fiber routes, exactly the way it does with interstate highway projects.

And like the interstate highway system, it would have profound, and mostly positive effects on the economy, because unlike the highway system, small communities everywhere would have a chance to hook up to a world class Internet backbone. If you are interested in the how this might look at a local, state, and national level, take a look at my paper on this topic--Connecting the Dots fo

Podcasting started a few months ago among a small group of geeks who cobbled together some software that makes it easy to download sound files from the Web and squirt them right into an iPod or other portable music player.

The best description I've seen for it is in this article, which calls it "Tivo for radio." Podcasting allows you to download audio content and listen to it whenever you like, as opposed to listening to radio live.

Here is a very readable article that explains some of the differences between the popular but still more expensive LCD panels and the older but now very cheap CRT-based monitors. LCD prices have fallen dramatically, and CRTs are now dirt cheap--just a few years ago, a 17" CRT was $600 or more, and you can now find them for $100 if you shop around. One nice advantage of LCDs is that they are easier on the eyes, as they do not flicker like CRTs, and they don't produce ionizing radiation like CRTs.

The northern region of New Hamphsire is taking control of it's economic future by developing a technology master plan for the region, as reported by the AP.

One of the drivers of the project is the need to be competitive from an economic development perspective. Design Nine is providing the coordination and guidance for the effort.

SpaceShipOne won the $10 million X Prize by being the first private space vehicle to make a round trip to suborbital space twice in two weeks. But more money has been put up by hotel mogul Robert Bigelow. Fifty million is the next prize, for the first private spaceship to take five people to orbit twice in two weeks.

If you want to see what it will be like when WiFi hotspots can be found almost anywhere, just check in for a night to any of the low end motels (e.g. Holiday Inn Express) that offer "free" WiFi.

What most of these places are doing are buying a cheap DSL line, sticking an access point on each floor, and hanging a banner out front (High speed Internet!). It's not high speed when every other guest in the hotel fires up their laptop at the same time and tries to download movie trailers.

The City Council of St. Paul, Minnesota has approved a study to consider the feasibility of citywide wireless broadband.

The three month study will look for "the common good" that might be gained from community-managed telecom infrastructure. This is, as far as I know, the first time the common good has been explicity acknowledged in this kind of study. It has been implicitly part of many other community telecom projects, but it's about time we started this particular conversation in more earnest.

Texas has a foot in the emerging Space Economy with the announcement that Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon, is planning a spaceport facility in southwest Texas.

Bezos is from nearby New Mexico, and has been working on this project from Seattle for several years. The most interesting part of this story is that the Bezos ranch, near El Paso, is not really that far from southern New Mexico's spaceport. The two locations are likely to form a "space tech" corridor that will fuel growth in the region for decades.

Griffin, one of the most innovative hardware companies out there, has just released a neat little $40 gadget that takes audio from your computer and broadcasts it to any nearby FM radios. This solves the problem of how to distribute the music from all those CDs you have ripped to your hard drive. It also means you can rebroadcast Internet radio stations to other locations in your house. RocketFM plugs into a USB port, and works with both Windows and Macs--a perfect complement to iTunes.

In yet another egregious example of an organization being hijacked by the IT folks, the FBI may have to scrap a brand new $170 million computer system because, get this, it doesn't work.

When these things happen, there is plenty of blame to go around. There are always at least three guilty parties.

There was an article in yesterday's Roanoke Times in the Business section about a new firm in Roanoke that is selling late model used cars with a "new car showroom" approach. The owner is trying to overcome the stigma associated with the stereotyped used car salesman by offering only late model cars in excellent condition, and using a high quality presentation.