Technology Futures

The NY Times (reg. required) has a short story on the music industry. Music sales are up 1.6% this past year, for the first time in four years.

What happened? Apple legitimized the online music market with it's highly successful iTunes Music Store, and a horde of competing online music services rushed in to give consumers a wide array of choices. Music sales went up.

Here is an excellent multi-page opinion article that discusses the plight of towns and cities in light of the recent Pennsylvania legislation that forces communities to ask Verizon's permission to develop broadband systems.

Here is an excellent article full of details about the citywide wireless project in Rio Rancho, New Mexico. Rio Rancho is a fast-growing suburb of Albequerque. Here is the quote that shows that Rio Rancho leaders "get it."

"We see it as an economic development tool—today's business needs good quality access, Palenick said [the city administrator].

Jewelry, flowers, clothing, and computer stuff fueled a 25% increase in online buying during the holiday season. This article describes the surge in spending in more detail.

Yet another former third world country has broadband projects underway that leave U.S. efforts in the dust. Andra Pradesh, a state of India, has embarked on an ambitious but entirely doable project to build a statewide network consisting of a 10 gigabit per second backbone, 1 gigabit Ethernet trunks to a thousand locations, and 100 megabit fiber connections to every town in the state.

According to Dave Winer, Quizno's has free WiFi at their 3300 U.S. stores. When companies like this are making the substantial investment needed to deliver the service, it's passed from the realm of a nice amenity for a few techno-geeks and has entered the realm of the ordinary.

But to make WiFi really work for a community, a community approach is needed so that it is widely available, not just at one store out by the main road. What is your community doing?

A UK startup called Light Blue Optics has announced they are developing a pocket-size digital projector, using breakthrough holographic techniques that allow using just a few small components, compared to the relatively bulky LCD projectors, which are still too big to carry around conveniently and still too expensive.

One of the best ways to create new jobs in your region is to make sure the businesses that are already in the community have access to good advice, including advice and guidance on technical matters.

The traditional role of the economic developer in the Manufacturing Economy was to recruit jobs from other parts of the country. But that has not been an effective primary strategy for many years. In a global economy, many traditional manufacturing jobs have moved offshore, and no amount of tax incentives are going to change that.

A diversified economic development strategy would put more time and resources into helping existing businesses grow. And there is plenty of simple and effective things that can be done. For example, I still find many businesses have poorly designed Web sites. Why not use some ED funds to pay for Web site critiques and reviews of business Web sites? This could be done on a 50% match basis to ensure that the businesses are likely to take the advice seriously.

As an example of how bad things could be, I just found a business with this statement on their "Contact Us" page:

To email us, order a free catalog, check on an order, etc., please call 1-800-829-xxxx.

I'm not making this up--to email the company, you have to call them first! Here is a business that has apparently been asleep for the past ten years, and still does not recognize that current and potential customers may want to email the company. I find that the majority of small businesses are still not taking the Web seriously, largely because they simply don't know what to do.

Part of the problem is not their fault. Too many businesses have been burned badly with bad advice. There are basically two ways to get help with a business Web site.

• You can go to a Web design shop. These outfits are often expert at building the Web site, but don't always have in-house expertise to help with marketing and business integration issues. So businesses end up with costly Web sites that don't actually have any impact on the business.

The New York Times (reg. required) has an article summarizing a new study on the impact of the Internet on our lives. As past studies have found, TV is the big loser, with Internet users watching about 17% less television. That's probably not bad news.

I just bought an inexpensive audio mixer to help with some recording tasks I have. It is sold by a small German firm. I was struck by the User's Manual, which came with instructions in the following languages:

Walmart has backed off its mandate that all its suppliers use RFID (Radio Frequency ID tags) by next week (note: NY Times site requires registration). It turns out, among other problems, that the tags don't work very well.

The theory is wonderful--Walmart employees, instead of tediously counting stock or handscanning barcodes, would simply walk down the aisle of a store waving a wand and accurately count what is on the shelf.

Texas continues to be a leader in rolling out public WiFi. Several months ago, the state announced it was going to offer WiFi at highway rest stops. Now it will also offer it in some state parks. The reasons are shrewd--state officials have decided to invest to boost tourism among some very narrowly targeted groups that want more access while out in the parks, with birders and "snowbirds," the winter RV crowd among those mentioned.

I'll be posting irregularly over the next week and a half. Thanks for all your support over the past year. Traffic and readership on the site has quadrupled since this time last year, and I am deeply grateful that so many of you find this site of value.

All my best,
Andrew Cohill

Ellen Goodman, in her syndicated column, writes that some restaurants are installing phone booths so that customers who want to talk on a cellphone have a place to go and do so without disturbing everyone else. A nice idea, and a neat compromise between those who feel they can't even get through a meal without answering the phone and those that feel they can.

Esme Vos at MuniWireless thinks that the real reason behind Verizon's fevered opposition of community wireless in Philadelphia is that Verizon is terrified of cheap VoIP over WiFi.

Sun Rocket, a Voice over IP company, has the VoIP universe abuzz with their ambitious business plans to expand from 3 to 50 metropolitan markets in 2005, and the company says they intend to be a player in 300 metro markets in the United States. Particularly interesting is their flat rate annual fee--for $199 a year ($16.58 a month), you get flat rate, unlimited, nationwide calling.

If you hate waiting in line at the Post Office to mail packages, don't. The U.S. Postal Service has online label and postage services that are just terrific. Now that I have an account with my credit card information saved, it takes about a minute to print out a bar coded shipping label complete with postage. If you get it done early enough in the day, put a sticky note on your mailbox and the postman will come right to your door to pick up the packages. Or if you are running late (as I am today with Christmas gifts), you can walk right in the post office, drop them off, and walk out.

According to European scientists who have concluded a four year long study of cellphone radiation (the same gigahertz level frequencies used in microwave ovens, by the way), cellphone radiation appears to cause damage at the DNA level in cells, and not all of it was repairable by the cell. This means you end up with mutated cells in your body, which is one suspected cause of some cancers. Scientists agree more study is needed. The cellphone industry has no response.

The Roanoke region recently competed for a Dell manufacturing facility, and lost out to North Carolina, which offered Dell a whopping $242 million in tax credits. That's an awful lot to pay for just one firm that could easily pick up and leave after a few years. Imagine what a few hundred small businesses with good business plans could do if given ten or fifteen years of tax relief.

Google released a piece of software a few months ago that would let you use Google to search your own hard disk, with results displayed just like Google displays search results from the Web. Sounds good, right?

Aside from the obvious privacy issues (Google swears they won't do anything with the data except target ads to you better, but they can change that policy anytime they like), I'd never let a third party search my own hard drive.