Future trends

The LA Times reports that there are now more cellphones than landlines. We went from basically zero cellphones about ten years ago. We are at a point now where most households have at least one cellphone.

We still have a few problems with cellphones, though.

One of the first really interesting uses of RFID (Radio Frequency ID) tags is described in this CNet article. A Japanese firm is looking at the possibility of using robots to guard playgrounds and other public spaces. It would be able to keep track of children by using RFID tags that would be worn by the kids, probably as a bracelet of some kind.

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.

I've been writing for a while about the Energy Economy and the Space Economy as emerging trends. But there is yet another emerging trend--the Diamond Age. Diamonds are fascinating stuff--the hardest substance in the world, with brilliant clarity and appearance, yet made from the cheapest of materials--carbon.

Natural diamonds are scarce, and hence, valuable. Industrial, manmade diamonds have been around for a while, but have usually been small and of poor quality. More recently, a Russian process for creating diamonds has been transported to the U.S. with some success, but the diamonds are yellow in color, limiting their appeal for both jewelry and certain kinds of industrial and optical applications.

Inexpensive diamonds, of sufficient size that they can be formed or machined into usable shapes, is a kind of holy grail for manufacturing and science. In an age of cheap diamond materials, the effects would be far reaching. Industrial processes that involve machining would become much faster and more efficient as diamond tool heads would replace carbide, which breaks and/or wears out fast compared to diamonds. Cheaper manufacturing processes would lower the cost of many items, and make other items available for the first time. Even in our homes, a diamond knife would never wear out and would never lose its edge.

Now Carnegie-Mellon researchers (hat tip to SlashDot) have developed a new process to produce optical quality , large diamonds. The process is producing much larger diamonds than anyone has ever been able to make, suggesting that "the Diamond Age is upon us."

What is the effect on communities? The most plentiful source of carbon on the planet is coal. If your region used to have a booming coal economy, start thinking (as a long term strategy) about the effect of cheap diamonds on your region. How about heavy industry? Would machine shops and equipment manufacturers benefit from improved efficiencies? This is still a few years away, but the ripple effects of cheap diamonds will be extensive.

When I tell people that the target for broadband ought to be 155 megabits or better, many scoff at me, even though I have plenty of information that shows we need that much for the things we all want to be doing in less than a decade.

Unfortunately, the FCC continues to prop up the incumbent telephone and cable companies by calling broadband anything faster than 256 kilobits. This allows the incumbents to tell poorly informed elected leaders and economic developers in our communities that cable modem and DSL service offerings exceed Federal government recommendations by a wide margin, when in fact the 1-3 megabit throughput of DSL and cable modems is woefully inadequate. Not knowing anything else about the issue, many leaders decide they don't need to do anything, since the community "already has broadband."

It's video that will drive much of the bandwidth needs, and with high definition (HD) programming becoming more common, you need, depending on whom you ask, somewhere between 3-8 megabits for a single HD video stream. With the average American household having 3.68 televisions, you have to design your network to support four of those video streams simultaneously, or somewhere around 40-50 megabits/second just to watch TV. And you have to be able to handle approximately a 3x "burst" capacity when you decide to watch a video downloaded via the Internet.

But my figure of 155 megabits is still setting the bar awfully low. Our Canadian (CANARIE) friends are already doing advanced testing of immersive, multi-party videoconferencing with enhanced audio services called High Definition Ultra-Videoconferencing. The system uses 3.5 gigabits/second in each direction--or about 22 times more bandwidth than my recommendation of 155 megabits/second.

Of course, it takes an all fiber system to do this. Fiber continues to be the best futureproofing a community can undertake, as it can handle whatever bandwidth needs we want to throw at it, just by swapping out the electronics at the ends.

Years ago, one of my favorite authors, Neal Stephenson, wrote a book called The Diamond Age. Set in the near future, technology had progressed to a point where most homes had a refrigerator size machine that could make virtually any common household item, most often out of diamond. Why diamond? Because the raw material is as cheap as, well, dirt--it's just carbon. Advanced microfabrication at the molecular level enabled the machine to build an item layer by layer at the molecular level. One thing that was handy in the book was diamond knives that never got dull.

Sound far-fetched? It's not. Industrial designers have been using polymer-based rapid prototyping machines for years to create three dimensional objects out of a soup of light-sensitive liquid plastic. A laser, driven by CAD/CAM information, hardens the plastic layer by layer, and the object "grows" right out of a container of goop.

More recently, some scientists have been using modified ink-jet printers to spray bio-compounds onto a sheet of plastic to create things like cartilage-based ear replacements for people that have suffered injuries.

Now we have the Replicating Rapid Prototyping Project, or RepRap. This UK-based university effort intends to build an Open Source system that can build complex objects. We won't have these in our homes any time soon, but our kids may. The Open Source approach--making it available for anyone in the world to both use and improve--has the potential to transform the world economy. What are some of the implications? Well, China might not have the economic clout it has now if common household items can be fabricated cheaply near the user of the item. The current "consumption" society would change radically as anyone could acquire almost any common household object for the cost of the raw materials--the cost of shipping, advertising, distributing, warehousing, and retailing would disappear.

Via the CANARIE mailing list, there is news that NTT, the Japanese phone company, has broken new ground with Wave Division Multiplexing, or WDM. In "old" fiber systems, a single channel of information travels over a fiber pair. With WDM, you can have multiple channels of information on a single fiber.

As the gadgets to capture audio and video get smaller and lighter, and as the tools to edit that content and then distribute it via the Internet become easier to use, I think there is a danger of narcissism, or what I call the "look at me" phenomenon.

Lately I've been getting more email that goes something like this: "Look what I just did! It's great! Stop by my Web site and watch the video (or listen to the audio)."

The subtext is "Whatever I just did is way more important than anything you happen to be doing, so stop what you are doing and look at what I am doing."

We are just at the dawn of the computer age. I know that because we are finally seeing computers that are not just, well, computers. The $99 iPod shuffle, barely larger than a stick of gum, is thousands of times more powerful computationally than my first hand-built personal computer from 1977. And we don't think of an iPod as a computer at all, but it is. Cellphones are handheld computers that have been programmed to behave like phones (and cameras, and calendars, etc.).

I started thinking about this when I read about Asterisk, which is an Open Source software project that makes a cheap Linux or Macintosh computer behave like a PBX. PBX is an old phone company acronym for Private Branch Exchange, or a small telephone switch normally owned only by medium and large companies because they have been very expensive.

But now any small business can afford a PBX simply by downloading this free software and installing it. It works with most popular Voice over IP protocols, and interoperates with other common telephone equipment. It's an incredible piece of work that is the result of probably hundreds of people working collaboratively for the common good.

And it must scare the pants off companies like Lucent, Alcatel, and others that still make a lot of money selling telephone switches. The world we knew is crumbling around us, and dazzling new opportunities are emerging.

I've been reading a lot of historical fiction and nonfiction recently. I've slowly been ploughing through Neal Stephenson's three book opus on the late 1600s and early 1700s. I'm just finishing up book two, ,The Confusion. It's a fictional account of those turbulent times when the first global economy began to emerge and innovations like paper money changed the rules of nations and commerce simultaneously. Stephenson is a genius of a writer, rooting his story firmly in the real history of the time, including figures like Isaac Newton and Leibniz, both of whom had a profound effect on that era.

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.

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'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.

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.

Neal Stephenson, some years ago, wrote a prescient novel called "The Diamond Age," about a time in the near future when diamonds are, literally, cheap as dirt. Stephenson, who is arguably the best novelist of the past fifty years with respect to taking emerging technology trends and crafting intriguing storylines around them, imagined a world where even the most common of objects could be made from diamonds--kitchen knives, as an example, that are much sharper than razors but never need to be sharpened because of the, well, diamond-hard edge.

IBM has sold their PC business to a Chinese firm. There has been much news coverage about this. They sold it for just over $1 billion, which is a paltry sum, considering the global market.

Most of the news coverage has been about whether or not it is a "good deal" for IBM. The conventional wisdom has been saying it makes sense for IBM to get out of a cutthroatl, commodity market with razor-thin margins.

But I see something different in the sale. What I see is a company that, like much of the rest of the IT industry, is intellectually bankrupt. It's almost beyond belief that IBM, with some of the brightest people in the industry on its staff, could not come with anything new, different, or interesting to differentiate IBM pcs from a cheap clone.

PCs are horrible devices. They work poorly, are virus-prone, are hard to fix and hard to maintain, and make simple things bizarrely complex much of the time. IBM could not come with a single thing that would make the PC better? This does not bode well for the American IT industry, for it IBM couldn't do it, with the resources the company has, who else will? Gateway can't. Dell won't--Dell makes it money selling stuff cheaper than everyone else, so it won't spend a nickel on research and development.

Microsoft is still two years away from the mythical Longhorn software upgrade to Windows. Longhorn has been in development for so many years now, it's almost a joke.

The only hardware innovation is coming from Apple. Apple has been delivering a major software upgrade every year for years, and issues minor upgrades almost every other month. Apple's hardware, year after year, wins design awards for it's good looks and functionality. Apple constantly strives to make its equipment simpler to use--the new G5 iMac requires, in one configuration, just one cable--the power cable--to be fully functional. That's right, you take it out of the box, plug it in the wall, and the machine is ready for use. And Apple's hardware is now cheaper, on a feature by feature basis, than Wintel pcs.

Glenn Reynolds, better know as Instapundit, has an article on Tech Central Station about the emerging trend of using public WiFi hotspots as business meeting places.

I wrote about this a while back, but Reynolds makes some interesting points, including this one about the effect on the real estate market:

It's not being covered much in the news, but you can be sure that the demonstrations against the stolen election in Ukraine is being organized in large part via the Internet.

Researchers have made what is being called a major breakthrough--a new process that allows the production of yarns made from carbon nanotubes.

In a deeply disturbing ruling, the National Transportation Safety Board has ruled that car manufacturers must put black box data recorders in new cars and trucks. The boxes will record speed, acceleration, braking, direction, and other data that could be used to reconstruct accidents, among other things.