Future trends

Netflix has raised prices. I got my notice via email yesterday. They have unbundled streaming from the traditional DVD via mail, and you now can buy one service, the other, or both. The DVD service is still more expensive than streaming, which suggests that the cost of mailing DVDs remains significant compared to the cost of buying bandwidth to drag streaming content across the Internet.

Take a look at this blood pressure cuff that connects directly to an iPod Touch, an iPhone, or an iPad. The data is stored and displayed on your own device, but the data is also sent to the manufacturer (Withings), where it can be shared with a health care professional.

With the price for copper hitting $4/pound, the biggest copper mine in the world is hanging on poles in the U.S. Copper thieves are actually knocking over poles to steal the copper cable in Antioch, California, but copper theft is a problem all over the U.S. The high price of copper and the steadily decreasing price of fiber makes fiber less expensive in new construction, and of course, with fiber, you have the added benefit of being able to expand capacity as needed.

Art Brodsky has an interesting article about the T-Mobile/AT&T wireless merger. Brodsky illuminates a wide range of interlocking business relationships that are helping to push the merger forward, even though it would create what amounts to a duopoly in the cellular business, with AT&T and Verizon having about 80% of the U.S. market locked up.

I have always had the feeling that becoming an Amazon customer is a bit like joining the Borg: resistance is futile. But Amazon really does believe in customer service, and is particularly good at identifying trends and then developing services to meet the new market demand. Amazon is beginning a big push for their Cloud Drive service, which lets you upload files to an Amazon server and then access them from anywhere. In concept, it is no different that the file storage Apple has offered first via dotMac and now via MobileMe.

Here is a lengthy article, but if you are interested in cloud storage services, it is an excellent primer on the advantages and risks. Cloud services, in many ways, is no different than the old mainframe computing environment, gussied up with a snazzy interface. Here are my own thoughts on the topic.

This jet-powered bicycle might be very handy in areas that still have no broadband, as hauling your data around by jet bike might be faster than dial-up. If we still don't have flying cars, a jet-powered bicycle seems like a pretty good consolation prize.

There have been rumblings for a while now that the dot-com era is back. A few companies have indicated that they may be considering IPOs, which have been scarce for ten years. The reason the dot-com era is back is because someone has decided Zynga, the company that developed the Facebook game Farmville, is worth seven to nine billion dollars.

$7 to 9 billion...Really? Farmville?

Comcast and Level 3 are having a public fight. Level 3 is a long haul network provider; the company owns thousands of miles of inter-city fiber and hauls all kinds of data traffic, including Internet traffic, for a wide variety of customers. But Comcast is groaning under the weight of Netflix and other video traffic, and the cable company wants Level 3 to pay more to drop traffic onto the Comcast network for delivery.

Netflix has announced an increase in the price of monthly subscriptions, which is no surprise, given the popularity of the firm's video on demand service. With Netflix subscribers using 20% of the nation's bandwidth every evening, Netflix needs some way to pay for all that bandwidth. The company has also added a $7.99/month streaming only subscriptions--you can't get any DVDs.

If you have not yet heard about "The Daily," you will shortly. The new digital "newspaper" is a collaboration between Apple and News Corp., and it is designed expressly for tablet devices like the iPad. There will be no Web or paper edition. Hence, we need a new term for this, and I think "newspad" is just right, as it is derived directly from its predecessor, the "newspaper."

Netflix had an outage of several hours that prevented their customers from accessing any streaming content. This article discusses whether Netflix is spending enough on infrastructure, but what has also emerged is that Netflix customers using the company's streaming services are now consuming 20% of all the bandwidth in the U.S. during peak evening hours. As I and many others have been predicting for years, video in all its forms is now driving use of the Internet.

A few months ago, a competitive telecom provider ran fiber down the main road near my home. Yesterday I figured out why; a crew was running a fiber drop to the bank branch on the corner. All over America, it is the dawn of Fiber 2.0. Fiber 1.0 took place in the late nineties, when an enormous amount of capital was spent on fiber too far in advance of the marketplace for demand. Along with the rest of the dot-com ventures, Fiber 1.0 was a bust.

The iPad is breaking every consumer electronic sales record and setting new records. The sales records set by the device include biggest first day sales, biggest first month sales, and biggest first year sales. Apple is on track to sell something north of ten million iPads in the first year. By comparison, the DVD player, in its first year, sold a measly 350,000 units. Apple sold 300,000 iPads on the first day.

Apple has announced a new version of Apple TV. Apple has cut both the price and size of the device; it's now tiny compared to the old version, and costs only $99. The old version of the product was able to store movies and TV shows, but the new version only streams movies and TV, either from online sources or from content stored on a nearby Mac computer.

The InterTubes are a a-flutter with articles about Wal-Mart's plans to use RFID smart tags on clothing. The little tags are readable via wireless handheld devices, and the new system will allow Wal-Mart to manage inventory better. Every article I have read, including this reasonably well-balanced one from USA Today, talks about "privacy concerns." But USA Today, near the end of the article, provides the necessary information to understand just how big the privacy threat is: not very big.

Like all popular Internet services, Facebook has enjoyed rapid growth over the past three or four years, as the service added many hundreds of thousands of users a week (or more--millions in some past months). But that growth has finally stalled out, as everyone who wants to be on Facebook already is. Geometric growth is a wonderful thing, but there was always a finite limit to that growth. Even more telling, the amount of activity by registered users has also dropped.

Lately, visiting some of my regular "regular read" blogs, I'm finding not only fewer posts but notes from the bloggers that after five or six years, they are turning the blog off or just posting a lot less. The comments all seem to run in the same direction: "I've said everything I have wanted to say." And regular readers of this blog may have noticed that I am posting a lot less than I was three or four years ago. Part of the change is due the the growth in Design Nine; we're planning and building more networks in more places around the country than we were three or four years ago.

Here is an article that says the median age of traditional TV viewers has moved up to nearly 51 years old. For an industry that covets the 25-44 year old demographic, that has to be bad news. It explains why you see so many laxative,Viagra, and arthritis ads on TV--nothing but creaky and cranky old folks watching.