Future trends

NBC, which has exclusive rights to broadcast the 2008 Olympics in the United States, is apparently upset that people are simply not bothering to wait for prime time to watch NBC's repackaged broadcasts. Instead, viewers are simply going to the Internet and watching the Olympics on the Web sites of media outlets in other countries.

As I predicted months ago when gas prices first started to rise, the suburbs are about to undergo a transformation. USA Today had a front page article about the 'burbs and the changes. In Arizona, they are doing what planners have been recommending for at least thirty years, which is to redesign suburbs as destinations, rather than just a place to sleep.

Cloud computing has replaced Web 2.0 as a popular IT buzzphrase. Nobody ever really knew what Web 2.0 was, but it sounded important, and a lot of small companies got lots of cash to "really important" Web 2.0 applications and services that were going to change the world, make a lot of money, and cure cancer. None of them made much money, and most of them made no money.

Apple's second generation iPhone was released for sale last Friday, and promptly broke every consumer electronics record. Apple and AT&T sold an astounding one million phones in just three days, making it not only the most popular cellphone in history but the most popular consumer electronics device ever. Even more incredible, there are still long lines of buyers waiting for phones--according to numerous reports, all 1800 AT&T stores are completely sold out, and most Apple retail stores are out of stock.

Apparently, multitasking (reading email, watching YouTube, texting, talking on the phone--all at the same time) is making us stupid. Literally. Our brains are being rewired, and not in a good way, according to this article.

It is more, apparently, than just a time management issue. How many times have you heard someone remark, only half-joking, "I need to get out of the office to get some work done."

Spit (Spam over internet telephony) may be worse than spam, according to this article. As more and more businesses and people make the switch to VoIP telephone services like Vonage, the spammers are gearing up for the mother of all dinnertime sales call efforts. But wherease the Do Not Call list mandated by Congress managed to get those annoying POTS (Plain Old Telephone Service) sales calls under control, Spit will be coming from servers in China, Nigeria, and other lawless areas of the globe, beyond the reach of U.S regulators.

Telehealth services are the sleeper when putting together a business model for community broadband projects. Telehealth services, which will be focused primarily towards the elderly but will also provide additional mobility and freedom for those with chronic health conditions, will have a substantial positive impact on the financial health of a community or municipal open services, open access broadband network.

Google has announced its long promised Google Health service, which stores your medical and drug records on Google servers. You get to set your own userid and password, and Google makes a big deal about the high level of security on their servers. But I don't think the biggest privacy concern is from hackers--I think Google CAN keep the servers secure.

Look for "fuel surcharges" to rapidly increase the cost of certain kinds of services. Our last Fedex bill included a $10 fuel surcharge on top of the normal $48 delivery charge for a single package. It's hard to imagine, given the volume of packages that Fedex handles, that every package now requires a 20% surcharge.

A new study indicates that 92% of all email sent in the first quarter of 2008 was spam. In other words, all of us, users and service providers alike, are spending a fortune to haul worthless and contemptible spam traffic across the Internet.

Recently, when we have had people over to house for dinner or when at someone else's home, I notice that a common topic of discussion is what is showing on YouTube. Everyone has a story about some usually goofy thing they saw recently on the video site. Anecdotally, several people have shared that they often just spend a little time in the evening goofing off on YouTube. This is usually followed by the admission they don't turn on the TV much anymore.

With the announcement of the iPhone Software Development Kit (SDK) which allows software developers to write native applications for the iPhone, Apple has also changed another set of rules for the game.

Apple unveiled the long promised SDK (Software Development Kit) for the iphone, along with serious support for business enterprise applications and services, including Cisco VPN (Virtual Private Network) support and Microsoft Active Sync support. The latter is needed to make the iPhone work fully with businesses using Entourage and other Microsoft business applications. The SDK allows developers to write and distribute iPhone native software applications, including games.

According to this report, the merger of XM and Sirius has stalled, a year after the deal was first announced. It is a perfect storm because you have a combination of FCC confusion, Congressional confusion, silly prices paid for on-air talent, and a bad business model.

Those digital photo frames that are becoming popular hold more than pictures. Millions of them apparently come pre-loaded with a potent virus designed to thwart computer anti-virus programs. The virus is spread from the frame to a computer when the frame is plugged into a USB port.

The virus is difficult to remove, and the article recommends plugging a suspect picture frame into a Linux or Macintosh first to see what is stored in the frame memory (and then deleting it).

I continue to be amazed that we seem to be abandoning the phone, which continues to be highly reliable, in favor of email, which is much less reliable.

A carefully designed study of cellphone use indicates that using cellphones within an hour of bedtime disrupts sleep patterns, causing fatigue and other symptoms. The double blind study ensured that participants did not know if they were exposed to cellphone radiation or not, so the results appear to be worth careful consideration. The article found that teens with cellphones were often using the devices just before going to sleep, setting up a long term pattern of restless sleep and chronic fatigue.

I had just finished up a meeting at a community interested in investing in telecom infrastructure, and before I left the building, I decided to take advantage of the local WiFi to send an email to someone who had been at the meeting but had already left; I wanted to confirm a follow up meeting.

HD quality streaming video has arrived on the Web. Pajamas Media, a conservative news blog, has posted HD quality video interviews with three of the Republican candidates. The large screen format requires a minimum bandwidth of 1.5 megabits (the equivalent of a T1 connection), compared to the 200-300 kilobits that a YouTube video might try to use.

This decade's format battle, largely ignored by everyone except the entertainment industry and unmarried nerds with lots of disposable income, has been the fight between the two HD disc formats--HD DVD and Blu-ray. In the past year, the movie studios have been releasing some movies in one format, the other, or both. Normal people have not been interested in buying movies in formats that could disappear in a year or two, so sales have been tepid.