Hardware and gadgets

Daily Wireless discusses a new NetGear home router product that has voice phone ports built in. NetGear is one of the biggest manufacturers of those cheap WiFi router/hubs that have been selling like hotcakes.

A New York Times article (registration required) talks about the growth in the worldwide market for ringtones (alternate ring sounds for mobile phones).

Most new cellphones have the ability to download alternate ringtones, which typically sell for $2-3 each. I've never understood the appeal of them--it's a phone, for crying out loud--all I want to know is that it is ringing. I don't need a long, noisy dirge to let me know that.

Nonetheless, I'm clearly a curmudgeon when it comes to this particular little piece of IT gadgetry. Worldwide, ringtones are now a $3 billion dollar market, and growing fast as more phones are bought with this capability. In a small bit of good news, perhaps Americans are a bit more sane than the rest of the world when it comes to this stuff, as the U.S. market for ringtones lags behind Europe and Asia.

The ringtone industry is in a major lather right now because the newest cellphones have polyphonic capability (meaning they can play snippets of real songs, rather than a tinny melody of the song). The music industry is gearing up to license huge chunks of their music archives as ringtones, including some downright foul and/or insulting recordings.

There is a larger issue behind all this. Who could have predicted even three years ago that a major, multi-billion dollar market would have emerged around ringtones? As dumb as they may be, the ringtone industry is creating jobs and revenue streams across whole industries.

It's creative destruction at work. Yes, some of our factory and low level office jobs are being outsourced to low wage countries. But whole new industries are replacing them. Would you rather work in the music industry as a ringtone and license manager or work in a satellite TV call center making cold calls? Which kind of job would be better for your region?

Trying to preserve the jobs and economic development strategies of the past is an exercise in futility. Communities need to be looking ahead, and planning in a futures context, instead of the context of what worked well in 1970.

Design Nine outgrew our old office space, and over the past week we moved into new, larger quarters--we're still in Blacksburg, Virginia, though.

I had to completely disassemble my desktop computer, something I have not had to do in over two years, when this machine was brand new. I ended up with a box of some 30+ cables for a computer and office phone, which on the face of it seems absurd for an otherwise entirely straightforward desktop machine used primarily for email and writing. In part, much of the problem has been the extraordinary success of the USB protocol as a peripheral connectivity solution.

In the "old" days, about three years ago, you typically had a couple of serial ports and two or three SCSI devices. You had a limited number of peripherals you could have hooked up at one time, and your ambitions for connected gagdets was low.

With the advent of USB, you could stick a hub on and fill it with as many things as you liked, and they would all actually work very well (most of the time). I have a seven port USB hub, and six ports are in use. Combine those USB cables with phone cables, Firewire cables, and power cables for all the devices, and you end up with a mess. It is incredibly ugly, difficult if not impossible to keep neat, and amazing that it works at all.

Firewire, in theory, should solve many of these problems. Firewire devices can be daisy-chained, so you don't have the multiple cable problem of USB, and Firewire is capable of providing more power than USB, so you can actually eliminate the AC/DC voltage converters entirely. Apple's iPod is a perfect example of this. You connect the iPod to your laptop or desktop with a single, thin Firewire cable that recharges the battery and transfers data several times faster than USB.

But Firewire has yet to reach its potential. Many PCs still do not come with Firewire (it's standard on all Macs), and even on the Mac, it does not always work as expected. My Firewire video camera (no power cable, thank you) does not get along with my Firewire hard drive (big AC power cable), and I have to unplug the camera when I back up files to the external Firewire hard drive.

The EETimes has an interesting article on how U.S. cellular providers are choking off innovation and profits in the electronics industry. As I have long predicted, cellphones are absorbing the features of standalone gadgets like PDAs; PDA sales have been flat for some time. One of the hottest "gotta have" gadgets is the Palm Treo 600, which is a cellphone with the Palm PDA built in.

So what's the problem? Fewer things (and fewer chargers) to lug around sounds good, right? Not when you can't buy any of the new gadgets on the open market. Try buying JUST a Treo 600. You can't do it. You have to buy a cellphone plan with it; when you do so, you get a discount off the "Manufacturers Suggested Retail Price" (MSRP), which we all know means nothing in an open market.

By tying cellphones to service plans, the cellular companies have created an odd kind of monopoly, in which they have captured and now control the marketplace for handheld consumer devices. The EETimes article discusses the potential impact on the digital camera market--as cellphones get megapixel cameras built in, the digital camera marketplace will disappear. Not only that, consumers lose choice and competition, which keeps prices low. MP3 players are another threatened market; by adding extra memory, cellphones become music players, and the MP3 marketplace disappears.

Consumers are already losing in this situation, and it will only get much, much worse. Bundling, which is what the cellular providers have been doing, is a classic strategy for locking a marketplace up and creating a monopoly. In effect, gadgets like the MP3 player and the digital camera become free, in the sense that the real cost is hidden in the cellphone service contract. And the cellphone companies are now demanding two year renewals on service contract, making it harder and harder to switch.

Microsoft destroyed the market for Web browsers in exactly the same way. Internet Explorer, by giving it away, wrecked the market for every other company. But Internet Explorer is not really free; Microsoft bundles the cost of IE into the cost of Windows--you pay for IE whether you use it or not.

In a widely reported story, Apple's iPod will be given to all Duke University freshman this fall.

The handheld computers will be loaded with course materials, lecture notes, and other university-related materials. While at Virginia Tech, I was involved with freshman orientation (providing information on university computers and networks), and I can tell you the incoming students get an enormous stack of paper, most of which is probably never read.

Delta Airlines has announced plans to use RFIDs (Radio Frequency ID) to track and manage luggage. Finally--a great use for RFIDs that has no privacy problems (unlike proposals to embed them in clothing so that we can be tracked 24 hours a day by the Gap). An RFID on a luggage tag will allow the airline to be able to tell where a piece of luggage is virtually in real time.

If there were not already enough to worry about, we now have cellphone viruses. A UK Web site has a story on a cellphone virus spread by the wireless Bluetooth protocol, which some newer phones have built in. Bluetooth is a short range wireless protocol intended to make it easier to sync cellphone data with your computer, among other uses.

Apple once again proves it is far ahead of other computer manufacturers with its just announced Airport Express.

Apple, which really pioneered consumer and casual use of WiFi, contrary to the ads Intel runs, has created a new wireless gadget that is Swiss Army knife-like in the features it has in a little box barely the size of a pack of cards.

A firm has developed a household appliance they are calling an "ironing robot." It follows on the heels of the wildly successful Roomba vacuum cleaner, which uses software that enables the "robot" to learn where things are in rooms and to successfully clean floors and carpets independently.

Cnet discusses a Gartner Group report that says all those computers purchased in 1999-2000 are going to be replaced soon, and that the number of new machines going out the doors of manufacturers will actually exceed the number sold to fix Y2K problems.

A small, privately held company in Blacksburg called NanoSonic has begun marketing what it calls "metal rubber." An article in the Roanoke Times indicated the nanomaterials company has been developing the product for several years. The material has the ability to conduct electricty while being stretched, and has been mentioned as a possible new material for use in "morphing" aircraft wings which could change shape during flight.

Following Nokia's initial foray into dual mode cellular/WiFi phones, phone giant Motorola is entering the marketplace. Motorola's phone automatically switches to WiFi mode if you enter a WiFi hotspot, meaning that you save your cellular minutes and your cost of calling will be lower overall.

California is a state slowly coming to its senses on the issue of electronic voting machines. An article in the SF Chronicle describes the recommendations of a statewide panel looking at potential problems with the popular touchscreen voting machines. Nationwide, local officials have spent millions on the equipment based entirely on the promises of the vendors, which clearly have a conflict of interest. It would be rare indeed for a vendor to tell a potential customer that their equipment has multiple security and validation issues.

In California, the state panel has recommended a ban on purchasing more machines until the security issues are resolved on the machines already in use. They have also recommended having paper ballots available at all polling places in case the machines fail. And some machines did fail in the March primary, leaving an unknown number of votes uncounted--imagine if that happened during a Presidential election. Finally, the panel has also recommended that the machines provide an auditable paper trail for all votes.

The problem inherent in electronic voting systems is that if the machines have been compromised or have software bugs, there is literally no way to know unless there is some physical redundancy (i.e.

PalmOne, the company formed from the merger of the old Palm company and Handspring, has announced new PDAs. The high end model is notable because the built in camera is a 1.2 megapixel, meaning it is actually useful as a camera, rather than as a novelty. In addition to all the usual organizer features, it has a voice recorder feature, can create Word and Excel-compatible files, and plays MP3 music files. It costs $299, and you'll need to invest at least $50 in a memory card to make it useful, so it's pretty pricey, but you do get a camera with it.

We're not really there yet, though, with respect to a truly useful device. Even with more memory, you can't store much music on it, and the 1.2 megapixel camera is where digital cameras were about 1995--low quality. Here is the dilemma: if you need a higher resolution camera, you still have to lug a camera around with you. If you want more than one or two albums to take on a trip (and you usually do), you need a much bigger MP3 player, like an iPod. And you still need a cellphone. So you have at least three devices strapped to your waist or stuck in your suit pocket or purse, along with all the usual charges, cables, and spare batteries. How do you avoid looking like a dork?