Submitted by acohill on Tue, 01/05/2010 - 10:15
Here is a roundup of rumors about the new Apple tablet. Apple has announced a media event late this month, but is not saying what the announcement is about. Until very recently, most pundits were guessing Apple's table computer would not be announced until June of this year, but I think the increasing interest in the Google Android phone may have caused Apple to move up their announcement to suck all the oxygen out of the room and take the media focus off Android.
If that is Apple's strategy, it is likely to work. The iTablet or iSlate (nobody really knows what the final name will be) will relegate the Amazon Kindle and other bookreaders to strictly second tier status, much like the iPod put all other MP3 music players into a permanent also-ran status, and completely transformed the music industry.
There is still much debate about whether the new device will have an iPhone style interface or a Mac style interface, with the conventional wisdom betting on the iPhone. But what a lot of people forget is that it probably does not matter very much, because the iPhone is a Macintosh underneath. Every single iPhone has the full power of a desktop or laptop Macintosh. So the iSlate may look more like an iPhone, but as it evolves, Apple can easily and quickly add more functionality just by peeling away the cover on the hidden power.
Why is this device going to be revolutionary? It won't be just the technology--Microsoft has a tablet operating system for years. What Apple is likely to unveil along with the iTablet is a new section of the iTunes Store, stocked with magazines and newspapers. iSlate owners will be able to subscribe to a wide variety of publishing content and get the content wirelessly on their iSlate. This will save the rapidly collapsing magazine and newspaper businesses, which have been unable to find or build their way out of the two century old paper-based distribution model. With the cost of distribution of a newspaper or magazine slashed to nearly zero, papers and magazines will be able to focus on high quality writing and reporting, which is always in short supply.
As with other breakthrough Apple technologies, new kinds of opportunities will emerge quickly, creating new businesses and jobs where none existed before. One big sea change will be in higher ed, where colleges and universities that are smart will simply issue every student an iSlate on the first day of freshman year. Faculty will be able to provide their students with very high quality (book quality) class notes, multimedia presentations, and even administer tests via the iTablet. Can't they do all that now? Sure, but not with the kind of high quality interface and superb usability that the iSlate will bring. And textbook prices should come down, although some textbook publishers will resist.
The iTablet will allow new college textbook writers to enter the marketplace quickly and easily, just the way the iPhone App Store has created thousands of new software publishing businesses. Writing a textbook will no longer require years of negotiation with publishing houses still operating on a business model developed during the era of Charles Dickens. Instead, textbook writers will be able to market directly to faculty at colleges and universities, with the textbook distributed at very low cost via the iSlate Textbook Store.
The big, sheet of paper size screen of the iTablet will allow colleges and universities to create "virtual registrar" interfaces that will give students the ability to fill out and submit forms quickly and easily from anywhere, with much better interfaces and ease of use than Web forms (because of the direct input pen interface).
The iSlate will also boost TV show and movie sales, with the existing iTunes TV/movies section all ready to send video content directly to a large, comfortable, easy to watch screen.
Apple has been planning this for years. Note that Apple has had wireless keyboards and mice for some time, and continues to roll out improved wireless devices like the popular Magic Mouse. Prop the iTablet up on a desk, start typing away on your wireless keyboard, and you have most of the functionality of a laptop.
If the first decade of the 21st century was dominated by Apple and the iPod, the second decade will be dominated again by Apple with the iSlate. Stand by and watch the fun begin as the publishing world is turned upside down.
Submitted by acohill on Mon, 01/04/2010 - 10:03
Via MuniNetworks, a link to a podcast that describes how Orem City, Utah is benefiting from the open access, open services, community-owned Utopia network. Local governments in Virginia that have invested in open access, open services networks are also benefiting in the same way. A community broadband network, with infrastructure owned by the community but services offered by the private sector, aggregates demand across the entire community, which leads to increased competition among private sector providers, does not compete with incumbents, and when done right, creates sharp drops in the cost of telecom services. The Wired Road network, in rural and mountainous southwest Virginia, is seeing price drops of 40% to 70% on the cost of Internet access for government and institutional customers.
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 12/29/2009 - 15:05
The recently announced Blockbuster store closings will cut about 20% of the firm's stores. Blockbuster plans to replace them with kiosks and smaller stores in more densely populated urban areas. Blockbuster also has a Netflix-style subscription service, but will only one-fifth the customer base of Netflix.
Based on my own experience, Blockbuster may have alienated too many customers with their outrageous late fees. They "eliminated" late fees two or three years ago, but replaced them by billing you for the full retail cost of the DVD if it was late. Once you returned it, they credited your account for the DVD, less a "restocking" fee, which, of course, is a late fee by any other name.
In practice, the service being sold (watching a movie) is identical no matter which company you get the movie from. So the movie rental business is based 100% on the quality of service. And so this is why Blockbuster is losing--Netflix does not have the late fee baggage of Blockbuster, and Netflix service is great--so great, you don't even think about it.
Watching movies may not seem to have much to do with economic development, but communities that don't have their eye on this ball will be losers later, in two different ways. High performance community-owned broadband is the only way some communities are going to get to watch movies over the Internet. Cable companies are just barely keeping up with the bandwidth demands now, but as more homes dump driving to the video store in favor of watching movies on demand, legacy cable and DSL networks are going to begin to influence where people WON'T live. That's right--young professionals don't want to live anywhere now where broadband is not available, and within a couple of years, they won't want to live in communities that only offer "little" broadband--that is, the low performance cable and DSL services.
So attracting and keeping the right kind of workforce is a community broadband issue. The second issue is how broadband is changing retail. Video stores have served as anchor tenants in retail shopping districts, as the stores provide a steady and predictable flow of people to a shopping area. As the video stores disappear, what happens to those retail buildings? What happens to the rest of the stores nearby that relied on that traffic?
In our broadband planning work, we continue to see too many communities clinging to a 1960s style of retail planning and economic development. Retail is going away entirely, but the combination of big box stores and the Internet has changed it drastically, and few places can lead with retail as an economic revitalization strategy--perhaps none can. Instead, communities need to think more broadly about how to put empty retail locations to new uses, including office space for entrepreneurs, start ups, and established white collar businesses. And the way to start that process is to begin placing duct and fiber in commercial and retail areas. Call Design Nine if you want help with thinking about your retail and economic development strategies.
Submitted by acohill on Thu, 12/24/2009 - 10:06
Some of you may have noticed that the search function on the site has not worked for some time. After struggling for months to get our hosting service to fix the problem, we have moved the site to a new server hosted by a different company. Not only is the site much faster, search now works. If you notice any problems, please drop me a note.
Have a great Christmas!
Andrew Cohill
Submitted by acohill on Thu, 12/24/2009 - 10:03
The recent outage that took down the RIM Blackberry network highlights the need for network diversity. The Internet has, in part, been such a fantastic success because there is no central controlling authority. In fact, there really is no "Internet." It just does not exist. What exists are hundreds of thousands of individual, physically separate networks that use a common set of protocols (rules) to exchange information like email, Web pages, and YouTube videos, among other types of information.
Any one of these networks can down without affecting any other network. Many of these networks can down without affecting the rest of the Internet. But it is even better than that. If major chunks of the Internet (i.e. individual networks) go down, these Internet protocols (rules) allow routing around the damage and most users on all those other networks do not even realize some portion of the Internet is temporarily down.
The Internet just works. To keep it working, we need more independent networks, not fewer, larger networks. We need private sector networks. We need community-owned networks. We need neighborhood networks. More networks, more independent networks equals more reliability, more competition, more choice, more robustness.
Submitted by acohill on Mon, 12/21/2009 - 16:08
As stimulus dollars start to roll, there is much excitement in the industry about an expected boom in "middle mile" projects. Many of these are being promoted as public/private partnerships, but some of the deals being done may result in the creation of substantial new long term monopolies.
Middle mile fiber is necessary, but these projects do not automatically create competition or solve business and economic development last mile connection needs. In fact, many middle mile projects have the potential to further fragment the broadband market space in communities and will have the paradoxical effect of raising prices for businesses and residents while slightly lowering prices for local government and public safety use.
It is all about demand aggregation and unbundling infrastructure from services. The two concepts, executed properly with the right level of local government participation, have the potential to dramatically lower the cost of telecom services: witness the 40% to 70% prices drops for Internet access on The Wired Road, (a Design Nine project) in just one year because local government "middle mile" needs and business/residential needs have been aggregated in a single unified market space.
Middle mile projects that award all the local government connectivity to a single provider that also controls or owns the middle mile fiber dis-aggregates the market space, creates stovepipe networks that are unable to benefit from infrastructure cost sharing, and discourages competition.
The result can be catastrophic to jobs creation and economic development, as it becomes much more difficult for businesses to negotiate favorable prices for telecom services and Internet access. Middle mile, done right, with true sharing of middle mile infrastructure, can be a powerful engine for economic development. But the demand aggregation and infrastructure sharing have to be built into the contracts for these projects.
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 12/15/2009 - 10:55
Reports are beginning to dribble out that Google is very close to releasing an "official" Google phone based on Google's Android operating system. Other mobile phone makers have been playing catch up with Apple's iPhone for the past two years, with little success--anyone seen a Palm Pre lately?
But Google has so much money that the firm, like Microsoft in the old days, can just throw money at a project until they get it right. So Android and the Google phone might just finally give Apple a reason to work harder. It will be interesting to see what kind of deal Google comes up with--maybe the phones and mobile service will be free if you can tolerate watching a fifteen second ad every time you want to make a phone call? Or each text message will have a little pop-up ad attached to it the way that little ads pop up on YouTube now? In the future, will everything be free if you will subject yourself to watching piles of ads and giving away every shred of privacy to Google?
How about a Google car? It would be electric, of course, but you get it for free. But every time you start the car to go somewhere, you have to watch a 30 second commercial. And when you listen to the radio, Google inserts a voice ad every ten minutes. And the car comes with a Google GPS tracking device that logs everywhere you go and reports it back to the company. So when you drive to RiteAid to pick up some aspirin, your GoogleCar interrupts and says, "Really, you should go to CVS because aspirin there is on sale today."
Sound far-fetched? In 1994, when I told real estate agents that some day, houses would be bought and sold over the Internet, they said it would never happen.
Submitted by acohill on Mon, 12/14/2009 - 09:27
The "Did you know" video has been around for years, but I just noticed it has been updated recently. It's worth watching again, and really should be required viewing for community leaders who are skeptical that community investments in broadband are important for economic development and jobs growth.
Submitted by acohill on Thu, 12/10/2009 - 14:08
This Forbes article is illuminating, as it neatly describes the Google vision for taking over and dominating every minute of our lives. Google provides a lot of good and even great tools, but the question is, "At what point does Google get so big and so powerful that it sucks all the oxygen out of cyberspace?"
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 12/08/2009 - 16:41
Via Eldo Telecom, According to Kiplinger, the FCC may be considering expanding the Universal Service Fund (USF) tax to help fund the expansion of broadband into rural and underserved areas. It is an idea that has been kicked around for a while, but if the FCC moves on this idea, community broadband projects like Utopia, nDanville, Palm Coast FiberNET, and The Wired Road should be eligible for those funds--not just incumbent phone companies.
Submitted by acohill on Thu, 12/03/2009 - 17:29
With newspapers and magazines going belly up almost weekly, is there any hope for them? The much speculated upon iPad or iTablet from Apple may end up saving the day. Part of the appeal of a newspaper or magazine is the convenience--easy to carry, easy to read, and you can get up close with them. It's hard to get up close to your computer, even a laptop, the same way. The mouse or a trackpad is no substitute for just turning the page. But what if you could subscribe to Sports Illustrated and have it turn up on a light, easy to use tablet device with full color, high resolution images and text that looked just like, well, a magazine page?
One thing that could happen is that we could break out of or away from the Web browser as the catch all container for content. Why or how would this happen? Just look at the iPhone. It comes with a Web browser, but Apple's superb operating system and programming interface makes it easy to create custom applications for specialized content. So when you subscribe to Sports Illustrated, you don't view through the still clunky Web browser, but instead view it using a specially designed application that really unleashes the content and graphic design without the legacy restrictions that have to be dragged along when squeezing content through a Web browser.
As the Internet destroys old business models, it enables the creation of new ones. We may be at the dawn of the golden age of newspapers and magazines, if they can just let go of the paper and barrels of ink they keep in the back room.
Oh, and one more thing....
If you play the YouTube demo of Sports Illustrated, you will notice they plan to include high resolution video, which will really change the way we think about newspapers and magazines--suddenly a magazine looks a lot like a TV channel. Interesting all by itself, but when we all sit down to the breakfast table in the morning with our coffee and iTablets to read/watch the news, guess what we will need?
Bandwidth. Lots of it. More than you are going to be able squeeze over WiFi connections. Fiber to the home is the only technology that will deliver the bandwidth for these next generation news and magazine services. Communities that are building fiber to the home, next generation infrastructure will have a huge edge over communities that rely on incumbent copper-based solutions or wireless only.
Submitted by acohill on Wed, 12/02/2009 - 09:19
The Huffington Post has a couple of interesting articles on the direction of journalism today. It is a weird time for news, as the old media and the new media continue to collide. There is much finger pointing going around, with many old media journalists and owners trying to make a fiscally sound transition to new media while simultaneously complaining that new media bloggers and news aggregation sites (like the HuffPost).
If you drop by the HuffPost, it looks just like CNN these days....a long way from the blogger beginnings of the site.
It is not at all clear to me that you can replace news organizations with a bunch of bloggers--news/opinion blogs work because they link to and comment on news articles. Now you can argue that the news articles are often heavily biased one way or the other, but there is still a different quality to even a biased news report compared to a blog post commenting on that report.
Maybe there is no longer much need for big national papers.....you have local news organizations (local radio, TV, news), and outfits like HuffPost aggregate local news into a "view" of national news.
But who then covers "national" and "world" news? Rupert Murdoch of News Corp. wants to charge for it, and the Wall Street Journal is already doing so successfully. And to muddy the waters even more, the FTC says it is considering providing subsidies to news organizations. It is hard to see how that could turn out well--do you really want a government bureaucrat deciding which newspapers and TV stations ought to get free government money at the expense of those stations and outlets that don't? And what if the government doesn't like the point of view your news organization embraces? This is a double-edged sword of exquisite sharpness.
Hat tip to Ed Dreistadt, who is always thinking about these issues.
Submitted by acohill on Wed, 12/02/2009 - 09:10
MacWorld reports that iPod zombies are scaring motorists and causing accidents in Great Britain. iPod zombies are bicyclists who pedal down the road with their iPod headphones plugged in. Yes, this means they can't hear road traffic, and worse, are probably mentally wrapped up in listening to the music instead of being aware of the traffic around them. How big a problem is it? The English Department for Transportation reports a 19% rise in serious injuries or death to bike riders this year compared to last year.
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 12/01/2009 - 11:22
Barnes and Noble is about to release an ebook reader called Nook. The bookseller and publisher wants to compete with the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader. It is easy to find people who say they love their Kindle, but I remain skeptical. I do think that within a few years, we will reading many more books using some kind of reader device, but I think the long-rumored Apple tablet is likely to crush these dedicated devices.
One of the arguments for dedicated book readers is that it is no different than lugging around a paperback--which I do all the time when I travel. But a paperback can be handled roughly--I don't have to worry about cracking the screen of a paperback, it never runs out of battery life, and it requires no charger. Once you have an ebook reader, you have to think constantly about charging it, loading the books on it, handling carefully, and even losing it--lose a paperback, and you are out $10. Lose or misplace your ereader, and you are out hundreds of dollars, and the hassle of replacing all the books stored on it.
A tablet device the size of the Nook or the Kindle that also does email, Web browsing, and handles light office tasks is going to be much more popular than adding another electronic device to your life.
Submitted by acohill on Mon, 11/30/2009 - 09:47
USA Today has an article noting some of the "Cyber Monday" shopping deals. But Glenn Reynolds at Instapundit says, "Who cares?" Reynolds makes a good point--that Cyber Monday evolved back when broadband at home was rare and people waited until the Monday after Thanksgiving to shop online--at work, where broadband connections made it much less frustrating. Nonetheless, online retailers expect big sales.
Submitted by acohill on Mon, 11/23/2009 - 09:30
Jeff Daily at App Rising reports that Utopia, the big community-owned fiber project in Utah, is having substantial success getting homeowners to pay for the fiber coming to their homes--to the tune of $3,000 per home. This may sound like a lot of money, but the market value of a residential home with fiber increases by $5,000 to $7,000, according to a Render study.
Homeowners routinely spend $5,000 or $10,000 or more on home renovations like kitchen makeovers and bathroom upgrades, and they rarely see even a 1 for 1 return on the investment. Brigham City, Utah is also building fiber to the home, and they are using a model I have long advocated--a pass by and tap fee. Brigham City has created a special assessment area and is charging property owners a fair portion of the fiber network, just as cities and counties do routinely with water and sewer pass by and tap fees. As citizens and businesses begin to read about the advantages of community-owned fiber (lower prices, more choice), it will become easier for these projects to start with user-based financing from day one.
Submitted by acohill on Wed, 11/18/2009 - 09:46
In case you have been worrying about Planet Nibiru swinging too close to earth and destroying the planet in 2012 (just two years away!), the good folks at NASA have a handy FAQ on the whole 2012/Nibiru/doomsday thing. In case you have been living off the grid and only just yesterday got an Internet connection, the new movie "2012" posits that the mysterious planet Nibiru makes its every 3600 year swing near earth and just about wrecks the planet. The movie trailers look like the whole film is just a pretty flimsy excuse for two hours of computer-generated disasters, but apparently some folks are writing to NASA asking how to prepare for the coming apocalypse. Hence the handy FAQ to try to quell the hysteria. Note that the end of the world was predicted on May 5, 2000 when a major planetary alignment was supposed to rip Earth to shreds. And apparently, according to NASA, Nibiru was supposed to do that in 2003, but it never happened, so it's now scheduled for 2012.
Submitted by acohill on Wed, 11/18/2009 - 09:30
Spain has decided that broadband is a "right," and is going to beginning legislating price and speed for bandwidth services. In the short term, this may get more affordable broadband to some rural areas of Spain, but in the long term, this kind of legislation tends to discourage innovation and competition.
In the U.S., it is tempting to look at rural areas the lack of broadband alternatives and think that legislation is needed, but there are options, like having local and regional governments make investments in broadband infrastructure and make it available to the private sector, which creates true competition. And this is already working and creating jobs in places like Danville, Virginia and Galax, Virginia. In both communities, open access fiber networks are creating private sector jobs and attracting new businesses to the downtown areas where fiber is available.
Submitted by acohill on Wed, 11/18/2009 - 09:23
Bing hasbroken the 10% market share for online search. I continue to like Bing--it returns fewer and better results than Google.
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 11/17/2009 - 09:03
If you ever wondered how the "free" video channels on the Intertubes could make any money, it is becoming apparent that the plan all along was to turn them into TV, complete with ads. And you can't turn the ads off. The stop button on the players does not work while the ads play.
It's not really surprising--someone has to pay for the bandwidth to deliver video. But with the emergence of ad-supported online video, it is another nail in the coffin of old-fashioned analog TV. The cable companies, in the early and middle years of this decade, bet many billions that they would be able to maintain control of their TV monopoly, but they are being squeezed because their business model for delivering Internet is broken--no matter how much bandwidth a cable customer uses watching online video instead of old-fashioned "TV," the cable company does not make a cent more. And even the newer cable systems, because they used an antiquated shared bandwidth model, can't keep upping the amount of bandwidth indefinitely without degrading their TV service.
They could quickly and easily dig themselves out of this hole by changing their business model to an open access, service-oriented architecture, but so far, they seem to prefer trying to hold on to their monopoly instead.
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