Submitted by acohill on Thu, 09/03/2009 - 07:30
I had eighteen emails in my inbox this morning, and sixteen of them were "legitimate" spam. By "legitimate" I mean each email was advertising a legitimate service, and their address, phone number, and valid email return address was included. Most of them come from businesses the company has ordered something from in the past, and the rest are probably harvesting the company "contact us" email address from legitimate sources or buying it from address list resellers. Of the sixteen emails, only two were anything I would have even the mildest interest in. Email is so cheap that there is little reason not to send out many thousands of solicitations. But there is a real cost, and it is shifted in email to the recipient.
But the lesson here is that I delete this ruthlessly, usually without even reading them. And some firms that I have ordered from and so see me or the company as a repeat customer are the worst. I don't want or need a "weekly specials" email, week after week, month after month. I unsubscribe from these lists, and some emails stop, but others pop up. And unfortunately, I don't see any solution to the problem.
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 09/01/2009 - 14:56
eBay has announced it is selling Skype. The auction giant bought the VoIP phone company several years ago for $2.6 billion, has already written off $1.4 billion and apparently hopes to get $2 billion in the sale--Meaning Skype never made eBay much money. In a related story, Skype has announced it is doubling its rates for international calls, where the firm makes most of its revenue.
Skype calls can be crystal clear or maddeningly noisy, and part of the problem is that Skype carries a lot of traffic across the public Internet, meaning so-so quality as a voice call traverses several different non-Skype networks. It is not a problem inherent to VoIP--done right, VoIP phone systems can be better than traditional copper-based land lines. But Skype has one of those "we'll give a lot of service away for nothing and make it up in volume, or international calls, or subscriptions, or something" business models. Skype's biggest asset is excellent VoIP software--it is an excellent tool that supports text chat, voice calls, and video calls. If they figure out their business model, the firm will do well.
Submitted by acohill on Fri, 08/28/2009 - 08:21
This story says that software for the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch has grown to $2.5 billion. This is a market that did not exist just two years ago. What the article does not mention is that most of the programmers writing and selling software for the iPhone are working from home, and many of those businesses are making hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.
This is where broadband becomes important. These home-based software businesses have to have reliable, high performance broadband connections--to coordinate activities with other programmers and co-workers also working with home, to upload and download software, and to access online business services (e.g. accounting, printing, etc.) that enables these work from businesses.
Economic developers: What is your strategy for attracting these new home-based businesses? Are you working with local builders and developers to ensure that "Internet ready" homes are available? Are you supporting a regional effort to improve access and affordability of broadband? Do you have a virtual business incubator that is designed to help home-based entrepreneurs grow successfully?
Communities that market their quality of life, their recreational resources, and that have open access broadband have a recipe for growth.
Submitted by acohill on Fri, 08/28/2009 - 08:11
Sirius XM has introduced something I might consider buying--it's a dock for an iPhone/iPod Touch. As I've said repeatedly, I don't want more gagdgets in my life. I have too many already. I want fewer, more capable pieces of technology. I've avoided a satellite radio because my car does not have one built in, and I have not wanted another one trick gadget in the car with another charger and cables taking up space. But this little dock is brilliant--it plugs into the 12 volt adapter in your car, charges your iPhone, and turns your touchpad iPhone into a Sirius/XM radio.
This devices highlights the brilliance of the iPhone as the first open cellphone platform (Apple now has competition from Google's Android phone and Palm's Pre). The iPhone as a platform rather than a dedicated phone has created new business opportunities, and by extension, new jobs.
Submitted by acohill on Thu, 08/27/2009 - 08:33
A sure sign that interest in TV is waning is the fact that major media firms like Disney, Viacom, CBS, and Time Warner have announced a partnership with some of the biggest advertisers in the country (Proctor & Gamble, AT&T, Unilever) to create a new ratings system that will more accurately measure viewer habits. The current Nielsen system is decades old, and the complaint is that it does not accurately measure the effect that DVRs and broadband are having on viewing habits.
People are not watching less "TV." In fact, they may be watching more when you add in video on demand services like Netflix, YouTube, and Hulu. But content developers and advertisers can't really tell from the antiquated Nielsen ratings system.
Design Nine is already working with some of the most innovative and technologically advanced IP TV service providers in the country. Firms like Cisco are building sophisticated new video on demand head end platforms for providers. Over the next ten years, TV as we know it is going to morph into a much richer, interactive, on-demand service that will blend access to "TV" shows, movies, live performances (e.g. NASCAR races, concerts, etc.), gaming, reality shows, and audience participation format shows like American Idol.
Where will this be available first? Communities with high performance open access broadband networks will have it first, because they have the business model to accommodate these new IP TV providers and the open access networks will have the bandwidth to make them work.
Submitted by acohill on Thu, 08/27/2009 - 08:21
Sony has announced it's $400 ebook. Intended to compete with the Amazon Kindle, the device costs $100 more than the Kindle but works with several open ebook formats, giving users access to a wider range of books.
Both devices are likely to founder. Everyone is sick of lugging around multiple devices, and worse, all the special cables and chargers needed for them. I'm kicking myself for buying a small Nikon camera without checking on the data cable--the camera uses a proprietary cable instead of more common mini-USB cable, meaning I now have to lug around yet another cable.
Enough information is leaking out now that it appears very likely that Apple is going to release a tablet device either this fall or in early winter. When it is released, it will kill both the Kindle and the Sony ebooks. A Apple tablet will support email, Web browsing, and probably thousands of applications, as opposed to the ebooks that do only one thing. We just don't have enough room in our bags and briefcases to lug around a laptop and an ebook device, and for a lot of us, a capable tablet will replace both the relatively heavy laptop and will also serve as a very capable ebook reader.
Book publishers are playing along with Sony and Amazon right now because they have to, and it's a good way to gain some experience with the economics of ebooks. But a more popular device that supports many book formats, not just one or a few, will swamp the competition. It's only a matter of time.
Submitted by acohill on Fri, 08/21/2009 - 12:40
Here is an interesting article about a study of current "cloud" computing services, which "seem to come up short. This really should not be a surprise. Businesses that think cloud computing services are going to be a panacea for their IT problems are going to be very disappointed.
First, cloud computing is just the latest IT industry buzz phrase, and is the latest in what is now a forty year history of selling old wine in new bottles. In this case, we are talking about very old wine indeed. Cloud computing is just the mainframe. And the mainframe was redefined in the early eighties as the mini-computer. And the mini-computer was redefined in the early nineties as client-server computing. And client-server computing became Web applications. And Web applications became Web 2.0. And Web 2.0 became cloud computing.
But all of those buzz phrases were and still are architecturally quite similar. The user is connected at a distance to a central repository of data. However, as the distances between the user and the data have grown, network latency, or how long it takes data to travel across the network between user and repository, has become a big problem. The Internet offers virtually no control over latency, for a whole variety of reasons, including the fact that the Internet was never, in its original design, intended for real-time transaction-based processing (cloud computing).
The answer is robust local, high performance open access broadband networks, which allow two things to happen--you can move the cloud closer to the user, and you can control and limit latency. Distributed cloud computing improves performance and reduces or eliminates the single point of failure that is being designed into some cloud environments. Apple, for example, is building a giant data center in North Carolina. But what happens if that facility loses power in a major storm? Apple and other cloud competitors like Amazon and Google do create redundant data centers, but a few massive data centers can't solve the latency problem the way putting cloud servers on local open access networks can.
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 08/18/2009 - 14:43
Digital music downloads continued to gain a larger share of the music sales in the U.S. While CDs still are the most popular way to buy music, digital downloads increased in the first half of 2009 by 50%, up to 30% of music purchases. The iTunes Store is now the largest retailer of music in the country, with 25% of the total market.
The success of iTunes is due in part to the increasing availability and affordability of broadband--without it, the iTunes Store is unusable. Music downloads are a great example of how broadband creates new opportunities that did not exist just a few years ago. Broadband enables new jobs and new businesses.
Submitted by acohill on Fri, 08/14/2009 - 13:57
This Scientific American article discusses something I and others have been saying for years--the 100 year old electric grid we use for residential and business power was not designed for electric cars, which have extremely high amperage power draws. It is not so much that the grid can't handle one or two electric cars in a neighborhood; it can, and the load is not much different than things like welders or potter's kilns. But the grid was not designed for say 35% of residential homes plugging in their electric cars every evening at 5:30, at the very same time that residential electric use already peaks.
Part of the solution is broadband. Resilient, reliable fiber broadband connections to every home will enable electric providers to talk to home power controllers. The home power controllers will have enough smarts to turn the car charging on and off at the direction of the power company so that the load is balanced throughout the night, when electricity costs the least to generate.
That's right--broadband is part of the energy independence solution.
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 08/11/2009 - 09:25
File this under "It's about time." Google has promised its new Caffeine search engine will be faster and more relevant. Why are they announcing this now? Probably because Microsoft's Bing must look pretty good to them. Nothing like a little competition to scare the complacent. While Google has gotten better at filtering out dreck, bargain travel sites, and link farm spam in the past couple of years, the search engine still coughs up way too many results that are not especially useful or relevant. Does anyone ever look past the second page of search results? In my experience, the relevant links disappear pretty fast after page two or three, but Google still seems to think returning 50,000 links is a good idea.
Submitted by acohill on Wed, 08/05/2009 - 09:34
Nikon has released its new Coolpix S1000pj camera. The device has a built-in projector that will display up to a 40 inch image on a wall or screen. As far as I know, this is the first pocket projector device that is actually available for purchase. I've been writing about these for at least two years, but all the earlier products were essential vaporware, with "in development" as the operative phrase. Nikon has apparently succeeded in getting one out the door, and at a reasonable price. You get a 12 megapixel camera and projector for $430.
Nikon says the throw distance is a maximum of six feet, with "VGA equivalent" resolution. What I could not determine is whether or not you could hook a laptop up to it for an impromptu presentation. Since that is not mentioned anywhere on the Specification page, it probably won't do that. And that's what a lot of business people want. I'm not sure the camera will be particularly popular unless the price comes down; adding the projector to the camera makes it about $200 more than an equivalent camera without the projector. Since most people are moving photos to their computer and managing photos on the computer, the projector seems to be of limited value.
Submitted by acohill on Fri, 07/31/2009 - 08:26
Via Boing Boing, the entertainment industry has grandly announced that their customers should not expect to be able to play songs, watch movies, or read books "forever." Instead, you should only be able to do that "for a while." Okay, I made that last quote up, but that is, in effect, what they are saying. It is really is strange that an profitable and successful industry is so contemptuous of its own customers.
Submitted by acohill on Wed, 07/29/2009 - 14:27
A submarine cable serving several African countries has been damaged. The cable is the only Internet route out of several west African nations, putting the entire country into a virtual Internet blackout, with slow, expensive satellite links the only way for data to move in and out of the countries. Here in the U.S., some counties and states are bigger than these countries, and route diversity is now a serious issue for relocating businesses.
Submitted by acohill on Wed, 07/29/2009 - 09:02
AT&T has been having problems with its cellular data networks--both EDGE and 3G. I noticed that things were not working at all on the data side (phone calls were fine) on Monday and Tuesday, but since the release of the new iPhone last month, I've had chronic problems with pokey data access. Every time Apple releases a new iPhone, another million or two new users get dumped onto AT&T's network, and all these new users are busy playing with their phones, downloading apps, surfing the Web, and using more wireless bandwidth than usual.
AT&T just has not been able to keep up, and it's not a problem unique to AT&T--it's a wireless issue that will never go away. As more people use wireless, you have to constantly add capacity. As you add capacity and the network gets faster, it encourages people to use more bandwidth...so you have to add more capacity...and so it goes.
It is very expensive to add capacity on wireless networks. Fiber, by comparison, in today's designs, starts out with enough capacity to do virtually anything you would want to do in a household or small business, so you don't get onto the wireless treadmill of constant upgrades and expenditures just to keep up.
Video is voracious, and we now have have wireless devices like the iPhone that have the horsepower to play high quality video. But the wireless networks don't have the capacity to support that in any meaningful way. And if you built a wireless network capable of supporting lots of video, you'd spend more than you would on running open access fiber to every home and business.
Wireless is here to stay for mobility access, but it's not THE broadband solution...it's part of the solution, but only part of the solution. Open access fiber is now essential public infrastructure if communities want to attract new businesses and keep the ones they already have; integrated fiber and wireless networks like The Wired Road, nDanville, Utopia, and the Eastern Shore Broadband Authority are the future of economic growth in the U.S.
Submitted by acohill on Mon, 07/20/2009 - 09:05
Amazon may have inadvertently killed its own Kindle ebook reader over the past week. The company discovered that pirated versions of Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm were available for sale on the Kindle bookstore. To comply with the copyright protection laws, Amazon removed the ebook versions from the online bookstore. But then Amazon also remotely deleted copies of the book from all Kindles and refunded the purchase price to the Kindle owners. So Kindle users woke up a few days ago to discover that Amazon had been rummaging around their Kindle, deleting stuff.
The outrage is understandable, and the issue highlights the difficulties of ebooks and copyright protection. Amazon was trying to comply with lawful request to remove pirated texts. And the difference between a paper copy of a book that has been printed as a pirated book and the same text as an ebook is that someone with a copy of a pirated ebook could, with some effort, but not a lot, make and distribute additional copies. So Amazon tried to protect the copyright owners but ended up alienating a lot of Kindle owners.
Amazon has since admitted it made a mistake and says it won't do it anymore, but the damage may already be done. It may dampen Kindle sales, but it may also dampen ebook adoption generally. Once unintended consequence: Kindle texts can be annotated with notes--the equivalent of writing in the margin of a paper book. When Amazon deleted user copies of the books, the company also deleted all the user notes, which were the rightful property of the Kindle owner. Oops....imagine if you had just spent hours reading that book and making notes for a term paper, and you wake up to discover all your work gone. You are not likely to buy another ebook for a long, long time.
Submitted by acohill on Fri, 07/17/2009 - 08:23
Google has announced a new service called Voice, which is supposedly a break through because you can give people one number and calls can then be routed wherever you like--home phone, cell phone, office phone, etc. It's a wonderful idea that VoIP telephone providers have been offering for years. Design Nine has used this kind of phone system for more than three years.
Google's promotion of this kind of service will help get more people interested in VoIP, but most people won't take advantage of it until they get better broadband connections that allow true open access networks with a variety of service providers. You can do most of the things Google Voice offers today with Internet-based companies like Vonage, but the quality of the calls varies widely with the time of day and your Internet access provider. The DSL and cable modem Internet providers hate independent phone service providers like Vonage because they siphon customers away from their own voice services. In a well-provisioned open access, service-oriented network, customers would have a choice of VoIP providers and most of them would have excellent voice quality because the network is designed specifically to support multiple providers at high standards of service quality.
Submitted by acohill on Wed, 07/08/2009 - 08:36
The intertubes are abuzz with news about Google's announcement of its Chrome browser-based operating system. Folks that think it will be a Microsoft killer will be disappointed. The new entry to the OS marketplace will erode Microsoft market share at about the same rate competing software like Apple's OS X and the Unix-based Ubuntu. It's bad news for Microsoft, but the new software will barely put a dent in the Redmond company in the short term.
The good news is that more options are a good thing. Not everyone has the same needs, and having a variety of operating system choices, each with a different set of price points, applications, and features creates more competition, more pressure to continuously improve each OS, and more pressure to deliver more at reasonable prices.
Part of the reason Microsoft has been losing market share is because for a long time, there was a lack of competition. The company had little pressure to innovate, reduce prices, or add real value. With Google bringing yet another OS to market, Microsoft has to work harder to keep existing customers and to attract new customers. That is good for everyone.
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 07/07/2009 - 10:44
The NOFA (Notice of Funds Availability) for broadband stimulus funding was released last week; the document defines how to apply for those funds, and both private sector companies and communities can apply. On page 66, beginning at line 1470, the NOFA does something very important: it provides an explicit preference for networks that offer open access services (or open services) to end users. Here is the exact statement:
Reviewers will also consider whether the application proposes to construct infrastructure and implement a business plan which would allow more than one provider to serve end users in the proposal funded service area.
This means networks that offer competitive pricing from more than one provider get preference--this is huge, and could have important long term consequences.
The rules also do something else quite important on the same page (page 66, line 1463), where there is explicit preference for open access transport, which in telecom jargon is "interconnection." The rules say that companies that post their interconnection fees publicly and agree to nondiscrimination will get preference.
Why is the interconnection clause important? I have specific knowledge of one phone company that offered the exact same circuit/service to a community project at FIVE TIMES the fee they charge to other telcos. That is discriminatory pricing, and it is done to discourage competition and to keep community projects out of the "club."
When the dust settles on the broadband stimulus funding in a couple of years, these two little items buried on page 66 may turn out to be the most important part of the whole effort.
Submitted by acohill on Mon, 07/06/2009 - 08:31
Michael Jackson's death crashed Twitter and several other online services, demonstrating the popularity of these things. But Twitter may be about to peak, as one company prepares to sell Twitter followers to advertisers.
Twitter is most interesting as an experiment in computing and social networking, with an emphasis on experiment. Twitter's popularity could diminish just as quickly as it rose if tweets start to be dominated by messages like "Buy Sugar Cola--It's good for you!"
Blogging has already passed its heyday. Blogging is not going away--in fact, it has proved to be an extraordinarily useful method of writing and disseminating news, information, and opinion. But hardly anyone still believes everyone will blog, and most now understand that blogs are just one more writing tool, and nothing more--a good writing tool, but that's it. Good blogs prosper because of good writers--just like every other kind of tool. Owning an expensive paintbrush does not make me Michaelangelo, and thankfully, we've passed through that phase of blogging where people thought a blog made them a good writer.
We're still trying to figure out what the long term purposes and uses of Twitter are--it's an interesting new tool, but not all of us need to tweet all day long.
Submitted by acohill on Mon, 06/29/2009 - 13:22
There are 185 million cellphones sold in Europe every year, meaning that at least that many cellphone chargers come with the phones. And it is likely that 185 million old chargers get tossed out or sit in drawers when that new phone is purchased. But over the next four years, cellphone makers of "data enabled" phones will standardize on mini-USB jacks for the chargers. It will reduce the waste, but also should lower the price of phones slightly, as it should be possible over time to skip including a charger with a new phone.
Design Nine was selected as a Broadband Properties top 100 company in 2008, 2009, and 2010.
Designed by Design Nine, the nDanville fiber network has won the Intelligent Community Forum's Smart 21 award for 2010.
Design Nine provides visionary broadband architecture and engineering services to our clients. We have over seventy years of staff experience with telecom and community broadband-more than any other company in the United States.
We have a full range of broadband and telecom planning, design, and project management services.
Eldo Telecom
Muni Networks
Free Fiber to the Home
Save NC Broadband
Broadband 2.0
Free Utopia!
Blandin on Broadband
Intelligent Community Forum
Cybertelecom
FCC Broadband Blog
KGP Broadband Stimulus
Daily Yonder
AppRising
Benton Foundation
Ars Technica Tech Policy
Broadband Policy
Bill St. Arnaud
Stop the Cap
Broadband Policy Watch
Lafayette Pro Fiber