Submitted by acohill on Thu, 11/17/2011 - 11:45
David Strom does a good job of describing the awful Tower of Babel mess we are in with the myriad of ways to supposedly "contact" someone. It's a good read, and describes what most of us struggle with on a daily basis.
To Strom's complaints, I'd add one more: the utter worthlessness of the old-fashioned phone book. We get two or three different versions of a telephone directory book at home and at the office. Each one comes from a different local phone providers, and each one has a different set of listings for the white pages. To find someone's number, you might, if you are lucky, have to look in three different directories. If the person for whom you are trying to locate a number has gone to a VoIP provider, they won't be in any of them. Or if they only have a cell phone, they won't be in any of them.
Read Strom's whole article, and then weep.
Submitted by acohill on Sun, 11/06/2011 - 11:00
Twitter messages are turning out to be useful for all sorts of real time data collection needs.
Submitted by acohill on Thu, 10/27/2011 - 13:29
A cryptic reference in the wildly popular biography of Steve Jobs suggests that Apple has something up its sleeve with respect to the TV set. MacRumors reports on a NY Times story that suggests Apple's intelligent agent technology, called Siri, may show up in an Apple-branded TV set. Instead of complicated remotes, we will just talk to our TV and tell it what we want to watch. As someone who never has liked all the effort it takes to program a VCR or DVR to record a few shows, the idea is very appealing. And presumably, the Apple TV would also know how to access other programming, like Netflix and Hulu.
Submitted by acohill on Sun, 10/16/2011 - 16:48
I had a chance to try out an iPhone 4S over the weekend, and I think Siri, the voice recognition service built into the phone, is potentially another Apple game changer, just as the touch interface on the original iPhone was a game changer.
While playing around with the iPhone, I discovered that the little pop up keyboard used to input text in virtually every application on the iPhone has a Siri button. If you tap it, the phone goes into voice dictation mode. Instead of laboriously tapping away on the virtual keyboard, you can just talk. I was able to try only a few sentences, but some of them were quite long, and the transcription was perfect--no mistakes.
Oddly, even Apple is not highlighting this feature. Instead, the ads for the iPhone 4S show the ability of Siri to answer queries like, "What time is it?" or "What is the weather in New York City?" This feature worked, but I was underwhelmed by it, as there is a slight lag while Siri goes to look for the information, and for things like the time or the weather, you can get it faster with a couple of taps. But the dictation is magical, and I can't wait to see Siri available on Macs.
Submitted by acohill on Wed, 10/05/2011 - 08:09
Now that the broadband stimulus money has been distributed, and the Google fiber initiative has taken root in the two Kansas Cities, a lot of communities seem to have lost interest in broadband initiatives. The cable companies have done a fairly good job of keeping up with demand, and the telephone companies continue to cling to their share of the broadband market by competing on price rather than on bandwidth.
But this apparent "Remain calm! All is well" approach is the calm before the storm. And the storm is coming to us in a huge cloud. In the past week, Amazon and Apple have rolled out new cloud-based initiatives that will stream content everywhere, all the time. If cloud storage seems like a gimmick, it is not. It is the answer to the utter uselessness of trying to keep all our media content, personal and business, on local hard drives. Music, pictures, movies, and what we used to quaintly call "TV" are driving this problem. Even though you can buy a two terabyte hard drive for $150, you can fill it faster than lickety-split with purchased video. And then you have to figure out how to back it up. Backing it up with a second drive is a good start, but suppose your house or business burns down? Both drives are gone, as is all your data.
Add to that the fact that everyone now wants everything available on every computing device they own, which typically comprises, for many people, FOUR devices: a smartphone, a laptop, a tablet, and a desktop computer. And the portable devices will never have enough storage to keep everything on the device itself. So the cloud is not a typical IT solution in search of a question. We know what the question is, and the cloud is the answer. But streaming everything to everyone all the time is going to create, over the next several years, exponential increases in demand for bandwidth. And that's when the copper-based DSL and cable modem networks will run out of steam.
Communities that have not made plans to ensure a modern fiber-based infrastructure that also supports ubiquitous wireless mobility access will be at a severe disadvantage from an economic development perspective.
Oh, and one more thing. There is another sleeper in the battle for streaming content....Rhapsody (the music service) just bought Napster to try to fight Spotify. Spotify is a streaming music service that is huge in Europe but only recently began operations in the U.S. So the music industry is still undergoing a massive reorganization that is focused on streaming any song ever recorded to anyone, at any time, anywhere. And it is going to be a battle of Titans, with Apple, Amazon, Rhapsody, Spotify, and even tiny Microsoft with its Zune music service all going head to head.
Submitted by acohill on Wed, 09/28/2011 - 13:20
Amazon has just announced the Kindle Fire. You won't be able to get your hands on one until November 15th, but you can order one now. If Apple was planning to release an upgraded iPad before the holidays, Amazon just stole all of Apple's thunder.
The Kindle Fire gets rid of the ridiculous chiclet keyboard, adds a color display, and sells for just $199. Can you spell "Christmas present?" The low price is surely going to steal market share from the iPad, as the Fire offers books, magazines, movies, TV shows, Web browsing, email, and some games. Unlike some of the earlier Kindles, this is a WiFi only device, which is not likely to be an issue for most people. You can download your books, videos, and magazines at home, and then read them while you are away from a wireless network.
Amazon also offers free cloud storage for everything you buy. This is another place where Amazon has gotten the jump on Apple. Apple's cloud service is still in beta, and so it is hard to evaluate what it means for the average Apple user.
This will likely force Apple to lower prices on the iPad. The iPad is a much more capable device, but the Kindle Fire is going to be judged as "good enough" by millions. Amazon has a winner. The only thing that could hurt sales is if the early units have technical or usability problems--remember the roll out of the Apple Newton? The Newton was widely ridiculed for some early software issues, which were quickly corrected, but the bad PR sunk the device and it never really recovered.
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 08/23/2011 - 19:22
What do Lowe's, Home Depot, PacSun, and Nordstrom all have in common? All these major retailers are starting to deploy iPads in place of cash registers. The firms are finding that putting iPads in the hands of customer sales reps roaming the floors of the store increases both the average size of a sale and increases the number of sales processed per day per employee. The increase in worker productivity is so substantial that the cost of making the change to iPads pays for itself very quickly.
Expect to see even relatively small retailers begin to use tablets in place of cash registers, and as this kind of automation becomes more common, highly reliable, affordable business class broadband will become even more important than it is today.
Submitted by acohill on Mon, 08/08/2011 - 12:47
Skype has rolled out HD videoconferencing for Macs--it's been available on the Windows platform for a while. Here at Design Nine, we just upgraded our own business videoconferencing software to include multi-party video. We use Skype videoconferencing daily for internal communications in our three geographically distant locations, which saves us money on our landline phone bill. We use Go To Meeting for client meetings, and find the screen-sharing particularly productive when trying to discuss something like a spreadsheet financial model. If you are interested in making more use of IP video, don't scrimp on the Web cam. We have found that the better cameras, with integrated, high quality lenses and microphones perform much better--plan to spend $80 to $100. You won't regret it.
Required broadband comment: If you want to make good use of the HD quality, you'll need symmetric bandwidth of at least 1.5 megabits. What does that mean? It means it won't necessarily work as well with asymmetric services like DSL and cable modems.
Submitted by acohill on Thu, 07/14/2011 - 09:54
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. The pricing change also suggests that many customers have largely transitioned away from DVDs to streaming content, and Netflix is giving those customers, that don't care about getting DVDs, a break on price.
Services like Netflix, Roku, and Hulu are going to continue to put tremendous pressure on the providers of "little broadband:" the DSL, cable, and wireless providers. These old systems are running out capacity, and it's a race to the bottom for these firms. They can keep trying to upgrade the old systems, but the more they spend, the faster their customers use up the bandwidth.
Don't believe that? Take a look at the cellular data services market. AT&T and Verizon have abandoned their unlimited data plans and have put bandwidth caps on their services because they can't keep up with customer bandwidth usage otherwise. This makes the concept that rural communities will all get their broadband via the cellular providers rather silly, unless you subscribe to the notion that rural folks should be relegated to what amounts to the 21st century version of dial-up.
Submitted by acohill on Mon, 06/20/2011 - 13:47
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. I'm not too excited about sharing my health information with a software firm, but what is important is that many of the standard diagnostic tools available to health care professionals are about to make managing your own health much easier, as well as giving you the tools to give your doctor much better information about your health. Doctors may be subscribing high blood pressure medicine based on just a few BP readings taken days apart, in the office, where the "white coat" effect on blood pressure is well known (your blood pressure is typically higher in the doctor's office, where you may be nervous about negative results). Compare that approach to health care to being able to easily take daily BP readings over a period of weeks or months to give a much better look at overall blood pressure. Couple this cuff with devices that reads blood sugar, heart rate, blood oxygen levels, and some other blood tests, and it will be possible to spend much less on doctor visits while actually getting better diagnoses.
Submitted by acohill on Wed, 06/15/2011 - 09:19
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.
Submitted by acohill on Mon, 06/13/2011 - 08:33
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.
What's next? Why, expect that in about two years, Verizon and AT&T will begin discussing a merger, because it will be so much better for their customers if they don't have to shop around and have to deal with the time-consuming research required when you have choice. And don't forget that in the landline business, AT&T and Verizon also own a majority of the U.S. market for phone and leased lines.
I was working for AT&T both before and after the 1984 break up, and there was nothing efficient about a company with a million employees. Prices for services were artificially high and there was no incentive to innovate. Even a duopoly is bad for customers, as whoever the two firms that own the duopoly market are, once they have driven out any competition, what's left is simply making it uninteresting to switch to the other provider. And this is best done by keeping prices at both firms high and relatively equal. Lots of profit and low customer churn.
The biggest loser is rural America, which needs high performance, affordable broadband to keep rural communities economically viable. What is troubling is the willingness of rural legislators to vote for laws and mergers that go against the interests of their own constituents.
Submitted by acohill on Wed, 03/30/2011 - 08:48
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. But Apple has never paid much attention to MobileMe, and my own experience with MobileMe has been decidely mixed. MobileMe and Cloud Drive are both essentially virtual hard drives, and they differ from the backup services like Carbonite because backup services are not designed to provide routine access to your files. On the other hand, the backup services provide more tools to make sure everything gets backup regularly. Some people are going to use both, and some might settle for the virtual hard drive approach to save money.
As I've been writing recently, cloud services are only as good as your broadband connection. The interesting thing about cloud-based virtual hard drives is that the big companies have no real advantage over a small firm with servers closer to customers. If I was starting a business, I'd be looking at something very different from the massive data centers Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft are building. I'd be looking at putting servers and services on community broadband networks and getting my cloud services as close as possible to my customers. Why? By doing so, I can provide better services at lower cost than the big guys.
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 03/29/2011 - 09:01
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.
Community-owned broadband networks have a bright future and will be the engines of economic development if they can weather the collapse of the incumbents. The fight in North Carolina is, at core, a rearguard action by the cable companies to prevent that collapse by making competition illegal at the economic expense of the communities they purportedly serve.
Submitted by acohill on Thu, 02/17/2011 - 11:20
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.
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 02/15/2011 - 13:36
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?
Some of the biggest manufacturers in the U.S., with billions in hard assets, are not valued at that level. Zynga has some software and some Web users. So did AOL once. Whoopee. It's that kind of "we're king of the world" thinking that got AOL and thousands of other dot-com era companies where they are today, which is nowhere.
Submitted by acohill on Sun, 01/16/2011 - 13:36
This video, while it has a advertisement for the book Socialnomics at the end, is an extremely compelling look at how social media is changing the way we communicate. Some of the statistics include:
The lesson for communities is that local leaders need to understand the change in communications strategies by young people and ensure that the infrastructure is in place to support these new modes of communication. Rural communities do not have the luxury of complaining that their young people are growing and leaving, never to return, while simultaneously refusing to make the infrastructure investments needed to keep and attract young people, young couples, and families.
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 11/30/2010 - 14:07
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.
Comcast execs must be scared out of their wits. Cable TV subscribers are canceling their subscriptions, and its not just because of the poor economy. Cable TV and its fabled "500 channels" does not deliver much value any more. Worse, video on demand ventures like Netflix are hugely popular and are using enormous amounts of bandwidth--Netflix customers are using 20% of the total U.S. bandwidth in the evening. And Comcast, which has been making a nice profit on their broadband service for years, is all of sudden facing a flood of demand for their data service which is killing their old-fashioned HFC (Hybrid Fiber Coax) networks. The cable companies guessed wrong ten years ago. They guessed that this Internet thing would never really catch on, and that they could do some tinkering with their existing copper-based network to deliver both TV and Internet, and they went off and borrowed billions to be able to deliver digital content over a fifty year old network design.
They have not paid that money back yet, not entirely, but the billions in upgrades have already run out of steam. The only answer is to build fiber all the way to the home, but they don't have the money to do that. And worse, their customers have decided that they don't really need the TV service if the Internet works okay. Except all of a sudden, the Internet is slowing down for cable TV subscribers, just when everyone wants more--a lot more.
If you are even slightly tempted to feel sorry for the cable companies, the big incumbent phone companies are in worse shape, as they thought they could string their customers along with 100 year old copper twisted pair networks, and the DSL services are running out of steam even faster than the cable networks.
Short story: Telecom in the U.S. is a horrible mess and will be getting much much worse very quickly. Unless you live in a community where there is a community-owned fiber network (think Chattanooga; Powell, Wyoming; Jackson, Mississippi; much of Utah; parts of Virginia, and a few other places).
Submitted by acohill on Tue, 11/23/2010 - 09:51
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.
That might be fine with some folks. Since we started using the streaming service, the number of DVDs we watch has fallen dramatically. Watch next for big changes from the content owners, who have been making a fortune on DVDs for the last fifteen years, but the DVD era is just about over. There will be wailing and gnashing of teeth by the TV and movie studios, but in the end, they will make a lot more money by aggressively licensing everything they own for streaming. The truly awful new copyright law is a last ditch attempt by the RIAA and other big copyright advocates to prevent intellectual property theft (e.g. illegal file sharing). But the new law gives the Federal government the ability to shut down ANY Web site arbitrarily simply if an accusation of copyright infringement is made--in other words, without due process. This will inevitably lead to abuse.
I've maintained for many years that the supposed cost of pirated material is overblown by the industry. People that steal music and video recordings, for the most part, would never have actually paid for them in the first place, so the inflated loss of revenue reports are just that--inflated. It's easy to find someone bragging about all the music they have acquired illegally, but they never would have bought it all. And most people are honest; if a product or service is fairly priced, most people prefer to pay for it. The idea of an entire industry starting from the premise that "all are customers, every single one of them, is a crook" has struck me as a bit strange. It's much like the current approach to airport screening: the TSA starts from the assumption that everyone, including the elderly, the infirm, and three year olds, are terrorists. Surely we can do better. And in fact, the huge success of online digital media services like the iTunes store proves that a lot of people are happy to pay fair prices for digital media.
Submitted by acohill on Sun, 11/21/2010 - 11:41
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."
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