Future trends

Is technology making us stupid?

acohill — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 06:47:47 -0700

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."

It is why "email free Fridays" and other boycotts of technology are beginning to take hold. Our fixation on technology is causing the slow death of relationships. We are still in the infancy of all these gadgets and services, though, so there is still hope that we will learn better how to use all this stuff appropriately. Put in the context of the development of the automobile, it is really only about 1925. We have a long way to go.

Spit will be worse than spam

acohill — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 04:24:54 -0700

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.

While spam can be filtered at the mail server, before you ever have to see it, spit is just going to make your phone ring. Researchers are already trying to develop methods to try to combat it, but the end result will be to make VoIP services cost more as we all pay for anti-spit services. As one example of how these costs affect prices, Design Nine's cost of mail service is effectively doubled when the spam filtering service we use is added in. Email is still a bargain, but costs more than it needs to because of spam.

Telehealth will support community broadband, lower health costs

acohill — Mon, 26 May 2008 07:13:36 -0700

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.

Companies like Steeplechase Networks are on the cutting edge of these kinds of consumer services, and Steeplechase is actively seeking out open, multi-service networks for their telehealth and telemedicine services.

Is Google Health healthy?

acohill — Tue, 20 May 2008 05:36:36 -0700

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.

What I worry about is Google simply nosing through everyone's health records, looking for data that can be sold, repackaged, or re-purposed for advertisers. Yes, the company has a security and privacy policy, but they are also free to change it anytime they like, after many of us have given them all our health information. The service is not bound by HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) rules, which would require Google to notify you, if for example, someone or some entity tried to subpoena your health records. "Free health record storage," however convenient it may be, is not free; the price one pays is giving up more privacy.

Fuel surcharges as a hidden cost of doing business

acohill — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 06:12:53 -0700

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.

All your email is spam

acohill — Thu, 17 Apr 2008 06:01:55 -0700

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.

Is YouTube the new TV?

acohill — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 08:01:48 -0700

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.

Communities who think that DSL and wireless services are adequate with respect to bandwidth are going to be very disappointed, as neither technology is capable of delivering large amounts of video to thousands or ten of thousands of residential customers, no matter what you read about the amazing abilities of WiMax to bring world peace, solve human aging, and deliver massive bandwidth to everyone at the same time. WiMax is a terrific technology that is much better than WiFi, but the amount of actual bandwidth that WiMax will actually be able to deliver to residential and business users is not going to support heavy IP-TV use (i.e. YouTube, movies on demand, TV show downloads, etc.). WiMax has the capability of reaching more premises by virtue of being able to get a signal over longer distances than WiFi. But as you extend the reach of a wireless signal, you also spread the amount of usable bandwidth over a larger number of subscribers, in most cases. This means the amount of per subscriber bandwidth may not increase significantly.

Wireless is part of a complete solution, but fiber is needed alongside it to meet the fast-growing video demands of residences and businesses.

iPhone is an open, multi-service network

acohill — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 13:59:33 -0800

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 is creating a special area in the iTunes Store for iPhone software applications. Software developers pay a small one time fee to have their software placed in the Apple store, and Apple takes on the responsibility for distributing, downloading, and installing the software, including certifying it is virus-free. Apple also takes on the responsibility for collecting the money for the software, processing credit card charges, bad debts, and all the associated headaches associated with running an online storefront.

In return for all that Apple support, the developer agrees to share revenue with Apple, on a 70/30 basis, with the developer getting 70% of the sales price.

This will unleash tremendous innovation and there will be, in the coming months and years, a flood of new software and services available for the iPhone because Apple has designed not just a piece of hardware, but an entire shared system that makes market entry for small, innovative businesses very low cost--Apple only gets paid once there is revenue flowing. Apple's approach makes it easy to try out new applications and services at low risk. It is identical to the open, multi-service networks being built in places like Danville, Virginia. In both cases, a shared system lowers the cost of offering products and services.

Apple iPhone SDK rocks phone world

acohill — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 12:15:33 -0800

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.

The iPhone is already the most popular cellphone in the world, but with today's announcements, Apple has unleashed the full power of the device, which actually runs Mac OS X. I wrote in this space years ago that the iPod was not a music player, but actually a new platform. Today, Apple has opened up the iPhone (which is actually an iPod) and has made the cellphone obsolete. RIM stock is off several dollars already (RIM makes the popular Blackberry), and Palm stock is down slightly, although Palm has had stock value issues for some time. But Motorola, Nokia, LG, and other phone makers are also in trouble, because the iPhone offers so much more than an old fashioned cellphone that Apple is well on the way to eliminating much of the competition, just as it did in the music player market.

The perfect storm for satellite radio

acohill — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 06:17:49 -0800

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.

It is a lesson for terrestrial broadband and communities as well, because most of the same problems and lessons apply in community telecom, where we also have the wrong business models, lack of clarity at the Federal level about what to do, and prices for services that are out of whack.

In the satellite market, it is hard to understand how Sirius would ink a $500 million dollar five year deal for foul-mouthed Howard Stern when the company is only getting about $35 million a year in ad revenue, along with anemic subscription sales.

What would make sense, as part of the merger, would be for XM and Sirius to go to an open content model, in which they become just the carrier, and let anyone with the money buy channel space on their satellites. Right now, the two companies are flogging the same old, tired business model used by the cable companies, which is to bundle hundreds of channels together, most of which no one listens to.

It would make more sense to charge $1 a month per channel and let subscribers pick which channels they want to listen to, with something like a ten or fifteen channel minimum.

The FCC and Congress could help out by promoting this as an option, just as they could help out communities by promoting open, multi-service networks like nDanville, which is the country's first municipal open, multi-service network. Service providers from all over the country are starting to call the City to find out how to put their services on the network.

Satellite radio has a bright future, but only if the old business models are tossed and a new, "open" model is adopted.