Exploring the impact of broadband and technology on our lives, our businesses, and our communities.
If the FCC was in charge of roads
Here is an interesting article that talks about what life might be like if the Federal Communications Commission was in charge of highways. It is not a pretty picture. The upcoming auction of 700 Mhz spectrum formerly used by TV stations is not likely to benefit communities or smaller, independent service providers.
The FCC has the opportunity to change things in a way that could simultaneously lower prices for wireless services and create lots of new business opportunities. What's the rub? The incumbents would have to compete on a reasonably level playing field with new companies, without a structural monopoly advantage. And that really worries them.
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Electric newspaper delivery
Even as the newspaper industry struggles with the transition to what some are calling the "viewspaper," meaning viewing the news on the Web, at least one local newspaper delivery person is changing the way newspapers are delivered. In my neighborhood, the guy that delivers the paper has abandoned his Jeep Cherokee for a small electric cart. It is a street legal, oversize golf cart with enough room and power to haul the driver and two hundred or so newspapers.
We are going to see many more all-electric vehicles in the next few years. For businesses that make mostly local deliveries (pizza, flowers, prescription drugs, etc.), all electric vehicles are a less expensive way to get products and services to customers. The purchase price of these electric utility vehicles is low relative to a full size van or panel truck, and they are inexpensive to operate. And as more and more electric utilities roll out power management that will enable lower differential pricing at night, the cost of charging them up overnight could also go down.
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Facebook easy pickings for identity theft
A study by research firm Sophos indicates that Facebook users are very willing to give personal information to complete strangers. The firm set up a fake Facebook entry and then made "friend" requests to hundreds of other Facebook users. Most of them happily revealed enough personal information (family names, photos, etc) to make it easy to steal that person's identity, according to Sophos. Among the items Facebook users were willing to share was their full date of birth, which is used by many organizations to validate identity.
Knowledge Democracy:
Spa in Space
Galactic Suites, the space tourism venture, has a Web site with additional information about the space hotel it is building. Space-related businesses are already transforming the New Mexico economy, and states like Virginia and Texas are also beginning to reap benefits. Not every region will find a niche with space-related opportunities, but the success of New Mexico illustrates that boldness and determination pay when it comes to economic development.
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Google: "We own your videos"
In yet another Google flop, the company has announced it is closing its video store. Some thing work, some things don't. No problem there. But customers who downloaded videos from the Google store received a letter from Google notifying them that the videos they had "purchased" were going up in smoke. The movies have DRM (Digital Rights Management) attached to them, and once the store is closed, the movies are no longer watchable.
Boing Boing has more on the fiasco. Google has offered the customers Google Checkout credit for the videos they purchased, but the credit is only good for sixty days. And some customers (probably most) may not even have a Checkout account (Checkout is the Google competitor to Paypal). So if you bought Google videos, you get limited store credit and have to find some company that takes Checkout payments (I can't recall ever having seen one).
It is an appalling way to treat customers, and especially so given that Google has billions in the bank, and could easily just write their movie customers a check. Google also breaks new ground by redefining the word "purchase" to mean "you purchase, we own."
Update (8/22/07)
Google has announced that it is giving all the video customers a cash refund, and it is letting them keep the Checkout credit it had already issued. The company has done the right thing; it is just too bad they did not think the refund process through a little more carefully.
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AT&T billing runs amok
iPhone users are starting to get bills from AT&T (which is really SBC), and the bills are apparently stupefyingly detailed. This article describes 52 page, double-sided bills that include detail on billing items that cost $0.00. Apparently one of the problems is that even if you have an "unlimited" data plan (for using the Web and email features of the iPhone, AT&T provides billing line items for every time you access the 'net, even if there is no charge for such access.
This is yet another example of IT departments run amok, along with accountants and bookkeepers who apparently lack common sense. Margins on cellphone accounts are already slim; it makes you wonder who is responsible at AT&T for looking at the cost of postage. How can the company afford to mail out a 52 page bill?
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Video and TV may be reaching the tipping point
Competition is a wonderful thing. As NetFlix and Blockbuster battle each other over customers for mail-based DVD movies, Blockbuster has purchased a company called MovieLink to compete with the NetFlix movie download service. The acquisition is particularly interesting because MovieLink has license agreements with several major movie studios, which are worth a lot more than any technology and systems the company might have in place.
I still get blank stares from a lot of people when I tell them that TV is moving rapidly towards delivery over a broadband network, but I sat in a conference room yesterday at a relatively small independent phone company and watched the firm show off their IP-TV service, which they can deliver to some of their customers immediately via their ADSL2+ service. But even more interesting was the the fact they they mentioned they were planning to private label the IPTV service for other providers to deliver on fiber to the home networks.
You can't download movies or watch TV on any affordable wireless system, and even the new buzz wireless buzzphrase--"700 Mhz"--is not up to the task. It is video in all forms, and especially High Definition video, that is going to ensure that fiber to the home and to the business is going to be essential infrastructure for personal and business use.
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New approach to comments
For regular (and new) readers, we've updated the site and are going to try a new approach to comments. Spammers have been a chronic problem, but we are now using "captcha" validation of comments. We hope this will allow our readers to comment on articles and keep spammers at bay.
Registration is no longer required to post a comment or to ask a question, but you will have to correctly identify one of those squiggly strings of characters before hitting the submit button on your comment.
Best regards,
Andrew
$43 million power outage
If you are an economic developer and have not been paying much attention to the "old" utility service we call electricity, you may want to continue reading. A Samsung chip plant had a power outage that lasted only one day, but cost the company $43 million dollars in discarded product and lost revenue.
These days, I am in more and more communities that are beginning to look at redundancy not just in terms of data cables, but also in terms of electric service. Businesses are now keenly interested in business parks that offer dual electric feeds coming from different parts of the local electric grid. If power from one substation is lost for some reason, the power coming in from a different substation can keep businesses going.
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Congress wants to own our devices
Mark Pryor (D-Ark) has decided that Congress and the Federal government should decide what we can and cannot see on our TVs, cellphones, and portable media devices. Pryor is sponsoring a bill that would require the FCC to develop a "super V-chip" that would have to be installed in every device that connects to any third party network, including the network.
There are so many things wrong with this that it is hard to know where to start. First, adding this sort of flawed technology to every single electronic device would raise the cost of everything. And remember that we are rapidly moving towards a time when every single electronic device we own (radios, phones, TVs, computers, music players, etc. etc. etc.) all have some kind of connection to networks. The cost of implementing this would be staggering, and we would get to pay for this with higher prices.
It also beggars belief that we would want FCC bureaucrats in Washington D.C. to decide what we can and cannot look at. Pryor is wrapping this in the usual "it's for the children" bait and switch language, but it would give the Federal government total control over the media. The V-chip was a dumb idea from the start, but if you squinted hard, you could dimly see some kernel of justification for it, since in 1996 a lot of us still got TV over the airwaves, which was still heavily regulated by the FCC. With all the alternative ways to get news, information, and entertainment today, the FCC is hardly needed to "protect" us.
Pornography is a scourge, but as more and more communities move toward an open services model for delivering media, the open market will take care of this problem quite neatly. In open services networks, some Internet access providers will be able to cheaply and easily sell "family friendly" Internet access with all sorts of parental controls built in. It will be quicker, cheaper, and easier than any government-mandated solution, and it will work better. That's the right way to do it.
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