Exploring the impact of broadband and technology on our lives, our businesses, and our communities.
Roanoke tries to attract youth
Roanoke is a city near Blacksburg, and the city's demographics are skewed, like many rural towns and cities, toward older people. The City recently decided to stop wringing its hands about the paucity of young people and actually do something. First they hired someone whose primary job responsibility is to solve the problem, and then gave him free rein. Stuart Meese, who landed the job, has both a blog and a city-sponsored online database of young people looking for work in the area.
With over 450 young people in the database after just a few months, the database is fast becoming a valuable resource for area businesses looking for talent. A hat tip to Roanoke and Stuart Meese for putting resources behind the problem and doing something other than just complaining. And while you might ask, "What about Monster.com?" I'd say, "What about it?" They are two different tools, and employers searching the Roanoke database can do so with a reasonable certainty they are looking at motivated potential employees who really want to work in the area. You can't say that with any certainty when you pull up a bunch of Monster.com listings.
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iPods more popular than beer
A new study of college students suggests that iPods are more popular with that age group than beer, which normally occupies the top slot among the things that college students prefer most. In recent years, more and more technology-related items and activities have been the top ten list, including instant messaging and Facebook. Facebook, the popular Web site for young adults, actually tied with beer for second place. So perhaps these gadgets do have some redeeming social value--they appear to be cutting down on drinking.
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Citywide WiFi projects are expensive experiments
Citywide WiFi projects in Sacramento, California and St. Cloud, Florida are both having problems, supporting my long-standing contention that these efforts are risky. MobilePro, the company that got a city government contract to blanket the city with WiFi, is pulling out of the project entirely after the company and the city could not agree on how to finance the project. What's mind-boggling is how the company and the city agreed to move forward without a clear understanding of how the system would be paid for. Unfortunately, this is typical of "knee jerk" broadband projects that are promoted vigorously to local leaders who don't really understand enough about how community broadband should be operated. And very few vendors do, either. Wireless vendors just want to sell hardware, and so they don't really care very much if a business model is weak or nonexistent.
In St. Cloud, Florida, which got a lot of publicity when their citywide wireless effort was announced, is now having problems because they are finding out what some of us have known for a long time--WiFi is at best a bridge technology, not a long term solution. And you have to understand its limitations to make best use of it. The St. Cloud problems are largely technical ones at this time, with many residents not able to get a strong enough signal to use the free service. Residents are being advised by the City to buy a $170 signal booster. But many say they are going to stick with DSL.
One of the problems with WiFi is that it is can be lumped in the same category as DSL and cable modem services--that is too say, not exactly a bridge to the future. If you already have DSL or cable modem service, switching to WiFi is not likely to bring any real improvement to throughput, and it might even be less capable. Consumers are price sensitive to a point, but at this time, many people already understand the value of broadband, and are willing to pay for it in return for adequate performance. What St. Cloud is finding out is that residents won't necessarily switch to a free service that does not perform up to their expectations. So the city's money may have been wasted.
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Google spreadsheets
Google has announced it will offer an online spreadsheet application, which sounds terrific in theory. How many times have you wished you could have several people on a phone call all look at the same spreadsheet at the same time, and even make live updates while talking. And a spreadsheet stored online means you don't have to keep emailing copy after copy of the same spreadsheet to people just because you updated a single cell.
So what's not to like about the Google app?
For starters, how about losing control over all the information in your spreadsheet? Google's sample page shows a spreadsheet that has information about a Little League baseball team. Great. Put the phone numbers, names, email, and addresses of minors in a spreadsheet and give it to a company that is very likely to mine all that information and sell it to advertisers, to say nothing of the security problems of having all that fall into the hands of sexual predators.
And any business that uses this to save a few bucks on software is crazy. You have no control over what Google does with this information, and why would you let Google have access to all your financial information, customers names and addresses, and all the other sorts of critical business information that routinely gets put into spreadsheets.
I'll pass on this one.
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Apple vs. Dell-to outsource or not to outsource
In an interesting tale of two companies, Apple has dumped its experiment in offshoring telephone support to India after just one month. Meanwhile, Dell is rapidly expanding its offshore tech support. What's going on? Apple, while not perfect, consistently gets high ratings from consumers for support. Dell, on the other hand, has been receiving a steady stream of criticism lately for poor customer support.
I attribute the difference to finances. Apple is extremely profitable, and seems to have figured out that taking good care of customers pays off over the long term. Dell, on the other hand, is on the ropes financially and appears to be trying to save its way out of a money hole. In my experience, cost-cutting at the expense of highly visible parts of the company like customer service never works out well. Dell's slide will likely continue.
Personally, I have rarely had a good experience with offshore customer support. I've observed two chronic problems. First, the heavy accents, even with someone who might speak English as a first language, often makes conversations quite difficult. And second, offshore staff seem to be often stuck following a script when trying to figure out what the customer wants. If the problem doesn't match the script, they can't adapt. I find that less so with American-based customer support (though not always).
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The work from home movement
When I talk to communities about the need to view residential neighborhoods as business districts because of the growth in home-based workers and businesses, economic developers often get upset. They get upset because having lots of small businesses driving a local economy does not fit the old Manufacturing Economy model of just trying to attract businesses from other regions.
This article from Fortune (hat tip to Slashdot) illustrates an increasingly common business--one with a majority of its employees working from home. MySQL AB is a major tech firm with 320 employees in 25 countries, and 70 percent of those employees work from home.
What that means is marketing industrial and business parks with great water and sewer offers nothing to a company like this one. Instead of the company relocating, it is employees and business owners that are relocating, and they want two things: great quality of life and affordable broadband. And the affordable broadband has to be in residential neighborhoods, not the local industrial park.
It's not that you give up on your business and industrial parks--far from it. But it does mean that you have to expand your economic development strategy to include new kinds of businesses, new kinds of workers, and new kinds of infrastructure, like fiber to the home. One interesting tidbit from the article is that MySQL relies heavily on Voice over IP (VoIP) telephone services to keep things working smoothing--and that means, once again, that broadband service in worker homes is critical.
How does your community rate in this new global economy? Do you have programs and strategies in place to attract work from businesses and employees? If not, why not? Why ignore the double digit job growth increases from work at home businesses?
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Where is my electric car?
Segway, the company that makes the two wheel electric scooter, has a new loan program so that you can purchase a Segway just like a car, with a loan. It turns out very few people want to pay $5000 in cash for one.
With the rist in fuel prices, these kinds of lower cost transportation devices are looking more attractive, but the Segway and similar electric scooters of more conventional design are not really practical for business people, who don't want to arrive at work windswept, with clothes askew, and even wet from riding something with no protection from wind and rain.
What we need is a street legal, slightly faster, weather resistant version of a golf cart. For many people who commute under ten miles to work or to shop, it would be just fine. In Blacksburg, most of my in town trips are under two miles. It's crazy to be driving a 3000 pound automobile capable of driving long distances at 80 mph just to go pick up milk and a loaf of bread. These would not replace cars, they would complement them. Most households should have a third vehicle--all electric, limited range, and cheap.
The Prius and other hybrids are not really practical, as they try to replace combustion powered vehicles but do so poorly, and at great expense. For much less than the cost of a replacement Prius battery (about $10,000), we ought to be able to buy something that is designed just for all those short trips.
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Vonage is sinking
Vonage may be the first big casualty of the "Web 2.0" craze. While Voice over IP is technically not a Web 2.0 application, we can use Web 2.0 as shorthand for the same kind of hysteria we saw in 1999 and 2000, when a lot of really bad ideas (from a business perspective) got way too much venture capital funding.
Proving that there is still a sucker born every minute, investors poured nearly half a billion dollars into the VoIP firm's IPO--even though the company has never had a single profitable quarter in its five year life, and in fact has lost nearly half a billion dollars in that time.
The problem for Vonage is that they set the stock price too high (well, the company has lots of problems, but I'm talking about the IPO). The $17 initial price has dropped below $15 in just a few days, and some are predicting it will fall below $10. High flying tech stocks are supposed to shoot upwards in value and make early buyers of the stock big profits.
But wait! There's more!
Vonage offered users of their telephone service an opportunity to buy stock at the initial opening price. That's an attractive offer if the stock value shoots up quickly; you can buy the stock and immediately know you are going to make a profit if you sell right away. But what if the stock price drops? Now you have to buy shares at $17 that the market says are only worth $14.50. What some subscribers are saying is that they are going to renege on their agreement to buy. And Vonage is now suggesting it will force subscribers to honor their purchase commitments.
It can't get much uglier than that.
Stepping back, Vonage has two structural problems. First, the business model for Vonage, in which you can make free calls to other Vonage users and pay to make calls to people not on the Vonage network, is not working--the company is losing money every day.
Second, the big access providers have started playing games with VoIP data traversing their networks so that the quality of the phone calls is much reduced. This is part of the "two tier Internet" issue, where the big providers first "prove" extra fees are needed by monkeying with the way their competitor's data traffic is handled, then claim special fees are needed to make the network work better. Vonage is an early victim of this because they have so many people using their service.
And in fact, heavy VoIP traffic can and does affect networks. But the solution is not to start charging companies like eBay, Vonage, and Google special fees to carry their traffic. The real problem is that the bandwidth model of selling Internet access that we have used for the last decade is badly broken. The two tier Internet "solution" is like putting a band aid on someone having a heart attack.
We need open access digital road systems where bandwidth is free and you pay for services. This allows everyone in the service chain, from customer to service provider, to price or pay for services based on the value of the service, and not on some completely artificial cost of some increment of bandwidth that has no relationship to what people and businesses actually do.
Some communities are already planning open access systems. As they become operational in the U.S., we'll see more and more movement toward them, because they are the only ladder out of the hole we are in. In the meantime, we have to hope our state and Federal legislators don't cave in to the two-tier Internet crowd and really screw things up.
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25 worst tech products of all time
There is something strangely pleasureable about reading this article. PCWorld has compiled its list of what its editors think are the 25 worst tech products of all time. It's a bit like watching cable TV shows like "World's Worst Drivers." You know you should not take pleasure in other people's misfortune, but somehow, you just can't change the channel.
The other thing about this is list you kind of want to scan it to see if you ended buying or using any of these boat anchor products. My guess is that most people can find at least one item on the list that they purchased, thinking it would make life better and instead made it much worse.
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iPod neckwear
In what has to be one of the strangest, but potentially quite practical, iPod accessories, you can buy a tie designed to hold an iPod nano on the backside. If you have never seen a nano close up, they are extremely small and very light, so this would actually work pretty well. And it looks like the tie would match your Nike/iPod sneakers. To trick out an entire ensemble, you might want to finish up with one of the jackets with a solar panel on the back so you can charge your iPod from the sun while you are walking in your Nikes.
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