Technology Futures

In a series of broadband planning meetings earlier this week, I heard about several companies that were seriously considering moving their operations to another city if the local electric power infrastructure was not improved. The firms said they were experiencing multiple outages per month that often lasted an hour or more.

It is not just "old" manufacturing businesses that are vulnerable to electric power interruptions. Any firm that uses IT to manage their business (i.e. almost all businesses) can be affected by power outages, and sudden power outages can not only stop business and manufacturing processes, but can also stop ecommerce as well, if the servers taking orders are offline because of power interruptions.

Economic developers: When was the last time you asked your businesses about the reliability of their electric service? Do you want to lose a relocation prospect because of lack of quality electric power?

A new study out from Forrester says 9% of the workforce is already working from home for their employer, and another 22.8 million are running their own businesses out of their home. This adds up to a major demographic that is turning neighborhoods into business districts.

The report also highlights what Design Nine has been telling communities for a long time--you have to have business class broadband services in residential areas or you are choking off economic development. A major reason for communities to get involved in broadband infrastructure is to ensure the community can compete economically. If people can't work from home in your town, businesses and workers are going to go elsewhere. In other words, do you want to lose 10% to 20% of the jobs in your community because of a lack of broadband in neighborhoods?

"Cloud computing" has replaced "Web 2.0" and "social networking" as the latest buzz phrase. IT folks love buzz phrases, and the IT landscape is littered with them. Whatever happened to "client-server," "relational databases," "artificial intelligence," and "fifth generation?" All of those buzz phrases were based on solid and useful technical advances that were grossly oversold as the answer to everyone's problems.

Cloud computing is just the latest, and beware of vendors and IT staff claiming a modest 15% increase in the IT budget to develop a "cloud computing platform" will fix all current and future woes. Or beware of "free" online services that tout cloud computing. Over the past five or six years, as more and more people and businesses have acquired broadband connections to the Internet, it has become more practical to store data of all kinds (documents, email, etc.) remotely and use a desktop application or Web app to access that data. Google Apps is a perfect example, as well as more common services like Gmail and Hotmail.

In many cases, storing data in a "cloud" somewhere on the network improves accessibility, reduces costs, or both. But there are two problems. If you are relying solely on a third party to store your data, you may lose it, as did customers of The Linkup, who just discovered that the company lost large portions of paid customer data. Some customers apparently did not have backups.

Social networking sites also store data in a cloud, and a recent lawsuit over data stored by LinkedIn, a popular business networking service, illustrates similar difficulties. The legal problem arose when an employee left a company in the UK and started a rival firm, using contacts built up during his previous employment and stored online at the LinkedIn service. The employee was sued and the courts forced him to turn over the information; the courts agreed that the contacts represented confidential company data. But it was stored online by a third party and the account was in the name of the employee. And apparently the firm encouraged employees to use LinkedIn to manage contacts.

So beware of cloud computing; technically, it can be used to solve all sorts of datasharing problems, but like any new technology, it can introduce new policy and management issues.

NBC, which has exclusive rights to broadcast the 2008 Olympics in the United States, is apparently upset that people are simply not bothering to wait for prime time to watch NBC's repackaged broadcasts. Instead, viewers are simply going to the Internet and watching the Olympics on the Web sites of media outlets in other countries.

The Olympics is a long and complex series of events that has never fit neatly into a two hour evening broadcast, but in olden days (say four years ago), that was about all we had. The much wider availability of broadband connections and the widespread use of online video sites like YouTube provides people with alternatives to broadcast and cable TV. Right now, the video folks are watching is of generally low quality, but demand for HD online video is going to increase rapidly, and more and more people are going to want to watch live events in real time, not NBC time, and will want those broadcasts in HD format. And the current DSL and cable modem systems simply don't have the horsepower to deliver it.