Technology Futures

A study by a watchdog e-voting group in Maryland called SaveOurVotes found that in that state, the switch to electronic voting machines raised the cost of elections by 866%.

But wait, there's more! The counties are still paying off a $67 million dollar loan needed to purchase the machines, even though the machines were found to have serious security flaws and have had to abandoned in favor of the older and more secure optical scanning equipment--which is much less expensive.

The only good thing about this story is that the state did eventually do the right thing and revert to a more secure voting system. But the taxpayers still have to pick up the tab for a lot of bad decisions.

In a just released Forbes survey, Blacksburg, Virginia is ranked tenth in the nation as one of the best small places to live and to work. If you live in a small community, it is worth spending some time reviewing the Forbes study. Of the nine factors they use to rank communities, four of the nine are related directly to quality of life. These factors are Culture and Leisure, Crime Rate, Educational Attainment, and Cost of Living.

Among the other factors, Cost of Doing Business is one that any community can work on quickly. Our work at Design Nine takes us to small communities throughout the United States, and one of the most glaring problems I see over and over again is the lack of good "Class A" office space in smaller towns and regions. Too many communities are still trying to bring retail back to Main Street, when they should be rehabbing storefronts and second floor space for small businesses and entrepreneurs.

When Norton, Virginia rehabbed an old downtown hotel for high tech start ups, including affordable fiber to the building, Main Street blossomed as the office workers in the building shopped and ate downtown. The spacious lobby of the building regularly hosts community dinners, weddings, and special events, so the investment does double duty--how many weddings have been held in the typical industrial park incubator building?

The biggest mistake a small community can make these days is to put too much emphasis on business and industrial parks far from traditional downtowns--by making modest investments in high quality office space in traditional downtowns, you get a much bigger community and economic development impact. And as always, fiber has to be part of the mix.

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.

A lengthy discussion on SlashDot highlights a new tactic by Amazon. The book distribution giant is trying to muscle out other print on demand services by forcing authors who use print on demand to use Amazon's print on demand (POD) service or else--the "else" being Amazon won't list their book.

Amazon has every right to do this, but it will be interesting to see if this works in their benefit or not. It would appear that with this new approach, Amazon wants to be both book distributor and book publisher. The two are not necessarily compatible, and it is not clear to me that this heavy-handed tactic will work.

Authors who use POD are either "vanity" authors without any identifiable audience or have some valuable information with an identified niche audience. In both cases, marketing will be up to the author; Amazon is not going to be able to add any value here, so the author can just as easily use some other POD service. In the end, book buyers who have made a buying decision by landing on the author's Web site or through some other route are going to click on a link to make the purchase. Most buyers won't care if the link goes to Amazon or to some other POD service.