Get ready for telepresence

Submitted by acohill on Thu, 10/16/2008 - 07:57.

Cisco has announced a new marketing effort to expand the availability of high quality videoconference facilities, or telepresence rooms. What is the difference between these rooms and older videoconference systems? Three things:

• HD quality cameras and monitors provide real "you are there" interactivity. No more grainy television monitors or YouTube style images blown up on an LCD projector.
• High performance, high capacity broadband connections that can carry multiple live HD video streams. How much is enough? Figure about 10 to 15 megabits per location, so if you have are having a conference with two remote locations, you need as much as 45 megabits of bandwidth.
• Dramatically improved audio. No more "I'm talking from the bottom of well" sound quality, where you can't really hear half the people in the room. Multiple microphones and sophisticated sound processing software make it easy to carry on conversations without shouting.

If you are trying to attract businesses to your town or region, you should have at least one well-equipped facility available for rent by the hour. It may be just the thing to get startups and entrepreneurs interested in more rural locations for their businesses. Every business park should have a telepresence facility, and every public library should have a meeting room available for both business and community use.

Air travel becoming an expensive luxury

Submitted by acohill on Wed, 08/27/2008 - 07:48.

This brief report discusses the fact that airlines are dropping nonstop flights even to and from major cities like New York. For business, this is devastating, as the increased cost of tickets can, to some extent, be moderated via other cost-cutting measures. But sending business people on trips that take all day instead of three or four hours is devastating, because you can't recover the lost time spent traveling.

Like it or not, business videoconferencing is going to become much more important more quickly, and bandwidth (or the lack of it) will determine how much it is used in any particular community or business area.

Video link to the elderly parents

Submitted by acohill on Sun, 08/24/2008 - 09:41.

This Slashdot article quickly gets into a down in the dirt technical discussion, but the question about full time video to elderly parents is an indication of what is coming. If you browse through the comments, what you quickly realize is that people are already doing this routinely. What is missing is high quality "like you are there" connectivity. Some companies like Accenture are already experimenting with full time HD video links for exactly this application, and telehealth and telemedicine uses of the same equipment are not far behind. We just need networks capable of providing the bandwidth.

9% of workforce already working from home

Submitted by acohill on Wed, 08/13/2008 - 09:07.

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?

iPhone breaks more records

Submitted by acohill on Mon, 08/11/2008 - 12:59.

The iPhone continues to break records. According to some estimates, Apple has sold 3 million phones in the first 4 weeks after the updated iPhone 3G was released. Last year, it took Apple three months to sell 1 million. One estimate suggests that Apple will continue to sell 800,000 phones a week for many months.

The App Store, which supplies hundreds of software applications, has also broken records, with more than 60 million downloads of software for the iPhone in the first month, and the store has been averaging $1 million per day in sales (some apps are free).

T-Mobile is feeling the pressure from the iPhone, as the company has announced it is also pursuing an online software store that will work with any of the phones it provides--a rather ambitious undertaking that spans several different cellphone operating systems. T-Mobile has been losing customers to AT&T as customers switch providers to get the iPhone, which only AT&T has.

NBC upset that people use on demand video

Submitted by acohill on Mon, 08/11/2008 - 08:15.

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.

No one wants to drive anymore

Submitted by acohill on Tue, 07/29/2008 - 15:12.

As I predicted months ago when gas prices first started to rise, the suburbs are about to undergo a transformation. USA Today had a front page article about the 'burbs and the changes. In Arizona, they are doing what planners have been recommending for at least thirty years, which is to redesign suburbs as destinations, rather than just a place to sleep.

By "destination," that means adding stores, office buildings, sidewalks, parks, and new downtowns, so that residents don't have to drive thirty miles to and from work.

Small towns and rural communities with traditional downtown Main Streets can also capitalize on this trend converting Main Street buildings into office space--with fiber broadband services. Small towns like Galax, Virginia, better know for some of the country's best barbeque and the Fiddler's Convention, is doing just that as a partner in the Wired Road.

Cloud computing replaces Web 2.0

Submitted by acohill on Thu, 07/24/2008 - 07:21.

Cloud computing has replaced Web 2.0 as a popular IT buzzphrase. Nobody ever really knew what Web 2.0 was, but it sounded important, and a lot of small companies got lots of cash to "really important" Web 2.0 applications and services that were going to change the world, make a lot of money, and cure cancer. None of them made much money, and most of them made no money.

Despite the hype, Web 2.0 signaled a shift to much more sophisticated use of the Web, with much better Web-enabled interfaces. The secret sauce for Web 2.0 services and applications was broadband. Cloud computing takes these sophisticated Web apps and high speed data connections to the next level, where both desktop computers and portable devices like the iPhone are connected continuously to data and services hosted somewhere on the 'net (the "cloud").

Apple probably has the clearest vision for this; the company has provided nearly seamless integration of desktop computers and portable devices like laptops and iPhones/iPods with its MobileMe service. For $99 a year, you get "cloud computing," which means your various devices (e.g. desktop, laptop, phone) all stay synchronized more or less automagically--as long as you have some kind of high speed data connection attached to each device.

Cloud computing, despite the hype, is here, and will quickly become a business necessity, meaning communities that cannot provide their own businesses with the right levels of connectivity will suffer economically. And cloud computing, to work properly, has to work from home as well as from business locations, so residential broadband is business broadband. Finally, communities have to have broadband hotspots for business travelers, because those business visitors have the most urgent need for access to the "cloud" of data they use to manage their work.

3G iPhone smashes all records

Submitted by acohill on Wed, 07/16/2008 - 07:36.

Apple's second generation iPhone was released for sale last Friday, and promptly broke every consumer electronics record. Apple and AT&T sold an astounding one million phones in just three days, making it not only the most popular cellphone in history but the most popular consumer electronics device ever. Even more incredible, there are still long lines of buyers waiting for phones--according to numerous reports, all 1800 AT&T stores are completely sold out, and most Apple retail stores are out of stock.

What accounts for the phone's popularity? It is not the hardware; the phone has some incremental improvements over the previous model, but nothing groundbreaking. A combination of lower price and an open platform seems to be the appeal. As the iPhone was released, Apple also rolled out thousands of free and low cost applications and programs for the iPhone, making the phone not just a phone/PDA but a true platform that can be customized by the user. This is the key difference now between the iPhone and most other cellphones. The Palm Treo and the RIM Blackberry have had this ability, but both devices have been relatively expensive. More importantly, both the Treo and Blackberry have small, cramped screens and low quality interfaces. The large, very high resolution iPhone display is startlingly clear and easy to use compared to any other portable device.

Samsung and LG have rolled out new phones that look a lot like the iPhone, and cellular providers like Verizon are advertising them heavily. But you can only have what the cellphone provider will let you have on those phones, and many of the add-ons come with steep per month subscription fees. The iPhone App store offers hundreds of free programs, and hundreds more programs that average about $5 in cost. Over time, the other cellphone providers will have to move to this model, or everyone will end up as an AT&T customer and an iPhone user.

Is technology making us stupid?

Submitted by acohill on Mon, 06/23/2008 - 08:47.

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.