Trends I'm Watching

Preventing Cancer

Guys, this is a no-brainer!

Link: mercola.com: Are You Taking the Right Form of Vitamin E?.

Gamma-tocopherol seems to be the important form of vitamin E that actually inhibits the proliferation of cancer cells. Four years ago there was a study that showed there was a 500% decrease in prostate cancer in men that had the highest level of gamma tocopherol.

Gamma-tocopherol has been shown to induce death in lab-grown human cancer cells while leaving healthy cells alone. This is really amazing. Most vitamin E supplements contain only alpha-tocopherol, a different form of vitamin E that alone does not have these anticancer properties.

Bottom line? If you have prostate cancer or are interested in preventing it or any other type of cancer, time to get on the band wagon and start taking gamma in addition to alpha tocopherol.

Distributed, Remote, and Mobile Workers to Drive Enterpise RSS Adoption

I use RSS to subscribe to my favorite blogs. It's an essential tool for knowledge workers.

Link: GlobeLogger Adoption: Distributed, Remote, and Mobile Workers to Drive Enterpise RSS Adoption.

RSS is enabling a new class of tools for information brokers. Looking more deeply into the characteristics of this group, we can start to see where adoption of RSS in the enterprise is likely to have the most immediate benefits.

The harder it is right now for people to accomplish their task of communicating—of routing information—the more improvement Enterprise RSS has to offer. Given that much of the information that will flow through an Enterprise RSS system is informal nuggets of information—not a white paper, but a pointer to an article; not a marketing campaign, but a note about a product incompatibility—much of the value of Enterprise RSS will be in replacing informal communication channels, that is, "watercooler talk" and information usually gleaned by "walking the factory floor".

The people for whom these channels have ceased to exist are mobile, remote, and distrbuted. Many of them only come to corporate HQ once a quarter, and ravenously eat up all the tidbits of information they can scrounge. They're the last to know about just about everything. But they're the ones in front of the customers, and in the middle of the revenue stream: sales, professional services, and field support.

Aside from field sales reps and consultants, many workers work in remote or home offices and are similarly disconnected from HQ. Enterprise RSS can help integrate these people back into the information fabric of a company.

Open-Air Lifestyle Centers Rise

Link: Today in Investor's Business Daily stock analysis and business news.

Although teens might still prefer to hang out in regular malls, many adults have taken to the ambience of lifestyle centers, with their outdoor promenades, landscaping, restaurants and entertainment.

These centers showcase higher-end and fashionable chains, often — until recently — doing without department stores.

About 20 lifestyle centers opened this year, more than any other year since they started to gain momentum in warm-weather states in the mid-'90s.

Now they're expanding into colder climates. In 2004 alone, they opened in Nebraska, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Indiana and Illinois.

The roughly 130 lifestyle centers are still dwarfed by traditional malls, which number over 1,100. But more than a third were built in the last two years. And lifestyle centers are expected to grow at twice the rate of traditional malls.

Multiple radios boggle cell phone design

In the 1980's there were numerous operating systems for PCs. The marketplace will pick the winner.

Link: CommsDesign - Multiple radios boggle cell phone design.

The bad thing about wireless standards is that there are so many of them, particularly for PANs. Indications are strong that one or two could consolidate or drop out during the next couple of years. But around the same time, three or more wide-area wireless standards hit the market, in what is starting to seem like a zero-sum game.

In the wide area, meanwhile, at least three approaches to delivering digital TV to handsets are marching toward a 2006 market debut. That's about the time WiMax is expected to start giving the latest cellular-data standards a run for their money for long-range, high-speed service.

Car-Sharing and Wireless Technology

Good ideas solving an urban problem.

Link: Car-Sharing and Wireless Technology - The WiFi Weblog - wifi.weblogsinc.com.

Two car-sharing services—Zipcar, based in Boston, and Flexcar out of Seattle—are geared to folks in big cities who find that owning and, much more difficult to deal with, parking their cars can be pricey and stressful. With car-sharing, users make reservations either over the Web or on the phone, and the companies use remote-acess systems to control who can use the car and when.

Zipcar has over 400 cars in its fleet for its 30,000 customers in Boston, Washington, D.C., and New York. Flexcar has 350 vehicles serving 25,000 members in 20 cities ranging from Seattle to Washington, D.C. Both services rent cars 24/7 in increments of a half-hour or longer. For example, prices in Boston range from $8.50 an hour to $12.50, depending on the vehicle model. Gas is included. Daily rates also are available starting at $60.

Both services can wirelessly track when a car’s engine has been turned off to determine whether to assess a late fee. In addition, Zipcar has partnered with Cingular Wireless to offer WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity inside its cars.

Internet TV: The Next Big Thing

More information, more decisions — more freedom?

Link: Internet TV: The Next Big Thing.

By this time next year, you will be up to your ears in Internet TV.

The technology, which enables communications firms to deliver
programming over the Internet to the TV via a Broadband connection,
will be hailed as the next big thing by industry analysts. Wall Street
firms will recommend that their clients buy companies that offer
Internet TV services. And, the mainstream media will cover the new
trend as if it were the Second Coming.

And, for once, they will all be right.

I predict that Internet TV will revolutionize the TV industry, giving
viewers thousands of programming options. Unlike a cable "head end"
or a satellite in orbit, an Internet server can store an almost unlimited
amount of shows.

Wireless Networking for the Home

Link: Today in Investor's Business Daily stock analysis and business news.

Netgear's products share shelf space with products from Cisco's Linksys, along with brands like D-Link, Buffalo and SMC Networks.

All of these firms are riding the growth of home broadband use. According to Nielsen/NetRatings, 53% of U.S. homes have high-speed connections to the Internet instead of dial-up.

Many of these homes have more than one computer. So the easiest way to share the connection is with wireless networking, also known as Wi-Fi. Wireless products account for over half of Netgear's sales.

Netgear and its rivals have similar business models. First, design products with off-the-shelf chips and software from other firms. Then have Taiwan-based manufacturers build the actual products.

All that keeps R&D costs to a minimum.

For its line of small office network switches, Netgear relies on software and chips from Marvell, (MRVL) Broadcom (BRCM) and Atheros Communications. (ATHR) Netgear's wireless music player employs software from Digital 5 and Mediabolic. Netgear's wireless antenna comes from Intellon.

The latest push: incorporate voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) into wireless routers. VoIP takes regular phone calls and puts them over broadband connections.

Competing with Craigslist

Another channel targeting tradition media. Are newspapers and magazines endangered?

Link: SiliconBeat: Competing with Craigslist.

A new report by the Classified Intelligence consulting firm drives home the profound effect the San Francisco-based Web site has had on its home turf.

Called "Competing with Craig,'' the collection of articles is aimed mostly at newspaper executives. Its centerpiece is a write-up by Bob Cauthorn, the former vice president of digital media at the San Francisco Chronicle who has never been afraid to speak his mind.

Cauthorn, who ran SFGate.com before leaving this year, illustrates how tiny Craigslist has stolen a massive chunk of the classified market from established media companies such as the Chronicle, the Oakland Tribune and Knight Ridder, parent company of the Mercury News, the Contra Costa Times and this blog.

Cauthorn estimates that with job listings alone, Craigslist has taken $50 million to $60 million away from print newspapers.

Craigslist, which has only about 14 employees, is successful because it's easy-to-use, cheap and has generated strong emotional ties with its users, Cauthorn says. He added that it doesn't hurt that many people believe -- incorrectly -- that Craigslist is a non-profit organization.

Open Source Databases: The Real Broadband Brain

Open source gets more pervasive every day.

Link: Om Malik on Broadband: MySQL - The Real Broadband Brain.

According to InformationWeek research published in November, open source databases such as MySQL continue to gain significant traction in mainstream corporate applications. Of the hundreds of companies interviewed, 42% of them are already using open source software in their production databases – with another 33% currently considering an open source deployment.

Geothermal Energy: Hot Dry Rock (HDR)

Link: Alternative Energy Blog - Alt-Energy.org: Geothermal Energy: Hot Dry Rock (HDR) - The Habanero.

Hot Dry Rock technology is capable of generating low cost, base-load power on a large scale.

In Australia the US $5.4m experimental basin represents the largest known geothermal resource in the world and has the potential to supply thousands of megawatts of low cost power. Known resources have the energy equivalent of 50 billion barrels of oil according to the article.

Hot Dry Rock (HDR) does not depend on new technology. It relies on extracting heat from particularly hot granite at depths of less than 5 km (approximately 3 miles) from the surface. The heat is extracted by means of circulating water from a deep surface well, through an engineered underground heat exchanger, with the hot water returning to the surface through the second well.

It is thought that a small number of locations around the world have the right conditions for cost effective production of HDR electricity.