Trends I'm Watching

Skype: Innovative and Proprietary

Can we have our cake and eat it?

Link: blogs | noirExtreme.

Skype is about reinventing telecommunications, not just porting a 100-year old application to a new medium. Skype is a smart peer-to-peer application built on top of a dumb network, delivering superior voice quality without the need for QoS, Session Border Controllers or any sophisticated system that traditional operators believe they need to deliver VoIP. And on top, Skype is nearly free.

So what's been holding me from jumping in? Skype is a proprietary solution. Users are escaping from the prison of the POTS only to jump into the walled garden of Skype. While this sounds like a religious statement today given the number of innovations Skype provides over the POTS, over time problems will undoubtedly appear. Although almost completely invisible today, Skype —like any other proprietary solution— will have the following significant drawbacks:

• Slower innovation —a lack of competition does not encourage vendors to continuously improve their products to reduce cost and add new functionalities.
• Unfair pricing for services —the absence of alternative for each element of the solution makes it possible for a vertical vendor to charge an unreasonable price for services.

Online Gaming Grows

As gaming becomes more Internet-enabled, the network effect kicks in and growth goes exponential. (Metcalfe's law: a network's value scales with the square of the number of users.)

Link: Better Living Through Software - XBox World Domination.

"The Xbox Live community has logged a record-breaking 91 million hours playing "Halo 2" since the title's launch -- more than any other Xbox Live game in the two-year history of the service. In addition, the instantly immersive gameplay has resulted in close to 61 million logged sessions on the game, with an average session lasting nearly 92 minutes, approximately the length of a major motion picture.”

Organic Polymer Electronics

Link: WorldChanging: Another World Is Here: Organic Polymer Electronics.

polymer electronics for a couple of reasons: they can be flexible, meaning that they can have applications beyond traditional computing devices; and they can be printable, meaning that they can be produced very inexpensively, and potentially even via next-generation fabbers. The technology is still fairly immature, but this week saw some details (and pictures) of a pretty interesting breakthrough. PolyIC, a German start-up partially funded by Siemens AG, announced in November that it had developed prototype entirely-plastic RFID tags operating faster than any previous polymer circuit, 600 kilohertz. More details have now emerged:

Web logs (blogs) on the 10 biggest tech stories of 2004 from Investors Business Daily

Blogs are my favorite source of insight.

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

• 8. Web logs. The staff of the Merriam-Webster dictionary in December named "blog" as its word of the year. And it's no wonder; blogs — short for Web logs — came into their own in 2004.

The online journals chronicle everything from love lives to movies.
At center stage last year was political blogs. They breathlessly followed every twist and turn of the presidential election.

They also kept close watch on traditional media. When CBS News anchor Dan Rather released files related to President Bush's military service, bloggers revealed them to be forgeries.

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.

Wi-Fi VOIP To Compete With Cellular

Link: E M E R G I C . o r g: December 23, 2004 Archives.

Each minute of wireless calling over Wi-Fi is a minute of calling not made over a cellular network. That has the potential to shake up the world of cellular calling.

Unlike a traditional cellphone call, which comes out of your bucket of paid minutes, calls over the Internet may not be counted at all. That means that if you were in your office -- or eventually your home, or Starbucks or any place that has a Wi-Fi connection -- you could make unlimited free calls (not counting the cost of the Internet service). That is particularly significant because roughly a third of all cellular calls actually are made from an office or home, according to a Yankee Group survey. DoCoMo's phone will work only if it is configured with a specific corporate Wi-Fi network; you can't just use it at Starbucks.(From the Wall Street Journal)

Wal-Mart's Linux Push

Link: Silicon Valley - Dan Gillmor's eJournal - Wal-Mart's Linux Push.

Wal-Mart is pursuing its own Linux strategy, retail-style, with desktop computers and now this laptop model. For under $500 you can get a well-equipped machine with both the OS and OpenOffice.

I'm no fan of Wal-Mart, and I won't shop there. But the Wal-Mart ruthlessness that makes me dislike the company is also responsible for what may be one of the only serious challenges to the Windows monopoly to date.

Google to digitize millions of books

Just a few years ago, no one understood how to make money with a web search engine!

Link: MercuryNews.com | 12/14/2004 | Google to digitize millions of books.

Google is launching an ambitious effort to make digital copies of some of the world's largest university library collections and will incorporate the texts into its vast Web index, apparently the largest project of its kind ever attempted. As envisioned, almost anyone with a computer could instantly tap into enormous academic libraries -- some with texts dating back centuries.

Stanford, Harvard and Oxford universities, as well as the University of Michigan and the New York Public Library, are participating in the program, which could span years and involve scanning and indexing well more than 10 million books and periodicals.

The project is another manifestation of the company's oft-stated goal to ``organize all the world's information,'' Google representatives said, reflecting Google's ambition to cast itself as the most authoritative search engine.