Monthly Archives: June 2006
Broadband to become essential. Just like water and power.
We are living in exciting times, I sometimes forget the incredible advances that we have made in the last 50 years, its scary to think that the BMW M5 has multiple times the processing power of all the computers involved in putting the Eagle on the moon.
Where will technology take us within the next 5,10,20 years? What amazing things will we have available to improve our quality of life?
The large-scale deployment of IPv6 will see a world where every imaginable (and sometimes unimaginable device) will be IP ready and jacked into the grid, self-restocking fridges will be commonplace, digital cameras will auto-upload to online storage, our TV’s will receive media off the net and VoIP will be king.
For content providers this means the end of dictated content – `user interactive` and `on-demand` become the norm and `broadcasting` becomes old news, the user will control his own usage, the independent content producer will be able to get his content to a much wider audience now and we will really see the effect of the long tail. Yeah, this all sure sounds a lot like podcasting (which is very “now”), except it will go through a series of changes before ultimately becoming mainstream, podcasting is still very edgy today and it stands out from other forms of user-generated media only because of the time-shifting aspect, i.e. download while you sleep.
I expect that the rapid adoption of municipal WiFi/WiMax/Mesh type technology will accelerate and soon entire cities will be blanketed with always-in internet, this will become an essential service and not a luxury. Blanket WiFi will change the face of technologies like podcasting and devices like the iPod, why have a hard drive if you can just download what you are watching on the fly and it costs next to nothing? Do you even need a hard drive on that device? Already services like Last.fm are hugely popular as they are so well tailored to your taste and it helps you find good content all for the price for a bit of bandwidth.
Another thorn in the side of local storage applications, especially video ones, will be the rapid consumption of disk space, imagine having to cache anything approaching a healthy collection of HD-DVD/TV content on your local machine. Now all of you are going to shout at me and say that disk storage is cheap but history has told us that while the amount of storage on the “standard” drive of the day keeps multiplying (Moore’s Law), the fact is that the number of disk hungry applications also follow that trend and it has really never gotten much cheaper to physically buy that standard hard disk. Example: My 512Mb , 2 Gig, 20 Gig, 40 Gig, 80 Gig etc. drive purchases over the last few years have always been roughly as expensive as the one before it (twice the storage at the same price) and if I need to buy a few of them it still hurts my wallet 
No, off-site/remote hosting is key.
Our digital persona’s will be irrevocably intertwined with our real lives, already we have seen the rise of the so-called MySpace generation, the next gens, they will demand unlimited access to blogging and social networking sites and to them being disconnected for any amount of time will be like hell.
Most of our personal computing will move onto the grid, take Gmail for example, I already can’t operate without it and to that reason network connectivity will need to become much more reliable with more fail safes and alternates in case something does go wrong.
We will track the movements of our loved ones with RFID and even the traffic department will use RFID to bill you for using a toll-road. Don’t make a mistake, big brother will be able to track you!
All-in-all I look forward to huge changes in everyday of life via new technologies, but I do find myself fearing that in South Africa we will be left behind due to the slow movement of the broadband glacier in this country due to socio-economic complications and plain old greed on behalf of the powers that be.
Luckily there are some people out there with vision! Just this evening I met someone attempting to start up a new WiMax based operator, he really seems to “get” broadband and realises that you cant retain customers by contract but rather by good service.
Lets back our local innovators, lets make our voices heard. Lets liberate our broadband. Recently heard someone mentioning the `Bandwidth Liberation Front` in jest, but seriously, has it become time for the “Broadband Liberation Front”? I already see developed countries like the USA grumbling that they are getting left behind in the high-stake game of Ultra-broadband, jeepers.
Vodafone using SA as a testing ground?
I see over on The Register that Vodafone UK are only now starting to publicly over the HSDPA data cards offered over here via Vodacom partnership for a couple months already.
Interesting, does this mean that SA could be seen as a valuable testing ground for such new technologies by the international telecoms players?
Yahoo Local rolls out Microformats
Yahoo! Local has rolled out a microformat implementation that includes hCalendar, hCard, and hReview microformats on almost all business listings, search results, events, and reviews.
This is pretty big news for the Microformats community at large as this signals a paradigm shift where we will see more and more big players starting to take notice and will encourage developers of consumption tools to up there pace. Finally microformats can start the transition of a geek toy into the daily consumption of Joe Average.
Other examples of significant uFormat rollout are:
Yahoo! Tech with hReview,
Flickr with hCard on profile pages,
Upcoming.org with hCalender,
and recently Technorari Kitchen with their hCard, hCalender and hReview search.
For those that are unfamiliar with what microformats are:
Microformats are a group of set standards that allow web content publishers to publish data like contact details, calendar events etc in an easy to style (using CSS) XHMTL compliant fashion that is both easy to consume by human readers and machines and avoids duplications by not having to publish seperate vCard data etc (for example) as well.
Start consuming Microformats today by installing the Tails extension for Firefox!
Read more on Yahoo! Local Blog.
Tags: microformats
CNN Money Link-love!
BarCamp Cape Town got some link love from CNN Money recently, thanks to Chris Messina for pointing it out.
Once again, the point of it all:
“We figured there was much more expertise in the audience than there possibly could be onstage,” says BarCamp co-founder Ryan King. Unconferences break the barrier between the two. Attendees write topics they’re interested in on boards, consolidate the topics, and then break into discussion groups. At traditional conferences, the most productive moments often occur in the corridor between meetings; at unconferences, attendees like to say, it’s all corridor.
If you where still reserving your decision on attending, does this get your attention now? Any brave companies out there that would like to chime in?
See you there 
Bead4Need
I don’t normally like to plug efforts by big corporates like SABMiller, but this one dropped into my mailbox by Mike Stopforth seems to be a worthy enough cause.
Beed4Need are racing against time to raise $10,000 before 16 June 2006 for charity.
From the site:
The Bead4Need Race against Time has one simple objective, “To raise $10,000 before 16 June 2006”. Every last cent of this money will be channelled into The CIDA City Campus that aspires to making a sustainable difference in the lives of the disenfranchised people in Southern Africa.
The are selling bead work on EBay as the main fundraising drive.
Links to the works can be found on their blog.
If you are a corporate with some cash to spend, please take a look and do your bit to further the peoples of our great country.
Buddy Dave says he is going to be using Bead4Need as a case-study in his Marketing 2.0 talk at BarCamp, interesting.
Technorati Tags: Bead4Need
Conversations tour
In case you have missed it, I know I have, Shel Israel, influential co-author of Naked Conversations and Rick Segal, Canadian VC and blogger are planning a whirlwind world tour and has earmarked South Africa as a stop. They are here somewhere around the 3rd of September though they still seem indecided on which city to visit, Cape Town or JHB? Here is my vote for Cape Town!
Is Google losing the plot?
So there is no denying the fact that Google is the most significant technology company to come along in recent years and I think most of us have walked a long road right from the beginning with ol’ Larry and Sergey, I for one converted way back in late 1999 when the Beta Engine really started hitting the press back then (they stole me away from Yahoo).
Now well over six years on, where do I stand with my relationship with the big “G”? Google has since started to branch of into all sorts of directions with some products that where groundbreaking and innovative on much the same level as The Search. We had GMail (awesome I use it everyday), Google Earth (a whole industry has been built on it) and the rest, well there are many, but none really as groundbreaking or revolutionary as the first three I mentioned. Picasa, GChat GTalk, GDesktop, GCalender, GNotebook anyone?
Yeah sure, there have been some great free products out there and there ain’t nothing wrong with free, but I have always seen Google as the ultimate innovator, the company that is developing the product suite that will blow the cobwebs of “ye old crappy corporate failures at software” and that will blow new life into parts of my digital experience that I never even realised needed revival.
Stop! Oh dear! Have a look at the products that they have just announced this week:
1) Albums in Picasa
2) Google Spreadsheet
3) Some wierd thing that will sample what I watch on TV?
If we stay still enough, we may just hear the sound of the GTrain sliding of the rail.. *bang* *crash*
Mark Forrester points out: “What gets me though is why are they diluting their brand?”
Om Malik asks: “Is Google Wasting Its Genius Cycles?”
Good point you two, Google might have to start holding back on these little experiments and start focusing there minds and money on producing the next big thing since GMail. I doubt they are causing any M$ Office managers any form of headache by releasing this product, this is not how you disrupt..
What about the small factor of people losing faith in your products, a sort of I couldn’t be bothered attitude. I mean we are all expecting great things now from you Google, that IS your brand. Or are you feeling the pains of a company that grew huge way too quickly?
Apart from the duh factor (come on people, have you never seen a spreadsheet?) there are some very serious privacy issues still in the way before most large corporations will even start looking at only office suites and right now there are some very good cross-platform alternatives out there for the desktop, OpenOffice being one of them.
As for that weak excuse for an upgrade to Picasa, when are we seeing web integration into Google’s own exciting FlickR killer? Now that would capture my attention!
Just about the only glimmer of hope I see from all of these little “Goodies” is that Google is proving some form of viability of the-web-as-a-platform, but I think they have a ways to go still to resolve the trust issues.
Holding my breath for the next announcement.
Be sure to read Mike Arringtons similar rant here …
Update: Over on digitalfarm JBagley comments that we are not seeing the big picture and that “All I’m saying is don’t always take things at face-value”, and that in the end it is about money. I agree there is something lurking in the muddy waters at Google HQ, but if I was the evil genius trying to take over the world, I would try to make sure that people are hooked and not release ho-hum pieces of software that are quickly sending the subsequent releases to “so what?” hell. I think they are heading towards a mismanagement disaster no matter what the intention is.
Technorati Tags: Google, Google+Spreadsheet