At the Huffington Post, James Boyce’s latest post is entitled “Why The Video IPOD Has DC Consultants Shaking In Their Gucci’s.” His basic argument is that the campaign media consulting business based on collecting fees for high-priced broadcast media buys will increasingly become a thing of the past, and that political campaigns that master the expanding array of new media will enjoy a crucial competitive edge.
As the technology world continues to change, almost overnight, how will campaigns be run? How can a candidate communicate with voters?…Will candidates offer free content to anyone who has a device like a VIDEO IPOD? Will free downloads of speeches be offered to anyone with a regular IPOD? How can we harness the growing power of instant messaging to drive communications?
Can we use the email capacity of new cell phones? Can we text message in our campaigns as they do overseas? How will our blogs develop and communicate? Should we have a real Democratic Convention in 2008 or a virtual one? If we have a real one, can we make the date 30 days before the election and spend our public finance money in weeks not months and have a virtual one earlier in the summer for organizing purposes?
Conference call technology is better - video conferencing technology is better - these incredible opportunities are spinning - we need to harness them.
Noting that RNC chair Ken Mehlman was correct in his prediction that the campaign that controlled the Internet in 2004 would win, Boyce offers his own prediction that “[t]he campaign that controls the next wave of communication developments in 2008 will win again, the only question is: what are they?”
Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 10:39 PM | Print | Comments (0)
An AP story at wired.com reports on “what is billed as the world’s largest hotspot, a wireless cloud [in northcentral Oregon] that stretches over 700 square miles of landscape so dry and desolate it could have been lifted from a cowboy tune.”
Similar wireless projects have been stymied in major metropolitan areas by telephone and cable TV companies, which have poured money into legislative bills aimed at discouraging such competition…But here among the thistle, large providers such as local phone company Qwest Communications International see little profit potential. So, wireless entrepreneur Fred Ziari drew no resistance for his proposed wireless network, enabling him to quickly build the $5 million cloud at his own expense.
While his service is free to the general public, Ziari is recovering the investment through contracts with more than 30 city and county agencies, as well as big farms such as Hale’s, whose onion empire supplies over two-thirds of the red onions used by the Subway sandwich chain. Morrow County, for instance, pays $180,000 a year for Ziari’s service. Each client, he said, pays not only for yearly access to the cloud but also for specialized applications such as a program that allows local officials to check parking meters remotely.
“Internet service is only a small part of it. The same wireless system is used for surveillance, for intelligent traffic system, for intelligent transportation, for telemedicine and for distance education,” said Ziari.
Homeland security and public safety are also a factor:
The high desert around Hermiston also happens to be the home of one of the nation’s largest stockpiles of Cold War-era chemical weapons. Under federal guidelines, local government officials were required to devise an emergency evacuation plan for the accidental release of nerve and mustard agents.
Now, emergency responders in the three counties surrounding the Umatilla Chemical Depot are equipped with laptop computers that are Wi-Fi ready. These laptops are set up to detail the size and direction of a potential chemical leak, enabling responders to direct evacuees from the field. Traffic lights and billboards posting evacuation messages can also be controlled remotely over the wireless network.
And for the Hermiston Police Department, having squad cars equipped with a wireless laptop means officers can work less overtime by being able to file their crime reports from the field.Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 2:23 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Technorati’s Dave Sifry summarizes the company’s latest data on recent growth in the blogospere. He also provides a link to a presentation he made at the recent Web 2.0 conference. Here are his bullet-point highlights:
Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 1:42 PM | Print | Comments (1)* As of October 2005, Technorati is now tracking 19.6 Million weblogs
* The total number of weblogs tracked continues to double about every 5 months
* The blogosphere is now over 30 times as big as it was 3 years ago, with no signs of letup in growth
* About 70,000 new weblogs are created every day
* About a new weblog is created each second
* 2% - 8% of new weblogs per day are fake or spam weblogs
* Between 700,000 and 1.3 Million posts are made each day
* About 33,000 posts are created per hour, or 9.2 posts per second
* An additional 5.8% of posts (or about 50,000 posts/day) seen each day are from spam or fake blogs, on average
As Cynthia notes, today’s New York Times features a bullish piece on the potential of broadband over powerline (BPL). But, as Om Malik points out, The Morning Call balances the NYT story with “a sobering report [that] PPL Corp of Allentown, considered one of the early leaders in the BPL space, is throwing in the towel and getting out of the BPL business.”
The Morning Call asks the question on a lot of our minds:
So which is it? Is broadband over power lines a failed experiment, or does the upstart technology present a real challenge to the two primary sources of residential high-speed Internet access — the cable modem and the digital subscriber line, DSL?
After citing former FCC chair Michael Powell’s statement that BPL is “within striking distance of becoming the third major broadband pipe into the home,” the Morning Call takes a stab at reconciling the disparate views of the technology’s potential.
PPL never said the broadband service didn’t work. The company came to the conclusion that it wasn’t profitable. It couldn’t charge a high enough price in the face of stiff competition from cable and telephone companies, and its pool of potential customers - 1.3 million Pennsylvania electricity customers - was too small. “The economies of scale wouldn’t work,” PPL spokesman Jim Santanasto said.The city of Manassas, which is working work COMTek, “represents a very different business model,” according to the Morning Call.
The city’s electric grid is, unlike PPL’s, publicly owned. COMTek, the city’s partner on the project, is a telecommunications company, not an electric utility. And, COMTek used one broadband-over-power lines technology while PPL relied heavily on another [the final connection to homes is over power lines in Manassas, while PPL is linking homes to power lines via wireless].
Manassas joined forces with COMTek—a Chantilly, Va., company whose formal name is Communications Technologies Inc.—in July of 2004. The city’s utility staff makes the necessary changes to the electric grid, such as installing couplers and repeaters, while COMTek maintains the servers that enable e-mail and Web hosting. COMTek also handles the marketing and customer service. The arrangement allows the city and the company to focus on their respective strengths…PPL, on the other hand, ventured into an entirely new business when it first offered its broadband service.The Morning call story cites a recent press release in which “Rick Nicholson, vice president of research for Energy Insights of Framingham, Mass., predicted that broadband over power lines growth would be limited by, among other factors, ‘a lack of utility expertise in running commercially successful consumer telecom businesses.’” In terms of the technology options, it cites a COMTek executive:
Walter Adams, vice president of new technology for COMTek, said the power outlet approach offers several advantages. First, it can be used in neighborhoods with below-ground utilities, whereas the wireless method relies on the availability of telephone poles. Second, it eliminates the problem of interference, since it does not require a line of sight between a telephone pole-mounted transmitter and the customer’s house. And lastly, it doesn’t require professional installation; all the customer needs is a modem, which can be delivered through the mail…”Utilities are risk averse. If it’s not a home-run, it’s not something they’re likely to stick with,” Adams said.Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 12:58 PM | Print | Comments (1)
This article in yesterday’s Washington Post will spark recognition among a lot of parents, who probably have wished their children’s video gaming time had been put to better use. Penned by Mike Musgrove, the piece describes how university researchers and international organizations are using video games to develop skills in solving some of the world’s most intractable problems…like war, hunger, genocide and ill-will toward the United States.
A team at Carnegie Mellon has developed a game that explores the mideast conflict — the winner negotiates peace between Israelis and Palestinians. The U.N. World Food Program has an online game to solve world hunger. USC is kicking off a gaming competition to promote good will toward the U.S.
Who knew? With all the railing against video games as mind-rotters and violence-instigators, it’s nice to see the gaming platform put to constructive purposes.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 12:34 PM | Print | Comments (0)The New York Times today has a valentine of sorts for the broadband-over-powerline industry. A piece penned by Ken Belson touches on the services offered by Current Communications and ComTek in Cincinnati and Manassa, VA, respectively, and notes that big investors, including Google and Goldman Sachs, have taken stakes in BPL companies.
The article doesn’t really get into some of the scaleability problems plaguing the BPL market, but it does note that ham radio operators, which carry a surprising amount of political power, have “besieged” BPL providers with interference complaints.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 12:08 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Web video publishing start-up Brightcove is gearing up for a November commercial preview of its new video publishing platform. (For more details, check out today’s IP Media Monitor.) The DIY system enables publishers to upload video, syndicate it and earn either ad revenues, or ultimately pay-per-view or some other form of direct compensation. Founded by Jeremy Allaire, Brightcove has been in tests with a range of video publishers for the past six months or so, a group of testers that ranges from small, independent publishers to major cable operators and networks.
One of Brightcove’s main goals is to leverage the Internet in opening up the distribution of video content, and is setting the prices of its service accordingly. “Brightcove’s console is a self-service environment for running Internet media systems,” Allaire says, noting that the costs of using the console are negligible, making the barriers to self-publishing very low. “Anyone can start operating with this with no upfront costs.”
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 11:29 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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