Universities are growing rapidly and per-student budgets are falling. Arizona State University is using Gmail and other Google services to cope with this dilemma. In doing so, they hope to exploit Google's accelerating IT technology improvement trajectory and the increasing efficiency of the Internet as an application platform.
For more on the Arizona State project see:
We talk about the increasing viability of applications that are hosted on the Internet as connectivity spreads and improves. The Picnik photo editor provides a good example. Once loaded, it is a fast photo editor with a very simple user interface. It cannot do everything a high-end editor like Photoshop can do, but it can do most of what an amateur photographer wants. Your photos are online and sharable, and they can easily be imported from other online photo-sharing sites. The basic program is free, and there will be a subscription-based professional version.
What are some of the key features of Photoshop or your favorite desktop editing program that are missing from Picnik? Yahoo allows Picnik users to import photos from their online photo service Flickr. If you were a Yahoo executive, would you allow users to export their photos?
A recent Information Week article criticizes the US cell phone industry for disabling phone features, restricting phones to one network, restricting Internet access, using incompatible communication technologies, and poor quality of service and coverage. For example, the article says that "by some estimates, nine out of ten cell phones in the US are sold by carriers, nearly reverse the ratio in other countries." Compared to the cell companies, wired Internet service providers are good guys and network neutrality advocates.
That is all bad news, but the article maintains that since mobile access is becoming very important in business, the cell companies might be pressured into reform. Consumers take whatever the operators offer, but business will not.
We spoke of this topic in an earlier post on Tim Wu and efforts to obtain wireless net neutrality.
In some nations, cell phones and cell service must be sold separately -- can you find which ones?
Rising gasoline prices have led to reduced driving in the US, and may also lead to increased telecommuting.
We have looked at the case of an hypothetical teleworker. Would you like to telecommute? What are some of the pros and cons from the standpoint of the society, the organization and the worker?
Our class notes cover progress in electronic, storage and communication technology. Russell Kay has written a short introduction to an emerging technology, phase change random access memory (PRAM). PRAM records ones and zeros by changing the electrical resistance of a microscopic spot. High resistance = 0, low resistance = 1. Intel expects to ship product in 2008, and PRAM may one day replace flash storage and RAM memory.
As networking technology improves, the alternative of using a software service improves relative to the alternative of running software in house. Still, there are pros and cons for both alternatives, some of which are covered in our class note on software as a service. Network World asked the question "is on-demand CRM better than an on-premises solution?" and published a short debate. You can read the Yes and No arguments online.
Consultant Mike Moran tells how search works in this four minute audio clip. He describes both organic search, based on page content and link frequency, and paid advertising search. This is an excerpt from a longer interview on his "how to" book on search engine marketing.
Dell solicits product requests from customers on their Ideastorm site. That is fairly common, but they have added a voting mechanism. If a user likes a posted suggestion, he or she can endorse it with a single click. Dell decsion makers (and customers) can query the site to see which requests are most popular and take appropriate action.
37 Signals also makes excellent use of Web forums for customer feedback using threaded discussion forums. Here is the forum for their Basecamp project management service. They accept and discuss feature requests, tips and tricks, how-to questions, bug reports, and examples of Basecamp use along with making announcements.
One measure of a nation's home connectivity is the rate of household broadband connections. A recent survey showed that 89% of South Korean homes have broadband connections while the United States has fallen to 25th in the world with 50% penetration. The situation is even worse than these statistics indicate, since US broadband speeds are lower than most nations and costs are higher.
With increasing demand for video content, homes, organizations and other fixed locations will eventually have fiber connections -- our DSL and cable modem connections will one day seem as slow as dial-up connections do today. South-east Asia, led by densely populated nations like China, Japan and South Korea, is deploying fiber faster than the rest of the world. As we see, 47 percent of the broadband connections use fiber:
Why is the US falling behind the rest of the world? What are the implications for a nation of falling behind on connectivity? Are there any advantages?
We all use the Internet from our desktops, but few of us access the Net when we are on the move. Many people expect mobile access to boom. Cellular phone, search, and hardware companies are all developing mobile access products.
Search firms Yahoo, Google and Microsoft have focused on the cell phone. You can try their efforts at http://m.yahoo.com/, google.com/m, and Windows live search.
Text entry is difficult on a cell phone keyboard, so Google and Microsoft are working with voice-based search. You can try them at 800-GOOG411 and 800-555-TELL.
Microsoft, Intel, Apple, phone manufacturers and others are also experimenting with larger form factors than the cell phone. A good example is Intel's Mobile Internet Device. Its features include a four or six inch touch-screen display, stripped-down version of Linux, fast restart from suspended mode, retractable keyboard, GPS radio, and a camera.
The world's largest model train store, Allied Model Trains, has been sold and is downsizing because they cannot compete with low-overhead Internet discounters. Consumers are getting better prices, but many of the highly specialized, knowledgeable store staff will be laid off.
Some of these workers may be able to earn income offering advice and information on-line, for example from advertising or subscription-supported blogs, but they will be in competition with on-line hobbyist communities. In general, amateur train enthusiasts will replace the professionals.
Allied owner Allen Drucker discusses the effect of the Internet on his business in this excerpt (1 min 40 sec) from a recent interview. (The entire interview is here).
This is reminiscent of the time supermarkets replaced small grocery stores or a Walmart store coming to a town. Can you think of other on-line markets where specialized jobs are being lost? What is lost and what is gained when specialized retailers are driven out of business by Internet-based alternatives?
Several governments have recently tried to tighten control over the Internet:
Nearly every government makes some attempt to control the Internet -- to preserve culture as well as political power. What are some other examples of government control over Internet content? Does the US government control Internet content?
We cover the affect of copyright, which is used to protect music, video and other Internet data. Apple's Steve Jobs has called for dropping copy protection on music, stating that 97% of the songs on a typical iPod music player are already in the open mp3 and AAC formats. The EMI record label has agreed to let Apple sell songs in Apple's AAC format. Microsoft may soon have a similar agreement with EMI.
Presumably Microsoft will distribute the music in the .mp3 format, which, unlike AAC, works with any music player or program. Is this the beginning of the end for copy protection on music? What is the outlook for video?
Skype recently petitioned the FCC to open access to cellular networks in the United States. That petition was based on a study by Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia University. Our class notes cover the Carterfone case which opened the wired telephone network, making the end-to-end Internet possible. Wu feels that a neutral-access cellular network would enable Internet-like innovation and competition on wireless networks.
You can read Wu's paper and see the Skype petition at the New America Foundation. Wu was also interviewed on wireless network neutrality by National Public Radio's On The Media. You can hear the interview (with a rebuttal by an industry representative) or read a transcript at the On The Media Website.
In our coverage of voice over IP (VOIP), we saw that VOIP sales passed traditional business PBX sales in 2003. VOIP is making inroads into the home. A recent Instat report states that as of the fourth quarter 2006, more than 10.6 million US households (9%) have at least one active VoIP user. That is up from approximately 9 million households at the end of the third quarter. It seems inevitable that eventually, person-to-person voice will be just another Internet service. Do you use VOIP? If so, do you also have a traditional land-line or cellular phone?
MIT Press has released a free-download version of their book Perspectives on Free and Open Source Software. This is an excellent collection of articles by well known authors. All of them are not open source "cheerleaders." For example, one chapter examines an important Linux module, and is highly critical of the code quality.
With this book, MIT Press has followed the open publishing format of the University of Michigan Digital Culture imprint. Let's hope it works well and more publishers do the same.
In a recent post, we noted that Apple had succeeded in negotiating some control over application and hardware design from Cingular wireless. Now Skype has petitioned the FCC to open cellular networks. If they prevail, we could see a wireless end-to-end network, with Internet like innovation. Wouldn't that be cool?
My guess is that the cellular companies will fight this vigorously, but that might be short sighted. If they provided competitively priced Internet access, they would take the wind out of the municipal network and hotspot movements. More important, an open wireless network would be an important piece of infrastructure, providing a much needed boost to the US economy and our sagging Internet.
There will be powerful companies on both sides of this important issue -- make your voice heard by signing an FCC petition.
The Skype petition is not yet posted on the FCC Web site, but we will update this post with a link when it is.
What happens if you are not sure who owns the copyright to something you want to use?
Lawrence Lessig, Stanford law professor and the inventor of Creative Commons licensing, discusses this "orphan" problem in the following presentations:
Lawrence Lessig, Stanford law professor and the inventor of Creative Commons licensing, gives his views on spectrum deregulation in this presentation.
The Global text project hopes to create a free library of 1,000 electronic textbooks for students in the developing world. One text, which is under construction, will introduce information systems.
I have just drafted a chapter that surveys quite a bit of the material we cover in this course. I'd appreciate feedback -- it is a first draft.
Our notes emphasize the fact that the Internet is an end-to-end network with application development, funding, hardware, and content being supplied by users, not carriers. Telephone, cable and cell phone companies would rather sell specific services which they provide, charge for and control.
Cellular companies have kept tighter control than telephone and cable companies, but this Wall Street Journal article says Apple's Steve Jobs played hardball in negotiating control over application and hardware design with Cingular in return for being the exclusive carrier for iPhone calls.
This means Apple can innovate. For example, iPhone users will be able to display a list of phone messages and listen to them out of order rather than consuming call minutes while a synthesized voice says "you have ten new messages ..." then listening to them one at a time. Try that with your current cell phone.
Podcasting pioneer Doug Kaye, Amazon's Jeff Barr and others discuss a complex application Kaye built using Amazon Web Services. Kaye describes both the system architecture (loosely coupled services buffered by queues) and the business reasons (zero startup cost and seamless scalability) for using Amazon's virtual servers and storage rather than his own. He also expresses concern about the lack of a service-level agreement and dependence upon Amazon. Barr talks about Amazon's plans and the important role of the developer community. The show notes contain other links for those interested in more detail and other applications Amazon-based applications.
Larry Lessig, inventor of Creative Commons licensing, gave a talk on "The Withering of the Net" at the Center for American Progress in Washington June 2006. Lessig mentions many things we cover -- the breakup of AT&T, telecommunication regulation, the end-to-end principle, license-free spectrum, copyright, net neutrality, etc. He fears Congress will let powerful network and media companies stifle innovation and participation. Favoring the "read-only" network at the expense of "read-write" network will harm our culture and economy.
Download the talk or the transcript.
If you find it interesting, you will also like Lessig's presentation on US copyright law.
We talk about composite applications or mashups in class. This blog serves as an example.
There is a link at the bottom of each post that reads listen to this article, and, in the right-hand column, there is a link reading Audio RSS Feed.
If you follow the first link, you will hear a slightly stilted sounding woman reading the text of the article. The program that does this text to speech conversion is quite complex and requires a fast computer, but that complexity is hidden. A server at Talkr.com does the conversion and the link to that service required adding only one line of HTML code to the blog template.
Adding the RSS feed converts the blog to a podcast. A user who subscribes to the RSS feed will automatically receive spoken recordings of articles when they are posted. Again, this complex feature was added with a single line of HTML code in the blog template.
Adding these audio features brought the blog into compliance with university regulations on accessibility by blind people. Doing so took only a few minutes because of the simple API exposing the service at Talkr.com.
Michael Geoghegan, co-founder & CEO of Gigavox Media, gives practical advice in this informative presentation on corporate podcasting. He focuses on podcasts for corporate customers, as opposed to dissemination of internal information.
Geoghegan covers both internally produced podcasts and sponsorship of podcasts produced by others. This 19 minute excerpt focuses on internally produced podcasts using examples from three case studies. (The entire presentation is over an hour long).
