Over at Silicon Alley Insider, Gregory Galant has a wonderful post about “18 Awesome Tech Things We Didn’t Have 10 Years Ago.” It serves as another great example of the amazing technological progress we have witnessed over the past decade. He’s asking people for suggestions for what else should be on the list, so head over there and let him know. Seems like wi-fi technologies should be on there somehow. FiOS deserves a shout-out, too. And where’s Firefox & Chrome? Also, I’ll put in a special word for some amazing new home theater technologies: high-def flat-screens and projectors; media servers & Windows Media Center; BluRay; and 3 incredible gaming / media consoles (Wii, PS3, & XBox). Anyway, here’s Galant’s list:
Wikipedia
Gmail
Facebook
YouTube
Twitter
AdWords
Amazon AWS
RSS (started in ‘99 but didn’t catch on till the ’00s)
Meetup
iPod
Google Maps
Podcasts
Mint
Skype/VOIP
iPhone
Google Docs
Creative Commons
Flickr
My friend Larry Magid, a technology columnist for CBS News.com and others, has a wonderful new column out about “The Decade in Technology.” You have to read it to appreciate just how far we have come in such a short time. Larry notes:
[T]he past 10 years were a momentous period for technology. Not only was there no iPhone a decade ago, there was hardly anything that could be considered a smartphone. The BlackBerry was introduced in 1999, when the well-heeled techno-savvy were carrying around flip phones. That year, 1999, was the height of the dot-com boom. But when you look back at it, the online world was nothing like it is today. There was no Facebook (founded in 2004) or Twitter (2007). Even MySpace wasn’t founded until 2003. The term Web 2.0 hadn’t been coined and most people who were online used the Web mostly to consume information. Those with the skills and resources to post to the Web were called “Webmasters.” Today, everyone with a Facebook account is a master of his or her own Web.
Larry also notes that giants came and went as technology continued to evolve in unexpected ways:
Ten years ago AOL was the most popular Internet service provider and was so successful that it was able to purchase media giant Time Warner in January 2000 for $182 billion in stock. But the marriage didn’t make it through the decade. The two companies formally split up this month, with AOL, once again, being traded on the New York Stock Exchange as a separate company. AOL thrived in the ’90s because people were using the service to go online via phone. Today most American homes have broadband.
That’s something I wrote about at length in my recent paper on “A Brief History of Media Merger Hysteria.” Anyway, read Larry’s entire piece. It really drives home how lucky we are to be living in the midst of such at technological renaissance and information cornucopia.
With weather-related travel trauma so prominent on my Twitterscope, and with news that the federal government is banning flight delays, I stopped short when I read this techology pitch:
One of the biggest hassles of travel has to be keeping track of those pesky hotel key cards and then trying to remember which way to fit the darned things in the wide variety of door locks. But that may soon change.
New technology’s been introduced and will soon be test marketed in Las Vegas hotels that allows guests to use their cell phones — any cell phone model at all — to unlock their hotel room door.
I’m not persuaded at all. The difficulty of managing hotel keys doesn’t even rate on my list of travel hassles.
The solution offered up is:
a simple system in which a computer generates a unique series of tones (that sounds kind of like those digitized cell phone ringtones used early this decade) that is then sent to the mobile device. When the tone is played outside the designated guestroom, a microphone incorporated in the locking system IDs the tone and unlocks the door.
Ohhhhh-kay.
There might be value to this technology or (more probably) others like it. Getting secure credentials onto people’s phones has a lot of promise.
But this iteration? Should it survive testing, and the easily imaginable failure modes and attacks on it, it might provide a scintilla of convenience in hotels.
Three months ago, when the DC Circuit struck down the FCC’s “Cable Cap”—which prevented any one cable company from serving more than 30% of US households out of fear that he larger cable companies would use their “gatekeeper” power to restrict programming—the New York Times bemoaned the decision:
The problem with the cap is not that it is too onerous, but that it is not demanding enough.
Even with the cap — and satellite television — there is a disturbing lack of price competition. The cable companies have resisted letting customers choose, a la carte, the channels they actually watch….
[The FCC] needs to ensure that customers have an array of choices among cable providers, and that there is real competition on price and program offerings.
Perhaps the Times‘ editors should have consulted with the Lead Technology Writer of their excellent BITS blog. Nick Bilton might have told him the truth: “Cable Freedom Is a Click Away.” That’s the title of his excellent survey of devices and services (Hulu, Boxee, iTunes, Joost, YouTube, etc.) that allow users to get cable television programming without a cable subscription.
Nick explains that consumers can “cut the video cord” and still find much, if not all, their favorite cable programming—as well as the vast offerings of online video—without a hefty monthly subscription. (Adam recently described how Clicker.com is essentially TV guide for the increasing cornucopia of Internet video.) This makes the 1992 Cable Act’s requirement that the FCC impose a cable cap nothing more than the vestige of a bygone era of platform scarcity, predating not just the Internet, but also competing subscription services offered by satellite and telcos over fiber. That’s precisely what we argued in PFF’s amicus brief to the DC Circuit a year ago, and largely why the court ultimately struck down the cap.
Bilton notes that “this isn’t as easy as just plugging a computer into a monitor, sitting back and watching a movie. There’s definitely a slight learning curve.” But, as he describes, cutting the cord isn’t rocket science. If getting used to using a wireless mouse is the thing that most keeps consumers “enslaved” to the cable “gatekeepers” the FCC frets so much about, what’s the big deal? Does government really need to set aside the property and free speech rights of cable operators to run their own networks just because some people may not be as quick to dump cable as Bilton? Is the lag time between early adopters and mainstream really such a problem that we would risk maintaining outdated systems of architectural censorship (Chris Yoo’s brilliant term) that give government control over speech in countless subtle and indirect ways? Continue reading →
ACT represents the interests of software companies, but today we’ve released a new paper trumpeting the virtues of hardware.
We highlight how software developers and computer chip makers increasingly depend on one another for better products. This symbiotic hardware/software relationship is crucial for the sort of exponential innovation we’ve grown accustomed to in the IT industry. And it is something ACT recently highlighted in a letter to the FTC signed by 37 software developers.
The old days of understanding computer processors and its effect on software was easy. Chips increased in clock speed (first in MHz, then in GHz) and this made software run faster. This worked well for years, but then it became apparent that high clock speed processors often ran idle because other system components couldn’t keep up. These processors also ran very hot, consuming lots of power and creating heat problems.
Today’s chips take a different approach. Chips now have processors with multiple cores (or CPUs) to separately but simultaneously handle independent tasks. In a survey of ACT members that we conducted for the paper, 58% of the respondents identified multicore technology as the processor advancement that has most improved their software products. One member said “multicore makes programming harder, but when my apps leverage it, they can do more.”
But how do programmers know what to do so they can better leverage processor designs such as multicore? Every major chip manufacturer worth a grain of sand has established support programs and created tools for the developer community. Sun has its Sun Developer Network, Intel has a Software Partner Program (and just announced a new software development kit (SDK) for its mobile Atom processor), and AMD has the CodeAnalyst Performance Analyzer to analyze software performance and help developers optimize applications.
In some ways it seems like chip manufacturers are sucking up to software developers. Continue reading →
The disabled have much to give thanks for this year—but contrary to common assumptions, it’s not for paternalistic government accessibility mandates, regulations or subsidies (see, for example, the FCC’s November 6 Broadband Accessibility workshop), but for the good ol’ fashioned private sector ingenuity that has made America great. Five broad categories of examples suggest how constantly-improving computing power and innovation can make life easier for many, if not all, disabled users—and how market forces empower the disabled along with everyone else.
Video transcription. Last week, Google announced “the preliminary roll-out of automatic captioning in YouTube, an innovation that takes advantage of our speech recognition technology to turn the spoken word into text captions.” Google uses the same speech recognition technology it refined with its free Goog-411 and Google Voice services to automatically transcribe video dialog (which can also be automatically translated using Google’s translation engine). Why? Not because of any government mandate, but because of some combination of three factors: (i) it’s an easy way for Google to invest in its “reputational capital,” (ii) the underlying technologies of transcribing videos make videos easier to use for all users, not just the hearing-impaired, and (iii) those technologies also make it possible to contextually target advertising to the verbal content of videos.
It’s worth noting that Hulu currently offers closed captioning for some of its television programming but notes that “closed-captioning data that’s used for broadcast TV isn’t easily translated for online use.” The online television clearinghouse promises to offer more closed-captioning soon. Perhaps they ought to license Google’s algorithmic transcription?
Voice recognition for direct consumer use—most notably, Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10, the latest version of the leading voice recognition software, which was released in summer 2008 but only recently seems to have really hit critical mass. Continue reading →
My colleague (and boss) Adam Thierer had a great post last week about how “fart apps” are a great example of the generative nature of the mobile phone application marketplace. But Fart apps are just one type of “soundboard” application. A typical soundboard app has a bunch of buttons, and each time you press a button a sound is played. Most soundboards play catchphrases from popular movies and TV shows. According to AndroidZoom.com, there are 319 applications in the Android Market with “soundboard” in the title or description. Most (280) of them are free.
Almost all the free soundboards I tried include advertising from Google. The three main developers of soundboard apps for Android are Androidz , aspidoff, and Raz Corp. Androidz has ads from DoubleClick and aspidoff and Raz Corp (who’s apps seem exactly the same) both have ads from AdMob (which Google recently acquired). I’m all in favor of ad-supported content, but I suspect that the sound clips used in these soundboards are not licensed. Continue reading →
I’m VERY impressed with my Droid, particularly its browser capabilities. I can even run the backend of WordPress inside the browser (“Look, Ma, no app!”) to blog! (The WPtoGo app helps, as there are a few things that don’t work quite perfectly inside the browser.)
My Droid is a pretty darn good substitute for a desktop PC. In fact, since my desktop’s motherboard died the other day, the Droid is all I have at home right now–and it satisfies most of my computing needs, at least for home use. So… that means every wireless carrier with a strong android/iphone-class device is a substitute, meaningfully, but of course not perfectly, for traditional ISP options like DSL, cable, fiber, etc. So why don’t 3G networks get counted at all when assessing whether broadband markets are so uncompetitive that only net neutrality regulations can save us from corporate abuse?
Oh, and did I mention that, if my thumbs get tired, I will soon be able to tether my Droid to bring Verizon’s data network to my PC?
Adam Thierer and I will be participating in two separate panels at the FTC’s December 7 “Exploring Privacy” workshop discussing, respectively, surveys & expectations and online behavioral advertising. Below is the cover letter I filed as part of my comments (PDF & Scribd), along with four past PFF publications and a working paper on the benefits of online advertising.
Privacy Trade-Offs: How Further Regulation Could Diminish Consumer Choice, Raise Prices, Quash Digital Innovation & Curtail Free Speech
In general, we at PFF have argued that any discussion about regulating the collection, sharing, and use of consumer information online must begin by recognizing the following:
Privacy is “the subjective condition that people experience when they have power to control information about themselves and when they exercise that power consistent with their interests and values.”[1]
As such, privacy is not a monolith but varies from user to user, from application to application and situation to situation.
There is no free lunch: We cannot escape the trade-off between locking down information and the many benefits for consumers of the free flow of information.
In particular, tailored advertising offers significant benefits to users, including potentially enormous increases in funding for the publishers of ad-supported content and services, improved information about products in general, and lower prices and increased innovation throughout the economy.
Tailored advertising increases the effectiveness of speech of all kinds, whether the advertiser is “selling” products, services, ideas, political candidates or communities.
With these considerations in mind, policymakers must ask four critical questions:
What exactly is the “harm” or market failure that requires government intervention?
Are there “less restrictive” alternatives to regulation?
Will regulation’s costs outweigh its supposed benefits?
What is the appropriate legal standard for deciding whether further government intervention is required? Continue reading →
Remember, remember the Fifth of November,
The Gunpowder Treason and Plot Privacy Dashboard, so hot,
I know of no reason
Why the Gunpowder Treason Privacy Dashboard
Should ever be forgot.
Sorry, I couldn’t resist, this being Guy Fawkes day (a major traditional holiday for Britons and, more recently, geeky American libertarians such as myself, who dress up as V for Vendetta for Halloween). Google’s announcement of its Privacy Dashboard (TechCrunch) is a major step forward in both informing users about what data Google has tied to their account in each of Google’s many products and in empowering users to easily manage their privacy settings for each product. If users decide they’d rather “take their ball and go home,” they can do that, too, by simply deleting their data.
Users can access the dashboard at www.google.com/dashboard (duh). Or, from the Google homepage, you just have to:
Click on Settings at the top right > Google Account Settings
See what data is associated with your account in 23 of Google’s products (Google notes that it will incorporate its 18 other products in the near future).
Directly access the privacy management settings for that account.
Access more information—”Links to relevant help articles and information pages.”
Some critics have complained in the past that it’s too hard to find privacy settings links on Google and other sites. Indeed, Google could have made it easier—and now they have! Google has taken another major step forward in user education and empowerment—just as it pioneered transparency into its interest-based advertising product with the Ad Preference Manager launched in March (which I applauded here). (The Dashboard is only for data tied to a user’s Google account, while the APM is tied only to a cookie on the user’s computer.)
The Dashboard really couldn’t be much easier to use—yet we can be sure it won’t be good enough for some privacy zealots who arrogantly presume that their fellow homo sapiens are basically vegetables with hair—unable to use any tool online, no matter how simple, and barely able to tie their own shoelaces without government reminding them how. The principled alternative is to “Trust People & Empower Them.” Because privacy is so profoundly subjective and because there is an inherent trade-off between clamping down on data and the many benefits enjoyed by Internet users from sharing their data, Adam Thierer and I have argued for that “household standards” set by individuals should trump “community standards” imposed on everyone from above: Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology. Learn more about TLF →
ACT represents the interests of software companies, but today we’ve released a 
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.