Mark Cuban Warns of Sharply Higher Broadband Access Fees

Count Mark Cuban as among those who expects broadband access fees to grow significantly as video streaming becomes a mainstream business model and experience.

Ironically, those fee increases will occur as operators have to provision lots more bandwidth and as users begin to cut back on legacy distribution such as cable TV, satellite TV or telco TV subscriptions.

"Expect your Internet bills to go way way up as ISPs make it clear that all this video over the internet is going to require billions in upgrades," says Cuban. "The irony is that while you may not like paying for cable channels you don’t watch, you will end up paying for cable channels on the Internet that you don’t watch as well."

"In this case you will be paying via higher net bills for the extra bandwidth required to stream cable channels that your neighbors like to watch," Cuban argues.

One might argue that is a good thing for service providers, as it will allow them to raise rates in a business where rates generally have dropped. It arguably will help access providers rebuild their business models from services based on voice or multichannel video entertainment.

The issue is that consumers likely will stubbornly resist such rate increases, especially if they keep shifting expenditure into wireless services. Not to mention a bigger version of a broadband problem ISPs have faced for some time.

Many ISPs have found that profit margins on broadband services do not scale in a linear way: prices per Mbps of service produce slimmer profit as the amount of bandwidth provisioned increases.

Also, the incremental revenue from investing in lots more access bandwidth is likely to be slim to non-existent. Cable operators will have to boost capacity to provide broadband-based video, even as they lose revenue from legacy video services.

Telcos faced a variant of this problem when they upgraded to broadband, and found that entertainment video was the only big "new" service they could offer, as the older copper network worked fine, or well enough, for voice and broadband access.

blog maverick

Ray Ozzie on Cloud Computing's Implications

"Whether in the realm of communications, productivity, entertainment or business, tomorrow’s experiences and solutions are likely to differ significantly even from today’s most successful apps," says Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie.

"Tomorrow’s experiences will be inherently trans-media and trans-device," he says. "They’ll be centered on your own social and organizational networks."

"For both individuals and businesses, new consumption and interaction models will change the game," Ozzie says. "It’s inevitable."

To deliver what is required, specifically new levels of coherence across apps, services and devices, lots of innovation will happen to occur in the user experience, the interaction model, authentication model, user data and privacy model, policy and management model, programming and application model.

If you wonder why tier-one service providers think cloud computing is important, all this is why.

Dawn of a New Day Ray Ozzie:

Endpoint evolution in the enterprise

Dave Michels illustrates enterprise endpoint evolution.
http://www.nojitter.com/article/227900662

Phones: How good an endpoint?

Not so good, says Dave Michels.
http://www.nojitter.com/feature/227900658

Think Seriously About a Post-PC World, Ray Ozzie Says

"It’s important that all of us do precisely what our competitors and customers will ultimately do: close our eyes and form a realistic picture of what a post-PC world might actually look like, if it were to ever truly occur," says Microsoft Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie, who has just announced his resignation.

"How would customers accomplish the kinds of things they do today? In what ways would it be better? In what ways would it be worse, or just different?," Ozzie says everyone must ask.

Whatever happens, the future is likely to include approaches that attack the complexity that now characterizes the PC-based computing model.

And make no mistake, Ozzi believes "we’re moving toward a world of cloud-based continuous services and appliance-like connected devices."

Continuous services are websites and cloud-based agents that are constantly assimilating and analyzing data from both a user's real and online worlds.

Tomorrow’s devices will be relatively simple and fundamentally appliance-like by design. They will be instantly usable, interchangeable, and trivially replaceable without loss. A world of content – both personal and published – is streamed, cached or synchronized with a world of cloud-based continuous services.

"Many years ago when the PC first emerged as an alternative to the mini and mainframe, the key facets of simplicity and broad approachability were key to its amazing success," Ozzie says. "If there’s to be a next wave of industry reconfiguration – toward a world of internet-connected continuous services and appliance-like connected devices – it would likely arise again from those very same facets."

Dawn of a New Day Ray Ozzie:

Windows Phone 7 Review: "Enticing," "Unfinished"

While it is superficially an enticing interface, whose appearance certainly distinguishes it from every other platform out there, the key problem with Windows Mobile 7 is the lack of information density, Charles Arthur, Guardian technology editor, says.

No matter what the screen size, you don't get many tweets, or emails, or just words on there, he says.

At first it's relaxing, he says, but over time, the lack of information density will make scrolling through long lists of apps tedious, and reading chunked information (such as Facebook and Twitter) exhausting.

Those issues can't be sorted without an overhaul of the interface, he says. If you want a lengthy review of Windows Mobile 7, with lots of comments from readers, this is worth reading.

Windows Phone 7 review: HTC HD7 on O2: did Microsoft write this? | Technology | guardian.co.uk

Thanks To Social Networks, Americans Feel More Connected to People

We can debate the issue of whether people are spending less time "face to face," and what that might mean. It is harder to argue about the subjectively perceived value. People do think they are more connected.

http://www.harrisinteractive.com/NewsRoom/HarrisPolls/tabid/447/ctl/ReadCustom%20Default/mid/1508/ArticleId/590/Default.aspx

A business built around online copy and paste

I think there's something to this. You might argue that people already use related sharing, rating or comment apps. But this approach potentially creates lots more analytical value, essentially surfacing content communities and making them more visible.

It's sort of a content version of "people who bought this also bought" or "people who liked this might also like" but bridging both consumer and producer parts of a content community.
http://m.zdnet.com/blog/foremski/tynt-a-business-built-around-online-copy-and-paste/1555

A Whole New Way of Looking at Augmented Reality

A humorous look at augmented reality, using subtraction rather than addition, which is the normal way we think about augmented reality application.

Starbucks Wi-Fi Usage Shows Dramatic Increase in Mobile Usage

Starbucks CIO Stephen Gillett says laptop usage in the company's stores is flat, or even slightly declining, and that mobile usage is on fire and growing a great percentage every month.

Gillett also said that iDevices from Apple are used more in its stores than any others. How important is that? Well, Gillett wanted to use Flash on the social network, but there wasn’t any way he could because of Apple's  refusal to support Flash. So Starbucks built its system using HTML 5.

In other words, the new Starbucks Digital Network is going to be optimized for mobile devices rather than PCs, and for HTML5-authored content.

Starbucks CIO shows why next version of Windows is “risky business” for Microsoft — Scobleizer

Netflix testing $7.99 and $8.99 streaming-only plans

Netflix now is offering streaming-only plans in the U.S. market, for prices that seem to range from $7.99 to $8.99, or $9.99 if users want physical disc access as well.

Netflix testing $7.99 and $8.99 streaming-only plans in US right now, one is not a discount (update) -- Engadget

Google plays cross platform in competition with Apple

http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/23/in-the-fight-against-apples-iads-google-plays-the-cross-platform-card/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Techcrunch+%28TechCrunch%29

Sprint to Create Own Mobile App Store

Sprint is going to create its own mobile app store, working with Openwave to develop applications running on devices using the Sprint network. The apps will be operating system agnostic, meaning apps at one store will run on the various operating systems Sprint supports, including Blackberry, Windows Mobile and Android, for example.

Sprint Says They Will Give App World “a Run for Their Money” | BlackBerry Cool:

What's "King" These Days?

People always can reasons to debate whether "content," "distribution" or "context" is king. Perhaps nobody yet is seriously arguing that "location" or "presence" or "social connections" or "mobility" is king, but one can predict that somebody will make those arguments.

One of the debates which slowly is growing, though, is over "openness" and "curated" approaches to end user experience. It would be too easy to say Apple is the foremost proponent of curation ("closed") while Android, Chrome and Firefox are examples of openness.

It might be more accurate to say the trend to curation is growing, across all platforms. You might think of curation as a culling, optimizing or editing process, where apps and software are optimized and filtered. Apple always has done this to optimize end user experience. But app stores, both mobile and soon Web app stores, also are curated environments, to a greater or lesser extent.

In Mozilla's view, for example, the open Web is the way to create rich applications, while Apple takes the opposite approach. In Apple's case, the company plans to create a new Mac Apps Store containing software expressly optimized for Apple devices and the Mac OS X operating system.

Apple plans to curate significantly, rejecting buggy apps, betas, apps built with Java, apps with Easter eggs, apps that aggregate content, apps that duplicate Apple's own apps, apps that contain pornography, violence, promote drinking and drugs, for example.

Mozilla Foundation is taking an entirely different approach for its new "OPen Web Apps" store. Designed around a "use any browser" approach, the idea is create a store that allows creation of Web apps that work in any modern desktop or mobile browser (Firefox 3.6 and later, Firefox for mobile, Internet Explorer 8, Chrome 6, Safari 5, Opera 10 and WebKit mobile).

Consider the Mozilla initiative an example of the "write once, run many" approach to software. In Mozilla's vision, apps are designed to run independently of operating system or hardware. See http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2010/10/19/prototype-of-an-open-web-app-ecosystem/ for more detail.

Open Web Apps will use HTML, CSS and JavaScript and will supoprt installation to a mobile or desktop Web browser, or to a native OS desktop or mobile home screen.

Open Web Apps will use existing identity systems like OpenID and support portable purchases, meaning that an app purchased for one browser works in other browsers, and across multiple desktop and mobile platforms without repurchase. Think iTunes and you have an example of the difference between the Mozilla and Apple approaches.

Open Web Apps will support access to one or more advanced or privacy-sensitive capabilities such as geolocation on a user opt-in basis.

In Mozilla's view, apps must be distributed by developers directly to users without any gatekeeper, and available through multiple stores, allowing stores to compete on customer service, price, policies, app discoverability, ratings, reviews and other attributes.

Open Web Apps will be able to receive notifications from the cloud, and support deep search across apps. In other words, apps can implement an interface that enables the app container (generally the Web browser) to provide the user with a cross-app search experience that links deeply into any app that can satisfy the search.

In essence, the debate over curated and open approaches is a preference for, or against, gatekeepers. But the emergence of new app stores, already announced by Google, Apple and Mozilla, should change the software development business in some key ways. Web apps should grow in popularity, and make more rapid development of lower-cost apps and lower-volume apps available in substantial quantity, as app store publishing will cost a lot less than traditional shrink-wrapped apps store in physical and online retail stores. See http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/10/web-app-stores-how-they-compar.php for more detail.

About the only safe statement is that all the traditional arguments about openness and curated approaches, including the issue of gatekeepers, are going to heat up again as the web app store trend gets established.

Watch a Mozilla video about the new Web Apps Store here: http://videos-cdn.mozilla.net/labs/openwebapps/openwebapps.webm

A Look at Google TV

A look at Google TV. using the Logitech set-top.