Personal Navigation: Quiet but a Big Deal

Garmin and TomTom will both ship over 10 million personal navigation devices this year, recent forecasts suggest. Total production in 2007 for just those two manufacturers is something on the order of 22 million units.

To put that in perspective, that's about half of the 55 million iPod music players Apple probably will sell in calendar 2007.

Location-based services seem to catching on very rapidly in the consumer space, after a long gestation in the commercial markets. Is it any wonder Google is so hot on location-based services, or the advertising and marketing opportunities that seem destined to come along with location awareness?

iRobot Cleans Up

This item just for fun, as my daughter worked on the company initial public offering. iRobot, which sells the Roomba vaccuum cleaner robots, got a five-year, $286 million contract from the U.S. Army for up to 3,000 military robots, spare parts, training and repair services.

Up to this point robots have used sparingly and mostly to deal with explosive devices. Apparently there are other things they can do. Aside from cleaning floors and sneaking up on dangerous explosives, that is.

FCC Relaxes Cross Ownership Rules

By a vote of three to two, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission has approved a plan to relax media cross-ownership rules. The rule change, which comes amid opposition from some politicians, allows companies to own both newspapers and broadcast stations within a top-20 market. The rules originally were put into place to safeguard the "diversity of voices" within media markets.

Of course, the context was different then. There were three national networks and maybe one or two major newspapers in a market, with a fragmented radio audience. Since then, cable programming has exploded, with three 24-hour-a-day news channels and two 24-hour-a-day business national news channels available in most markets, and multiple local news channels in many major metro markets as well.

The daily newspaper business, meanwhile, has continued its inexorable, decades-long decline. Indeed, one can argue reasonably that the daily metro newspaper might not exist in the future, at all.

And on top of that we have the rise of blogs, Web news portals, podcasts, Webcasts and other media and news outlets.

Though there was not unanimity on the issue, one can argue that local media markets bear little resemblance to markets of the past, and are in transition to an even-more-different structure in the future.

The last time I looked, the major broadcast networks had become "entertainment focused" in the extreme. I can't even tell you how the "voice" of any of the five local national broadcast networks differs from any of the others. To the extent that the concern about "voices" explicitly is about "political" voices, there seems even less justification than there used to be for cross-ownership restrictions.

National broadcast TV networks don't seem to have any substantial differences of voice. Newspapers are on the way to extinction. Radio is highly fragmented. And then there are the cable news outlets, national and local, plus Web-based news and opinion portals and blogs too numerous to count.

As elsewhere, legacy rules are straining to keep pace with rapid changes in media, communications and information infrastructure.

Wireless Spending Now Equals Wireline

U.S. consumer household spending on wireless now equals spending on wired voice services, the Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Expenditure Survey shows. Homes with multiple teenagers and two working parents probably will argue that wireless spending now vastly outpaces wireline, as landlines are phones connecting "places," while mobile connect people. There being more "people" than "places" in such a household, it is easy to see that wireless is the dominant spending category.

Cellular phone expenditures increased rapidly from 2001 through 2006. Coupled with a decrease in spending on residential landline phone services (residential phone services) over the same period, spending on the two types of services were practically equal in 2006.

Expenditures for cellular phone services per consumer unit rose from $210 in 2001 to $524 in 2006, an increase of 149 percent. Expenditures for residential phone services per consumer unit fell from $686 in 2001 to $542 in 2006, a decline of 21 percent.

In 2001, the ratio of spending on residential phone services to spending on cellular phone services was greater than 3 to 1. In 2006, the shares of these two components were almost equal, with residential phone expenditures accounting for 49.9 percent of total telephone expenditures and cellular phone expenditures constituting 48.2 percent.

Are Users Dumber, Or Software Too Complex?

Tech Support: "What does the screen say now?"
User: "It says, 'Hit ENTER when ready'."
Tech Support: "Well?" Person: "How do I know when it's ready?"

Make no mistake: our civilization runs on software. So be exceedingly glad when developers hide complexity so well something seems intuitive and natural.

Useful Condescending Phrases

This is just humor: don't do this at work! And don't get me wrong: I love cats. It's just that they once were worshipped as gods, and they haven't forgotten....

1. Thank you. We're all refreshed and challenged by your unique point of view.
2. The fact that no one understands you doesn't mean you're an artist.
3. I don't know what your problem is, but I'll bet it's hard to pronounce.
4. Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental.
5. I have plenty of talent and vision. I just don't care.
6. I like you. You remind me of when I was young and stupid.
7. What am I? Flypaper for freaks!?
8. I'm not being rude. You're just insignificant.
9. I'm already visualizing the duct tape over your mouth.
10. I will always cherish the initial misconceptions I had about you.
11. It's a thankless job, but I've got a lot of Karma to burn off.
12. Yes, I am an agent of Satan, but my duties are largely ceremonial.
13. No, my powers can only be used for good.
14. How about never? Is never good for you?
15. I'm really easy to get along with once you people learn to worship me.
16. You sound reasonable...Time to up my medication.
17. I'll try being nicer if you'll try being smarter.
18. I'm out of my mind, but feel free to leave a message...
19. I don't work here. I'm a consultant.
20. Who me? I just wander from room to room.
21. My toys! My toys! I can't do this job without my toys!
22. It might look like I'm doing nothing, but at the cellular level I'm really quite busy.
23. At least I have a positive attitude about my destructive habits.
24. You are validating my inherent mistrust of strangers.
25. I see you've set aside this special time to humiliate yourself in public.
26. Someday, we'll look back on this, laugh nervously and change the subject.

Traffic Shaping, Not Blocking

Users of RCN broadband access services are complaining about blocking of BitTorrent connections. That seems unlikely, though traffic shaping seems certain. RCN has in the past noted that more than 90 percent of upstream traffic was composed of P2P streams. And since upstream bandwidth is the key resource constraint, RCN traffic shaping was not unexpected. When users are sharing a scarce resource, some "rationing" is simply fairness.