Southwest Virginia Blogs

Arguably, there are way too many college football bowl games. If you just don't have time to watch them all over the next three or four days, don't worry. You can watch them via the Internet. All of the bowl games are going to be available on the iTunes Store and other online media stores within 24 hours of each game's finish. It is one more sign that cable and satellite TV as we know it are nearly dead. It also indicates that we are going to need a whole lot more bandwidth than we have right now.

As I visit communities around the country and work with local economic developers and elected officials, I find great skepticism focused on my insistence that we need minimum acceptable bandwidth of 100 megabits per second to every home and business. These officials often scoff at the notion that their citizens will ever need that kind of bandwidth, and the example they often cite is elderly people in their community, who "will never need that kind of bandwidth."

Uh huh. Accenture is busy designing a new home to home video system that allows family members in different locations to enjoy meals together. The three essential ingredients are High Definition cameras, HD flat panel monitors, and a high performance broadband connection between the two locations. A single channel of high quality HD video requires 18 to 20 megabits per second each way, for a total of about 40 megabits per second.

This kind of system is well beyond the capacity of DSL and cable modem systems, can't run at all on WiFi, and would overwhelm the Passive Optical Networks (PONs) being rolled out by the phone companies.

Once in production, these systems are expected to sell for $500 to $1000, and have great promise in telehealth for the elderly. Regular contact with distant family members and with health care professionals promises to delay moving some older people into assisted living facilities or nursing homes for months or years, making the systems a real bargain--the typical monthly cost for assisted living or a nursing home is upwards of $3000 per month.

Is your community attracting retired people because of the good quality of life? These folks are prime candidates for this kind of system in a few years, and high capacity, affordable broadband is needed. High performance broadband is going to change our lives in many small and large ways, and communities need to invest in the right kinds of open service provider networks to ensure that their citizens and businesses have the right kind of broadband.

Economic development bonus: There will be lots of business opportunities for local entrepreneurs to install and maintain these new kinds of systems--if the community has the right infrastructure in place to support them.

As I visit communities around the country and work with local economic developers and elected officials, I find great skepticism focused on my insistence that we need minimum acceptable bandwidth of 100 megabits per second to every home and business. These officials often scoff at the notion that their citizens will ever need that kind of bandwidth, and the example they often cite is elderly people in their community, who "will never need that kind of bandwidth."

Uh huh. Accenture is busy designing a new home to home video system that allows family members in different locations to enjoy meals together. The three essential ingredients are High Definition cameras, HD flat panel monitors, and a high performance broadband connection between the two locations. A single channel of high quality HD video requires 18 to 20 megabits per second each way, for a total of about 40 megabits per second.

This kind of system is well beyond the capacity of DSL and cable modem systems, can't run at all on WiFi, and would overwhelm the Passive Optical Networks (PONs) being rolled out by the phone companies.

Once in production, these systems are expected to sell for $500 to $1000, and have great promise in telehealth for the elderly. Regular contact with distant family members and with health care professionals promises to delay moving some older people into assisted living facilities or nursing homes for months or years, making the systems a real bargain--the typical monthly cost for assisted living or a nursing home is upwards of $3000 per month.

Is your community attracting retired people because of the good quality of life? These folks are prime candidates for this kind of system in a few years, and high capacity, affordable broadband is needed. High performance broadband is going to change our lives in many small and large ways, and communities need to invest in the right kinds of open service provider networks to ensure that their citizens and businesses have the right kind of broadband.

Economic development bonus: There will be lots of business opportunities for local entrepreneurs to install and maintain these new kinds of systems--if the community has the right infrastructure in place to support them.

As I visit communities around the country and work with local economic developers and elected officials, I find great skepticism focused on my insistence that we need minimum acceptable bandwidth of 100 megabits per second to every home and business. These officials often scoff at the notion that their citizens will ever need that kind of bandwidth, and the example they often cite is elderly people in their community, who "will never need that kind of bandwidth."

Uh huh. Accenture is busy designing a new home to home video system that allows family members in different locations to enjoy meals together. The three essential ingredients are High Definition cameras, HD flat panel monitors, and a high performance broadband connection between the two locations. A single channel of high quality HD video requires 18 to 20 megabits per second each way, for a total of about 40 megabits per second.

This kind of system is well beyond the capacity of DSL and cable modem systems, can't run at all on WiFi, and would overwhelm the Passive Optical Networks (PONs) being rolled out by the phone companies.

Once in production, these systems are expected to sell for $500 to $1000, and have great promise in telehealth for the elderly. Regular contact with distant family members and with health care professionals promises to delay moving some older people into assisted living facilities or nursing homes for months or years, making the systems a real bargain--the typical monthly cost for assisted living or a nursing home is upwards of $3000 per month.

Is your community attracting retired people because of the good quality of life? These folks are prime candidates for this kind of system in a few years, and high capacity, affordable broadband is needed. High performance broadband is going to change our lives in many small and large ways, and communities need to invest in the right kinds of open service provider networks to ensure that their citizens and businesses have the right kind of broadband.

Economic development bonus: There will be lots of business opportunities for local entrepreneurs to install and maintain these new kinds of systems--if the community has the right infrastructure in place to support them.

As I visit communities around the country and work with local economic developers and elected officials, I find great skepticism focused on my insistence that we need minimum acceptable bandwidth of 100 megabits per second to every home and business. These officials often scoff at the notion that their citizens will ever need that kind of bandwidth, and the example they often cite is elderly people in their community, who "will never need that kind of bandwidth."

Uh huh. Accenture is busy designing a new home to home video system that allows family members in different locations to enjoy meals together. The three essential ingredients are High Definition cameras, HD flat panel monitors, and a high performance broadband connection between the two locations. A single channel of high quality HD video requires 18 to 20 megabits per second each way, for a total of about 40 megabits per second.

This kind of system is well beyond the capacity of DSL and cable modem systems, can't run at all on WiFi, and would overwhelm the Passive Optical Networks (PONs) being rolled out by the phone companies.

Once in production, these systems are expected to sell for $500 to $1000, and have great promise in telehealth for the elderly. Regular contact with distant family members and with health care professionals promises to delay moving some older people into assisted living facilities or nursing homes for months or years, making the systems a real bargain--the typical monthly cost for assisted living or a nursing home is upwards of $3000 per month.

Is your community attracting retired people because of the good quality of life? These folks are prime candidates for this kind of system in a few years, and high capacity, affordable broadband is needed. High performance broadband is going to change our lives in many small and large ways, and communities need to invest in the right kinds of open service provider networks to ensure that their citizens and businesses have the right kind of broadband.

Economic development bonus: There will be lots of business opportunities for local entrepreneurs to install and maintain these new kinds of systems--if the community has the right infrastructure in place to support them.

MySpace is the latest battleground for Universal, one of the world's biggest music publishers. The company is upset that MySpace users can post copies of music videos on their MySpace pages. Universal wants a piece of the action. The firm has already arm-twisted YouTube into sharing ad revenue because of grainy music videos posted on the popular video site.

The content publishers have some grounds for trying to control distribution, but the music and entertainment industry has been so obstinately one-sided and spiteful in their approach (suing grandmothers without computers and young children, among other examples) that it is hard to take them seriously. The companies are now on a war footing to force equipment manufacturers to not only pay them for every digital recording device, but the firms also want draconian content controls on the machines that essentially take ownership away from the users of the music or the video.

There is a middle ground here, but the music industry and Federal lawmakers, who seem to care more about campaign contributions from the music industry than good and fair laws, are making things much worse. In the end, only the industry, with its attitude that all customers are crooks, will lose. We can get our content from other sources, and in fact, we already are.

MySpace is the latest battleground for Universal, one of the world's biggest music publishers. The company is upset that MySpace users can post copies of music videos on their MySpace pages. Universal wants a piece of the action. The firm has already arm-twisted YouTube into sharing ad revenue because of grainy music videos posted on the popular video site.

The content publishers have some grounds for trying to control distribution, but the music and entertainment industry has been so obstinately one-sided and spiteful in their approach (suing grandmothers without computers and young children, among other examples) that it is hard to take them seriously. The companies are now on a war footing to force equipment manufacturers to not only pay them for every digital recording device, but the firms also want draconian content controls on the machines that essentially take ownership away from the users of the music or the video.

There is a middle ground here, but the music industry and Federal lawmakers, who seem to care more about campaign contributions from the music industry than good and fair laws, are making things much worse. In the end, only the industry, with its attitude that all customers are crooks, will lose. We can get our content from other sources, and in fact, we already are.

Would you pay $15 a month to be able to watch cheesy YouTube videos on your cellphone? Verizon is betting that you will. The company has licensed the rights to a selection of YouTube videos that Verizon subscribers will be able to download and watch on their cellphone. This represents, perhaps, the 457th attempt by a cellular company to get people to pay for content no one cares much about. ESPN recently gave up trying to get people to watch sports on cellphones, after burning through a few hundred million of someone's money.

YouTube is not exactly "must see" TV. It is generally the kind of fluff you might pull up at ten PM after you realize there is nothing on the old-fashioned television. You watch a couple of YouTube clips and go to bed. YouTube is popular, in part, because it is free. Making it cost money will be interesting because we will be able to establish its real value, and Verizon shareholders will get to foot the bill for this market research.

The flaw in all these fairly silly cellphone content ventures is the wrongheaded assumption that there is an unlimited supply of subscribers willing to pay for unnecessary stuff on top of their basic cellphone bill. At the core, it is a supply and demand issue. There may be an unlimited supply of content these days, but demand is not as elastic. Watch this venture quietly fold in about a year.

Would you pay $15 a month to be able to watch cheesy YouTube videos on your cellphone? Verizon is betting that you will. The company has licensed the rights to a selection of YouTube videos that Verizon subscribers will be able to download and watch on their cellphone. This represents, perhaps, the 457th attempt by a cellular company to get people to pay for content no one cares much about. ESPN recently gave up trying to get people to watch sports on cellphones, after burning through a few hundred million of someone's money.

YouTube is not exactly "must see" TV. It is generally the kind of fluff you might pull up at ten PM after you realize there is nothing on the old-fashioned television. You watch a couple of YouTube clips and go to bed. YouTube is popular, in part, because it is free. Making it cost money will be interesting because we will be able to establish its real value, and Verizon shareholders will get to foot the bill for this market research.

The flaw in all these fairly silly cellphone content ventures is the wrongheaded assumption that there is an unlimited supply of subscribers willing to pay for unnecessary stuff on top of their basic cellphone bill. At the core, it is a supply and demand issue. There may be an unlimited supply of content these days, but demand is not as elastic. Watch this venture quietly fold in about a year.

Would you pay $15 a month to be able to watch cheesy YouTube videos on your cellphone? Verizon is betting that you will. The company has licensed the rights to a selection of YouTube videos that Verizon subscribers will be able to download and watch on their cellphone. This represents, perhaps, the 457th attempt by a cellular company to get people to pay for content no one cares much about. ESPN recently gave up trying to get people to watch sports on cellphones, after burning through a few hundred million of someone's money.

YouTube is not exactly "must see" TV. It is generally the kind of fluff you might pull up at ten PM after you realize there is nothing on the old-fashioned television. You watch a couple of YouTube clips and go to bed. YouTube is popular, in part, because it is free. Making it cost money will be interesting because we will be able to establish its real value, and Verizon shareholders will get to foot the bill for this market research.

The flaw in all these fairly silly cellphone content ventures is the wrongheaded assumption that there is an unlimited supply of subscribers willing to pay for unnecessary stuff on top of their basic cellphone bill. At the core, it is a supply and demand issue. There may be an unlimited supply of content these days, but demand is not as elastic. Watch this venture quietly fold in about a year.

Would you pay $15 a month to be able to watch cheesy YouTube videos on your cellphone? Verizon is betting that you will. The company has licensed the rights to a selection of YouTube videos that Verizon subscribers will be able to download and watch on their cellphone. This represents, perhaps, the 457th attempt by a cellular company to get people to pay for content no one cares much about. ESPN recently gave up trying to get people to watch sports on cellphones, after burning through a few hundred million of someone's money.

YouTube is not exactly "must see" TV. It is generally the kind of fluff you might pull up at ten PM after you realize there is nothing on the old-fashioned television. You watch a couple of YouTube clips and go to bed. YouTube is popular, in part, because it is free. Making it cost money will be interesting because we will be able to establish its real value, and Verizon shareholders will get to foot the bill for this market research.

The flaw in all these fairly silly cellphone content ventures is the wrongheaded assumption that there is an unlimited supply of subscribers willing to pay for unnecessary stuff on top of their basic cellphone bill. At the core, it is a supply and demand issue. There may be an unlimited supply of content these days, but demand is not as elastic. Watch this venture quietly fold in about a year.

Microsoft's new search engine, called Live Search, looks pretty good at first glance. It looks almost exactly like Google, which is probably a wise strategy. Many of the other search engines have interfaces that are quite different, and probably put some people off with all the options and choices. I tried a few test queries and compared them to what I get on Google, and Live Search appears to do a very good job of cutting down on non-relevant results. It also seems to do a good job at finding the most likely "best fit" items, which are usually what you want to see on the first page. Finally, the system also seems to be making an strong effort to index blogs; I found several items in search results that pointed to blogs that I had not seen on other search engines.

And of course, it has ads that also look just like Google's. If any company has a chance of unseating Google as the king of search, it is Microsoft, and it looks like they learned some lessons from their earlier attempts at search.

Microsoft's new search engine, called Live Search, looks pretty good at first glance. It looks almost exactly like Google, which is probably a wise strategy. Many of the other search engines have interfaces that are quite different, and probably put some people off with all the options and choices. I tried a few test queries and compared them to what I get on Google, and Live Search appears to do a very good job of cutting down on non-relevant results. It also seems to do a good job at finding the most likely "best fit" items, which are usually what you want to see on the first page. Finally, the system also seems to be making an strong effort to index blogs; I found several items in search results that pointed to blogs that I had not seen on other search engines.

And of course, it has ads that also look just like Google's. If any company has a chance of unseating Google as the king of search, it is Microsoft, and it looks like they learned some lessons from their earlier attempts at search.

Microsoft's new search engine, called Live Search, looks pretty good at first glance. It looks almost exactly like Google, which is probably a wise strategy. Many of the other search engines have interfaces that are quite different, and probably put some people off with all the options and choices. I tried a few test queries and compared them to what I get on Google, and Live Search appears to do a very good job of cutting down on non-relevant results. It also seems to do a good job at finding the most likely "best fit" items, which are usually what you want to see on the first page. Finally, the system also seems to be making an strong effort to index blogs; I found several items in search results that pointed to blogs that I had not seen on other search engines.

And of course, it has ads that also look just like Google's. If any company has a chance of unseating Google as the king of search, it is Microsoft, and it looks like they learned some lessons from their earlier attempts at search.

Microsoft's MSN search and news site is trying to avoid Google's fate in Belgium, where a court told the search company to stop filching newspaper articles from the Web sites owned by the newspapers. Google would show the first few paragraphs of an article, and then provide a link to the rest of the article, claiming fair use. But of course, there were ads on the Google page and so Google was benefiting from someone else's copyrighted content. The Belgian courts told the company to cut it out. So Microsoft, which apparently does the same thing, is negotiating with the newspapers over the issue. The obvious solution is to share ad revenue with the papers. Less money for the search sites, but then, they would be doing things fairly and legally, which should not be difficult concepts.

Microsoft's MSN search and news site is trying to avoid Google's fate in Belgium, where a court told the search company to stop filching newspaper articles from the Web sites owned by the newspapers. Google would show the first few paragraphs of an article, and then provide a link to the rest of the article, claiming fair use. But of course, there were ads on the Google page and so Google was benefiting from someone else's copyrighted content. The Belgian courts told the company to cut it out. So Microsoft, which apparently does the same thing, is negotiating with the newspapers over the issue. The obvious solution is to share ad revenue with the papers. Less money for the search sites, but then, they would be doing things fairly and legally, which should not be difficult concepts.

Microsoft's MSN search and news site is trying to avoid Google's fate in Belgium, where a court told the search company to stop filching newspaper articles from the Web sites owned by the newspapers. Google would show the first few paragraphs of an article, and then provide a link to the rest of the article, claiming fair use. But of course, there were ads on the Google page and so Google was benefiting from someone else's copyrighted content. The Belgian courts told the company to cut it out. So Microsoft, which apparently does the same thing, is negotiating with the newspapers over the issue. The obvious solution is to share ad revenue with the papers. Less money for the search sites, but then, they would be doing things fairly and legally, which should not be difficult concepts.

After days of rumors, Google has confirmed that it has paid $1.6 billion for YouTube, a tiny video startup that has never made a cent and that has only 67 employees. What is Google buying? In a word, eyeballs. Google's own video venture has been a huge flop, so the company had just two choices: abandon the lucrative advertising potential of free video, or buy the market, which is basically YouTube.

In just a couple of years, YouTube has become a cultural phenomenon and a political force, along with being a huge time waster and a terrible drag on office productivity. Instead of standing around the water cooler talking about what was on TV last night, office workers talk about what is on YouTube, then go right back to their cubicles and watch instead of working, and driving up the company's cost of bandwidth at the same time.

Google is looking more and more like Microsoft. Like Microsoft, they were not the first with a product (Apple introduced windows to computers before MS), but like Microsoft, they were able to capture a big chunk of the market through good marketing. Windows has consistently lagged behind competitors in terms of quality and features, just as Google's search is also long in the tooth. And like Microsoft, the company has had more hits than misses; Google's social software has flopped along with it's video. So the company now has to buy innovation from others. That has rarely worked well for Microsoft, which has lost billions in acquisitions of brilliant software that then quickly disappeared.

YouTube is not likely to disappear, but the transition to becoming part of the Google empire will open up opportunities for video competitors to gain marketshare. And in the search market, competitors are becoming more aggressive; last night, I saw a very hard-hitting Ask.com ad on TV. Google could fall even more quickly than it has risen, as ad dollars can be redirected with a few mouse clicks.

After days of rumors, Google has confirmed that it has paid $1.6 billion for YouTube, a tiny video startup that has never made a cent and that has only 67 employees. What is Google buying? In a word, eyeballs. Google's own video venture has been a huge flop, so the company had just two choices: abandon the lucrative advertising potential of free video, or buy the market, which is basically YouTube.

In just a couple of years, YouTube has become a cultural phenomenon and a political force, along with being a huge time waster and a terrible drag on office productivity. Instead of standing around the water cooler talking about what was on TV last night, office workers talk about what is on YouTube, then go right back to their cubicles and watch instead of working, and driving up the company's cost of bandwidth at the same time.

Google is looking more and more like Microsoft. Like Microsoft, they were not the first with a product (Apple introduced windows to computers before MS), but like Microsoft, they were able to capture a big chunk of the market through good marketing. Windows has consistently lagged behind competitors in terms of quality and features, just as Google's search is also long in the tooth. And like Microsoft, the company has had more hits than misses; Google's social software has flopped along with it's video. So the company now has to buy innovation from others. That has rarely worked well for Microsoft, which has lost billions in acquisitions of brilliant software that then quickly disappeared.

YouTube is not likely to disappear, but the transition to becoming part of the Google empire will open up opportunities for video competitors to gain marketshare. And in the search market, competitors are becoming more aggressive; last night, I saw a very hard-hitting Ask.com ad on TV. Google could fall even more quickly than it has risen, as ad dollars can be redirected with a few mouse clicks.

After days of rumors, Google has confirmed that it has paid $1.6 billion for YouTube, a tiny video startup that has never made a cent and that has only 67 employees. What is Google buying? In a word, eyeballs. Google's own video venture has been a huge flop, so the company had just two choices: abandon the lucrative advertising potential of free video, or buy the market, which is basically YouTube.

In just a couple of years, YouTube has become a cultural phenomenon and a political force, along with being a huge time waster and a terrible drag on office productivity. Instead of standing around the water cooler talking about what was on TV last night, office workers talk about what is on YouTube, then go right back to their cubicles and watch instead of working, and driving up the company's cost of bandwidth at the same time.

Google is looking more and more like Microsoft. Like Microsoft, they were not the first with a product (Apple introduced windows to computers before MS), but like Microsoft, they were able to capture a big chunk of the market through good marketing. Windows has consistently lagged behind competitors in terms of quality and features, just as Google's search is also long in the tooth. And like Microsoft, the company has had more hits than misses; Google's social software has flopped along with it's video. So the company now has to buy innovation from others. That has rarely worked well for Microsoft, which has lost billions in acquisitions of brilliant software that then quickly disappeared.

YouTube is not likely to disappear, but the transition to becoming part of the Google empire will open up opportunities for video competitors to gain marketshare. And in the search market, competitors are becoming more aggressive; last night, I saw a very hard-hitting Ask.com ad on TV. Google could fall even more quickly than it has risen, as ad dollars can be redirected with a few mouse clicks.