The Technoverse Blog

Until recently, when confronted with a very limited budget for a critical task that had to be completed yesterday, you had few options. You could face mutiny by squeezing more person-hours from your staff or else turn to budget-busting temp agencies.

I recently took on the job of analyzing some of FCC Chairman Genachowski’s public statements on broadband policy as recorded on YouTube. My goal was to gain more insight into the  policy course that’s been roughly charted in the National Broadband Plan. (Well, someone had to do this, it might as well be The Technoverse.)

We don’t have much staff, we have  limited $s. What to to?

I  wrote about CrowdlFlower, the crowdsourcing solution company. Why not put them to work for me? Read more …

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Ubiquitous high-speed mobile connectivity is spawning new industries and allowing existing industries to become more productive. These services and others yet to be developed will enable entrepreneurs, consumers, non-profit organizations, and government to interact and build better businesses and stronger communities. If deployed as planned, Harbinger’s integrated satellite/terrestrial 4G mobile wholesale broadband network will form another platform for innovation and growth of the U.S. economy.

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I’m been trying to keep up with multiple stories (Sprint-Clearwire “4G”,  Harbinger Capital’s nationwide LTE network , iPad) while running around tending other assignments.  No, I don’t have much of a smartphone,  more of a Bronze-age artifact that came with my Verizon plan.  So how do I monitor my RSS feeds  using my basic cell phone when I’m away from desk?

My only requirement was that I won’t compromise my core philosophy of  applying minimal programming effort to the task at hand. I’m thankful to be living in the right era to help me stay true to my beliefs: they’re so many great software components and productivity  tools available that it’s possible to glue together off-the-shelf parts to produce a useful digital time-saver with minimal perspiration.

As you know from a previous post, I’m excited about Twilio’s VoiceXML-lite hosting service. I will also reveal for the first time my love for a visual-oriented RSS mashup tool from Yahoo, called Pipes.

I just needed to glue a simple Pipes workflow to a little bit of PHP that calls Twilio’s SMS service and I’d have a poor man’s news notifier.  Read more …

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We’re going to roll out something that we think is appropriate not just for Twitter users but also for the ecosystem. When we develop this monetization platform , it’s not going  to just be for us, it will actually extend to  all of these apps that everyone is using.

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Image from Gizmodo

I am very  excited about the new Sprint 4G phone revealed at CTIA 2010: a mashup of Android OS-CDMA-WiFi-WiMAX and encased in an HTC Evo package (see  more sexy pictures here). It should be available this summer.

Why does the phone earn the 4G signifier? Not sure. This smartphone’s high-speed data bits pass through Clearwire-Sprint’s wireless data network (voice is still CDMA), which  is  based on more of a 3G standard, 802.16   or WiMAX. Read more …

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I spent part of a long rainy afternoon two weekends ago slaying a Giant with a small pebble. No, it wasn’t a new video game. The Giant is the large connected component that can crop up in random graphs. Random graphs, as you may recall, are used as a modeling tool to analyze networks—Facebook, Twitter, the Internet itself—and I wrote a post last month about one social scientist’s contrarian research in this area. In that post, there was a somewhat irregular and perplexing (for me, anyway) diagram that explains why, under certain circumstances, the “Tipping Point” concept championed by Malcolm Gladwell may not tell the whole story.

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UTOPIA is a good candidate to partner with Google in the new project and to bring the experiment to well-prepped ground. UTOPIA has successfully pursued models of deployment and found a sustainable and reliable model.

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In the National Broadband Plan, there is hardly any mention of a wholesale or “unbundled” model of fiber-to-the-home. That’s unfortunate. There are many examples of successful deployments of fiber in which the physical part is built by the public sector (or through public-private partnerships), with private providers stepping in to resell access for voice, video, and data at the retail level. For a nitty-gritty description of one European city’s experience laying fiber under cobblestones and into canals,  you can read about Amsterdam’s CityNet project, written by the company’s CEO.

The US does have many open access projects in which municipalities in underserved areas take the lead in financing fiber’s significant sunk costs.  There’s one deployment that stands out, linking together over 16 cities in Utah and serving about 40,000 households. It’s called the Utah Telecommunications Open Infrastructure Agency, which acronymized becomes UTOPIA. Read more …

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About two years ago while researching a blog post on crowdsourcing, I discovered Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service. As a  crowdsourced labor solution, the Turk completely turns around the relationship between computers and people.  Instead of asking silicon to perform complex pattern matching (finding words or concepts in text documents), speech recognition (transcription), or image processing (identifying road signs in photos), why not have software call out for help? That is, we the humans become non-software subroutines that tap into our unique biological processing engines especially suited for CPU-stumping tasks.

Other companies have followed suit delivering what are essentially systems to manage piece-meal work for conceptually intensive tasks.  CrowdFlower is one of them.  They’ve taken the “labor in the cloud” model one step further. Read more …

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At the Consumer Electronics Show in January, Freescale was showing off what its chips can do. Freescale’s 7″ tablet reference architecture was meant to inspire manufacturers. And to my eyes, I think they’ll generate lots of interest. Since CES, they’ve added Chromium and Android OS to the line-up— at CES, they had a Linux mock-up. The expected retail price for a  Freescale gadget is in the  $200 to $250 range. Check out the demo after the jump.

Updated 3/23/2010: Read James Surowiecki’s article on why low-end (FreeScale-based) and high-end tablets (iPad) will dominate the market.
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