Month: September 2010

Archaic Telecom

Mapping Fun with FCC Data

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I wanted to get this post out before we close up shop for a small business-related trip. We’re taking off to study social networking issues in a beloved southern European country noted for its incredible contributions to art, culture,  food, and civilization as we know it. We’ll be back on October 10.

To the matter at hand … mapping FCC competitive data. I had been looking for a better way to show and share this regulatory agency’s “477” records on ISP competition. I then discovered the potent Google Maps Data APIs, which let you send and receive geo data as a feed. With access to the feed and using Google mapping software, data can be viewed, analyzed, and even updated by large distributed groups.  It’s really an amazing tool.

So with a little bit of effort I loaded competitive ISP data for suburban NJ into a shared Google Map. I’ve conveniently embedded it into this post.Continue reading

The Rack

Cruz Reader:Tablet Lite

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I was hoping to enter the Android-age this week courtesy of Velocity Micro’s $199 Cruz Reader. The Reader arrived yesterday on my porch sometime during a late afternoon editorial meeting. I excitedly opened up the UPS cardboard to be teased by the words “Unlimited Possibilities” printed on the Cruz’s product packaging.

I haven’t purchased that much gadgetry in recent years, but I do recall that my cell phone  came with a fairly thick operating manual. The Cruz Reader takes a more minimalist approach, providing you with a single-page folded booklet. I couldn’t find much more on-line, so I assumed this is a completely intuitive device that will guide my fingers in doing the work.

After booting up and then adjusting the touch calibration setting, I found that I couldn’t get the Cruz Reader to respond. I thought I had paper-weighted this thing. My fingers told me to reboot this mini-tablet by pressing the silvery on-off button on the side. I learned later that I was actually just putting it into a kind of sleep mode.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Avaya Flare: Can Android Enterprise Tablets Thrive?

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As expected,  Avaya announced yesterday that its “chameleon” video device is in fact … a tablet computer. And not surprisingly it runs  Android OS (2.1 for the record). It is larger than Cisco’s previously announced Cius (11.6″ versus 7″). Both share a 1.6 GHz Intel Atom processors. I can go on, but for a rundown of the specs, see Network World‘s nice comparison table.

The hardware and OS are just the stage and props for the real act: the “Flare Experience,” which is Avaya’s voice, video, and data collaboration extravaganza. And based on the slickly prepared video presentation I saw, it is a nicely designed app that makes unified communications—as it’s called in the enterprise world—a working reality. An “A” to Avaya on this effort.

I didn’t see a live demo of Flare in the hands of a reviewer, so it’s hard to know what this is really like. Keep in mind that Android’s Froyo (their latest release) is, in the words of Google’s director of mobile products Hugo Barra, “not optimized for tablet use.”

Another fact to consider: The Flare is priced— for now anyway—at somewhere between $1500 – $2000. Cisco’s Cius is pegged at around $1000.Continue reading

@NYC

Kodingen: Free, Easy Web Development Environment

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I missed this month’s New York Tech Meetup due to a previous engagement that was scheduled over 5000 years ago. By the way, Matt Merriam has a nice summary of September’s NYTM demos. One of the startups, Kodingen, caught my attention. It is a free web development environment that encourages a community to provide support and cheering. I filed this away.

I was intrigued by the recent release of the FCC’s open APIs for accessing competitive ISP data. I had already hacked out—I am not a developer by any means— tools for graphically displaying the FCC’s “477” data on Google Maps (see references below). Could I somehow combine this all into a single project and perhaps use the amazing Google Maps Data infrastructure for sharing my results?

A tall order.  That’s when I brought Kodingen back to the head of my to-do list, and so I registered on the site to see what I’d be up against.  In fact, this is a delightfully simple open-source environment to work in.

Nothing against my current hosting service, Bluehost, but I was able to start working almost immediately in Kodingen without any of the usual obstacles and annoyances.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

1 Gbps in Chattanooga

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I practically did a spit take while drinking my coffee this morning and reading The New York Times story about a municipal broadband project in Tennessee.  I learned that  Chattanooga’s  community owned power provider, EPB, has plans to offer up to 1 Gigabit per second  to its fiber-to-the-home subscribers by the end of the year. True, that can cost you almost $350 per year (lower if you bundle in voice and video).

I checked some of the pricing of their various service bundles—a classic triple-play of voice, video, and data—on the EPB website, and the packages are quite competitive: 30 Mbps data, enhanced video, and voice for $111.

This is a big win for non-profit fiber projects nationwide. And possibly a leading candidate for winning Google’s Fiber for Communities contest to build and test an  ultra-high speed network.

By the way, it appears that Comcast was at one point the sole  broadband and cable video provider for Chattanooga.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Say It Ain’t So Joe Nocera

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The New York Times’ indispensable business reporter, Joe Nocera, slipped in a story about net neutrality just before the long holiday weekend.  The normally dependable Nocera—he’s been completely vigilant in his reporting on the financial crisis—really lost his way in his “Struggle For What We Already Have.”

Maybe his Labor Day celebration started a little earlier or our unusually cool late summer weather in the NYC-metro area put him into a more generous state of mind.  For whatever reason, his reading of Google’s recent net neutrality proposal as completely benign is not worthy of his reporting.

He got a few things really wrong. One, there was no mention of Google-Verizon’s Advanced Services— the private Internet. Two, the language for non-discrimination in the Voozle contrivance was intentionally weakly worded, and this was not, as he implied, an issue only for the idealistically pure. Three, cable television is not really the model for the Internet, and, um, there actually is non-discrimination language in the relevant Title VI statutes, forced on the cable providers by angry consumers and content providers.

I guess Nocera got me a little upset.  Continue reading

The Rack

Samsung Tab: Good Reviews (with disclosures)

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While you were asleep this morning, Samsung officially launched Tab, its 7″ Android 2.2 tablet at the IFA show in Berlin.  There’s lots of coverage from the likes of Endgadget, PC World, TechCrunch, Huffington Post, etc.  Some are calling it a larger version of the Samsung Galaxy S, which to my mind is a compliment.

Last month, Dr. Smartphone and I went to Samsung’s retail store in New York City to visit with the Galaxy smartphone.  We both came away feeling this was the device to give Apple’s iPhone a smartphone inferiority complex. We were completely blown to pieces by its fluid video playback of Avatar.  It also seems to me that the Tab will  be breathing down iPad’s virtual neck over the next few years—1024×600, 1GHz Cortex A8,  HD replay, and many of the same Hub apps as the Galaxy.  Supporting both  2.5G GSM and 3G HSPA, Tab will be released in Europe first, and then ultimately the United States.

The reviews were very positive, and I think the excitement is entirely warranted.  What struck me was that many of  the reviews disclosed the writer’s travel expenses had been paid for by the show’s organizers or Samsung themselves. This is clearly a consequence of the  FTC’s new guidelines on “material connections.”Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

NSF Funds a NeuroPhone

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Here I’ve been getting excited about  new user interface niceties such as voice rec in Windows Phone 7 and Android, while completely missing the bigger picture. The National Science Foundation has announced it will be funding a NeuroPhone, “the first Brain-Mobile Interface (BMI).”   This “high risk, exploratory research,” to be conducted at Dartmouth College, involves developing a consumer-level wireless EEG (electroencephalography) headset to interface with a mobile device.  From what I can decipher from the proposal abstract, they will study ways to digitize and interpret brain wave activity.

Does this mean in the future I’ll be able to directly think my emails, SMS, and tweets to a super smart phone?  (Hat tip to Nick Carr.)Continue reading