Technology360

Ending spectrum scarcity

I had an interesting lunch recently with Michael Calabrese, who is a VP and director of the Wireless Future Program at the New America Foundation.  He has been a champion of the notion that much of the radio spectrum is unused and that building smarter receivers and transmitters can unlock enormous amounts of spectrum which are over-allocated due to the need to protect "dumb" receivers.  NAF advocates a commons approach to spectrum that might be freed up in this way; other organizations with the same technology approach take a spectrum-as-property approach.  Nevertheless, to us broadcasters who consume lots of spectrum and to those of us in public radio who have run out of spectrum for pubic service, efforts in this regard should be of strong interest.

It turned out that Michael's program within NAF had just released four papers on this subject.  I've now either read or scanned all four and suggest you checking them out at the links below.  These links go to executive summaries of each paper, with a pdf link provided at the end of each one.

Michael Calabrese, The End of Spectrum Scarcity.
Preston F. Marshall, A Potential Alliance for World-Wide Dynamic Spectrum Access.
Michael J. Marcus, New Approaches to Private Sector Sharing of Federal Government Spectrum.
Sascha Meinrath and Victor Pickard, Revitalizing the Public Airwaves.

The NAF at which these papers were released featured these individuals plus Kevin Werbach of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and Tom Stroup, CEO of Shared Spectrum Company.  You can listen to an audio recording of these event here.

Finally, Nate Anderson has an accessible article of this in Ars Technica, White spaces on steroids and free spectrum for everyone.

--Dennis

Internet to the dashboard

Broadcasting consultant Mark Ramsey comments on a report from Harve Alan that Volkswagen and Intel are partnering to bring internet services to the dashboard of the former's vehicles, saying:

The thing you need to understand about this (inevitable) technology is this: Anything that occupies space with a radio and consumes the same attention and time as a radio competes with a radio and substitutes for a radio.

Link:  hear2.o.  Amen.

Along these same lines, NPR's Mike Starling provided me with a link to Azentek's entry into this space.  Azentek describes itself as "an automotive OEM specializing in onboard computer technology tailored for safe use in your vehicle.  Link:  Azentek.

And Consumer Reports has a report on Blaupunkt's entry.  Link:  Consumer Reports.

Of course, if you have an iPhone, or one of Nokia's media-enabled phones, or any of dozens of others that support audio and IP access, you already have this in your car.  I've written in this space a number of times about my mobile IP listening.  With the iPhone and any of a number of radio apps available for it such as the Public Radio Tuner (later post), it couldn't be easier.

And I continued to be tantalized by the USB connector on my Jeep's nav/sound system.  There's no reason why we couldn't have one of those 3G wireless sticks with a hybrid HD Radio and IP radio tuner on board that would plug into the dashboard unit.  I'm tempted to say, if it can be done, it will be done.  But the CES and broadcasting industries need to think out of the box for that to happen.

--Dennis

How Radio Works

The Southgate Amateur Radio Club (London, England) has posted a wonderful 1937 movie explaining how radio works to YouTube.  The film was produced by the Jam Handy Organization, sponsored by Chevrolet and CBS, and runs just over six minutes.  Very entertaining.  Thanks to Kathy Dahmen and Kerry Swanson for the tip.  --Dennis

Device storage = irrelevant

I got the following post from my son Andrew (a designer in Providence, RI) on Twitter this morning:

ahaar Just got app for streaming music from home computer to iPhone. Device storage = irrelevant, future = now

That home computer, though, still needs space for music, photos and video.  I just bought an iMac yesterday, mostly for photo editing, and it has a half terabyte drive.  I see that the drive in the latest TiVo is a full TB.  In March 2006 I wrote here that the then 100-GB TiVo hard drive would be 1.6 TB in five ticks of Moore's Law (1 tick = 18 months).  Wrong -- it took only 32 months to get to 1 TB.  Big home storage seems to be a settled thing, but increasingly it looks to me like Andrew is right about the diminished need for mobile storage as long as 3G mobile networks are available.  --Dennis

Radio for the deaf and hard-of-hearing

On election night, National Public Radio Labs, Harris Corp., Towson University, WAMU and WGBH's Media Access Group are teaming up to simulcast captioned NPR coverage of that night's results to the deaf and hard-of-hearing.  The demo will take place in at NPR here in Washington (via WAMU's digital transmission) and at NPR member stations Colorado Public Radio (Denver), KJZZ (Phoenix), WGBH (Boston), and WTMD (Baltimore).  On election night, anyone can view the captioning at www.npr.org and www.harris.com.  Link:  NPR news release.  --Dennis

The remote control as platform

I've written here before about how, increasingly, remote controls need to be considered media platforms in their own right rather than mere appendages to other devices.  The wonderfully intuitive TiVo remote is one example and Nintendo's Wii remote is another (the Comcast DVR remote is IMHO a frustrating counter-example).

Pictured to the right is the Freespace™ from Hillcrest Labs.  The Washington Post Thursday carried a story about how Hillcrest had filed a complaint with the U.S. International Trade Commission and a suit against Nintendo in U.S. District Court for patent infringement.  The gadget blog, Gizmodo, had more details, and earlier had a very positive review about Hillcrest's loop-shaped remote control which characterized it as better than the Wii.

I don't know anything about the merits of this complaint, but think there's a bunch of room for innovation in this space.  Now, if they can just get Comcast to license them.  --Dennis

Nokia N810 WiMAX Edition

My favorite toy is Nokia's N810, a diminutive WiFi- and Bluetooth-enabled Linux-based touchscreen tablet computer.  It connects super-easily to hotspots, has a decent if unremarkable pair of speakers, and runs a wide variety of open source Maemo applications.

Of late, I've used it a few times with my Verizon EVDO USB card, a Cradlepoint Technology battery-operated wireless router, and my Jeep's sound system to create a mobile Internet radio (together, they're smaller than most portable radios).  I've driven from downtown Washington, DC to both Dulles and BWI airports listening to my former station in Washington State without a dropout.

Now I see that Nokia has introduced in the U.S. a WiMAX edition of the N810, and better yet it supports the 802.16e, the mobile flavor of WiMAX.  It's intended for use on Sprint's Xohm network (Washington, DC will be, or perhaps already is, a test market).  So since its range should be similar to EVDO when it's rolled out, one might be able to omit the mobile router.  According to the Xohm article in Wikipedia, the intent is to merge it with Clearwire.  I was a Clearwire customer back in the Northwest and loved it.  It uses an early flavor of WiMAX and I was able to get good WISP service five miles from the transmitter using only a small indoor antenna perched in a window.

Lastly, my Jeep's sound system already has a USB port on the front panel, and Cradlepoint's technology makes connecting 3G or 4G cards very easy, so adding EVDO or WiMAX capability to car radios is just a matter of software and should be a no-brainer.  I've written here previously that I think a great path to that is marrying it with HD Radios using SMIL and listeners can be their own programmers.  --Dennis

"Defeat Dementia" campaign

The tech community has a wonderfully constructive attitude about solving the world's problems in ways that apply its methods to things that might otherwise seem unorthodox.  One of my great professional privileges was meeting and working for two years on Open Media Network with Silicon Valley legend Mike Homer, who has been laid low for more than a year with a fast-moving dementia called Creutzfeldt-Jacob disease (CJD).  Mike's friends in the tech community raised $7 million for CJD research at the University of California San Francisco.  Now, the UCSF Memory and Aging Center has entered a partnership with YouTube kicking off UCSF's "Defeat Dementia" campaign, inspired by Mike's situation but encompassing several other dementias that devastate victims' lives and their families across the globe.

All Things Digital/BoomTown's Kara Swisher has a very nice column on this today and it has several links to information about this effort.  Please take the time to check it out.  Link:  BoomTown.  --Dennis

The Most Influential Media Writing of 2007

Blogger John Bracken, whose day job is at the MacArthur Foundation, sent me and a bunch of others a request to name the most influential media writing of 2007.  In spite of a reminder, I couldn't come up with anything on a par with Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks that I and many others nominated last year.  Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur was quite influential, largely as a provocation to the new media cognoscenti, and David Weinberger's Everything Is Miscellaneous has also been influential for more positive reasons.  Both are in my to-read stack, but I hadn't gotten to either of them so didn't feel comfortable nominating them.

Fortunately, others on John's list weren't as lacking in imagination as I and this year he's put together another great list.  I look forward to exploring the ones I've not yet read.  --Dennis

First Monday has moved

The excellent online peer-reviewed journal about the Internet, First Monday, has moved from www.firstmonday.org to Open Journal Systems at the University if Illinois at Chicago.  Its new (unmemorizable) URL is www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/ and it now requires a free registration.  Its archives have been moved here also.  In a big step forward, it now has RSS and Atom feeds, so I've subscribed in Bloglines and will be seeing new things as they're posted rather than every few months when I happen to remember I haven't visited the site in awhile. 

From the September 2007 number, check out Desperately seeking the consumer: Personalized search engines and the commercial exploitation of user data by Theo Röhle.  Here's the abstract:

With reference to surveillance studies theory, this paper critically assesses the role of personalized search engines as a mediator between advertisers and users. It first sketches the economic and technical background of online marketing and personalized searches. Then, it engages in an in–depth discussion of two examples of personalized search engines with regard to the data collection process used and the way in which this data is used for advertising purposes. The discussion shows that users’ information needs, as well as their personal data, are subject to a growing pressure in terms of commercial exploitation. Essentially, search engines now fulfill the task of translating information needs into consumption needs.

Link:  First Monday.  --Dennis