Yes Dear Reader a little TCO analysis can save you money. We have been saying for years that the shell game of free phone, payback is a b!@#$ thru the contract is a bear. It also hurts your wallet. –

He’s considering buying a data-only plan from T-Mobile and relying primarily on SkypeOut purchases, with a backup of free Gizmo5 calls through Google Voice, although new Gizmo5 sign-ups are currently suspended. That means little to no mobile calling (unless you used the free Guava app). Then again, Ben sees some significant savings by the end of what would be a two-year contract, and considers himself a “near-total” dependent on Google services. Could you imagine making the data-only jump?

Just go over to the lifehacker article and see for yourself. Keep in mind that the author is considering only going with a data only plan, 2yr contact. There are other considerations one can also employ. For instance, does your spouse have a phone with a carrier who does a Friend and Family deal? Why not punch the Google voice into the loop? Then the calls to her are free. And if perchance one has a small VoIP server then a VoIP app on the Nexus might avoid all the Gizmodo fiddling as well.

While we are on the subject. The Nexus Launch. A captured live blog feed is here with pics. Initial take — very iPhonish. But that seems to be where the jive is at the moment. The wise move being made? You can buy the phone separate and go with any vendor you wish. That’s a damn smart move, especially for the consumer.

I just hope the carriers are prepared for the bandwidth assault. This phone screams — Songbird App. But your data store staying on the home server and streamed to the Nexus as an audio terminal. Oh and anybody out there developing a multiparty audio remix app for the Nexus. It would sell.

We have projected for 2 years that it was time for unbundling the phone. We would have expected it to happen before the smartphones took hold. But I guess it takes the extra functionality of the smartphone to force the issue on the carriers. Hope I am right but wrong.

Nexus one analysis.

I have used Visio for years. First when it was and independent and afterwards when Microsoft bought them out. In the Corporate world it is THE graphics package. Visio is so dominate that there is little competition. You have to go to the Mac space to find viable alternatives.

Well that changes now —

Cacoo - Real-time Collaborative Diagramming & Design from Nulab Inc. on Vimeo.

Issues? I had only one. My base system runs 64bit Ubuntu and the flash player I am forced to use is an experimental v.11 code. Does not work. But a 32 bit Ubuntu with flash does.

But is it a Visio killer? Out of the box no. There are features that this Cacoo do not even touch. For example diagram packs for Cisco gear right down to the card that can go in the frames. Not there yet. But, from small beginnings competitors are made. This online tool is sufficient for most small businesses. It is perfect for any individual. That’s the rub for Visio too. Once someone buys into a base package the customer is more inclined to buy add-ons and upgrades. Now that might get short circuited.

Would highly recommend folks give them a try.
website: http://cacoo.com/

Kurzweil, is there anything this guy can’t do? His book the Singularity is Near has spawned a whole new way of thinking about the future. He is a prolific inventor past and present. So what’s he go an do? Well remedy the bland existence of eReaders that’s what! —

One of Blio’s major advantages over current e-book readers is that the software offers a full color experience. E Ink, which is the black-and-white display used currently in almost all e-readers, works best for text, and even then most e-books still look ugly, thanks to design limitations in the readers.

Blio actually lays out the “pages” as they would be seen on paper, with typography and illustrations copied across. It also supports video and animation. In some ways, it’s reminiscent of the interactive magazine applications (also meant for upcoming tablet devices) shown off by the likes of Time Warner, Popular Science publisher Bonnier and Wired’s parent company Conde Nast.

Add to that some nifty features such as text-to-speech and the ability to synchronize things (like bookmarks, highlights and the page you last read) across multiple devices, and it makes for an interesting e-reader.

“We can take a PDF and an audio book and merge the two to get a combination such that you can hear the audio book and see the words highlighted on the PDF at the same time,” says Peter Chapman, an executive at Kurzweil Technologies.

For publishers, says Kurzweil the advantage is that Blio preserves the original book’s format, including typsetting, layout, fonts and pagination.

Wired goes on to mention stiff competition, etc. My guess is maybe not. First this has the attributes that most any student or researcher keeps in the stachel — marker, highlighter, sticky notes, etc. Then it supports color. Of course that’s more a hardware restriction than anything. But still color will probably be what separates the have nots from the haves in the ebook market very quickly once power issues are corralled.

What’s not to like? Well format for one. Got too many right now. Many non-Amazon systems were starting to gravitate around the ePub format. This will delay that for awhile.

Now the hardware makers need to step up. The merge of tablet and eReader will continue. Somebody will come out with a 8.5×11 formatted screen and the rest will be history. Whoever does it will have the same impact that IBM did when they introduced their laptop line oh so many years ago.

Linky.

Here’s another lab measurement that will probably make it to the real world, but it does give us some idea of what is possible if the marketplace were competitive enough to motivate providers to offer more.

Verizon yesterday said it tested a fiber technology in its labs and a customer home that delivered 10 Gbps downstream over its FiOS network and 2.4 Gbps in upload speeds. The technology, called XG-PON, delivers insanely fast speeds and is part of Verizon’s efforts to make its $23 billion investment in fiber grow with the demand for better broadband.

If you read our blog in mid-November, you already knew about this, but we didn’t have details on the standard Verizon was using. The XG-PON standard won’t actually become official until mid-2010. The current Verizon technology is GPON which delivers 2.5 Gbps downstream and 1.2 Gbps upstream. Currently Verizon splits those speeds among about 30 homes. Brian Whitton, executive director of access technologies at Verizon, who originally told us about these tests, explained what people might do with such blazing web connections, which mostly involves better video technologies.

My guess is that we will be seeing Gigabit connections showing up in consumers homes at reasonable prices in the next couple of years. That will be terrific for those living in Japan, Korea, and some European countries.  As for the US, don;t look for much to change as long as our regulators belong to the duopoly.

No one is really sure what the limits of fiber optic capacity are.   One thing is certain: With a little investment there’s no scarcity of available bandwidth on existing infrastructure.

Alcatel-Lucent today said that scientists at Bell Labs have set an optical transmission record that could deliver data about 10 times faster than current undersea cables,  resulting in speeds of more than 100 Petabits per second.kilometer.  A petawhat? This translates to the equivalent of about 100 million Gigabits per second.kilometer or sending about 400 DVDs per second over 7,000 kilometers, roughly the distance between Paris and Chicago. (Gigaom)

Latency is that nasty habit of the internet to slow the transfer of data as it has to travel further. Technologies like content delivery networks, placing servers in multiple location nearer to most users beats latency by reducing  distance. It’s expensive and has limited mass distribution of streaming media to the few with very deep pockets.  So what of distance didn’t matter? According to new research that could happen….and the few could become the many.

The researchers, who were supported by grants from both the National Science Foundation and Cisco, presented their work at the SIGCOMM meeting on Thursday; they’ve placed a paper describing it online as well. The paper describes how the system—which they term a Lossy Difference Aggregator—would operate in principle, describe some simulations of its performance, and suggest how it might be implemented. Unfortunately, it appears that it would require an extension to an IEEE standard that’s only been adopted recently, as well as dedicated processing hardware.

Doing real-time monitoring, if you ignore implementation details, is simple: simply assign each network packet a timestamp when it leaves a piece of hardware, and then compare that to the time at which it’s received. The challenge is communicating these timestamps between the hardware. Each has to be matched with a specific packet, which can be computationally intensive, and the two pieces of hardware have to transfer the data in order to make time comparisons. It’s possible to cut down on the work by choosing a representative sample of packets for a given time period, but coordinating the choice of packets across hardware can be a challenge. (Ars Technica)

Apple and AT&T have an agreement in principle that neither party would partake of supporting anything that injuries the other party in any material fashion. AT&T is concerned about users foregoing the voice components on iPhone and using the data component via VoIP. Google then shows up with an application for the iStore to do exactly what AT&T does not want. Is it rejected? Welllll, not exactly, but then you can’t download it either –

AT&T and Apple told the FCC that they did have an agreement that Apple would not help iPhone owners use VOIP calling services like Skype on the iPhone. VOIP calls use the data, rather than the voice plan, and would cut into the companies profits. Thus, Apple and AT&T agreed to cripple the Skype iPhone app so that it would only work when the iPhone used a WiFi connection.

The companies say they also agree not to let apps that stream live television, which AT&T says would strain its network.

As for Google and its app store?

Its FCC filing emphasizes that Android phone users can get apps from outside the store — unlike iPhone users. (Users can “jailbreak” their iPhones to do so, but this invalidates the warranty.)

It says only one percent of apps in its online marketplace have been rejected, mostly due to copyright or obscenity reasons.

Google did not, however, mention that it too crippled mobile apps at the request of a telecom.

T-Mobile asked Google to remove apps that let customers use their phone as a modem for a laptop, a practice known as tethering, and Google complied. T-Mobile, like all of the U.S.’s largest carriers, charges customers extra for that service. Google later re-allowed the app, but not for T-Mobile customers.

Is Google the unvarnished victim in this? The maiden for her prince to open the gates? Well not exactly either. Google is doing the same thing for T-Mobile on Android platforms. Google you can pucker up, but wash your shoes first, they reek of BS.

All this jockeying and “where’s the pea” is going for naught too. Wimax is continuing to rollout. The following cities are targeted this year — Charlotte, Chicago, Dallas, Fort Worth, Honolulu, Las Vegas, Philadelphia, Portland, Seattle. Wimax is already in Atlanta, NYC, Los Angeles and the outskirt of WashDC. So many of the mass market areas are in coverage. The upshot is the Wimax providers are not freaking out that VoIP will traverse their network. Fact some providers are offering bundles that include VoIP. So the cat’s already out of the bag. Fact some are considering using a “netbook-as-phone”.

By the way Who if on first and What is on second and Google is in the outfield. Google still has not understood how damaging their lack of 700mhz ownership means to them over the long haul.

Linky.

SoundCloud, is a twitter portal originally targeted as musical types as a means to share work. Sort of a delayed simulcast for music tracks. At its best it is sort of a TiVo for music production, each artist adding their contribution in turn. –

In a few short months SoundCloud has begun to give mighty MySpace a run for the hearts and minds of recording artists eager to interact more nimbly with fans than is possible on the giant social network which has, for the past five years, been the de facto online platform for musicians.

Sonic Youth used SoundCloud to stream their latest album via Twitter while Moby uses it to promote his latest tracks on his site rather than on MySpace. And when Beck decided to trash his so-five-years-ago Flash-based site and start over with simple pages heavy on high-quality content and light on everything else, he too turned to SoundCloud.

SoundCloud sounds like an obvious idea — like every good one does once somebody else has it. The necessity that was the mother to this particular invention was the absence of a truly collaborative online environment that could replicate the kind of back-and-forth spontaneity that musicians need to feed on and which proximity uniquely enables.

Twitter is used as the enabler for finding and following a particular effort. A backend is used to do the streaming proper. I am sure we will see other services that use Twitter as a workflow engine.

Linky.

Opportunistic Access to the Airwaves

As the FCC begins its year-long process to recommend a National Broadband Plan, one starting point is to unlock publicly-owned assets that can facilitate ubiquitous, affordable broadband access. Wireless spectrum remains the most cost-effective and rapid means to deliver broadband access to rural and unserved urban residents. But as mobile broadband use continues to increase exponentially, demand for spectrum will rapidly outpace availability under current spectrum management policies.

Public policy seems stymied by the myth that spectrum is scarce. In reality, only government permission to access the airwaves (licenses) is scarce – spectrum capacity itself is barely used in most locations and at most times. This underutilized spectrum represents enormous, untapped, public capacity for high-speed and pervasive broadband connectivity. It is vital to a national broadband plan to consider policies that will encourage more intensive and efficient use of the nation’s spectrum resources.

Not quite as far fetched as it sounds. Consider –

• The DoD already does a fair level of spectrum reuse/reallocation in their day to day operations. Bands not in use even in the same operational theater routinely are reallocated on the fly as the equipment has the smarts to look for an oper frequency and do the proper handshaking to permit a conversation of data stream to occur. Fact the military fosters such frequency hopping antics as it makes it harder for some opponent to intercept the information.
• Even for civilian use, bands are reallocated as needed in a static fashion. The former analog UHF, VHF bands were only good for line of sight. So, the FCC, by properly spacing frequency allocations based on distance can have 300 TV stations using the same band. Same with high power AM. But with spread spectrum (aka your WiFi router and 900mhz wireless phone) It would be literally possible to allocate all the bands that are not in use in a particular geographic area.

So imagine. Many TV stations even today, sign off at 2 or 3 in the morning and don’t come on again till 6 or 7am. So for roughly 5-6 hours we have several GBits of bandwidth available not being used. But what if WiFi towers polled the frequency and saw it open? They could hop on and up their backhaul capabilities for pennies. Fact I could see a very nice business for high speed backhaul for scheduled traffic. Not all data is interactive, but batched and this would match nicely.

The next step up which is what the presentation above was about is the development of CPE that is intelligent enough to query a very large swath of bandwidth and utilize an open frequency and bandwidth sufficient for the job at hand. Then hop off once the traffic is complete. Another words a MIMO Wifi like device that does frequency interrogation.

I would have love to have gone. Would have been interesting.

Linky.

A computer engineer has connected his home to social networking service Twitter, enabling it to Tweet him with updates about his residence’s electricity and water consumption.

Andy Stanford-Clark, 43, has fitted wireless sensors onto household items scattered around his 16th Century thatched cottage on the Isle of Wight, according to various online reports.

The sensors feed information to a central hub that, with the help of some specially written software, translates into words a sensor notification that, say, the bathroom heater has been turned on.

[source]

This is the best use I have seen for the Twitter service yet. Most readers know I think Twetters to humans turns all into Twits. Nor do I mean that in a flattering manner. But as a machine based protocol for sending/receiving queries it rocks.

I already have several client’s servers that send me critical messages as to they had to switch over battery power, cooling etc. So the question would be how hard is it to develop an API that handles the Twitter-X10 interface? If that was in place one could possibly build a remote control interface to the home right from a Twit enabled handheld. Possibly a two message format. First message with the intended action. Second with the security code to add that activates it to the hub’s queue.

Twitter really needs to up the message limit to say 2048 characters.