My last memory of pleasant air travel goes back to the days of Braniff, when I was barely old enough to travel alone. Seats were comfortable and service was offered without malice. Broadband access could make the current cattle maze / cattle car experience more palatable, and could bring the airlines some badly needed cash.

American Airlines has been outfitting its fleet of 15 Boeing 767-200 aircraft with an air-to-ground system by Aircell LLC and has said previously that it expected to allow customers to test it during the first half of this year.

Southwest Airlines is scheduled to begin test a system by Row 44 Inc. on four of its Boeing 737 planes starting in July. A broader test is scheduled for August, and a spokeswoman said Monday that the technology could be rolled out to customers as early as late summer or fall. (Dallas Morning News)

Not to slam our current crop of tech and business reporters, but it’s refreshing to see an interview with a tech CEO done to the point with relevance. Done at the D6 conference, Om Malik Questioned Mr Bezos on how Amazon web services got stated and where it’s going. Om also brought Wall Street’s complete ignorance of the significance of the cloud computing wave into focus.

• How and when Amazon began its cloud computing effort.
• Why Amazon has become an innovator with Amazon Web Services and how it relates to their core business of being an online retailer.
• Whether or not Wall Street recognizes Amazon’s cloud efforts.
• What’s next for Amazon Web Services.
• Whether or not Amazon has plans for a VC fund or for cloud computing startups. (GigaOm)

When it comes to determining who has how much in real terms, not marketing terms, content delivery provider Akamai is in a position to know. A new report that is expected to be revised quarterly shows that a paltry 20% of US connections accessing their servers has a =>5MBPS connection. This is very bad news because a great many of the new applications and services now in the pipeline will simply not worl correctly with the majority of the US connections. Talk about killing the economy! Before you bash Mr. Bush by his lonesome, remember that the other party controls both houses of Congress where laws are actually written of repealed. The entire cast of DC Pols are collectively out to lunch.

Akamai data shows that South Korea is the leader in delivering what the Massachusetts-based CDN provider calls, high broadband. It means connections that connect to Akamai’s at speeds exceeding 5 Megabits per second. Nearly 64% of South Korean connections qualify as high broadband.

US, by that metric is a deplorable, with only 20 percent connections qualifying as high broadband. Interestingly, when you reduce the connection speed to 2 megabits per second, US ranks at #24 with 62% of connections at speeds exceeding 2 Mbps.

In US, the state of Delaware has 60% connections that qualify as “high broadband.” California scores rather poorly and is not even among the top ten. Thanks to Cablevision, Verizon and Time Warner, New York comes in at #3 with 36% of its connections at speeds exceeding 5 Mbps. (Gigaom)

Memo to Pols: Make no new laws unless the said laws end the conditions that created the duopoly and continue to protect it from competition. Laws do not make for improvement in service. An open competitive market does.

Entire new businesses and communities have been built around user generated media. While the devoted amateur could always find a way, the declining cost of good production tools along with the ease of web distribution brought UGM to the masses. The blog you are reading now was enabled by a collection of free and easy to use open source products. As of today, the lines have completely blurred between producer and consumer as so many of us are both.

Applications may be the next wave. Imagine anyone who has learned how to use a few simple tools being able to create the next Digg or Facebook. Unlimited free to cheap utility computing becoming available in the cloud, combined with easy to use tools will supercharge the most devoted non-coder, and inspire many more casual users to create apps for themselves and share them. While the tools that powerful are not here yet, they are progressing in that direction. An open source project called Open Mashups may be on the cusp of that next wave.   If you’d like to automate some of the ways you use the web, or have a glimpse of what the near future holds, Open Mashups is a free download.

While we are still in the process of defining what is Web 2.0, pundits are beginning to postulate what will constitute Web 3.0. A thorough study of the complete article sited below brings us to the unavoidable conclusion that all scenarios postulated require abundant ever expanding bandwidth at low cost.

“In May 2006, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web stated:

‘People keep asking what Web 3.0 is. I think maybe when you’ve got an overlay of scalable vector graphics - everything rippling and folding and looking misty - on Web 2.0 and access to a semantic Web integrated across a huge space of data, you’ll have access to an unbelievable data resource.’ (Gimme The Scoop)

Of course, the complete post has several more chiming in besides Mr. Berners-Lee. As for the Third Pipe viewpoint, Web 3.0 will not happen without a Third Pipe. With Web 2.0 we are beginning to view the Web as a utility where capacity should grow to meet demand without rationing. In order for Web 3.0 to become possible, we must first have free and open competition with a growing list of access providers instead of the entrenched duopoly that stifles innovation and limits growth.

Yes, like the 1984 flick ‘Runaway’ starring Tom Selleck. The plot for that film was that small industrial ‘bots were running around killing people. Selleck’s character was assigned to a police unit that exterminated such wayward bots. Well folks the plot is coming true. At least the ‘bot piece is.

It may have seemed like just another improbable scene from a Hollywood sci-fi flick – Tom Cruise battling against an army of robotic spiders intent on hunting him down.

But the storyline from Minority Report may not be quite as far fetched as it sounds.

British defence giant BAE Systems is creating a series of tiny electronic spiders, insects and snakes that could become the eyes and ears of soldiers on the battlefield, helping to save thousands of lives.

Now part of the key to this ‘bot army will be wireless technologies — Wifi, UWB and others. The reason being that if you are going to send in a ‘bot you want to see the target and make assessment of next moves. Then possibly having identified the target use the ‘bot as the targeting sensor for an appropriately designed warhead.

The world, when I leave it, will be more like Star Wars than I ever could have imagined..

Linky.

There’s more to keeping the web free and open than encouraging fierce competition between access providers and equally impartial treatment of traffic. Free and open also extends to software technologies that enable and extend our use of the net.

When it comes to software, we like free. Free insures quick adoption by those who have a compatible platform. Free and open is better, but in the case of the net, open is a necessity to insure continuous development, improvement, and availability to the broadest range of platforms.

According to Mozilla’s Tristan Nitot :

“proprietary solutions running on top of the Web are trying to take over”…”So far, there has not been a problem,” Nitot said. “Both Adobe and Microsoft have been willing to give (Flash and Silverlight away) for free. But maybe they have an agenda. They’re not here for the glory; they’re here for the money.”Nitot gave two historical examples of Microsoft and Adobe withdrawing or withholding products from certain platforms: Microsoft’s discontinuation of Internet Explorer for Unix and Mac, and Adobe’s long-standing refusal to “provide a recent version of Flash for Linux users.” He suggested that Web developers should be asking those companies whether they are “sure that Silverlight and Flash will always be available on all platforms (and) run decently on all platforms.” (Cnet)

Adobe’s recent move to partly open Flash is an improvement, but does not go far enough. Closing software that is dominant also causes stagnation. Windows is a great example of that.

Channeling Intel: Dear Americans, we conceived and largely developed Wimax here, and believe that there is a ready market. While the builders of the first nationwide Wimax networks are strapped for cash and looking for investors we are handing Tiawan a load of cash to build out there instead.

INTEL ANNOUNCED bright and early on Monday morning that they’ll be chucking $500 million Taiwan’s way, spread out over the next half a decade to develop the Island’s WiMax infrastructure. The agreement will also apparently try to promote a greater level of WiMax congruency among gear developers. (The Inquirer)

Unfortunately for Americans, the developers of Laptops and other portable technology are in Taiwan, so they get first dibbs. It makes sense when you consider there is nary a single PC manufacturer in the LTE camp today and Wimax has a time to market advantage over competing technologies. Could it also be that Intel would rather not do battle with the US telcos who now have a lock on the majority of access both fixed and wireless access?

Despite all of the bad press you have been reading about Wimax, some deserved and some FUD, the Wimax devices are coming. Acer is the first mainstream notebook maker to announce a laptop with built in Wimax capability.

The Acer Aspire 5920 is already being manufactured by notebook PC contract maker Quanta Computer and could be available by the end of this year.

The notebook will be sold along with WiMax service in a manner similar to the way mobile phones are sold along with service packages, said Trisha Pan, a product marketing manager at Acer, on the sidelines of a WiMax news conference in Taipei.

Intel is also buying some of the laptops for testing, said Pan. The laptops will be made available to all WiMax network operators. They won’t be out until Sprint or other companies start selling the devices with their WiMax services. (Yahoo)

This is only the first of many to come. There are small pockets of successful Wimax deployments in the US and extensive success stories world wide making a ready market for Wimax enabled devices. In the near future a tech writer who is touting the alledgedly superior LTE will be transmitting said article via Wimax while waiting for the telcos to deploy LTE.

Mike Liebhold of the Institute for the Future addressed the O’Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference a little over a year ago about the roadblocks to and promise of an open wireless web. In view of recent developments, this 17 minute presentation is right on topic. While progress has been made, the roadblocks he clearly identified remain in place.

Network operators have invested millions into reliable networks. In order to recover their costs, they have developed a strategy of offering enhanced services developed by and limited to their own in-house resources. But there is a fundamental flaw in this strategy. This “walled garden” approach to enhanced services ignores the many entrepreneurs and creative people who are eager to develop new services on wireless networks. The social trend of users at the edge of the network wanting to create their own experiences is ignored. The end result is that the growth of the mobile web is stifled. (IT Conversations)

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