Category Archives: Technology

The real impact of broadband

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Yesterday I was trying to remember how to adjust something on my venerable Hasselblad 6×6 camera. I knew I had the manual which came with it when I bought the camera many years ago, but it lay entombed somewhere in the chaos of my study. So instead of spending ages searching for it, I looked for a copy on the Web. Even though the Hasselblad site denied all knowledge of the publication, Google found it — buried deep in the site’s archives. So I downloaded the document, located the pages I needed and solved the problem. In minutes. This is kind of simple thing was was inconceivable before the Web (and Google?).

Later… When putting the camera away later in the evening, I found the missing manual — exactly where it should be!

Is Microsoft’s enemy our friend?

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My Observer article about the long term significance of Google…

A few months ago Bill Gates let slip an interesting thought about Google in an interview. It reminded him, he said, of Microsoft in its honeymoon period – ie. the decade 1985-95. This is the first time in recorded history that Gates has dignified a competitor by actually naming it in public: generally, he speaks only in paranoid generalities. But the Microsoft chairman knows trouble when he sees it, and Google does indeed pose a long-term threat to his profitable monopoly.

That’s par for the course in the capitalist jungle. A more important question is whether Google spells trouble for the rest of us in the long run. And the answer to that could well be yes…

My colleague Conal Walsh goes into more detail on the privacy front.

The end of telephony as we know it?

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This morning’s Observer column…

You know the scenario. For years, nothing much seems to be happening. There’s a lot of excited muttering among geeks about a particular technology, but no evidence that would compel a sensible man in a suit to pay attention. Standard market research, for example, fails to detect any important trend. Consumers profess complete ignorance when approached by persons with clipboards. The graphs meander along, hovering just above the X-axis like the Donegal mountains seen from a distance – sometimes rising slightly, sometimes falling a little, but essentially not going anywhere.

Then suddenly one day all hell breaks loose. What looked like the silhouette of foothills has abruptly turned into the vapour trail of a rocket. The graphs – of take-up, media column inches, consumer adoption – have gone through the roof. Now the aforementioned suits are hollering from the same hymn sheet: ‘What the hell is going on?’

Computing and global warming

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Wow! Fascinating post by Martin Varsavsky. Excerpt:

Computing also requires enormous amounts of electricity. Every new chip developed requires more and more energy to function. If present trends continue computing and computing use and interconnection will soon make up 20% of all our electricity needs up from a current 7%. The person who brought this to my attention was Larry Page. During a session at CGI I asked Larry what he thought were Google´s limit to growth. His surprising reply was: electricity. Google he explained to me is by now the world´s largest owner of computers and therefore the internet´s biggest electricity user. This Larry said was of great concern to him and he was looking of ways to make Google carbon neutral.

Taxation and mobile phones

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This week’s Economist has a fascinating report of research into the way mobile phones are taxed in developing countries. The findings are summarised in this chart.

The conclusion is obvious: there’s a strong inverse relationship between consumer take-up of the technology and the level of taxation. And it exposes a wider tragedy, because there’s no doubt that wide dissemination of mobile phones could be an important driver of innovation in countries with poor fixed communications infrastructures.

Google finds Roman villa

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Yep. From Nature (so it must be true!)

Using satellite images from Google Maps and Google Earth, an Italian computer programmer has stumbled upon the remains of an ancient villa. Luca Mori was studying maps of the region around his town of Sorbolo, near Parma, when he noticed a prominent, oval, shaded form more than 500 metres long. It was the meander of an ancient river, visible because former watercourses absorb different amounts of moisture from the air than their surroundings do.

His eye was caught by unusual ‘rectangular shadows’ nearby. Curious, he analysed the image further, and concluded that the lines must represent a buried structure of human origin. Eventually, he traced out what looked like the inner courtyards of a villa.

The Economist on VoIP

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If you thought I was a bit hyperbolic about VoIP, you should see this week’s Economist

It is now no longer a question of whether VOIP will wipe out traditional telephony, but a question of how quickly it will do so. People in the industry are already talking about the day, perhaps only five years away, when telephony will be a free service offered as part of a bundle of services as an incentive to buy other things such as broadband access or pay-TV services. VOIP, in short, is completely reshaping the telecoms landscape. And that is why so many people have been making such a fuss over Skype—a small company, yes, but one that symbolises a massive shift for a trillion-dollar industry.