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Road Train Concepts

by Andrew McCaskey
The EU is planning a study on Road Trains

It’s basically a big semi trailer with a “professional driver” , and a series of automobiles drafting danger close behind in a line. Wireless sensors and radar link these autos maintaining precise distances and synchronized speeds while Presumably those drivers are taking a nap or catching up on work online.

It’s sort of a guidance “tractor beam” that, once you join allows the group of vehicles to travel on down the road all controlled by the lead driver. Because the vehicles are so closely spaced in the airflow, fuel savings of 20% are anticipated.
The drivers can relax until they wish to leave the road train, at which point they signal their intention to the driver at the front, and they are free to accelerate out of the trainline to an adjacent lane, and the tractor beam signals the car behind you to take up the slack.

The EU’s study will be entirely focused on the system working with wireless sensors and up to eight vehicles ranging from your everyday family cars to buses and trains. In theory, these vehicles could be mixed and matched in a ‘road train’

Either way, test trials are set to begin in the UK, Spain and Sweden on tracks with public road trials beginning in Spain.

Bet there are an entire generation of lawyers in school right now on this one.. a business opportunity for lawyers.

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Changing Business Telco

by Andrew McCaskey
Small Business Telco Definition

The definition of small business telephone service is changing, and changing quickly. For sole practitioners, the combination of Google Voice, a cell phone and Skype pretty quickly eliminate the need for a landline connection. Like many entrepreneurs, I use Skype for almost all of my out bound calls. The convenience and quality – especially on the MacBookPro beats any speakerphone combo. With colleagues and vendors I often run on Video as well – even if they don’t have the webcam capability, it speeds the interaction and adds another dimension to the relationship.

Even with the addition of partners, a small company can flexibly move forward without Verizon or local telco “business line” support. And with services like Grasshopper augment their telecom presence on a flexible, month to month basis.

It’s hard to beat the flexibility of such new offerings with any Verizon package, or the Packet8 Asterisk system. Too much overhead, too much telephone speak.

I expect great things from Google. With the purchase of Gizmo5 the SIP client by Google, there is now an end to end solution to the public switched network that can exist totally within GoogleTalk/GoogleVoice/Gizmo. And they did not even have to get a new service name beginning with the letter G..

DISCLOSURE OF MATERIAL CONNECTION: http://cmp.ly/0

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Augmented Reality from Esquire

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Pricing Human Nature

by Andrew McCaskey
Setting Broadband Rates

It only seems fair – With broadband, as with other utilities such as electricity and water, people should pay for what they use. Apparently, none of the ISP’s are considering doing this, because they have a more profitable way that taps into human nature.

It’s the same little quirk that sells laptop and cellphone batteries, because we keep them on the charger far more than they really need to be. You want to have plenty to go, to keep them topped off. We are afraid to run out, and that’s exactly the fear that the new “metered” services (which are not metered at all, but are sold in tiers) are designed to tap into.

Demand and use of the Internet has risen faster than capacity can keep up, which means that the all-you-can-eat model of unlimited broadband per month no longer applies. ISPs’ version of metered broadband isn’t priced like your water or electricity. Carriers would never want to do this because it would actually reduce their profits. Broadband will instead be priced like a cell phone plan.

In wireless, if you use around 450 minutes a month, you want to make sure you don’t run over and get extra charges – so you opt for the 600 minute plan. Your usage – and those of most people will still stay around 450 minutes. You are buying assurance that you aren’t going to get cut off or run up a big bill. But in fact, the probablity that you will consume up to the next limit is low.

If you paid a large price for “unlimited use” per month, your calling patterns would have to change drastically to seriously impact their network – and the difference is almost pure profit.

Broadband is going to be the same way. You are not paying for bits, you are paying for peace of mind. And there is always a market for that.

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3D Parallax Television

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Google Discovers Tom Sawyer

by Andrew McCaskey
Crowdsourcing is all the rage – and Google does it in a reverse Mechanical Turk – right out of Tom Sawyer.

Mechanical Turk is the Amazon system where people are paid a few fractions of a cent to look at a browser and decide if a page contains automobiles or boats, then hit the button.

Today’s newly announced Building Maker as a cross between Google Maps and a gigantic bin of building blocks. Basically, you pick a building and construct a model of it using aerial photos and simple 3D shapes – provided by Google.

. When you’re done, Google takes a look at your model. If it looks right, and if a better model doesn’t already exist, we add it to the 3D Buildings layer in Google Earth. You can make a whole building in a few minutes.

It’s work disguised as a game – and as a break for a minute or two, I expect that Google is going to be pretty successful in getting the cooperation and participation of hundreds of thousands worldwide.

The only thing that would improve it ? a Leaderboard with the square footage drawn. That would get the biggest buildings quickly built out. Then, harness a team approach of square footage versus number of buildings, to provide weighting favoring the smaller structures.

It’s a notch above Windows Solitare, and would include bragging rights at no charge.

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Google Building Maker

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AP and Murdoch Problem Almost Solved

by Andrew McCaskey
Problem Almost Solved

Newsweek writes that Rupert Murdoch gave an impassioned speech to media executives in Beijing decrying that search engines-; in particular Google – are stealing from him, because Google links to his stories but doesn’t pay News Corp. to do so.

It is an impassioned plea that has risen up from the Associated Press and from NewsCorp – and they claim as the reason that ad revenues have dropped from about $750 Million a year to $700 million.

Weston Cassova calls BS: ” But if Murdoch really thinks Google is stealing from him, and if he really wants Google to stop driving all those readers to his Web sites at no charge, he can simply stop Google from linking to their news stories by going to his Web site’s robot.txt file and adding ‘Disallow.’ ”

Simple and effective – if not dramatic “Yet neither AP nor News Corp. has taken this simple step to stop the marauding Google pirates from pillaging their cargo. Why? Because they know that their traffic would dry up overnight. They’d rather blame someone else for their failure to compete in a changing marketplace. They happily take all the customers Google sends them for free, and then accuse Google of theft. Classy.”

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120 MPG BMW Concept 3 wheeler

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Skype’s Chances

by Andrew McCaskey
Skype Implosion

I think that there is a more than even chance that Skype will implode. And if that happens, it will be a major loss.

The news over the weekend that the two Skype founders have sued not only eBay and Sierra Partners, but ex-Joost executive Mike Volpi and a UK investment house indicate to me that this has moved way beyond a business case and into the personal.

Joost was probably one of the most highly hyped introductions in the past three or four years. Fast out of the gate, the officially santioned Hulu was dismissed as a joke. Something happened along the way, and it’s coming back to haunt the Skype transaction. Apparently, as Joost was scrambling to change from a peer-to-peer architecture (the original configuration that kept transmission bandwidth expenses low), Volpi became aware of some technical secrets that got passed along to eBay, without the knowledge or permission of Friis and Zennstrom.

Not only double crossed by a partner, but making a fortune at the same time. With all parties being as rich as kings, there’s no need to seek further gain except to fund revenge. The Skype founders (and the underlying bits for Kazaa, Morpheus and half a dozen others) have nothing they want so much as to sink Volpi. And if they have to bring down a service that keeps 400 million people in touch, they’ll do so.

That’s the game that only rich guys can play well. {sharethis}

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Skype Suit Better Get Sorted Out

by Andrew McCaskey
Better Get Sorted Out Fast

The lawsuit between the inventors of Skype and eBay, SilverLake Partners and investors better get sorted out quickly. The speed at which the net moves could puncture that revenue balloon in a few months.

It’s extremely hard to believe that the deal several years ago went through without somone questioning the exact details of what was and was not included in the transfer. To have left the technology ownership in question looks like a monumental mistake on the part of Meg Whitman and the eBay management team at that time. And, as I mentioned on air, it appears that the big deal equivalent of Title Insurance is not in play here either.

What is in play is the announcement that all 350 million Facebook users are soon to have access to a realtime VoIP chat client – one to one and one to many. Add to that the Google voice, Google Wave and similar systems that are playing around in the same arena, and Skype’s functional advantage may not be as ironclad as it was only two years ago.

In addition, Twitter and Jajah just announced a way to link Twitter users by phone, passing info through Twitter DM for free two minute calls. Sort of an audio tweet, but realtime and sufficient for many uses.

Along with some recent actions by Skype that seem to have cut the legs out from under an independent developer ecosystem, it looks like some strange decisions are being made in the platform. All that is not building value into the deal. In fact, it’s slipping away minute by minute.

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The iTunes Moment for Television

by Andrew McCaskey
Television, As We Know It

Andrew Baron is the Founder of Rocketboom, and he says that, contrary to the opinion voiced over the weekend by a Microsoft exec, television, as we know it has a good deal of kick left in it. Plus, the momentum from hundreds of millions of dollars in projects that are funded well over the next two years.

“The industry has about two to three years to adapt or face its iTunes moment,” said Highfield, the managing director of consumer and online at Microsoft UK, at the MediaGuardian Edinburgh International Television Festival. “And it will take at least that long for media brands to build credible, truly digital brands.”

Traditional media owners must make the move, “The traditional television business has to aggressively move its content online, build a critical mass of content that the traditional buyers of airtime will understand and buy into,” he added. “They want to see TV-like reach and impact.”

I think Andrew’s on the wrong side of this one. His argument is the sunk cost of productions already underway have the next two years spoken for. I’d be afraid that means that in two years the industry would be all dressed up and no place to go. Or at least a lot fewer to go with.

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Politics and Unintended Consequences

by Andrew McCaskey
Use a Proxy, Do the Time

It’s always dangerous when politicians are using technology to show how tough they are on crime.

An example is the New Federal rules that could count the use of Proxy servers in a computerized crime as “sophisticated”. The ruling calls for a 25% longer jail sentence, using the line of reasoning that judges use in stiffer sentences when a gun is used in a robbery.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation is on top of the case, for a number of reasons: Reasons of privacy online. Secondly, unintended consequences for corporations when employees abuse VPN’s, or the situation where someone could use a proxy without their knowledge,as an ISP or cell phone provider could use proxies without users’ knowledge to reroute traffic.

TOR, the Internet anonymizer that is promoted by EFF, is also targeted in the new legislation. Some activists believe this legislation is an effort to stop leaked US Government information from reaching outside sources, such as Wikileaks.

Much like the recent Boston College incident where students were found with “alternate operating systems” where commands could be directly typed in at a prompt and were suspected cybercrooks at best and cyberterrorists at worst – it’s a good thing the EFF is speaking in a language understood by politicians.

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Cellular Book Demo

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Real Threat to eMail is not Spam

by Andrew McCaskey
The Real Threat to eMail is Not Spam

It’s the wonderful word coined at a WordCamp in 2007, bacn : It’s better than spam, but .. not that good. Wikipedia defines it as “messages which have been subscribed to and are therefore not unsolicited but are often unread by the recipient for a long period of time, if at all. Bacn has been described as “email you want but not right now” .

Newsletter digests, twitter followers – press releases and updates flow into my inbox in a continuous stream – and if can keep ahead of them with rules I can keep them out of sight. With the new Microsoft study that proclaims 97% of email traffic to be spam, the legitimate traffic has to be shoehorned in within that 3% along with the bacn.

It’s not a new problem – I’ve seen it rampant in corporate email for at least ten years. At first, it was due to the ignoramus “reply to all” , followed shortly by the friend mailing list of jokes, stories and political commentary, then by the CYA “copy stakeholders” practice. With combinations of all of the above, those systems had reached gridlock years ago. Only now it’s moved to another level on personal email as well.

This turn of events came about because we granted permission – and much like privacy that slips away as we gain one more marketing advantage, coupon or registration bacn comes our way. Just like the old Pogo cartoon: “We have seen the enemy and he is us”

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