BookBlog

Someday when Apple merges with Disney

On that day, Disney will license all of its content with creative commons licenses, and offer Disney fans a set of creative tools to remix video, and retell stories, and create games, and resell the content they create using Disney raw materials....

Then Disney stories will return to the folk art roots from which they started, and fans young and old will multiply the time they spend with Disney stories and characters by a factor of several, and the market for creative tools and accessories will grow.

Today this is but a fairy tale. Second Life, the creative stepchild of the entertainment business, is enabling the creation fo a secondary market in player-created game content. The stepchild of the entertainment business is misunderstood and despised by its elder sisters, but it will be queen someday.

Katrina reconstruction corruption watch

The New York Times has the scoop on piles of suspicious findings in the $1.5 billion in Hurricane Katrina reconstruction contracts.

More than 80 percent of FEMA contracts were awarded without bidding or with limited competition. The largest deal was $568 million in contracts for debris removal landed by a Florida company that was a former lobbying client of Mississippi governer Haley Barbour. What better deal than to promote your lobbyist to have purchase signoff authority?

The second best deal is to have the buyer's ex-boss be the lobbyist. Two contractors, the Shaw Group and Kellogg, Brown & Root, a subsidiary of Halliburton are represented by Joe M. Allbaugh, the retired head of FEMA who recommended his college buddy Brown to take over when he left to lobby for reconstruction contracts.

The contracting practices are starting to smell like fish in a freezer with the power out.

Meanwhile, Time hunts for more Mike Browns.

NYT lays off newsroom workers as Yahoo hires

New York Times lets go 500 workers including 80 newsroom employees. Meanwhile, Yahoo hires a war correspondent.

Let's hope the new models make up for the old and more. The New Orleans Times Picayune staff deserve a Pulitzer prize and a national medal for their local, detailed coverage of Hurricane Katrina and the aftermath. Our society needs good journalism in order to function.

By the way, I'd be pretty surprised if Yahoo turned out to a significant player in real journalism. Yahoo's management comes from the heart of the LA entertainment industry. It seems more plausible that they want a war correspondent so he can take pictures of things going kaboom.

What we need as a society with respect to say, the Iraq war, includes information to answer questions like:
* is reconstruction making progress toward a stable and democratic society, or is Iraq headed toward breakup and civil war.
* how much money has the US spent in Iraq, and how much of that money has gone to its intended purposes

By "real journalism", I mean nothing about the brand which is may well change along with disruptive technologies, and everything about the quality, breadth and accessibility of the information.

US broadband growth slows; Muni fiber can be 10x cheaper

Two nicely complementary stories this week.

The Pew Internet study shows that broadband peneteration showed minimal growth in the six months between December, 2004 and May 2005.

At the same time, a presentation at the Broadband Properties Summit showed that that Utah's UTOPIA model, where government-layed fiber supports competitive private sector broadband, is leading to a 10-fold drop in broadband prices.

Connect the dots

Green mortgages

When I did research into sustainable business five years ago, the market was stymied by lack of liquidity. Sellers of green technology faced a lack of much venture and institutional investment interest. Buyers of green technology faced a different problem. Some energy conservation technologies have a long payback period. The buyer needs to spend the money up front, and then reaps consistent savings over the life of the asset. This is a financing opportunity.

via Sustainablog, Fannie Mae is offering an Energy Efficiency Mortgage Program. The program allows homebuyers to finance energy improvements.

According to Cascadia Blog, these mortgages have been on the market since 1979, but required cumbersome paperwork. FNMA's program streamlines the paperwork and increases adoption. It's still a niche product, says Joel Weise of Indigo Financial Group, based in Lansing Michigan, a network of mortgage brokers which specializing in these mortgages. Another gap in the market is the lack of home appraisers who can evaluate energy efficiency, says says Wiese in the comments of the Residential Energy Savings Network.

So, a large upside to be had from good marketing and education, with the biggest downside risk being the overall housing bubble. A real estate market crash would take down this generation of innovation and education.

I prepared for the hurricane, and all I have are these extra peas

So, I got a concerned call from my Mom on Thursday morning, with a complete disaster preparedness shopping list. Flashlights and batteries, radio, water, canned food, sensible so far. Not quite enough. Do you have two to three weeks of food? Canned fruits and vegetables? A cooler? A tent and sleeping bag? Are your papers in a waterproof container?

Now, Austin is 150 miles inland, and my house is pretty well elevated from Stacy Creek. I figured that the most likely scenario if the storm came by was a lot of rain and wind, and the power out for a few hours, a day or two if it's really bad.

So I went to the HEB, and got some water, tuna, crackers, pbj (all of which will get consumed during the normal course of things). And, against my better judgement, this can of peas. I resisted the temptation to buy a styrofoam longhorn cooler, thank goodness. Came home from the store and found that the hurricane had changed route. The peas will make a fine food bank donation.

p.s. wishing the best for the folks in East Texas and Louisiana who are getting hit by the hurricane, and the folks in Houston for the traffic jam on the way home.

Katrina contracting corruption watch

The Project on Government Oversight has been tracking the story.

The latest juicy tidbit: the administration's top procurement official, David Safavian, had been working on developing contracting policies for the Katrina relief effort. He was arrested for obstructing an investigation by the GSA's Office of Inspector General. Safavian allegedly helped lobbyist Jack Abramoff aquire GSA-controlled property the Washington, D.C., then lied about it to the investigators.

Laura Rozen is collecting reports on the Safavian investigation.

What's Google doing with that fiber?

Om Malik speculates that Google is building a nationwide fiber network, will use wifi at endpoints to reach users, and then use location-awareness to turbo-charge ads.

The dots to connect are:
* Google has been quietly buying up dark fiber around the country
* Google is working with a small startup in San Francisco that has software for location-based services at wifi hotspots
* Google just launched Google Talk, a text and voice messaging client.
* Google spends a lot of money on IP transit fees, and could avoid those fees by sharing traffic directly with ISPs.

If that's what Google is doing -- wow. Google is very good at building very big, low-cost computing systems. The network incumbents have an inflated cost structure and a business model based on lobbying for competitive advantage. Some smart capital investment could free vast potential energy in communication services. This could go kaboom.

Corruption early warning alert

The Louisiana reconstruction has the potential to be a vast cesspool of corruption. Hopefully some investigative journalists smell one-in-a-lifetime muckracking opportunities and will be following the money.

Here's one bad smell: "A bill introduced in the House [last week] by Rep. Kenny Marchant (R-Tex.) and co-sponsored by Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (R-Va.) would waive rules for congressional notification of certain no-bid purchases".

And another: The LA times reports that "Senior officials in Louisiana's emergency planning agency already were awaiting trial over allegations stemming from a federal investigation into waste, mismanagement and missing funds when Hurricane Katrina struck. And federal auditors are still trying to track as much as $60 million in unaccounted for funds that were funneled to the state from the Federal Emergency Management Agency dating back to 1998."

One of the few good things about the D/R fingerpointing is that the Democrats will be keeping an eye on the Feds and the Republicans will be keeping an eye on the locals.

von Hippel's "lead users" vs. Goeffrey Moore's Visionaries

Michael Osofsky picks up the thread comparing Eric Von Hippel's "lead users" to Geoffrey Moore's "visionaries," and prompts some more reflection on the similarities and differences between the categories of technologyearly adopters.

I suspect that von Hippel's Lead Users and Moore's Visionaries are mostly the same people viewed with different perspectives shaped by time and technology.

Moore saw visionaries as "early adopters" -- people who are eager consumers of brand new products. von Hippel studies early adopters as innovators -- people who not only consume but customize products.

Early adopters have always played a role in customizing products, but they have more opportunities to do so these days. There are more tools available to modify products, ranging from open source software to low-cost CAD and low-volume contract manufacturers.

When Moore first wrote Crossing the Chasm, it was most important to help technology companies to see how different mainstream buyers were from early adopters. A technology provider wishing to hit the big time needed to focus on packaging the product for more mainstream buyers, and to ignore the eccentric preferences of the visionaries.

These days, customer innovation has been democratized, changing the rules of business success. Successful tech companies (like Google, Amazon, Ebay) need to be good both at packaging a service for broad use, and at providing tools for lead user customization.

By moving away from Moore's understanding of users as eager but passive "consumers" and focusing on the active role played by lead customer innovation, von Hippel reaches several insights that Moore didn't a decade ago. Many lead user customizations are one-offs which allow a manufactured product access to an application the vendor couldn't supply cost-effectively. Many other lead user customizations are applicable to a larger class of customers, and vendors can use the signals of end-user customization to lead their next-generation product development efforts.

So, instead of abandoning lead users, von Hippel recommends serving them with customization tools, and adopting popular customer innovations into the manufactured product line.

Vint Cerf helps Google reduce evil

In an interview with CNET, the internet pioneer evangelized sensible ideas about public policy for the internet.

Cerf told CNET that he finds it ''"troublesome" that various states and localities have been proposing and implementing measures to outlaw municipally sponsored broadband networks. "Why on Earth would we inhibit people from making their own investments--deciding, for example, to float a bond?"'.

Cerf has also been out talking to Hollywood, encouraging them to 'view the Internet as an alternative distribution outlet. "Some are responding positively, but some legal departments are still having trouble swallowing the idea."'

Hopefully Cerf's well-respected presense and active evangelism will help Google throw its weight behind good tech policy and counteract the force of the telecom and content oligopolies. The tech business strategy mantra is "commoditize your complements." Google benefits when there are fatter pipes available to more people, and more content available for indexing and related ads. The world will get better when the innovative business that see the fortunes to gain pry off the stranglehold of stagnant businesses who only see what they have to lose.

Asterisk needs marketing

Socialtext is considering the use of Asterisk as a telephony server. We use a mishmash of skype, vonage, POTS, and freeconference.com to support our distributed team. It's amazing that it can be done at all, but the string and baling wire is getting tiresome. "Can you hear me" isn't amusing any more, and wastes plenty of valuable time.

The open source telephony server toolkit has tremendous potential to provide low-cost telecom services for small-to-mid-sized businesses But somebody needs to step up and market the heck out of it.

I was browsing through the Asterisk site itself, and the sites for some Asterisk VARs. The sites all focused on a long, long, long list of features. The laundry list is probably helpful for a telecom geek who knows exactly what she is looking for, and is in search of the specific set of protocols, hardware devices, and functions.

The "feature list" approach is next to useless for a small business person who wants to know how their telecom needs can be met effectively. A good marketing person would talk to small business people and understand what sets of capabilities they're looking for in a phone server. Then they would explain, step by step, what Asterisk can do, and what the packages contain. The laundry list of features would show up on the site as a third level of detail, when the customer, now with a better understanding of what they are looking for, can see the details and compare to alternatives.

What's needed isn't marketing fluff -- airy promises about enhanced productivity solutions yada yada. It's for basic, clear, education so customers can learn what to buy and how to buy it.

Boycott Windows Vista

Personal computers were overwhelmingly successful in because they supported a wide variety of software and peripherals. PCs put digital control of words and data into the hands of end-users, routed around central IT bottlenecks, and a multi-billion dollar market was born.

Special-purpose word processing computers bit the dust. IBM's monolithic model -- where you bought the computer, storage, peripherals and software from the same vendor -- lost market share. Microsoft played a huge role in making the PC explosion happen in the 80s and 90s.

Now, Microsoft is breaking this model that made it successful with its upcoming Windows Vista operating system. Audio and video are the latest media to move from the exclusive control of central distribution into the hands of end-users. And Microsoft has written Vista to keep that control out of end-users' hands.

This News.com story explains how Vista is designed to restrict audio and video capabilities:

For the first time, the Windows operating system will wall off some audio and video processes almost completely from users and outside programmers, in hopes of making them harder for hackers to reach. The company is establishing digital security checks that could even shut off a computer's connections to some monitors or televisions if antipiracy procedures that stop high-quality video copying aren't in place.

The News.com article goes into more detail on how Vista reduces opportunites for software developers, hardware devices, and end-users.

This is a fine reason not to upgrade to Windows Vista when it comes out. A software upgrade ought to provide customers a better product, not a worse product.

This is also an opportunity for entrepreneurs building on Linux and web-based services. People who can package easy-to-use, open personal creativity systems have a vast market to gain that's being left behind by Microsoft.

Cingular Wireless sucks

The superb What Geeks experience contrasts with the dismal customer service black hole which is Cingular Wireless.

My account has fallen victim to the merger between Cingular and AT&T Wireless. I sent Cingular a payment, but continued to get dunning phone calls. It turned out that while I had changed the address from Cingular to AT&T, I had failed to update my account number to the new Cingular account. They couldn't find my payment. So I double-paid using my credit card to keep them from turning off the account.

The next step is to fax bank and bill-pay records of the transaction to their research department. The support person had a helpful demeanor, but was unable to confirm the fax number of the research department, or any way to check on the problem once the records had been faxed in. I'm scheduled to get a call back on Wednesday.

In the meantime, Cingular has a visible amount of my money earning interest somewhere. If one has bad memories of MCI billing "glitches" that turned out to be genuine, one might start to be suspicious at this point. There's plenty of money to be made by double-billing people who have problems with the AT&T conversion. Hanlon's Razoroffers some mild comfort to the paranoid: "Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence."

p.s. Here's Chris Shipley of Network World and the Demo conferences telling her story about getting stuck in the AT&T/Cingular transition.

Kudos to What Geeks

I dreaded an endless cross-vendor finger-pointing maze when when the Microsoft documentation for securing a wireless network contradicted the Linksys documentation, and the Microsoft rep tried to send me to Fujitsu.

At that point, I gave up on the vendors and called Whatgeeks a rental help desk service that promised assistance at $.99 per minute. The Whatgeeks tech support person was superb. He helped me through configuring security for a network with several versions of Windows and different speeds of network cards. Then he helped with another network misconfiguration. The tech was polite, informative, knowledgeable and efficient. What great customer service. Highly recommended.

New Orleans reconstruction money

Josh Marshall is following the story of how the billions of dollars for Katrina reconstruction is being funnelled toward companies tied to the Bush Administration

What FEMA promised

Why didn't local government have enough stockpiles for four days post-emergency?

This first-hand report from the Hurricane Pam exercise says that FEMA promised the locals quick and massive response.

They promised to have 1,000,000 bottles of water per day coming into affected areas within 48 hours. They promised massive prestaging with water, ice, medical supplies and generators. Anything that was needed, they would have either in place as the storm hit or ready to move in immediately after. All it would take is a phone call from local officials to the state, who would then call FEMA, and it would be done.

And why did FEMA seem to spend much of its energy turning down offers of supplies?

There were contracts-in-place with major vendors across the country and prestaging areas were already determined (I'll have more to say about this later, but this is one reason FEMA has rejected large donation and turned back freelance shipments of water, medical supplies, food, etc: they have contracts in place to purchase those items, and accepting the same product from another source could be construed as breach of contract, and could lead to contract cancellation, thus removing a reliable source of product from the pool of available resources."

AA Batteries save lives

I'd been wondering about the horrible on-the-ground communications problems in Louisiana, and this article in fcw.com (Federal Computer Week) has the answer.

The handheld radios used by first responders in the New Orleans area use cellphone-style batteries that require electricity to recharge. Without new power, they ran out of battery and were out of touch. Fcw.com reports that the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) in Boise, Idaho, sent in radio systems that run on AA batteries.

Something as simple as radios that run on AA batteries can save lives.

Also, the different parishes used different frequencies to communicate, and local groups used different frequencies than the feds, according to this Wall Street Journal article. There was a sort of central switchboard that could patch together communications across the systems, but it was knocked out during the storm.

Upgrading to AA-battery radios with compatible frequencies is just the sort of unglamorous maintenance expense that is easy to avoid in tight budgetary times. And a seemingly little thing that is infinitely expensive in an emergency.

Update: another reason for the breakdown in communications -- apparently the National Guard's backup generators were in Iraq. Need to re-find the source that reported this.

How to rebuild New Orleans

Worldchanging.com has creative and inspirational ideas about how to rebuild New Orleans to make it less vulnerable. Also some good ideas from Ergosphere. Both articles suggest razing neighborhoods that are destroyed and filling in to a much higher level. Ergosphere suggests building with stilts and jackable frames, so houses can be raised as the ground sinks. The WorldChanging article suggests using fitting new buildings with solar panels, which would be too expensive to retrofit but would be reasonable and financeable in new construction.

Dennis Hastert has backed away from his suggestion not to rebuild New Orleans. A strategy to continously rebuild coastal property in Florida and abandon New Orleans seems suspiciously like natural-disaster-enabled redistricting.

Give thanks for infrastructure

There's a traditional Jewish blessing said after using the bathroom, expressing awe at the complexity of the human body and thanks that we can rely on this system. Atheists and agnostics can search-and-replace God with Nature.

"Blessed are You, Hashem, our G-d, King of the universe, Who formed man with wisdom and created within him many openings and many hollows (cavities). It is obvious and known before Your Throne of Glory that if but one of them were to be ruptured or if one of them were to be blocked it would be impossible to survive and to stand before You (even for a short period of time). Blessed are You, Hashem, Who heals all flesh and acts wonderously."

The Katrina disaster shows how much we have become utterly dependent on manmade systems of wondrous complexity:

* water
* sewer
* electricity
* telecommunications
* natural gas
* gasoline

When these sytems are disrupted as with Katrina our civilization dissolves. This is incentive to give thanks every day for systems that we take for granted and for their maintainers. Every day there is light and water and indoor plumbing and net access is a day to be thankful.

......

And to do what we can to prepare for disruptions. What caused the nearly complete failure of the on-the-ground communications in New Orleans, among police, emergency workers, and flooded areas? Was it a lack of extra batteries and generators? The military has communications systems for wartime. What was NO missing?

DRM Sucks, iTunes division

I'm moving files to a new computer. I transfered the files over the network from the old computer. iTunes isn't recognizing the music files. These are supposed to be the instructions. Maybe I need to copy it to a CD, instead of moving on the network?

DRM just makes things difficult for customers.