The Changing of the Rules.

"The informationalized businesses often become worth more than the parents from which they sprang in the first place.

That is why American Airlines makes more money from its SABRE reservations systems than by flying people around on airplanes,

- Why Ford makes more money financing cars than making and selling them, and

- Why Marriott makes more money from management contracts to run hotels than from owning the brick and mortar real estate."

"You live in the first half of the information economy. By 2020, it will transform itself into something new. As the second half of this economy unfolds, bandwidth will become virtually infinite. Sound and image will completely pervade the Internet, turning every Web site into a potential television network. This has yet to happen, but it will. Change is the only unchanging rule."

"Many businesses now make more money from their information services than they do from their core enterprises."

"In the future, infotech and biotech will overlap and many biological processes will be digitized. This will change the nature of information... 

Just as it was difficult in the 1950s and ‘60s to imagine that computers would change everything, it might be hard today to imagine biotech’s impact — but it will happen."

Comments from the book,
"Lessons From the Future" by Stan Davis,
summarized by www.GetAbstract.com

High-Speed Wireless Is Here -- Sort Of...

It's official.  The first "2.5-generation" cellular phone system has hit the Seattle area in the guise of an AT&T Wireless GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) system, and it's expected to expand to Las Vegas and Portland, Oregon within the next two months.

The "sort of" is because initially, the only phone able to work with this service, a Motorola 7382i Timeport, is limited to a maximum of 40 kilobits/second according to the July 19 PCWorld.com (http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,55623,tk,dn071901X,00.asp).  And, it's "sort of" because AT&T doesn't yet have roaming agreements in place with other carriers; that means that these phones' voice and data will go mute outside of their cities.

But these early limitations will surely pass, with the system eventually supporting a real-world data rate of about 100 kilobits/second, and as PDAs gain the ability to reach out and touch the Internet at these higher speeds.  Then, about a year from now, AT&T plans to upgrade this system to EDGE (Enhanced Data for GSM Evolution) technology, which should raise the peak data rate to a respectable 388 kilobits/second.  A year later, they then expect to convert to WCDMA (Wideband Code Division Multiple Access) technology, which should further improve the data rate.

What will this faster data service cost?  Initially, $50 for 400 minutes of voice, and 1 megabyte of data.

Not Home Alone.

Another carrier, Verizon, plans to have its 3G network up and running in New York before the end of this year; Sprint PCS plans its first U.S. 3G city by September, expanding to six others before the year is out; and DoCoMo also plans its first U.S. implementation before this New Year comes and goes.  Of course, none of these carriers are committing to what their real-world, end-user data rates will be... (http://www.zdnet.com/enterprise/stories/wireless/0,11928,5095085,00.html)

So -- these initial 40 kilobits/second implementations may not sound too impressive.  But if you need mobile data, they should be a lot better than today's typical 14.4 kilobits/second.  And they do represent some very real first steps along the path towards broadband data in our pockets. 

To Trip The Light Fantastic.

But these 2.5G, and later 3G wireless systems, may prove to be just the beginning.  Some of the next steps towards ever-higher speed wireless broadband could be, well, almost out of this world!  For example, consider this NASA and SkyTower Telecommunications prototype:

This fanciful solar powered flying wing is a real prototype airborne communications platform with a wingspan longer than a 747's -- but it's only six feet tall!  It's designed to loiter at 100,000 feet (a bit more than twice as high as you'll fly on your next trip), it's controlled by an on-board Macintosh, and it will carry communications gear to provide wireless broadband data at up to 125 megabits/second.  (http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,2803563,00.html)

But why not just use our tried and true satellites?  One reason is cost; this plane is estimated to cost $10 million, compared to a satellite's $200 million.  And the other is latency -- the speed-of-light delay that introduces significant lag to today's geosynchronous communications satellites that sit 23,000 miles high, rather than the planes' mere nineteen miles above the ground.

Of course this isn't the only "high flying" plan to beat the bandwidth blues.  Angel Technologies has already test flown it's manned HALO plane,

which will fly "tag team" with its sister at about 55,000 feet to provide 24-hour broadband coverage to a city.  (http://www.angeltechnologies.com/)

And then there's the blimp set, perhaps best known by Sky Station International's initial work.

They envision this lighter than air communications platform station-keeping 70,000 feet above a city as it provides wireless broadband to 7,500 square miles. (http://www.skystation.com/faq.html)

Pervasive Internet Access Is Coming.

And there are as many more ideas as there are innovative people, such as the 288 Low Earth Orbit Satellite (LEOS) system proposed by Teledesic, which could provide complete global coverage with low latency through relatively inexpensive satellites, yielding very high bandwidth of 64-megabits/second downstream and 2 megabits/second upstream!  (http://www.teledesic.com/tech/tech.htm) 

Because of these examples and more, through one means or another (or through many), I expect relatively pervasive wireless broadband to become a reality.  Eventually.  And that will change a LOT of rules.

It certainly won't be a fast, or a painless, or an obvious road to pocket broadband.  But 25 years ago, when my mobile phone took up most of the trunk of my car, few people could have imagined the tiny StarTac phone that now keeps me in-touch by voice as it gets lost in my pocket.  Today, I can envision a not too distant future when we simply "expect" our pocket "communicating computing appliances" to be high speed, always-on portals to the Internet, and to our world.  And that will be a very interesting time, indeed...

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Storage Update.

Half A Gigabyte In Your Pocket?

That's what Intel has in store for us, and they're pursuing several new memory technologies to make this a reality (they hope) within just a few years.  According to the July 12 ZDNet News (http://www.zdnet.com/zdnn/stories/news/0,4586,5094037,00.html), the likely candidates will force us to learn some new acronyms, such as: PFRAM (Polymer Ferroelectric RAM, which is "plastic memory," where a special polymer is melded with a CMOS chip); OUM (Ovonics Unified Memory, similar in principal to what makes a rewritable CD work); and MRAM (Magnetic RAM, which retains its memory in tiny magnetic domains).

The goal is to come up with memory that is as fast as current "main memory," sips slowly at the power straw, and packs huge amounts of memory into tiny spaces -- so much so that a revolutionary, rather than a mere evolutionary increase in the amount of memory in portable devices, might spawn completely new devices and new services. 

How might our PDA or cell phone, or our pocket music/video player, be different if it could hold 500 megabytes of data?  We may get to find out!

Or, How About TEN Gigabytes In That Same Space?

This $599 device from Serial Systems (http://www.mineterapin.com/terapin/index.htm) plans to put a ten gigabyte "server" right in our pockets!  If we plug it into a LAN wherever we go, our work files, digital multimedia files, and whatever else we care to tout around will be instantly accessible.  If things go as Serial has planned, this should be available very soon.

Or, How About 100 Gigabytes In Our Notebooks?

Notebooks with tens of gigabytes of data on their Lilliputian 2.5-inch disk drives are now common.  But suppose we need more storage, such as for digital movies to keep us entertained on a flight to Australia, or for carrying huge product and customer databases?  Reader Jamie Walker points out that a recent development from Fujitsu may make 100 gigabyte notebooks a reality -- next year!

Specifically, according to the Aug. 23 CNN.com (http://www.cnn.com/2001/TECH/ptech/08/23/fujitsu.disk.recording.idg/index.html), Fujitsu is now able to store 106 gigabits on each square inch of disk surface, which is more than three-times the density recently announced by Seagate and Toshiba.  This data density rivals IBM's "Pixie Dust" (http://researchweb.watson.ibm.com/resources/news/20010518_pixie_dust.shtml) -- but Fujitsu expects to commercialize it a year sooner.  And they believe that they'll eventually be able to triple this density, to around 300 gigabits per square inch.

Or, How About FAR More...?

My first hard drive, in 1984, was a then-huge 20 megabytes.  Today, a ten gigabyte pocket or a 100 gigabyte notebook might seem equally large.  But if current research by Shouheng Sun makes it out of IBM's research labs, ten gigabytes may seem like child's play (indeed, a mere 10 gigabytes of storage might well find its way into children's' toys.)  Because Shouheng has come up with an iron and platinum material that blasts through the "superparamagnetic limit" -- the theoretical blockade that says that the "dots" of magnetic storage can only get so small before they lose their ability to store and give up information.

Shouheng has used his new material to create 4 nanometer magnetic particles (which are less than half the size of those commonly used today).  And that translates into half-terabyte hard drives by 2006.  By 2011, this could lead to single platter disk drives holding 10 terabits on each square inch, and it might improve towards a theoretical limit of 60 terabits per square inch.

But perhaps even more interesting (and a hint of things to come), is how Shouheng builds the regular arrays of these tiny magnetic particles onto the disk -- he doesn't! 

According to a Sept. 4 PC Magazine report brought to our attention by reader Gerard Wenham, he "has discovered that with the right mixture of chemicals, the molecules are self-assembling, aligning themselves neatly in the service of data storage."  

As this "self assembly" evolves, it will change ALL the rules.

Just The Beginning.

"Smart things," with incredible amounts of information built-in (and with wireless links to the information left out), may soon become the norm.  And when we routinely carry around more information than fills a good-sized library, the opportunities will be fascinating!

Road Trip -- To Mars?

Finally, it seems that NASA is offering to take us on a road trip! 

Well, not exactly "us," but certainly our names!  At http://spacekids.hq.nasa.gov/2003/ , we can fill out a form, and the name we enter, along with many others, will be encoded onto a CD that will travel the highways and byways of Mars; it will be carried inside a Martian Rover on its 2003 Mission to Mars.  This rover will be relatively autonomous, wandering 100 meters per day during the 90-day mission on the surface, carrying our names hither and yon. 

Rather a neat way to drum up public interest in this project.  And, if the Martians ever decide to visit US, well, now they'll know whom to contact first! 

Come to think of it, I wonder if NASA will let us include our Email addresses, in case the Martians want to log on to the forthcoming Interplanetary Internet... (http://www.ietf.org/internet-drafts/draft-irtf-ipnrg-arch-00.txt)

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