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January 31, 2005
Who will speak for us?
Here's what the always-excellent telecom analyst Anna-Maria Kovacs has to say about the regulatory implications of the AT&T-SBC deal:
"As Congress works on rewriting the Telecom Act and as the FCC moves ahead on a whole host of issues ranging from inter-carrier compensation to the treatment of broadband and VoIP, the debate will be very different without AT&T. The major voices in Washington will be those of the ILECs, the cable companies, and the content providers."
It's a sobering thought. The counterweights to the incumbent local phone companies will be... the incumbent local cable companies, and every user's friend, the content industry. That doesn't seem to leave any industry forces pushing for competition, innovation, or user empowerment. To the contrary, it makes it easier to foresee regulatory and Congressional deals in which both sides work to keep users and new entrants at bay.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 6:19 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 27, 2005
Telecom Thinkability
Back when I was at the FCC, then-Chairman Reed Hundt famously torpedoed a rumored BellSouth-AT&T deal by calling it "unthinkable" for regulators. Now comes word that SBC, one of the other Bell companies, is in serious talks to acquire AT&T.
We'll see. The industry has changed a lot in the past few years, but I'm still skeptical something like this will actually happen. Given the progress AT&T has made in transforming itself into a data-centric company, it would also be a bit of a shame if it were swallowed up by one of the Bells. On the regulatory side, much may depend on who replaces Michael Powell at the FCC. It won't be an antitrust crusader, of course, but in this game, degrees of emphasis matter.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 11:46 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Fun with "GPS-enabled digital videocamera-cum-terabyte server rigs"
A9's visual local search functionality looks very cool. Check out John Battelle's Business 2.0 write-up.
Amazon has an uphill battle with A9, given the popularity of existing search engines like Google and Yahoo!, but out-of-the-box innovations like this are exactly what it will take to make headway.
And who knows, maybe Googlezon isn't so far-fetched.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 8:27 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 26, 2005
A billion infomercials, all the time
Seth Godin talks about how video P2P will merge TV and advertising into something new. And, contrary to what you might think, all those informercials would be a positive development.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 11:44 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
BusinessWeek Online column on the digital back channel
The first installment of my semi-regular column on BusinessWeek Online is now up. It looks at the power of the digital back-channel, tying together blogs, social networking, recommendations, the long tail, digital video recorders, cameraphones... and an Indonesian volcano.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 10:04 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 25, 2005
Good point, bad metaphor
ZDNet: "Ultimately, the convergence trend is not a revolution but a gradual migration. And like wildebeest migrating across the Serengeti plains, they may find themselves in some surprising places along the way."
(If you can't tell, that's from a piece about voice over IP in the enterprise.)
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 10:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
We'll Always Have Manhattan
Heading back from a day of meetings in New York. Other than Amtrak-induced travel delays, it was great.
I love the vitality that oozes up from the streets of Manhattan (and down into the subways as well, apparently!). Having lived in New York for four years, I don't feel like a visitor any more when I, well, visit there, which makes all the difference in the world.
Back again next week, for a dinner and a conference....
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 5:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Rise of the VideoNet
The Implications of Video P2P on Network Usage [PDF] is a paper I presented at a conference last fall, which will be included in a book from the Columbia Institute for Tele-Information. I point out that, to a first approximation, video peer-to-peer file sharing isn't just a significant use of the Internet; it is the Internet. And it's going to get much, much bigger in the years ahead.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 4:29 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Grokster and the Future of the Net
The Supreme Court will hear the appeal of the Grokster litigation on March 29. The case deals directly with the legality of distributed peer-to-peer file-shsaring services, but its ramifications could go much further. Like the landmark 1997 case striking down the Communications Decency Act, the Grokster decision could be a bellweather for Internet freedom... or it could push the Net down a much less open, less innovative, less dynamic, and less valuable path.
Several amicus briefs were just filed in the case. Ed Felten gives a good summary of what's wrong the with anti-P2P view:
"These briefs are caught between nostalgia for a past that never existed, and false hope for future technologies that won't do the job."
Like it or not, much more than the future of the music industry is at stake here. In fact, business models for recorded music are are among the least likely things to change depending on how Grokster comes out. The P2P horse is out of the barn, but so is the licensed digital music horse, thanks to iTunes, Real Rhapsody, Mercora, and other innovators. I'm much more worried about what the case might mean for the Net as a whole.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 4:18 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 24, 2005
We're going to Jacksonville!
Wow, what a game. We suffered through wind chills below zero, but it was worth it! The Eagles convincingly beat the Falcons, and for the first time in 24 years, they are going to the Superbowl.
We picked a good year to get season tickets! Here's a photo, taken with my Treo, of the scene on the field after the game. I didn't bring my regular digital camera because I was worried it would freeze.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 9:11 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 23, 2005
Morning in blizzardville
Well, here's what it looks like outside this morning.
We got about a foot of snow, with another 1-2" predicted this morning. Soon, we'll suit up in our layers and layers of clothing to brave the elements at the Eagles game. We better win!
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 10:09 AM | TrackBack
January 22, 2005
Let it snow
They are now predicting 12-18 inches of snow here in the Philadelphia area. We're hanging out at my in-laws' house -- here's the view out the front window right now.
Tomorrow, we're going to watch the Eagles play in the NFC championship game. The snow is supposed to stop before game time, but it's going to be cold. Like, 18 degrees with a wind-chill below zero. Brrr. Are we crazy or what?
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 2:38 PM | TrackBack
"We have no other alternative. We have to do this to survive."
That's Hossein Eslambolchi, CTO of AT&T, describing the company's transformation into a data-centric service provider. He's right. Go read the New York Times article for a good perspective on how telecom is changing. As I've written, AT&T has a fighting change to emerge from the turmoil as a leader, largely thanks to smart executives like Hossein and CEO Dave Dorman. But it faces a tough road in getting there. Turning around a big, proud company like AT&T is never easy, and it's especially challenging in an environment like this.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 8:31 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Exeem
Exeem, designed as a next-generation BitTorrent for distributed P2P video sharing, is now available in public beta. Given the huge (and under-appreciated) impact that BitTorrent is already having on Internet traffic, Exeem could be quite significant. As I point out in the paper linked in the prior sentence, the Internet is already, to a first approximation, primarily a P2P video distribution network.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 8:26 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Pulver launches Bellster
It worked for music file sharing... can it work for telephony?
VOIP pioneer Jeff Pulver has announced Bellster, a peer-to-peer non-commercial phone network. You allow people to make VOIP calls that terminate through your public switched telephone network connection, in return for the ability to do the same.
This will be an interesting experiment to watch.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 8:22 AM | TrackBack
Whole-house VOIP: It's about time
I've been waiting for a product like this. It's an IP phone with built-in wireless connectivity to remote handsets. That means your voice over broadband connection will automatically support phones throughout your house, a key element in making residential VOIP ubiquitous.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 8:20 AM | TrackBack
January 21, 2005
Powell on Powell
This is how Michael Powell sums up his time as FCC Chairman:
"During my tenure, we worked to get the law right in order to stimulate innovative technology that puts more power in the hands of the American people, giving them greater choices that enrich their lives."
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 2:57 PM | TrackBack
A Farewell to Powell
So Michael Powell is reportedly going to announce his resignation as FCC Chairman today. This is a surprise to no one in the telecom policy world. Powell has been Chairman longer than most, and has taken quite a few arrows in his back. It was always assumed he'd leave shortly after Bush's re-election.
I've known Powell since he first joined the Commission, in late 1997. I have great respect for him as a person, and as a policy-maker. As I've written, he isn't the deregulatory ideologue that so many make him out to be. Even I must admit, though, that his record as FCC Chairman is mixed. Many important proceedings, including the one covering voice over IP and crucial spectrum policy reforms, reamin unfinished.
I wish Michael well. It will be interesting to see what he does next; I'm confident we haven't heard the last of him. And I'm very curious who will be his successor. Given the politics of FCC confirmations, it could be months before someone is confirmed. It's unlikely that the next FCC Chairman will make any radical changes in direction, although they will bring a different style and areas of focus to the position. Even Powell's critics have to admit that he knows, and cares a lot about, emerging technologies. I hope the same can be said of his replacement.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 12:42 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Halo 2 was the Fourth Highest Grossing Movie of 2004
So says Mitch Ratcliffe. And the latest Grand Theft Auto game was a bigger seller than Halo!
I was having this conversation with a friend yesterday. The line between console games and movies is going away. In five years, Hollywood will count box office receipts of games along with theatrical films. And there will be all sorts of hybrid releases that blur the line further.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 8:50 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Finding Nemo in DRM standards?
So, a group of consumer electronics companies creates a digital rights management standard called Marlin, after creating a related alliance called Coral. For those of you who haven't seen the movie, those are the two parents of the eponymous Nemo in the hit Pixar film. That's a bit odd, considering that Disney (which distributed the film), isn't part of the group, and 20th Century Fox (a competitor) has endorsed it. I guess someone involved has a sense of humor.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 8:47 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Unwiring the Inaguaration
Open Park, a non-profit that I co-founded, is working to cover the Mall in Washington DC with free WiFi wireless connectivity. This week, my co-founders set up a special hotspot along the parade route of the Presidential Inauguration. The Open Park Inauguration blog has photos and reports from yesterday's big event.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 8:43 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Honey, I shrunk the camera
My old Canon S330 camera on the left, and my new Canon SD300 on the right. (Taken with my Treo smartphone.)
The kicker? The smaller one has four times the resolution (4mp vs. 2mp), has a bigger LCD, is better in every other regard... and cost less than the big one did 3 years ago.
We're used to the Moore's Law cycle of increasing price-performance for personal computers. Double the speed, or half the price, every 18 months. We're not used to the same curve for consumer electronics. VCRs, film cameras, and TVs get better year-to-year, but not like this. For the first time, the technical guts of my camera are functionally equivalent to the technical guts of my PC, benefitting from the same process improvements and economies of scale.
I don't think anyone has quite fully processed the implications of Moore's Law for consumer electronics. It means a different upgrade cycle for vendors, and different expectations for customers. And, it means that the digital camera I buy in 2008 (assuming I wait that long!) will not only be less than a quarter-in thick, it will run rings around my current one. Then again, by 2008 the camera embedded in my mobile phone will probably be as good as the digital camera I bought this year. I may never buy a standalone camera again.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 8:26 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 19, 2005
Flickring with photos
I finally had a chance to upload some photos to Flickr, a great online social photo sharing platform that I've been following for a while. My photo page is here. I'll be adding more stuff soon.
The cool thing about Flikr is that it's extensible. Other services can tap into the content and do interesting things with it, using RSS syndication and an API. Technorati's tags feature is one example.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 8:07 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 17, 2005
Freedom to Connect conference
My friend David Isenberg just announced F2C, aka Freedom to Connect, a conference on network connectivity, economics, applications and policy.
More specifically, as he writes:
"F2C is where communications policy meets networking technology, network economics, networked applications, and network construction and operation. F2C is dedicated to the proposition that strong networks build strong democracies, and vice versa."
It will be held March 30-31 in suburban Washington, DC. David has lined up some great people to participate, and I'm planning to be there as well. The issues couldn't be more important or more timely.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 4:03 PM | TrackBack
Bottom-up semantic web
Once upon a time, there was structured markup, and there was hypertext, and they were good.
Or at least, they seemed good to those who cared. Which was a small but sophisticated community, working on things like SGML and Xanadu. Hypertext systems were complicated and centrally maintained. After all, that was the only way to make everything work.
And then, along came a Brit working in Switzerland, named Tim Berners-Lee. He took those beautiful hypertext systems, and he broke them. In their place, he created a little tool called the World Wide Web.
The earth shook. (Or, so we can imagine in hindsight.)
For the Web was very good. Very, very good. Sure, you could put a link on a Web page to a site that didn't exist, or to a site that stopped existing at some later point. Anyone who clicked on that link would get an ugly "404 not found" error. No matter. The Web still worked. And because there was no central system to prevent errors and collisions, it was suddenly far easier for anyone to publish on the Web. Before long, we had Yahoo!, Amazon.com, eBay, Mathir, an expensive sock puppet, the Google IPO, and various and sundry other epochal developments.
So far, this story is a paraphrase of things Clay Shirky has written far more eloquently here, here, and probably elsewhere.
The irony, of course, is that Berners-Lee has lately spent much of his energy into something called the semantic Web. (Clay nails this one too, as does Cory Doctorow.) The semantic Web looks for all the world like the bad, old pre-Web top-down approach to structured markup. The core idea is a good one: adding structure to the Web would make the vast assemblage of information on the global network even more powerful. If computers knew that a certain page was talking about books, or that a certain photo was of a new Macintosh computer, or any number of other structural relationships, they could do wonderful things with that information. Google and other tools have shown that we can get further than expected with brute force and clever algorithms operating on unstructured text. But semantic structure is still the next great frontier for the Web.
Well, guess what. It's happening. Just not in the way the Semantic Web proponents have been advocating.
The latest and greatest example of the bottom-up semantic Web in action is tags. Tags are user-created labels for objects on the Web, such as pages and photos. Using a tool such as Del.icio.us (for bookmark links) or Flikr for photos, anyone can assign tags. Once objects are tagged, users can search on those tags and retrieve human-categorized results. Technorati recently introduced tag search across blog posts, del.icio.us bookmarks, and Flikr photos, with the ability to tag other types of objects as well.
What's cool about this is that, in true Web spirit, it simply ignores the biggest problems with a decentralized system. I might think something belongs under a "politics" tag that you categorize differently. Or, different users will tag the same item in inconsistent ways. Not to mention that, to take a trivial example, "blogs," "weblogs," and "Web logs" might all refer to the same thing, but be treated as distinct tags. So what. Tags work well enough to be useful, despite not being perfect. Just like the Web vs. SGML, just like Ethernet vs. token ring networking, the lightweight, decentralized solution wins.
And it gets better.
The exciting part of tags is that they fit together with mechanisms to build open programmatic interfaces to Web resources. A tag category, for example, can easily become an RSS syndication feed. And more. Lots of smart people, and many startups, are coming up with intruiging applications of these new capabilities.
The semantic Web is dead. Long live the semantic web.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 3:24 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
January 16, 2005
E-A-G-L-E-S Eagles!!!
Ahhh, football. Nothing like gettin your aggression out with 68,000 of your best friends. My throat is horse, I'm tired, and I'm still thawing out from 3 hours outside in sub-30 degree weather... but I'll go to bed happy tonight. Eagles 27, Vikings 14. One more win and my team is in the Superbowl.
We'll be there again next Sunday afternoon. I can't wait.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 8:47 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
January 2, 2005
Happy New Year
I know, I know, another long blog hiatus. Not a way to end -- or start -- a year. What can I say? I've been busy.
When you're a student, the time in between semesters is a vacation. When you're faculty, it's often the most intense time of the year. You assume you can get "real work" done then, so you make a long list of things to finish before school starts up again. While I wasn't teaching the past two weeks, I wrote a research paper and did a good deal planning work for Supernova, not to mention grading 58 bluebooks. It was a bit of a sprint, but it's done. Tomorrow I head out to LA with my family, to spend some time with my parents.
I'm really looking forward to 2005.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 10:23 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack