This article provides another example of the "no free lunch" principle as it applies to community wireless. Sprint is having trouble rolling out its WiMax service offering because of backhaul costs (you need fiber to the towers to provide adequate bandwidth) and subscribers are getting about 4 megabits of bandwidth--exactly what I was hearing years ago from knowledgeable wireless experts.

WiMax is an excellent set of technologies that will eventually replace most WiFi, but wireless is only a partial solution for community broadband.

A study by a watchdog e-voting group in Maryland called SaveOurVotes found that in that state, the switch to electronic voting machines raised the cost of elections by 866%.

But wait, there's more! The counties are still paying off a $67 million dollar loan needed to purchase the machines, even though the machines were found to have serious security flaws and have had to abandoned in favor of the older and more secure optical scanning equipment--which is much less expensive.

The only good thing about this story is that the state did eventually do the right thing and revert to a more secure voting system. But the taxpayers still have to pick up the tab for a lot of bad decisions.

Find Your Spot is an online relocation service that helps business owners and prospective employees find a place to live that matches personal preferences like the weather, arts & culture, recreation, education, the cost of living, health care, and the local economy.

Here is a key quote from the FAQ portion of the site:

Thanks to advances in technology and the economy, more people than ever are choosing where to live based on the factors that really matter to them — the weather, schools, recreational activities, cost of living, and general quality of life.

Notice that they are saying job seekers and relocating businesses are interested in personal and life style factors, not the availability of water and sewer in the industrial park. A community that is offered as a pick is going to be much more likely to get someone to move there if that community has a lively community portal, lots of recently updated community and civic Web sites, and attractive government, Chamber, and economic development Web sites.

Who in your community is responsible for the long term strategy of ensuring the community or region looks great on the Web? What specific activities are they doing regularly to ensure a job searcher or a relocating business thinks, "This community looks like a great place to live and to work?"

I've been playing around with my new Nokia N95 for the last couple of weeks and quite amazed with its ability to stream live video from the phone to the Internet. Like last weekend when I streamed from the Smithsonian Kite Festival; for around 30 minutes I gave a tour of the festivities and took questions from users as they watched the stream over the Internet.

I've also spent some time talking it up with colleagues at NPR, brainstorming the possibilities of what would happen if reporters used these phones - or if their sources did. The example that keeps coming to mind regarding the latter scenario is the rioting in Tibet. While some video has leaked out, it's been limited and often delayed. Imagine if the protestors were able to webcast their protests - and the ensuing crackdowns - live over their phones using China's GSM network? The video would stream live and get crossposted via tools like YouTube, Seesmic and Twitter, spreading the content around so it can't be snuffed.

But that raises an obvious question - how long could protestors or dissidents get away with such activities before getting caught? If you were running software on your phone to send live video over a 3G network, like I've been doing on my N95, you'd think it wouldn't take too much effort on the part of the mobile provider and/or government to figure out which phone was sending the signal and its precise location.

So that got me wondering: is there a mobile equivalent of Tor?

For those of you who aren't familiar with it, TOR is a software project that helps Internet users remain anonymous. Running the TOR software on your computer causes your online communications to bounce through a random series of relay servers around the world. That way, there's no easy way for authorities to track you or observe who's visiting banned websites. For example, let's say you're in Beijing and you publish a blog the authorities don't like. If you just used your PC as usual and logged into your publishing platform directly, they could follow your activities and track you down. With Tor, you hop-scotch around: your PC might connect to a server in Oslo, then Buenos Aires, then Miami, then Tokyo, then Greece before it finally connects to your blogging platform. Each time you did this, it would be a different series of servers. That way, it's really difficult for authorities to trace your steps.

As dissidents and protestors embrace mobile devices for conducting civil disobedience or recording human rights violations, it would make sense for Tor and projects like it to adapt to their needs. That way, if that hypothetical protestor in Lhasa tried to stream live video over Qik, post a photo to Flickr or record a mobcast via over Utterz, they'd lessen the chance of getting caught so easily.

Does anyone know if there's a mobile equivalent of Tor, relaying voice connections or data from one network to another, anonymizing the user of the phone? If not, is it technically feasible? How might one go about creating one?

In a just released Forbes survey, Blacksburg, Virginia is ranked tenth in the nation as one of the best small places to live and to work. If you live in a small community, it is worth spending some time reviewing the Forbes study. Of the nine factors they use to rank communities, four of the nine are related directly to quality of life. These factors are Culture and Leisure, Crime Rate, Educational Attainment, and Cost of Living.

Among the other factors, Cost of Doing Business is one that any community can work on quickly. Our work at Design Nine takes us to small communities throughout the United States, and one of the most glaring problems I see over and over again is the lack of good "Class A" office space in smaller towns and regions. Too many communities are still trying to bring retail back to Main Street, when they should be rehabbing storefronts and second floor space for small businesses and entrepreneurs.

When Norton, Virginia rehabbed an old downtown hotel for high tech start ups, including affordable fiber to the building, Main Street blossomed as the office workers in the building shopped and ate downtown. The spacious lobby of the building regularly hosts community dinners, weddings, and special events, so the investment does double duty--how many weddings have been held in the typical industrial park incubator building?

The biggest mistake a small community can make these days is to put too much emphasis on business and industrial parks far from traditional downtowns--by making modest investments in high quality office space in traditional downtowns, you get a much bigger community and economic development impact. And as always, fiber has to be part of the mix.

Sprint is touting a new Samsung phone that is very similar to the iPhone. One of the most notable differences is that the new phone runs on Sprint's EVDO data network, giving it email and Web access speeds 4-5 times faster than AT&T's EDGE data network. Apple has always maintained that it used the slower network to provide better battery life. But this new phone is a good thing; competition always brings lower prices and more features, and this will force Apple and AT&T to get a more capable iPhone to market. Perhaps more importantly, it may force AT&T to improve both its voice and its data networks. The most common complaint I hear from iPhone users is that the AT&T network has poor coverage.

If you have not had a chance to try out an iPhone, stop in an Apple or AT&T store to take a look, especially at the Web and email features. The iPhone is truly revolutionary, and is just the first of an entirely new kind of mobile device that most of us will have within five years.

Recently, when we have had people over to house for dinner or when at someone else's home, I notice that a common topic of discussion is what is showing on YouTube. Everyone has a story about some usually goofy thing they saw recently on the video site. Anecdotally, several people have shared that they often just spend a little time in the evening goofing off on YouTube. This is usually followed by the admission they don't turn on the TV much anymore.

Communities who think that DSL and wireless services are adequate with respect to bandwidth are going to be very disappointed, as neither technology is capable of delivering large amounts of video to thousands or ten of thousands of residential customers, no matter what you read about the amazing abilities of WiMax to bring world peace, solve human aging, and deliver massive bandwidth to everyone at the same time. WiMax is a terrific technology that is much better than WiFi, but the amount of actual bandwidth that WiMax will actually be able to deliver to residential and business users is not going to support heavy IP-TV use (i.e. YouTube, movies on demand, TV show downloads, etc.). WiMax has the capability of reaching more premises by virtue of being able to get a signal over longer distances than WiFi. But as you extend the reach of a wireless signal, you also spread the amount of usable bandwidth over a larger number of subscribers, in most cases. This means the amount of per subscriber bandwidth may not increase significantly.

Wireless is part of a complete solution, but fiber is needed alongside it to meet the fast-growing video demands of residences and businesses.

Virgin Galactic, the space travel start up and spin off of Virgin Airlines, has teamed up with Google to start colonizing Mars. Google is supplying the financial muscle for the venture, and Virgin is contributing the work the firm has already done on their privately funded space vehicle. The two companies are already beginning to solicit team members willing to be part of the first Martian colony.

A lengthy discussion on SlashDot highlights a new tactic by Amazon. The book distribution giant is trying to muscle out other print on demand services by forcing authors who use print on demand to use Amazon's print on demand (POD) service or else--the "else" being Amazon won't list their book.

Amazon has every right to do this, but it will be interesting to see if this works in their benefit or not. It would appear that with this new approach, Amazon wants to be both book distributor and book publisher. The two are not necessarily compatible, and it is not clear to me that this heavy-handed tactic will work.

Authors who use POD are either "vanity" authors without any identifiable audience or have some valuable information with an identified niche audience. In both cases, marketing will be up to the author; Amazon is not going to be able to add any value here, so the author can just as easily use some other POD service. In the end, book buyers who have made a buying decision by landing on the author's Web site or through some other route are going to click on a link to make the purchase. Most buyers won't care if the link goes to Amazon or to some other POD service.

Today during my lunch break I streamed some live video over my N95 mobile phone from the Tidal Basin in Washington DC, home to the annual blossom of DC's famous cherry blossom trees. The first video didn't work so well - I had the video at such a high resolution the network crashed - but the second take worked like a charm. The video is about 16 minutes long, and features lots of cherry blossoms, some helicopters, and my disembodied voice talking about the history of cherry trees in DC. My wife Susanne and daughter Kayleigh even make a brief cameo - they were touring the cherry blossoms with my mother-in-law and I bumped into them near the FDR memorial. Enjoy! -andy

Just wanted to give all of you a head's up that I'll be on All Things Considered this Sunday, March 30. Host Andrea Seabrook got a kick out of all of the Bit Torrent analogies we came up with yesterday, so she figured she might as well have me on air to talk about them. I don't know the exact time I'll be on air, but it'll probably be in the middle of the show. It broadcasts in many places at 5pm ET on Sundays, so that would mean looking out for me between 5:20pm and 5:40pm ET, give or take. Check your local listings to see when it airs. If you can't figure out when it's airing locally, you can always check out the live stream offered by WAMU here in Washington DC, which also airs the show beginning at 5pm ET.

Thanks again to everyone who contributed analogies. When we recorded the segment I talked about several of them, but we'll have to wait and see what gets edited in or out. -andy

So I was leaving NPR to grab some lunch and I bumped into a colleague as I was exiting the elevator. She grabbed me for a moment and asked me, "If you had to explain Bit Torrent to a five-year-old, what analogy would you use?"

Apparently, she's working on a radio story about Bit Torrent, the peer-to-peer protocol created by my fellow TR35 alum Bram Cohen. Not that our target audience is made up of toddlers, but given how not all of them are necessarily tech-savvy, it makes sense to come up with an analogy that translates well to a broad audience.

Before we get to the analogies, here's a quick technical overview of what Bit Torrent is. Like I just mentioned, it's a protocol for enabling what's known as peer-to-peer software, which means that rather than downloading a piece of content from a single source, your employ software that checks in with other users within a network who may have bits and pieces of what you're looking for. So if what you wish to download is an hour-long video, the software checks for anyone that might have it. One person may have one section of the video, another person may have a second section, and so on. The software assembles the bits and pieces of the video from all the sources that have it, so eventually you download a complete copy of it for your own personal use. And because your computer is part of this file-sharing network, other users who seek out the same content can automatically download what you've assembled on your computer to their computers as well, share-and-share alike.

It's not terribly complicated, but would the average NPR listener be able to follow all of that without saying, "Huh?" Maybe, but maybe not. And so I get grabbed outside of the elevator by a colleague searching for a good analogy.

As I walked back and forth to lunch, I came up with two potential analogies, both of which take place in a rural setting.

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For those of you who have been wondering why Susanne has been getting sick so much over the last month that my mother-in-law has been staying with us to look after Kayleigh, I might as well spill the beans now. Susanne is pregnant again, due at the end of September!

This Monday was the beginning of her second trimester. That means she's 13 weeks along. We've known for almost two months but haven't advertised it too much given our history with difficult pregnancies. We were actually getting ready to shell out the bucks to begin IVF treatment when we found out she was pregnant. Talk about a pleasant surprise! Unfortunately, the surprise came with extreme morning sickness - so much so that Susanne lost over 15 pounds and had to be put on an IV and a medicine pump. The IV came out last month, and yesterday she removed the pump, so for the first time in six weeks, she's now wireless and untethered. She'll still have to take anti-nausea meds for a while longer, but the worst is over.

We're absolutely thrilled to be expecting another baby, and the timing couldn't be better, as we're in the process of buying a house in Silver Spring. We just accepted the seller's terms and are sending in a home inspector next week. If all goes well, we'll close the deal on April 28. Our second baby, our first home - talk about a momentous year! :-) -andy

I'm back in Austin, TX for a couple of days of NPR meetings, so last night I convinced my colleagues to make the 45-minute trek outside of the city to the Salt Lick, an old-time barbecue joint with some of the best BBQ in the area. While we waited for our table, I thought it would be a great occasion to break in my new Nokia N95 video phone. Using the streaming service Qik.com, I was able to stream a live video as I toured the barbecue pit, watching cooks slapping briskets onto the fire and slathering them with their tangy sauce. (I also managed to let the video keep recording after I thought I hit the stop button, so the end of the video is kinda funny.) This video is an archive of the live event.

As far as I'm concerned, being able to stream live video from a mobile phone to the Internet is an absolute game-changer. I'm hoping I can get some of these phones into the hands of NPR colleagues so they can test them out in the field, but imagine the possibilities when everyday people can press a button on their phones and start broadcasting. I keep thinking of the Tibetan protests that took place against the Chinese government, or the Burmese monk protests last year. In both cases, there was a limited pool of video available, and much of it came up after the fact. Imagine if a protestor - or a whole group of them - were able to broadcast what was going on around them in real time?

It's very much an extension of the mobcasting concept I advocated three years ago. Back then, I talked about using open source tools to allow protestors and citizen journalists to post audio and video to blogs and RSS feeds as events unfolded:

...A quick example: imagine a large protest at a political convention. During the protest, police overstep their authority and begin abusing protesters, sometimes brutally. A few journalists are covering the event, but not live. For the protestors and civil rights activists caught in the melee, the police abuses clearly need to be documented and publicized as quickly as possible. Rather than waiting for the handful of journalists to file a story on it, activists at the protest capture the event on their video phones -- dozens of phones from dozens of angles. Thanks to the local 3G (or community wi-fi) network, the activists immediately podcast the footage on their blogs. The footage gets aggregated on a civil rights website thanks to the RSS feeds produced by the podcasters' blogs. (Or perhaps they all podcast their footage directly to a centralized website, a la OneWorld TV but with an RSS twist.) This leads to coverage by bloggers throughout the blogosphere, which leads to coverage by the mainstream media, which leads to demands of accountability by the general public. That's mobcasting.

Back then, though, we were limited to somewhat crude mobile podcasting tools like Audlink.com and Audioblogger.com, both of which are now defunct. Today, we're seeing the deployment of new services that allow for near-real time audio and video posting, like Utterz and Kyte.tv. These services also incorporate social networking features that allow users to track each other's content, comment on it, and cross-post it to various social media sites, like Twitter or Facebook. And now with Qik, near-real time becomes actual real-time. Rather than waiting for you to finish recording your content before posting it from your phone, Qik streams it with just a 5-10 second delay. That's not so different than the delay you see in "live" broadcasts on TV news or radio.

In some ways, the term mobcasting is more appropriate than ever: groups of people using mobile phones in coordinated actions to cover an event without any easy way to censor them. It's both exhilarating and intimidating at the same time. It's just a matter of time before there's another government crackdown, police beating incident, voter intimidation or other incident that authorities wouldn't want the rest of us to see. But we will see it. Live. -andy

This New York Times article makes it clear that there is no free lunch for municipal wireless. There are still a lot of communities pursuing initiatives that cling to the idea that they can get a wireless provider to come in a build an extensive wireless network for free. These kinds of efforts have been and continue to fail, due to cost overruns, poor performance, and the lack of business-class services. Wireless is necessary as a mobile access technology, but it is not sufficient. Communities contemplating broadband investments should start with a careful planning effort that identifies the business and financial model early, before spending money on equipment.

An Australian wireless ISP who has operated a WiMax network for more than a year unleashed a blistering attack on the protocol, calling it a "disaster" and that it "failed miserably." Unfortunately, the article provides little detail on exactly what frequencies were used (WiMax is a catch all term for the protocol, which can use several different chunks of frequency spectrum). The interesting thing about the comments is that the firm is planning to deploy more traditional WiFi as part of their wireless network. This article illustrates that wireless systems are not a panacea, and that they have to designed and engineered carefully to get good performance.

The guy who built the toy offers some background:

Far from being a replacement for me, I was always right there with him enjoying his fun. And with all the troubles that I went through to build the ball machine, I still end up throwing more balls than that the machine could count! According to the computer, he played with the machine by himself only 3 times in his life.

I recently put this video on YouTube to keep alive my earlier memories of him and (hopefully) provide some "humorous distractions" for anyone that might drop by.

I wonder what the cat equivalent of this toy would be like?

Hat tip - BPP and Andrew Sullivan

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Photographed on the Red Line, approaching New York Avenue heading into Washington DC.

Today at the National Press Club, Professor Lawrence Lessig launched the Change Congress project. Created in conjunction with Joe Trippi, the project intends to employ the strengths of the Internet to end the impact of PACs and lobbyists on congressional policymaking. What's really fascinating about this initiative is that he's taking the lessons learned from creating the Creative Commons copyright initiative and applying it to political reform in a way that's never been done before.

In his speech, Lessig gave several examples of policy changes that should have taken place but didn't because of the influence of money, such as combating global warming or limiting the recommended allotment of sugar in our diets. These are policies that should have been no-brainers, but industry influence upended the process. He noted that when the country's forefathers talked about independence, it wasn't just about independence from Britain, but independence from improper influence as well. In that sense, he argued, their goal of achieving independence has failed.

But Lessig thinks it's still possible to remove this dependence between Congress and money once and for all. The Change Congress project will take a three-step approach to the issue.

First, he wants members of Congress and the public to go online and pledge their support for up to four different goals: no longer accepting money from lobbyists and PACs; banning earmarks; supporting public financing of campaigns; and achieving total transparency of how Congress works. Users will be able to do this in the same way you select a Creative Commons license for your website. Their website will have a form that lets you select which ones you support, and it'll generate a code you can put on your own site. This code will contain metadata driven by the semantic Web - essentially, a collection of URLs, each defining which of the policy goals you support. (update, 4:20pm: when I wrote this paragraph, the site's badge generator wasn't up and running yet, but now that it is, it seems that the code generated for users doesn't contain Semantic Web metadata yet. Update 4:37pm: I'm now told that Semantic Web metadata might be rolled into the badges very soon, possibly later this evening or tomorrow; a volunteer is working on the code and hopes they'll use it. -ac)

Embedding this code into your website, whether you're a policymaker, a candidate or a member of the public, will let them reach step number two: tracking who supports what. In the same way that search engines can pick up websites that employ different Creative Commons licenses, Change Congress will be able to pick up which sites support each of the four policy goals. They'll then be able to map out where support is strongest and where it's weakest. Then, they'll deploy crowdsourcing, just like on Wikipedia, to get an army of volunteers delving into the details to see who's just pledged support and who's actually supporting the cause in measurable ways. This information, too, will be mapped for all to see and scrutinize.

Step number three will be to employ these tools for raising money. The public will be able to make small donations - even just five or 10 dollars - to candidates that share the same policy reform beliefs as they do. This will allow for grassroots fundraising to take place, not unlike Emily's List or the Obama campaign. Taken all together, he describes his project as a "Silicon Valley approach" to policy reform.

Lessig admitted there will be naysayers, particularly those who feel there are other problems more important that reforming Congress and the flow of money. To them, he gave the example of the alcoholic. An alcoholic faces many problems - loss of family, employment, health, etc - but none of them can be solved until the underlying problem - dependence on alcohol - is addressed first. To Lessig, before we can solve all the major policy issues of our day, we must first eliminate Congress' dependence on money and outside influence. Once this can be done, the real work of implementing important policy solutions can take place. Harnessing the power of the Web and its seemingly endless community of concerned citizens, he may just be on to something here. -andy

I never thought I'd see an NPR reference in a so-called 419 fraud email scam, but apparently there's now a fraud scheme making its way around that pretends to be "the Joan B. Kroc Foundation." Kroc, you may recall, was the widow of McDonalds restaurant magnate Ray Kroc who left more than $200 million to National Public Radio in her will. The scam claims to be doling out cash to nonprofit groups. If you respond, they'll end up demanding a hefty processing fee or even direct access to your bank accounts.

Here's the text of the email:

Subject: Your Grant.

JOAN B. KROC FOUNDATION
Registered in England & Wales (No. 2826074) 15 High Street, London, NW8 7NG (UK) United Kingdom
====================================
Tel/Fax: +44 703 1935 095
====================================
Dear Sir/ Madam,

We wish to inform you that the above foundation has short-listed you for the grant of US$550,000.00 for your humanitarian/organizational activities; this grant is in recognition of your programmes and activities. Mrs. Kroc, who died on October 12, 2003, at age 75, left $1.91 billion to 10 organizations.She was the widow of Ray A. Kroc, the founder of the McDonald's Corporation. Her gifts were: $1.5billion to the Salvation Army, in Alexandria, Va., to construct and endow up to 50 recreational and educational facilities across the United States and UK; $200 million to National Public Radio to support the network's operating reserves and endowment; $60-million to Ronald McDonald House Charities to be distributed to its programs worldwide; $50 million to the University of Notre Dame to support the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies; $50-million to the University of San Diego to establish the Joan B. Kroc School of Peace Studies at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace & Justice; $20 million to San Diego Hospice and Palliative Care to support its programs and services; $10 million to the San Diego Opera to support artistic programming; $5 million to KPBS radio and television, in San Diego, to establish an endowment and operating reserve and create a capital-equipment fund; $5 million to the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of San Diegoto build a high school; and $500,000 to Mama's Kitchen, a meal-delivery service in San Diego for people with AIDS. Before her death, Mrs. Kroc gave $5 million to the University of San Diego to endow a lecture series at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for Peace & Justice.You're therefore requested to contact Kofi Daneils either by e-mail: dkofi@live.com or call: +233 245411574 for details and procedure to obtain your grant.

Sincerely,
Ms Anne Brown
UK Foundation Secretary.
====================================
JOAN B. KROC FOUNDATION USA Office (Head Office):- 2435 California Ave. Seattle
Washington 98116 USA. Fax: +1 (413) 376-2751
====================================

Hat tip to Pat Aufderheide of the Center for Social Media for passing it along. -andy