Carlos Domingo - Un poco de todo

Early this year I had a chance to visit the telepresence system that HP has set up near by Barcelona and later in a trip to Tokyo I saw the one that Cisco had in a NTT showroom of their new generation network. Both systems are very similar, you have a room with a table in a semicircle and in front of you there are three huge (60 inches, probably) plasma screen where you see the other side of the videoconferencing. The speakers are at full size at the screen and they are sitting in a room exactly like yours (their table seems to complete the semicircle of yours), video quality is great as well as audio. The rooms are somehow set up like movie studios, where the lighting and audio conditions have been carefully set so that you get a very good image and sound. Compared to commonly used videoconferencing systems, the notion of reality is way higher and therefore it is more useful than a regular one. However, the cost is huge, they required dedicated fiber connection to each room and as I mentioned, the room itself has to be decorated in a particular way to increase the sensation that you are with the other people in the same room. At work we are prototyping a videoconferencing system using 3D screens from Philips to increase further the perception of reality. I think that we are seeing the beginning of one trend that will develop during the next ten years, telepresence, videoconferencing were the notion of reality and of being in the same room is much higher and therefore, eventually substitutes face to face meetings. And some of the makes are making sure that you do not miss this trend. Check out the season six of 24 where the president of the United States talks to the president of Russia via a telepresence system from Cisco.

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The municipal WIFI projects (basically, blanket a city with free hot spots so everyone can be online for free all the time) have been a topic of discussion since a year ago at work. Obviously, when you make money providing Internet connectivity to consumers, the idea of the city using taxpayers money to provide the same service for free is pretty challenging for your business model. I also defended that those projects were not going to be successful due to the difficulty and cost of covering well enough the city for the service to be useful. At least, not with WIFI technology, WIMAX is a different story but then WIMAX runs in licensed spectrum while WIFI in unlicensed so we are talking about different things here. The last couple of weeks there has been a string of news announcing projects being killed or postpone (Chicago, San Francisco) and more importantly, EarthLink (the main company behind this projects) has announced that it will lay off 900 workers, including the head of the municipal WIFI division. The main reason is that they do not see how to make money with a “free” service (there is no free lunch, remember?). Actually, those projects were never completely free to start with (obviously, being a company involved that is suppose to be there to make money). The idea was that the city puts some money to subsidize part of the cost and then the “free” version was either ad supported or low speed with a higher speed version available for free. Two things have happened, the number of pay subscribers has been generally very low and then to get a decent coverage, they have had to install lots more WIFI receivers than expected. Not surprising, I cannot even get WIFI all over my apartment with just one receiver so I always wonder how they were planning to get coverage throughout a whole city full of buildings like Chicago. Now it seems that they want the city to pay in advance the cost for everything so even if the number of subscribers do not go up to cover costs, the company deploying the service will not lose money. The moment this becomes very expensive for a city, all these projects will end. I think that solutions like the one in NY were you get free WIFI in most of the major city parks are good, they do provide some sort of free connectivity for the citizens but are not too costly for the city.

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I am no fan of republishing links to other articles but this article of Richard MacManus from the Read/Write Web blog is so right on spot that I wanted to share it with as many people as possible. Many of the topics he is listing are already here in some form or another (virtual worlds, mobile web, RIA, online/Internet TV), some others have been here since ages like AI (btw, mencioning Amazon Mechanical Turk as an example of AI is not correct, as far as I know, there is no articial intelligence involved there) but without becoming mainstream and others like the Semantic Web, everyone talks about but there is no where to be seen yet.

Here is the list of trends, for specifics, read the article:

1. Semantic Web

2. Artificial Intelligence

3. Virtual Worlds

4. Mobile Web

5. Attention Economy

6. Web Sites as Web Services

7. Online Video / Internet TV

8. Rich Internet Apps

9. International Web

10. Personalization

CD

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