Internet Phones, Video Blogging, Nano

Say if a city like New York is bathed in Wi-Max, wireless broadband, do we end up with mobile phones that are internet based that are very cheap, like $10 a month, or maybe even free, because imagine the boost to a city's productivity! Already Vonage offers unlimited calls to US and Canada for $25 a month. A nice reason to ditch your traditional landline altogether. And because of its features like being able to check voice mail over email from anywhere, and your ability to take the phone anywhere with you that has broadband internet, it can give some serious competition to the traditional cellphone.

For me, I like the regular size keyboard of my laptop. That is why I am not big on comupters that are the size of cellphones. Plus, being offline and away from phone rings is also important: for solitude and reflection, for study time, reading paper books, time to listen and watch uninterrupted, thinking, for face time and socializing, bonding. Always-on is not good. On-whenever-you-want, but not always-on.

I can't wait for video blogging to become an option, like text and audio are now with Google's Blogger. Perhaps Google will take its Blogger to that level. You want to be able to upload and not have to worry about hosting, kind of like digital photos at Yahoo Photos. At that point, everyone anywhere becomes a media house in his or her own right. Ah, communication.

And, I just found a bunch of articles on Nano at the BusinessWeek site, a few also 0n BioTech.



Come to the think of it, Newton was an alchemist. The nano people join his ranks. I guess the idea is to set up industries at the level of atoms. Some possibilities: "superefficient fuel cells," so you don't have to keep recharging your batteries that often, your laptop can stay unplugged for days and still perform, talk about mobile; "golf balls designed to fly straight," "carry computing beyond today's silicon and transistors," "pint size laboratories" for doctors and nurses, "nano sensors" to detect "anthrax and sarin," and so on.

What really makes my day - I am not a golfer, it is not physical enough for me - is this: "Toward the end of the decade ... new computer memories composed of nanoparticles could conceivably pack the digital contents of the Library of Congress into a machine the size of a yo-yo." Every human thought that ever came into any human mind and got recorded could be stored away forver. Every scientific writing, every painting, every piece of music, every book, article. Ever written, produced, composed, painted. To be written, produced, composed, painted. Everyone will have access to everything. For free. To be supported by the ad model. Food, water, and internet access for everyone on the planet.

You can't even begin to imagine the synergies.

Economic growth can be limitless because it is not to do with natural resources, it is to do with the human mind. And the mind knows no limits to its creative power. This generation's greatest achievement is the next's virgin territory.

The human mind is the least tapped natural resource. And much of the hindrance comes from our primitive arrangements in group dynamics, where we tolerate people getting in each other's way. The scarcities are truly "artificial," man-made.

It is possible to imagine the per capita global income hit $20,000. Within decades.

Google And Browsers And More

I just read news, Google Snaps Up Top Firefox Programmer. The guy, Ben Googler, I mean Goodger, (how did his parents know, or rather ancestors), announced the news on his blog. That tells you where he belongs.

In one of Larry Ellison's biographies, the earlier ill-written one, there is talk of how the guy - his lifestory reads like fascinating - would promise of software that half the time never got delivered, but he hogged marketshare anyway! Google is the opposite of that. It delivers and surprises. Noone saw the digitizing libraries project coming.

But there is such noise Google is angling for a browser. That would be a major step. You have a slim machine running on Linux, you download a Google browser, you do your word procesing online - the technology is already there, just look at all the features with Blogger, Gmail meets all your email needs, personal as well as work, and so on, and where is Microsoft now! You handle all your text, audio, video, data processing stuff online. There is no Desktop, so to speak of. Wow. I mean, with Internet2, you have 10 gigabytes per second kind of speed. You are always on. With that kind of reliability, you won't need a desktop.



Two schools emerged within Microsoft in the mid-1990s, one Windows, but the other one wanted a new universe entirely around a browser. MSFT would be the gorilla dot com. But Gates squashed that effort. To Gates' credit, he gave some valid reasons, like, how do you make money if you give everything away! (Google's answer: you sell ads, stupid!)

Windows made Microsoft what it is, but it also might be the albatross around its neck.