Tag: internet

Inukshuk Wireless Internet

Post ImageSay it with me now – wireless everywhere! Looks like it’ll be happening in Canada sooner than expected too, according to Om Malik:

The Canadians are taking a lead on the US, and are putting together a nationwide fixed wireless broadband network, according to Digital Home Canada. Two Canadian incumbents – Rogers Communications and Bell Canada have decided to pool all their licensed wireless broadband sepctrum into a new company – Inukshuk Internet – that will be equally owned and controlled by the cable guys and the phone company. They will also equally share transmission capacity and will work with other wireless broadband providers such as Clearwire to make sure that wireless broadband users can roam on other networks. Inukshuk will build and operate the network, that within three years should bring wireless broadband to two-thirds of Canadians. It is going to cost $200 million and will cover 40 cities and approximately 50 rural and remote communities across Canada.

This is a glimpse into the future my friends, mark my words. It won’t be long until we can walk anywhere and be connected to the Internet. And when a cable and a phone company team up, well you know it’s got to be important.

The Globe and Mail has more on the story:

“The promise of wireless broadband is here and Bell and Rogers have the expertise, resources and commitment to make it happen,” said Bob Berner, chief technology officer of Rogers. “This is a powerful tool for Canadian businesses and consumers — both of whom will benefit from the substantially increased and accelerated competition the network will bring.”

I think the name is particularly interesting, Inukshuk. An inukshuk, similar to the logo chosen for the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, was historically important for navigating across the arctic tundra. As there were no natural landmarks (just endless seas of white) native peoples would build inukshuks to help them mark where they had been and to find their way to various locations. In that sense, inukshuks kind of connected the north. Wireless everywhere is going to connect the north again.

Read: Om Malik

Always On Wireless

Post ImageWhat’s my mantra? Wireless Everywhere! I look forward to the day when wireless is like oxygen; everywhere you go, it’s there. So it always makes me smile when I find an article that really nails the vision:

“If you ask someone what the (return on investment) on plumbing is, they couldn’t tell you, because it’s just part of what the building needs to survive,” Ed Cantwell, president and CEO of InnerWireless says. “Wireless is like that. People can debate if wireless is a utility, but I contend that it already is just like heating and cooling, lights, plumbing and electricity.”

I think that’s an excellent step, treating wireless access like water and having buildings designed with that in mind. That’s what happened at the University of Chicago hospital:

The pediatric hospital’s new wireless infrastructure aggregates two-way radio, public-safety radio, paging, Wi-Fi and cellular networks into one system that runs throughout the building, augmenting signals with antennas spread around each of its six floors.

There’s a whole host of startups providing such infrastructure. If I were to build a building, you can bet that an integrated wireless utility would be part of the specifications.

Read: CNET News.com

Upgrade to Web 2.5

Post ImageI really like the idea of “the Web as a platform”, an idea that has been termed “Web 2.0” and has become pretty widespread. While definitions vary, I rather like this one (from Richard MacManus and Joshua Porter’s “Web 2.0 for Designers“):

This may sound like we’re in the Matrix, but in the words of Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos, “Web 2.0… is about making the Internet useful for computers.”

I think in the longrun that by making the Internet useful for computers, we can make it even more useful for humans. At least that should be the goal. Richard MacManus has an excellent collection of descriptions if you want more detail.

There are a ton of so-called “Web 2.0 companies” getting lots of love from the geeks in the crowd for being forward thinking and embracing this new idea of how to create web applications. Not sure which companies I’m talking about? Think Flickr, del.icio.us, 43Things, Google Maps, and A9 just to name a few. All of them offer an API, and so they make themselves a platform. These platforms have spawned some pretty cool services, like HousingMaps, Mappr, Colr Pickr, Cheap Gas, and many others. Very cool stuff.

Web 2.5

The problem with most of the Web 2.0 stuff floating around right now is that it relies on the browser. If Web 2.0 is about relinquishing control, why are all the current examples and mashups trapped inside the web browser? Seems pretty backward for such a forward thinking idea to me. And yes there’s the argument that creating a web page makes the application independent of the platform – it’s not tied to Windows or Mac or Linux. Yet with all this Web 2.0 goodness, I can’t help but wonder where the rich clients are? (There are lots of reasons to want a rich client, which I have written about in the past.) Do we have to settle for a thin client just to take advantage of this new “web as a platform” methodology? If that’s the case, it’s not as great as I thought!

If Web 2.0 is about creating a platform, then Web 2.5 is about creating a platform that can extend beyond the browser. Flickr’s API includes support for SOAP and XML-RPC, so there’s no reason that it couldn’t be used by rich client applications on Windows (for example) without having to use the browser. And what about those services that only offer a REST api or otherwise make it difficult to use outside the browser? Well then they aren’t Web 2.5 ready, are they? 🙂

Web 2.0 has the potential to take the Internet to the next level, and it many ways it already has. And while it’s still very early in the grand scheme of things, I can’t help but wonder if we’re going to get trapped by the thin client. So please, platform developers and mashup makers, upgrade to Web 2.5!

Everything online? Not likely!

Post ImageIn a recent post, popular PR blogger Steve Rubel says:

It’s not to hard to picture a world without Microsoft one day if you believe these guys. ePlatform, now in beta, promises to deliver over the Internet virtually every application you need to effectively manage your life, all available on demand.

Sounds like a great concept, but it’ll never, ever fly. Why not? Let’s list the main reasons:

  • I very much doubt the majority of consumers would be willing to give control of their personal data to a third party. We’ve seen this time, and time again. Remember Hailstorm anyone?
  • Video games continue to grow, and you just can’t power Doom3 or Halo2 over the net. Even if we did get fast Internet access absolutely everywhere, there will always be an argument for rich clients. Games are just one example, video creation is another. It’s not feasible to edit your 20 GB of video using a program hosted on a server thousands of miles away.
  • How about taking content offline? That’s one of the main reasons I used NewsGator as my aggregator – I can take all the blogs I read offline on my tablet. As much as I want wireless everywhere, so that I’m always connected, we’re a long way from that goal.

There are lots of reasons both for and against so-called “thin clients”, but I think that the “rich client” world pitched by Microsoft is more likely to succeed, for the reasons I’ve noted above as well as many others. I’d guess that the closest we’d ever get to a thin client world would be if everyone had their own central server in their house or office. Actually, I guess that’s already happening with tools like the Xbox and Media Center PC. But a third party acting as the central repository and processing house?

Not likely.

As an aside, I think it’s interesting to note that the ePlatform application looks a LOT like Outlook 2003 and Outlook Web Access.

Read: Steve Rubel