Dewayne-Net Technology Weblog

The Role Of Abundance In Innovation

from the it-increases-it… dept
<http://techdirt.com/articles/20090526/0151295007.shtml>

A few weeks back, Dennis wrote about a recent Malcolm Gladwell article in the New Yorker about innovation, but I was just shown another article from the same issue, by Adam Gropnik, which may be even more interesting. Gopnik points to evidence challenging the idea that “necessity is the mother of invention,” by noting that more innovation seems to occur in times of abundance, rather than times of hardship. The idea is that in times of hardship you’re just focused on getting through the day. You don’t have time to experiment and try to improve things — you make do with what you have. It’s in times of plenty that people finally have time to mess around and experiment, invent and then innovate.

This makes a lot of sense… and certainly fits with plenty of other things we’ve seen in recent research. Innovation tends to occur not because of one brilliant idea from one brilliant individual — but as an ongoing process, with lots of folks tossing different ideas at the wall, and seeing what sticks. Invention is the beginning process, but then people innovate around various inventions to improve it and make it acceptable to the market. In fact, this is why we tend to think that the long run impact of investment bubbles isn’t usually bad. Historically, the impact of bubbles has actually been quite good, and it’s for exactly these reasons. Within the bubble there is tremendous abundance, and that allows for many different ideas to get tested incredibly quickly. The bad ones fail, but plenty of good ideas (and infrastructure) stick around. It’s bad if you get caught up in the investment bubble, but it’s good for the overall economy in the long run.

[snip]

[Note: This comment comes from a reader of Dave Farber's IP list. My comment on Burstein's comment: "So say we all!". DLH]

From: Dave Burstein <daveb@dslprime.com>
Date: June 29, 2009 6:51:11 PM EDT
To: dave@farber.net
Subject: New FCC staff

Dave
We’ve had discussion on this list about how important it is to have more people who understand technology in depth at the FCC. I know several of the appointees are brilliant, but he hasn’t filled that gap. Those whose voices are heard at the FCC might want to say something.

FCC CHAIRMAN JULIUS GENACHOWSKI ANNOUNCES STAFF

Edward P. Lazarus will serve as Chief of Staff. Mr. Lazarus comes to the FCC from Akin,
Gump, Strauss, Hauer & Feld, where he was co-head of the firm-wide global litigation practice
and a member of the firm’s management committee, overseeing more than 800 lawyers. He is a
former prosecutor, having served as an assistant U.S. Attorney for the Central District of
California, and started his legal career as a law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Harry A.
Blackmun. Mr. Lazarus has also served as the Chairman of the board of AbilityFirst, a provider
of housing and vocational services to people with disabilities, and the Children’s Law Center of
Los Angeles, a nonprofit legal services organization that represents roughly 25,000 dependent
youth in Southern California.
Chairman Genachowski has appointed two senior advisors and two legal advisors to assist him
on the full range of policy issues.

Colin Crowell will serve as Senior Counselor to the Chairman. In this role, Mr. Crowell will
serve as strategic advisor on a broad range of matters, and will also have particular responsibility
for the communications, legislative, intergovernmental affairs, and public liaison functions of the
agency. Mr. Crowell previously worked for more than 20 years on the staff of the Honorable
Edward J. Markey (D-MA), serving on the staff of the House of Representatives Subcommittee
on Telecommunications and the Internet when Mr. Markey chaired the panel, and in the
Congressman’s personal office when Mr. Markey was the Subcommittee’s Ranking Member.

Bruce Liang Gottlieb will serve as Chief Counsel to the Chairman and senior legal advisor. Mr.
Gottlieb will manage the Commission’s overall agenda and have responsibility for policy
coordination with the Bureaus. In addition, he will have particular responsibility for wireless,
engineering and technology, and public safety issues.Mr. Gottlieb served as legal advisor to Commissioner Copps from 2006-2009.
Mr. Gottlieb alsopreviously practiced communications law at Harris, Wiltshire and Grannis, and wrote for Slate.
He began his legal career as a clerk to the Honorable David S. Tatel of the U.S. Court of Appeals
for the D.C. Circuit.

Priya Aiyar will serve as Legal Advisor, with particular responsibility for wireline competition
and international issues. She was most recently a partner at Kellogg, Huber, Hansen, Todd,
Evans and Figel, where she practiced in the areas of litigation and telecommunications. She
began her legal career as a law clerk for the Honorable Stephen Breyer of the U.S. Supreme
Court and the Honorable Merrick Garland of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
Prior to entering law school, Ms. Aiyar was a Rhodes Scholar.

Sherrese Smith will serve as Legal Advisor, with particular responsibility for media, consumer
and enforcement issues. She was most recently Vice President and General Counsel of
Washington Post Digital. Prior to that, Ms. Smith was a member of the Intellectual Property
group at Arnold and Porter. She currently serves on the board of the ABA’s Forum for
Communications Law, has served on the board of the Media Law Resource Center Institute
and was a co-chair of the Copyright Committee of the ABA. Ms. Smith is a frequent lecturer on
media, publishing, internet and intellectual property issues and is a faculty member for the
Practicing Law Institute.

Sherry Gelfand will serve as Confidential Assistant to the Chairman. Ms. Gelfand served as
executive assistant to the Assistant Attorney General, Antitrust Division, U.S. Department of
Justice, from 1993 and 1996. Since leaving the Department of Justice, she has served as Manager
for Business Intake for a major Tampa law firm and has served as executive assistant to the
Chairman/CEO of Valor Telecom in Dallas. Most recently, she served as executive assistant to
the Chairman/CEO of Soundpath Legal Conferencing in Washington, DC.

Daniel Ornstein will serve as Special Assistant to the Chairman. Mr. Ornstein comes to the FCC
from CBS, where he managed several new media initiatives and helped run the network’s
growing mobile business. Previously, Mr. Ornstein worked on a start-up company called
Click.TV, which was acquired by Cisco Systems in 2007.

Mary Beth Richards will serve as Special Counsel to the Chairman for FCC Reform, and will
head a comprehensive program to provide openness and transparency at the agency. Ms.
Richards first joined the FCC in 1984 and held a variety of positions, including Deputy Chief of
the Consumer and Governmental Affairs, Enforcement, and Common Carrier Bureaus, Deputy
Managing Director and Special Counsel to the Chairman, before moving to the Federal Trade
Commission in November 2006 as Deputy Director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection. She
recently returned to the Commission as Deputy General Counsel, and has been serving as Acting
Managing Director. In 1995, she received the Presidential Meritorious Executive Service
Award.

Ruth Milkman will lead the transition effort in the Chairman’s office. Ms. Milkman served at
the Commission between 1986 and 1998 in a variety of positions, including Deputy Chief of the
International and Common Carrier Bureaus, and Senior Legal Advisor to Chairman Reed Hundt.
Ms. Milkman also was a founding partner of Lawler, Metzger, Milkman & Keeney, LLC, and
served as a law clerk to the to the Honorable J. Harvie Wilkinson of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the
Fourth Circuit.

-FCC -

U.S. vs. Japan: Residential Internet Service Provision Pricing

U.S. Residents Pay More and Receive Lower Speeds
By Chiehyu Li, New America Foundation
New America Foundation | June 23, 2009
<http://www.newamerica.net/publications/policy/u_s_vs_japan_residential_internet_service_provision_pricing>

• The following chart lists the price, download and upload speeds of residential Internet services in the U.S. and Japan.

• NTT (Nippon Telegraph and Telephone) is the major incumbent telephone operator in Japan. NTT has focused on fiber-optic business while Yahoo! BB (a subsidiary of SoftBank Telecom Corp.) has had first-mover advantage for DSL Internet. Due to unbundling requirements, Yahoo! BB and @nifty provide DSL service by renting NTT’s telephone lines at low prices.

• Cable/DSL service
• In the U.S., the price for cable or DSL (1Mbps-7 Mbps) ranges from roughly $20-45/month. Comcast has higher speed Internet, 15Mbps-50Mbps, and costs $43-$140 per month
• In Japan, the typical Internet speed is higher than the U.S. (8Mbps-50Mbps), and costs $30-60 per month. J:COM, a large cable Internet provider, has cable Internet up to 160Mbps, costs $63 ($0.4 per megabit).
• The high-speed Internet market is very competitive in Japan. Customers who pay two dollars more can upgrade from 8Mbps to 12Mbps or even more. For this reason, customers tend to choose higher speed Internet because the marginal costs are low.
• Fiber-optic service
• In the U.S., Verizon is the only large provider of fiber-optic service, FiOS. There are three options of the service, 15Mbps, 25Mbps, and 50Mbps, $50-$145 per month.
• In Japan, the average of fiber-optic speed is up to 100Mbps~1Gbps, costs from $25 to $56 per month ($0.06-0.7 per megabit) for condo residences (up to 6 households or so) depending on VDSL/LAN/Fiber distribution; single house residences are charged higher rates, $55-67($0.03-0.6 per megabit), which is both much cheaper and much faster than the U.S.

[snip]

New energy-saving transistor to eliminate the need for AC adapters in laptops

<http://mdn.mainichi.jp/mdnnews/news/20090624p2a00m0na013000c.html>
Fujitsu Laboratories announced Tuesday that the company has developed a new energy-saving transistor.

The new transistor developed by the company, based in Kawasaki, Kanagawa Prefecture, can reduce electricity loss that occurs in the power supply units of computers and other devices to one-third or less of the current level. By downsizing the transistor, the power supply unit can be integrated into the body of laptop computers, eliminating the need for AC adapters. The company is aiming for practical application of the new transistor by 2011.

In computers, the power supply unit converts alternating current into direct current, during which about 30 percent of the electric power is lost as the transistor produces heat.

While traditional transistors are normally made from silicon, Fujitsu’s key technology research team succeeded in developing a transistor using gallium nitride, a material commonly used in blue LEDs. With gallium nitride’s resistance to high-voltage current being 10 times as high as silicon’s, transistors made from gallium nitride are more robust. At the same time, such transistors can reduce the electricity loss to below one-third of the level of silicon transistors, while a shorter inter-electrode distance enables a downsizing of the transistor.

[snip]

June 27, 2009

A Ham Radio Weekend for Talking to the Moon
By ASHLEE VANCE
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/27/technology/27moon.html?partner=rss&emc=rss&pagewanted=all>
PALO ALTO, Calif. — Dogs bay at it. Lovers swoon under it. And some people like to bounce their voices off it.

The first two are easy, but sending a voice signal 239,200 miles to the moon and back is not quite as simple.

On Saturday, amateur radio buffs or “hams,” as they call themselves, will hold a global bounce-fest, using as many giant parabolic antenna radio telescopes as they can borrow around the world.

Not that one needs an excuse to hold a moon-bounce, but this one is being held as a kind of advance celebration of the 40th anniversary next month of the Apollo 11 mission.

Moon-bouncing, also known as Earth-Moon-Earth communications, or E.M.E. requires a higher grade of ham-radio technology than that used for traditional earth-bound communication across parts of the radio spectrum approved by governments for amateur use. Only about 1,000 hams worldwide have stations capable of moon-bouncing.

Skill and luck also help. As the hams say, the moon is a poor sounding board, since it is spinning and has a rough surface that can disrupt signals. The hams’ voices must survive atmospheric interference over the long round-trip journey in a discernible form.

“It’s the equivalent of climbing Mount Everest in amateur radio,” said Joseph H. Taylor Jr., a Nobel Prize winner and retired physics professor fromPrinceton University who has written software to help radio buffs communicate via weak signals. “It’s possible, but only barely possible.”

Large dishes like those owned by the government and communications companies can solve many of these problems by making it easier to send and receive signals. That’s why the hobbyists have searched out retired or rarely used dishes. So far, operators of about 20 large dishes in the United States, Australia and Europe have agreed to participate in the event.

One of them is located on a hill overlooking Stanford University’s campus, and will serve as the command center for the weekend’s event. Known simply as the Dish, the 150-foot-wide antenna, owned by the federal government, will be outfitted with special equipment and a computerized tracking system to keep a powerful, focused signal on the moon.

[snip]

Rural Americans long to be linked

By Leslie Cauley, USA TODAY
<http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2009-06-07-rural-broadband-digital_N.htm>

PLAINS, Texas — The people who live here are still waiting for the digital revolution to arrive.
The local phone company, Windstream, offers high-speed DSL service in part of Plains (population: around 1,450). But those who live outside the city limits, including farmers such as Jeff Roper, don’t have a lot of choice.

Roper currently uses ERF Wireless, which provides service in more remote areas. He says the service, which costs $40 a month for a 1.5-megabit connection, is pretty good, though it sometimes goes down for days at a time.

To help run his 2,400-acre farm, he spent $65,000 on equipment for a satellite-based GPS service for his tractors, useful for navigation in the field. Broadband, handy for a variety of diagnostic and operational purposes such as irrigation and real-time weather monitoring, isn’t available — so Roper and other farmers in this West Texas community do without.

Rural folks aren’t prone to complain, Roper says. They work hard, love their communities and wouldn’t think of living anywhere else. But that doesn’t mean they don’t want, and need, to be connected to the outside world.

“Just because we live in rural America doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have broadband,” says Roper, a third-generation peanut farmer. “We’re all Americans. We shouldn’t be treated less than anyone else.”

Congress agrees, and has allocated $7.2 billion in economic stimulus funding to support broadband deployment across the USA. The goal: to help drive broadband penetration in places such as Plains, which have long lagged urban areas in terms of choice, quality and cost.

By pushing hard on broadband, lawmakers hope to close the “digital divide” that has long separated rural America. In doing so, they hope to give rural consumers access to the same sorts of high-speed services and opportunities — think telemedicine, distance-learning and Web-based commerce — that city dwellers have enjoyed for years.

There’s also the social divide to consider. While websites such as Facebook and Twitter might seem like mere entertainment, they also turn the Internet into a town hall meeting that spans the globe. Broadband is essential to that cultural shift, and to making sure consumers can participate.

The biggest argument in favor of rural broadband, however, can be boiled down to two words: job creation.

The way President Obama sees it, broadband is the future of the USA. According to non-profit Connected Nation, in Washington, a 7% increase in broadband penetration in underserved parts of the country could stimulate the economy by more than $134 billion. Benefits would accrue from the creation of jobs, commerce and other intangibles — such as fuel savings of non-commuters working from home — that would follow.

To realize that dream, however, broadband needs to become a ubiquitous service, such as power or water.

The problem: High-speed Internet access is far from pervasive in rural America, home to more than 60 million consumers. The average cost of broadband in the USA is about $45 a month, but fees in rural areas can run much higher.

Currently, about 57% of urban households and 60% of suburban households subscribe to broadband. In rural areas, only 38% do, according to a report by the Communications Workers of America.

“As a country, we’re basically punishing people for living where they want to live,” says Vince Jordan, CEO of Ridgeview Telephone, a small Colorado-based carrier that caters to rural customers.

Jordan says it isn’t unusual for rural phone companies to charge $300 to $600 for a broadband installation. The fees cover the cost of dispatching a crew to wire up a home for DSL, which works off existing copper phone lines. In urban markets, installation is often free.

Why so pricey? In the broadband world, the more subscribers you have, the more quickly you can recover costs. In rural areas, 20 phone lines or fewer per square mile isn’t unusual, so that can take a long time.

Ridgeview charges $30 for a broadband installation. Because it charges so little, Jordan says, it can take his company eight months to recover its costs. “But we also get a lot more customers” as a result, he says.

Dean Cubley, CEO of ERF Wireless, says he’s heartened by the national push to bring rural areas into the 21st century. But he worries that public-policymakers aren’t equipped to come up with realistic solutions.

“A lot of people think rural America is where the road narrows from four lanes to two lanes,” says Cubley, who grew up on a farm in East Texas. “Rural America is where you drive off the gravel road to get to the farm house; it’s where you have to get in a car and drive to visit your neighbors,” he says. “Millions of people live that way. And they need broadband just like everybody else.”

[snip]

Financial shenanigans wiped out all productivity gains from digital technology

POSTED BY CORY DOCTOROW, JUNE 27, 2009 11:26 AM
<http://www.boingboing.net/2009/06/27/financial-shenanigan.html>

The new report from the Deloitte Center for the Edge says that, “return on assets for U.S. companies has steadily fallen to almost one quarter of 1965 levels,at the same time that we have seen continued, albeit much more modest, improvements in labor productivity.” Jon Taplin explains, “any productivity gains from the digital revolution have been more than wiped out by our corporate (as well as personal) addiction to debt. To understand this, it’s important to grasp the difference between return on equity (the classic Wall Street measurement) and return on assets…By masking their absolutely dismal performance in the last 40 years in ROA, by taking on more and more debt to juice ROE, both Wall Street and America’s corporate elite are engaged in a massive shell game, in which the average investor is the mark.”

[Note: This item comes from reader Mike O'Dell. DLH]

From: Michael O’Dell <mo@ccr.org>
Date: June 27, 2009 7:01:03 PM PDT
To: Dewayne Hendricks <dewayne@warpspeed.com>
Subject: GaN Transistors…

<http://www.nitronex.com/>

Nitronex has been delivering GaN transistors for some time now.
Their parts are quite attractive because they are built
on a standard silicon wafer substrate, unlike most other GaN efforts.

I haven’t seen any technical details of Fujitsu’s parts so
i dunno about theirs, but most other GaN transistor projects are
trying to use a SiC (silicon carbide) substrate. the problem
with that approach is that making the SiC substrate seems
to be as hard as making the GaN transistors once you have
a workable substrate.

it will be interesting to see details of Fujitsu’s parts

-mo

TV Anywhere Gets A Boost: Paging Christine Varney! (and Jon Lebowitz and, eventually, Julius Genachowski)

By Harold Feld on June 24, 2009 – 2:10pm
<http://www.publicknowledge.org/node/2494>

[Note: Be sure to checkout the 11 minute video interview of Roubini. DLH]

Soros or Roubini? Pick your poison.
by WSS (Reuters, CNBC)
<http://www.wallstreetswat.com/articolo.asp?art_id=720385>

Yesterday, economist George Soros said the economy is over the worst. But on video, watch Roubini say that a correction is coming to the market, not a recovery.
You can pick your prediction this morning—are you feeling optimistic or pessimistic? Here’s a taste of both.

The worst of the global economic crisis is over, multi-billionaire financier George Soros told Polish news channel TVN24 on Sunday urging the creation of international regulations to oversee global markets. Soros said that the Euro laregle decided which countries were hurt most in the past year, and that in the future, regulation should be aimed at controlling market bubbles.Reuters reports Soros saying:
“Decidedly the worst (of the crisis) is already behind us.” “This is not like previous crises but marks the end of an era. The system to date had been based on the false assumption that markets can independently regain their equilibrium and that the system is self-correcting,” he explained.

[snip]