Techization

I found this from my girl Julia Roy.  I love these videos because they are so mind provoking and really make you think on a macro level.

I found these particuarly interesting:

By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers.
This illustrates the shift occuring in our society right now in the U.S.  —  The older generations are falling out of power in business and society and Gen Y is taking over!

Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web.
Didn’t think I’d ever see this happen!

1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum.
I am included in this 1 in 6 students.  UW-Stout is a leader in online curriculum.  In fact, most classes I take in a year are online.

I have spent the last week in the Chicago metro area.  From the northwest suburbs of Schaumburg and Elk Grove Village to Grant Park on the Lake Michigan shoreline downtown.  This urban immersion has provided some valuable lessons.

• iPhone battery life is kind of bad!

Living in the isolated and desolate state known as Wisconsin, it is not often my iPhone use is ‘heavy’.  I know most places I go so I don’t use battery-sucking GPS Google maps, I know the good places to eat so no need for Yelp. No long commutes to listen to my iPod.  I thought my iPhone battery life was ‘okay’ but certainly could be better.  I would plug it in nightly with 30%-40% of battery life remaining after light to moderate use.  Being in Chicago I had to consciously think, ‘do I really need to look this up or should I save my battery?’  Leaving for downtown in late morning my battery would dead by 6 or 7 p.m.  Between Twitter, Google Maps (w/ GPS), Yelp! (to eat), Photos (snap, snap!) and iPod (1 hr commute in downtown via train), my battery was taking a real pounding.

• The AT&T network really does suck!

You’ve read all the grumblings from other metros, New York, San Fran, L.A. and Miami.  AT&T’s network is terrible.  Do we need to rehash the SXSW incident where all the tech geeks converging caused the AT&T network to crash with the convention in town?  I think not.  I use the SpeedTest.net app on my iPhone to measure bandwidth.  I only got one good result of 2.3 mbps down and 280 kbps up.  That was in the fringe suburbs of the metro though.  When downtown I was getting varying results between 250kbps-700kbps down and 40kbps-170kbps up.  Needless to say I wasn’t very impressed.  Yes the speed varied with the time of day, but overall I was unimpressed with the networks ability to handle the data. That is a teaser for my next point!

• Digital spread is thick in metropolitan areas.

I had a realization moment while riding the Metra train back to Elk Grove Village this afternoon during rush hour.  I was crammed like sardines with business professionals commuting home from work.  Everyone around me had ear phones in and either an iPhone or MP3 player in their hands.  With about 50-60 people in my car, well over 75% were holding a portable media device.  The other 25% were reading the paper, book or using their laptop.  During down time, consumers of digital media simply ‘graze’ news, tweets, music, podcasts etc. as they cruise their way to home or work.  Many companies want to know how to reach a large mass on social media platforms like Twitter.  The truth is because so much information fly’s through our networks, we can’t take it all in.  If you tried, you’d burn out before you knew what hit you.  Many are ‘grazing’.  During proper times they digest what is active in their network at that time and simply turn it off when they need to.  I would argue some of the best times to reach those in your network is commute times and lunch.  However, peak times to reach your network varies with your networks ‘lifestyle’.

So much attention is given to new media and websites like YouTube, Hulu and Ustream.  Nielsen, the leading ratings company, released a report putting things back in perspective.  The numbers of mobile video viewers has risen, time spent watching videos online has jumped, but television still overwhelmingly dominates as the medium of choice.

2008

116 Million Internet video viewers averaging 2 hours per month.

9 Million mobile phone subscribers (viewing hours not rated)

2009

131 Million Internet video viewers averaging 3 hours per month

13 Million mobile phone subscribers averaging 3.5 hours per month

Each statistic is quite a substantial upward trend.  Many logical factors can explain the increases.  Video capable mobile devices like the Blackberry Storm and iPhone are becoming more widespread.  I’ve personally noticed this trend first hand.  Being the tech geek I am, in high school (2000-2004) I was one of very few kids who toted a ’smart phone’.  Most of my friends had your typical Motorola flip phone or Nokia candy bar.  Now it seems all my friends and younger kids I know own Blackberry’s, iPhone’s and Sidekicks.  This shift towards mobile convergence devices is being fed by the Internet and affinity to social networks like Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.

Internet viewing hours will continue to rise as President Obama pushes for nationwide broadband access and Hulu and YouTube continue to get more mainstream press.  A perfect example is the Discovery Channel show ‘Mythbusters’.  Earlier this year they had a ‘YouTube’ episode with user-generated content and myths.  Take a look at this graph about YouTube’s hit count comparing April 2008 vs. April 2009.

264,710,806 in 2008… up to 440,273,651 in 2009.  That’s nearly double the amount of hits in a year.

All these statistics are fine and good, but now lets unveil the ‘big momma’ in video viewing.

Television still overwhelmingly dominates as the medium of choice.  Respondents report viewing over 153 hours of video on the television each month.

I can stream movies on Hulu via my laptop and watch YouTube on my iPhone.  However, neither option beats watching a Blu-Ray movie on my 46″ 1080p television!  Comfort still beats convenience, at least right now.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is about to begin hearings on how to expand broadband access to consumers here in the United States.  Barack Obama’s $787 billion dollar stimulus package directed the FCC to come up with a strategy on how to spend billions of dollars on our nations network infrastructure.  Telecommunications companies are already gearing up for fight with the FCC after talk about hearings ignited another heated debate about net neutrality between telecom companies and consumer groups.

$7.2 billion dollars has been allocated to broadband networks and other related projects.  This money will be invested into expanding broadband service and speeds on those networks.

What does this mean for small private telecom companies that currently serve rural areas?  Will this government investment finally make the government to take a hard stance on net neutrality?
“[The new infrastructure investment is ]the biggest responsibility given to the FCC since the Telecom Act of 1996,” acting FCC Chairman Michael Copps, said in an interview. “The market has done a lot, but it hasn’t done enough to keep us competitive in the world.”

Obama has stressed that he plans on closing the gap when it comes to broadband Internet access. The FCC’s new plans will go into affect February of 2010. Starting Wednesday they’ll open up the floor to comments from interested parties. It’s likely that current industry heavyweights will have plenty to say as the future of broadband Internet access in the U.S. is defined.

Time Warner Cable is under fire as they continue to roll out a 40GB cap to customers in various markets.  They are not the only Internet Service Provider doing these restrictions, but they are the most conservative at 40 gigabytes.

• Charter Communications – Connections less than 15mbps (Most households) – 100GB Cap
• Comcast – 250GB Cap
• AT&T – 150 Cap

“A mere 5 percent of our subscriber base is responsible for requiring half of the available capacity through local cable lines.” said Kevin Leddy, Time Warner Cable’s executive vice president of advanced technology

Nearly all these companies will charge $1 per extra gigabyte your go over the cap in a billing period.  This could leave some families in the red when their cable bill comes.

Companies in markets that Time Warner Cable is testing the new capped system are already jumping on the offensive.  Frontier Communications in Rochester, NY have publicly released they will not place any caps on their DSL service in that market.  Frontier has also stated they will deploy an aggressive marketing campaign to steal customers away from Time Warner.

A recent report from Sanford C. Bernstein supplied by Business Week suggests that a family on the 40 GB plan that streams 7.25 hours of online video a week (a fraction of the 60 hours Americans spend watching TV in a week) could end up spending $200 per month on broadband usage fees. And that’s just for video viewing, before factoring in such Internet activities as music downloads and photo sharing.

“To put it mildly,” says Bernstein analyst Craig Moffett, “the decision to limit data consumption can be expected to have profound implications for [consumer] behavior.”

I wonder how ISP’s like Comcast can feel they will remain competitive by capping bandwidth.  File sizes and quality continues to rise, but with data caps consumers may be hesitant to use the new technology.  The perfect example comes in the form of high definition video.  If you were to download an HD movie, (from a legal source!) it would eat up about 8GB of your bandwidth.  That’s nearly a quarter gone from one machine.  Let’s not even delve into the prevalence of routers and most homes now having two or three personal computers on a network.

These data caps are just another effort to ward off P2P illegal file sharing users.  Comcast thought it had the answer until it got slapped by the FCC for violating principles of network management.  The large ISP’s need another way to put a kink in illegal file sharing, only difference now is they are willing to jerk around their entire subscriber base since they can’t single out file sharing users by throttling their traffic.

It just does not seem logical.  I would hate to see something like this stifle technological advances in quality of content.  I think this again strangles the United States in becoming competitive in the broadband race.  Japan has ran away with the title with this move by domestic ISP’s. But let me make one thing clear, I’m not 100% against capping, but 40GB is down right outrageous.

Speaking of Japan, 1GB bandwidth with no cap sounds good to me.

Here is a graph showing the average advertising broadband speed from countries around the world:

Phone call from Time Warner Cable warning about bandwidth usage

This second video is from a guy named ‘Joe’ who was threatened by Comcast Cable a few years ago.  There are a few obscenities so watch it at your own discretion if your at work.