What's up with all this Twitter following - how should we be handling?

I've been hearing the term "jump the shark" recently when some discuss Twitter. What does that mean?

I notice a lot of business people using Twitter, maybe it has jumped the shark. What are they doing? How are business people using it?

So, lots of people seem to be giving Twitter a try but how do we know who has actually drank the kool-aid and has become a daily Twitter user?

Before we talk about numbers, The Influential Marketing Blog has put together something called the 5 stages of Twitter Acceptance.

We talk a lot about impact when it comes to grants - can you explain what that means?

So, what's the interest in things like Twitter?

What are some Twitter measurement tools?

So, what did this guy do?

How do metrics applications handle these spammers?

What can be done to prevent Twitter manipulation?

• Provides a realistic simulation and visualization learning environment that supplements classroom equipment
• Enables multiuser, real-time collaboration and competition for dynamic learning  
• Enables authoring and localization of structured learning activities such as labs,  demonstrations, quizzes, exams, and games
• Empowers students to explore concepts, conduct experiments, and test their understanding
• Allows students and teachers to design, build, configure, and troubleshoot networks using  virtual equipment  
• Supports a variety of teaching and learning tasks such as lectures, group and individual  labs, homework, and competitions  
• Supports integration with external applications through an API to enhance the functionality  of Packet Tracer in areas such as curriculum and assessment delivery, games, accessibility,  and interfacing with real equipment. 
  

We've had a great relationship with Pierre, James and CCSF and were fortunate to get them on camera to talk about MPICT at the 2008 SAME-TEC Conference.

MPICT is off to a great start under the leadership and direction of Pierre and James. Contact them for more information at www.mpict.org

Here's a list of questions asked during the podcast:

Where is the information for this podcast coming from?

Why is this important?

So, we've now got a security issue with WPA encryption! Before we get to WPA - can you give us a little background on wireless encryption?

So, the first attempt was WEP. Most devices still support it - why should we not use it?

So, that's not good. What did the IEEE do?

What else did the 802.11i group do - what was the second solution?

So, let me make sure I understand. Older wireless devices can be updated to support WPA which includes TKIP. Now, I've heard of WPA2 - what is that?

So, the new products support both but old products only support WPA. I think I've got it! What did Tews and Beck actually crack?

So the problem is with old devices that only support WPA and TKIP and not WPA and AES?

What is the problem with TKIP?

The ars technica piece mentioned short packets are ideal - especially ARP broadcasts. Why?

Let me see if I understand, an attacker sniffs a packet, makes minor modifications to affect the checksum, and checks the results by sending the packet back to the access point.

So it is not something we should be worried about?

What can we do to protect our networks?

Can you describe rekeying?

Now, I've heard of this - you need to be careful. You don't want to enable rapid rekeying unless ALL of your clients support IEEE 802.1x and an authentication method (e.g. EAP-TLS) that supports key distribution.

So, let's get to the point here - WPA really is not broken?

Listen to get the answers!

At the SAME-TEC conference this past July, I had the opportunity to interview Bio-Link Director Dr Elaine Johnson. In the interview Elaine discusses the work the Bio-Link Center and Regional Centers are doing to bring students the knowledge and skills essential to the field as well as the ability to continue with more advanced education in math, science and engineering.

My undergraduate background is in Microbiology so I've always had an interest in biotechnology and related fields. If you are faculty and considering starting a biotechnology program or maybe a student thinking about a biotechnology career, you will find her interview very interesting.

1. Those devoted to lasers, optics, and photonics technology; and
2. Those devoted to technologies that are enabled by optics and photonics.

1. Serve as a national resource center for optics and photonics education and training.
2. Create, assemble, align, and distribute coordinated curriculum materials designed to support optics, laser, and photonics education in high schools, two-year colleges, and retraining of adult workers.
3. Support established and new photonics education programs in high schools, community and technical colleges, universities, and professional societies.
4. Provide education and training for administrators, counselors, high school teachers, and community college faculty members to prepare them to:

• Faculty in technology programs who want to learn about new technologies and how to expand their
  existing programs
• College representatives, program development specialists, and counselors who are interested in
  creating more robust technology education programs and strategies for recruiting students
• K-12 teachers who want to learn how to integrate advanced technology concepts into their existing
  science and math curriculum
• Industry trainers and learning managers who want to gain insight into future training needs
• Industry personnel investing in workforce education and training
• Workforce development personnel from government, labor, business, and education who are involved
  in shaping workforce development programs
• Individuals concerned with issues related to skill standards and employability

Mike: Passive Optical Networks use Fiber â could you talk a little but about Fiber to the Premise or Home (FTTP or H)

Mike: So what exactly is a Fiber P2P Network?

Mike: OK, so whatâs a PON?

Mike: What are the PON Architectural Choices?

Mike: What is Centralized Splitting?

Mike: What is Distributed/Cascaded Splitting?

Mike: What are some of the Protocols and Standards used with PONs?

Mike: What are the Outside Plant Components?

Mike: Whatâs an ONT?

Mike: Are Technicians typically terminating fiber in the field?

Reference List:

FiOS: Our Future
James Armstrong, Chris Cote, Stan McCoy, James Todd
STCC Verizon NextStep Class of 2008

Passive Optical Network Splitter
Lawrence Graham, Mike Thompson, Jodi Lewandowski, Jeremy Dillensneider, Stephen Booher
STCC Verizon NextStep Class of 2006

FTTH Explained: Delivering efficient customer bandwidth and enhanced services
http://www.iec.org/online/tutorials/fiber_home/
Michael Kunigonis, Product Line Manager: Access Corning Cable Systems

What about external storage, battery life and ports or connectors? 

Back in 2005 Congress passed a law that requires all U.S. TV stations to convert to all digital broadcasts and give up analog spectrum in the 700 MHz frequency band. This law will free up 62 MHz of spectrum in the 700 MHz band and effectively eliminate channels between 52 and 69. This conversion, which has a deadline of February 18, 2009, has freed up spectrum that is being split up by the FCC into five blocks:

• A-Block - 12 MHz, split up into 176 smaller economic areas
  
• B-Block - 12 MHz, split up into 734 cellular market areas
  
• C-Block - 22 MHz, up into 12 regional licenses
  
• D-Block - 10MHz, combined with approximately 10MHz allocated for public safety, a single national license.
  
• E-Block - 6 MHz, split up into 176 smaller economic areas

The D-Block lately has been most interesting to watch. Early on it appeared Frontline Wireless would be one of the biggest bidders for D-Block spectrum - the company was setup for D-Block and had worked closely with the FCC on putting together specifications for the spectrum. Frontline built a formidable team including Vice Chairman Reed Hundt, who served as Chairman of the FCC between 1993 and 1997. The business plan, the organization, the technology seemed to all be in place........ On January 12 the company placed the following statement on their website:

Frontline Wireless is closed for business at this time. We have no further comment.

Another company, Cyren Call also looked like they were planning to bid on the D-Block Auction but did not.

What happen? Rumor has it Frontline could not attract enough funders - it seemed like a good investment - or at least you may think so up front. Many are now asking if the FCC's approach to solving the public safety inter-operability problem is in trouble.

Verizon and AT&T accounted for 80% of the nearly $20 billion AT&T agreed to pay $6.6 billion for 227 spectrum licenses in markets covering much of the country. Verizon Wireless, a joint venture of Verizon Communications Inc. and Vodafone Group PLC, won 109 licenses for $9.4 billion.

Dish Network Corp., which bid for spectrum through Frontier Wireless LLC, did acquire a significant footprint, winning 168 licenses throughout the country for $712 million. Satellite-TV providers are looking for a way into the high-speed Internet business to better compete with cable and phone companies. But Credit Suisse analyst Chris Larsen said in a research note that the particular segment of spectrum Dish acquired would make it difficult for the company to offer interactive wireless broadband service. He said the company could use the spectrum to broadcast data or for on-demand video.

Google had indicated interest in a nationwide package of licenses before the auction, but it bid just high enough to trigger rules that will force winners of one segment of spectrum, known as the C-block, to allow any mobile devices and applications on their networks. Verizon won the lion's share of spectrum in this segment. Google had pushed for the regulation since its efforts to sell some mobile services had been stymied by major carriers, which traditionally have strictly limited the kinds of devices that consumers could use on their networks. Even before the auction had wrapped up, Google scored a victory as Verizon voluntarily agreed to open its network to devices it doesn't sell through its own retail network. Verizon released details of its new policy on Wednesday.

Mike: Were there any licenses that dod not get any bids?

There were 1,099 licenses auctioned and only eight did not receive any bids:

It's  happening with business too Mike.  Let's take Verizon as an example as quoted in a Light Reading post from last September.

Verizon Business, which began its first phase of deploying IPv6 on the public IP network in 2004, will complete the North America region in 2008 and move into the Asia-Pacific and European regions from late 2008 to 2009. The company will operate both IPv6 and IPv4, in what is known as a "dual stack" arrangement, on its multi protocol label switching (MPLS) network core. The company also has deployed IPv6 throughout its network access points (peering facilities) where Internet service providers exchange traffic.

Gordon: Mike, can you give us a quick rundown on what Apple released on Thursday?

Sure, much of our discussion today is based on an excellent post at macworld.com titled The iPhone Software FAQ. Macworld editors Jason Snell, Jonathan Seff, Dan Moren, Christopher Breen, and Rob Griffiths contributed to this article. They also thank Glenn Fleishman, Craig Hockenberry, and Daniel Jalkut for their feedback and contributions.

Here's how Macworld answered the question:

The SDK is a set of tools that lets independent programmers and software companies design, write, and test software that runs on the iPhone. Right now there's a beta version for developers, but a final version of the iPhone software that supports the installation of new programs written by independent programmers is due in late June.

As a part of the announcement, Apple introduced a new iPhone program, App Store, through which you'll be able to purchase, download, and update iPhone software. That will be available as part of the new iPhone Software 2.0 update in late June. That's when you'll be able to add third-party apps to your iPhone for the first time, at least via official channels.

Gordon: You blogged about you experience with the SDK - can you tell us your first experience?

That's a good question and one that was sort of answered in the macworld.com post. Macworld assumes Apple wonât let you sell a âfreeâ? program that requires an unlock code. However, there are some other scenarios we expect to see. First, donationware: People will probably sell âfreeâ? programs that request that you make a donation if you want to keep the project going. We donât think Apple will have any problem with that, since the donation would be voluntary. Second, itâs possible that youâll see two versions of various iPhone programs: a free âliteâ? version thatâs a good advertisement for a more feature-rich for-pay version.

Macworld also mentions  Iconfactoryâs Twitterrific, a Mac program that is free, but contains ads. For an âupgradeâ? fee, users can shut off the ads. Whether Apple would allow this to be handled within the program or there would need to be two separate versions of an iPhone version of Twitterrific remains to be seen.

Gordon: I'm going to go back to the Macworld post again and take some questions directly from that FAQ:

1. What kind of stuff does Apple say it wonât allow developers to create?

2. What if someone writes a malicious program?

3. Whatâs a âbandwidth hog?â?

4. Can I buy these programs on my Mac, or just on the iPhone?

5. What about software updates?

6. What if youâve synced your phone on one computer and then restore it on another? Do you lose your apps until you sync to the original?

7. If I buy a program for my iPhone, can I also transfer it to my significant otherâs iPhone?

8. Can I download programs off the Web, or any place other than the App Store and iTunes?

9. What about internal, âprivateâ? software? What about beta testing?

10. Can I try the iPhone SDK and how could it be used in the classroom?

 Gordon: Apple posted a roadmap video - can you tell us a little bit about that?

On March 6, Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone software roadmap, released the iPhone Software Development Kit, and introduced the iPhone Enterprise Beta Program. You can watch the presentation now and see what's ahead at http://www.apple.com/quicktime/qtv/iphoneroadmap

Mike: Gordon, can you give us a little background on the auction?

Back in 2005 Congress passed a law that requires all U.S. TV stations to convert to all digital broadcasts and give up analog spectrum in the 700 MHz frequency band. This law will free up 62 MHz of spectrum in the 700 MHz band and effectively eliminate channels between 52 and 69. This conversion, which has a deadline of February 18, 2009, has freed up spectrum that is being split up by the FCC into five blocks:

• A-Block - 12 MHz, split up into 176 smaller economic areas
  
• B-Block - 12 MHz, split up into 734 cellular market areas
  
• C-Block - 22 MHz, up into 12 regional licenses
  
• D-Block - 10MHz, combined with approximately 10MHz allocated for public safety, a single national license.
  
• E-Block - 6 MHz, split up into 176 smaller economic areas

Mike: I know we discussed the auction a few weeks ago and not much has changed. Can you give us an update on where the auction is today?

Bidding round 102 came to a close yesterday afternoon with $19,524,595,900 (last week the auction finished at $19,450,389,100 - it is slowing) in total provisionally winning bids. Things have slowed considerably with only 40 new bids placed in round 102. For reference, on Thursday, each round averaged about 50 new bids.

Most active in the final round yesterday were E-Block licenses in the Bismark, North Dakota and Rapid City, South Dakota areas along with B-Block licenses in the southeastern United States.

The public safety D-Block still has not had a bid since the first round and will end up being re-auctioned by the FCC.

This may end up being the last week (an FCC decision but I'm thinking so). After the auction is closed the FCC will announce the winners.

Mike: Let's talk specifically about D-Block, the public safety piece. What's happened - why are we not seeing any new bids?

I think you have to go back and look at the history of D-Block. Early on it appeared Frontline Wireless would be one of the biggest bidders for D-Block spectrum - the company was setup for D-Block and had worked closely with the FCC on putting together specifications for the spectrum. Frontline built a formidable team including Vice Chairman Reed Hundt, who served as Chairman of the FCC between 1993 and 1997. The business plan, the organization, the technology seemed to all be in place........ On January 12 the company placed the following statement on their website:

Frontline Wireless is closed for business at this time. We have no further comment.

Another company, Cyren Call also looked like they were planning to bid on the D-Block Auction but did not.

Mike: So what happened?

Rumor has it Frontline could not attract enough funders - it seemed like a good investment - or at least you may think so up front. Many are now asking if the FCC's approach to solving the public safety inter-operability problem is in trouble. At the same time many are also asking "Is there a better way?"

I've always liked the idea of public-private partnerships and we've seen them work in times of disaster - last August I wrote here about the Minneapolis I-35 bridge collapse tragedy and how within minutes USI Wireless opened their subscription-based Wi-Fi service so anyone could use it for free. US Wireless didn't just stop there - because the network had only been built around part of the disaster, the company installed additional Wi-Fi radios in areas surrounding the catastrophe to blanket it with signals, providing an additional 12 megabits per second of capacity to the area around the bridge collapse.

A national network built from scratch may be too big of a bite though.

Mike: So what are we looking at for a solution?

Last month I had an interesting conversation with Rivada Networksâ Senior Vice President for External Affairs John Kneuer about emergency responder communications and the FCC Spectrum Auction.. Rivada uses existing cellular networks and commercial off-the-shelf technology to deliver high-speed voice and data services over a network that can survive natural or man-made disasters. I like the idea of using the existing commercial infrastructure for public safety for lots of reasons.

State homeland security officials have struggled for years with the inability of local emergency responders to communicate with each other and their federal counterparts during disasters. This inter-operability problem is so serious it has been identified as the number one concern of state homeland security officials in the National Governors Association 2007 State Homeland Security Directors Survey. Here's a quote from the report:

• Is available today,
• Does not require new spectrum allocation or depend on federal spectrum auctions or mandates, and
• Offers far greater range and capability at a fraction of the cost of other existing or planned technologies.

• Building new towers in areas without sufficient commercial infrastructure;
• Employing Rivada Interoperable Communications Extension Systems (ICES) â âfly-inâ? units capable of being deployed within hours â where existing infrastructure has been degraded or destroyed;
• Using proprietary backwards-compatible technology to provide full interoperability between cell phones, PDAs, laptops, landlines and traditional âwalkie talkieâ-type Land Mobile Radio (LMR) systems; and
• Combining all of these elements into an efficient network architecture.

Regional Economic Areas

The C-Block (22 MHz) is being auctioned using the 12 Regional Economic Areas (REAs) created by the FCC. The REAs are an aggregation of the 52 Major Economic Areas (MEAs) defined by the FCC.

All FCC areas, along with names, county lists, maps and map info data can be found on the Commission's website linked here.

On their website, the Federal Communications Commission has  a public notice titled Auction of 700 MHZ Band Licenses. This document describes the bidding procedure for the 214 companies that have qualified for the auction, which will be handled by the Wireless Telecommunications Bureau (WTB). The WTB is one of seven FCC Bureaus and is responsible for all FCC domestic wireless telecommunications programs and policies.

Here's a summary outline of the procedure pulled from the 12 page FCC document:

• Bidding in Auction 73 started on Thursday, January 24, 2008.
• Each qualified bidder received prior to January 24:
  
  • At least two RSA SecurID tokens
  • An Integrated Spectrum Auction System (ISAS) Bidderâs Guide
  • A FCC Auction Bidder Line phone number

• The FCC will conduct the auction over the Internet and telephonic bidding will also be available. In either case, each authorized bidder must have his or her own SecurID token.

• There will be a minimum opening bid amount for each license and package and the minimum opening bid amount is subject to reduction at the discretion of the WTB. The WTB will not entertain requests to lower minimum opening bid amounts.
  

• The WTB has established the following block-specific aggregate reserve prices for Auction 73:
  

  • Block A, $1.807380 billion;
    
  • Block B, $1.374426 billion;
    
  • Block C, $4.637854 billion;
    
  • Block D, $1.330000 billion;
    
  • Block E, $0.903690 billion.
    

• If, at the close of bidding in Auction 73, the aggregate reserve price for the A, B, C and/or E Blocks has not been met, the WTB will issue an announcement that bidding in Auction 73 is closed and set a date for commencement of Auction 76.

• Round results will be available approximately 10 minutes after the close of each round. and two types of reports will be available to bidders: (a) publicly available information, and (b) bidder-specific information available only to that bidder when logged in to the FCC Auction System.

• Each qualified bidder will have a default watchlist that contains every license and packages of licenses selected on the bidderâs short-form application. Qualified bidders may also create custom watchlists.

• On Tuesday, January 22, the WTB conducted a mock auction, which will allow qualified bidders to familiarize themselves with the FCC Auction System. Only qualified bidders will be permitted to participate in the mock auction.
  

• Once winning bids are announced (either after Auction 73 or Auction 76) and winning bidders are announced, winning bidders will have 10 business days to file a long-form application (FCC Form 601) and make down payments for all of the licenses it won.

The 26th round finished yesterday (Friday - Feb. 1, 2008) afternoon - here's a quick update from the FCC auction site:

• Bidding Rounds to Date: 26
  
• Bid totals to Date: $18,554,080,600
  
• The A and B-Blocks have been getting most of the attention lately:
• The Los Angeles A-Block leads the A's with a current bid of $580,268,000.
• The Chicago B-Block leads the B's with a current bid of $892,400,000.
• There has not been a C-Block bid since it passed the FCC reserve price on Thursday. The current C-Block bid is $4,713,823,000.
• The public safety D-Block has not had a bid in 25 consecutive rounds and is stuck at $472,042,000, well below the $1.3 Billion reserve price set by the FCC.
• E-Block bidding has been slow with the New York City E-Block leading at $178,897,000.
• 23 licenses had not registered a bid at the end of round 26, 19 of these 23 are in the E-Block.
  

• It looks (to me anyways) like the C-Block bidding may be done. Since the FCC reserve price of $4.6 Billion has been passed, the open-access that Google wanted is assured. We won't know who the winning bidders are until after the auctions have closed but I'd say Google is the current leading C-Block bidder.
  
• Right now it does not look like the D-Block will meet the $1.3 Billion reserve price and will end up being re-auctioned by the FCC.
• A number of E-Block licenses will not meet minimum bids and will also be re-auctioned.
  
• The FCC had set an original goal of $10 Billion for the auction. With current bids totaling over $18 Billion, it appears the auction (from the FCC's perspective) will be a success.
  

Mike: Gordon, can you give us a little background on what AT&T is doing?

Project Lightspeed was announced as a 6 billion dollar project by AT&T in June 2004 and involves running optical fiber out to a remote terminal, or node and providing the last portion of the connection over copper wire. The project was ambitious from the start with initial plans to reach close to 19 million homes by the end of 2008. AT&T has given the product the name U-verse and at the TelcoTV conference last October, VP of converged services at AT&T Labs Research Peter Hill gave the keynote address featuring the product. Here's a few quotes from an October 26 CED Magazine post:

Homes Passed: Approximately 5.5 million living units (as of end of 3Q07)

Mike: Gordon, I know you are very familiar with Verizon and the companies FiOS fiber to the home ((FTTH) product. How is the project coming along?

FiOS is Verizon's Fiber to the Home (FTTH), also know as Fiber to the Premise (FTTP) product offering. The service provides high-bandwidth data, voice and video services. The company has posted some interesting data on their policy blog for the third quarter of 2007. Here's a summary:

Fiber Implementation: Source: http://www.verizon.com/fiberoptics

Verizon expects to continue passing some 3 million premises annually through 2010,

when the company expects to have passed about 18 million homes, or over half the homes

it serves.

Verizon will begin boosting speeds and capabilities on its all-fiber network when it begins

deploying advanced G-PON electronics in 2007. This technology can increase

downstream broadband speeds by up to four times, and upstream speeds by eight times.

Verizon is investing nearly $23 billion in the FiOS project, between 2004 and 2010.

Mike: How about broadband products?

Broadband Products: Source: http://www22.verizon.com/Content/ConsumerFiOS/

Mike: What about video?

Video: Source: http://www.verizonfios.com/tv

On November 19, Verizon announced they have completed a 100 Gbps optical communications test between Tampa and Miami, FL. The two cities are 312 miles apart. Here's a couple of quotes from the press release:

The test, which utilized a live video feed from Verizon's national FiOS TV network as the "payload," was successfully completed Friday (Nov. 16). The 100 Gbps transmission was conducted on a Verizon Business ultra long-haul optical system carrying other live traffic at 10 Gbps. The test demonstrated that by deploying advanced electronics, an existing network system can easily and quickly be upgraded to 100Gbps.

Intro: The first DOCSIS standard, short for Data Over Cable Service Interface Specifications, standard was released by the company Cable Labs in 1997. In this podcast we take a look at the history of these standards and discuss DOCSIS 3.0 â the emerging standard in the cable industry.

Mike: Gordon, can you give us a brief history of the first DOCSIS standards?

Gordon â just covers up to 2.0

Mike: What are âtiered servicesâ??

Tiered services is business jargon for providing a service (such as telecom connectivity or cable channel service) according to separate, incrementally distinct quality and pay levels, or "tiers." Weâre seeing this term used a lot recently in political debate regarding ânet neutralityâ?.

Mike: Can you tell us a little more about DOCSIS 3.0?

Sure â in a nutshell itâs bigger, better, fasterâ Itâs a needed response to products from competitors like Verizon with FIOs FTTH product and AT&T with the FTTN Lightspeed product. Itâs triple play broadband â voice video and data.

DOCSIS 3.0:

- Much higher bandwidth through channel bonding

- Starts at 160 Mbps Downstream, 60 Mbps Upstream and goes up from there

   - TI just rolled out their Puma 5 chip set a couple of weeks ago for cable modems. The chipset supports new DOCSIS 3.0 features, such as channel bonding, enable ultra high downstream bandwidth rates of at least 160 Mbps in the residential data and voice services configuration and 320 Mbps in video and business services configuration. In addition Puma 5 also supports greater quality of service with IPv6 and security with Advanced Encryption Standard (AES).

- Multiple 6 MHz (or 8 MHz) channels are bound, treating them logically as one

• Channel bonding in both upstream and downstream

- IPv6 for advanced networking capabilities

- Expanded address space (2128 or 3.4 dodecillion)

• Improved operational capabilities

Mike: How will IPv6 be rolled out?

Thereâs a lot of speculation now but it looks like it will be in to phases. John T. Chapman and Shalabh Goel from Cisco Systems have an interesting piece weâve got linked in the shownotes (http://www.cable360.net/ct/sections/features/20942.html )

âThe initial deployment phase allows the cable operator to set up an IPv6 control and management plane for managing the cable modems, set-top boxes, and multimedia terminal adapters (MTAs) with a cost-effective upgrade. In a subsequent deployment phase, cable operators can offer IPv6 directly to the home network. Many new devices are already IPv6 capable, and cable operators could soon be running the largest IPV6 networks in the world.â?

Mike: What are some other key features of DOCSIS 3.0?

Other key related DOCSIS 3.0 features, which may be migrated over time, include:

â Enhanced security, including advanced encryption standard (AES), security provisioning and theft of service features;

â An upstream frequency range extension to 85 MHz and a downstream frequency extension to 1 GHz that allows an operator to add existing capacity with plant upgrades at a later date;

â Enhanced plant diagnostic features, including a cable modem diagnostic log, enhanced signal quality monitoring, extension of IP data record (IPDR) usage and capacity management.

Mike: How about the commercial services?

(from: http://www.cable360.net/ct/sections/features/20942.html)

DOCSIS 3.0 specifications define two technologies for business services over DOCSIS: layer 2 virtual private networks (VPNs) and T-1 circuit emulation.

Business users will be able to videoconference from their PCs and PDAs and tap into corporate networks through VPNs; residential customers will subscribe to video-on-demand (VOD) and IP telephony services with low latency and minimum packet loss; and users everywhere will be able to upload and download files at much greater broadband speeds.

Mike: When will it be available?

• Comcast demoâed 150 Mbps at the May 14, 2007 Cable Show in Las Vegas.

• âThe Associated Press described a demo in which a 30-second, 300MB television commercial was downloaded in a few seconds, while a standard cable modem took 16 minutesâ?.

• âAlso downloaded, in less than four minutes, was the full 32-volume Encyclopedia Britannica 2007 and Merriam-Websterâs visual dictionary. With a standard cable modem, that download would have taken three hours and 12 minutes (dialup would have taken 2 weeks)â?.

• âComcast is currently trialing this in the Boston area. In one trial, the cable operator will set up an IP video headend to experiment with carrying voice, video and data over a single IP connectionâ?.

According to FierceIPTV (http://www.fierceiptv.com/story/comcast-to-trial-docsis-3.0-iptv/2007-05-08 ):

âComcast's planned converged-services trial will take place in a system that serves 50,000 homes, and will include an IP-video headend and DOCSIS 3.0 STBs, as well as the Slingbox from Sling Media, dual mode WiFi-cellular handsets and mobile phones capable of playing video.â?

According to Chapman and Goel: The industry consensus is that fully compliant DOCSIS 3.0 CMTS* implementations will be available in 2008 to 2009. Many cable operators will require the most critical DOCSIS 3.0 features, such as downstream channel bonding and IPv6, far earlier. To meet this demand, many vendorsâ CMTS products now include early implementations of such a subset of DOCSIS 3.0 features.

* CMTS: A cable modem termination system or CMTS is equipment typically found in a cable company's headend, or at cable company hubsite and is used to provide high speed data services, such as cable internet or Voice over IP, to cable subscribers.

In order to provide these high speed data services, a cable company will connect its headend to the Internet via very high capacity data links, also known as a circuit (canonical form of telecommunication circuit), to a network service provider. On the subscriber side of the headend, the CMTS enables the communication with subscribers' cable modems. Different CMTSs are capable of serving different cable modem population sizes - ranging from 4,000 cable modems to 150,000 or more. A given headend may have between half a dozen to a dozen or more CMTSs to service the cable modem population served by that headend.

One way to think of a CMTS is to imagine a router with Ethernet interfaces (connections) on one side and coax RF interfaces on the other side. The RF/coax interfaces carry RF signals to and from the subscriber's cable modem. (source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CMTS )

Emotionr is a way to gauge your happiness on a scale of 1-10 (decimals included). As the name touts, it is a way to express and share your emotions and feelings with those around you.

The iPod touch is basically an iPhone without the phone. It comes in two storage sizes â there is a 8 Gigabyte version for $299 and a 16 Gigabyte version for $399. Iâve written about the iPhone and storage capacity in the past - as a rough guideline, 1 Gigabyte of storage space will hold approximately 250 songs or 45 minutes of video.

The iPhone requires a 2 year AT&T contract while the iPod touch idoes not require any cellular contracts. You buy it and use it as you would a classic iPod.

Gordon: Mike - the products appear to be similar and you have an iPhone - can you describe wireless connectivity?

In addition to allowing you to listen to music and watch video the iPod touch has built in wireless WiFi functionality and can be used for Internet access in any area where there is WiFi availability. Places that provide free WiFi access include most college campuses, libraries, some coffee shops, restaurants, etc. Many of you probably have WiFi in your homes now, with services provided by companies like Verizon and Comcast

Gordon: How about web browsing?

The iPod touch has a similar 3.5-inch widescreen display that the iPhone has allowing you to surf the web, watch videos, TV shows and view photos. The iPod touchâs screen appears to be of a slightly higher quality than the iPhone, with 163 pixels per inch to the iPhoneâs 160 pixels per inch.

For web browsing, and like the iPhone, it comes with the Safari web browser. If you have not had a chance to âsurfâ? the web with an iPhone (or iPod touch) the next time you are in the mall stop in the Apple store and give it a try with one of the display models. I think you will be very impressed.

Mike: I know you are impressed with the user interface - can you describe?

If you currently own an iPod you are familiar with the click wheel interface that you use to select, play, fast forward, etc. The iPod touch does not have a click wheel, it has the same multi-touch screen interface as the iPhone. It does not take long to get used to the multi-touch interface. You can do all the things you can do with the click wheel and also use simple hand motions like pinching, flicking and flipping to do things like zoom in on websites, scroll though music lists and flip through album covers. Once I tried multi-touch I was hooked.

Gordon: How about some differences when compared to the iPhone?

• There is no email client on the iPod Touch
• There is no Maps application on the iPod Touch
• There are no Stocks or Weather widgets on the iPod Touch
• There is no built-in camera for the iPod Touch
• There are no Blutooth capabilities for the iPod Touch
• The iPod Touch has a differently styled âDock,â? with a reflective surface â akin to the Dock that will debut with Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard)

• While the iPod Touch is sleeping, the user can tap the home button twice to bring up touch controls on the screen â a feature the iPhone currently lacks
• The iPod Touch has a separate Contacts app â itâs built into the Phone application on the iPhone
• The iPod Touch has separate Video and Music apps, whereas the iPhone has a single âiPodâ? app that contains these functions
• There is apparently (and obviously) no microphone on the iPod Touch, though it will be interesting to see if such audio-in capabilities could be enabled via a third-party device.
• The iPod touchâs headphone jack is on the bottom of the device
• The iPod touch lacks a built-in external speaker

Mike: And how about iTunes - any news on where Apple is going with it?

Also if you own an iPod you are familiar with the process of purchasing songs and video from the iTunes store. The songs are purchased from the store using your computer. The iPod is then connected to your computer with a cable and the purchases are downloaded to the iPod. When the downloads are complete you disconnect the cable and can now listen to and watch the music and videos you purchased on your iPod. Iâve always found this process cumbersome but it looks like it will get easier soon. Later this month Apple plans to launch a Wi-Fi version of the iTunes store. This means you will be able to purchase and download music directly from the iTunes music store using an iPhone or iPod touch. You will be able to find what youâre looking for, preview it, buy it and download it directly to the to either of these devices. If you own a classic iPod (with a click wheel) you will still have to use the computer and cable to make purchases and downloads.

At Procter & Gamble, The Good And Bad Of Web 2.0 Tools

Mike: Gordon, we love Google products and services - is there a the problem?

It may be Google does too good of a job! Have you ever tried Google searching on a persons name? A simple Google search on my first and last name gives over 1.9 million results!

Today, three companies control almost 90% of online search:

- over 50% of all searches are done using Google

- over 25% on Yahoo

- and over 13% using Microsoft

There are some problems though â these search engines primarily give results based on the number of sites linking to a page and the prominence of search terms on a page. Because they work this way there is room for niche.

Mike: With this kind of lock on search it would be almost impossible for a startup to launch a successful general search product - right?

Yes - it would be almost impossible but we are seeing some acrivirt in the niche areas. Areas like travel and finance are niches that have already been filled but today there seems to be some room in the people search area.

Mike: Are there companies in this market we should be looking at?

One of the startups to watch is Spock at www.spock.com. Spock is scheduled for their public launch the first week of August. Among other places on the web, Spock scans social networking websites like Facebook and LinkedIn. Search results give summary information (age, address, etc) about the person along with a list of website links that refer to the person.

According to Spock 30% of the 7 billion searches done on the web every month are related to individuals. Spock says about half of those searches concern celebrities with the other half including business and personal lookups. According to Spock, a common problem that we face is that there are many people with the same name. Given that, how do we distinguish a document about Michael Jackson the singer from Michael Jackson the football player?

With billions of documents and people on the web, we need to identify and cluster web documents accurately to the people they are related to. Mapping these named entities from documents to the correct person is what Spock is all about and theyâre coming at the problem in an interesting way.

Mike: I've looked at Spock - what is the Spock Challenge?

Theyâve launched what they call the Spock Challenge â more formally referred to as the SPOCK Entity Resolution Problem linked here: http://challenge.spock.com/pages/learn_more

If you go to the site you can download a couple of data sets â one called a training set (approx 25,000 documents) and the other called a test set (approx 75,000 documents).

Along with the document sets they include a set of target names. You assume that each document contains only one of the target names (even though most documents contain many names). The challenge is to partition all the documents relevant to a target name by their referent.

Mike: When does the contest begin and end?

Mike: What languages and tools be used?

You can use any language and any non-commercial libraries, tools and data to develop the solution. There is one catch - the winner grants Spock non-exclusive right to use the software and data. As an FYI, much of Google is actualy written in Python with the Search Engine Core written in C++. Python provied scripting support for the search engine. and some apps like google code are done in python

Michael Jackson - The King of Pop or Wacko Jacko?

Michael Jackson statistics - pro-football-reference.com

The referents of these articles are the pop star and football player, respectively. Theyâve also included the ground truth for the training set so you have something to compare against.

Once you're done training, you can run your algorithm on the test set and submit your results on this site. Spock will provide instant feedback in the form of a percentage rank score. This way you can see how you stack up against the other teams.

So they provide you with a lot of well constructed data, and the ground truth about that data. âGround truthâ? data is real results and you use this information to validate your search algorithm results.

This data is documents about people, and the challenge is to determine all the unique people described in the data set. This data can be your training set. Once you have got your basic algorithm working against the training set, they let you further tune your code by running it against a second test data set and give you instant accuracy feedback in the form of a score. The score depends on how many correct unique people you can identify in the data. This way you can continue to refine your work, and see how you are doing, and how well others are doing.

This looks like a great academic challenge. At the end of the contest time, you submit your code, a 3 page description of your approach, pre-built binary executables that can run in isolation on Spock servers, and your results (the âSoftware Entryâ?). Spock will select the finalists based upon submissions, and fly the finalists to visit the judges. The winner will win $50,000, 2nd place wins $5000 and 3rd place wins $2000.

You may enter the Contest by registering online at www.spock.com/contestregistration . You may register as an individual or as a team. During the registration process, you must provide your name, your age, your email address, and the country you are from. If you are entering on behalf of an organization, a school or a company, you must identify its name. If you are registering as a team, you must provide the same information for each member of your team as well as the identity of a team leader. You will also provide a name for your team or for yourself by which you or your team will be known to other participants in the Contest. Spock may change the name if it feels the name you select is not appropriate for any reason.

Mike: What are the differences between the Spock Challenge and the Netflix Challenge?

Mike: How about some other companies?

Wink â www.wink.com Similar to Spock â launched a few months ago. Claim that Wink People Search now searches over two hundred million people profiles. Searches people across numerous social networks including MySpace, LinkedIn, Friendster, Bebo, Live Spaces, Yahoo!360, Xanga, Twitter and more. Also included in the results are Web sources such as Wikipedia and IMDB with more coming all the time.

Zoominfo â www.zoominfo.com Specializes in executive searches. Claim 37,131,140 People and 3,518,329 Companies indexed. You can currently search on three categories â people, jobs and companies.

Searchwikia - http://search.wikia.com Jimmy Wales and his open-source search protocol and human collaboration project. From Press release:

"Last week Wikia acquired Grub, the original visionary distributed search project, from LookSmart and released it under an open source license for the first time in four years. Grub operates under a model of users donating their personal computing resources towards a common goal, and is available today for download and testing at: http://www.grub.org/ .

NCTT 10th Annual Summer Worskshop discussion.

Thursday, July 12, 2007 Blog

Skype Everywhere

There have been a couple of interesting Skype product upgrades/releases over the past few days.

The first is SoonR Talk, an AJAX enabled application that allows Skype to run on the iPhone and other mobile devices.

The second is the release of Skype on the Nokia N800 Internet tablet. The small hand-held device connects to available Wi-Fi networks that we're all finding just about everywhere these days.

Here's a Yahoo News quote from Gartner analyst Elroy Jopling:

Saturday, July 14, 2007 Blog

Some Interesting Skype Alternatives

Network Computing recently published a piece evaluating 6 Skype Alternatives here. Each alternative adds enhanced features that Skype currelty does not offer. Here's the list:

T-Mobile HotSpot @Home service   For $10 a month, on top of your regular plan, you can eliminate the problem of poor wireless coverage in your home and make unlimited calls without using voice-plan minutes. All it takes is a broadband connection, a Wi-Fi network, and one of two Wi-Fi-ready handsets sold by T-Mobile. T-Mobile's product is based on  Unlicensed Mobile Access (UMA) - we'll have to do a separate podcast on this technology.

Thursday, July 19, 2007 Blog

Friday, July 20, 2007 Blog

Gordon: Hi Donna, welcome and thanks for joining Mike and I, before we get into the great details, can you give us a quick overview of IWITTS and a little bit of IWITTS history?

See www.iwitts.com and www.womentechworld.org and www.womentechstore.com

Mike: Can you tell us a little about your background?

Donna discusses basic bio, IWITTS history, etc

Gordon:  What is some of the work your organization is doing that could help National Science Foundation technology centers and projects??

Donna discusses the WomenTech Portal and the CalWomenTech Project along with several other IWITTS projects.

See http://www.iwitts.com/html/womentechportal_home.html and http://www.iwitts.com/html/calwomentech_summary.html

Mike: Gordon and I both have daughters (Gordon has 2 and I have 1) so we are very interested. How are girls doing? Are they going into these technical fields?

Donna discusses the facts that #s are still small and the AAUW Tech-savvy study. Research shows interventions make a difference including proactive recruitment.

Donna also discusses the Discover Engineering" program http://www.iwitts.com/html/017anderson.pdf

Gordon: My 15 year old is really excited about computer science - it is not engineering but similar. Any information on CS?

Donna discusses the TWiCE program http://www.iwitts.com/html/052bair.pdf

Mike: Now you do not just focus on engineering and computer science. What other fields do you provide information on?

Donna discusses the focus on emerging technology, type of technology does not matter because principles are the same

Gordon: Many community college technology programs would like to have more women entering their programs but they just do not sign up. How do we change this?

Donna discusses several methods and opportunities to recruit women.

Mike: Many of our technology programs find that the women who do enroll tend to drop out, how do we improve retention of women in technology programs?

Donna discusses several methods and opportunities to retain women.

Gordon: How can people get more information about the work you are doing and how can they get in touch with you?

See www.iwitts.com and www.womentechworld.org

CalWomenTech Community College Sites 2007

-     City College of San Francisco, Digital Home Integration Technology certification

-    San Diego Mesa College, Geographic Information Systems Program

-     Canada College in Redwood City, CA, 3-D Animation and Video Game Art Program

-     El Camino College in Torrance, CA, Air Conditioning Refrigeration Program

All four colleges will receive free, intensive training and assistance on recruiting and retaining women in their technology programs for the next 4 years. 4 to 6 more colleges from California will be selected via a competitive process end of 2007.

Wikipedia: www.Wikipedia.org

Videos have Net bursting at the seams: http://www.chicagotribune.com/technology/chi-0702230143feb23,0,1395493.story?coll=chi-bizfront-hed

BitTorrent to open digital media store:
http://news.com.com/BitTorrent+opens+digital+media+store/2100-1025_3-6161944.html

Appeerances Can Be Deceiving: What's that 40-gig hard drive doing inside my Apple TV?

References:

IPTV Emerges as Major Growth Driver for Networking Gear in 2007: http://www.isuppli.com/news/default.asp?id=7203

Budde.com: http://www.budde.com

JP Morgan: http://www.jpmorgan.com

Nielsen Media Research: http://www.nielsen.com/

In-Stat: http://www.instat.com/

US Bancorp: http://www.usbank.com/

Lehman Brothers: http://www.lehman.com/

Verizon: http://www.verizon.com/

Cox: http://www.cox.com

Comcast: http://www.comcast.com

Time Warner: http://www.timewarner.com

Question: I know this project was really just announced. Before we get into the technology involved - can you tell us what phase the project is in?
According to the BBC Jimmy Wales is currently recruiting people to work for the company and he's buying hardware to get the site up and running. 

Question: What makes this concept fundamentally different than what Google or Yahoo! Are doing?
When Wales announced the project he came right out and said it was needed because the existing search systems for the net were "broken". They were broken, he said, because they lacked freedom, community, accountability and transparency.

Question:  This sounds a lot like digg - am I on the right track?
Yes you are - what you end up with is a digg like application, or what Wales is calling, a "people-powered" search site.

Question: Can you provide a bit more detail on how Google works?
Googlebot is Google's web crawling robot. Googlebot finds pages in two ways: through an add URL form, www.google.com/addurl.html, and through finding links by crawling the web.

Source: www.google.com 

Question: That's Googlebot, how does the indexer work?
Googlebot gives the indexer the full text of the pages it finds. These pages are stored in Google's index database. This index is sorted alphabetically by search term, with each index entry storing a list of documents in which the term appears and the location within the text where it occurs. This data structure allows rapid access to documents that contain user query terms.

Source: www.google.com

Question: So now that everything is indexed, can you describe the search query?
The query processor has several parts, including the user interface (search box), the "engine" that evaluates queries and matches them to relevant documents, and the results formatter.

PageRank is Google's system for ranking web pages. A page with a higher PageRank is deemed more important and is more likely to be listed above a page with a lower PageRank.

Source: www.google.com 

Question: Can you run us through, step by step, a Google search query?
Sure - this is also off of Google's site, Here's the steps in a typical query process:

1. User accesses google server at google.com and makes query.

2. The web server sends the query to the index servers. The content inside the index servers is similar to the index in the back of a book--it tells which pages contain the words that match any particular query term.

3. The query travels to the doc servers, which actually retrieve the stored documents. Snippets are generated to describe each search result.

4. The search results are returned to the user in a fraction of a second.

Source: www.google.com

Question: OK, so now we know how Google and Yahoo! How will this new Search Wikia type search engines work.
I can give some details based on what I've taken a look at. As we've said the Search Wikia project will not rely on computer algorithms to determine how relevant webpages are to keywords. Instead the results generated by the search engine will be decided and edited by the users.

There are a couple of projects called Nutch and Lucene, along with some others that can  now provide the background infrastructure needed to generate a new kind of search engine, which relies on human intelligence to do what algorithms cannot. Let's take a quick look at these projects.

Lucene: Lucene is a free and open source information retrieval API, originally implemented in Java by Doug Cutting. It is supported by the Apache Software Foundation and is released under the Apache Software License. 

We mentioned Nutch earlier. Nutch is a project to develop an open source search engine. Nutch is supported by the Apache Software Foundation, and is a subproject of Lucene since 2005.

With Search Wikia Jimmy Wales hopes to build on Lucene and Nutch by adding the social component. What we'll end up with in the end is more intelligent and social based search tools. Now, don't think Google, Yahoo!, Microsoft and all the rest are not working on these kinds of technologies. It will be interesting to watch how these new technologies and methods are implemented.

Sources: http://search.wikia.com
http://search.wikia.com/wiki/Nutch
http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/

http://wikipedia.org/

References:

Wikipedia creator turns to search: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6216619.stm

How Google Works: http://www.googleguide.com/google_works.html

Search Wikia website: http://search.wikia.com

Search Wikia Nutch website http://search.wikia.com/wiki/Nutch

Lucene Website: http://lucene.apache.org/java/docs/

Wikipedia Website: http://wikipedia.org/

References:

SPI Dynamics Website: www.spidynamics.com

Wikipedia: www.wikipedia.org

• looking up the population of New York City [=GoogleLookup("New York City", "population")] or
  
• when Google was founded [=googlelookup("google", "founded")]
• =GoogleLookup("Springfield, MA", "population") gives us 152,082 
• =GoogleLookup("NJ", "population") gives us 8,414,350
  

What are some of the entity types you can look up?

Here are some of the types of entities you can access using GoogleLookup, and a few popular attribute names (some entities won't have all these attributes, and some will have more, so experiment):

• Countries and Territories (like "Burkina Faso"): population, capital, largest city, gdp
• U.S. States (like "Tennessee"): area, governor, nickname, flower
• Rivers (like "Amazon River"): origin, length
• Cities and Towns (like "Chicago"): state, mayor, elevation
• Musicians (like "John Lennon"): date of birth, place of birth, nationality
• Actors (like "Audrey Hepburn"): date of birth, place of birth, nationality
• Politicians (like "Anwar Al-Sadat"): date of birth, place of birth, nationality
• U.S. Presidents (like "Zachary Taylor"): date of birth, place of birth, political party
• Baseball Players (like "Wade Boggs"): games, at bats, earned run average, position
• Chemical Elements (like "Helium"): atomic number, discovered by, atomic weight
• Chemical Compounds (like "Isopropyl Alcohol"): chemical formula, melting point, boiling point, density
• Stars (like "Betelgeuse"): constellation, distance, mass, temperature
• Planets (like "Saturn"): number of moons, length of day, distance from sun, atmosphere
• Dinosaurs (like "Velociraptor"): height, weight, when it lived
• Ships (like "USS Chesapeake"): length, displacement, complement, commissioned
• Companies (like "Hewlett-Packard"): employees, ceo, ticker
  

In this session we'll take a look at a few of the common social media applications including mySpace, Facebook and Flickr. We'll also look at some applications that are designed specifically for academic use.

Gordon, can you tell us a little more about what these social media tools?
ÃïïWhat we want to express with the term social media is the fact that in media design we are aware of the existence of others and the collaborations we see happening through the so-called social software. Concrete examples of social media are online communities, social networking places, social sharing tools (flickr),.... Ãïï

Source: Belgian Master course in Communication & Multimedia Design: http://listserv.aoir.org/pipermail/air-l-aoir.org/2006-April/009573.html

How about some examples?

 mySpace: http://www.myspace.com/

Eons: http://eons.com

Flickr: http://www.flickr.com

 Digg: http://www.digg.com

MyHeritage: www.myheritage.com

del.icio.us: http://del.icio.us

(www.Facebook.com)

LetÃïïs take a look at the Facebook website site tour. [Source: http://www.facebook.com/sitetour/]

IÃïïve heard about social media applications that extend beyond the desktop. Can you give an additional example?

Dodgeball: http://www.dodgeball.com/

Mobile location-based service that functions using Ãïïdevices formally known as cell phonesÃïï and text messaging. See website for demo.

Are there any specific academic applications?

CiteULike: http://www.citeulike.org/

Is there a good comprehensive list of social media application links?

Sure Ãïï Wikipedia maintains a great list that is linked up in the shownotes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_social_networking_websites

How about academic applications?

Blackboard/WebCT (www.blackboard.com) Ãïï RSS not available yet

Moodle (www.moodle.org) has a basic blogging tool.  It has the capacity to add tags and create RSS feeds for the other people in your course/class.

Ãïï        Moodle is an Ãïïopen sourceÃïï applicationÃïÂÃïÂ

Other Course Management Systems [samples from www.wikipedia.org]

ANGEL Learning (commercial)

Brihaspati (Open source, commercial version also)

eCollege (commercial)

Desire2Learn (commercial)

Dokeos (open source)

Edumate (commercial)

LON-CAPA (open source)

.LRN (open source)

Sakai Project (open source)

Scholar360 (commercial)

WebCT (commercial, owned by Blackboard Inc.)

Vuepoint (commercial)

Overview: According to wikipedia.com: MMORPGs are online Role Playing Games (RPG's) in which a large number of players interact with one another in a virtual world. As in all RPGs, players assume the role of a fictional character (most commonly in a fantasy setting) and take control over many of that character's actions. MMORPGs are distinguished from single-player or small multi-player RPGs by the number of players, and by the game's persistent world, usually hosted by the game's publisher, which continues to exist and evolve while the player is away from the game.

Today business and industry (including Intel and IBM) along with academic institutions (including Harvard and the University of Washington) are developing MMORPGs that provide education and training. In this session we'll take a look at some of the common games and discuss how they could potentially be used in our classrooms.

Social networking also refers to a category of Internet applications to help connect friends, business partners, or other individuals together using a variety of tools. These applications, known as online social networks are becoming increasingly popular[1]. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_networking

MMORPGs Your Future Students are Playing

Disney's Virtual Magic Kingdom: www.vmk.com
Good Article: http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2006/05/disneys_virtual_magic_kingdom.html

Cyworld: http://us.cyworld.com/
Good Article: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/05_39/b3952405.htm

Ones Your Current Students are Playing

World of Warcraft: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/index.xml

EverQuest: http://eqplayers.station.sony.com/

Maple Story: http://www.maplestory.com/

Final Fantasy 11: http://www.playonline.com/ff11us/index.shtml

Guildwars: http://www.guildwars.com/

Second Life: http://secondlife.com
Good article: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_18/b3982001.htm

OpenBC: http://corporate.openbc.com/en/the-company.html

What is Business Doing? 

IBM Second Life Story:
http://news.com.com/2300-1014_3-6135108-1.html?part=rss&tag=6135108&subj=news

What about education :

USA Today: http://www.usatoday.com/tech/gaming/2006-10-05-second-life-class_x.htm

Second Life Community: Education
Link: http://secondlife.com/community/education.php

Example: Harvard Law in the Court of Public Opinion
Course Link: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/cyberone

20 Minute Second Life Harvard Tutorial Video: http://cm.dce.harvard.edu/2006/01/82002/P11/seg1/index_SingleHighBandwidth.html

Gordon: Mike - what is webware?

Webware is an online software application that trys to replicate the richness and responsiveness of a traditional desktop application. What's really made this even remotely possible is the widespread adoption of high-speed or broadband internet and a new architecture for the Web (Web 2.0 and AJAX - we'll talk about these more some other time). Google Docs & Spreadsheets is an example of webware - an online analogue of the ubiquitous Microsoft Office.

Gordon: I know we've been using Google Docs and Spreadsheets - can you give our audience an overview of how these applications function?

Google Docs & Spreadsheets is a fairly full-featured online word processor and spreadsheet editor that enables you, your colleagues and your students to create, store and share documents and spreadsheets. It's this sharing - the collaboration - that's really exciting! Sharing enables you to decide who can access and edit documents, and even better, all changes are kept in a document revisions history. You can create documents from scratch or upload existing documents and spreadsheets. Other than a web browser and a network connection, there's no software required, and all your documents are stored safely online and accessible from any network-connected computer. Some of the neat features include being able to save documents to Word, spreadsheets to Excel and either (documents or spreadsheets) to HTML or PDF. The Spreadsheets even have a panel that allows collaborators to have a live chat regarding the spreadsheet. A particularly useful feature - AUTOSAVE - means you never have to remember to save your work!

How are people using it? Teachers are publishing announcements about upcoming assignments and monitoring student progress via the revision history. In the revision history, you can see clearly who contributed to what assignment and when; if a student says he or she worked on a given project for five hours, it will be documented (no more "dog ate my homework" excuses). Additionally, faculty are using GDS to keep track of grades, attendance, student projects and assignments. Students are using GDS to stay organized and work more effectively. Google Docs & Spreadsheets helps promote group work and editing skills, and encourages multiple revisions and peer editing. Students can go online to collaborate with other students, teachers, parents, relatives and tutors, and enter updates anytime from anywhere. And through their revisions history, kids can check how they've revised a document and who has helped. Not to be outdone, Google spreadsheets allows students to track their grades, assignments, semester goals, baseball statistics, car expenses, or anything else that interests them.  

Gordon: Can you give us some more examples of how these can be used?

Consider the example of a high school English and journalism teacher who uses Google Docs & Spreadsheets to help facilitate students' work and has found significant improvement in their writing.  Among the reasons she gives, GDS:

               -     facilitates peer editing and revising,

               -     allows for multiple versions of an assignment,

               -     allows her to see who students collaborated with and when,

               -     prevents students from losing documents either by failing to save or having crashed hard drives, and

               -     provides 24/7 access to their documents from anywhere in the world.

Adds the teacher - "It has changed the way I teach writing... for the better!!"

Here are some interesting uses other people have found for this tool: http://www.google.com/google-d-s/tour5.html

Imagine the way you could use GDS in your work - collaborating with colleagues to develop curriculum, a budget or even complete committee work - the possibilities are endless - take it for a spin and let me know what you think at mqaissaunee@brookdalecc.edu

Mike: Gordon, there's been 3 new products released in the last week - the Zune, the Wii and the PS3. Can you give us a quick update?

Microsoft's Zune digital media player came out a week ago and has had mixed reviews.

Positives:

Looks including color choices of white, gray or brown

Connectivity: 802.11 b/g with range up to 30 feet

 Zune's wireless song-sharing functions (many are calling this aa killer app), which allow users to digitally "loan" songs to other Zunes. Those loaned songs disappear from the devices after three plays. The song-swapping capability has been dubbed "squirting." Microsoft is working on other uses for squirting, and has called the song exchange a good first step in using the technology. Although the wireless sharing does not allow users to expand their music libraries permanently, it could give Zune owners a way to try out music and see if they like certain songs enough to buy them.

Negatives:

Weight, which is heavy for a digital media player, coming in at 5.6 ounces.

Critical mass is not there yet - yes you can do file sharing with other Zune users but how many people do you know that have bought one?Time will tell!

Mike: How about the Sony PS3 and the Nintendo Wii?

Looking at www.gametalk.com and the Next Generation Console Debate forum where people discuss  Xbox 360 vs Wii vs PS3 you get the usual fans - and most of these people are pretty dedicated to their favorite platform. I (or correction - my kids) got a Wii and I get it play it sometimes. When I do get to play it - it is incredible. The controller - what I like to refer to as the user interface - is incredible. It's wireless and what I would probably call like a wand or a television remote control. You swing the wireless controller like a baseball bat or golf club or tennis racket. You can even simulate the throwing of a bowling ball. You can also attach the optional nunchuck controller and play two handed games like boxing. On the gametalk website there are lots of people complaining about sore arms - I know you sent me a tongue in cheek link written at Scientific American titled: Could the Nintendo Wii Reverse the Childhood Obesity Trend? Based on my own personal experience I think it could. Yesterday I threw 120 pitches in 7 innings and ended up having to ice my arm!:) Seriously - it can and does provide an excellent workout. I'm waiting for Nintendo to come out with Velcro sensors you wrap around your ankles. This would allow both the feel and arms to move - think of the potential -  DDR for all 4 limbs!!

The Nintendo is about half the price of the high end PS3. I have not used a PS3 so can't provide much comment on usability. The control has some limited motion capabilities but not like the Wii. The graphics are supposed to be incredible.

Mike: What about the Microsoft Xbox 360?

The 360 is sorta old news believe it or not. It launched in March of 2005 so it's tough to compare to the new products from Nintendo and Sony.

We'll have to put together a separate podcast comparing these products once my arm gets better!!!

References:

Microsoft's Zune Garners Mixed Reviews: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nf/20061120/bs_nf/48070

 Zune Website: http://www.zune.net

Could the Nintendo Wii Reverse the Childhood Obesity Trend?: http://blog.sciam.com/index.php?title=could_the_nintendo_wii_reverse_the_child&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1

On November 6, 2006, BroadLogic Network Technologies, a San Jose chip manufacturer, announced The World's First Massively Parallel, Multi-Channel Video Processor, a terapixel-speed video processing chip that will allow cable providers to recover bandwidth that can then be used to deliver more high definition channels, video on demand and high bandwidth data services without major network upgrades.

Mike: Gordon, before we discuss the Boradlogic product, can you give us an idea of how current cable delivery systems work?

Traditional cable delivery systems work by allocating 6MHz of analog bandwidth for each channel. Most cable providers offer approximately 80 channels that consume (6 MHz/channel x 80 channels) 480 MHz of bandwidth. Typical cable networks provide only 750 MHz of bandwidth and with 480 MHz used for video, there is not much left for other services.

Let's think about this a little bit more - one channel consumes 6 MHz of bandwidth but it takes 480 MHz of bandwidth to deliver that single channel to your TV while "wasting" (480 MHz - 6 Mhz) 474 MHz of bandwidth. Not very efficient even if you have a few TV's going in your house watching different channels at the same time.  In summary and according to an article at Light Reading and linked in the show notes:

Each analog channel consumes 6 MHz of capacity (or roughly 1/125th of the total capacity of an upgraded cable plant). Re-claiming that channel slot frees up enough capacity to launch 2 more channels in HDTV (each of which consumes about 2.4 MHz), or ten more digital Standard Definition (SD) channels (each of which consumes about 0.6 MHz), another ten QAMs, each capable of delivering an additional VOD stream, or more broadband [Internet] capacity.

Many of the hundreds of digital broadcast TV channels a cable operator delivers are not being watched at any given time. It is a network inefficiency that can be remedied by simply switching off those channels that are not being watched. By reclaiming much of this analog spectrum, splitting fiber nodes, and employing switched broadcast video (SBV) techniques, there is lots of room for cable to expand service offerings, including HDTV and VOD.

SBV has attracted major interest to this point and involves the delivery of all 80 or so channels in digital format ÃÂÃÂÂÃÂÂ it works but requires every attached TV in the house to be connected through a set-top box with each box having its own remote controller - we have 6 connected TVs in my home now so 6 boxes plus 6 more controllers - expensive and we have enough time keeping track of a single remote.

Light Reading says Comcast Corp. has an aggressive plan to cut the average number of analog channels it carries in half over the next five years, from 70 to 35. That means moving some three dozen basic cable networks from analog to digital-only carriage.

This is where things get interesting:

Until digital penetration reaches 100% being left off the analog tier means reduced distribution. And that means lower affiliate fees, and lower advertising revenue.

It's gonna be slow because subscribers will not want to pay for the extra boxes, will not have room for them on their shelves, etc.

This means the programmers will fight this tooth and nail. Ironically, it is SBV that may well help prove their case is built on a house of cards. Cable TV programming networks sell themselves to advertisers based on their total distribution footprint - say 40, 60, or 80 million homes. The metric is bogus, as only a small fraction of homes are viewing it. With SBV, MSOs will have all the statistical details on who is watching, and eventually, so will advertisers.

Mike: So last week along comes Broadlogic, what does this product do?

According to Broadlogic website:

The BL80000 TeraPIX chip is capable of decoding dozens of digital video streams and generating a full analog and digital service tier, including an 80-plus analog channel lineup, that any number of cable-ready devices (TVs, DVRs, PCs with tuner cards, etc.) can view, plus up to 160SD or 50HD programs.

The TeraPIX processor powers a new type of Residential Gateway, installed outside or just inside a residence, which allows the network to be all-digital, while subscribers continue to receive the cable-ready analog video, digital video, high speed data and voice services they crave. Conventional set-top boxes output one channel at a time and thus feed only one TV. Cable MSOs can use this technology to take their networks all digital, thus tripling their digital capacity at a time when rising content and competitive requirements demand it.

Mike: It sounds like the Broadlogic chip may be a much more cost effective solution - can you give more detail?

More according to Broadlogic website:

The BroadLogic TeraPIX video processor works by decoding bandwidth-conserving digital video signals delivered by a cable operator, and generating 80-plus high-quality channels of television. Cable operators get their extra bandwidth, and consumers get the channel lineups they're used to without having to get more set-tops, run more coax, or lose more remotes.

The TeraPIX processor enables solutions that support virtually all existing analog and digital consumer devices. For example, if a subscriber has a DVR set-top from their cable operator, the digital signals are passed through TeraPIX to the DVR.

The price of an individual chip is around $300 when purchased in bulk (1000 or greater numbers)  and cable companies are saying this could be a cost effective way to increase network bandwidth.

The technology is moving at such an incredible pace and it is easy to see more bandwidth and more applications and, from an academic perspective, the ability to provide more and more quality IP delivered content to our students at a distance. Very exciting stuff and - what's next??

Mike: Let's change the subject a bit - I know you took a train ride last week and performed an interesting "experiment". Can you fill us in with some details?

On Tuesday I had an excellent visit with the Borough of Manhattan Community College Video Arts and Technology Program (http://www.bmcc.cuny.edu/speech/VAT/VAT.html ) faculty and administrators. BMCC has an NSF project grant titled "Creatiing Career Pathways for Women and Minorities in Digital Video Technology" , an exciting project with an HDTV focus. We're looking forward to lots of good results from the VAT group at BMCC.

Instead of driving I took the AMTRAK train down to New York City from Springfield, MA. I had my notebook computer with me and on the way home, as I was doing some work, I decided to let NetStumbler ( http://netstumbler.com/ ) run in the background. NetStumbler is a Windows application that allows you to detect 802.11b, 802.11a and 802.11g Wireless Local Area Network Access Points (WLAN AP's). In addition to Netstumbler, there is MacStumbler for Macintosh computers, and Kismet for machines running Linux.

Many people use Netstumbler for wardriving that involves driving a car around with a wireless enabled laptop or PDA and logging wireless Wi-Fi networks. According to the Netstumbler website wardriving was first started in the San Francisco area by the Bay Area Wireless Users Group (BAWUG) and is similar to using a scanner for radio. Many wardrivers will use GPS devices to find the exact location of the network found and log it on a website. In fact, if you have a GPS device attached to your computer Netstumbler will automatically log the latitude and longitude settings for future reference. There are several active databases on the web that maintain lists of open hotspots - one of them is maintained and accessed via the Netstumbler site.

In the train I started up Netstumbler on my PC at the New Rochelle, NY stop and just let it run until I got to Springfield, MA with some interesting results. Netstumbler logs, among other things, the access point MAC address, SSID and whether or not the AP is running any kind of encryption. An un-encryped access point is one that is wide open for access. Between New Rochelle and Springfield I logged 1441 access points, many unencryped and wide open for public access. SSIDs were sometimes very descriptive and I found open access points from at least one large insurance company, one law firm and the 36th floor conference room of an unknown company. I also got a kick out of some of the creative SSID names people are using.

Hundreds of the access points still had the Vendor SSID with linksys, NETGEAR and default [note: SSID default is commonly used by no-name routers sold by the big box retailers] popping up on my screen as we rocked along the tracks at 60 mph. Hundreds were setup for open access - I could not actually log in to any because we were moving to fast but I'm convinced I could walk the tracks from New Rochelle to Springfield and maintain free wireless access by piggy-backing on these networks.

I don't want to get into a debate on what's legal and what is not - my concern is seeing so many open access points with many likely connected directly into corporate networks. I thought we had this security problem licked but it appears many are still buying these things and just plugging them in.

Anyone want to carry a load of batteries?

References:

Netstumbler Website: http://www.netstumbler.com

BROADLOGIC UNCLOAKS CABLEÃÂÃÂÂÃÂÂS SECRET WEAPON; Nov 6, 2006; http://broadlogic.com/11062006press.htm

Introduction

In "The World is Flat," Thomas Friedman makes the case that a number of forces have converged to flatten and restructure the global competitive landscape, and that this process is continuing and accelerating.  This flattening has empowered individuals to compete and collaborate on a global scale like never before.  As educators, we must understand the implications for us, our students and our institutions and more globally on education and learning.  Key flatteners that are already impacting education include the Internet, open source software, search, wireless/mobility, VoIP, digitalization, personalization and virtualization. One of the key observations of this less predictable, less hierarchical flattened world is that knowledge is widely distributed and rapidly changing leaving traditional course-based learning increasingly unable to meet the needs of students.  Bridging this divide requires new paradigms in education that incorporate "flat' world strategies such as informal learner-driven knowledge transfer and new technologies and forms of learning.

Question from Mike: Gordon, can you give us a little background on some of the new tools being used?

In the 1990's many of us first started to use the Internet to deliver and supplement content for our courses. We developed relatively static web pages that included text and pictures in similar format to traditional textbooks. Today with the combination of high bandwidth access and new development tools, fresh web content looks and feels much different. With "Web 2.0" tools and delivery methods, instructors are discovering new ways to develop and deliver content to and engage their students. Among the new tools finding their way into business and into the hands of our students are:

• Search,
• Instant Messaging,
• Blogging/Podcasting,
• Wikis,
• RSS/Subscription, and
• Wireless/Mobility.

While many faculty are well-versed at using websites, email, and course management systems to interact and engage with their students, most have been slow to adopt some of these "new" technologies into and outside of their classroom.

These new tools are part of the dynamic, interactive new Internet many are calling Web 2.0. According to techtarget.com, the term Web 2.0 was first used by O'Reilly Media and MediaLive International in 2004 during a next generation web conference. Web 2.0 based technological advances have continued over the last two years and new applications are coming out daily that allow faculty and their students to experience new ways of interacting and learning. Much of this new technology is built around two fundamental technologies, AJAX and RSS.

Question from Gordon: AJAX Ãïï thatÃïïs soap, right Mike?

Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path (www.adaptivepath.com) is responsible for coining the acronym AJAX in a February 2005 article. In the article, Garrett describes AJAX or Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, as a new approach to web applications. In terms of user interaction, what makes AJAX stand out is that it allows developers to create web applications that start to approach the richness and responsiveness of desktop applications. AJAX is not a technology, nor is it code or an application that can be downloaded. Instead, it is a collection of technologies that have all matured and when combined together provide for a new paradigm for the architecture of web applications.  More precisely, AJAX includes XHTML and CSS; DOM or the Document Object Model; XML and XSLT; XMLHttpRequest; and JavaScript.

To understand how AJAX works, we first have to understand the classic or traditional client-server web application model.  In this model, user actions (typically through a web browser interface) trigger an HTTP request back to the web server, which processes the request (retrieving data, performing calculations, etc) and responds to the client (user) with an HTML page.  While this model has been extremely successful at building out the Internet, it breaks down when developers try to replicate the user experience of desktop applications.  ThatÃïïs where AJAX comes in.  AJAX represents a fundamental shift in what's possible on the Web.  To provide this functionality, we introduce an AJAX engine as an intermediary into the traditional client-server model. Simply put, instead of loading a web page at the start of the session, the browser loads the AJAX engine on the client side of the relationship.  This engine is JavaScript code that coexists with the browser, usually in a hidden frame, and is responsible for rendering the web interface and communicating with the web server on the user's behalf.  Practically speaking, what this does is ensures that the user is never looking at an empty browser window waiting for the server to respond and the page to refresh.  With first generation web technology, user actions would generate an HTTP request; with AJAX these requests are JavaScript calls to the AJAX engine.  Many user actions don't require communication with the server and can be handled by the engine.  If the server is needed, the engine makes the request asynchronously using XML, with no interruption of the user-application interaction.

Question from Mike: Gordon could you tell us a little bit about RSS?

RSS (RDF Site Summary and also referred to as Really Simple Syndication) is a technology used to push content out to subscribers using an aggregator application like My.Yahoo or Google Reader. In addition web browsers like FireFox and Internet Explorer 7.0, along with Mac OS X and Microsoft's upcoming Vista operating system, have built in aggregator functionality. These applications allow the user to subscribe to different feeds and have content pushed out to the aggregator. Here's an example of how you can use this technology Ãïï if you have a free Yahoo account, you can configure your account to aggregate, or collect, different types of content. Once setup, you can go to any computer with a browser and an Internet connection, go to My.Yahoo.com, log in with your username and password and have your custom page come up with all of your subscribed feeds listed. Your feeds are selected by you and you can add and remove as you see fit. Here are some the feeds we like and subscribe to: Gizmodo for breaking gadget news, Broadband Reports for news on delivery technology and Information Week for breaking IT news. Let's look at how it works Ãïï let's say Information Week publishes an article on a IT workforce needs Ãïï if you are logged in to your aggregator and subscribed to the Information Week feed, you see the title, a brief summary of the article and how long ago it was published (minutes, hours, days, weeks, etc) on your aggregator page. If the article looks interesting you can click the link and then read the entire article. This technology has allowed many to cut back considerably on hard copy technology journal reading and email subscriptions Ãïï most common journals and periodicals are now publishing content with RSS feeds, allowing readers to subscribe and rapidly scan and review content.

RSS developers create an XML file that describes content as it is posted on websites. The blog at nctt.org/blog is a good example if you want to take a look at an XML file. The blog is written using a word processor and then the content is typically copied and pasted into a blog editor with the XML file automatically updated with the latest content. If you are a subscriber to nctt.org/blog your aggregator checks the NCTT blog site periodically for updates and, if it finds one, it lists the content on the aggregator screen. You can see a brief summary on the aggregator and, if you wish to read further, you can click the link and read the entire blog.

Your current students are using this technology on, in some cases, a minute by minute basis. Let's take a look at how it can be used. Let's say you wake up one morning not feeling well and have to cancel your classes. When and how do your students find out you are out sick? Maybe you send out an email which requires students check their campus email account or (worst case) you call in and a note goes on the door or board. In both cases many, if not all, of your students will show up for class and be disappointed to find out you will not be there. Using a simple RSS feed, you could give your students the option of subscribing and actually push the message out to their cell phone or other connected device. Students get the message and do not end up showing up for a class that has been cancelled.

Question from Gordon: Mike, What are some of the popular apps out there now that people are using?

The Ãïïkiller appÃïï or application that demonstrated the potential and viability of AJAX is GoogleÃïïs gmail service. The use of AJAX has since exploded. Examples include the aggregators we mentioned earlier, which all leverage AJAX technology to provide for a more pleasing user experience, as well as a whole class of ÃïïwebwareÃïï Ãïï web-based applications that attempt to replicate desktop applications, including Writely, ZohoWriter, ZohoShow, Google Spreadsheets, and DabbleDB. With these applications, you and your students have access to a virtual office suite, allowing students to interact and collaborate online. This new class of tools and technologies provide faculty with an opportunity to engage their students inside and outside of the classroom.

Question: Gordon: Where can people find the content of this article?

You can find the content of this podcast in the Oct/Nov 2006 edition of Community College Journal, at nctt.org/blog and at nctt.org/podcast.  In addition you will find a maintained list of several interesting links that further demonstrate these technologies. You can reach the authors at gsnyder@stcc.edu and mqaissaunee@brookdale.edu and at their National Science Foundation center and project websites at www.nctt.org and www.maitt.org

What I'd like to introduce to you today is the Cornell Note-taking method. Developed by Cornell's Walter Pauk to help Cornell University students better organize their notes, this system is just one of many different strategies designed to help students take more effective notes. No one method is better than another, the goal is to find a method that works for you. I encourage you to share this method with your students and encourage them to give the method a chance. At the very least, it will get them and you thinking about how they take notes.

The Cornell Note-Taking System

To use this system, separate your page into 3 separate sections (nice illustration here), as follows:

1. The Notes column (6-6.5 inches wide on right) is the largest and primary section. This is where the notes go, whether they're lecture or textbook notes.  Stress using bulleted lists for easy skimming, as well as economy of language - abbreviations (see resources below), short sentences and fragments and eliminating all unnecessary words. 
2. The Cues column (2-2.5 inches wide on left) is used to highlight main ideas, clarify meanings, give examples, draw diagrams, or link ideas and examples. If done well, this area is where you do the bulk of your studying from.
3. The Summary area (1-2 inches high on bottom) is used to reinforce concepts and provide an overview area where you write a sentence or two to summarize the notes on the page. This section is great for skimming your notes and locating information. 

Now for the technology
You didn't think I'd do a blog without including some sort of technology did you? I really don't have the time nor the inclination to sit with pencil, paper and a ruler to layout the Cornell method. So instead, here are a couple useful links:

• The Cornell Method PDF Generator is a web-based form that creates printable PDF's in the Cornell style with either unlined, ruled, or graphed notes sections.
  
• Cornell Word Templates provides instructions for creating your own Microsoft Word Cornell template, as well as down-loadable template that can be customized to suit your needs.
  

Note Taking - Symbols and Abbreviations

This site provides a great list of common abbreviations that can help students take down their lecture notes as quickly as possible.

Temple University: The Cornell Note-Taking Method

This link shows an example of a page of notes taken using the Cornell method. Using this as a handout is a quick and easy way to illustrate the method to students.

Temple University: General Note-Taking Tips

A site with more general tips and suggestions for better note-taking. A great place to send students as they start to think about their note-taking.

BYU: The Cornell Note-Taking System

A nice overview of the Cornell system. Not the only place to learn about the system, but a good starting point.

Some additional PDF resources on the web can be found at PDF Pad. PDF Pad allows you to generate pdf version of a variety of useful documents, including

• Calendars
  
• Flags
• Graph Paper
• Smith Chart (for Electrical Engineering)
  
• Staff Paper (for musically inclined)
• Storyboards (for aspiring directors and producers; and maybe control freaks)
  
• Sudoku

WiMax - Why Not?

Craig McCaw is a visionary, who has had an uncanny ability to predict the future of technology.  WiMAX has the potential to do for broadband access what cell phones have done for telephony - replacing cable and DSL services, providing universal Internet access just about anywhere - especially for suburban and rural blackout areas.

Just like in the early 1980's Clearwire's Craig O. McCaw has been buying up licensed radio spectrum. You may not have heard of Craig but in the early 80's he recognized local cell permits being sold by the the FCC were greatly undervalued and he started bidding cellular phone licenses. He did his buying under the radar screen of the telcos and, by the time they recognized what he was doing it was basically too late ÃÂÃÂÂÃÂÂ Craig had already purchased and owned licenses in most of the major markets.

Of course he had the money - in 1986 Craig and his brothers sold a cable television business their father had left them for $755 million and concentrated on building a national cellular phone network. The story continues - MCI Communications sold its cellular and paging operations to Craig in 1986 for $122 million and their company went public with the brothers holding around 40% of the company. His last big acquisition in the cell market was the $3.5 billion deal for LIN Broadcasting where he outbid Bell South. With the LIN acquisition Craig and his brothers had almost complete control of the 1989 U. S. cell market.

McCaw brothers sold the company to AT&T in 1994 for $11.5 billion and a lot of people figured they would just ride off into the sunset ÃÂÃÂÂÃÂÂ not the case!

Fast forward to today - Clearwire, under Craig's direction, has quietly purchased enough licensed radio spectrum  to build a national WiMAX network.

What is WiMax?
Let's begin by putting WiMax in context.  You and I both have cable modems. This is Broadband access - for residential access either a DSL or cable modem and at the office either a T1 or a T3 line - pretty expensive and not available in all areas
We also have WiFi access - at home, at work or on the road WiFi routers or wireless access points provide mobility with connectivity - hot spots are very small, so coverage is sparse
not that many years ago, we both used dial-up access - many (71%) use dial-up either because broadband is not available or too expensive - painfully slow
That's where WiMax comes in to the picture. WiMAX or Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access is the name given to the IEEE 802.16 wireless standard, which provides:

• speed of comparable to broadband service
• wireless access (significantly cheaper than cable or DSL and much easier to extend to suburban and rural areas)
• broad coverage - much more like a cellular network rather than small isolated WiFi hotspots

Can you give us some specs for WiMax

WiMAX can provide two forms of wireless service:
non-line-of-sight, WiFi sort of service,

• a small antenna on your computer connects to the tower

• uses a lower frequency range -- 2 GHz to 11 GHz (similar to WiFi)

• lower-wavelength transmissions provide greater immunity to physical obstructions
  

• limited to a 4-to-6 mile radius (~25 square miles of coverage; similar in range to a cell tower)

• fixed dish antenna points to the WiMAX tower from a rooftop or pole
• stronger and more stable, so it's able to send a lot of data with fewer errors
• use higher frequencies (up to 66 GHz)
• at higher frequencies - less interference; more bandwidth.

Craig has also attracted some major investors with Motorola and Intel giving him close to $900 million in July. Rumor has it that, with Clearwire's potential network, within 3 years the company will be able to offer nationwide WiMAX service for around $25 per month which is significantly less that people are currently paying for other providers nationwide lower bandwidth data services.

Clearwire is not without competition. According to WiMAXTrends.com:

        On August 8 Sprint Nextel President and CEO Gary Forsee announced that Sprint will adopt WiMAX as it technology choice for its next generation "4G" network.              Mr. Forsee announced that its current EV-DO network will complement a mobile WiMAX network.  The mobile WiMAX network will be utilized with a full range of             WiMAX-embedded devices.

The products are coming and the providers are committed to build the network. This makes me think seriously about the Muni WiFi initiatives we are seeing springing up in most U.S. cities. Will they survive? If I'm a business person on the road do I take my chances on Muni WiFi or do I just pay Clearwire $25 per month for guranteed access?

  References:

The Wizard of Wireless: http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/mcc0bio-1

Also see NCTT Summer Workshop Resource Area for Workshop Content: http://www.ncttbuzz.org/NCTT_01/

It all started as a simple idea: enjoy WiFi technology everywhere across a WiFi infrastructure built by same members of the FON Community. Joining us is just as easy. All you need is to register for free, have broadband connection and to download our software onto your router. This converts your router into a FON Social Router. If you do not have a router that is compatible with FON's software, you can purchase one of our subsidized FON Social Routers at our online store.