Author: Serkadis

New data released by Japan’s Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare (MHLW) shows once again that the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster is far from over. Despite a complete media blackout on the current situation, levels of Cesium-137 (Cs-137) and Cesium-134 (Cs-134)…

Two closely related strains of clostridium difficile, better known as C. diff, have become resistant to antibiotics, allowing them to spread rapidly to hospitals around the world, according to a new study. The researchers have also managed to show how the bacterium…

Researchers from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville have discovered that a species of fungus naturally produces nanoparticles capable of boosting the immune system and killing tumors. Their findings were published in the journal Advanced Functional Materials. …

Imagine a society where your brain can be scanned to see if you are a danger — because the scan can predict that you are likely to commit crime. This may sound like a sci-fi movie but the brain scanning technique already exists, according to a new study conducted by…

Milk thistle is a flowering plant that is part of the daisy family. It gets its name from its bristly and prickly nature and the “milky” sap that oozes out of the plant. The leaves, fruits and seeds of milk thistle have been used for centuries as a natural medicine…

State-sponsored euthanasia ought to shock and outrage every compassionate, sensible human being, but unfortunately there are still too many people willing to trust government-run healthcare managed by faceless bean counters. Great Britain’s National Health Service…

Too much stress and too little sleep is the fool-proof recipe for declining long-term health — including a weakened immune system, impaired cognitive/memory function, heart disease, mood disorders, premature aging and accelerated tumor growth, among others. And it’s…

Two studies have found that the pesticide neonicotinoid, used since 1990, is contributing to killing the honeybees needed for pollination of our food crops. Our food supply is reliant on bees to pollinate the crops. They contribute to $15 billion worth of our food supply…

Globalization affects everyone. The shrinking world brings people in the United States closer to ideas and cultures from all corners of the earth. Likewise, other countries are introduced to many facets of the American life and that way of life includes genetically modified…

You’re not smart enough to make your own decisions. You’re irresponsible with liberty and you can’t be relied upon to know how best to live your own life. Only government can make those decisions for you, and by golly, government ought to be doing that. Or so says…

Bye-bye daddy, bye-bye mommy: MSNBC discovers who children really belong to. Finally. This burning question has been answered. What a relief. Melissa Harris-Perry, a university professor and weekend host at MSNBC shares the wisdom: ”We have never invested as much…

Another irritating example of government waste at its most absurd, the taxpayer-funded National Science Foundation (NSF) has reportedly awarded a sizable grant to researchers at the University of Iowa to study the reproduction habits of New Zealand mud snails. According…

Struggling electric car maker Fisker Automotive has yet another thing in common with infamous solar panel maker Solyndra. Shortly after Fisker laid off 160 of its workers — or 75 percent of its staff — last Friday, law firm Outten & Golden hit the company with a class action lawsuit alleging that Fisker violated the Warn Act, which requires companies with 100 or more employees to provide at least 60-days notice before conducting mass layoffs or closing plants.

I reported that Outten & Golden was investigating Fisker and interviewing employees last Friday, and Auto News has the full report of the filed lawsuit, as well as a PDF of the filing itself. Outten & Golden won a $3.5 million settlement against Solyndra using a similar suit.

The suit, filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Santa Ana, Calif., against Fisker alleges that the company violated both federal and California state WARN acts, and the class action lawsuit was filed on behalf of lead plaintiff and former Fisker employee Sven Etzelsberger. The suit is asking for an unspecified amount of damages including unpaid wages and accrued holiday pay for 60 days, as well as legal fees.

Fisker laid off 160 employees last week and has kept 53 around to negotiate with the Department of Energy and to work on selling its assets. Fisker owes the DOE the first loan repayment at the end of this month for its $193 million loan. The company hasn’t made a car since the Summer of 2012, reportedly saw potential acquisition and investment bids from two Chinese auto makers fall through in recent months, and announced last month that its founder design Henrik Fisker had left the company over disagreements.

Filing for bankruptcy is a very real next possible step for the company. Fisker has reportedly hired a bankruptcy lawyer to look at its options.

Fisker has raised over a billion dollars in private funds, including money from Valley venture capitalists Kleiner Perkins and NEA. The company has sold a couple thousand of its $100,000 electric hybrid Fisker Karmas to customers, including celebrities like Al Gore, Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio, Justin Bieber and the Game.

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I am simply stunned by the ridiculous number of “Microsoft will be dead in four years” stories, following Gartner’s grim PC forecast three days ago. I offered brief analysis then and promised something later, and this is it. Yesterday, colleague Alan Buckingham posted first: “Microsoft is nowhere near death’s door” — and he absolutely is right.

Throw a rock, and you can’t miss a doom-and-gloom armchair analysis. Among the many are “Gartner: Microsoft is dead, Windows has expired, Office has ceased to be” (Computerworld); “How long can Microsoft go on like this?” (InfoWorld); “Apple’s ultimate victory over Microsoft” (Motley Fool); and “Gartner may be too scared to say it, but the PC is dead” (ReadWrite). For the most part, all these armchair pundits are mistaken. Hugely.

Counting is Bad Math

By the numbers, the PC’s future looks grim compared to rising smartphone and tablet shipments. But the data misleads. Gartner sees PC shipments falling from 315 million this year to 271.6 million in 2017 — that’s a 13.7 percent decline. Mobile phones rise to 2.1 billion from 1.9 billion, a 13.5 percent increase. Tablets: 197 million to 468 million, or 137 percent growth. Microsoft’s presence in both latter categories is negligible. Windows mobile operating systems had 3 percent smartphone sales share in fourth quarter (Gartner) and Windows on tablets 4.7 percent forecast this year (IDC).

The numbers and pundit analysis about them ignore several key factors:

1. The addressable computing market isn’t growing gangbusters. For the four categories — ultramobiles like Microsoft Surface Pro is the other — total shipments rise from 2.4 billion this year to 2.96 billion in 2017. That’s just a 22.9 percent increase. It’s healthy growth but not large expansion, which reflects something not expressed in the data (see #3).

2. The overall market actually changes little in four years compared to today. Based on Gartner’s data, mobile phones will account for 77.7 percent of shipments in all four categories this year but only decline to 72 percent in 2017. Handsets are most important among the devices, and that’s not a new situation. Microsoft’s mobile OS position is equally as weak two years ago as it could be in 2017, if not better then.

Armchair pundits fixate on a couple data points. Android is one of them. The operating system rises from 35.7 percent of all devices shipped this year to 49.5 percent in 2017. There’s presumption this rise will shift developers away from Windows, establishing a new dominate ecosystem. That’s absolutely true for mobile phones. But most people, not even in emerging markets, will replace PCs with smartphones. In some markets, buyers will take smartphones instead.

Something else: Gartner’s numbers are for all mobile phones. The analyst firm expects 1 billion smartphones sold this year, for example, out of 2.4 billion handsets. Dumb phones aren’t really viable PC replacements, or displacements.

3. Shipments don’t reflect install base. A category’s actual size matters more, particularly when assessing the ecosystem of applications, services and other things. This is important addressing tablets’ real impact on PCs. Cumulative tablet ships are forecast to be 1.05 billion between 2012 and 2017, which would be the install base increase if every unit sold (unlikely). PCs: 1.23 billion — more when adding ultramobiles.

The personal computer starts out with a larger install base (well over 1 billion, according to combined analyst and Microsoft reports). I don’t have data for tablets, but guesstimate a couple hundred million (based on analyst shipment data). If overall PC shipments are greater, and from a larger install base, the category is by no means dead. Nor is Windows, which still has 90 percent PC market share.

4. The PC is more like the television 15 years ago. By the 1980s, most people who wanted a TV had one. The market saturated and sales slowed to replacements and younger adults buying for the first time. HDTV changed everything, by giving consumers reason to replace their sets. Larger screens and clearer audio and video made replacement attractive. Suddenly existing TVs weren’t good enough.

There was a time, during these lackluster TV sales days that some analysts started comparing PC shipments to televisions, and some tech companies (Microsoft among them) bought into the popular idea that personal computers would replace televisions. That didn’t happen for many reasons. Yes, the PC displaced some TV-watching behavior, but in certain contexts, such as bedroom or dorm room or where the consumer could afford one device and chose the PC’s utility. The number comparison and talk about future trends back then remains of PCs and tablets today.

Once big-screen TVs hit the market, roles reversed. Television sales rebounded and newer models took on PC-like capabilities, which is particularly common during this decade. I can see several scenarios where the PC could equally revive and survive any competition smartphones or tablets pose.

That’s excellent segue to the next section, about context.

Worldwide Devices Shipments by Segment (Thousands of Units)

Device Type	2012	2013	2014	2017
PC (Desk-Based and Notebook)	341,263	315,229	302,315	271,612
Ultramobile	9,822	23,592	38,687	96,350
Tablet	116,113	197,202	265,731	467,951
Mobile Phone	1,746,176	1,875,774	1,949,722	2,128,871
Total	2,213,373	2,411,796	2,556,455	2,964,783

 

Context is King

As I’ve repeatedly expressed here: There is no post-PC era. It’s a fiction coming from the minds of analysts (looking for things to count and sell), Apple cofounder Steve Jobs (when alive looking to sell more devices) and people pretending to know more than they really do but who can shout, be heard and be believed across the Internet’s vast reaches of fools. They are many.

We have entered the contextual cloud computing era, where the PC’s role moves from the center to being one of many devices connecting to the cloud as hub. The PC is unique for being a Swiss Army Knife — a device that does many things, and not often all of the well. Single utility is more commonplace, with products designed to one thing, sometimes a couple, really well. Cloud services and supporting apps pick up the Swiss Army Knife role, delivering what people want, or need, in context. What the device is matters less.

Take watching a movie as example. Most people would prefer to do so on their big-screen TV. But when traveling smartphone or tablet will do, in that context. The film you start at the airport can be finished at home. Location and device change, but content stays the same. The example applies to music or personal interactions.

What changes in the new era is the PC’s relevance, which decreases as the cloud — and some apps, too — enables other devices’ broader contextual usages. Granted, smartphones, and to lesser degree tablets, are more personal than PCs because they’re carried more frequently and act as gateways that matter most — everything from family and friends to new “Game of Thrones” episodes.

Microsoft’s problem is two-fold, and obvious: Windows Phone is a market loser, and legacy Windows has no perceptual market share on tablets, which are the two biggest computing device categories. Neither’s situation likely changes for Microsoft in four years.

But that’s okay. As I explained on March 25 and last week, there’s a new Microsoft. The company already executes on CEO Steve Ballmer’s pledge to reinvent as a “devices and services” company. Signs are everywhere, as Microsoft updates products faster and moves more of them to the cloud. Think Office 365 and server hosting, for example.

The company is transforming from a developer of PC applications and platforms to to a provider of middleware — products and services that bind any platform to its server and datacenter software and services and major applications, principally from Office System. Think glue. Cloud middleware isn’t sexy, but it’s platform independent and provides essential contextual services that can be consumed on any device, anytime, anywhere.

The best mobile apps on Android or iOS should be from Microsoft, not Apple or Google, and leverage the established enterprise stack. That’s how Microsoft solves the mobile and PC problems. Ballmer clearly is leading the company that way, which can preserve its relevance even as the PC declines.

Worldwide Devices Shipments by Operating System (Millions of Units)

Operating System	2012	2013	2014	2017
Android	497,082	860,937	1,069,503	1,468,619
Windows	346,457	354,410	397,533	570,937
iOS/MacOS	212,899	293,428	359,483	504,147
RIM	34,722	31,253	27,150	24,121
Others	1,122,213	871,718	702,786	396,959
Total	2,213,373	2,411,796	2,556,455	2,964,783

 

Bring Your Own Service to Work

Microsoft is wed to the PC, for better or worse. The company saw the better days, now they’re worse. But the aggressive contextual cloud services approach can take Microsoft where Windows doesn’t reach widely enough — aforementioned smartphones and tablets.

Gartner’s data — and most certainly little of the punditry about it — fails to ask and answer question: Why? And why now? The mobile phone trend isn’t new, as I explained above. Tablets are the bigger encroachers on PC turf, starting three years ago with iPad’s release, and they are more likely than smartphones to displace new computer sales.

There, changing purchasing habits in emerging markets is one factor displacing PC sales. Gartner and IDC both call out this trend in reports released within the past month. The so-called BYOD — bring your own device — to work is the other. BYOD is not a new trend, contrary to perceptions analysts, bloggers and other pundits foster. Cell phones, BlackBerries, laptops and PDAs all found there way into offices in employee hands during the last century, for example.

Following the 2008 stock market collapse and, coincidentally, as iPhone created more demand for Apple products and other smartphones, many enterprises grew more permissive about BYOD. With IT budgets slashed, managing new device categories employees owned took on a money-saving role.

According to “Good Technology’s 2nd Annual State of BYOD Report”, 76 percent of enterprises with more than 2,000 employees have programs in place, and the total is expected to reach 88 percent this year. However, in half the companies with BYOD programs, employees pay for devices and supporting services, such as cellular data for cell phones, tablets and some laptops. You want a new laptop, or to use a smartphone or tablet — “bring your own” is the new trend. The devices are cheaper to manage than to buy.

Where device-counting comes up short: Explaining why bring anything. Contextual cloud, and apps supporting it, is the answer. BYOD is a misnomer. The acronym should be BYOS — bring your own services. Even BYOA, bring your own apps, applies.

Microsoft is in process of using its enterprise entrenchment to become the defacto standard for managing BYOD and BYOS. If that strategy succeeds and is contextual, which includes separating work and personal spaces and behavior, Microsoft will easily be highly relevant during the next computing era. Let other companies sell devices, while Microsoft provides contextual end-user experience leveraged first from core market of businesses then extended to organizations serving consumers.

The problem: Apple controls the most direct user experiences on its devices, as do Android device manufacturers. Unquestionably, Microsoft needs to up the game in smartphones and tablets, but because of other software and services strategies, it’s not game over.

Think Apple, Not IBM

Many pundits compare Microsoft to IBM, and I’ve made some allusions myself. They see similarities between Microsoft today and Big Blue at the dawn of the PC era. But Ballmer, who has made many strategic mistakes the last 13 years, gets context enough and steers the Good Ship Redmond on a path that preserves the core enterprise business while opening relevance in the cloud. Seas ahead are stormy enough to sink even this mighty monopoly, however.

Microsoft already is in process of reinvention, such that Apple applies more than IBM as comparison. How often before 2007 did pundits predict Apple’s decline? Now look at what has become the most profitable tech company on the planet. Apple was near bankruptcy in 1996 and looked like a goner to grim reaper pundits in 2001, too. Jobs and Company stood against Microsoft’s monopoly and the impenetrable 90-percent PC market share. There was no hope. Yet Apple adapted, by opening up new product categories and revenue streams with them. Microsoft does likewise (see paragraph after next one for more). Now the grim reapers talk of another death — and they’re wrong.

Microsoft’s fortunes are less tied to PC sales than the armchair pundits would have you believe. If consumers and businesses choose not to buy new personal computers for sake of, say, tablets, OEMs lose out. But not necessarily Ballmer and Company, and that is one explanation why a new Windows version ships this year. Upgrades — Microsoft can trigger a new software upgrade cycle on existing PCs. Remember, the install base is huge and most of it on Windows 7 and hardware that will run 8, and presumably 8.1, just fine.

There is much Microsoft can do to trigger upgrades and even co-opt rivals in the process. Windows RT runs on ARM processors. Microsoft and OEMs distribute the software on new computers, but it doesn’t have to be this way. Suppose the company tweaked RT for ARM tablets, like Google Nexus 10, and allowed upgrades. Users could bring Windows along, allowing Microsoft to gain faster foothold on tablets for its connected cloud services.

Something else: Microsoft puts subscription revenue first in the most recent product cycle. Office 365 is at least partly platform and device independent. The cloud service runs in different browsers on multiple operating systems, although Office 2013 still needs an OS X or Windows PC. As more consumers subscribe, the more Microsoft revenue smooths out — status already achieved among enterprises. Sixty percent of Business division (aka Office) revenue comes from annuity licensing contracts — 50 percent for Server & Tools. That’s money in the bank.

Microsoft isn’t dead yet and nowhere close to it. The company has a clear strategy that can and will transcend the PC. Unquestionably, the company’s position would be stronger if more smartphones or tables shipped with some Windows version. That said, Microsoft can win, even if the PC market loses to other devices.

Photo Credit: Kucher Serhii/Shutterstock

Hidden amidst the winding pathways of Llewelyn Park, New Jersey, America’s oldest gated community, steampunk designer Will Rockwell is building a future that never was. He began his career as a TV producer but he always loved to tinker with metals, leather, and wood – the three components of good steampunk. After building a set of Rocketeer-style USB keys, friends turned him on to Etsy. He opened a shop and almost immediately was flooded with orders.

These designs are a labor of love for Rockwell who scours the junkyards of New Jersey for cool odds and ends. He has two workshops, one in Pennsylvania and one in the basement of his 1912 home.

Rockwell doen’t expect to get rich with his hobby but he’s doing well, nonetheless. His unique style, nautical-themed designs, and electronic additions to his devices meld the modern and the mysterious in a quirky way. My favorite project? His electric guitar outfitted with wild effects and knife switches, although his handmade USB keys are still amazing.

Will is definitely following the maker spirit and is even making a little money. His world is one of the imagination, full of undersea starships and steaming hard drives run by pistons. It’s enough to make you think you’ve stumbled upon the world of Captain Nemo via the Jersey Turnpike.

TechCrunch Makers is a video series featuring people who make cool stuff. If you’d like to be featured, email us!.

The democratization of data is a real phenomenon, but building a sustainable data democracy means truly giving power to the people. The alternative is just a shift of power from traditional data analysts within IT departments to a new generation of data scientists and app developers. And this seems a lot more like a dictatorship than a democracy — a benevolent dictatorship, but a dictatorship nonetheless.

These individuals and companies aren’t entirely bad, of course, and they’re actually necessary. Apps that help predict what we want to read, where we’ll want to go next or what songs we’ll like are certainly cool and even beneficial in their ability to automate and optimize certain aspects of our lives and jobs. In the corporate world, there will always be data experts who are smarter and trained in advanced techniques and who should be called upon to answer the toughest questions or tackle the thorniest problems.

Last week, for example, Salesforce.com introduced a new feature of its Chatter intra-company social network that categorizes a variety of data sources so employees can easily find the people, documents and other information relevant to topics they’re interested in. As with similarly devised services — LinkedIn’s People You May Know, the gravitational search movement, or any type of service using an interest graph — the new feature’s beauty and utility lie in its abstraction of the underlying semantic algorithms and data processing.

The problem, however, comes when we’re forced to rely on these people, features and applications to decide how data can affect our lives or jobs, or what questions we can answer using the troves of data now available to us. In a true data democracy, citizens must be empowered to make use of their own data as they see fit and they must only have to rely apps and experts by choice or when the task really requires an expert hand. At any rate, citizens must be informed enough to have a meaningful voice in bigger decisions about data.

The democratic revolution is underway

The good news is that there’s a whole breed of startups trying to empower the data citizenry, whatever their role. There are companies such as 0xdata, Precog and BigML trying to make data science more accessible to everyday business users. There are next-generation business intelligence startups such as SiSense, Platfora and ClearStory rethinking how business analytics are done in an area of HTML5 and big data. And then there are companies such as Statwing, Infogram and Datahero (which will be in beta mode soon, by the way) trying to bring data analysis to the unwashed non-data-savvy masses.

Combined with a growing number of publicly available data sets and data marketplaces, and more and more ways of collecting every possible kind of data —  personal fitness, web analytics, energy consumption, you name it — these self-service tools can provide an invaluable service. In January, I highlighted how a number of them can work by using my own dietary and activity data, as well as publicly available gun-ownership data and even web-page text. But as I explained then, they’re still not always easy for laypeople to use, much less perfect.

Can Tableau be data’s George Washington?

This is why I’m so excited about Tableau’s forthcoming IPO. There are few companies that have helped spur the democratization of data over the past few years more than Tableau has. It has become the face of the next-generation business intelligence software thanks to its ease of use and focus on appealing visualization, and its free public software has found avid users even among relative data novices like myself. Tableau’s success and vision no doubt inspired a number of the companies I’ve already referenced.

Assuming it begins its publicly traded life flush with capital, Tableau will not just be in a financially sound position — it will also be in a position to help the burgeoning data democracy evolve into something that can last. More money means being able to develop more features that Tableau can use to bolster sales (and further empower business users with data analysis), which should mean the company can afford to also continually improve its free service and perhaps put premium versions in the hands of more types of more non-corporate professionals for free.

The bottom-up approach has already proven very effective in the worlds of cloud computing, software as a service and open source software, and I have to assume it’s a win-win situation in analytics, too. Today’s free users will be tomorrow’s paying users once they get skilled enough to want to move onto bigger data sets and better features. But the base products have to be easy enough and useful enough to get started with, or companies will only have a lot of registrations and downloads but very few avid users.

And if Tableau steps ups its game around data democratization, I have to assume it will up the ante for the company’s fellow large analytics vendors and even startups. A race to empower the lower classes on the data ladder would certainly be in stark contrast to the historical strategy of building ever-bigger, ever-more-advanced products targeting only the already-powerful data elite. That’s the kind of revolution I think we all can get behind.

Feature image courtesy of Shutterstock user Tiago Jorge da Silva Estima.

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Suicide. Just the word conjures a dark place that some know all too well, while some can never fathom. Most have glimpsed a place like this, as a part of natural emotion cycles, and been able to let it go and, after a time, re-embrace life. What do you die from when…

I was so excited by the prospect that my newly built home in Austin, Texas might get Google Fiber’s gigabit service, that I couldn’t sleep last night.

I felt like kid the night before Christmas, running over all the possibilities in my head and generally waking my husband up every few minutes to exclaim ridiculous things like, “This means our bandwidth won’t fluctuate when we’re watching Hulu at night!” or “I bet we could build some kind of video related IM, so I could be in the kitchen and ping you at work. It would just be always on! Hell, it might be streamed at the new higher than high-def, 4K standard or better if we’re doing gigabit service. OMG 4K!”

It’s no longer a question: Google is bringing its Google Fiber network to Austin. I’ve confirmed it with sources and the brief publication of a post in the middle of the night by Google should assuage anyone else’s doubts. While I have no idea how far Google plans to extend its network, if it plans to model the roll out on Kansas City’s build out I just have to get my neighbors as excited about a gigabit as I am.

My husband’s willingness to humor my gigabit suggestions became less enthusiastic after midnight, but he pointed out what many people are no doubt thinking, “We won’t have to deal with Time Warner Cable anymore.” As a customer of Time Warner’s business service, he has had several bitter experiences. On the residential side I’ve been miffed by the price hikes (I’m paying $70 for 30/5 service) but content with the service. But as I sit here writing this post while streaming music via my Sonos and while my child watches Netflix, I’m well aware that even if the executives at Time Warner Cable may say that consumers don’t want a gig, I do.

And you should too. Heck, in Kansas City I’d pay the same price for a gig as I do now for something 30 times slower.

Broadband is making your life more fun. And better.

Broadband has undoubtedly made our lives better in countless small and large ways. Every time someone sends you a goofy YouTube video or animated GIF you’re taking advantage of the ever-increasing speeds ISPs have delivered. When I started accessing the web via dial-up modem, an animated GIF stopped a web page for loading for minutes. Yet, we waited!

Now people pop nine of them in a news article as a means of telling the story. Favoring visuals instead of text on web sites is a superficial change, but it’s part of an evolution to real-time video connections and maybe even ambient presence. It’s like Skype on steroids.

But there are more serious benefits. For example, a few years ago when my daughter broke her leg I wrote how awesome it was that the doctors in the ER could just email her X-rays to the pediatric orthopedist on call.

The on-call doc got to stay home and we managed to get answers faster and get my daughter back home. X-rays are big files, and we’re lucky the doctor had the ability to receive them. He’s lucky he didn’t have a data cap that would prevent him from — or charge him extra — for getting multigigabyte files.

And that’s one of the biggest repercussions of Google’s fiber roll outs. The more people who can pay $70 for gigabit service (or get 5 Mbps for free), the more pressure this puts on the existing providers to upgrade their networks and cut anticonsumer crap like data caps. But that’s exactly why more cities need these networks.

You don’t need a gig today, but you need one for tomorrow

You may be wondering why you, in particular, need a gig. The answer is that today you don’t.

I spend all day thinking and writing about broadband and even I have no idea what I would do with a symmetrical gigabit network inside my home. But we’ve gone far beyond the idea that the internet is just a fad. It’s the underpinning of the information economy. Right now our content is digital, and while next generation video standards like 4K will require 25 Mbps connections, the real reason you need a gig isn’t about video.

The internet today transfers digital bits, but it’s rapidly moving to the place where it will transfer physical atoms. Thus, it won’t be about information, but about physical goods. Things like Uber or same-day delivery are examples of this. You tell the internet what you want and it delivers it for you in real-time or at least that day. If you consider 3D printers and the evolution of on-demand manufacturing then the internet could bring you physical goods directly. You want a bracelet you see online? If you have a 3D printer, the company will send the file to your Makerbot and it will print it.

More likely, the company would ship the design as a file to a manufacturing partner near your home and they would print it. Then they deliver it to you or you pick it up. Take this outside the consumer realm to manufacturing and maybe you get a car part in a few hours as opposed to waiting a few days for it to ship. In medicine, better and faster connectivity opens up the possibility of custom, on-demand drugs. There are startups today offering biological research services via the web. It’s not so far-fetched to imagine your pharmacy stocking the raw materials and then getting a custom drug recipe from your doctor via the web, and having it manufactured on the spot.

Let’s say goodbye to the information age and embrace what’s next.

This is the future, or some variation of the future. The point is we don’t know exactly what we will need, but it will need connectivity. And while we have physical resource constraints, legal barriers and a lack of knowledge about how to pull this future together, we shouldn’t have to worry about our connectivity. For us to move beyond the information age we need to be able to take out ability to transfer information reliability and at low cost for granted. Fiber networks offering a gigabit allow us to take data caps, congested networks and service providers that don’t want to lose their triple play revenue out of the equation.

Only then does the information age become something that’s a given. Something that’s so much a part of our fabric that we can move on to the next level of innovation. And that is why we need a gig even if we don’t know what we’re going to do with it.

We need it so we can innovate. So we can move beyond animated GIFs and into the next wave of interactive story telling. So we can take the ability to ship medical records to the best doctor, no matter where she is located, for granted and start working on custom cures that will help that patient.

With Google Fiber, Austin will get that chance. Every single person who gets the opportunity to sign up should. They should stay up late talking to their spouses what they want to do with unlimited connectivity. The information age was awesome, but now it’s time to see what’s next.

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Yesterday T-Mobile started taking orders for iPhone 5, which goes on sale from the carrier on April 12. I ordered one black and one white 16GB iPhone 5, setting me back nearly $293, thanks to California’s outrageously high sales tax (yeah, I know it’s a pittance to many Europeans). I’m in process of ripping all five lines from AT&T’s grubby paws and moving them to T-Mobile. Expect a very public spectacle, as I write about my struggle to get AT&T to reduce early-termination fees.

My first attempt on the first three lines failed. An AT&T customer rep knocked $100 off my bill, which isn’t nearly enough. He said, and I’ve heard this before, the carrier’s computer system wouldn’t let him reduced ETFs. They’re firm obligations that I don’t feel obligated to pay — well, not fully. I’m ready to make my case in the court of public opinion and in process hopefully raise more discussion about ETFs. T-Mobile does away with them. Why not other US carriers?

I don’t switch carriers lightly — something long pondered — because of onerous ETFs. But I’ve reached a point where enough is enough and take the risk knowing AT&T may compel me to pay more than $700 extra after the last numbers migrate. AT&T ETF is $325 per smartphone, an amount that reduces monthly through the contract period.

Piss-poor Service

My family is switching to T-Mobile for two reasons:

• Cutting the monthly bill (including ongoing device payments) by about one-third
• Terrible AT&T service in my area — otherwise I would wait out the contracts and change later

The latter reason reflects on ETFs. Almost since I moved to San Diego five-and-a-half years ago, AT&T service displeased. Early days, we had frequently-dropped calls, which increased after iPhone 4 and again 4S released. Some of these problems are documented in past BetaNews stories. Eventually, call dropping nearly stopped altogether.

But a new problem emerged about a year ago. While calls are clear to us, nearly everyone on the other end complains voice is broken up. The problem is much, much worse following iPhone 5’s launch, and it’s chronic.

Mutual Obligations

From my perspective, AT&T failed to live up to its end of the contract. Phones are useless as phones if we can’t make calls. Neighbors in the same apartment building complain of reception problems, too, and it’s not unusual to see someone in my family or another tenant walking down the street to make calls. We put up with this situation for a long time. The local corporate AT&T store admitted some years ago that my neighborhood is known for signal problems. Since switching three lines to T-Mobile late last month, calls are clear. Is service like that too much to ask?

My father-in-law is 91 — he spent three days in hospital at New Years. His life could depend on our receiving a phone call from him. He uses and iPhone, and I really can’t ask him to learn something else. Frankly, I should have switched carriers sooner for his benefit and strongly feel AT&T is owed little to no ETFs on the three lines where phone calls are difficult to next to impossible to make.

Funny, if I moved from T-Mobile for similar reasons, I would feel differently. Under the new Simple Choice plan, a phone is clearly financed and unlocked free and clear if I want to take it elsewhere. iPhone 5 is $99.99 upfront and $20 monthly for 24 months. AT&T sells the phone for more, upfront ($199.99) with contract or full price without ($649 vs. $579.99 from T-Mobile). But, more importantly there, is the contract, which, I say, obligates both parties — AT&T to provide service and for me to pay for it. Why should I pay for service that isn’t provided? T-Mobile financing is a one-way obligation — that I pay off the phone as promised for the privilege of putting down less upfront and to receive interest-free financing. The “Uncarrier” makes no service objection directly related to the phone’s cost to me.

Subsidy Madness

ETFs are the bones holding the whole subsidy model in place. US carriers sell you a smartphone for X-lower dollars, hiding the device’s real price, and on smartphones obligating you to pay for data service for 24 months. My father-in-law doesn’t need data at all on his iPhone 4 — home WiFi is more than enough. But as part of the subsidy-obligated contract, data plan is required. Twenty bucks a month for 300MB data. Last year I moved the whole family to a shared plan, trying to waste less paying for nothing.

If AT&T provided adequate phone service, I would wait out the contracts and move them one by one. That’s what I did with T-Mobile years ago, when we switched to AT&T so that my daughter and father-in-law could have iPhones.

I’m ready to pay half the ETFs, and AT&T is welcome to the subsidized phones. I don’t expect to pay nothing. But if I’m contractually bound to pay, AT&T is obligated to provide adequate service, which it never has to our apartment since the family moved here in late 2007. We put up with poor cellular service — from frequently dropped calls to garbled ones — for more time than is reasonable. AT&T can’t win back my cellular business, but could keep me for U-verse, for which I’ve been a customer since February 2008.

I’ll do the right thing and pay something. Will AT&T do the right thing, too, and make fees reasonable for the service provided? A future post will answer that question.

Photo Credit: Christina Henningstad/Shutterstock