Two trillion and there isn't fiber to every building. There aren't that many buildings with fiber into them. Copper and HFC, probably. Fiber notsomuch. And even when there is fiber into an MTU, how many customers do you think are with an alternative carrier (other than the Duopoly of cable and ILEC)? Very few. (I have looked at a couple lately with zero).
Branding. Woefully awful in our space. If these SPs were selling OTC drugs or ice cream, they couldn't even buy space on a store shelf! Is it any wonder that getting a channel partner's attention is so hard?
Yeah, I am cynical. Only because our industry could be doing so much better but always take the low road.
]]>Meanwhile WhatsApp sells to Facebook for $16B, which is how much FB made on their IPO on Friday, May 18, 2012.
Oracle has a market cap of $181B today. C-Link is $21B. WIND is $6B. AT&T is $185B. VZ is $202B. Twitter has $22B. Telcos are riddled with debt. And The Street values layer 7 more than Layer 1. Just saying.
]]>Take a look at any research study about UCaaS or some other buzzword service. Is it a comprehensive list of the true players in the space? Or is it a select list but with a few names that make you crease your brow and go Huh?!.
When I see a UCaaS study and all of the hardware PBX guys are listed but a handful of true cloud providers are missing, especially West IP or members of the Cloud Comm Alliance - I make the assumption that it is pay to play OR the object of the study was to lean to premise. If it was a commissioned study, I want to know who paid for it. If it was a product that the research house is selling, then I have to wonder how relevant it can be.
I see companies and people go crazy over awards from a business journal or what have you. Why? Well, validation for one thing, especially if you are looking for investors. The best validation? Customer testimonials and sales.
It's kind of a shame that everything is for sale. It's a bigger shame that the general public doesn't know it.
]]>Put on your foil hat because I am going to make some crazy points.
The FCC only wants to deal with a few companies, not thousands of them. The FCC Chair likes having AT&T and VZ on speed dial - and the 2 remaining RBOCs like controlling a lot of the telecom infrastructure in the US.
I think a Duopoly was pre-determined. It's easier than free market competitive landscape that can't be controlled.
Think about how hard Vonage was pounded by patent lawsuits when it got too big for its britches. How come no other VoIP company has been attacked with patent suits since?
Who knew that a telephone carrier would need a veep of national security? Last job, for a CIA front company and he carries a double zero designation.
Who knew that everything that outraged me about the Cheney-Bush Administration would just become business as usual in the Obama Administration?
The voters have become so complacent that the best they can do is post a picture to Facebook and like it, instead of screaming at their Congressman or marching on Washington.
Since 9/11 and the passing of the Patriot Act, we have moved to a police state all in the name of national security.
The journalist who broke the latest version of the story - that VZW hands over daily call records to the NSA due to FISA court order - Glenn Greenwald has railed against these types of abuses for years. The next piece of the puzzle was PRISM, the NSA program that allows Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Facebook, Skype, AOL, Apple to all secretly sharing private user communications with NSA.
Remember that FBI laptop with millions of Apple IDs? Makes sense now huh?
You thought that what they did on 24 and Leverage was sci-fi, huh? It is straight out of fiction, like I said before when I wrote about Brad Thor's book.
You want to talk about a BIG DATA probelm - how does the NSA, even with 25,000 square feet of computing power in one place, sift through all of that data? How does it translate that data from the thousands of dialects and languages in use in the US?
Lifehacker has an article to explain what it means for the average person and how you might take precautions to gain back some privacy, but as anyone on Facebook knows, the only privacy is when you never post.
I wonder what these companies - ATT, VZ, VZW, Google, Microsoft, AOL, Facebook, T-Mobile, Qwest, Yahoo - got in return for violating every privacy policy.....
]]>The FCC is working on two fronts. In one, the FCC formed a Task Force to monitor the transition to an all-IP, general purpose communications network. I say monitor because they won't do more than that.
Quick Aside: It's been 11 years since 9/11 and we still don't have a public safety network yet! That's the H block that they will be auctioning off next year. Whew! Really moved glacial fast there, folks!
I know Regulatory issues are boring - and perhaps you think I am chicken little about this. The truth is if the CLEC industry is threatened, then so is the Agent community. Plain and simple.
Without an innovative telecom industry, how does America stay competitive with the rest of the world? Our Broadband Economy kind of depends on, well, broadband.
On the other front, the FCC is in court over its Net Neutrality rules.
"A federal court is currently considering a case that could determine how much power the Federal Communications Commission has over the primary communications tool of the 21st century: the Internet.... The case, which is before the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, is Verizon's challenge to the FCC's controversial net neutrality rules," The Hill reports.
If the FCC loses the case, all IP will be unregulated. Can you say caps, metered, slow, pricey broadband? It's what the RBOC's hope for.
But does it really matter?
Everything is pretty deregulated now. It's the wild west in VoIP. Everyone with a 486DX computer carcass has slapped on Freeswicth or Asterisk to offer VoIP. It's actually beyond the FCC to enforce it all.
Let's face it - I have proclaimed this before - the FCC is not in enforcement. Sure, a nipple here, a CPNI fine there - piddling stuff when you consider the trillions in investment to form a Duopoly that have decided to NOT compete with each other on any front.
People ask why I dislike the RBOCs so much. This is why. They spend tens of millions each year on lobbying and litigating. For what? They still have majority stakes in all the pies they are in. They could be spending that money on customer care or better broadband. But No! Let's fight the FCC and the CLEC "threat". Not to mention how both of them treat Agents!
When all the information runs on the Internet and we count on 10 companies to supply that network, privacy (what little is left) will be removed from the dictionary.
Meanwhile, Sprint, flush with cash from Softbank, has acquired US Cellular customers and spectrum in the MidWest. Sprint is also in talks with DISH about partnering on DISH's spectrum, a political football at the moment. This just reeks of Clearwire Part II.
Now that T-Mobile is getting the iPhone (5S with NFC maybe?), and perhaps MetroPCS, will it catch up to Sprint? And even if it does, combined Sprint and T-Mobile with MetroPCS (56.4M+42.5M) - throw in Leap and Clearwire too - are smaller than VZW (with 108.7M).
Another interesting tale is the Avaya Debt which cost the CFO there his job.
]]>Voter Suppression, media green zones like in Baghdad (and here), indefinite detention of Americans by military, the revolving door between lobbyists and government, SOPA, Congressional insider trading, shorting on the debt ceiling, re-districting to keep power - aren't we tired of this crap yet? I am. Very tired. DC and state capitals are owned and run by career politicians and lobbyists. This truly is Corporate America or America, Inc.
I have spent the last few weeks trying to decide if I should run for Congress. I spoke with several campaign people in Tampa Bay as well as a few close friends, family and advisors. Despite my being a registered Democrat - and most of the folks I spoke with being Republican – everyone was very supportive, some even a little too giddy at the idea of me running for Congress.
I bitch about politics, so I figured I needed to get involved. More accurately, I want to fix it. It’s a tall order. Either you are a part of the problem (empathy, not voting, blaming) or part of the solution. I want to be a part of the solution.
I have to tell you that what I learned is that the process to run for office is challenging. It takes a lot of money to run for office. A standard Congressional seat needs a minimum of $1.3 million dollars for staff, advertising, printing, office and travel. That's a minimum. The candidate will be asking for money 4 to 6 hours per day, every day. The candidate will be stumping, at events, at churches, in neighborhoods, seven days a week, long days, for a year. There's no way my business would survive that schedule. And anything less than going 110% just isn't in my DNA. I want to win, even on projects with clients - I want a win. I want a positive outcome.
A few people told me to start small - like a county seat - but the point is: I don't want to be a career politician! They are the problem! We have politicians, not Statesmen. It’s a Big difference.
The other problem is the national blame game. “It's the Dems!” “It's the GOP!” PUH-lease! The difference between the two parties is slim at best. Take the politics out of it and look at the issues: healthcare, education, economy, foreign policy, term limits, civil liberties and the US Constitution.
I could point out that in 1992 the Clinton Administration was trying to design a healthcare solution, but the GOP stalemated the whole Clinton Administration, like it is doing to the Obama Administration now. But that’s being political. The issue is that the elected Congress Critters are NOT doing their JOB! Stalemating isn’t governing. We have real issues in the country that need to be fixed before we begin a slide into third world status.
People forget that the US economy is service based. The Bush tax cuts put money back in consumers – not voters, Consumers – pockets. Why? So they would spend it in our economy, since our economy is built on consumers buying stuff. Wal-Mart, McDonalds, Apple, Microsoft, etc. require the US consumer to buy their stuff. And to buy more of it every quarter in order to maintain the stock price for the fat cats on Wall Street. (I won’t go on a tangential rant about how Wall Street only extracts value from the economy.)
When the Middle Class gets squeezed, there is less money being spent in the economy. I wrote a while back about how banks, credit card companies and insurance companies had reached their peaks, when the economy was humming along on the real estate bubble up to June of 2006. Since then, it has been downhill for these companies and they have to find new ways to make money from the shrinking number of customers. (That would be you!)
Small businesses don’t think about raising prices to make more revenue or how to add fees to customers’ bills to make a few extra dollars. Only public companies think that way, since they are a slave to Wall Street.
What happens when the economy slows down further??
Here’s a scenario for you: the payroll tax cut doesn’t get renewed, the holiday credit card bills arrive in January to lucky that are still employed but now with less take home pay. Whoops! Now even less money for restaurants, gas, food, lottery, etc. This cycle ends up with small businesses closing. McDonalds won’t close, but a franchise may close. Wal-Mart won’t close, but a few mom-and-pops will. BP won’t close, but the gas station owners may. Now we have more unemployment, more vacant buildings, and more burdens on society, which ripples to more bankruptcies and foreclosures. The pool of people paying for the largesse is shrinking. It’s a mess. In addition, small business is the job growth engine, not large business. As small business dies, so does job growth and the economy.
But can a freshman Congressman make a difference? Not likely alone. He or she would need help from a lot of places.
Am I going to run? Not this time. I would need a lot of money. My business would suffer. The spotlight and mudslinging would be annoying. The political process is daunting, so I am going to get my feet wet by helping others this time round. I am going to shed some light on the DC mess and make some noise (not here, don’t worry). I also may be joining these three organizations: NoLabels, Rebuild the Dream and My America.
What do you want Your America to look like in 5 years? What are you doing to get it there? The elected are not leading us; they are screwing us down the river. Ranting on twitter, FB and your blog is fun, but action is where the tires meet the road. You can make fun of Occupy but at least they got up and did something. Are you?
And voter ignorance in this country is epidemic. See here and here and here. Maybe it is head in the sand defense against so much going wrong that is out of our control or maybe it is that we are getting so dumb as a nation that we can't grasp the debt any more than we can balance our check book or maybe it is an attention deficit society looking for immediate gratification.
In his 2005 Stanford commencement speech, Jobs talks about his life lessons, including failing. Lesson # 1: If Jobs could risk it all in the spotlight - time and again - and fail - and climb back up to risk it all again - why can't you do it just once? Don't just read the eulogy - learn the lesson. Without Risk there is No Reward.
Lesson # 2 from that same speech: Do What You Love! Slogging through life is no way to go through life. There's no practice run. It's one and out. And you could be out sooner than you know - Jobs was only 56.
High MacLeod of GapingVoid released a cartoon in eulogy for Jobs. It sums up my thoughts. Even though I am not an Apple fanboy, I have to respect the way he revolutionized the design of devices. He destroyed whole industries - mp3 players, laptops, cellphones - by making something that basically made the Big Players look lazy, unimaginative and lackluster. Think about it. (I'll wait.) The Walkman series is gone. Creative Labs. Blackberry. (I love my Blackberry, but after the iPhone and Android, this company faultered.) Motorola. All with design.
I rag on FB because it's like they don't have any people there that know how to program at all. Like they just slap code here and there randomly to make a clunky interface that always has parts failing. Take a lesson from iTunes. I don't use iTunes, but, holy cow do people love that site. The UX (user experience) is the primary focus. If only VoIP companies had some Steve Jobs in them. Lesson # 3: Get Inspired.
Here's to the Crazy One. The Genius. Rest in Peace.
May the rest of us push the limits of imagination instead of just pushing out me-too crap and spinning it as something special.
Lesson # 4: have Imagination. He was CEO and co-founder of Pixar. That takes imagination and creativity.
Lesson # 5 might be to Love. Apple's Board released a statement that Steve's greatest love was for his wife. Even he couldn't work all the time.
Every online sale takes away from brick-and-mortar business just as Wal-mart has run over mom-and-pop stores, each resulting in empty storefronts and unemployment. When we start automating basic jobs - like robots to make fast food burgers - we have to realize that the unemployed and the unemployable will grow. (There 's a great article in The Atlantic about what it's like to be unemployed for an extended time.
As more jobs become 1099 (contractor jobs), more and more will make less and less. Workers shifting from W-2 (an employee) to 1099 will experience anxiety over the loss of benefits and a steady paycheck. There's more to being a contractor than just performing the tasks in the contract. You have to market yourself for the next contract.
You can't blame the Administration for not creating jobs. It's not what any Administration is good at. And they are up against a lot of factors. Shovel ready jobs take months to move a mound of dirt. Politics get in the way by adding needless hurdles.
Seth Godin made the case in his book, Linchpin, that the free education system was designed to create consumers and factory workers. When the masses are out of credit, our consumer spending index crashes. And without factories our workers have no where to work. This is the foundation of today's problem.
The massive layoffs that we have seen in telecom from the synergies of the mergers have resulted in many unemployed. But also underemployed and unemployable. By that I mean, there are many that were earning 6 figures, who simply cannot find another position that pays that. Certainly, even as a consultant (the word many unemployed use instead of job-seeker) trying to grab a 6-figure salary is a challenge. Unemployable means that the worker does not have a skill set that is valuable in today's workplace.
[Blogger's note: I could make the case that most of these mergers have not resulted in any noticeable consumer benefit.]
For example, Florida's economy tanked because it has been (and continues to try to be) based on real estate development. So construction workers, real estate agents, mortgage brokers and title workers lost jobs. The new jobs are paralegals, bankruptcy and foreclosure lawyers and credit-repair specialist.
The start-up world in Tampa Bay needs designers, programmers, business minds and venture capital. Those are skills that are scarce in the job pool.
That's the unemployable issue. We have seen the under-employed issue before. In Florida, that issue is dragging on the housing market because without cash it's difficult to buy a condo - even a foreclosure. And as the larger employers - the governments, schools, telecom, real estate industry - layoff, the result is under or un-employment.
As we make more and more tools of productivity and couple that with a flat world where we do not value the worker, the American economy is going to have a huge Digital Divide. To heck with whether or not they all have broadband, what will they do with it? Other than buying stuff on Amazon or playing on Facebook (or Google+) or comparison shopping to save every dime, broadband may not make that much difference in the economy.
Broadband can offer benefits but it would need to be coupled with a desire to connect, a desire to learn, and the capacity for self-education. Plus, we all have to become marketers and salespeople - marketing our skills online and selling ourselves into 1099 projects. Most people do not have these skills. Hence, why jobs are put on a platform like eLance.com and the bidding process begins. [Blogger's note: I won't get into the price war on creative jobs in this post.]
For all the talk about Indeed.com and Monster, the desirable jobs are not online. They are available mainly through your network. Another skill for workers to learn (and master). Another time consuming task to be done, when we are already stretched for time and stressed out.
As we battle at every local government over education (and other spending), we may find that we are sliding into a third world. The divide grows between the haves and the have-nots. It's funny that the US is exporting the American Dream abroad, when it might not even be available at home to many, including those serving in the Armed Forces delivering the Dream abroad.
Immigrants seem to take to the American Dream better than many who were born here, especially those with roots a few generations old. How do we transfer that passion for success to inner city and poverty stricken areas?
I don't have the answers, but I do know that no one in DC has the answers either. I'm not even sure that anyone in DC knows what the problem is. When Senator McConnell states that the President owns the economy (and the insuing problems), I have to ask, "Why isn't it Everyone's problem?" I know the answer is politics, but this is America. Shouldn't we all be working to make it better instead of just working to make a buck? Who knew that America would become the Land of the Selfish Bastard.
In Tampa Bay, a group of us talk about the issue of growing start-ups often. Start-ups are the engine for job growth and economic prosperity, but take a lot of elements to grow (kind of like a farm). There are very few hotbeds for this incubation - Silicon Valley, NYC, Boston, Austin, and RTP. How do we make it spread?
UPDATE: Gary Kim writes that while the Wireless Industry is booming - revenues have grown 28% since 2006 - it's employment numbers are dropping by 20% -- even amid the 4G roll-out. "The disconnect between employment and industry growth reflects the broader head winds lashing the U.S. job market, as consolidation, outsourcing and productivity gains from new technology and business methods combine to undermine job growth," the Wall Street Journal says. BTW, it's mainly non-union workers that shrunk.
In another note: Rich Tehrani writes that 71% of Austin Companies Complain of Tech Worker Shortage. So Dice.com will be hosting a Job Fair at the ITEXPO in Austin in 2 months!
]]>Fact checking is important, according to Newmark. I agree and he gave the names of many sites that do that. Web 2.0 has certainly had an effect on shining the light in some areas. These sites grade non-profits: Charity Navigator, GreatNonProfits.org, and Guidestar. Also, Donors Choose. These check political facts or money: Politifact and Influence Explorer, [I would add Open Congress here and mention that Politifact is a project of the St. Pete Times newspaper, which is owned by the Poynter Foundation. Local pride for Tampa Bay!]
He is working with some crime fighting nerds to check grant apps and vet veterans groups. Craig worries about journalism (especially since media empires are crumbling), since the Fourth Estate is supposed to keep our Democracy in check. For our democracy to survive, the press has to have integrity and be diligent in fact checking. I'm not surprised that The Daily Show wih Jon Stewart does the best job of fact checking, according to Newmark.
Craig has his hand in many pies that all revolve around social good, customer service and doing what's right. I'll leave you with 3 quotes from his speech.
"Listen to people and then do something about it. That's customer service. Try to listen to everyone because even a disgruntled customer can be right."
"Working together for the common good - whatever your version of that is."
"Sunlight is the best disinfective for government."
Dear PR People and Constant Contact, WTH???
First, Constant Contact. Gail Goodman, for goodness sake, please move to an opt-in approach to your service. After being added to anyone's list, the adressee should immediately get an email that asks if they want to be on it. Period. Otherwise, you just support spam and waste a lot of my time.
Why Constant Contact? Because twice today and at least five times this month, when I am added to a list, I get to see the CC logo and this:
It gets tiring to have to keep deleting this stuff. I asked CC about it and I can get a universal unsubscribe, where no one using CC can send me email, but what about the legitimate email lists?
It's 2010 and spam is still a huge problem.
Why is a press release emailed to me spam? Because I did not ask for it. Because who needs a press release emailed to them? We have tools for that: RSS, Google Alerts, newswires.
And because the people who put me on these lists do so indiscriminately.
I don't write press release stuff. Have you read my blog? I write about neat stuff happening or things that affect the Channel or the fact that telecom is broken. Apparently, PR is even more broken than telecom. And so is Constant Contact. MOve to an Opt-in approach. Seth Godin wrote Permission Marketing in 1999.
Here's a couple examples of the emails.
"Here's an announcement on a newly released location-based journal and social networking application called [software name to never be mentioned here] that I thought would be of interest. Just out on iTunes last week, it has already been downloaded more than 10,000 times and is being used in more than 50 countries."
"XXXXX Networks Hires Industry Veteran [Who Cares] as Chief Marketing Officer"
HOT INT'L RATES & ROUTES
In the case of the hiring press: that's for SEO. You just need it on the newswire to fill your SERP's. It should be keyword optimized, short and sweet. If you wanted a blogger to write about it, don't send the release, send a note saying, "Hey, Hu just got hired and wants to talk to a couple of bloggers.
And the best is when the company rep keeps pinging me about where the blog post is about their company. Oh, don't worry, it's coming!
BTW, it's not just me. Have you heard of Bad Pitch Blog?
It's time consuming to keep opting out of these lists and deleting. I get over a thousand messages per day -- I don't need more. ]]>
So many experts. Of course, they are experts. When the mass majority doesn't have a clue about something, anyone confident can come along and be taken as an expert. You know what a Confidence Man is? A Con Man.
When I first joined LinkedIn, there was a group called LIONs. These were the numbers people - chasing to be connected to everyone on LinkedIn. (Today, you can buy that ability from LinkedIn.) I learned early on that it wasn't a game of numbers. I could connect with any of the Top 5 LION's and reach their whole network, so why go crazy?
There is a sense of accomplishment when you hit 500 connections and even more when you hit 1000, but it isn't about the numbers. It's about the quality.
I know quite a few people like the LIONs. I call them Promiscuous Networkers because they want to connect with everyone. One is very good at it. But let me tell you something about the Promiscuous Networkers: they can't hold a job.
No one is paying them per Fan or per connection. Along the way, they forgot what they were connecting for. Was it just to have an audience? It might be. But that doesn't pay either. Bands know this. You have to have something to sell them -- and then you have to package it the way your audience wants to buy it -- and then you have to actually market it to Ask them to Buy.
You can use social media as a broadcast medium, as a PR tool, but that is most likely not going to result in sales. Sales come from engagement. That's right, you have to engage the prospect, uncover the perceive pain, then provide the solution for that pain. That can be automated for commodities like DSL or LD or books, maybe even for a T1, but not for IP Comm. (And in my case, not for consulting or training either).
When building that network, you have to know something about the people in your network. One Promiscuous Networker likes to send out quotes and a popular one is about it's about how you make people feel. If that were true, how do you make them feel when you Face-tweet link after link? It's the engagement that people seek. You want to know that someone is reading your tweet, your blog; that someone got something out of the article that you got something out of.
I've kind of given up on Linkedin these last few months. It's so noisy now that people tweet to LinkedIn. The questions section is littered with repeated questions and baiters (people that send out a question to bait answers so they can connect with more people). The spammers, people that automatically add me to their newsletters, events announcements, etc., tired me out.
One segment kills me: the people who pimp out the groups. Do I really have to go to five or more groups to get an answer to a question? Yes, because the industry has been so fragmented by ten or more people setting up their own groups instead of adding to the communities that are already established. That's not a Linchpin. That's self-serving. But then Promiscuous Networkers may say, "What can I do for you?" but underneath they are thinking, "What will you do for me?"
A thing to remember about social media: What are you there for? All your actions stem from that.
You can automate what you do on social media using apps like Hootesuite, but what part of engagement or social is automated? Do you automate your offline sales and marketing efforts as well? Are sales good? Maybe it works for you.
Certainly, broadcast can work if you are looking to drive traffic to a website. That website will then need to have an excellent landing page and conversion system. (Most don't.)
You wouldn't run into a networking event in-person and do half the stuff people do online. Think first. Sales is about making a friend.
]]>I'm an American. This is the greatest country in the world. The potential here is limitless. And we have a bunch of Creatives and really bright minds. Unfortunately, we also live in a society that favors short-term versus long-term thinking.
I was a Chemist for over 6 years (Glaxo, Bayer, Oil of Olay and BIC). In Pharma, you see huge potential and unfortunately huge disappointment. No, I don't mean when a clinical trial fails and the company loses tens of millions. I mean, the way the FDA works WITH the Industry. The other huge let down is the way Pharma isn't about Cures but about maintenance of illness. There's less money in cures.
So on the one hand, we have this great country filled with boundless potential. WOOT!
Then we have government and the totally screwed up political system undermined by special interests and lobbyists for those special interests. What was once a Of the People, By the People, For the People has become of, by and for the select few who buy it. They aren't called F-Agencies for nothing.
What's the theme here? I see boundless potential constantly going to waste. I have high expectations that repeatedly go unmet.
Now let's take telecom. Boundless buckets of cash. R&D gets replaced by lobbyists and lawyers who fight for laws and rule changes instead of just living up to the countless promises made to every state PSC in the nation since 1999. In other words, build the broadband networks that ratepayers financed with rate increases granted to ILEC's for the express purpose of broadband build-out.
Think about this: over $7B per year goes into the Universal Service Fund (USF) and is funnelled back to ILEC's and others willy-nilly to pay for landline voice service; Internet Access in libraries and schools; and rural healthcare. RUS hands out grants and loans annually to the tune of $3B. In just 5 years, that's $50B in hand outs. Shouldn't we already have broadband across the land, un-metered and at least 6MB x 1MB by now?
Innovation. We have a dirth of PhD candidates. Who wants to go to graduate school adding tens of thousands of dollars in loans to the tens of thousands in loans already collected for a Bachelor's degree that can't get you the dream job?
Bell Labs has a history of innovation. It used to employ tens of thousands. Last I head, it has less than 1000 PhD's. As Slashdot states, "The great labs of this era--Bell Labs, Xerox PARC, and IBM's labs--were places with massive budgets, where the world's top scientists were invited to pursue "blue sky" research into areas with no immediately apparent commercial applications. The facilities were state-of-the-art, and there was no pressure from management or shareholders to do anything but science for science's sake."
And today we are a precipous. We need ubiquious, reliable broadband to an unencumbered, open Internet. Why? Because we are competing daily for jobs (hence, money) with a global workforce willing to work on a laptop with wi-fi anywhere in the world. And most folks don't get that.
You think just the Fortune 5000 outsource jobs and dollars? Everyone who uses eLance, Guru, Rent-a-coder, et al is likely hiring someone outside the US. Oh, that 4-hour work week guy? He also sends dollars he earns in the US to India. He encourages it. So for our unemployed to make a living someday, they will need new skills, a competitive edge, broadband, and a computer.
We are slowly becoming a service economy of freelancers. We need to wrap our heads around what that is going to mean.
So my outlook may seem pessimistic, negative, cynical, etc. What it really is is disappointment, frustration, and realism. I'm disappointed that I saw the housing bubble but 99% of the people didn't. I'm not the brightest guy in the world. I know way too many people who are far more gifted than me. But I also have high expectations for myself, society, and my country. Expectations that go unmet daily because of stupidity, short sightedness, greed and laziness. In 2000, I said that if we didn't fix certain things - healthcare, Medicare, Social Security to name a few - we would be screwed. Welcome to my brain. I see this stuff coming. I can't fix it alone. I watch it happen. That's frustration.
I do try to balance that seemingly negative outlook with ideas on how to fix it. On what is missing. On what direction may be a way to go. I hope that helps to balance things out. And that's an hour inside my head. (Nice to get that on paper)> Thanks!
]]>This first is from FCC Commish Copps (thanks to Benton Foundation):
"I think most of you understand how important the Internet and access to high-speed broadband are to the future of our country. This incredible technology intersects with just about every great challenge confronting our nation-whether it's jobs, education, energy, climate change and the environment, news, international competitiveness, health care or equal opportunity.
"You know, history is pretty clear that when some special interest has control over both the content and distribution of a product or service -- and a financial incentive to exercise that control -- someone is going to try it. That's a monopoly or an oligopoly or whatever you want to call it -- I call it a danger to America."
The second is from Al Franken:
"But there's an even bigger issue here. It's that when government will not act, corporations will. And unlike government agencies, which have a legal responsibility to protect American consumers, the only thing corporations care about, the only thing that they have a legal duty to promote, is their bottom line."
"We can't let companies write the rules that they're supposed to follow," Franken added, "because if that happens those rules are going to be written only to protect corporations."
Net Neutrality is largely misunderstood by the public. By and large though, if a company is going to spend millions to get their way, the consumer will be getting that bill for lobbying, astro-turf funding and advertising.
Finally:
"Terrorists will never defeat America, but Jersey Shore, like necrotizing fasciitis (flesh-eating bacteria), could rot us from within. - Alan Weiss
]]>When they are having fun, the crowd is having a blast. Translated: When your employees are enjoying life, so are your Customers!
Cricket did some smart sponsoring on this one!