Tuesday, June 7, 2005

Verizon CEO touts trickle-down benefits for communications industry. Ivan Seidenberg tells a packed house at Supercomm that Verizon's success in deploying new services will benefit the entire industry. [CNET News.com] Here's another look at innovation, this one from a cellular provider but in this case complaining about access to cable TV markets. Once again, just like Verizon itself does for its cellular customers in order to corral competitors, its competitor in cable TV is doing it to Verizon. And guess who's complaining now. In this case, I'm fed up with cable monopoly. Although I use Road Runner cable modem, I'm fed up with the pricing of the monopolistic TV pricing. Warner Cable, now Time Warner, negotiated with our hapless local politicians many years ago, now they can't be replaced. When Congress acted to reduce rates several years ago, our rates actually went up as Warner (and their brethern, I'm sure) found ways to repackage programs to reduce rates while at the same time extracting greater rates. Just like we need more competition in the cellular arena, more in cable would be good, as well. And, interestingly enough, as I interview readers for an article I'm writing for July on software migration strategies (version upgrade hell), I found one guy using Linux, it's cheap, it's supported, he's as happy as can be. Read all about it next month in Automation World. 6:38:08 PM    comment []

Innovation Benson Hougland of Opto 22 just sent me this link to a great article on innovation by Walter Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal. This article discusses innovation in the cell phone industry (or lack thereof) and raises some very important questions. One conundrum is how to strike a balance between intellectual property and a fair return on investment on one side versus the consumer (and societal) benefit of technology open for innovation. There have been instances in the automation industry where some have tried to extend the reach of old patents in an attempt to make money from them rather than innovate and create something new--and in the process actually inhibiting innovation. This is an article worth pondering. Think about its ramifications over your coffee in the morning. 4:20:34 PM    comment []

A Better Robot, With Help From Roaches. A graduate student has taken a novel approach to the problem of robotic navigation: he's using roaches as "drivers." By JOHN SCHWARTZ. [NYT > Technology] This may be interesting, but I bet it'll be a long time before a roach drives an industrial robot. Or, maybe not... 6:13:38 AM    comment []