TECHNOLOGY NEWS
- Ohio Company Launches Silver Bullet Attack on SPAM with SFAN
- Can high-speed Net connections prevent the heartland from emptying out?
- Wild about wireless
- Internet Access Definition Still Divides Senate
- NEWS RELEASES from Nomad Internet and Great Lakes Communication Company
- Find out about Broadband in Michigan
Ohio Company Launches Silver Bullet Attack on SPAM with SFAN
TOLEDO, OH - September 30, 2003 (INB) -- Addressing the public outcry to do something about the increasing volume of unwanted emails, a Toledo, Ohio company is launching the Spam Free Ad Network, or SFAN.
SFAN blocks virtually 100% of unwanted email as well as damaging viruses from reaching participating Internet users nationwide. SFAN is a patent-pending method for eliminating unsolicited emails while allowing a select few emails from legitimate advertisers. This managed service eliminates the need for ISPs to spend human and financial resources trying to stay ahead of the growing spam problem. Simultaneously, it reduces unnecessary traffic on their network infrastructure.
Participating Internet service providers will be able to offer the service free to their subscribers. "The cost to operate the service is carried by the legitimate advertisers who see a value in solving end-user complaints about being deluged with porn, mortgage, and anatomy enhancement solicitations daily," said Carl Dettmer, SFAN spokesman. "We believe that once Internet users see how effective SFAN is in eliminating their spam, they'll be happy to accept a few emails from legitimate advertisers that have a real value to offer consumers. It's really a win-win for everyone, except the spammers."
There are three major benefits to SFAN:
1) Subscribers see a reduction in spam (up to 100%) utilizing a process they control.
2) Legitimate advertisers will have their messages delivered to a willing recipient in a spam-free environment.
3) ISPs see a reduction in bandwidth and server utilization because the spam and viruses are stopped at the Spam Free Ad Network.
"ISPs are also going to see a reduction in their churn rate because spam-free customers are happy customers," said Dettmer. It's estimated that 76 billion unsolicited emails will be sent in 2003 by spammers.
"We've taken the same approach as television and radio stations have for decades. You can't just get on a TV station and start sending messages or you'd have spam TV," said Dettmer. "Heck even junk snail mailers have to pay for what they send. We believe SFAN is the silver bullet the public has been asking for, and it doesn't take any act of Congress. It stops spam cold, puts complete control in the user's hands, and it costs the Internet user nothing."
Source: InternetNewsBureau.com
Broadband to the Boonies
Can high-speed Net connections prevent the heartland from emptying out?
September 25, 2003
One of the most ambitious plans to jump-start American productivity comes not from a startup in Silicon Valley or a boardroom on Wall Street. Instead, it is taking root just north of a sugar beet field in Bismarck, North Dakota.
It is there that Extend America will begin its drive to provide wireless high-speed Internet access to hundreds of thousands of rural people who still tap their own wells for water and may drive 60 miles to buy groceries. “The real digital divide is no longer determined by whether you are connected to the Web, but by the speed of your connection,” says Ed Schafer, CEO and a former two-term governor of North Dakota.
If successful, the broadband-to-the-boonies movement could go a long way in creating thousands of jobs and reversing a demographic collapse in the Great Plains, the vast natural grassland that spans the central part of North America from central Texas to the Canadian border and encompasses all or most of a dozen U.S. states. The area accounts for one-fifth the land of the U.S. but only about four percent of its population. An area five times the size of California contains fewer people than the Los Angeles metropolitan region. And it is not thriving.
Nearly one in five counties in the region has consistently lost population every decade since 1950. That hollowing out appears to be accelerating – 38 percent of the counties in the Great Plains declined in population between the 1990 and 2000 U.S. Census Bureau reports. Some places have even reverted to what the Census Bureau calls "frontier territory," an area with no more than six inhabitants per square mile. Additionally, seven of the ten poorest counties in the U.S. are from the Great Plains, according to the Plains Humanities Alliance, a group dedicated to preserving the cultural heritage of the area.
Many heartland communities face the prospect of becoming ghost towns, as older inhabitants die and younger residents move away. While the coasts and south exploded with development, the Great Plains grew emptier and emptier. Fly over Kansas, Nebraska, the Dakotas, or Wyoming and look down. There are oceans of wildflowers and prairie grass, wind-sculpted rock, twisting rivers, even the occasional lonely farm. But few towns or cities. It is not hard to figure out why. The Great Plains hardly compares to the electric buzz of New York or the cocoa butter beaches of the West Coast. Nebraska or Iowa do not have the cool factor of Alaska, or nationally recognized recreation spots like Montana. No Hollywood actors or tech zillionaires make their vacation homes in Rapid City. You cannot think of a less appealing state in the public's imagination than North Dakota.
For years, states like North Dakota have had a terrible time keeping young, ambitious people. While in office, Mr. Schafer regularly met with peripatetic kids. Each time he would ask them the same question: What will keep you here? The answer always revolved around quality of life. “Kids are attracted to the bright lights of Broadway,” says Mr. Schafer. “Unless they get that connectivity, they are out of here.”
Mr. Schafer says he hopes Extend America not only keeps homegrown talent but creates new pioneers – drawing people from urban areas to rural communities by offering the lifestyle choices they want and the access that broadband provides. Using dozens of base stations located throughout the prairies, Extend America's team includes business heavyweights like Michael Larson, Bill Gates' personal investment advisor; the former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral William Owens; former governor Mr. Schafer; and Rich Karlgaard, publisher of Forbes . They are all native North Dakotans, but more importantly all believe that offering faster Web access to underserved rural markets can create vast new economic opportunity.
The company also has a formidable partner in Nextel, which has invested technology and exclusive use of its spectrum, as well as $500,000 in capital. Other investors include Ignition Venture Partners ($4.5 million), as well as Cascade Investment Group, the Greenspun Corporation, and Nextel. Total investment raised: $7.1 million.
The first markets to be offered high-speed digital voice and data services will be Bismarck and Mandan, North Dakota, which cover 13,000 square miles where approximately 114,000 people live or work. Later, they will extend the service to more than 1.8 million people spread through a quarter-million square miles of South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming and Nebraska. A beta test of 2,500 customers will conclude by year's end, with a full-scale launch by mid-2004. Mr. Schafer says he hopes to get 10 percent of the area's population hooked into the service. Right now, the market is wide open. Only Monet Mobile Networks offers broadband services to the area. George Tronsrue III, Monet's chairman and CEO, says Monet, which is a privately held company, has “several thousand” customers evenly split between residential subscribers and commercial businesses. Tronsrue adds that growth is happening “at a 45-degree angle,” and he aims for 6 to 8 percent market penetration.
Mr. Schafer admits convincing Midwesterners to spend $40 or more per month on broadband services might be a tough sell. “The folks out here don't typically click into the latest and greatest. We pretty much get along with what gets thrown at us.” But he is adamant that high-speed wireless technology is a critically important part of keeping the heartland economically alive, and he hopes to jump-start his group's efforts with government grants and low-interest loans from places like the USDA's Rural Utilities Service.
Will the availability of wireless create jobs? It is too early to tell. Certainly, high tech has brought vast fortunes to some sons of the prairie. Doug Burgum famously grew Great Plains Software, a maker of accounting packages for small- and medium-size businesses, from a computer retail chain of two stores in 1983 into a software firm that Microsoft bought in early 2001 for $1.1 billion in stock. Likewise, Ted Waitt founded Gateway Computers (market cap: $2.16 billion) in 1985 in an Iowa farmhouse.
The spread of high-speed Net access could create a second inland movement, where wired professionals and well-paid service workers make new lives in the Great Plains. Technology's spread into the boonies is a hugely democratizing force. It means that opportunities to create meaningful work are limited only by the imagination. Small cities may turn out to be the rising stars of the early 2000s. Talented white-collar workers will not automatically head for Silicon Valley, Seattle or Manhattan as they did from 1981 to 2000.
For nearly two centuries, one of the cornerstone American dreams was to settle the heartland. In the 1840s Horace Greeley, the founder of The New York Tribune , encouraged his readers to "turn your face to the Great West and there build up your home and fortune." One of the most famous images of the day was an 1861 painting by Emmanuel Leutze that showed excited Eastern emigrants, some in mid-whoop and others poised like heroic Greek statues, surveying the noble distant land from a hilltop. Its title: Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way . The high-tech pioneers of the 21st century, unlike their agrarian predecessors, might be able to reconcile the myth of the heartland with the American dream.
Source: RedHerring.com
Wild about wireless
Last modified:November 11, 2003, 12:00 PM PSTBy John G. Spooner
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
You would expect Sean Maloney to be wild about Wi-Fi. After all, as general manager of chipmaker Intel's Communications Group, it's his job to wave the flag for wireless broadband.
But Maloney also enjoys a unique vantage point in the technology food chain. Intel makes a broad assortment of processors for communications, Ethernet and Wi-Fi, allowing the company to tap into emerging trends long before they become conventional wisdom.
Despite the inevitable hype that surrounds the 802.11 radio frequency standard, Maloney expects wireless to continue to surge in popularity. Wi-Fi's next destination, he says, is in the home by way of a new generation of interconnected home electronics .
Meanwhile, changes are in the works that will affect the way Wi-Fi develops in the United States and overseas. Maloney recently spoke with CNET News.com about what's on the horizon for wireless technologies.
Q: What's the market for communications chips like these days?
A: The economics are looking better now than they were. We always need the next big thing, and the next big thing is wireless broadband. We had a recession in 2001, 2002 and then from the beginning of this year. It was very clear that Wi-Fi was going to be a very big deal. It's going to generate a new set of applications, a new range of interest, a new cause for optimism. That's all pretty much played out.
It's not that we're in boom times, necessarily, but things do look better. At any time in the past when recessions have drawn to an end, there have been winners and losers. The losers tend to be the people that haven't invested, and the winners tend to be the people who have invested. People who cut back when times get tough cut back too much. They tend not to really recover when the recovery comes. People who have invested in Wi-Fi are seeing growth.
Did Intel's buying 35 companies involved in networking and communications help out?
That was mainly during the boom. Since 2001, when we formed Intel Communications Group--we formed it out of all of those businesses--we've done a series of acquisitions, but nowhere near the same level.
Or was it that Intel didn't divest heavily during the economic downturn and resulting semiconductor slump?
We trimmed. We exited certain businesses, and then we doubled down on certain others. So we doubled up the wireless investment. We were late to wireless. No, let's put it this way: We were late to Wi-Fi relative to what we should have been. We had to run to catch up, but we're comfortable that we've caught up.
| Homes are already digital. Everyone's already got a computer. The question is, how do you network it? |
The analogy is the Internet. The first time I saw a browser was 1992. It was like science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke's line, "Any good technology is indistinguishable from magic."
You get the same feeling when you first use broadband wireless. Sitting in San Francisco International Airport, watching rugby on my notebook computer and synchronizing my Intel Outlook e-mail at warp speed is a magical experience. I used to spend an hour and a half or two hours a day futzing around, synchronizing my e-mail, as do so many road warriors. Now (snaps his fingers), it happens like that. It's magical.
The era now does have analogies to 1994. You know that there is too much hype. On the other hand, you know that it is going to change everything.
Can you give an example?
Police--San Mateo's putting a wireless umbrella over the whole California county so that the cops don't have to come back to the police station to synchronize. They say they were spending as much as three hours per day driving back and forth to the police station. It completely changes things.
We had a doctor from Beijing who has done a ton of motion study on doctors there. They spent more than an hour a day walking backward and forward to get information. These are people who spent seven years training. An hour a day walking is a total waste of time.
Broadband wireless is coming out with all these amazing different ways of doing things, just like the Internet did in 1994.
When you say wireless broadband, what do you mean? Wi-Fi, or 802.11b, is usually what comes to most people's minds
Broadly, you're right. The reason I don't want to be dogmatic on it is that the Koreans and the Japanese are both insistent that they are going to get 2 megabits of data per second over 3G (third-generation cellular networks).
| You know that there is too much hype. On the other hand, you know that it is going to change everything. |
It doesn't have to be a standards war, anyway. But it's definitely broadband. Me sitting in San Francisco's airport wirelessly at 24 kilobits per second--that's not what this is about. This has to be orders of magnitude faster than that. 802.11b or 802.11a or 802.11g or 802.16 or the very high-ends of 3G--that's it. That's it. That's what's going to change things.
To me, the fascinating question is: What are the unexpected consequences of widespread Wi-Fi? What unusual, unexpected thing is going to happen? It's a fascinating time.
Have you seen the movie "Minority Report"?
Sure.
Is it going to be like the scene in that movie where the main character is shown walking in a shopping mall and advertisements change as he walks by or call out to him by name?
Hyundai in Korea is doing something similar. Right now, if you go to any of the big U.S. stores, they have your shopping history already, but it's at the terminal...and it's often only accessible through some clumsy interface. What Hyundai has done in its stores is to give all the store assistants PDAs (personal digital assistants). So when you come in the door, the guy says, "Good morning. What's your phone number?" and you give your number, he says, "Oh. Hi, John. You bought so-and-so here last week."
The PDA will automatically suggest what you want to buy today. So, by giving all the assistants PDAs, all the assistants become personal shoppers. You don't have to check out, because he's got your credit card detail there, so he just ticks off that you've got it, and you walk out the door. The experience for you is smoother, and the store has the opportunity to get you to buy more stuff.
Basically, that data was already tracked at the cash terminal. Now the data is everywhere, using 802.11b in a PDA.
But Hyundai mainly went to the effort to use software to make that work?
Yes. There are tons of examples like that.
Businesses are increasingly turning to wireless. How does Wi-Fi aid the digital home concept, which a number of companies are beginning to pursue again?
Homes are already digital. Everyone's already got a computer. The question is, how do you network it? If you ask anybody, "Do you want a network?" they all say no, because they either don't know what a network is, or they do and they don't want the hassle of having to maintain it.
But if you ask someone, "Do you want these devices to talk to each other?" they'll say, "Yeah. Sure I do."
Parks Associates did some interesting studies on that recently. The conclusion is that home networking is absolutely exploding because of Wi-Fi. After 10 years of almost nothing, it's (now) just going through the roof.
The analogy to me is if you think about how USB (universal serial bus) came along five or six years ago--you'd go into a store and buy all these little USB gadgets that work with a PC--now its going to be Wi-Fi gadgets. Wi-Fi cameras. Wi-Fi printers. Wi-Fi media adapters. Wi-Fi TVs.
Do you have a digital camera? When you get yourself a fancy, spanking-new one, you just end up taking so many digital pictures, and they're all stuck on the hard drive. Your loved one says, "What's the use of them being on the hard drive? Why can't we go back to having them on paper?"
So then you display them on the TV. It's almost inevitable that you're going to end up having fast quantities of video, vast quantities of pictures and all your music on your hard drive. You just need these super easy Wi-Fi gadgets to get it all around the home. A bunch of Taiwanese companies are making them at the moment and selling them through companies in the United States.
How does this tie back into the business of selling chips and making money for Intel?
The digital home has already happened. The PC is already there. Wi-Fi now means that you can get that content all around the house--that you can link all these devices up.
You've got a virtuous cycle of people buying more devices with more chips in them.
So that's where Intel benefits?
Yes.
If I buy wireless networking gear from Linksys or another brand, how much of it will have Intel's chips inside it?
It's a mix. Some of it does. Some of it doesn't. We sell the little Intel XScale processors that go into a lot of these things. A lot of the Linksys stuff has got Intel network processors in it.
On the Wi-FI chips, so far, we've been selling almost 100 percent into computers, just because we've been so preoccupied with that space. We haven't really bothered going after the others. Eventually we will.
We have a new radio coming out real soon. We're very happy with a number of things about that product in terms of performance and all sorts of things.
That's the combination 802.11b/g radio module we've been hearing about that will go into Centrino notebooks ?
Mainly, but a lot of Asian manufacturers are very interested in using the device for other things.
I can't tell you exactly when it's launching, but it's coming out soon.
Source: C/net
November 11, 2003
Internet Access Definition Still Divides Senate
By Roy Mark
U.S. Sen. John McCain said Monday he hopes the Senate can pass some version of an Internet access tax ban within the next two weeks. The five-year moratorium on taxing consumers' connections to the Internet expired on Nov. 1.
McCain predicted Monday the issue would be resolved before the Senate leaves for its Christmas break, which is currently scheduled to begin before the Thanksgiving holidays. However, a highly partisan dispute over judicial nominations is roiling the Senate and may extend the current session into December.
Senators Ron Wyden (D.-OR) and George Allen (R.-VA) last week tried to win passage of a permanent moratorium but ran into opposition over the legislation's expanded definition of Internet access. Opponents, led by a coalition of Republican and Democratic senators who formerly served as governors of their states, claim the new definitions are too broad and could cost the states as much as $9 billion annually in taxes.
A number of states contend the new definitions would exempt not only certain telecommunications services used for Internet access, but would also expand the pre-emption to include bundled telecom services that offer high-speed connections and local and long distance telephone service in one package.
The cash-strapped states' concerns prompted Sen. Lamar Alexander (R.-TN) to introduce an amendment to extend the language of the just expired access tax moratorium for another two years.
"What we are proposing is a two-year extension of the current law with one exception: level the playing field between the phone companies and the cable companies," Alexander said. "This short term solution allows us to craft careful changes in a rapidly changing technological world."
Wyden said the Alexander amendment would make it easier for states to tax wireless connections and other types of Internet access never contemplated by the original 1998 ban on access taxes. Wyden said he and Allen offered to compromise by extending the ban for only five years but with the new language included. The compromise failed.
Senators Wyden and Allen have said they were willing to compromise on the length of the moratorium but were holding fast on the definitions, which, they claim, are designed to keep states from taxing DSL connections. Some taxes have interpreted DSL connections as a telecommunications service and subject to taxation.
The U.S. House of Representatives has already passed legislation, which includes the expanded definitions of Internet access, to make the access tax ban permanent. Any differences between the Senate and House versions would have to be resolved by a joint conference committee.
"We're down now to one basic difference: the definition of Internet access," said McCain, chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, where the Wyden-Allen legislation originated. "I would hope absolutely before we leave for the Christmas break that we would have this issue resolved and voted on by the Senate," McCain said.
Source: dc.internet.com