Plastic Logic e-Reader

Its great when you can talk about work you have done, and great companies you have worked with. Too often in cutting edge tech work, the NDA’s are pretty constrictive. Anyway, this week Plastic Logic unveiled its next generation e-Reader, using flexible pages. There is a video of it over here from DEMOfall.

As the article we’ve linked to notes, however:

Other bloggers have overreacted somewhat by predicting that the Plastic Logic reader will kill the Kindle, but that isn’t going to happen. There’s more to providing a good e-book experience than industrial design. The Kindle is very well supported by Amazon, and it has that unique free-forever wireless-data link. But if Plastic Logic can find a partner with ties to the publishing industry and solve the wireless problem, the result would be a serious challenge to Amazon.

Exactly – the lesson, from the iPod onwards, is that the end device needs to be supported by an end to end supply chain to capture maximum value. I’m sure Plastic Logic is well aware of this. But, having seen the technology in action, all we can say to anyone contemplating buying an e-Reader is check these ones and maybe wait till they come out.

There was an interesting post (now sadly removed) from a delegate at the Office2.0 conference which flew in the face of the current convention: a man who fears that he has lost he his laptop but loses no sleep about the data he might have lost. Okay, so losing something as valuable as a portable computer would have been no laughing matter and then there is all the hassle with filling out insurance forms, sourcing a new machine etc, but (and here is the crucial difference) no panic about the data that’s been lost with it. No fear about personal information falling into the wrong hands. No paranoia about identify theft.

The difference? This owner of this particular laptop relies on his laptop for little more than access to the internet. No data is stored on it (and in all likelihood virtually no applications either). He is a proponent of Office2.0 technology and as a result his data is all stored on secure, backed-up, safely housed, hulking great servers that can’t get left in the back of a taxi or dropped down the back of a pub sofa.

Okay, so I no it is not as black and white as that and there are plenty of potential risks to data security posed by reliance on external service providers and wireless internet connections – but all the same, perhaps in the current climate there is something to be said for moving back to a situation where the client machine is little more than a dumb terminal, devoid of stored data and therefore devoid of risk and of value to a third party. A move which Office 2.0 is perfectly placed to enable. It lets your staff wander around the country with laptops, it lets them work wherever they need and it lets them have access to the data they require – it just doesn’t let them take it with them, with all the attendant risks this seems to bring…

Very interesting post on Techmeme about Google investing in subsea cable:

Google is working with a consortium of carriers planning to build an intra-Asian submarine cable system. The new cable, dubbed the Southeast Asia Japan Cable (SJC), would link Unity’s landing station in Japan to Guam, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Thailand and Singapore. The cable is still in the planning stage, and the consortium has yet to announce a supply contract. ‘Given the current flurry of undersea cables under construction, the SJC cable will probably not be ready for service until 2011 at the earliest,’ said TeleGeography analyst Alan Mauldin

This follows huge investment in quite a number of other distribution plays, including wireless spectrum. So why do this? Now part of this requirement is clearly to move traffic between datacentres, but to say the least, its unusual for a media aggregator and Ad server to want to be a major global Telco.

So, a thought experiment – Google’s business model initially was to allow users to find content they want on the internet, and to pay for this it monitors their behaviour in order to optimise adverts it serves to them. Over time the model has more become about selling advertising by capturing various strands of user data, of which search is now just one component. Strategically, Google “pwns” the content market by making it easy to find it. Its market dominance allows it to “pwn” the consumer market in many ways. However, the one area it dows not “pwn” is the distribution function. But that traffic travels over the assets of some of the few companies in the world who are both rich enough and smart enough to give them a run for their money. Google gets a “free ride” right now as operators are (i) charging users for pipe and (ii) subsidizing it to grow traffic, so that their fixed costs are amortised over more people (and they get more subscription). But what if the Telcos thought the upstream players should also help pay for the next upgrades, especially those pumping out the video that is filling their pipes?

Our hypothesis is thus that Google’s greatest strategic Achilles heel is in internet distribution. This is the one area where it faces a major competitive threat, as the distribution companies (mainly Telcos and ISPs) can control Google’s traffic, and extract value from that. AT&T made this point very clearly when it showed that it too can monitor internet behaviour. And when it comes to who has the whip hand, its the Telcos in the final analysis. They own the means of distribution.

Hence a content aggregation and search company is making such a play in becoming a pipe owner.

Futurists, especially those who claim to have a methodology beyond psychic prediction, tend to rely primarily on Moore’s Law for figuring out what technology will be like 5, 10, or 20 years from now.

But Moore’s Law, which predicts that computing power will drop in cost by 50 percent every 18 months, isn’t some absolute speed limit and some measures of technical achievement are actually moving faster than Moore’s Law predicts.

It’s not that they violate the law (if it even IS a law) but that they take advantage of loopholes like the one where Moore’s Law can sometimes be applied TO ITSELF, leading to even faster change. That’s what’s about to happen to television and why your new digital television probably won’t matter much as a technical standard after 2015.

In order to understand this better let’s first look at the broadband Internet market. I’m an American employed as a cranky technologist by an American television network, so this is pretty U.S.-centric, but there are lessons here for many countries.

Ten years ago, the United States had the fastest and cheapest residential Internet service in the world. Today U.S. residential Internet service, especially broadband, is among the slowest and most expensive. Fortunately, this is likely to change as U.S. broadband Internet services become decidedly more competitive, both in terms of cost and available bandwidth. Unfortunately, U.S. broadband adoption rates are slowing at a rate that suggests ultimate market penetration under 90 percent.

Japan went from being among the most expensive countries for residential Internet bandwidth a decade ago to absolutely the cheapest today. While some of this change can be attributed to technology improvements, most of the change can be attributed to competition, specifically the entry of Softbank BB into the Japanese broadband market.

Softbank BB entered the Japanese market early this decade with loss-leader pricing that forced all the incumbent broadband suppliers to respond in kind, leading to a dramatic expansion of the Japanese broadband market where today residential 100-megabit-per-second service costs less than $20 per month.

This Japanese model does not apply well to the U.S., where there is no broadband provider willing to take the bet-the-farm approach of Softbank BB. The U.S. market also has no true national broadband ISPs that operate on a scale comparable to those in Japan. And the topology of the U.S. Internet is such that the high-bandwidth technologies applied in Japan would not work as well here simply because of a larger rural customer base.

Korea, as it is often wont to do, followed Japan in terms of bandwidth pricing. More importantly the government of Korea made it a national priority to build out the residential Internet infrastructure at government expense.

This was, ironically, in part inspired by the U.S. National Information Infrastructure plan, which was intended to accomplish the same end but failed miserably. Though they took full advantage of $150 billion in tax credits, the U.S. telcos simply did not build the network they had agreed to build, yet their model inspired more successful efforts in Korea, Singapore and other Asian markets.

Of the 30+ nations that can be judged to have residential Internet service superior to the U.S., in case after case that superiority can be attributed to government funding of infrastructure, to largely urban (short-distance) topologies, or to aggressive competition.

In the United States, unlike most of the rest of the world, broadband Internet service has been dominated by cable television companies offering cable modem service on their hybrid fiber-coax systems, with telco xDSL service a less popular broadband alternative until very recently. Cable Internet service was originally coordinated on a national basis through Excite@Home, but with the failure and liquidation of that company in 2001 most cable systems were left to fend for themselves as ISPs, with varying levels of success.

Since few cable TV systems have competition and regulation has tended to concentrate on television — not data — service, changes in price and available bandwidth have been generally dictated by whatever competitive broadband offering came from the local telephone company.

It is important to realize that bandwidth has not been lacking for U.S. cable ISPs, which typically devote to Internet service the bandwidth of one analog channel (usually Channel 80) on their systems. By adding a second data channel or (more often) segmenting their network into subnets, cable ISPs have plenty of aggregate bandwidth at their disposal but have simply not been challenged to provide it given that competitive telco products have been, until recently, limited to 1.5-megabit-per-second downloads.

Technology improvements and business model changes among broadband ISPs appear to be finally leading to significant changes in the U.S. residential broadband market. Technology is always advancing, of course, and the technologies coming into play are DOCSIS 3.0 on the cable Internet side and various forms of Fiber to the Home and Fiber to the Curb among the telcos.

The business model changes involve so-called “triple play” services where ISPs hope to make money from providing not just Internet service, but also telephone and television. The cable TV companies want to steal from the telcos basic phone service while the telcos want to steal television service from the cable companies. Since either possibility requires advanced data services and more bandwidth, users benefit.

DOCSIS 3.0 services will begin appearing shortly, offering up to 150 megabits per second, though it is doubtful that many cable ISPs will jump straight to that level given the emerging xDSL telco limitation of 24-26 megabits per second.

The telcos, notably AT&T and Verizon, are aggressively building out their fiber plants. Verizon is taking fiber directly into the home, but AT&T is taking its fiber only as far as the curb . This ostensibly limits AT&T to xDSL speed limits, though the company can use channel bonding (more than one pair of copper wires per service) to increase speeds if forced to do so by competition. Verizon is rolling out residential fiber service from 30-50 megabits per second but its equipment can jump to 100 megabits per second if needed without requiring another truck roll.

An important secondary motivation for this fiber rollout is that telcos are not required to share such facilities with competitors as they have been required to share copper infrastructure under the Telecommunications Act of 1996. So while there may be competition in the neighborhood from cable modems, once the fiber is in and the copper is out the telcos need never again fear competition from Competitive Local Exchange Carriers (CLECs).

Over time there will be other types of broadband ISPs that may provide competition and thereby spur service improvements. One possibility is WiMax, but WiMax is NOT a service that can compete for true high-bandwidth (above 10 megabit-per-second) service on an economical basis. The same applies for so-called 3G and emerging 4G wireless data services from cellular phone companies, which are also limited in total aggregate bandwidth.

While the number of U.S. residential broadband users is continuing to increase, the rate of that increase is slowing according to several surveys by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Extrapolating these numbers suggests that ultimate broadband penetration will be comparable to cable TV, or around 85 percent. This slowing of growth may be inspiration for the growing telco vs. cable battle over triple play digital services, with the idea that some telephone users (where market penetration is already 97+ percent) will be induced to buy broadband service to lower their telephone costs.

There is a base cost of around $20 per month for providing broadband Internet service irrespective of the allocated bandwidth based on published cost assumptions of international ISPs. This $20 is essentially the ISP overhead and is unlikely to decrease significantly no matter how inexpensive bandwidth, itself, becomes. So while there has been some moderation in broadband subscription rates in recent years, it has been minimal, with ISPs generally using introductory specials, rather than permanently lower rates, to attract customers.

Broadband customer churn is minimal, probably due to local monopolies and not wanting to give up ISP-branded e-mail addresses, so there is not significant price pressure. Rather, there is pressure to provide greater bandwidth at the same price. Nearly any U.S. residential pricing model, then, will have a base subscription cost of around $30-40 per month but with the ISP allocating increasing amounts of bandwidth for that unchanging payment. In this instance the ISP is generally hoping to make much of its profit on value-added services like Voice-over-IP phone service or movie downloads.

After staying for years at an average 1.5-megabit-per-second download speeds, broadband ISPs are moving to an average of 6 megabits per second in 2007-2008, 24 megabits per second in 2010-2012, and 100 megabits per second in 2014-2016.

Okay, so that’s the bandwidth picture, but what will we do with it? Here’s where Moore’s Law reenters the picture. As processors get more and more powerful they will migrate into many consumer electronic devices, especially televisions. It’s not that televisions will become computers but that televisions will become more and more computerized.

This leads to a very interesting effect. As we’ve seen above, Internet bandwidth growth is already defying Moore’s Law, growing at 100 percent per year with roughly flat prices. Add to this increased processing power in televisions and we’ll get decreasing bandwidth requirements as televisions will be able to run more powerful codecs. Where many PCs today can’t do real-time 1080p video decoding in software, simply throwing in another generation or two of Moore’s Law will eliminate that problem completely.

So bandwidth will get cheaper and cheaper while our entertainment devices will be doing more and more with available bandwidth. Add to this the slow evolution of video standards and we’ll have cheap bandwidth and even cheaper processing power colliding with the wall that is the 1080p HDTV standard, leading to ultra-low per-stream costs for entertainment providers.

To explain this another way, traditionally industry would react to such cheap bandwidth by jumping us all to 2K or 4K displays or maybe 3D, and that might well happen eventually. But until then we’ve decided as a technical culture that 1080p — so-called Full HD — is as good as it gets. Jumping beyond 1080p will require years of haggling and during that time 1080p will become cheaper and cheaper and cheaper to do, leading to that inflection point alluded to in this week’s column headline.

Around 2015 is the time when the cost of sending a separate 1080p video signal to every Internet-connected viewer — or POTENTIAL VIEWER — will be the same as using a broadcast model and sending that signal through the air. After 2015 there will be no scaling limits, no processing limits, no decoding limits. And since individual video streams mean individual commercials with a requisite CPM (cost per thousand) bump of up to 10X, commercial television as we know it will die, replaced by consumers choosing from a menu or recommendation engine what they want to see when they want to see it.

Just follow the money.

Commercial stations will repurpose their bandwidth for alternate wireless services, eventually shutting down their digital transmitters completely. And PBS, which can’t create a marketplace all by itself, will follow.

I’m not saying here that you shouldn’t buy that new DTV, because it will fit into most any emerging system. But I am telling you that the era of the television programmer, where some guy at the network or down at your local station thinks he knows in what order and on what days the audience really wants to watch TV, well that era will be gone forever, seven years from today.

If you have a retail business whether it is online or not, you surely accept credit cards payments. Most of people who love to shop don’t want to bring a lot of cash around with them and they will use their credit card to pay instead. It is simpler and safer.

Moreover, if a buyer currently doesn’t have money to buy something, they can use the credit card and pay later, when they have the money.

To accepts credit cards payment a merchant must first apply for merchant accounts. The easiest way to do this is to apply it online through MerchantWarehouse.com. Applying for credit card processing solutions with MerchantWarehouse.com is really simple and without too many requirements or paperwork.

After your application has been approved, you can access all of the merchant services such as cash advance programs, gift cards programs, etc. You need to bear in mind that the solutions offered by the site are not just for retail processing only but also for wireless and online processing as well, which give you a lot more of flexibility.

For retail processing you will surely need credit card machines installed in your store. MerchantWarehouse.com also provides Credit card terminals, including big brand names such as NURIT, Verifone, Ingenico and Hypercom.

So if you’re considering start taking credit cards, MerchantWarehouse.com is simply the best place for you to apply for complete credit card processing solutions, designed to make your business more efficient, and your clients’ lives a lot simpler.