City sets up wireless as lifeline

City sets up wireless as lifeline

After spending millions of dollars to develop the downtown commercial area of Winston-Salem, officials in the North Carolina city are setting up free wireless service to serve as a technology hook to attract young professionals and help the area thrive.

For those who aren't familiar with Winston-Salem, it's a small city (about 200k people, I think) in North Carolina, not part of the Research Triangle Park, but looking to diversity its economic base (dominated mainly by agriculture, especially tobacco). This is not unlike the access program that Long Beach rolled out recently.

Another unscientific WiFi node count

This blog entry records results from a node count in a taxi, starting at 72nd and driving up Amsterdam Avenue:

Between there and 120th Street, I picked up 180 WiFi nodes; only 48 of them (27%) were WEP-protected. Of course, there’s no telling how many of them were willing to dole out an address to me, nor how many of them had filters preventing random computers from connecting, but that’s still damn impressive, and way more access points than I would have thought I’d see.

I think the basic fact w/ regard to WiFi counts is, no one really knows.

About 6 months ago, I e-mailed the heads of Wi Fi user groups, asking them how many Wi Fi nodes there were in their area. The universal response was, "We have no idea. Whatever the number is, it's growing."

Two new members

Since our meeting back in March, we've added a couple more members to the research group, who have access to both the discussion group and the blog. I just wanted to let everyone know who they are:

Maria Savolainen is a usability consultant with Satama.

Maria Koskijoki joins us from Sitra. From Google, I find that she's also working on a dissertation on personal possessions in modern society.

Welcome!

Mimi in Miami Herald!

From Janine Warner, "Cellphones shape behavior patterns of teens in Japan," Miami Herald (7 April 2003):

Imagine how important your cellphone would be if using it were the only way to get together with your friends after school, compare notes about your classes, or keep in touch with your high-school sweetheart.

That's the reality for most of the young people in Japan today, arguably the most wired population in the world with 97 percent cellphone usage reported among Japanese college students and 79 percent among high school students.

''Kids get phones because they are excluded if they don't have one,'' said Mizuko Ito, a visiting scholar at the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of Southern California.

P.S. I found this via Howard's Smart Mobs blog, which I think is a very nice model for what a group blog ought to be. There are 11 people who contribute to it; mainly the entries are links to articles, but there are also some entries that are more substantive and original.

We're Upgrading to Better Serve You

You'll probably see some tinkering with the style sheet, a placeholder background banner, and some other stuff this afternoon. I'm doing some work to get the style sheets in order, and start making the whole site look a little prettier.

Yes, I know the current design looks like the menu of a diner in "The Flintstones," but I just wanted to do SOMETHING to break out of the Total Absence of Color on the site.

Cluster competition

This New Scientist piece is from their jobs section, hence some of the focus. Place discussion at the city, region, agglomeration, and community level.

Biotech by the bay
The Bay Area has a biotech pedigree stretching back three decades, and is home to the grandaddies of the industry. But will the region's freewheeling energy keep it ahead of its rivals? Philip Cohen investigates
http://www.newscientistjobs.com/biotech/sanfran.jsp

A CENTURY ago, San Francisco Bay was ripe with the fumes from stockyards, meat-packing plants and the steel mills that forged beams for the Golden Gate bridge. On the land where many of those industries once stood are now arranged neatly landscaped buildings and sophisticated research labs - the epicentre of arguably the world's oldest and most vital biotech industry.

According to the Bay Area Bioscience Center, which tracks the industry, 535 biomedical companies circle San Francisco Bay and around 300 more call the nearby Northern California region home. The Bay Area has the greatest number of biotech start-ups and established companies with over a hundred employees in the US, and it also ranks number one in attracting life sciences venture capital. It's ranked second for patents granted, behind New York, and third in money received from the US National Institutes of Health, trailing Boston and New York. It is easy to see why biotech's success in this area is the subject of worldwide envy. ...

Groovespace

Groove's continued focus on collaboration activities and its open architecture is generating some interesting fringe discussions of mobile work, inside and outside of organizations. Note that M$ chose today to add SharePoint to its Office suite.

InfoWorld  //  Test Center
REVIEW
Uniting under Groove
Groove 2.5 ties shared spaces into the mainstream
By  Jon  Udell
February 14, 2003  
http://www.infoworld.com/article/03/02/14/07groove_1.html?s=tc

Groove founder Ray Ozzie and his teams have always pretended to build application software. But what they have actually delivered are the operating systems of the future ? years ahead of schedule.

The XML business Web is only now achieving the architecture that Lotus Notes laid down 15 years ago: message-oriented exchange of semistructured documents. As today's operating systems catch up with that paradigm, Ozzie is tackling the next set of challenges in Groove: drop-dead simple, secure collaboration, presence management, coordination of user and device identities, and ad-hoc group formation. ...

That's the ticket! Until now, you had to step out of the mainstream to take advantage of Groove's advanced collaboration technology.

Finally, we can have our cake and eat it too.

Telespace increasing according to NYT

Today's NYT has an article on the increasing in commuting/telespaces (see the extended entry). The article, which mentions both 9/11 and Iraq, is little different than the NYT article on telespaces written after 9/11. Interesting enough.

The article seemed pertinent because of scene in one of Sunday's new hours. A newsreader sitting in a big studio was talking to a remote expert. This expert was sitting in some boring room somewhere and having his voice/image brought to the studio.

Now for a second imagine turning to your left and seeing your friend while you talk with her. Your friend is the same size as you, about four feet away, and have an aspect ratio that, from the waist up, is taller than wide.

Well, the in-studio display that the remote expert was presented on was one of the now ominpresent widescreen thin television monitors, turned upright. He looked like he was about four feet away from the newsreader, the same size, and looking at him. I don't know why, but the remote guy looked MUCH more real than he would have on a traditional wall-display or tv monitor.

Tamara and I were commenting that this one piece of equipment, a wide-screen display turned on its end, seemed to provide many of the telespace cues that are the focus of teleconferencing and VR projects.

Travel Fears Cause Some to Commute Online
By JONATHAN D. GLATER
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/07/technology/07TELE.html

As fears of terrorism, the mysterious respiratory disease known as SARS and consequences of the Iraq war have mounted over the last several weeks, many businesses are reducing travel in favor of virtual meetings, and more employees are learning how to telecommute.

The Sprint Corporation has seen minutes spent on teleconferences spike in recent months, rising 23 percent in March from February, and 58 percent from March of last year for its top customers, according to Jackie Bostick, a spokeswoman for the company. Sprint expects to have more growth in the coming weeks as businesses squeezed by the slow economy and constrained by travel fears switch to Web-conferences, video conferences and old-fashioned telephone conference calls ...