Broadband Or Bust!
Broadband or Bust! Networking Society to Accelerate Economic Growth: A Discovery Inquiry Click here to download Adobe Acrobat Reader free
The Telecosm Party
QUALCOMM’S CDMA, already the leading wireless technology in North America, is now poised to triumph in the next era of wireless. To explain why, let us revisit the now-legendary cocktail party that Qualcomm founder Irwin Jacobs long ago conceived as an analogy for cellular systems. At the party, several guests have paired off in conversation. But for each listener the Read More ›
Internet in the Balance
A few weeks back, Al Gore, mocking his own penchant for hyperbole, bantered with David Letterman’s “Late Show” audience: “I gave you the Internet — and I can take it away.” This is no joke. While Republicans waste time with captious critiques of the straight-arrow Gore’s credibility and character, the real threat posed by the Democratic candidate is utterly ignored. Read More ›
Telecosm
The computer age is over. After a cataclysmic global run of thirty years, it has given birth to the age of the telecosm — the world enabled and defined by new communications technology. Chips and software will continue to make great contributions to our lives, but the action is elsewhere. To seek the key to great wealth and to understand Read More ›
The Outsider Trading Scandal
Stock markets are world-wide webs of information. So why half the time do they behave like members of some candy mountain mystical sect, torn between dreams of eternal wealth and horror of a bottomless pit? Ultimately ruling markets are data about the remorselessly real facts of supply and demand, the empirical realities of finance and the intricate, unforgiving details of Read More ›
The New Era
The computer age is over. Bandwidth and now “storewidth”, eclipse the PC paradigm. PCs remain important but peripheral. After a cataclysmic global run of 30 years, the PC revolution has stiffened into an establishment. So swiftly and subliminally did this silicon tide pass through the economy that many analysts missed much of the motion until it stopped. Then they mistook Read More ›
Open Access Now!
America Online has been lobbying for months for laws mandating that cable companies offering broadband service provide “open access” to AOL and other Internet service providers. But last week AOL borrowed one of the late Gilda Radner’s old “Saturday Night Live” punch lines: “Never mind.” AOL succeeded in persuading local governments from Portland, Ore., to Broward County, Fla., to mandate Read More ›
The Faith of a Futurist
Every year I host a conference on the future of the Internet in a world of bandwidth abundance. On the last day, I hold a debate or panel on the religious significance of the technological disputes. Every year, some attendees object to this insertion of theology into the midst of a meeting otherwise devoted to the higher vocations of microelectronics Read More ›
From Space, the Web Appears as a Swirling Sphere of Light
Imagine gazing at the web from far in space. To you, peering through your spectroscope, mapping the mazes of electromagnetism in its path, the Web appears as a global efflorescence, a resonant sphere of light. It is the physical phase space of the telecosm, the radiant chrysalis from which will spring a new global economy. The luminous ball reflects Maxwell’s Read More ›
Happy Birthday Wired
Near the turn of the last century, scientists contemplated with rising anxiety what might have been termed the Year 1900 Crisis. Embalmed in the mathematical coffins of Newton and Maxwell, the science of matter was undergoing a near-death experience. Except for extrapolating the lordly equations of gravity and electromagnetism, there seemed to be nothing left of any great consequence for Read More ›