14 minutes from internal Microsoft distribution to WSJ blog publication; I doubt that was unintentional...
Just prior to Microsoft’s annual advertising conference advance08, Kevin Johnson, president of the company’s Platforms & Services division, sent the following strategy update to PSD employees:
Microsoft on Yahoo: Internal Memo From Kevin Johnson | Kara Swisher | BoomTown | AllThingsD
A major milestone for Webpaint; see the full article for more details
Today it's releasing Wetpaint Injected, a slick new technology for adding interactivity and secret Google juice to Web sites.
Buzz has grown since details surfaced in March, and last week DAG Ventures and an unnamed person added $25 million to Wetpaint's $15 million in funding.
The technology was code-named "Balco," a reference to baseball's steroids scandal, because it's a performance-enhancing substance that can be injected into Web sites.
Business & Technology | Wetpaint poised to make splash | Seattle Times Newspaper
Sign of the times -- and a very smart application of Internet technology
Hot or Not, a Web site where people submit photographs of themselves so that strangers can rate how attractive they are on a scale of 1 to 10, has spawned many imitators (plus a fair number of critics who view it as a sign of the end of civilization as we know it).
One new spinoff, Pos or Not, has a serious purpose (tasteful or not). The site, www.posornot.com, introduced in late April, is an H.I.V. education effort disguised as a game. It shows photographs and brief biographies of men and women ages 21 to 30, and asks visitors to decide whether each is H.I.V. positive or negative. The message is that you can’t judge someone’s virus status by looks, occupation or taste in music.
Web Game With a Message Debunks H.I.V. Myths - New York Times
A Microsoft strategy snapshot -- see the full article for the rest of Kevin Johnson's letter, including actions 4 - 8.
advance08 will underscore our commitment to search and online advertising, and you'll continue to see announcements demonstrating our progress in this space. Earlier this week, I spoke to leaders across our online services business about our core strategy, the importance of acceleration and a set of actions we are taking, including:
1. Innovate and disrupt in search - We will disclose some elements of our plans with this week's release of search and sharpen our focus on user experience and business model innovation. The work we have done over the last 4 years on search has established a solid foundation to build upon.
2. Win targeted distribution - With this release of search, we are now ready to throttle up broader distribution initiatives.
3. Reinvent portal and deliver new experiences across PC, phone and web - We are building our new releases of Windows 7, Windows Live wave 3, Windows Mobile 7, Internet Explorer 8, Search and MSN with an eye towards optimizing and unifying experiences and scenarios.
(Microsoft must be a bit annoyed, if this wasn't an intentional leak; it apparently took 68 minutes for the full text of the letter to appear on news.com after internal Microsoft distribution.)
Kevin Johnson's letter on Microsoft's updated online strategy | Tech news blog - CNET News.com
The saga continues...
“In light of developments since the withdrawal of the Microsoft proposal to acquire Yahoo! Inc., Microsoft announced that it is continuing to explore and pursue its alternatives to improve and expand its online services and advertising business. Microsoft is considering and has raised with Yahoo! an alternative that would involve a transaction with Yahoo! but not an acquisition of all of Yahoo! Microsoft is not proposing to make a new bid to acquire all of Yahoo! at this time, but reserves the right to reconsider that alternative depending on future developments and discussions that may take place with Yahoo! or discussions with shareholders of Yahoo! or Microsoft or with other third parties.
Burton Group has introduced a new research offering, its Data Management Strategies (DMS) service. As with the other Burton Group services, DMS is focused primarily on enterprise information technology domains (commercial, government, and higher education), and includes a mix of published research content and customer interaction in the forms of telebriefings (web conference presentations with Q&A) and dialogues (on-demand discussions with analysts). You can find more details about the new DMS service on this page. I'm the Research Director for the DMS service, and I've been focused on bootstrapping the DMS team for the last few months. I'm psyched about the DMS team and the opportunity to focus full-time on data-related topics, as I've been something of a data zealot for most of the last 25 years. While many people are familiar with my collaboration-related experience, e.g., running Notes product management at Lotus Development Corp. and working in product management and competitive strategy at Groove Networks, my inner data-geek goes back to 1982, when I started in my first database application developer/programmer job. After a couple years of working on minicomputer DBMS applications, I went to graduate school at the University of Minnesota, where I learned a lot more about DBMS topics and was also introduced to conceptual data modeling, in a class with John Carlis (co-author of what I still consider to be the best data modeling book, Mastering Data Modeling: A User-Driven Approach; the book's other co-author, Joe Maguire, is a member of the new DMS team). After graduate school, I had the privilege of working in database-related applications and data architecture for Procter & Gamble. To give you an idea of how different the DBMS landscape was at that time (mid-1986), one of my first tasks at P&G was to establish SQL as a global P&G standard, something that was, at the time, quite controversial (in part because P&G had, a year earlier, made a global commitment to IDMS, a pre-relational DBMS). I also had the opportunity to work with Metaphor Data Interpretation System applications at P&G -- then very leading-edge stuff, with workstations and database machine-based servers that made the PC client/server systems at that time (and some of today's leading database products as well...) seem primitive in comparison. My Metaphor and other database-related experience at P&G turned out to be very relevant for Lotus Development Corp. in mid-1988 -- Lotus was then working on a set of database tools, code-named "Baseline," and I made the jump from the enterprise IT database domain to the weird and wonderful world of software product development. The late 1980s and early 1990s were a very dynamic time in the PC database business, and some of the brightest database people I've had the privilege to work with were on the Baseline team, but the product never shipped (a long story -- partly due to a focus on OS/2, partly a fateful decision to base a desktop database tool on the 1-2-3/G n-dimensional spreadsheet engine...). I eventually concluded the world of software product management and marketing was a little too out-there for my career, and switched back to enterprise IT mode; in 1990 - 1991, I led an IT team at Lotus that rolled out the then-fledgling PeopleSoft system, running on a very expensive (and now positively quaint) Compaq server running Microsoft SQL Server on OS/2. I next embarked upon what became an approximately 15-year career detour into collaboration software, joining the Lotus Notes team in 1992 (with an initial focus on Notes/DBMS integration) and focusing mostly on Notes-related activities until I left (what had by then become IBM Lotus) for Groove Networks about a decade ago. I made another career change in 2000, in my first stint as an industry analyst -- I covered early .NET topics and the then-new web services domain for the Patricia Seybold Group, before jumping back into the software product side of the business as VP Strategy for Macromedia. I continued to apply data modeling throughout these job experiences, e.g., building a conceptual data model of Notes with the product's lead designer in the Notes 3.x/4.x period, and using data models to analyze products ranging from web app servers to productivity apps (e.g., creating a conceptual data model of Microsoft's smart tag technology, in 2001). I also continued to occasionally build databases and apps along the way, ranging from some non-profit volunteer work using dBASE in the mid-80s to freelance database design for a sports-oriented web site start-up in the late 90s. I've been at Burton Group for ~4.5 years now, starting in Burton Group's Application Platform Strategies (APS) service in 2003 and later working as the founding Research Director for Burton Group's Collaboration and Content Strategies (CCS) service. I wrote a couple database-related APS reports, snuck a few conceptual data model diagrams into my CCS reports, and closely tracked the rapidly-evolving market dynamics at the intersection of XML and data-stuff. Since early 2008, I've been stealthily building the new DMS service. I started by recruiting some of the brightest data folks I've met over the last 20 years, and then collaborated with the new DMS team to formulate a research agenda and start writing research documents. We launched the DMS service today, and published our first few DMS research docs; you can grab a complimentary copy of one of the documents (on conceptual data modeling, written by Joe Maguire) on this page, to get a sense of the DMS focus and style. Okay, that turned out to be a bit more of an autobiographical soliloquy than I intended; I mostly wanted to tell readers of this blog about my new job focus, and to introduce another blog, the Data Management Strategies service blog, where the DMS team will be sharing impressions of assorted data-related products, technologies, and issues -- along with occasional conceptual data model diagrams :)...
A couple timely articles in The Atlantic -- one asking "How would Obama’s success in online campaigning translate into governing?"; lead paragraph:
America’s politics have regularly been transformed by sudden changes in the way we communicate. And revolutions in communications technology have always bestowed great gifts on those politicians savvy enough to grasp their full potential. It is still unclear how far Barack Obama’s talent for online campaigning will take him. But it’s worth noting that some of the best-known presidents in U.S. history have stood at the vanguard of past communications revolutions—and that a few have used those revolutions not only to mobilize voters and reach the White House but also to consolidate power and change the direction of politics once they got there.
The second article "The Amazing Money Machine", is about "How Silicon Valley made Barack Obama this year’s hottest start-up"
Read the full story for more details
Japanese superhero Ultraman vanquishes an evil enemy during a live performance at a Tokyo games arcade. But Ultraman's real battle is proving much harder -- enticing customers back to the nation's arcades.
Japan's $6.9 billion arcade industry has been whacked hard by new advances in gaming, particularly Nintendo Co Ltd's wildly popular Wii, the latest big craze to compete for the time and pocket money of Japanese kids.
Japan's arcade industry slumps as Wii takes off | Technology | Reuters
A NYT reality check -- without much to support the assertions below
Similarly, two successive Microsoft chief executives have long tried, and failed, to refute what we might call the Single-Era Conjecture, the invisible law that makes it impossible for a company in the computer business to enjoy pre-eminence that spans two technological eras. Good luck to Steven A. Ballmer, the company’s chief executive since 2000, as he tries to sustain in the Internet era what his company had attained in the personal computing era.
Empirical evidence, however, suggests that he won’t succeed. Not because of personal failings, but because Mother Nature simply won’t permit it.
The Computer Industry Comes With Built-In Term Limits - New York Times
A stark reality check
According to Mark Bauerlein, an English professor at Emory University and author of “The Dumbest Generation”, leisure reading among American 15-to-17-year-olds fell from 18 minutes a day in 1981 to seven in 2003. Electronic media, of one sort or another, now occupy every spare moment.
Mr Bauerlein fears that, far from opening new vistas for learning and awareness, digital technology has fostered a level of public ignorance that now threatens not just our competitive wellbeing but our democracy as well.
To some extent, government statistics bear him out. Proficiency scores in reading, writing, science and mathematics for American teenagers in their last year of high school all fell between 1992 and 2005. Only one in three children left high school able to read proficiently. Only one in four could write a coherent paragraph.
I finished reading Mary Jo Foley's new book yesterday. I consider it required reading for anyone interested in Microsoft's past/present/likely future. It's an in-depth and, imho, refreshingly objective assessment from a top-tier tech journalist who has been closely tracking Microsoft for a couple decades. Check it out at Amazon.com.
Amazon.com product description:
Microsoft 2.0 is about Microsoft's future, not its past. The coming years will be challenging ones for the Redmond software kingpin. Many of the executives currently leading the Microsoft charge are likely to go their own way. Technology will continue to advance at a breakneck pace. Microsoft will forge deals of the size and scope it previously never envisioned in order to keep pace. Foley doesn't claim to possess a crystal ball, allowing her to predict flawlessly what Microsoft plans to do in the next few years ? or even few months. But based on the many Microsoft executives, partners, customers and competitors with whom she converses regularly, she is sitting in a good spot to make some fairly educated guesses that will be most interesting to her readers.
This book describes the Microsoft people, products and strategies that will be key for the next-gen Microsoft. Foley uses her professional experience to piece the puzzle together in order to reveal a reasonable, educated guess as to what Microsoft 2.0 will look like as it enters the next decade and beyond.
Hmm -- an interesting Fake Steve Jobs post...
Just got a nervous call from my lawyers who said they wanted to give me a "heads up" about a "situation" at Broadcom. See more about it here. Basically the feds are going after some Broadcom execs over some options backdating stuff. I'm like, So what? I don't work at Broadcom. They're like, Um, well, see, Broadcom did its own internal investigation and already cleared these guys, and the SEC isn't buying it apparently, and though the company itself has already settled the whole thing the SEC is still going after the executives as individuals. Now you do you see? Is this ringing any bells?
The WinFS dream continues -- read the full interview to understand how WinFS is not dead yet, at least in spirit...
WinFS was an ambitious effort to embed an integrated storage engine into the Windows operating system, and use it to create a shared data ecosystem. Although WinFS never shipped as a part of Windows, many of the underlying technologies have shipped, or will ship, in SQL Server and in other products. In this interview Quentin Clark traces the lineage of those technologies back to WinFS, and forward to their current incarnations.
A stark Financial Times reality check
A week ago, Jerry Yang was trying to sound buoyant about the prospects for an independent Yahoo and insisting he was in it for the long haul. “This is not something I got into lightly last year,” he told the Financial Times, referring to his assumption of the chief executive’s title. “It’s too great a company for anyone who does not intend to be here long-term to do this job.”
For Mr Yang personally, the long term looks like it just got shortened considerably. Having spent much of the year fending off Microsoft ’s chief executive, Steve Ballmer, who had strived to stay scrupulously polite despite his mounting personal frustrations, the Yahoo boss on Thursday came under the far more caustic fire of Carl Icahn.
FT.com / Companies / US & Canada - Bare-knuckle fight begins for Yahoo
XBRL R Us (via Cover Pages)
The proposed rule would require all U.S. companies to provide financial information using interactive data beginning next year for the largest companies, and within three years for all public companies.
"This is all about bringing investors better, faster, more meaningful information about the companies they own," said SEC Chairman Christopher Cox. "It would transform financial disclosure from a 1930s form-based system to a truly 21st century model that taps the power of technology for the benefit of investors."
More on WXP + OLPC
Windows will add a bit to the price of the machines, about $3, the licensing fee Microsoft charges to some developing nations under a program called Unlimited Potential. For those nations that want models that can run both Windows and Linux, the extra hardware required will add another $7 or so to the cost of the machines, Mr. Negroponte said.
The laptops now cost about $200 each, and the project’s goal is to eventually bring the price down to about $100.
Microsoft Joins Effort for Laptops for Children - New York Times
See the full article for more details on this timely reality check
The One Laptop Per Child Foundation, of Cambridge, will next month start distributing a version of its XO laptop that will run Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system. While the move has long been expected, it represents a major shift for OLPC, which has relied on the free Linux operating system.
"It's not about the operating system, it's about the educational experience," said OLPC's chief executive, Chuck Kane. He said the foundation's Sugar suite of educational software is being modified to run atop Windows.
The tension mounts... See the full article for more details; apparently Yahoo's board has been much more responsive to Icahn than they were to Microsoft.
Icahn said in a letter to Yahoo's board that a combination with Microsoft "is by far the most sensible path" if the Internet company wants to take on Google Inc.
"The board of directors of Yahoo has acted irrationally and lost the faith of shareholders and Microsoft," said Icahn, 72. "I sincerely hope you heed the wishes of your shareholders and move expeditiously to negotiate a merger with Microsoft, thereby making a proxy fight unnecessary."
Sign of the times
Zillow, watch out.
Google Maps now can show real estate listings, presenting pushpins that show houses for sale.
To show real estate results, click "Show search options," then select "Real Estate" from the drop-down list. The Web site then shows a list of properties for sale on the left tied to pushpins on the map on the right.
Google adds real estate listings to Maps | Tech news blog - CNET News.com
Somehow I suspect this won't be popular...
Charter Communications, the fourth-largest cable system in the United States, has started telling its high-speed Internet customers that it is going to keep track of every site they visit on the Web.
The cable company will sell the data to a firm called NebuAd, which in turn will use it to show ads to Web-surfing Charter customers that are meant to be related to their interests. (Visit a knitting site yesterday and see yarn ads today.)
Charter Will Monitor Customers Web Surfing to Target Ads - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog
More on the Plaxo acquisition (no WSJ subscription required for this one)
In simple terms, Comcast wants to be a sort of Facebook of video sharing. As Mr. Schwartz explained it, if you love an episode of “Lost,” you will eventually be able to use Plaxo’s multi-platform connection technology and Comcast’s video-licensing agreements to share it with your friends. “We can bring you the show,” he said.
Plaxo, based in Mountain View, Calif., had been looking for a buyer since at least January. Comcast was a natural partner since Plaxo was already providing the Philadelphia-based cable giant with software to help integrate its cable TV, phone and Internet services into a common platform.
Its Complaxtic: Comcast Buys Plaxo to Boost Video Sharing - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog
See the full article for several perspectives on the utility of Wii Fit
Now Nintendo’s latest brainchild, Wii Fit, could send similar ripples through the home-fitness market. Scheduled to be released in North America next week, Wii Fit is not meant to replace a gym. But in a world of $3,000 elliptical machines and $150-an-hour personal trainers, it has at least a chance of becoming a global, affordable, mass-market interactive home-fitness system. (On its overseas debut last month, it became one of the fastest-selling games ever in Britain.)
Hmm...
Comcast Corp. said on Wednesday that it will acquire networking Web site Plaxo, in an effort by the cable operator to broaden its range of services.
Terms of the deal weren't disclosed. Plaxo, a closely held company based in Mountain View, Calif., offers technology that helps users more easily share contact information and media such as photos or personal Web-site information.
Via Fake Steve Jobs
A generation of unprecedentedly large and fast iPod docks is now on offer, and it has now been announced that firm customer orders have been placed.
Air New Zealand will equip eighteen of its airliners with in-flight entertainment rigs allowing iPod users to play their video on seatback screens, listen to audio through the aircraft system, and control their device via the plane's interface.
Kiwi airliners converted into giant iPod docks | The Register
With friends like these, ...
The countersuit exposes how the tension between the companies has been growing since shortly after eBay’s 2004 purchase of a 28.4 percent interest in Craigslist. Craigslist’s suit says eBay has continually tried to exert control over Craigslist, a privately held company in San Francisco that is widely known for its anticorporate philosophy.
It revealed that eBay acquired the shares by buying an option to acquire the shares of a minority shareholder of Craigslist, whom the company did not identify. The suit said that because eBay’s option prevented Craigslist from finding another buyer, Craigslist then repurchased the shares and issued new shares to eBay.
Craigslist’s Countersuit Criticizes eBay’s Tactics - New York Times
A timely Financial Times reality check
For IBM, the king of the IT services business, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. But if Hewlett-Packard thinks its purchase of EDS will immediately put it toe-to-toe with the market leader, IBM’s own long and difficult ride in services should make it think again.
IBM Global Services, which accounts for more than half of the Big Blue’s revenues, has rebounded to become the main driver of the company’s earnings since the middle of last year. After a period of negligible growth, it has taken a radical restructuring and new leadership to revive the business, lifting growth back to 9 per cent in the first quarter even before the benefit of currency fluctuations.
FT.com / Companies / IT - Small matter of the Big Blue challenge
Interesting times
Database maker Vertica Systems is moving its technology to Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud infrastructure (EC2), hoping to score customers who want a hosted, pay-as-you-go model for data warehousing and BI (business intelligence), the company announced Monday.
utilitycomputing.itworld.com - Vertica moves BI database to Amazon's cloud
Definitely one to watch -- go create a free wiki for yourself and check it out
Short version: Wetpaint might be one to watch.
Long version: TechCrunch's Michael Arrington has alerted us to a dark horse candidate in the race to dominate the land of wikis. It's Wetpaint, a Seattle-based service we haven't heard a whole lot from lately. The reason, Arrington says, is that it's positioning itself to be a player in niche social networks, not just mini-Wikipedias.
In a crowded market, Wetpaint's colors look solid | The Social - CNET News.com
Looks like maybe Adam Smith's invisible hand is about to slap Jerry Yang...
The activist investor is considering beginning a proxy fight at the Internet media company, fewer than two weeks after it rebuffed a takeover offer from Microsoft, a person briefed on the matter told DealBook. Mr. Icahn began stockpiling a large stake in Yahoo, one as large as 50 million shares.
[...]
The move would be reminiscent of his role in orchestrating a deal between Oracle and BEA Systems last year. Then, Mr. Icahn took a position in BEA, an enterprise software maker that rejected Oracle’s advances. After a convoluted series of events, including some strong-arming by Mr. Icahn, BEA finally submitted to an Oracle takeover.
A timely Financial Times reality check; read the full article
The eventual limits of the fast-growing search market, which accounts for almost half of all online advertising, are still impossible to discern, but it is already a business that stands comparison with the technology industry's most fabled success stories. On the current trajectory, Google's revenue - almost all of it coming from search - will probably surpass the income that Microsoft generates from the Windows operating system some time next year.
There is no guarantee that the search company will alight on another idea as powerful as its advertising system, says Mark Anderson, a veteran technology commentator. Yet that may not matter for some time, he and most other industry insiders say. "I think it's enough for the next 10 years," says Mr Anderson. "When God gives you a golden goose, you have to hold it tight."
Nice... (via Fake Steve Jobs)
While police in White Plains, N.Y., were coming up empty with their investigation, Duplaga learned that her computer was being used on the Internet, and she turned on the Back to My Mac feature installed on her Mac from another Mac, according to the report.
The feature allowed Duplaga to see immediately how the computer was being used at the time, as well as operate it remotely. Recalling that she had a camera installed on the computer, the fast-thinking Duplaga snapped images of one of the burglary suspects before he realized what was happening, according to the Times. Duplaga showed the image to friends, who recognized the suspect as someone who attended a party at the apartment.
Stolen Mac helps nab burglary suspects | Tech news blog - CNET News.com
An interesting snapshot
Microsoft officials won’t say how many servers total Microsoft has churning in its various datacenters. But Microsoft’s corporate vice president of Global Foundation Services Debra Chrapaty is on record saying Microsoft is adding 10,000 new servers a month.
(Facebook is estimated to have 10,000 servers total, the Data Center Knowledge folks report. In other words, Microsoft is adding one Facebook-worth of new servers every 30 days.)
Microsoft adding 10,000 new datacenter servers a month | All about Microsoft | ZDNet.com
Cool...
Microsoft Research is launching a free application today that lets people navigate deep into the universe and view galaxies, nebulae, planets and other celestial objects through the lenses of the world's best observatories.
The WorldWide Telescope draws on more than 12 terabytes of imagery — bigger than the print collection of the Library of Congress — from several orbiting and land-based telescopes.The desktop application downloads the images on demand and stitches them together to form an interactive, browsable universe supplemented with information from top astronomical databases and guided tours that put it all into context.
A timely reality check
Despite the large year-over-year revenue growth of his two investments, Ellison said that on-demand enterprise software is growing slowly, comparing it to how open-source software has evolved. It all depends on your point of view. Most people would agree that on-demand and open-source are gaining market share at the expense of the incumbents, especially among smaller businesses.
But Ellison is playing in a different league. He looks at MySQL, which Sun acquired, and doesn't see it eating his lunch. He looks at Salesforce.com and NetSuite with his parental, velociraptor eyes and doesn't see them as worth pursuing at this time. That may change down the road. Oracle has consumed most of its worthy competition from the old world, and it will get hungry again, especially if it wants to expand its market downstream from the large enterprises.
Ellison: On-demand software growing slowly | Outside the Lines - CNET News.com
Mixed blessing for Microsoft
While Apple's market share gains are cause for consternation for many in Redmond, one unit is clearly benefiting.
Microsoft's Mac unit is set to disclose on Tuesday that copies of the new Office for Mac 2008 are flying off the shelves at three times the rate of its predecessor. The company wouldn't disclose sales numbers, but said the sales are the highest in the 19-year history of the unit. That continues a trend that has been going on for some time.
Mac Office sales soar on Apple's gains | Beyond Binary - A blog by Ina Fried - CNET News.com
Interesting times
The question is whether an acquisition of E.D.S. would give Hewlett-Packard the inside track it is looking for in competing against I.B.M. and other rivals. And the answer on Monday from Wall Street analysts was a decidedly mixed one. Hewlett-Packard’s stock price seemed to reflect the uncertainty, falling after news of a potential deal began to circulate. The stock closed at $46.83, down nearly 5 percent.
Shares of E.D.S. closed at $24.13, up 28 percent from Friday’s close.
“It’s a very significant combination,” said Ben Pring, a research vice president in the IT Practices Group at Gartner. But “people who are skeptical of big integrations will have a field day around this,” he said. “It’s putting together two large businesses with two different heritages. It’s going to be a big culture clash.”
Hewlett-Packard Said to Be Close to Buying E.D.S. - New York Times
Wow -- that was a brief retirement...
Jeffrey S. Raikes, 49, will replace Patty Stonesifer, another former Microsoft executive who helped Bill and Melinda Gates start the foundation in an office over a pizza parlor. He will join the foundation on Sept. 2, a day after he retires from Microsoft, at roughly the same time that Mr. Gates begins devoting most of his time to its affairs.
Interesting times
Wikipedia, the upstart Internet encyclopedia that most universities forbid students to use, has suddenly become a teaching tool for professors.
Recently, university teachers have swapped student term papers for assignments to write entries for the free online encyclopedia.
Once shunned by academics, Wikipedia now a teaching tool - Yahoo! News
A timely snapshot
By year's end, it's expected that the next generation of wireless networks will be launched, blanketing initial service areas with a fast Internet signal — accessible to subscribers from homes, streets and traveling vehicles — and capable of giving mundane home appliances a voice.
In this Jetsonian vision of life, which could take several years to arrive fully, a washing machine embedded with a wireless chip would detect a problem and contact the manufacturer even before the homeowner knew something was wrong with the spin cycle.
Business & Technology | WiMax deal could lead to universal connectivity | Seattle Times Newspaper
