Genesys XVIII

The 18th Annual Genesys Partners Venture Dinner — Gen XVIII– Monday night at the Union League Club in New York attracted more than 100 venture capitalists, investors, journalists, entrepreneurs, and industry executives. As always, Jim Kollegger — CEO of Genesys Partners and one of the pioneers of the information industry — was an elegant master of ceremonies. He introduced the various sponsors, next day panelists for the SIIA Conference, several startup CEO’s, and a few of us who have been around the block a few times, each to make some comments.

Like a broken record, I offered the normal upbeat view of the future of the Internet but prefaced my remarks by asserting that we are only 10% of the way there. In other words, of all the things that could be done on the Internet that would save us time and make our lives better, only 10% of them are there. It may sound low but consider retail e-commerce. Although there has been continuous and steady growth of retail e-commerce it still represents just 4% of total retail (as of the end of October). Why isn’t it 25% or more? Much is written about that here at patrickWeb but the short version is that there are still a lot of lame web sites. “Click here for the location of our nearest dealer where you can visit” or “call to buy the product you just found” or “Click here to download this form and fax it to us”. And of course there are the ubiquitous clipboards at doctor offices where we take a pen and provide a lot of information information that they already have.

I described one man’s view of the evolution of the Internet including the seven characteristics below. This parsed way of looking at the Internet has served me well for quite a few years. The things going on under each area continuously change and Jim asks me once a year to do a thumbnail sketch of my latest thinking.

Fast
Broadband in the U.S. is not a pretty story compared to other parts of the world. We are second after China in number of broadband users, but 28th in the world in number of broadband users as a percentage of our population. The problem is that there are too many lobbyists and the FCC is a political organization. The new FCC head is a very smart guy with venture and business experience. He totally gets it. The only problem is that AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon have more lawyers than he does. Meanwhile France is offering 100 megabit access for $90 per month and WiFi throughout the country. Thanks to the telco lobby, many states have banned the offering of WiFi by municipal entities. Every citizen in Greenland has Internet access. We have 31,000 post offices.

Always On

WiFi is part of the fabric of the world. The big shift is streaming of data — not just tweets, but data from *things*. Bridges, toll booths, traffic lights, buildings, cars, and health monitoring devices attached to people. Hospital physicians will soon be adjusting the drip rate on infusion pumps in the hospital from their office based on real-time data from the patient. The WiFi infusion pumps enable hospital administrators to know where the pumps are (they never have enough of them) and which ones need maintenance. The creation of data is staggering. Of all the data in the world, 90% of it was created in the last two years. YouTube receives 60 hours of new video every hour. Wikipedia has 4 million articles and 8,000 editors.

Everywhere
There are one billion computers (including tablets), one billion cars, 1.5 billion televisions, and 2 billion Internet users. Small numbers compared to cell phones — 5.2 billion paid subscribers. The Internet used to be where your PC is, now it is where you are.  Most of the cell phones are dumb but soon most of them will be smart and they will all have Internet access. The mobile web is unfolding and is taking part in creating data in addition to consuming it through streaming. When you take a picture on your iPhone, it goes into the photostream and from there to iCloud and from there to all of your other devices.  

Natural
Social networking has become fundamental to all aspects of our economy and society. Integration of social networking with a full range of web applications will evolve to become the primary means of collaboration. The emerging issue is that many people are a bit liberal with sharing their every movement — what they are eating, listening to, where they are headed, their current latitude and longitude, and where they slept last night. They are not thinking that some day they may run for office or interview for a job. OpenSocial is an important new standard that will enable social media apps that work across all of the social media sites. The Europeans may legislate it, but regardless, a capability is needed to be able to remove things from the social media.

Intelligent
The Semantic Web is the next big turn of the crank but the crank is moving slowly. Most web pages have links but do not have context. In other words the words on the page do not necessarily mean anything — but they could. If a web page said “Join us for a concert by The Eagles at Kimmel Center in Philadelphia next Tuesday” that set of words could have a lot of context. Clicking on it could add the concert to your calendar, knowing what “next Tuesday” means. It would also know exactly where the Kimmel Center is and that The Eagles is a performing group that performs a particular genre and your music player would receive a list of suggestions of music they have recorded or links to live concerts under way at the moment. This is the tip of the iceberg. The semantic web will lead us to a point where most of the interactions of web pages will be between computers not between computers and people. The biggest growth of intelligence is occurring in the field of analytics. Exabytes of data are being stored. Analytics will enable businesses to make sense of it, model their business and continuously adapt to what is going on. IBM’s Watson took on humans on the Jeopardy Show, but what is more interesting is the ability for a primary care physician to call and get a recomendation based on patient data they describe to Watson. Within a couple of seconds Watson will be able to review all medical information in the world and make a useful suggestion. Business Intelligence and analytics are poised to enable new insight into the mounds of data that are being accumulated.

Easy
Technology isn’t the easiest thing at times. There are many dimensions to “easy” but one good example is the Nintendo Wii. At a local senior center, members find the Wii to be their exercise coach. It is not just for kids! The iPhone and iPad have shown how easy it can be to get applications on a handheld computer. Amazon has done the same with the Kindle. Most companies still don’t get the idea that the Internet is about power to the people. If you can’t make it simple, people won’t buy it. Cloud computing has become the mainstay for me and for millions. The convenience and reliability of the clouds is compelling. Add Dropbox and you have a completely replicated set of data, wherever you are and with whatever device you may be using. How about TV? Three remotes — BlueRay, Cable box, and TV — include 151 buttons. Even a savvy child could not possibly master this impossible user interface. Boxee TV has produced a good model of the future of TV, but I suspect that an upcoming Apple TV will be what finally provides the needed regime change.

Trusted
This is the big one. Will we trust the Internet? Security technology is available to achieve much higher levels of security than presently deployed both at enterprise and consumer levels. It is a constant battle and requires significant budgets and a lot of talented people to maintain the needed security. The bigger issue will be privacy. (Stay tuned for the Firefox “do not track” feature). Banks have our personal information and they are using it. Healthcare insurers have more information about our health than our doctors do. Nevertheless, there is much to be optimistic about when it comes to electronic medical records. Perhaps 25% of doctors and hospitals use them but they are not easily interchangeable and accessible. This will change over the next few years as the government adds dollar incentives to make it happen. The result will be better quality of care, better outcomes, and fewer errors. And, fewer clipboards.

On Wednesday I gave a talk about the Future of the Internet and Healthcare at the SIIA Conference. The presentation can be found here.

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Tags: broadband, fcc, future, health, health care, Healthcare, IBM, internet, ipad, iPhone, jeopardy, john patrick, Mobile, opera, siia, social media, supercomputer, union league, WiFi

R2D2 – WiFi – 1xRTT

A high school teacher named Kristen wrote to say that her students had been using some web pages from the patrickWeb blog as a source of information for their studies and projects. The posting below is one of the pages they found useful. The story was originally posted on June 10, 2003. One of the students in Kristen’s class, Brian, contributed an additional link to the blog that he has found particularly valuable in using Linux. I am grateful to all readers for using patrickWeb and especially appreciate it when they make suggestions or report errors in the site. Having just updated the site to an all new design, I am sure there will be some bugs that are discovered.

WiFi is such a clean and user-friendly name. WiFi stands for “wireless fidelity” and it is based on a standard called 802.11 — but who cares? It is becoming a household name, more and more available, and extremely useful. The information technology and telecommunications industries often get enamored with the technical name or the name of a standard and then these “tech-names” take on a life of their own — even though they may be next to impossible to remember, spell, or understand. An example is the technology used in the Sprint PCS wireless service which I use with my ThinkPad. It is referred to as 1xRTT. Somewhat like R2D2 except that I think most people know what R2D2 is.

According to Webopedia.com, 1xRTT is short for single carrier (1x) radio transmission technology, a 3G wireless technology based on the CDMA platform. 1xRTT has the capability of providing ISDN-like speeds of up to 144 Kbps. 1xRTT is also referred to as CDMA2000. Clear as mud? What are 3G and CDMA? Again, according to Webopedia.com, 3G is an ITU specification for the third generation (analog cellular was the first generation, digital PCS the second) of mobile communications technology. 3G promises increased bandwidth, up to 384 Kbps when a device is stationary or moving at pedestrian speed, 128 Kbps in a car, and 2 Mbps in fixed applications. 3G will work over wireless air interfaces such as GSM, TDMA, and CDMA. The new EDGE air interface has been developed specifically to meet the bandwidth needs of 3G. Seems that each definition leads to several others.

CDMA is short for Code-Division Multiple Access, a digital cellular technology that uses spread-spectrum techniques. Unlike competing systems, such as GSM, that use TDMA, CDMA does not assign a specific frequency to each user. Instead, every channel uses the full available spectrum. Individual conversations are encoded with a pseudo-random digital sequence. CDMA is a military technology first used during World War II by the English allies to foil German attempts at jamming transmissions. The allies decided to transmit over several frequencies, instead of one, making it difficult for the Germans to pick up the complete signal. Because Qualcomm Inc. created communications chips for CDMA technology, it was privy to the classified information. Once the information became public, Qualcomm claimed patents on the technology and became the first to commercialize it.

As for what to use, I’ll stick with WiFi. When on the train or other places that don’t have WiFi yet, I continue to use the Sprint PCS service. Or is it 1xRTT? Or 3G? Or CDMA? It really is a good service, albeit expensive. I rarely get the advertised 100 kbps+ speed but it is usually at least 50 kbps. The best part is that there are no wires and if the signal is lost, it reconnects when a strong enough signal reappears. I hope the definitions were useful to those may have been curious like me. I found them at Webopedia, which is one of internet.com‘s network of more than 160 Web sites. They have the sites organized into 16 channels. You can find further information at Internet.com.

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Tags: Internet Technology, internet.com, WiFi

iPad 2

The iPad 2 announcement was mostly as expected–thinner, lighter, faster, two cameras built in, and a gyroscope! A new dual-core processor, branded the A5, is included and promises significantly faster performance. The positive surprise is that all the new features come with the same great battery life as the first iPad, and an innovative new magnetic cover with a choice of two materials and ten colors that helps keep the glass clean and doubles as a stand to elevate the iPad for typing. The only disappointment was that an upgrade to the brilliant retina display of the iPhone 4 was not included.

The new iPad comes in various models based on storage size and networking preference. As far as storage goes, I always recommend getting the maximum available for two reasons. First is that the shift toward more video in our lives requires a lot more storage. Secondly, assuming you want to get an iPad 3 as soon as it comes along, you can get more value on eBay for your prior device with the larger storage capacity. As for network options, if you want WiFi only, the iPad will work in most places but not everywhere. If you want it to work more ubiquitously, you can select a 3G model which will work with your favorite network operator– either AT&T or Verizon. Too bad there is not more competition in the network operator space as neither of these giants is great. The good news with them is that you do not need to commit to a contract. It is pay as you go. If WiFi is available where you are, then that is what you use–automatically. If there is no WiFi then the cellular connection kicks in. The cost is $15 per month for 250 megabytes of data from AT&T and $20 per month for a gigabyte from Verizon. There are significant differences between the two operators as far as what happens when you use more than your initial limit. I have found 250 to be adequate to get email in out-of-WiFi-range and to use the web moderately. If you plan to stream Pandora music or Netflix movies you will use up the 250MB in a hurry. For very heavy use of 3G, the Verizon offering looks better. I plan to stay with AT&T.

There are going to be many thousands of apps spurned by the iPad2 that will take advantage of the faster processor, the gyroscope, and the two cameras. I think the built-in FaceTime app is mot significant because of how easy it makes it to connect with friends and family. It will work with another iPad 2 or with an iPhone 4. If you have grandchildren, you need FaceTime! I view FaceTime as profound. We have a remodeling project going on right now more than 100 miles from our primary home. The builder has an iPhone 4 and can call not just to ask about a bathroom fixture but to show us the wall and point his finger at where we want something installed. He marks the wall with an X while we are looking at it. If you have an injury and need your doctor to look at it, the iPhone is the perfect way to show him or her. There are issues of scheduling time with the doctor and the doctor getting reimbursed for time spent with you on FaceTime but I am confident these issues will be worked out. FaceTime can extend our lives into other places and other’s lives into our space — if any of us so chooses to do so. As for the other apps, I can’t wait to try the new GarageBand for iPad 2.

If you haven’t watched the keynote where Steve Jobs introduces the iPad2, I found it an enjoyable 63 minutes. He is justifiably proud of this latest Apple innovation. I don’t know where the limit is, but at the current price of Apple stock, the company has a market capitalization of 1.5 times GE, IBM, or Microsoft and is catching up to Exxon, the world’s most valuable company.

Tags: apple, facetime, garageband, ipad, ipad 2, jobs, WiFi

SIIA Conference – Buzz on the Panels

John Blossom took pictures and notes at the SIIA Conference last week. He did a really good job at it! If you want to get more insight to what some really smart panelists had to say, you can get it at John’s Buzz. He covered two panels.
Jim Kollegger’s panel
CEO Outlook: Winning the Platform Wars – Betting on the Next Digital Wave

John Patrick’s panel
Top Mobile Technology Trends – A Moving Target


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Tags: adobe, bloomberg, broadband, elsevier, fcc, flash, Healthcare, html5, IBM, ipad, iPhone, jeopardy, Jim Kollegger, john patrick, Mobile, opera, siia, social media, supercomputer, time magazine, WiFi

Top Mobile Technology Trends – A Moving Target

The SIIA Conference marked its 10th year of bringing together an audience of senior executives to address important strategic issues and to network. The theme was”Moving from Wired to Wireless”. My role was to moderate a panel named Top Mobile Technology Trends – A Moving Target. The distinguished panelists were Bill Godfrey, Executive Vice President, Chief Information Officer and Head of Global Electronic Product Development at Elsevier, Oke Okaro, General Manager and Global Head of Mobile, Multimedia at Bloomberg L.P., John Paris, Sr. Director, Mobile Strategy at Time, Inc., and Bob Sutor, VP, Open Systems and Linux at IBM’s Software Group. See their bios on the speaker’s page. It was an honor to lead the discussion.

I set the stage with a few comments about the big picture. The mobile Internet is taking off because of a supporting takeoff in three areas. First, the smartphone is becomine a bigger share of mobile phones. It is still mostly dumb phones out there but the mix is changing and soon smartphones will be in the majority. Seondly, the Cloud is gaining a lot of momentum as an efficient way to store information. Dropbox is an interesting model to follow as it allows replication of your data from the cloud to all your devices. The third factor I cited is the explosion in social media. The comgination of these three areas is resulting in an Internet that is where you are, not where your PC is Lastly, the mobile environment is very personal. Power to the people! More on my big picture view from the Genesys Partners dinner that was held on Monday evening.

The panelists offered the audience a lot of insight. Although they were not able to provide specifics of time and price, it was clear that there is a strong commitment to get magazines on the iPad and other mobile tablets. There are magazines there now but not in a desirable way. The obvious change coming is the subscription model instead of paying $4.99 per copy. More profound is the commitment I heard to make tablet magazines compelling by merging the social media experience with the e-zine content. Imagine reading a Time Magazine story about electric cars and simultaneously see how many other people are currently reading the story, how many have read it and liked it or did not like it, and how many of them own an electric car. In the case of a Business Week story, imagine seeing live data about the industry or company you are reading about. When it comes to Elsevier professional and research journals, we can expect big changes with them also. Tablets are ideal for reading journals with the ability to take notes and add bookmarks. You can also imagine drilling down from a Google search to a Wikipedia article to a medical journal to a particular intervention to live data from a clinical trial that may be underway. All these things can be done in a browser on a PC or Mac but the experience is not as real or personal. The mobile Internet lets you have your content with you wherever you are and with whatever device you may want to use. You may read on the train with your iPad and then read with your iPhone or Droid phone while you are in line at the deli waiting for a sandwich.

Bill, John, and Oke were all bullish about the potential for the mobile Internet to extend the reach of their content and all are actively working on their delivery mechanisms and business models. Some say information wants to be free but good content developers and journalists and subject matter experts need to get paid. Advertising may continue to foot a significiant part of the bill, but the upcoming subscription model may be preferable to readers who prefer not to be tracked or blitzed with advertising. Bob was not as optimistic about an end to the format wars as the publishers were about their business models. It looks like HTML5, the new standard for web content, including video, that has the potential to subsume all the competing formats. Bob said the odds of Microsoft, Apple, Firefox, Adobe, and Google all agreeing on a single standards based approach are slim. The good news is that the technology for developing the content is getting sophisticated enough that the publishers will be able to create compelling content and then push the button to produce multiple versions of the content so that it can be consumed on all the various mobile platforms.

All in all, it was an enlightening conversation with four very knowledgeable experts. There was a consensus throughout the conference that 2011 will be the year that the mobile Internet reaches the tipping point.

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Tags: adobe, bloomberg, broadband, elsevier, fcc, flash, Healthcare, html5, IBM, ipad, iPhone, jeopardy, john patrick, Mobile, opera, siia, social media, supercomputer, time magazine, WiFi

Genesys XVII

The 17th Annual Genesys Partners Venture Dinner — Gen XVII– Monday night at the Union League Club in New York attracted more than 100 venture capitalists, investors, journalists, entrepreneurs, and industry executives. As always, Jim Kollegger — CEO of Genesys Partners and one of the pioneers of the information industry — was an elegant master of ceremonies. He introduced the various sponsors, next day panelists for the SIIA Conference, several startup CEO’s, and a few of us who have been around the block a few times, each to make some comments.

Like a broken record, I offered the normal upbeat view of the future of the Internet but prefaced my remarks by asserting that we are only 10% of the way there. In other words, of all the things that could be done on the Internet that would save us time and make our lives better, only 10% of them are there. It may sound low but consider retail e-commerce. Although there has been continuous and steady growth of retail e-commerce it still represents just 4% of total retail (as of the end of October). Why isn’t it 25% or more? Much is written about that here at patrickWeb but the short version is that there are still a lot of lame web sites. “Click here for the location of our nearest dealer where you can visit” or “call to buy the product you just found” or “Click here to download this form and fax it to us”. And of course there are the ubiquitous clipboards at doctor offices where we take a pen and provide a lot of information information that they already have.

I described one man’s view of the evolution of the Internet including the seven characteristics below. This parsed way of looking at the Internet has served me well for quite a few years. The things going on under each area continuously change and Jim asks me once a year to do a thumbnail sketch of my latest thinking.

Fast
Broadband in the U.S. is not a pretty story compared to other parts of the world. The problem is that there are too many lobbyists and the FCC is a political organization. The new FCC head is a very smart guy with venture and business experience. He totally gets it. The only problem is that AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon have more lawyers than he does. Meanwhile France is racing at full speed to offer 100 megabit access and WiFi throughout the country. Thanks to the telco lobby, many states have banned the offering of WiFi by municipal entities. Every citizen in Greenland has Internet access. We have 31,000 post offices.

Always On

WiFi is part of the fabric of the world. The big shift is streaming of data — not just tweets, but data from *things*. Bridges, toll booths, traffic lights and sensors, buildings, cars, and health monitoring devices attached to people. Hospital physicians will soon be adjusting the drip rate on infusion pumps in the hospital from their office based on real-time data from the patient. The WiFi infusion pumps enable hospital administrators to know where the pumps are (they never have enough of them) and which ones need maintenance. WiMax continues to struggle. Some believe it will replace WiFi. My bet is on WiFi and in a two years or less we will have WiGig — gigabit wireless. Ubiquitous wireless plus an explosion of tablet computers is totally changing the model of personal computing.

Everywhere
Cloud computing has become the mainstay for me and for millions. The convenience and reliability of the clouds is compelling. Add Dropbox and you have a completely replicated set of data, wherever you are and with whatever device you may be using. The next big wave underway is enterprise cloud computing. Virtualization is making enterprise servers more scalable, reliable, and efficient than ever. AJAX is enabling applications to run in any browser on any kind of computer including mobile. Especially mobile. There are hundreds of millions of PC’s but there are billions of mobile devices. Today most of them are dumb. In a few years most of them will be smart. Opera sofware is enabling even the dumb phones to have web access.

Natural
Social networking may not be a business model in and unto itself but it has become fundamental to all aspects of our economy and society. Integration of social networking with a full range of web applications will evolve to become the primary means of collaboration. The emerging issue is that many people are a bit liberal with sharing their every movement — what they are eating, listening to, where they are headed, their current latitude and longitude, and where they slept last night. They are not thinking that some day they may run for office or interview for a job.

Intelligent
The Semantic Web is the next big turn of the crank but the crank is moving slowly. Most web pages have links but do not have context. In other words the words on the page do not necessarily mean anything — but they could. If a web page said “Join us for a concert by The Eagles at Kimmel Center in Philadelphia next Tuesday” that set of words could have a lot of context. Clicking on it could add the concert to your calendar, knowing what “next Tuesday” means. It would also know exactly where the Kimmel Center is and that The Eagles is a performing group that performs a particular genre and your music player would receive a list of suggestions of music they have recorded or links to live concerts under way at the moment. This is the tip of the iceberg. The semantic web will lead us to a point where most of the interactions of web pages will be between computers not between computers and people. The biggest growth of intelligence is occurring in the field of analytics. Exabytes of data are being stored. Analytics will enable businesses to make sense of it, model their business and continuously adapt to what is going on. Stay tuned for IBM’s supercomputer to take on humans on the Jeopardy Show.

Easy
Technology isn’t the easiest thing at times. There are many dimensions to “easy” but one good example is the Nintendo Wii. At a local senior center, members find the Wii to be their exercise coach. It is not just for kids! The iPhone and iPad have shown how easy it can be to get applications on a handheld computer. Amazon has done the same with the Kindle. Most companies still don’t get the idea that the Internet is about power to the people. If you can’t make it simple, people won’t buy it.

Trusted
This is the big one. Will we trust the Internet? Security technology is available to achieve much higher levels of security than presently deployed both at enterprise and consumer levels. The bigger issue will be privacy. (Stay tuned for the Firefox “do not track” feature). Banks have our personal information and they are using it. Healthcare insurers have more information about our health than our doctors do. Nevertheless, there is much to be optimistic about when it comes to electronic medical records. Maybe 5% of doctors and hospitals use them but this will likely rise fast and the result will be better care, better outcomes, and fewer errors. And, fewer clipboards.

Tomorrow I will be moderating a panel at the SIIA Conference about the future of mobile.

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Tags: broadband, fcc, Healthcare, ipad, iPhone, jeopardy, john patrick, Mobile, opera, social media, supercomputer, WiFi

Kindle 3

The new Kindle 3 — “Smaller, Faster, Cheaper“” — arrived on Friday morning, a few days earlier than Amazon had promised. I would say that the new device will assure Amazon’s lead for some time. It is really fantastic. I had no complaints with the Kindle 2 — in fact I love it — but the new one has a nicer feel to it. The slightly smaller size allows you to truly read “one handed”. The power switch was moved to the bottom from the top and I find that much more convenient. The new color seems more with the times. A few other button changes but overall it is pretty much a refined version of the Kindle 2 which was a refined version of the Kindle 1. I am sure we won’t have to wait a year for the Kindle 4.

The Kindle 3′s new no glare screen has increased gray-scale contrast — it is clear as a bell and it loves the summer sun. The battery life is supposed to be one month. The migration from Kindle 2 to Kindle 3 was trivial. Took the new device out of the box, plugged it in, and turned it on. I clicked “register” and gave it my Amazon account id and password. I also gave it the SSID of my Wireless Access Point here at the Lake and that was it. In seconds I was reading the book that I had started on the Kindle 2 (and read parts of on the iPhone 4 and the Kindle app on the iPad).

I still love the iPad but when it comes to reading  books the Kindle is hands down better and with the Kindle 3 that advantage will be multiplied. The new Kindle comes in two flavors: one with WiFi for $139 and one with WiFi and 3G for $189. For most of us the WiFi model is more than adequate. If you are going on a trip you can download your favorite newspaper plus a book or two or more using your home WiFi and you are set. You don’t really need 3G for other applications because the Kindle doesn’t have other applications! That is what your iPad is for.

The magazine, book, and newspaper publishers still haven’t figured out what to do about the rapid adoption of e-readers. The iPad is great for reading news, but which news source is best to read?  The New York Times has the worst model. They offer a dozen stories and plan to charge if you want more. The Wall Street Journal charges $3.99 per week for their news on the iPad but if you want to read a WSJ story on the web or your iPhone they want you to take out another subscription. Wired and Time want you to pay $5 per issue of their magazines.  I believe people will be willing to pay for good content but nobody yet has the right model. I have experimented with quite a few news “readers” that display the RSS feeds of just about all publishers. I currently like NewsRack the best. None of the news readers are perfect but they are all getting better.

Meanwhile the Kindle DX has found a temporary home on eBay. The auction began Friday evening and already has 13 watchers and eight bids. The Kindle DX has been in use for airport and approach charts on the airplane but is no longer needed now that the pilots have iPads. This is a good example of where a “multi-purpose” device is better. There are many applications that are very handy in the cockpit and the iPad becomes an EFB (electronic flight bag). Hopefully, the pilots are not reading books while flying!

Tags: amazon, author, Aviation, efb, electronic flight bag, ipad, Kindle, kindle 3, kindle 4, publisher, WiFi

Grand Canyon

Until this week I thought the Grand Canyon was a unique place in Arizona. The Grand Canyon there is the giant for sure — 277 miles  long, up to 18 miles wide and over a mile deep — but now I have learned about another Grand Canyon — in Pennsylvania. The motorcycle trip started out in cloudy weather but within the first hour we encountered rain — not just a few sprinkles but a steady downpour. By the time we reached downtown  historic Tunkhannock the streets were flooded. We found a place to park and went into Twigs Restaurant and Cafe.

I was anxious to check the radar at wunderground.com on the iPhone 4 to see where the storm lines were so I asked the hostess if they had WiFi. Oh, yes we do she proudly announced. Great, what is the SSID? You mean the password? No I mean the name of your wireless access point. Oh, just use “twigs”. Is that with a capital T or lower case? It doesn’t matter. Excuse me, but it does matter. No problem I will try both. Neither worked. Excuse me, is that with one g or two? Just one. Sorry but neither work. Sorry, said the hostess. The owner knows but he isn’t here. Maybe someone else knows? The hostess returned and said it was Twigs1. Nope. No, you need two T’s. I tried TTwigs and Ttwigs, and ttwigs. None worked. The bartender said it is TwigsTwigs1. I tried with and without the 1 but had no luck. The hostess said she had confirmed with the owner that it was correct so if it doesn’t work then you have to contact WiFi! If that doesn’t work try your Internet Service Provider. I explained that the name was set in a little box right there in Twigs and that it was up to them what name they gave it and seems strange that they would want to make it so hard for their customers to use. I finally gave up. At least the food was good. Looking out the window at the downpour and the four of us suited up in our rain gear and headed out into the torrents of rain.

The next hundred miles was more of the same. We could tell that the scenic U.S. Route 6 — more than 3,000 miles long extending from Provincetown, Massachusetts to Bishop, California — offered some great views of the hills and valleys. The stretch of Route 6 we were traveling along the 444 mile long Susquehanna River was beautiful but unfortunately we were not going to witness that on this day and we also needed to keep very focused on the road in front of us. The 175 mile adventure ended in Wellsboro, Pennsylvania, a small town of 3,500 people but with a disproportionate number of shops and restaurants to accommodate the tourists who come there to see the Grand Canyon of PA.

First steps for my brother and I and our wives were to check in to the motel, get our motorcycles parked, get a hot shower, and get our rain gear spread out to dry. The  motel WiFi was simple and fast and the iPad was great for checking email, the day’s market activities, and the news and weather — no longer a need to travel with a heavy laptop.  We headed out with umbrellas to Timeless Destination, a fine Italian restaurant a few blocks from the motel. The food was great and just for grins, I asked if they had WiFi. Oh yes but only the manager knows the password and he isn’t in today! I still stand by my deciiion to have gotten the iPad and the new Kindle (coming in a couple of weeks) with no 3GS, just WiFi. WiFi may not be ubiquitous but it is getting there — with a few exceptions in north central Pennsylvania.

After eggs and potatoes at the Wellsboro Diner in the center of town (did not bother asking about WiFi),  it was time to head out west on Route 660 to Grand Canyon. We gambled that we would not need our rain gear and although the weather was not picture perfect we did escape all but a few sprinkles for the day. A short ten mile ride through the hills and valleys brought us to the end of 660 and to the scenic overlook on the east ridge of the canyon in the 160,000 acre park in the Tioga State Forest. I haven’t been to the Grand Canyon in Arizona since I was a child so I can’t compare accurately but the Grand Canyon PA was quite impressive. Also known as Pine Creek Gorge, the Grand Canyon of Pennsylvania is situated along Pine Creek. The Canyon begins near Wellsboro along Route 6 and continues for approximately 47 miles. The maximum depth of the canyon is 1,450 feet and the distance from rim to rim is approximately 4,000 feet. It is worth seeing and with more time it affords some excellent hiking.

The ride back to the Lake gave us the chance to see the scenic overlooks that we had missed during the prior rainy day. Near Towanda in Asylum Township along the banks of the Susquehanna we saw an historical marking that states, “Marie Antoinette Scenic View, 2000 feet”.  Turns out that in 1793, during the French Revolution several French loyalists fled France and the French island of Santo Domingo (present-day Haiti) to escape persecution and death for their loyalty to King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette. They landed on the shores of Philadelphia where some prominent Philadelphians agreed to finance their stay in Pennsylvania. 1,600 acres in Northeastern Pennsylvania were purchased and given to the refugees.  The loyalists traveled up the Susquehanna River to a pristine area in the valley. They had found their safe harbor and named it Asylum. (During the Reign of Terror, at the height of the French Revolution, Louis XVI was deposed and the royal family was imprisoned. Nine months after her husband’s execution, Marie Antoinette was tried, convicted of treason, and executed by guillotine in October 1793.

We stopped in Towanda for lunch. The main street was similar to many towns along Route 6 including it’s own Opera House dated 1886 which is now a hardware store. Unfortunately, the business landscape of rural Pennsylvania and New York reveals many closed retailers and manufacturers. The primary place you see thriving buildings with full parking lots are at schools, hospitals, medical labs and clinics, senior citizen living centers, and various government buildings. I have been fortunate to have traveled to many countries around the world but there is much more to see within a day’s motorcycle ride in the northeast part of America.

Tags: french revolution, grand canyon, grand canyon pa, marie antoinette, motorcycle, rain, route 6, towanda, trike, tunkhannock, wellsboro, WiFi

American Glory

The destination was unknown but the weather outside was so perfect that a motorcycle ride was an easy decision. The trike was full of gas and mp3 music and ready to go in any direction. Heading west on Route 35 and then north on I-684 and west on I-84 got me to the Taconic Parkway in just under forty miles. The scenic 105 mile Taconic has quite a history dating back to the 1920′s. The ride was enjoyable until the TomTom Rider GPS somehow came loose and flew off the trike. Pulling off the road and going back to get the TomTom without getting run over was a challenge and after retrieval it was clear that this TomTom would be no more — it had served me well since 2005.

Heading northwest on route 82 from the Taconic brought me to historic Hudson, New York, a city named after the adjacent Hudson River (315 miles long) and ultimately after the English sea explorer and navigator Henry Hudson. Hudson is only about 2.5 square miles with a population of about 7,500 but it has a very interesting main street with shops, restaurants, and even an Opera House which is in the 1855 former Hudson City Hall. I chose the American Glory for lunch and it was a real treat. A cup of chilli with a piece of cornbread, a small salad, and a WiFi connection to use the iPad. What more could anyone ask?

The second hundred miles of the ride was across the backroads of New York to Great Barrington, Massachusetts and then south through Sheffield and into Connecticut. Turns out the the Iron Bridge crossing the 149 mile long Housatonic River is closed for repairs and there was a twenty mile detour. No problem — some more nice roads to ride! It was a great day to enjoy the scenic views of rivers, mountains, farms, and an infinite number of antique shops. The total trip in the motorcycle log is 222 miles. It will soon be time for 15,000 mile service on the trike.

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Tags: gps, housatonic, hudson, motorcycle, opera house, taconic, tomtom, trike, WiFi

Cable Or DSL – Who Is The Winner?

The single question that I get asked the most in my travels is which is better, DSL or cable? The related question often asked is which will win? The short answer is — the consumer. However, the questions are part of the bigger issue of “speed”. The Next Generation of the Internet has many new characteristics that we will gradually begin to experience. The obvious one is Fast – more speed. The term bandwidth has become the common way to refer to the speed, or responsiveness, we experience when we are connected to the Internet. Soon we will be awash in bandwidth! If, like me, you have been in a hotel room recently and got connected at 19,200 bits per second or less and were relieved to get even that much speed you may wonder how I could make such an assertion. Bandwidth galore? At times it seems like we are starving for bandwidth; however, these are short-term limitations that we are experiencing and that will soon seem like history. (read more)

Tags: bandwidth, cable, dsl, WiFi