Now since CNN is dedicating so much time to the Broken Government (no disagreements here), I thought I would dedicate some equal time providing examples of how well the government is working . . . —xxxxxx Just kidding, its not working and I won’t pretend, but I will talk about how technology is not working.

Now, I’m not typically a pessimist in this area and have been accused of being if anything too optimistic so this will be an exercise for me and hopefully an illustration of what trends are emerging in need of a fix!

The Internet is Broken

In 2005 an article was published with Technology: An MIT Enterprise Review, and the name of the article was “The Internet is Broken” by David Talbot.

Talbot’s article starts off by covering David D. Clark, somewhat of an ‘Internet elder statesman’ who had quipped about some of the deficiencies of the original Internet design and the potential for these deficiencies to eventually amount to a big problem.  His concern about a year ago and somewhat foretold in a PowerPoint from 1992 was that the Internet’s original simplistic communications purpose is being hi-jacked by many convoluted processes and systems that the Internet was never designed to handle from instant messages, to video on demand and VOIP, peer-to-peer file sharing and more, pick your poison, pick your bandwidth hog, pick your security sensitive area.

Clark argued for a new design of a completely fresh system to potentially replace the Internet someday and the National Science Foundation indicated that they would take on that mission and hopefully deliver a result 5-7 years down the road after spending $200-300 million dollars.

So that was last year, and we should have 4-6 more years to go.  Now as I see it, this is a useful approach.  Let’s face it the internet is not getting any younger and the infrastructure was not designed for many of its current uses.  The network is benefiting from better hardware and from better software, but fundamentally things are still broken down much the same as they were 10 years ago.

Can the internet continue to evolve and grow in a somewhat open source development type of approach where public and private and individuals and groups and companies from around the world contribute to patching, inventing, fixing, redesigning, and growing different parts of the internet year after year?  Grown in many ways on the backbone of an even older telephone switching system, which has gone mostly digital, but fundamentally engineered to maintain a type of backwards compatibility with all the wired versions of the phone system still in existence.

What role will WiMax and wifii and 3G or 4G play in leap frogging the world out of this technology?  We shall see, but in the meantime it would appear that we will continue with the same old broken internet.  At least for another 4-6 years!

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DaytradeTeam provides an interesting service with its Day Trading Packages. They provide expert advice in real time in a very unique manor.

DaytradeTeam provides stock trading tips, education, and recommendations in their monthly and yearly packages. What makes DaytradeTeam unique is their Live Trade Room access(see below or view their demo to see an example in action). Their trading experts are online in front of webcams and providing live access to their screens. Traders can see what the expert trader from DaytradeTeam is watching and chat back and forth to ask questions in real time as the market moves.

DaytradeTeam offers classic Day Trading systems, plus Options Trading and Swing Trading Systems. They offer a free 1 week trial offer if you watch the demo or you can sign up for a trial period of 5 days for $5. The trial period then automatically kicks off an annual membership that has been discounted from $2,950 down to $995.

Alternatively, monthly memberships are available starting at $295 per month. The value pricing is obviously in the annual membership, and with the 5 day trial, experienced traders can test the system to insure it meets their requirements.

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I used some simple online flash tools from a site that is working to build user customized advertising for HP. The ad is for a personal computer. 

Its a fun little exercise and I was pleased to see an interesting version of a mindmap used in the graphical online interface to set up the video ad.

Basically, as I setup the ad, I picked a few things that I use my PC for and they then incorporated those elements into the advertisement itself.

Now, I’m not going to win any awards for being a good looking flash ad actor or anything, but for a quick automated thing it was fun.  We have to take time to laugh at ourselves and goof off on occasion to keep the brain fresh.  All work and no play . . .

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So Microsoft launched the Vista Coupon season a couple days ago.  It like every Microsoft OS campaign before it worked under the principle that if you buy a PC now, you get the upgrade to the new OS when it comes out at the beginning of the year. 

Only problem is there are lots of complications.

There are multiple Vista editions rolling out and multiple existing XP editions.  Some of these ‘paths’ will entitle users to a free upgrade and some will require a nominal fee, but if you want to move from one path to another say XP Home ->Vista Home Basic ->Vista Business then all bets seem to be off.

Zdnet walks through this complexity rather clumsily, but to their defense Micrsoft has created a complex product structure and attempted to link that to a complex new product structure.  Bottom line if you can wait to buy a PC, maybe you should wait!  (BTW that’s exactly what Mossberg is advising too!)

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There’s black gold in online video and in video podcasts and a company called PocoTag is working to provide a service that makes the service more interactive.

PocoTag works with an advertiser and provides them with a special unique five digit code to be used in a video ad.

The advertiser then can offer up in their ad a call to action to the viewer and provide them with the SMS code.

The viewer can then send an SMS message to that code (and the first time include a copy of their email address to establish an account).

PocoTag then performs an email verification and the advertiser can then complete the loop by providing the result of the call to action whether its providing free information, or accepting the answer to a poll question or a number of options.

It basically puts an action cycle in a video that might otherwise just be a passive tool.  Online videos are growing very very rapidly.  Videos are being created by large studios and even individuals like the team from AskANinja that has seen the popularity of their AskANinja series increase to the point where 200,000 people are downloading their videos every day and they are getting 3 million views of some of their videos, its not exactly American Idol numbers, but for a show put together by two guys they are getting a huge bang for their buck.

This tool basically helps advertisers interact with their customers and it also provides some additional marketing program tracking inforamtion using the wireless SMS medium.

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