Who should be the ultimate arbiter of rights-of-ways in a municipality? This wonky question is one that average people wouldn’t want to spend precious moments pondering, but, the answer to this question could have a very visible impact, whether through aesthetics, the availability of competitive broadband and even public safety.
If a Cable Falls in the Street, Does Anyone Care How It Happened?
Yes, the above title is a play on words about the philosophical question about the tree falling in a forest and whether it makes noise. A little more than a week ago, telecommunications’ cables fell to the ground and no one really heard or saw what happened. Fortunately, no one was injured and service was apparently not lost, but it is a mystery as to why it happened. This failure points to a bigger battle playing out in Washington and Sacramento over some pretty arcane telecom rules.
Set-Top Be Gone
Jared Baumann, Manager of Market Development and Deployment for C Spire, provides an update of their journey towards the elimination of the set-top box. To be more precise, this is about C Spire’s goal of allowing customers to access content on the device or screen of their choosing without having to rent a set-top box from C Spire. Baumann reports that the early results are phenomenal, as customers love not having set-top fees and they love the new C Spire TV user interface.
Living Through a Hardware Renaissance
“Reaching another generation of entrepreneurs” is how Nick Langston, Market Development Manager for TE Connectivity, describes Arrow’s Incubation and Certification programs. Speaking at International CES2017, Langston explains how Arrow’s programs help entrepreneurs transform an idea into a proof-of-concept, raise financing through crowd-funding (e.g. their partnership with Indigogo) and bring in partners to ensure the end-product is designed for manufacture.
Rethinking Cities Through Personal Transport #CES2017
As pointed out in an article in a recent Wall Street Journal article, thanks to mandates and its size as the largest vehicle market, the Chinese market is driving the demand for electric cars. Eli Electric Vehicles, a Beijing-based, electric vehicle start-up is driven beyond mandates, however and has a vision to create mobility at a human-scale.
A Force Multiplier – An Autonomous Mobile Sensing Device
“The K3 and the K5 we have been operating now over 180,000 hours and over 100,000 hours all across the country helping security guards and security professionals do their jobs more effectively,” said William Santana Li, CEO and Chairman of Knightscope, Inc. These mobile, autonomous data gathering machines, with sensors to measure and record things such as video, audio and thermal, are helping Knightscope’s 32 clients cost-effectively secure their facilities across 8 states.
Some Tweets and Short Thoughts:
- Puerto Rico & US Virgin Islands to receive up to $77 million from FCC to restore communications – what may be most interesting is what Alphabet/Google is doing with its Project Loon to help restore cell service.
- Reply to @RepAnnaEshoo – What about the role and impact of RT using decades-old broadcast
#MustCarry laws to gain access to millions of TV viewers? Excellent Wall Street Journal article regarding media carriage loophole. - Paraphrasing Alan Kornhauser in the Smart Driving Cars Podcast, Episode 6, “Truck driving more dangerous than coal mining…..OSHA should be arguing against weight limitations in current legislation that will prevent safety benefits of automation technology in the trucking industry.”
- RT @TomBamonte “US Postal Service Is Working on Self-Driving Mail Trucks. First deployment focus–rural routes. Onboard operator”.
Mr. Roboto Ready for Business
Robots as a tool to help humans be more productive was a common theme of the 2017 ROBOBusiness Conference held in Santa Clara. Steve Crowe, Managing Editor for Robotic Trends, discusses the panel he moderated, which featured leaders from DHL, GE, Intel and NASA, and how machine and deep learning are helping robots to act autonomously by seeing and reacting to their respective environments. Reinforcing Crowe’s comment was one of the speakers from one of the breakout sessions who suggested that the addition of natural language interfaces, combined with machine learning, allow quality inspection engineers to “train” robots by talking to them to help identify good and bad parts.
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