Be on the wave or under it™

I’ll definitely be keeping my eye on Monet and other hinterland broadband efforts over the coming year.
NCS@lecoma.com

• FTTH Growth Thoars: Alert SNS Reader Nick Stanley also sent along an article on Fiber To The Home (FTTH), a topic covered in a previous SNS. America’s Network calls FTTH “An area of communications infrastructure where deployment rates will skyrocket over the next 12 months.” The article quotes a study by market research firm Render, Vanderslice & Associates that forecasts 330 percent growth between 2002 and 2003.
  America’s Network
  
  
• P2P Wireless Sniffer: One significant security problem many enterprises are facing today is the proliferation of unauthorized, and often poorly secured, wireless access points. When any employee can pick up an AP at the local CompUSA or Radio Shack and install it in their office, you can see why companies are concerned.
  
  IBM has a neat solution to finding these rogue APs. Rather than providing a laptop-based sniffer that security personnel use while roaming around offices, IBM uses network-connected and wirelessly-enabled client computers to do the job. Each client searches its local area for access points and reports its findings back to a central database. Located APs are compared with a list of authorized APs and rogue access points are thus identified. This is a very cool application of peer-to-peer (P2P) technology.
  IBM
  
  
• Tech Jobs Fell: A particularly poorly kept secret is how badly the technology sector has been hit by the recession. A study released by AeA, the nation’s largest high-tech trade association, found that employment in the nation’s high-tech industry fell by 113,000 jobs, or two percent, for the first six months of 2002.
  
  It might even be worse than that, according to Matt Noah, founder of networking events company NetSuds. Noah said in his recent newsletter, “In the last 2 years, I estimate 40-50% unemployment in the ‘com and .com’ markets.  [. . .] Locally, the trend seems to be complete career changes.  One NetSudser reports buying in to a kitchen cabinet franchise. Others report going back for advanced degrees. One went from founding a VOIP [Voice Over Internet Protocol] security equipment firm to raising and selling buffalo meat - www.purenaturemeats.com.” 
  
  You can do something about this trend by hiring me, of course! Or you can go on to the next item . . .
  MHTA
  
  
• The Triumph of Form Over Meaning: I admit it. I’m a word guy. I’m a graphics illiterate. The way graphics people think and communicate is foreign to me. Coming from a different place, I always clash with designers. I feel that Websites, for example, need to be useful, serviceable, usable, and meaningful. They do not necessarily need to be pretty. Consequently, I hate sites that open with a Macromedia Flash animation. I can’t hit that Skip button fast enough. Well, here’s a site that not only has no Skip button, but it gets aggressively in your face and beats you over the head with its design-heavy message. It’s been my poster site for the triumph of form over meaning since I discovered it in 2000. I’d love to hear what you think of it.
  Balthaser
  
  
• Gartner Predicts: Here’s a site you’ll want to bookmark and visit periodically. Gartner Group has released their 10 predictions of trends that will affect enterprise businesses over the next eight years. They range from the mundane to the controversial. Here’s the list:

1. Bandwidth becomes more cost effective than computing
2. Most major applications will be interenterprise
3. Macroeconomic boost from interenterprise systems
4. Successful firms in strong economy lay off millions
5. Continued consolidation of vendors in many segments
6. Moore's Law continues to hold true through this decade
7. Banks become primary provider of presence services by 2007
8. Business activity monitoring is mainstream by 2007
9. Business units, not IT, will make most application decisions
10. Pendulum swings back from centralized to decentralized

• Weblogs and Amateur Publishing: Clay Shirky is an insightful commentator on all things Internet. In his latest newsletter, he discusses the impact that amateur publishing efforts such as Weblogs, also known as blogs, will have on traditional publishing. A blog is a way to publish journal-like musings on the Web. You can get an idea of what they’re like by visiting MIT’s Blogdex. The essay is well worth reading.
  Shirky.com

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