Last 100 is a blog that I hadn't heard of before, but it's got lots of interesting stuff, which speaks to the future of The Cable Game. The title, "last 100," by the way, refers to the last 100 feet, between the wire and the home computer--and that 100 feet is increasingly wireless. Which speaks to the big change coming, which is complete mobility for the digital user; he or she will no longer be forced to sit in front of a screen, be it TV or computer. In other words, what has happened with telephones--gone from cordless to completely mobile--will happen to other critical machines, too.
In the opinion of Daniel Langendorf, "The Gphone and not the iPhone will be the one to change the face of the wireless industry." And thereby hangs a tale of technology, worth exploring.
It's a given, TCG thinks, that in the future, the personal digital assistat(PDA) will be the key device that serves as the standard unit for communications, as the telephone was, then the television, and then the personal computer.
The PDA, of course, will be all three, especially when it is coupled with accessories and hooked up, as need be, to "dumb terminals" and the like. And so in the not-too-distant future, you will walk around with your PDA and "light up" various keyboards and terminals as you need them. And of course, various advertisers will light up your PDA, as you permit them to.
Cable news will do fine in this environment, because people always want to keep in touch--indeed, in a world of instantaneous happenings and interconnectedness, it will be all the more vital to keep paddling in the "river of news."
The question, then, is what sort of device will win--what will be the standard PDA, if in fact, there will be a standard PDA.
Last spring, TCG would have guessed that the standard PDA would be the iPhone. Needless to say, there have been cell phones and BlackBerries and the like for a couple of decades now, but we all kept reading how totally awesomely cool the iPhone was going to be, and how pretty, to boot!
Well, the iPhone debuted in June, to enormous hoo-haw (remember FNC's Laura Engle getting mugged, on camera, during a standup in front of the Apple Store on Manhattan's Fifth Avenue?), and yet once TCG got her hands on that hot little thing, it felt, well... cold. As in, not hot.
I mean, it's nice and everything, but the iPhone is clearly not so superior that it is going to blow Motorola, and Nokia, and Samsung, and RIM, and all the rest of the cell phone/PDA makers out of the water.
And so the world waits. Maybe, suggests Langendorf, the waiting game will end when the "gPhone" debuts, which could be as soon as Spring '08.
We shall see, of course, but if Google can do to phones what it has done to search and to web-based advertising, it will be a pretty ferocious threat to the status quo.
Of course, TCG isn't totally happy with Google. This significant article in The Economist paints a somewhat scary picture of the Googled future, in which all content providers, including news outlets, bow down to Google. As the magazine put it,
The list of constituencies that hate or fear Google grows by the week. Television networks, book publishers and newspaper owners feel that Google has grown by using their content without paying for it. Telecoms firms such as America's AT&T and Verizon are miffed that Google prospers, in their eyes, by free-riding on the bandwidth that they provide; and it is about to bid against them in a forthcoming auction for radio spectrum. Many small firms hate Google because they relied on exploiting its search formulas to win prime positions in its rankings, but dropped to the internet's equivalent of Hades after Google tweaked these algorithms.
That's a lot of issues that the political process is going to have to work through!
And for its own sake, among other reasons, The Cable Game needs to be on top of it.
