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Let's connect these two dots: (1) Cisco buys WebEx for $3.2 billion; and (2) Scoble says "Watch what happens after Ray Ozzie jumps into the market" where "Amazon S3 charges right now about $.15 per gigabyte of stuff delivered".

The first item tells us there is big value in services that run on the Net. The second item tells us there is leverage in abundant storage on which back-end busienss services can be hosted.

So here's an idea for telcos and cablecos: leapfrog Amazon, Google and Microsoft by putting Big Storage as close to customers as possible, and then work partnering deals with local outsourced IT companies to provide back-end services to local individual and business customers.

So I was just talking with Bob Belle-Isle of VPT — Vermont Public Television — about a hunk of spectrum that is ripe with opportunity. It's called ITFS, for Instructional Television Fixed Service. It was created 43 years ago by the FCC for educational purposes. Nonprofits with educational credentials, such as school systems and public television organizations, are in good position to be first movers in utilizing the twenty ITFS frequencies (which begin just above wi-fi, at 2.5GHz) for modern wireless purposes, and not just the one-way transmission that was imagined back in 1963.

I figure I've got about 500 cassette tapes, 100 open reel tapes and 75 microcassette tapes, some of which I would love to digitize. Among them are recordings of old radio (going back to the earliest 1960s), recordings of interviews or gab sessions, and other stuff I haven't bothered to label, much less catalog. For years I've avoided doing anything with most of them, because I don't want to subject the delicate media to any more loss or degradation than nature has already imposed. In the case of some cassettes, the mechanisms or containers are warped, missing pieces (the springy pads that press the tape against the playback head have fallen out of several cassettes) or otherwise in need of replacement or repair.

Anyway, I heard from a friend yesterday who wants to save her old recordings as well, and was wondering what approach I might recommend. Since I don't have an approach yet, I thought I'd pass the question along to the rest of ya'll.

Right now I'm looking for statistics about mobile phones. Also about mobile devices in general. My purpose is not to just to write stuff, but to provide thought-provoking fodder for the Mobile Identity Workshop, which Harvard's Berkman Center is putting on in San Francisco today. The workshop will be led by yours truly, in my first public performance as a Berkman fellow.

Questions crowd the front of my mind. "How many mobile phone are we using in the world today? Is any other digital technology more widely used -- or more personal? And how can we use them to assert more capable and powerful roles for ourselves, as customers and as citizens? Can our cell phones carry and present the credentials we need to engage organizations in helpful ways? How can mobile technology help us improve the both the efficiency and humanity of the social spaces we call markets?

Thomas Hawk, an outstanding photographer who works for Zooomr, writes,

I'm beginning to edit all my metadata now directly in my photo file EXIF info. I hate the fact that the tags that I've spent hours and hours inputting into Flickr are locked into their closed system. And to be fair at present your tags are just as locked into Zooomr's closed system as well, but at least with Zooomr I uniquely know that we are committed to figuring out a way to eventually get these tags back to our users and feel like I have more control to ensure that this happens working for the company. I'm sure that Flickr is just as committed in assisting their users in getting their tags out of Flickr but I don't have access to the internal workings of Flickr so all I can say is that I hate that I can't get them out today.

DRM is a solution to a problem that only appears on the supply side of the market for easily copied entertainment goods. In the absence of a real relationship with customers, the entertainment industry characterize the problem of file copying as "piracy", treats every customer as a pirate, and solves the problem by crippling the goods they sell and limiting each customer's freedom of use.

Thus DRM excludes even the possibility of a relationship with the customer, beyond that of jailer to prisoner -- because DRM's "solution" is to sell damaged goods to chained customers inside jails the supplier maintains.

The jailer-to-prisoner relationship isn't a stretch for CRM, which too often has a customer containment objective in any case -- though usually with softer walls and longer chains: memberships, discounts, incompatibilities with competitors and so on. So the CRM mentality doesn't have a hard time rationalizing DRM, because it's just a harsher form of the same old thing.

VRM can obviate DRM by offering means to genuine relationships between suppliers and customers.

For example, let's take an Apple iTumnes customer named Joe.

Ubroadcast.com is gearing up to let you "Host hour own live Internet talk radio show or music station". Slick site. Looks promising. From the Company Overview:

ubroadcast, Inc. is The World's Online Broadcasting Community for the entertainment, education, advertising, marketing and sale of goods and services by a diverse community of individuals and small businesses.

ubroadcast's mission is to provide a global broadcasting platform and forum where practically anyone can discuss anything, and to provide "premium" content of music and entertainment to its listeners. We intend to provide the best of traditional radio, satellite radio, and Internet radio rolled into one venue.

I'm looking for a nice simple bridge that goes like this:

Audio line in —> Ethernet —> audio line out.

Two boxes. One at the source. One at the destination.

Context: Helping a neighbor get audio from a stereo system in one room to a stereo system in another room when the only path is the house's structured wiring system, which has Ethernet going to every room and a patch panel in the middle.

We want cheap here. Nothing complicated, and nothing silo'd into a system that requires a PC or haredware dedicated to other purposes (such as, all due respect, Apple's or Sonos's). Just an audio-Ethernet bridge.

That's the question on the floor right now.

I've been told, more than once, that the way around the a copyright hassles involved with podcasts (basically, you can't play music from the big record companies — namely, most music you know — without going through legalistic that are very much not in the lightweight-labor ad-hocky nature of what podcasters do) is to get a real (FCC licensed) radio station to play your podcast. Because they're allowed to play that music and you're not.

So, if you can get a friendly station to run your 'cast at 3am on a Sunday or whatever, you're set.

I've been a customer of DishTV since 1997 or '98. Not sure which. We signed up when we lived in Emerald Hills, between Woodside and Redwood City in the Bay Area. Back then Dish had one satellite to pick up, but the number of channels it received far exceeded what we could get with cable, or with terrestrial TV. Their system also figured we got no terrestrial TV reception (in fact it was excellent), so they made local terrestrial signals available from our choice of city. My wife is from Los Angeles, so we picked that one. Worked fine.

In that first location I ordered everything online and hooked it all up myself. Everything worked. What's more, I was impressed by DishTV's service, which as easy to reach, informative and always helpful.

Those were the good old days, now gone.