One of the most audacious New Media projects I’ve been involved with as a viability consultant is Outernet, my friend Syed Karim‘s project to bring free Internet access to more than four billion people. He plans to do this by piggybacking a fleet of mini-satellites onto commercial satellite launches. These mini-satellites, known as cubesats (each a 10 cm cube weighing no more than 1.33 kg), will provide Internet access (albeit mainly text access) to the majority of the world’s people, who don’t live in regions where Internet access is affordable or even receivable, which is a surprisingly large portion of the planet’s inhabited landmasses. Hundreds of cubesats have been launched for other non-profit purposes during the past 11 even years. Karim and his Outernet team have already raised the US$10 million necessary to build and launched their network of cubesats. CNN recently featured a story about him. Prior to his heading the Outernet project, I’ve known him as Director of Innovation at the Media Investment Loan Fund, a position he still holds. I’ve been an adviser to MDIF for the past seven years.
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Spain recently passed a law that would require online news abstractors and aggregaters, such as Google News, to pay royalties to Spain’s periodical publishers. It’s a bone-headed law, but not surprising that at least one developed country would pass such a law, pressured by the publishers’ lobbying. Those publishers haven’t adjusted to individuation of their contents – the fact that each person online wants to be able to search (or otherwise find or be delivered) only for the stories that match that person’s own unique mix of needs, interests, and tastes, and to be able to receive such stories from all vendors and publications without having to purchase all those publications. The news law is a desperation move at the behest of those publishers. Google announced that Google News will shutdown in Spain on Tuesday. Similar machinations have been underway in Germany. Subsequent stories about the Spanish law – as well as my own talks with Spanish friends (disclosure: my wife is a Spaniard) – indicate that the new law is immediately unpopular among Spain’s online consumers. Rumors have begun that AEDE (the Spanish daily newspaper publishers association) may be having second thoughts about the law. However, I should note that Google’s policies about recording its users actions have often, and probably still do, violate the European Union’s 1995 Consumer Data Privacy regulations, something that few American commentators deign to mention. I only regret that this particular case occurred three weeks too late for me to feature it in the the week’s class on Internet Law that I teach in my postgraduate New Media Business course at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. It’ll be part of the syllabus there next year.
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Forget what’s being called Wearable Computing technologies. The BBC this week reports from Sweden about Implantable Computing technologies.
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