Last week I asked a simple question, “What is broadband?” The technical definition is easy, however defining broadband in terms of public policy is anything but. As you know, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 directed the FCC to submit a National Broadband Plan to Congress by February 17, 2010 that addresses broadband deployment, adoption, affordability, and the use of broadband to advance solutions to national priorities, including health care, education, energy, public safety, job creation, investment, and others. So, in the spirit of getting a Socratic dialog going, I am asking you to think about what the United States needs to do to be a digital super-power in the 21st century.

Today’s question is equally difficult, “What is a bit?” Again, the technical definition is easy: A bit (from binary + digit) is a unit of measurement of information; the amount of information in binary system having two equally probable states, on or off, 0 or 1, true or false, etc.

But “What is a bit?” as it applies to public policy is far harder to understand. For example: a bit that comes to you from your ILEC (incumbent local exchange carrier) is taxed by local, state and federal authorities under one set of tax laws, but the same bit traveling to you from your local MSO (multi-systems operator) over a DOCSIS (Data Over Cable Service Interface Specification) modem, if it is taxed at all, is taxed under a different set of guidelines and regulations. Of course you can make and receive, what are commonly called, telephone calls over both sets of bits. When is it a phone call, when is it VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol)? If the ILEC uses VoIP technology to provide your service, is it still a phone call?

Bits may be the fundamental building blocks of digital data, but at the moment, all bits are not equal. Everyone charges different amounts for bits. And, the people who decide how to tax them, tend to tax the services, not the bits. Should we differentiate between bits that are taxed and bits that are simply charged for? Are all bits taxable?

Up until now, there was absolutely nothing wrong with this system. After all, water comes to us in many different packages and it is either free or expensive depending upon its availability and its packaging. Why should bits be any different? Are bits a scarce resource? Should they be treated as such?

That being said, the technological landscape is changing at an ever-increasing pace. What is true today will not necessarily apply to tomorrow. So, just for fun, let’s take a second to consider how bits might fit into a future-thinking National Broadband Plan.

What would it mean if all bits were equal? Would all devices have equal access to bits? If that were true, you could replace the words “Internet” and “broadband” with the word “connectivity.” Devices would be connectable or not. One could easily imagine that, in practice, every device that had any use for connectivity would be connectable. The most important aspect of the “equal bits” future would be the astonishing behavior changes brought about by a fully interoperable, interconnectable world. Don’t get too excited. The science for this is easily in our grasp, but the business rules that would make it possible are not. Oh wait, we could have a government policy that would mandate an interoperable, interconnected world … we could, but we won’t. It would marginalize an infrastructure that is uninterested in being marginalized.

If all bits were equal, television, telephone, tele-commuting, telegraph, tele-evangelism, and even tele-summo-wrestling, would all be the same. After all, a bit, is a bit, is a bit.

In the real world (the one we currently live in) all bits are not created equal. Many will convincingly argue that they should never be. Phone calls are different from television shows which are different from Internet browsing which is different from video gaming which is different from gambling which is different from ecommerce, etc., etc.

Of course a bit is just a one or a zero. The bits really don’t know the difference.

Right now, there aren’t that many places to buy bits. You can get them from your phone company, your cable provider, an ISP and in some markets, an overbuilder. In today’s marketplace, ways to move lots of bits at high speeds are still relatively scarce.

In a couple of years, you will be able to purchase high-speed wireless bits from Verizon, AT&T, Sprint. Wired high-speed bits from every phone and cable company. There will be ISP’s as well as other bit purveyors all competing for your bit dollars - and most of them will offer, what we would now consider, high capacity bit moving.

The question you have to answer is, “what will the marketplace look like?” Are the airwaves public, should we have a say in what kind of bits are available over the air and how much they should cost? Fully open networks are very, very pro consumer, but are they pro business? Can they ever be? ? What do bits over fiber and wires look like? They certainly have to cost something, don’t they?

If the speed of information is directly equated to economic success, and a bit is the smallest unit of digital information, how can we ensure that the United States moves the most bits to the most number of people in the shortest possible time? It’s up to you. Visit broadband.gov and tell them what a bit is!

Shelly Palmer is a consultant and the host of MediaBytes a daily show featuring news you can use about technology, media & entertainment. He is Managing Director of Advanced Media Ventures Group LLC and the author of Television Disrupted: The Transition from Network to Networked TV (2008, York House Press). Shelly is also President of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, NY (the organization that bestows the coveted Emmy Awards). You can join the MediaBytes mailing list here. Shelly can be reached at shelly@palmer.net For information visit www.shellypalmer.com

Twitter is the topic de jour. And, as far as I can tell, most people don’t have it quite right. While it is true that Twitter is a social network. And it is also true that Twitter is filled with much more ambient noise than curated knowledge. The power of Twitter is, first and foremost, the fact that it is a “real time data stream.”

Real time, as in, “it is happening right now” is a not new. Human beings have been able to communicate in real time since the advent of language. As a species, we have been able to communicate in real time over long distances since smoke signals. Admittedly, the technology got better over time. Semaphore flags were pretty close to real time as was Telegraphy (invented and brought to commercial use circa 1804-1837). Of course, we’ve had personal experience with instant real time communication in the United States since March 10, 1876 when Alexander Graham Bell spoke into his first woking Telephone with the immortal words, “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.”

The ability to communicate in real time, to and from remote locations, has had profound sociological ramifications. As you well know, the speed of information has been directly equated to economic success since the beginning of recorded history. If you know something before your competitors do, you will almost always be able to profit from the knowledge. Real time information is always valuable.

It is one of the biggest paradigm shifts in recent memory and it is going to change the way be behave.

Fast-forward a hundred years (more or less) to the emergence of the World Wide Web. The first Web sites were static pages filled with text, graphics and links to other Web pages. In a very short time, millions of them had been created. In the early days of the medium, having a Web site was like putting your business card on a wall of 10 million business cards. It was useful if you knew where it was, but it was practically useless otherwise. For obvious reasons, the static web spawned the search engine industry.

Just after the turn of the century, RSS (really simple syndication) started to become the de facto way to syndicate Web content. What this meant, in practice, was that you could make a change to your Web site and people (or machines) that subscribed to your RSS feed would be notified or actually see the content.

Which brings us to the next stage in the evolution of the Web — Real Time Data.

Twitter is based on Real Time or “push” technology. The moment the message is completed, it is sent out in real time. “Push” is about “now” and it is the notion of “push” that makes Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and all of the other social networks with news feeds “new” and spectacularly exciting!

Note: Many people mistakenly believe that RSS is a “push” technology. It is not. Most RSS readers poll the servers that they are subscribed to at pre-determined intervals and, when they find something new, they “pull” it down from the server. This is important for you to know for two reasons. 1) You will sound like a genius at the next cocktail party where this issue comes up and, 2) RSS is not intrinsically compatible with the “push” technologies of the Real Time Web.

Lastly, the current proprietary clients for Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc are also “pull.” However, the data is accessible (and can be made available) through streaming API’s. If you are an engineer and would like to have a Socratic debate about push and pull, find me on e-mail, it is not the point of this article! Normal people, just think “real time.”

A quick review: First we had static Web sites. Then, we had Web sites that could notify us when they were updated. Now, we have the Real Time Web, which is powered by real time streaming data. It is one of the biggest paradigm shifts in recent memory and it is going to change the way be behave.

We have had tools that enable instant one-to-one and one-to-many communications between remote locations for all of our lives. We all know how to use them. In fact, the conventions of the remote communications tools are almost identical to the conventions of our biological short-range communications tools.

The Real Time Web gives us two new tools that we actually don’t physiologically know how to use; the ability to communicate many-to-one as well as many-to-many.

The only people I know of who have any experience dealing with real time many-to-one communication are kindergarten teachers. They routinely stand in the middle of 20 screaming kids who have not yet learned how to raise their hands and, magically, kindergarten teachers seem to be able to triage the communicative needs of their charges in real time.

Most unfortunately, there is no human experience that allows for the processing of many-to-many communication. To do this, and to practically deal with many-to-one, we need tools.

Twitter (and the other social network news feeds) are one part of the first generation of this tool set. A real time search, sentiment and zeitgeist engine like PeopleBrowsr.com is the next step. Then we will all need some practice.

“Now” is powerful. I often get asked, “Why would anyone care if I was going out for a latte?” This always makes me chuckle. If you have a few dozen followers and your social network is GPS equipped the proper tweet is, “I’m going out for a latte, does anybody want one?” It’s not a tweet for 10,000 followers, but it is a valid use of the technology. And, it is behavior-changing.

Go have a look at yammer.com and see if it would help you. If you have a GPS enabled BlackBerry, download Ubertweet and see what happens next time you find yourself on a business trip without a dinner companion and you tweet, “At the Westin Peachtree thinking about dinner.” That exact tweet, at 4:30pm, created a dinner party for 30 of my friends/followers who all happened to be in Atlanta by 7:30pm that evening.

Open up PeopleBrowsr.com and search 10 different, but related, key words in 10 different columns and tell me you don’t see the extraordinary power of “now.”

It will take a little bit of time, but before you know it, we will see the next Google emerge. It may be PeopleBrowsr, it may be something like it, or something completely different. It will use a combination of real time human filtering, machine filtering and a series of algorithms to enable us to look at the real time web and understand what we are seeing.

People are empowered by communicating. The real time web gives everyone with something to say a worldwide stage. The real time web gives people with insights and experience a way to collectively filter information into knowledge. The real time web takes data and gives it context. There is very little information that is more important than what is happening right now.

Shelly Palmer is a consultant and the host of MediaBytes a daily show featuring news you can use about technology, media & entertainment. He is Managing Director of Advanced Media Ventures Group LLC and the author of Television Disrupted: The Transition from Network to Networked TV (2008, York House Press). Shelly is also President of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, NY (the organization that bestows the coveted Emmy Awards). You can join the MediaBytes mailing list here. Shelly can be reached at shelly@palmer.netFor information visit www.shellypalmer.com

Had the pleasure Wednesday of seeing Michael Chin of Kickapps do a (kickass) presentation in my Digital Marketing class at Baruch’s biz school. He demonstrated not only how social media centered around a brand or organization can cultivate enthusiasm (and generally give an indicator of sentiment), but also how much mineable data there is about each participant in the network. That data goes beyond the typical demographic info — zip code, age, gender and so on — into deeper direct or inferential matter about everything from the person’s preferences, lifestyle,“friends,” and even to clues about what enthuses, delights and annoys them. One avid basketball fan Chin showed, for example, had put a wealth of info about herself in reams of discussion posts, videos, comments, still photos on a team’s fan site. That’s a gold mine for that team if it chooses to access it.

Chin, at the Social Times conference  (which my company helped produce the media for) a few weeks earlier had told me that CRM (Customer Relationship Management) can become a lot more than the grid-driven database systems we have today. True, powerful tools like SalesForce.com allow collaborative workers to share information and better serve (and sell and upsell) clients and potential customers. Just call a rep at your cellphone provider to see, in action, how a good customer database system can tell the person on the other end of the line all kinds of things about you that might get you to either stay happy with them or pay for more service.

But those systems pale in comparison to the kinds of data we’re giving about ourselves on personalized media like social networks and Twitter. Imagine if through some sort of Semantic Web application a company could glean information not only on what info you offered, and tags you’d left, but also the things you were passionate about, what you’d been writing and saying, asking for and complaining about. Imagine if the company could handle the complaint or fuel the delight of that passionate, highly involved (ok, “engaged”) fan — how much might she crow about you, then, an not only increase her loyalty but also help spur others into the fold?

True, it’s a lot of work. And some of the work is subtle and requires a very human touch. We don’t today have an algorithm that can mine such soft and random data in this way (though a recent Open Calaisdemonstration did wow me to the possibilities), and it takes a human touch to understand the not-so-fine line between delighting someone and making them feel you’ve gone over the creepy edge into invading their privacy. 

It’s 11:45am on a sunny summer day in New York. In just a few minutes, promises will be broken, years of trust will be betrayed and a high-value customer and millions of dollars will be lost.

This is the story of a very expensive customer loyalty program that worked flawlessly for two decades only to be derailed by several remarkable misuses of technology.

It’s 11:55am. The executive admin for a very high net worth individual vies to get her boss’ attention as he heads out for lunch. She tells him that today is the deadline to complete the air miles transaction for his Christmas vacation. Only one problem, he’s short 20,000 miles.

No issue he says, I paid my credit card bill ten days early and you should see 39,000+ miles show up in the account … in fact, you should have seen it already, I did it at the beginning of the week. Just give them a call and check on it.

A bit of background: This particular executive, I’ll call him Charles, has had an airline affinity credit card for almost twenty years. As a relatively high net worth individual, he pays his $25,000-$35,000 per month bill in full and really uses the card just to get upgrade miles on his favorite airline. Purchases are worth a mile per dollar and, when added to the actual miles flown, his account usually has over 200,000 miles available.

Back to our story, it’s 2:05pm and Charles’ EA is still on the phone when he returns from lunch. Charles overhears one side of the conversation, but he knows exactly what is happening on the other end of the phone. “Is there anyway you can expedite the transfer?” “But we don’t have four business days.”

Charles listens for a few more seconds and mouths to his assistant, “Are you talking to a supervisor?” She nods, yes.

Charles asks her to transfer the call to his desk and he begins. “What seems to be the problem?” The customer service supervisor on the other end of the phone tells him that his miles can be transferred for free on his upcoming statement date or, he can pay $35 and have the transfer expedited. However, the expedited service will take four business days. Unfortunately for everyone on the telephone, Charles needs that transfer done right now.

Here we have the first horrifying use of technology. How is it possible that an electronic transfer takes four days in 2008. American Airlines can transfer miles in and out of your account while you’re on the phone with them and you can see the transaction by refreshing your browser. You would think that a bank would have more robust transactional software than an airline, wouldn’t you?

To make matters worse, the supervisor, #XYZ234 is reading from a script on a computer screen. (Technology Failure number two). She has no authority to speak for herself. Is she any more valuable than an IVR (interactive voice response) computer? Not really, for the next five minutes, she listens attentively to Charles and then repeats the exact same thing. Sometimes, to spice things up, she adds, “I’m sorry you feel that way …” to the front of her pre-packaged script.

Charles has had just about enough of this and he uses the only technique that is guaranteed to work with a customer service supervisor. He tells her who he is, asks her to look at his account for the last 20 years and then says, “As you can see, I am a very high-value customer. I am also a businessman and I know your company spends over $1.1 Billion annually to advertise to people like me. I have a problem that someone at your company can easily solve right now, you are obviously not that person, I really need to speak with that person because if you cannot solve my problem, I am going to stop using this credit card and you will lose me as a customer. If, however, you can solve my problem, I will be very, very happy to stay with you for the next 20 years.”

Supervisor #XYZ234 simply repeated the words written on her script.

Charles is right. Advertising Age estimates that CitiGroup spent $1.135 Billion on advertising in 2007. That same year, MasterCard spent $1.08 Billion on advertising to acquire 116 million new customers. According to Frederick Reichheld, an analyst at Bain Capital, acquiring a new customer costs six to seven times more than retaining a customer. How could a problem this simple end a 20 year business relationship?

2:25pm. Charles was pretty angry, but still felt that he had some loyalty to the brand. So, he did what anyone in 2008 would do. He spent ten minutes on Google looking for someone at the credit card company to call. All he could find was a number for the parent company. (Technology failure number three). There was no way to determine from online search who the responsible parties might be. (Technology failure number four). In a last ditch effort to get his problem solved, Charles dialed a number that looked promising. He had found the name of the CEO and felt sure that someone in the CEO’s office would rather help him than lose him. After 14 minutes on automated hold (Technology failure number five) and a short, hard to navigate IVR tree (Technology failure number six), Charles was connected to an operator.

He asked for the CEO by name and was told that that gentleman didn’t work at that office, but – remarkably – he had called the right office for his problem. The operator asked Charles who he wished to speak to. Charles responded, I’d like the highest-ranking officer in the building. The operator responded that she didn’t have titles of the people in the company directory (Technology failure number seven or policy Failure, depending upon who you ask) and that she could not help him without a name.
2:59pm. It was over almost as fast as it started. A high-value customer gone, no one responsible for customer acquisition will ever know. No one responsible for customer retention will ever know. Thousands of dollars wasted, millions lost – all of which could have been avoided by a half-way decent CRM system or a little bit of SEO, SEM and an XML wrapper or two. How unbelievably sad for the credit card company — how inconvenient for the customer – what an object lesson in applied technology (or lack thereof). Customer loyalty is a terrible thing to waste.

Shelly Palmer is the host of MediaBytes a daily news show featuring news you can use about technology, media & entertainment, Managing Director of Advanced Media Ventures Group LLC and the author of Television Disrupted: The Transition from Network to Networked TV (2006, Focal Press). Shelly is also President of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, NY (the organization that bestows the coveted Emmy® Awards). He is the Vice-Chairman of the National Academy of Media Arts & Sciences an organization dedicated to education and leadership in the areas of technology, media and entertainment. Palmer also oversees the Advanced Media Technology Emmy® Awards which honors outstanding achievements in the science and technology of advanced media. You can read Shelly’s blog here. Shelly can be reached at shelly@palmer.net

This week, FCC Commissioner Kevin Martin put some new spectrum up for auction. But there’s a catch. The winner will be required to provide free wireless broadband access to 50% of America within four years and, cover 95% of the country within 10.

First, I want to offer a tip of the cap to Commissioner Martin and the other FCC commissioners. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is an independent United States government agency established by the Communications Act of 1934. The FCC is charged with regulating interstate and international communications by radio, television, wire, satellite and cable. It’s nice that people who are responsible for regulating our communications have started thinking about the size and shape of the broadband cloud that will define interpersonal and business communications for the next half century.

This random act of future-mindedness has inspired a few questions:

What kind of wireless broadband connectivity would best serve the people of the United States of America?
Should we start with the feature set or think through the benefits and work backwards?
Who should pay for the network?
Is nationwide wireless broadband connectivity a privilege or a right?
Should it be run by a private enterprise or a government agency?
Should it be a “freeway” or a “toll road?”
Should this really be a version of Al Gore’s “Information Super Highway,” a service to be purchased in a free market or a service protected by a government granted monopoly?

Yes, this is the tip of the iceberg and the list of questions is practically endless.

For the moment, let’s cut away the “how” and the “who” parts of the equation and focus on the “what.”

What should be built?
What is the job we expect it to do?
What is the promise of ubiquitous, free, nationwide wireless broadband?

There is a school of thought that follows a mantra “deployed innovation must match consumer aspiration.” This group will advocate for an “also ran” network. Users of such a network would have an experience similar to a current low-end ASDL wired broadband connection. (1.5 Mbps down, 768Kbps up). The actual numbers and techno-speak don’t matter. This would be a slow network with very limited multi-media and file transport capability. Music piracy might still be an issue, but the casual transport of high or even medium quality movie files would be cumbersome. The devices that would take advantage of such a network would be very similar in concept and construction to those available today.

Then, there’s the “Beam me up, Scotty” group who will advocate for the fastest, highest quality network that current technology will allow. Many people believe that this would be a version of WiMax technology with speeds approaching slow cable modems. (6 Mbps down, 3 Mbps up). This kind of network would enable all kinds of interesting stuff. At that speed, you can move big, high-quality movie files with relative ease, but – more importantly, you can access big files stored on remote servers in realtime. This last point is the most important because it would change the fundamental way we use computers.

Right now, your computer, PDA or Cell phone all use the following component parts. A central processing unit (cpu) connected to some random access memory (ram) that is in very close proximity to the cpu. There is also some storage (like your hard drive) close by. Unless your computer is on a robust local area client/server network (like many businesses are), most of the data you access is stored inside your computer.

This fundamental construct of a personal computer has not changed substantially since they were introduced in the late 1970s.

Fast forward to life in a high-speed, wireless broadband cloud. Your laptop, PDA or cell phone will not have to have enough built-in storage to store everything you want or need - you will be able to access the data over the air. Now, add an OLED (Organic Light Emitting Diode) screen and a big battery and you have a class of wireless devices that will change the way we behave. Everything would change. Every movie would be one click away. All retail products would be one click away. All downloadable products would be accessible. Every photo you ever took, every .pdf file you ever scanned would all be available in the palm or your hand or in the back-seat of your car instantly. It would truly be a life-changing network. Think about the computers in your oven, coffee maker, car, wrist watch, toys, etc. A network of this capability would give certain inanimate objects the illusion of thought. We would live in a world that could be taught to react to us and to our needs. It’s really fun to think about.

Back to reality – we’re not likely to see this kind of technological innovation inspired by the current auction. It the last auction, private enterprise steered clear of the spectrum that was going to be encumbered by requirements to share it police and fire departments. And for good reason … no one wanted to spend billions of dollars and have any restrictions placed upon how they might maximize their investment.

However, I think this is an encouraging step in the right direction. I also think you should personally weigh-in. Contact your elected officials and tell them how you feel about this. Stone axes, bear-skins and smoke signals or a center seat on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise - it’s up to you!

Shelly Palmer is Managing Director of Advanced Media Ventures Group LLC and the author of Television Disrupted: The Transition from Network to Networked TV (2006, Focal Press). Shelly is also President of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, NY (the organization that bestows the coveted Emmy® Awards). He is the Vice-Chairman of the National Academy of Media Arts & Sciences an organization dedicated to education and leadership in the areas of technology, media and entertainment. Palmer also oversees the Advanced Media Technology Emmy® Awards which honors outstanding achievements in the science and technology of advanced media. You can read Shelly’s blog here. Shelly can be reached at shelly@palmer.net