From the Connected World report:

Another sign of upheaval in the connectivity landscape is the presence of “switch backs.” Digital visionary Nicholas Negroponte predicted over a decade ago that wired services would become wireless, and wireless services would become wired – dubbed the Negroponte Switch. Now we see many “switch backs” in play. For example, VoIP (Voice over IP) brings phone calls from wired to wireless and now back to wired. Mobile TV brings TV from wireless to wired and now back to wireless. The Negroponte Switch could still be the end state, but currently we are seeing numerous switch backs, illustrating the very unsettled nature of the connectivity landscape. 

The FCC just auctioned off $13.9 billion of wireless spectrum, with T-Mobile, Verizon and Cingular the big winners (bidders).  However, new competition from regional carriers MetroPCS and Leap Wireless is expected, for they were large bidders as well.  So was a cable consortium owned by Comcast, Time Warner and Cox.  The quadruple threat of voice, data, video and mobile continues.  See the full story.

This just in from UsingRFID.com:  A US company, Paraben, has created a special pouch for your RFID-rich passport.  The pouch blocks RF signals so that when the passport is not needed (which is most of the time), it can be safely stored without fear of data being skimmed from the RFID tag.  All this despite the many security features that go with the new RFID passports, which are expected to be issued to some 15 million citizens in 2007.  See full story.

Apple is one of many industry crossovers taking place lately (see Industry Crossovers chapter).  Yesterday the company announced its iTV, a device that enables you to display on your TV movies, TV shows and other video downloaded from the Internet.  This is a computer crossover into TV, playing off the company’s iPod/iTunes success and leveraging the Disney-Pixar merger (the first crop of downloadable movies are from Disney).  Watch as more players join in the downloadable movie phenomenon and consumer acceptance picks up, just as it did with downloadable songs.  Apple has been crossing over into personal entertainment for some time, and iTV puts Apple squarely in the living room, headquarters central for home entertainment.

See the Wall Street Journal on the iTV announcement (login required).

See commentary on the TNL.net blog, which speculates that, in the long term, Apple might be able to disaggregate programming content from TV channels, effectively enabling people to program their own channels and putting an end to traditional channels and to advertisting-based TV.

One of the technologies featured in the TR35 (Technology Review’s young innovators of the year) is ad hoc networks, with references to military and commercial possibilities, including networked parking meters.  That’s great for finding empty parking spots—and it will also let the police know asap when your parking meter has expired.

In our chapter on Networks in New Places, Connected World talks about ad hoc networks and the DoD’s JTRS network, an ad hoc mobile network under development that provides interoperability across the spectrum of military environments, from back packs to ships.  A single JTRS radio can support different standards, frequencies, bandwidths and waveforms via software controls that are adapted to the mission and intended platform.  Because the network is ad hoc, warfighters will have “instant on” communications and there is no risk of having a single point of failure in the network, as each node in the network routes traffic to any other node as required.  A single wireless base station is not needed.  This opens up all sorts of possibilities for putting networks in new places. 

The potential commercial applications like the networked parking meter remind us that anything that can be connected will be connected, discussed in our chapter on Connected Things.