SEATTLE – Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates told Washington state legislators that harnessing the power of technology will help them serve their constituents more efficiently.
Gates said computers will keep getting smaller, and they’ll make it easier to wade through e-mails, schedule appointments, stay on top of news and to-do lists and make lawmakers’ work more transparent to the public.
University of Washington President Mark Emmert conducted the on-stage interview with Gates on Wednesday before the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Emmert drew laughs – and a sheepish smile from Gates – when he pointed out the irony of a university president interviewing the world’s most famous college dropout.
Gates, who dropped out of Harvard University to start Microsoft, got more laughs later when he said a four-year degree is at the top of the list of prerequisites for jobs at his company.
Gates said he’s troubled by a decline in the number of U.S. college students graduating with computer science and engineering degrees, while China and India are getting better at training tech-savvy college grads, many of whom have gotten jobs at Microsoft.
The Well put on sales block: The Well, an eclectic online community whose profits have never quite measured up to its pioneering influence, is being put on the sales block by its current owner, long-struggling Web publisher Salon Media Group Inc.
“We have really ambitious goals with Salon and didn’t want to dilute our efforts by trying to support two different brands,” said Elizabeth Hambrecht, Salon’s chief executive officer.
Salon plans to take its time to ensure the new owner is a good fit for The Well’s main asset – its community of roughly 4,000 members. There were about 6,000 members when San Francisco-based Salon bought the Well for $5 million in stock 61/2 years ago.
Although its audience has shrunk since its heyday in the early 1990s, the Well still looms large in Silicon Valley because of its place in online lore.
The service started in 1985 as a quasi-social experiment by Steward Brand, the founder of the counterculture Whole Earth Catalog, and Larry Brillant, an entrepreneur trying to popularize the concept of computer conferencing systems. They called it the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link, or Well.
Starting with just a few hundred people connecting over clunky telephone modems, the Well turned into a bustling online hub as high-tech geeks, iconoclasts, hippies, artists and journalists began to exchange ideas and share intimate details of their personal lives.
The emotional and intellectual bonds formed over the Well’s electronic connections inspired one early participant, Howard Rheingold, to coin the phrase, “virtual community.”
Despite its impact, the Well has never been a big moneymaker. It currently generates $500,000 in annual revenue and is “marginally profitable,” Hambrecht said.
Internet-phone consumers soar: The number of consumers bypassing the traditional phone network and opting for Internet voice service is soaring beyond expectations.
An analysis by the TeleGeography research group found 2.7 million subscribers nationwide in the second quarter, compared with just 440,000 a year earlier.
The technology, known as Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP, requires a broadband Internet line but generally offers inexpensive calling plans and novel features such as the ability to manage voice mail on a Web page.
The revenue generated from consumer VoIP services remained relatively small, at $220 million, but that is expected to change quickly. TeleGeography forecasts annual VoIP revenue hitting $3 billion in two years.
The biggest factors in the numbers are cable TV companies, which are using VoIP to bundle phone service with their TV offerings in hopes of staving off competition from incumbent phone companies that are just beginning to get into the TV business.
Lawmakers fear software use for terror: Two members of the Dutch parliament have questioned whether a free mapping program from Google Inc. may help would-be terrorists by providing aerial photos of potential targets.
Google Earth, launched this year, uses overlapping satellite photos to simulate the experience of flying from the stratosphere down to any spot on earth.
The photos come from a variety of sources. Though not all areas are highly detailed, some are so good that people can see details of their own homes, such as a pool or garden shed.
Lawmakers Frans Weekers and Aleid Wolfson read about the software in a Dutch newspaper article that raised the possibility that terrorists could use the program to study government buildings or nuclear reactors. So Weekers and Wolfson demanded answers from the administration.
Justice Ministry spokesman Wibbe Alkema said Wednesday the government was still crafting its response.
Google spokeswoman Catherine Betts said benefits of the software “far outweigh any negatives from potential abuse.”
New law targets hidden Net tolls: A new law that’s apparently the first in the nation threatens to penalize Internet service providers that fail to warn users that some dial-up numbers can ring up enormous long-distance phone bills even though they appear local.
A long distance call even within the same area code can cost 8 to 12 cents a minute, adding up to hundreds, even thousands of dollars a month.
Companies face fines of up to $500 for each offense, and consumers could pursue civil action claiming an unfair business practice.
The National Conference of State Legislatures said it knows of no similar law elsewhere.
About 700 consumers in the Rochester area alone were billed more than $200,000 combined in unexpected Internet access charges in an eight-month period, while others elsewhere were charged $5,000 to $10,000 more than expected because the Internet connection was left open through a long-distance number.
From Herald news services
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