January 18-21: blogging from the bus

A few days ago, on the 7th, a friend in Cincinnati proposed sending out a blogger call for a road trip in conjunction with the inauguration. The response was pretty positive. Today, we have the resources lined up and the plan partially fleshed out. Tomorrow, we start pounding the phones for money.

To this point, we have a bus reserved for 4 days. It carries 55 and has two drivers. It will start in Cleveland late on the 18th, stop in Akron, and hit Columbus at midnight. From there, it will proceed to Cincinnati, where there is an event at 3 PM, after which it will go on to DC, where it will arrive sometime early in the morning of the 20th and disgorge its load at the end of a T1 line, where the load will proceed to live blog and tweet and stuff for the entire day. We have made arrangements for clearance papers--I guess it involves the metropolitan police and the Secret Service. Then, on the 21st, it's back home. Coming and going, there will be photo ops and other media events.

We have lodging arranged for the only night when a bed will be possible, between the 20th and the 21st. A few other people and I are getting the money together for the bus, for food and lodging, and for a modest amount of walking-around money for each participant. Gloria and I can't go due to her recent retrofit, but we can certainly get vicarious. The bus will populate itself, we think, with three generations--it's a great opportunity for recording oral histories and the varied perspectives of the past 50 years.

Tomorrow, in addition to sponsorship, we'll be trying to get in-kind participation, as in air cards and wireless services. If we could blog and tweet all the way from Cleveland to Akron to Columbus to Cincinnati to DC and back, wouldn't that be a marvelous advertisement for a new wired America? The bus trip is a story in itself, and there are lots of other stories within that story.

grand opening at Steelyard

Cleveland's Steelyard Commons -- Our friends over at CoolCleveland.com have noted the following festive event:

Steelyard Grand Opening Families are invited to enjoy activities, giveaways and parade marking long-anticipated grand opening of Cleveland's largest retail center, Steelyard Commons, on Thu 9/6 from 4 – 8:30PM. Live entertainment, games, raffles and more (a parade of performances featuring local community talent begins at 7PM). Steelyard Commons, 3584 Jennings Rd. (From downtown, take I-71 South to Jennings Freeway, exit at Steelyard Dr.

One thing I find extremely heartening is that the IHOP is open 24 hours. Also, the Chipotle serves fairly healthy food, and there's lots of open space for rallies and other massed-up community events. In retrospect, we should have thought to use it for the PutItOnTheBallot.com campaign, but the convoluted access from the freeways might have been a drawback. Getting into Steelyard Commons seems to be an acquired skill, for many. Perhaps for a few days this month we could call all seniors to register for the Homestead Exemption (a $400 value, give or take) before October 1st. This would give our little Mitchell the exposure he so badly needs for the Steelyard project, perform a needed public service, and test the accessibility quotient of the site, and its centrality in the context of the county.

One thing that makes no sense at all to me is that I hear there is a Starbucks coffee shop buried over there somewhere, but it has no street presence.

homie David Pogue explains why AT&T is running scared

Are U.S. Cellphone Carriers Calcified? - Pogue’s Posts - Technology - New York Times Blog -- David Pogue, son of Dick, or Richard Pogue, and now also home-boy expatriate in the NYC area, explains why AT&T was so frantic to jam SB117 up our nether parts, and all with the mindless cooperation of our elected lightweights at the state level: They're losing ARPU:

The cellular industry is going through insanely rapid change. Almost everyone there—800 attendees from 200 phone companies in 65 countries—was running scared of VOIP. That’s voice over I.P., better known as Internet phone. VOIP includes cheapo unlimited home-phone service like Vonage, as well as absolutely free computer-to-computer calling with programs like Skype. It’s all growing like crazy, which is making a huge dent in these companies’ ARPU.

Oh, yeah—that’s Average Revenue Per User. Telecom companies live and breathe ARPU. The talks at this conference were all about “Improving Your ARPU.” (They *love* acronyms in this business. Typical seminar description: “Learn how ISM and FSM can decrease your OPEX and CAPEX and boost your ARPU!”)

Most of these carriers intend to fight off VOIP by growing into a Double Play, Triple Play, or even Quad Play.

What, you don’t know those terms either!?

If you’re a single-play company, you just provide landline service. Add cellphone coverage, and you’re a double play. Add Internet service and TV, and you’re a quad play. You can see the same syndrome here in the U.S., too, as cellphone companies try to deliver TV service, cable companies roll out phone service, and so on.

T-Mobile heralds the death of the landline

http://laptopmag.com/Review/T-Mobile-HotSpot-at-Home.htm -- Here's an interesting phone technology that works off both Wi-Fi and GSM. It can also lower your monthly expenses if you're currently paying for a cellphone and POTS, or a cellphone and VoIP. Not only could you get the phone lines off your house; you could also dispense with the cable. Ponder how this impacts all cable service, and how AT&T is so far behind the power curve. But, if you can't innovate, legislate, and now we have to watch the sad, clumsy cable-carrier maneuvering made possible by our state politicos and SB117.

Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership does wi-fi

Pittsburgh Downtown Partnership now offers free wi-fi downtown for up to 2 hours daily. The annual rates at $120 for unlimited access aren't bad if you live or work there, either. How soon will we have similar service in Cleveland+? Why don't we have it now?

peripatetic dialogues, total mobility, affordable pricing

The Little Projectors That Pack a Punch - New York Times -- Lately, with our MTB community dialogues, I've been thinking a lot about the peripatetic method of discourse that comes to us from Aristotelian times. It's becoming increasingly important to have knowledge you can lug around with you, knowlege you can use and share. We're all fairly accustomed to laptops, PDAs, and wi-fi, the things that are for intake and for personal use, but now it's time to start thinking about small scanners, printers, and projectors, the things that are for output, sharing, and dissemination. This NYT article touches on the projectors considered novelties--I'm thinking of them as mainstream accoutrements for the way I want to do business.

great news from Tremont

Plain Press: The Community Newspaper Serving Cleveland's West Side Neighborhoods -- great article here about Sammy Catania providing new leadership at the Tremont nonprofit, news about reinvolving the neighbors, expanding wi-fi using local contractors, security cameras to enhance safety, branding with a logo that sounds attractive and cool, fostering transparency and communication, building out the community, strengthening the networks already there. This bears watching, perhaps emulating.

Gypsy Beans lives the life, walks the walk, talks the talk

Gypsy Beans & Bakery in the Gordon Square Arts District in the Detroit Shoreway Neighborhood (Cleveland, Ohio)--I just clicked through the MTB ad network to this new website and was heartened to note, on their home page, that they're advocates of what Uncle Norm has tagged as "local production for local consumption."

Please note they also offer free wifi, but you have to ask them for access first. Only after that can you do what the suburban commuters do in Tremont: Go park in the lot, use the free wifi, and not buy anything from the merchant. We first ran into this freeloader, freerider phenomenon over at Scoops last year.

There's no mention of wifi on the Gypsy Beans site right now, but I'm sure that will be forthcoming.

Callahan's pizza run brings a community together: there's a meeting here tonight

Callahan’s Cleveland Diary » Blog Archive » Robbed at gunpoint--Heads up. There's a meeting around these parts tonight. Let our councilman [can you believe the size of the City Hall fonts? Where's the Tech Tsar?] tell you about it [emphasis mine]--

FYI – there will be a Crime & Safety meeting this Thursday, Jan. 25th at 7:00 pm at the Archwood UCC, which will be utilized to hopefully squelch rumors on the street relative to the murder on Riverside. These other crime trends will also be discussed. In addition, with assistance from the local development corp., the 2nd District Police and Huntington Bank, we’re holding a Brooklyn Centre Merchant’s meeting next Monday morning at 7:30 am at the Brooklyn Centnre Huntington Branch for area businesses to discuss crime trends in the commercial district (a few recent break-ins), as well as what more can be done to have businesses better coordinate safety strategies.

On the bright side, we saw Bill at the MTB session with Jim Rokakis last night, and he reports that the hoodied perps DID NOT take his pizza that fateful night.

I was trying to look at the positives of all this early this morning as I took out the rubbish and shoveled the drive and the walk, and the only thing that occurred to me was to be thankful that my mittens had a trigger finger.

I'm sure we'll come up with more and more positives at the meeting tonight.

all that rises must converge, or words to that efffect

PC Magazine announced a new product today that seems attractive, and it also has navigation software built in. This whole bundle, to me, seems valuable, finally, since it includes a phone, a modem, and Bluetooth and 802.11b/g WiFi. Is there anything they left out? Read the whole article, but here's the lead-in:

GPS firm Pharos today launched its first hybrid GPS/cell phone, a Windows Mobile smartphone called the Pharos GPS Phone.

The GPS Phone is a pull-out-all-the-stops Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC, with a top-notch SirfStar III GPS chip and a range of high-end features. It's a quad-band GSM world phone, with high-speed Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR, 802.11 b/g Wi-Fi, and an EDGE cellular modem. You can take pictures with a 2-megapixel camera, or listen to a built-in FM radio. The device has a 2.8-inch, 320-by-240 touch screen, but no built-in QWERTY keyboard.

Pharos has made the unusual choice of selling the GPS Phone unlocked, letting users pop in an existing Cingular or T-Mobile SIM card. While this keeps the price high, at $699.95, it lets Pharos bring the phone to market without the drag of carrier approval processes—so it will be on sale next month.