Around 4 a.m., drivers on the interstate were blinded by patches of fog and smoke. The result was pileups on both sides of the highway with dozens of cars and multiple tractor-trailers involved. Steven R. Camps was driving into the haze on the highway and describes what he experienced:

“You could hear cars hitting each other. People were crying. People were screaming. It was crazy”

“It was happening on both sides of the road, so there was nowhere to go. It blew my mind.”

“looked like someone was picking up cars and throwing them.”

The interstate had been closed due to a brushfire that was intentionally set but recently re-opened just a short time before the horrific collisions took place. Upon arriving at the scene rescuers had difficulty locating the victims because of the thick smog and heavy smoke. The fire which had already burned 62 acres as of sunday morning was still burning as workers labored to clean up the highway.The highway was re-opened on Sunday around 5:30.

The crash has many asking why the highway was okay’d to be re-opened after the earlier closure. Investigators are still looking into who started the fire.

The following is a video taken just a short time after the accidents as crews attempted to clear the highway and make sense of the catastrophe:

A quick review:

AT&T, Verizon, and others are chomping at the bit to get a hold of the 700 MHz band, soon to be returned to the federal government by broadcast television once regulation takes effect requiring them to go digital. This swath of spectrum is ideal for wireless broadband and mobile phone networks.

But to get the most of profit from it, incumbent telecom providers must pressure the FCC to not impose requirements on how the spectrum is used. Rather, incumbents would prefer a setup similar to what they have now, with little incentive to give consumers choice in wireless services.

They do this by limiting devices that can be used on their networks, what third-party applications can be installed, exclusive contracting like with the iPhone, and punitive contract termination fees.

And they want it to stay that way.

Google, though, and consumers, and pretty much everybody that’s not an incumbent, want a section of the spectrum reserved with requirements that are more consumer friendly. Though incumbents have argued that doing so would devalue the spectrum and limit competition, the intent is just the opposite, to foster new players in the arena, and by default, putting pressure on incumbents to think more about customers and less about the bottom line.

Enter Google, the white knight (yes, I’m editorializing, it’s what I do best), who last Friday sent a letter to the FCC promising to bid at least the minimum reserve the agency had in mind for that slice of spectrum, $4.6 billion, but only if the FCC enforce four principles of open access.

This does three things: ensures new, consumer-friendly competition; takes away arguments against from incumbents; and really ticks AT&T off.

Okay, that wasn’t as quick as I thought it was going to be.

What AT&T has to say about it:

Om Malik gets credit for chasing down this statement from AT&T Senior VP Jim Cicconi:

…Google has now delivered an all or nothing ultimatum to the U.S. Government, insisting that every single one of their conditions “must” be met or they will not participate in the spectrum auction. Google is demanding the Government stack the deck in its favor, limit competing bids, and effectively force wireless carriers to alter their business models to Google’s liking…

He also said something to the effect that Google should "put up or shut up," which comes across as belligerent, whiney, immature, and ultimately, threatened. He is right that Google is making demands. He is also right that Google couldn’t win the auction in a fair fight with the telecoms (nor could anyone else, save Microsoft).

But that’s why supporters of open access are concerned. With about four major providers pooling their resources, they could hoard that valuable spectrum and keep America behind other countries in wireless services indefinitely.

The irony of Cicconi’s statement is breathtaking, even painful, as one might not be able to decide which is the pot and which is the kettle. AT&T has always had the deck stacked in its favor…remember Ma Bell? … and Google’s potential entry into the market has them scared they won’t be able to manipulate the market like they are used to doing.

Cicconi’s words are nothing but saber-rattling, a tantrum, a scared kid crying foul when he knows it was fair.

UPDATE: Google responds to Cicconi and AT&T, saying that new rules are necessary to ensure competition as the spectrum auction is already rigged in favor of incumbents.

And the people start shouting for somebody to pull on the reins. A Microsoft/Yahoo assault seems to be the only recourse for blocking an all-out Google takeover of the advertising/publishing industry.

Former Microsoft employee Robert Scoble says the acronym "FOG" (Fear of Google) has entered the common lexicon of the marketing world:

"The perception on the street is that Google is leaving its competitors in the dust and they don’t like that, which is causing them to cheer on Microsoft and Yahoo just so they’ll do something interesting and stay in the game."

Coupled with the fear of monopolies is the fear of what Google knows about the average searcher/consumer. Demographic and behavioral data that Google could collect will become increasingly valuable commodities in the marketing world, which will bring up serious concerns about privacy on the Web.

FOG isn’t new, even if it’s new to the mainstream. A quick Google search shows that the acronym was used as far back as 2005, when more astute observers began to notice the Mountain View, Calif.-based company’s potential.

The Fear is prevalent enough at least to have inspired poems, even if this one has more to do with tedious time-consumption than all-encompassing market panic. Warning to the wise: Google poetry has quite the checkered history, but Stock’s send-up of the Googtopia at least brings it up a notch from its Vogon past.

Then again, this could just be traditional (nearly annual) Google jitters.

The talk was an interesting one about where social media is headed and especially the ways that small businesses can use social media to their advantage. Twitter, Flickr, Zooomr, MySpace, Facebook, blogging, videoblogging, podcasting, UStream.tv, Digg, etc., are all tools that all businesses ought to be aware of at a minimum and using to follow the conversations that are taking place about their company and products.

Mike Doeff caught some of the talk on video and you can see that here.

UStream.tv featured prominently in the talk and there were three separate UStream.tv feeds running live while the talk was going on in addition to a back channel IRC and interaction through things like Twitter.

With the popularity of Justin.tv, UStream.tv especailly seems to be of interest these days. UStream.tv allows anyone to stream their life or real time video via cams and is potentially bringing a new realtime nature to social media. Jeremiah and Scoble spent much of the Web 2.0 conference broadcasting in real time through UStream.tv.

Comments

Michael Lopp
Cabel Sasser
Joshua Schachter
Joel Spolsky
Evan Williams

A number of interesting points raised. A few of the top ones:

Joshua Schachter, who developed del.icio.us was asked “Del.icio.us was a simple app, with a really simple interface. How did it end up going so viral, and become so popular?” Schachter:

“One of the things I did was put an RSS feed wherever I could in del.icio.us, so that people could access their information easily. They could take their information, put it in their blogs, share it, do anything they want with it.”

Question from the audience: “How do you turn your brand into users?”

Joel Spolsky: My blog, Joel on Software, has a big brand and a big reader base. Fog Creek makes bug tracking software, which isn’t something you buy every day. But it is important to our core audience of readers. So when they need bug tracking software, they think of us. When we’ve tried to develop things that were less applicable to my readers, those products didn’t catch on as well.

Question: How do you hire?

Joel: The one thing that works for us it to have summer interns. After the end of three months, we know if they’re going to be good or not. If they are good, we make them an offer that’s going to be the best offer of anyone in their graduating class. We can do that because there’s no risk…we know they are going to be good, and that it’s worth it. Also, your first five-six-seven hires have to be generalists…they need to be able to design, to build, to market, to do Quickbooks for a couple of weeks. After that, you can get specialists.

Evan Williams: In venture funded companies, there’s a situation where you hire too fast. You have to be careful of timing…your VCs, your board may be putting pressure on you to hire fast. When you have more than the two or three founders, and things are uncertain, and you have a dozen or twenty or more people to get up to speed when things change, it can be deadly.

Schachter: With del.icio.us, we did a variant on the intern thing…we’d hire consultants. My first hire was a guy who kept sending in bug reports to my code. He worked for us for six months before I ever met him…he lived up in the boonies in Toronto. The other thing is to get an office assistant…all that stuff that’s “not the product,” and I was wasting my time on stuff that wasn’t part of our core.

Question: What if you have a great idea, but aren’t technical. What do you do?

Joel: Get a co-founder. Ideas are easy. It’s the execution that’s hard. Get a co-founder…if you can’t find at least one other person who is will to devote themselves to the idea, it’s probably not that good.

Sasser: Keep whittling down that idea, to it’s simplest form. Make sure you can explain it.

Question: What’s the mistake you made that almost sent the whole company down the tubes?

Schachter: For me, it was almost not-doing-it. I was on the fence for about two years. I was lucky…it seemed I made a lot of good choices.

Joel: One thing we did was an affiliate program, and all sorts of promotional efforts. None of those things ever worked. The thing that worked? Creating improved versions of our products. When we come out with a new version, our sales double.

Question from the audience: Did anyone on the panel have a business plan?

Panel: ::crickets::

Sasser: Make things that you want to use. Your heart will be in it, your passion will be in it.

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Christopher Carfi, CEO and co-founder of Cerado, looks at sales, marketing, and the business experience from the customers point of view. He currently is focused on understanding how emerging social technologies such as blogs, wikis, and social networking are enabling the creation of new types of customer-driven communities. He is the author of the Social Customer Manifesto weblog, and has been occasionally told that he drives and snowboards just a little too quickly.

“Harry, didn’t you do something to your glasses to stop the rain fogging them up when we played Hufflepuff in that storm?”
“Hermoine did it,” said Harry. He pulled out his wand, tapped his glasses, and said, “Impervius!”
-- Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, by J.K. Rowling.

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
-- Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future

A scholarship to Hogwarts won’t be required. In fact, creating a fogproof nanotech coating could be accomplished by the person next door.

National Geographic quotes MIT materials scientist Michael Rubner as observing the ease with which it could be created. “It’s a cheap, simple process. I could teach you how to do this, and you could make these products in your garage.”

The scientist announced the process at the American Chemical Society’s Washington DC conference. Their discovery that silica nanoparticles bonded to a surface can make it resist fog could make morning shaving and foul-weather driving a clearer experience.

In another story, PhysOrg.com describes the process as consisting of alternate layers of tiny particles of glass (the silica nanoparticles) and an inexpensively-made polymer called polyallylamine hydrochloride.

The article notes the military, which helped fund the project via DARPA, and a couple of car manufacturers have shown interest in the breakthrough.

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.

I’ve finally started my own podcast, “Dan Bricklin’s Software Licensing Podcast“. It will be a series of interviews and perhaps other material that should be of interest to people who care about the legal and managerial aspects of software licensing in general, Open Source licenses in particular, and who knows what else.

As I’m doing more frequently these days, I find and listen to new podcasts as part of learning what others are doing and how they’re doing it. I listened to Dan’s second podcast, a phone conversation with Joel Spolsky, author, blogger, Windows developer and co-founder of Fog Creek Software, recorded last Thursday.

Pretty niche subject matter: keeping track of where software code comes from, differences between Windows and Unix, etc. Not the type of subject matter I’d naturally seek out (as perhaps the topics Shel and I discuss in our show might not be what Dan would naturally seek out).

What it illustrates, though, is the beauty of ‘niche podcasting’ – if you have a topic you want to talk about, you can just go ahead, create your podcast – include interviews like Dan’s if you want – and make your recordings available via your blog or website and in an RSS feed. People will discover it. If they like it, they’ll come back for more. And it doesn’t really matter if you have 10 listeners or 1,000 – the barriers to entry are so low that it’s feasible to do no matter how many or how few listeners you have.

I wrote a lengthy-ish post a few weeks ago about the value such a communication channel could present to almost any business as part of overall communication and developing more effective relationships with stakeholders of all types.

Dan has some of the most succinct and sound reasons for doing a podcast that I’ve seen:

So here I have what I hope is a good business model for podcasting:

It’s not a bad business model.

Link: VisiCalc

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Neville Hobson is the author of the popular NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.

Neville is currentlly the VP of New Marketing at Crayon. Visit Neville Hobson’s blog: NevilleHobson.com.