Promise of broadcast broadband

A recent decision by the Federal Communications Commission opens up hitherto unused frequencies that should result in interesting technologies.

Companies such as Motorola are interested in mining the new spectrum to extend broadband Internet access into rural areas. However this plays out, there is no question that pervasive broadband is working its way into the hinterlands, a trend that, coupled with increasingly sophisticated mobile devices, means that being without a Net connection will soon be a thing of the past.

The frequencies in question are the so-called white spaces between the channels occupied by broadcast television. Mining them to expand broadband plays into other mobile trends that are in full swing.

Thus Adobe's agreement with chip-maker ARM to make the former's software run on future devices. ARM's chips are found in 90 percent of the world's mobile phones, while Adobe's Flash technology manages three-quarters of the video found on the Web. The result: What you see on your desktop browser will increasingly be available, in all its video richness, on any mobile device.

Or most devices, anyway, for the iPhone doesn't yet use Flash, a situation Adobe is intent on changing. While that story develops, consider how widespread broadband works into Adobe's interesting business model. This is a company that started out in the publishing software trade (think Photoshop). It is now a major player in the battle to manage how your applications run, and where. Adobe AIR melds nicely with Flash as a way to use your desktop machine's power while tapping programs whose operations are conducted on the Web.

This is a space Google would like to dominate, but the company that moves quickly with the best tools will be a force to contend with, and Adobe's growing expertise at this kind of hybrid computing is putting it in a solid competitive condition. I was pondering all this while working up a presentation that needs to use slides. This is PowerPoint territory, but Web-based presentation tools are growing in capability and fewer and fewer venues lack a Net connection.

That means companies such as SlideRocket have real traction. The San Francisco-based firm (www.sliderocket.com) uses Adobe tools to make building presentations online a breeze. You can upload and work with existing PowerPoint files, add content from Flickr or YouTube, draw stock art from an online graphics store, and share your work with colleagues. Because the program presents the same interface to any connected device, worries about operating system complexity don't arise, and version control keeps you working on the most recent file.

All this is helpful and points to other emerging presentation tools online, such as Zoho Show (www.zoho.com) and Google Presentations (docs.google.com).

But play with SlideRocket and you begin to see the dynamic power of working online. You can, for example, draw data from Google Spreadsheets (itself an online program) and watch as your slides update themselves to reflect the latest information. SlideRocket also offers a set of metrics that let you judge a Web presentation by seeing how long each slide was viewed, and what link clicks or form submissions followed.

I'm convinced that Microsoft's older office software model, programs like Office that run on your local PC and network under Windows, is rapidly becoming history (Microsoft's own online Office tools aren't due until 2010). Ubiquitous broadband couples beautifully with programs that are accessible through the Internet wherever you are. Rather than carrying a laptop to every meeting to run your presentation, why not reduce to your mobile device (for contacts and schedule) and draw your slides directly from the Net? Or use SlideRocket's offline player when the Net connection is down.