Objected by the wireless industry and some consumer groups, but “free, pornography-free wireless Internet service to all Americans” is still what the FCC is pushing for. Interesting! Is this the reason the FCC approved the White Spaces left by analog television to be opened for wireless broadband? The business model of a USA wide wireless ISP would be much more ‘problematic’ if they also have to license a certain frequency for operation. But this plan is not intended to use the White Spaces, but is negotiated to be part of a plan for one of the frequencies just sold.

“The meaning is in the use.” It is a quote often used and taken from Wittgensteins Philosophical Investigations. But what are actually the implications of this powerful phrase? This week I was assigned to give a lecture about the linguistic turn argument in the discussion on political obligation. Taking the argument from Hanna Pitkins text ‘Obligation and Consent‘ I tried to explain my colleague students what it states, but discussion showed the difficulty to truly understand it. As it is one of my favourite philosophical subjects, according to Wittgenstein the only one, I will give it another go.

Last Saturday the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam was officially opened with the screening of Episode 3, Renzo Martens ‘piece of art’ about poverty in Africa; Congo to be precise. The screening left no one untouched I guess. People were mad, astound, nauseated, sad, or felt powerless. For a documentary to do that, is quite an achievement I think. Afterwards the creator commented on his documentary, and one remark caught it all to my opinion. On a question about his intentions with the film, Martens replied: “well, there’s no real difference between there and here, it’s just different lifestyles.”

The presidential election was without doubt the most important vote on November 4, 2008. There was yet another very interesting and important vote, the FCC voted on what to do with the “white spaces” (frequencies unused after the USA will go to an all digital TV broadcasting system.) The FCC voted 5-0 allowing unlicensed devices to operate in the frequencies formerly used for TV signals. Larry Page calls the wireless broadband technology “WiFi on steroids” on his blog. Initially intended for “customer premises devices” it is a direct competition of WiMAX. It might prove a threat to mobile (3G/4G) as well, but comparable to how iPhone uses WiFi.

Last Friday it was for the first time in my life I have felt some affiliation with the Dutch prime minister Balkenende. In his weekly talk on television he explained how and why the Dutch state was invited to be part of the G20 meeting about the current economic crisis. Through good diplomatic relations and a demonstrable capacity to deal with international and economic troubles he earned a recommendation of no less then Sarkozy and Bush. “Finally,” I thought, “finally the Dutch government is trying to recover its position as mediator and discussion partner.” For years we have just been following the path of others and not for the good. The day before I witnessed all of this I was to give a lecture about Martha Nussbaum at the university, about a text that can be seen as a guide to understand international relationships.

As we were visiting the Leaders in Dubai conference this week, Tom Peters, one of the keynote speakers mentioned a famous quote made by legendary auto executive Lee Iacocca: “as goes General Motors, so goes the nation“. He had made the remark years before the current crisis, but with the dooming bankruptcy of the automobile giant, the quote seems to cast a dark shadow on the United States. Will GM indeed go bankrupt and what will that do to the States? Obama feels GM needs to be saved, helping the company with additional funds to survive. And as it so happens, that was the topic of a recent discussion we had with our friends at Coburn Ventures…

I have been enthusiastically reporting on Amazon’s cloud activities lately. And yesterday they launched yet another interesting service. They launched a content delivery network called Amazon CloudFront. This content delivery framework makes your S3 bucket (sorry for the lingo) accessible through a domain of your choice. But not from one location, no from the location geographically near. With the familiar ‘pay as you go’ model they charge for actual downloaded GBs. Europe and US are cheapest, but Hong Kong and Japan also have edge locations.

Microsoft’s most important product (line) is Microsoft Office. Certainly on the PC, but also on the Mac, it is the de facto standard in office productivity. Google Docs are heralded as the next evolution in office productivity. But Balmer is not so scared of Google Docs. His direct competition in office productivity comes from OpenOffice.org and StarOffice, he responded when asked about Google Docs. As with Linux these products has taken their time to mature. But with 3 million downloads in the first week the lates release can be called a blockbuster. But still Google will be their worst nightmare, only somewhere else, a phone.

What if Africa is going to be the next economic power to rise? How that will influence the world is probably one of the first questions that pops up in somebodies mind. Another question would be how Africa will look like? Off course there is a lot to say about this related to the topics of industrialisation, agriculture, infrastructure, ICT and so on. One thing that particularly caught my attention is the way we should see Africa: a continent of diversity. But what is the power of diversity and when should we take profit from the exact opposite: unity?