But before I lay out these “slugs” as we call them in the news business, let me imagine that one could map the world’s technology clusters. Silicon Valley is the archetype but every major nation has tech centers of excellence — Scandinavia with cellular, Israel with telecom and security, Japan with consumer electronics and so on. Such a map could briefly describe the expertise of each tech cluster and provide links to regional associations for further information. The map would draw attention to itself and become a networking tool for global tech professionals. It would be a production headache at the outset and a milder annoyance over time. As it gained traction, every region with a factory or a university will want to be represented. But it would also become a singular resource that would reinforce the global nature of coverage. Just a thought, if not for now then for later, as I think such a map would be a sponsor magnet.

Now back to the watch words I will have in mind as I survey the tech landscape. This is a work in progress. As you catch my drift please feel free to post suggestions in comments. If any of these themes are unfamiliar, a quick visit to Wikipedia would bring you up to speed.

With that let me set down some ideas in no particular order:

Workforce trends:

• visas and green cards
• which industries are hiring and firing
• skills in demand, salary trends, stock options
• foreign students coming and going

Policy

• Obamatech
• The FCC and its issues, such as Net Neutrality
• DARPA and Commerce and NIST, oh my
• Occasional peeks at NSF and National Academies studies

Industrial themes

• Semiconductors, the foundation and the pulse of electronics
• Networks and broadband as the enablers of e-commerce
• Software, with an eye toward the cutting edge, i.e. parallel processing, open source
• Personal computers, personal electronics, as matters of manufacture and trade flows
• Enterprise technology as the battleground for big tech vendors

Trade, Intellectual Property, Privacy

• Trade tensions in a contracting global economy
• Outsourced manufacturing, software development and R&D
• Export controls and industrial espionage
• Patents, copyrights, trademarks and trade secrets, licensing
• Encryption, network surveillance, Big Brother

to be continued

Reding, a former journalist and legislator from Luxembourg (bio), laid out her vision for what she called “an internet of things” in an October 3 speech at the European Policy Center in Brussels. Her 14-page prepared remarks argued that Europe, overall, leads the world in broadband penetration and that a few EU nations even beat South Korea and Japan in connecting households and business (PDF of written text).

“European standards for mobile communications continue to dominate and expand world-wide,”  Reding said, giving European firms an advantage in delivering software and other media through smart phones.

Reding went on to describe a ubiquitous and mobile internet of the future, characterized by “almost unlimited bandwidth capacity, wireless access everywhere, trillions of devices interconnected, integrated security and trust for all parties, and adaptive tools for personal services.”

She envisions this future internet as the Christmas tree of economic growth and these trillions of devices as profitable applications that would hang off the network. For instance, the winter traveler returning home from a long trip could use an internet-enabled remote control to turn on the heat and warm a cold flat. Elderly patients at home could be monitored by long-distance diagnostics. “This evolution presents enormous opportunities that we cannot afford to miss,” argued Reding who sees behind these future applications trillions of motors and sensors and software applications — the sort of products that create jobs in a knowledge economy.

With Europe now mired in the same financial crisis that has already humbled the United States, it may be difficult for member nations to focus on futuristic industrial policy. But Reding’s vision has already caught the attention of at least one world power, Google. It’s technology ambassador, Vint Cerf, one of the founders of the internet, recently returned from a European tour with kind words for Reding.

“Her bottom line is simple: the Internet will thrive only by remaining free and open,” Cerf wrote in a blog posting that references the so-called Network Neutrality debate.

In brief, net neutrality, is the slogan of those who want to preserve the status quo on the delivery of internet services — that is, new functions appear at the edge of the network and consumers take advantage of all-you-can-eat service plans to download whatever they please. The telephone and cable companies that deliver internet services to homes and, in some cases, businesses, want the flexibility to create tiers of service to assure, for instance, that granny’s diagnostic monitor isn’t disrupted by teenagers downloading pirated movies.

Cerf’s simplification of Reding’s message grows out of Google’s desire to get policy makers in the United States to enact some form of net neutrality legislation and also reinvigorate what is widely thought to be a stagnant broadband infrastructure.

Judging by her speeches, Reding’s views toward net neutrality are somewhat nuanced. She does worry that the “internet of things” could be unplugged if network providers have overly restrictive pricing powers. “A truly open digital economy based on interoperable networks and inclusive access to the internet is of crucial importance,” she said in September.  But at the same time she tipped her hat to network operators, noting that, “we must recognize that openness for innovation sometimes cannot exclude legitimate network management practices . . . traffic prioritization can sometimes be an important driver of value and growth for operators.”

Meanwhile, there is some sentiment in Europe that broadband internet access should be a universal service requirement enforced on network providers. The European Commission recently launched a debate about whether high-speed access should be as much a right in the 21st Century as a dial-up phone was in the 20th Century. The EU’s current universal service statement does not include such a requirement but it does obligate policy makers to revisit the menu of services every three years. To require network operators to provide a new service “it must be considered essential for social inclusion, i.e. it should be used by the vast majority of people/households.”

To calibrate Europe’s action on these issues against thinking in the United States, consider that the lower chamber of its national legislature, the House of Representatives, only recently passed a bill to get more information about how many Americans have high-speed access. “Broadband data collection in America is such a mess,” noted the web newletter Ars Technica. That bill still faces a vote in the U.S. Senate.

So while the United States decides whether it wants a better sense of its broadband infrastructure, Reding is advising Europeans to use the evolution toward an “internet of things” to leapfrog its trans-Atlantic rival.

“Today California alone attracts twice as much venture capital as the whole of Europe,” she said in her Brussels speech, suggesting that bold policies could close the gap. She advanced one such idea relative to the switch from analog to HDTV television broadcasting (FAQ on U.S. deadline).

“Let’s give 50 percent of the gains back to broadcasters to experiment with HDTV or Mobile TV and use the other 50 percent for innovative broadband such as bringing the high speed internet to all Europeans to cover all the white spots where there is no fast internet,” she said.

No surprise then, when the California Coastal Commission, an environmental regulatory agency in the United States, studied desalination in 1993 it noted that 60 percent of the 7,500 plants then in existence were located in the Middle East, where need, wealth and energy abundance make this process most practical.

It has taken coast-loving California almost 15 years to embrace desalination. But with its 35 million inhabitants facing a drought, state regulators recently approved a $300 million desalination plant for San Diego, a city on the state’s desert-like southern coast. The plant, which will be built by Poseidon Resources, is expected to go online in 2011 and produce about 10 percent of San Diego’s drinking water.

Environmental opponents said sea-life would be sucked into the input pipes and also worried about the effects of pumping the salt-concentrated brine back into the ocean. A letter from local elected officials, who needed state approval to overrule these objections, suggested how far salt-from-seawater extraction has come in the last 15 years:

Today, there are 21,000 desalination plants producing 3 billion gallons of drinking water a day in 120 countries around the world. 

The Pacific Institute, a U.S. environmental group, took a neutral stance toward desalination in a recent report that looked at two dozen similar proposals in California that had been awaiting the San Diego decision. The report also provides an overview of global desalination projects, citing a new and environmentally-sensitive plant in Perth, Australia as a model.

Growing water scarcity should create demand for desalination. But in addition to environmental concerns, this technology runs afoul of rising energy costs. The current favored technology for salt-water extraction, reverse osmosis, depends on energy-powered pumps. Rising energy prices put a premium on energy-saving process improvements.

One example in this regard is the California company,  Energy Recovery Inc., which took itself public in July on the strength of a pump that reuses the energy from one part of the process to reduce overall energy costs. Its stock is currently “under water” to use the market slang for a company selling below its offering price. But given the fundamentals of water demand, once financial markets settle down, Energy Recovery and its competitors should resurface as growth investments.

“The next killer app will be in clean technology,” predicted Edmunds, who manages Deloitte’s practice in the western United States, including Silicon Valley.

Of course Deloitte is trying to make this come true by arranging investment and collaboration between clients in China and the West. But P. Christopher Lu, the head of Deloitte’s 8,100-person Chinese practice, suggested that need and public pressure would drive Chinese demand for a range of environmental remediation technologies.

On a brief visit to San Francisco before returning to his office in Shanghai, Lu said Chinese youth are environmentally aware because they live with the consequences of the industrial pollution that has been an unwelcome side-effect of more than 10 years of double-digit economic growth. Although the government controls mass media, the internet offers new means for public opinion to assert itself and Lu said Chinese leaders must take such sentiment into account.

“There are times when it is raining mud in Beijing,” Lu said, owing to the desertification of inland areas. 

While China may one day become a market for Western environmental technologies, so far the most visible evidence of Chinese involvement in green tech is the manufacturing of solar cells. Consider the rapid rise of the Chinese solar manufacturer Suntech, which went public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2005 and recently made San Francisco its North American headquarters.

Behind the scenes China has laid the groundwork to make itself a solar manufacturing power by creating a domestic capacity to refine polysilicon, the excruciatingly purified version of sand used to produce most semiconductors, including solar cells and computer chips. Chinese consumption of this vital but little-known product had caused polysilicon shortages a few years back. Since then manufacturers in Europe and North America have built new refining capacity that should be online soon and polysilicon supply could overshoot demand for a while especially if the world economy cools.

Meanwhile, the Deloitte officials say an increasingly affluent and urbanized Chinese population will create a domestic demand for clean technologies. “There are 200 million people moving into the middle class,” Edmunds said. Urbanization is an equally powerful trend. Lu said that about 40 percent of the Chinese population is urbanized today. Government plans call for moving an additional 20 percent of the populace into cities over the next two to three decades, he said. 

Such plans would involve a movement of upwards of 200 million people, or roughly the combined populations of Germany, France and the United Kingdom. So perhaps along with concrete and steel, China will have to buy environmental technologies — either that or equip city-dwellers with mud-proof umbrellas.

The EU action follows a request, made in May by the United States and seconded by Japan, asking the WTO to investigate tariff charges of up to 14 percent that EU officials had placed on certain cable and satellite set-top TV boxes, flat panel computer monitors, and multifunction printers.  Global exports of these products were estimated at over $70 billion in 2007, according to a May statement by U.S. Trade Representative Susan C. Schwab.

“The EU should be working with the United States to promote new technologies, not finding protectionist gimmicks to apply new duties to these products,” Schwab said.

The EU rejected those accusations in May, insisting that once set-top boxes evolved to include hard disk drives — allowing users to pause recordings or speed through commercials — they became “properly classified as video recorders” falling outside the scope of the 1996 accord.

“The only way to adapt the ITA to changed technologies is to renegotiate the product scope of the ITA with all its signatories,” the EU’s External Trade directorate said in a statement, adding that, “Such a renegotiation would also allow addressing other problems encountered in trade of IT products.”

The statement left those “other problems” unspecified but the dispute appears to have been simmering for nearly two years before the U.S. brought it to boil in May by filing its WTO action. Taiwan has joined the U.S.-Japanese alignment against Europe according to the Information Technology Industry Council, a lobbying organization headquartered in the United States and dominated by U.S. brands.

The ITIC issued a statement this week calling the EU’s call to re-negotiate the ITA “a distraction” from the U.S. trade complaint, which the WTO’s Dispute Settlement Body is expected to begin considering on Tuesday (Sept. 23).

This tech tariff rift suggests that the collapse of the WTO’s Doha round in July cannot be blamed entirely on bananas and the other agricultural differences that received the most attention at the time — and that imbalances in the high-tech goods economy the EU pushing the pause button on “free trade.”

It’s been six decades since the invention of the transistor spawned a new genre of tools for work, play and communications. Science, industry and capital have trained fickle semiconductors to switch electricity on or off at will. This seemingly simple trick breathes purpose into the digital vocabulary of one and zero. Ingenious software, paired with advances in materials science and manufacturing, have created a global electronics industry that continues to touch and transform our lives.

Join me as I explore this technology realm. As a reporter in Silicon Valley I know a bit about the topic. I can point to samples from the articles I’ve written or tout my book. But keeping a hobby blog on media has taught me that writing online is less a lecture than a conversation. I have an ambitious goal — to track the many sub-sectors of technology, and spot opportunities and challenges. That’s too big a job for one brain. I need your questions, insights and criticisms.

My bio can tell you about my past but here I want to reveal how I think. I see technology as a process of iteration and look for forces, inventions or personalities that drive or impede innovation. History and experience are my guides. Consider how Japan rose from the ashes of World War II to become an industrial power on the strength of the keiretsu system. That tactic of creating alliances among companies, backed by government policies, has become the template for building technology clusters. During the 1980s Taiwan followed this formula to make itself an essential cog in electronics manufacturing. During the 1990s Ireland and India leveraged well-educated, English-speaking workforces to become service and software centers. More recently Germany used tax policy to start a solar manufacturing industry and South Korea has made itself a world leader in broadband internet.

The emergence of the World Wide Web as the popular manifestation of the internet is second only to the transistor as a technology catalyst. The Web has become a global switchboard that short-circuits industries and institutions. In the mid-1990s the Spanish-born sociologist Manuel Castells wrote ”The Rise of the Network Society,” a prescient work that predicted white-collar outsourcing, the globalization of labor, the enfeeblement of governments and the paradoxical re-emergence of tribalism.  (This interview offers a taste of his thinking.)

In 2005, ten years after the Netscape IPO ignited the dot.com boom, Wired Magazine cofounder Kevin Kelly put the network on a spiritual plane. In his essay, ”We Are the Web,” he saw the stirrings of a planet-wide consciousness, with:

billions of human minds entangled in this global network. This gargantuan Machine already exists in a primitive form. In the coming decade, it will evolve into an integral extension not only of our senses and bodies but our minds.

That’s a bit mystical for my pragmatic sensibilities, but the abbreviated lingo of cell phone texting already hints at how technology is changing culture. We talk about digital natives raised on music players, MySpace pages, video games and virtual worlds. But what does that mean? An expert on media consumption has said that:

Media use is higher (in hours spent) than sleeping. It is the No. 1 activity we do in our lives,” said Ball State Professor Robert Papper, a former broadcast journalist. “People put on media shortly after they get up in the morning and then it accompanies them through their entire day.”

So in less than one lifetime the transistor has immersed many of us in a waking dream! Technology this powerful engenders new fears, including the not-so-distant speculation about what may occur once our electronic tools start using artificial intelligence to improve themselves.

But the global electronics industry has no off switch. Indeed, innovation and integration accelerate. Thousands of engineers in Silicon Valley design chips with billions of transistors. They ship their designs to fabs from Israel to Malaysia where billion-dollar machines make parts that may sell for a few bucks. Chip-making begins with silicon ingots smelted to excruciating purity and once they cool, software engineers from India to the Ukraine vie to write new code. Marketers from Tokyo to Manhattan devise products with short shelf lives, while investors from London to Hong Kong try to pick winners and losers.

To freeze such a process and pack it into a story seems like a fool’s errand. But by assembling bits and pieces, likes tiles in a mosaic, we may stand back to get a glimpse of this vast undertaking. It will at least be fun and fascinating to try.

– Tom Abate