Will consumer adoption of unlimited mobile plans cause your call quality to suck? ABI Research seems to think so. In a report released today, ABI Research says unlimited plans can lead to more phone calls, more data use and worst of all, more YouTube-related video streaming. And that leads to more of a burden on wireless networks and backhaul. Since Sprint’s unlimited plan includes 3G data as well as voice, it may be the canary in the coal mine for other carriers waiting to see what unlimited means for their networks.

Brian McConnell is the founder of the Worldwide Lexicon project and Der Mundo.

The launch of Google’s Application Engine, which allows developers to build a web application and then host it on Google’s existing infrastructure, is a watershed moment in the software development industry. The days of building and hosting your own servers, except for specialized applications, are officially over.

This is good news. And App Engine will give everyone, including Amazon, a nice scare, which means that these companies will be forced to take a hard look at what they offer today, and what they need to do to improve it.

Here’s what I want on behalf of our firm, a web application company, from an elastic computing provider. (I think the majority of developers and managers will agree with most of these points.):

• I want scalable computing and bandwidth on autopilot. I don’t want people spending their time configuring server arrays.
• I want the service to look like a single instance of a generic Linux CPU with services pre-installed
• I want to be able to use the scripting language of my choice (mine are PHP, Python or Ruby)
• I want a distributed file system that looks like an ordinary file path
• I want MySQL in the local cloud for database services
• I want everything to be standards-based, to the fullest extent possible, so that I can spread resources across more than one vendor and if I need to change vendors, I don’t have to redesign my entire application
• I want the option of not hosting applications with a potential competitor.

Google’s big weakness — which Amazon, Rackspace and others will soon exploit — is that it’s not a neutral player in this market. So for companies that are building highly automated services and web apps, Google’s inherent conflict of interest is an issue. I think App Engine will be a great deal for independent developers who want to build and host their apps somewhere but don’t care so much about building a business, much the way Geocities and other services were great for people who wanted a home for their web pages.

I don’t think it’s such a good fit for companies with legitimate concerns about vendor neutrality, access to sensitive data, etc. I know my board would be squeamish about hosting everything at Google. The search giant’s motto may be “Don’t Be Evil,” but given the choice between hosting at a company that also offers its own web services and a neutral vendor, I’d go with the neutral vendor.

In terms of vendors, Amazon seems most likely to benefit, as App Engine has further legitimized the concept of cloud computing. And in terms of needed improvements, AWS has the fewest. S3, last time I checked, required a lot of work to implement. It should have looked like a local file path, with caching and whatnot being handled transparently so apps don’t need to know about S3. Same thing with database services. I’d just like to be able to talk to a MySQL or Postgres server in the cloud, way easier than building something around a new system.

Amazon’s simple database server may be better, but it doesn’t matter. SQL is like ASCII. That’s what people are accustomed to using, and that’s what all the tools are built around. All Amazon really needs to do is make their elastic computing service look like a Linux CPU with a giant local file system, and a pre-provisioned SQL database server ready to talk to. Add some basic tools for launching and killing new systems in response to CPU or network load, and this sounds like it’d be pretty useful. (We’ve been looking at AWS pretty closely for a while now).

As with hosting and colocation, I don’t see this being a winner-takes-all market. There have always been a variety of vendors catering to different markets. Sometimes you need a cage where you can install specialty appliances (spam filters or VoIP servers, for example). So it seems to me that the winners in this category will be the same companies that have done well renting remote servers. They can offer users a range of services, from elastic computing to remote servers to rackspace and connectivity. That’s a complete solution, which if you’re building a company around your services, is often what you need.

I’ve been looking at several elastic computing services. Every one I’ve looked at so far was close to what we needed, but not quite there. Hopefully App Engine will scare the bejesus out of other companies to the point that they’ll work out the few remaining issues with these products, allowing us throw out our dedicated servers and smoothly switch over to an elastic computing platform.

Chipmaker SiBeam scored $40 million yesterday and said it would begin production of its 60 GHz chips used to transmit uncompressed HD video wirelessly throughout the house. SiBeam is one of the fabless companies behind the WirelessHD standard that is competing with Wi-Fi and Ultra-Wideband to push wireless high definition video transfer. If all goes well in production, SiBeam chips will be available in consumer devices for this year’s holiday season.

Dubai port authorities have impounded two ships, MV Hounslow and MT Ann, believed to be responsible for damage to undersea cables that saw India lose half of its Internet capacity earlier this year, according to India’s Hindu News. Conspiracy theories have flourished about the source of the cuts, which affected the undersea cable network of a Reliance Globalcom unit. Reliance fingered the two based on satellite footage of ship movement in the Mediterranean around that time. And while it’s not clear whether the two ships are behind the service interruption yet, even if they are, it probably won’t stop the speculation that surrounded the original break.

Now that the haze of exhaustion has worn off, I’m reviewing my notes from CTIA. Our cheat sheet was spot on — with the exception of an Android phone, that is. The same prototypes were available that folks saw in February at the Mobile World Congress show in Barcelona, but there was no actual handset there with which to muck around.

Another disappointment was Sprint’s delay of the launch of Xohm until later this summer. Yet even despite the sense that LTE has gained the upper hand with existing carriers, plenty of vendors were showing WiMAX products. But really, the real news at CTIA this year was around the services that can be delivered over a mobile phone, not the phones or the networks on which those services will be accessed.

I left the mobile TV news to NewTeeVee. On the handset side, touch phones reigned, but there was little else to get excited about. Speech recognition, however, has really gained credibility as a navigation tool with a product launch by Yahoo of its speech-powered oneSearch product and several announcements from Nuance Communications, ranging from voicemail to text to a navigation partnership with TeleNav.

Which brings me to the space that I believe will have the most impact on my life in the near term — Internet-connected navigation services. Om has covered the Dash Express, which is designed for the car, but CTIA made me rethink my plans for a Dash and refocus on my phone.

In June, the Samsung Instinct will combine voice, turn-by-turn directions and an unlimited data plan to produce the BLT of personal nav devices. Allowing voice input and output without forcing me to pay an extra $10 a month to access the service makes me consider changing carriers. I also learned about Dial Directions, a voice-activated search service accessed by calling DIR-ECT-IONS. Simply state your current location and where you want to go, and the service will text you turn-by-turn directions. Some of the navigation options from Wayfinder were useful as well.

Indeed, this year the excitement centered on mobile phone services rather than the phones themselves. For carriers worried about, in the words of Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin, becoming mere “bitpipes,” such an emphasis represents both a worry and an opportunity.

IBM today announced a new supercomputer called Hydro-Cluster that uses water to cool down the device and reduce overall energy consumption. Call this a not-so-lean-yet-mean-green-machine. This system uses water-chilled copper plates above each of its microprocessors that continuously remove heat from the electronics, the company said in a press release, and claimed that it can cut data centers’ energy consumption by 40 precent. Up next? IBM says they are working on ways to allow water to go directly inside the chip. Once inside, the water can be routed out of the computer and pumped into the heating system for re-use.

As we keep more and more of our valuable content online, do we need a new type of storage? A crop of venture-backed companies — among them Storwize and Ocarina Networks to Gear6 — certainly seems to think so. These companies solve one of two problems: how to access the data faster and how to store it more compactly.

Unlike the previous storage paradigm, which focused on backing up relatively static enterprise data and storing frequently accessed database information, storage today must be more nimble. Everything from photo sites to online email companies are offering and even encouraging consumers to store more and more bits of data. At last count, there were 281 exabytes of data being created each year. Much like cramming clothes into a suitcase, the more information you can store on a given box, the less you have to pay for the boxes — as well as the infrastructure to keep them running.

Last year, large storage vendors such as NetApp and EMC pushed the concept of de-dupulication, essentially storing only the new files at each backup, rather than the entire system, to reduce storage costs. Ocarina and Storwize solve this problem by going further than ignoring previously stored files, with an appliance that unpacks each file and then compresses it using proprietary algorithms.

The flip side of storing more is accessing that data faster. We’ve written about Gear6 and Atrato before, which both use caching and software to keep frequently accessed files easily available. The end road for most of these startups, however, is an acquisition, perhaps by bigger storage players such as EMC, or maybe even by Dell, HP or IBM.

Photo of the First IBM disk storage system courtesy of the Computer History Museum

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