I know many people will be out this weekend, practicing walking down the streets and not looking where they're going.

This is in preparation for Google's new augmented-reality glasses -- code name Project Glass -- which were teased this week.

I use the word "teased" advisedly. Always.

For though the sight of Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin wearing the glasses in public might offer credibility to the high-tech specs, it might also reveal a desire on Google's part for outpourings of love.

You see, those who have spent much of their lives working in augmented reality are offering that Google's lenses are very far-sighted.

As Wired reports, Pranav Mistry, of MIT Labs, and Blair MacIntyre, director of the Augmented Environments Lab at Georgia Tech, are both squinting with misgivings.

Mistry is less than misty-eyed at Google's revelation. "The small screen seen in the photos cannot give the experience the video is showing," he told Wired.

MacIntyre suggested that with the small screen placed to the side, it would be very hard to see and interact with the actual content on display.

Some may imagine that there might be a helping of envy in such comments. But MacIntyre is more than forceful in his view that Google's glasses are half-empty: "In one simple fake video, Google has created a level of overhype and overexpectation that their hardware cannot possibly live up to."

The most touching and telling word here might be "hype." The company that once eschewed hype as if it was an especially retrograde plague is now embracing it like a long-lost (and wealthy) uncle.

Whether it's for Google+ or for Chrome, Google's strategy with respect to real human beings has taken a mightily radical turn that even its own self-driving
car might balk at.

Larry, Sergey, and friends have come to realize that people have feelings, and if you can make those feelings about your company positive, then you can persuade them to buy far more of your products.

Yes, that's what Apple does -- though it also manages to make its products appeal to those human feelings too, something around which Google still struggles to get its vast head.

Project Glass might well, in the future, prove to be more than a little amusement. We might all be wearing these things and even learning how not to barge into each other on Fifth Avenue. Currently, though, Google's putting this out there to make you like the company more.

Which, in its way, is a refreshing change.

With new legislation authorizing incentive spectrum auctions, it's tempting to think the crisis in mobile broadband has been avoided. But it will take at least 10 years to put new spectrum to work, and the FCC's own estimate is that we have only three years left before hitting the wall.

With the passage last week of legislation authorizing the FCC to conduct new spectrum auctions, you might think that the looming spectrum crisis has been averted.

Nothing could be farther from the truth--or more dangerous to the continued health of the mobile ecosystem.

To avoid severe service interruptions or outright collapse of mobile networks, the FCC's 2010 National Broadband Plan estimated that mobile users will need an additional 300MHz of spectrum by 2015 and an additional 500 MHz by 2020. Many industry insiders believe these estimates are actually low.

The FCC now has the authority to conduct auctions to get that capacity into the hands of mobile carriers. The problem is that we don't have anywhere near that much usable spectrum left.

The frontier is now closed
Barely a blip a few years ago, mobile broadband is growing at an astronomical pace. AT&T reports that since offering the
iPhone on its networks in 2007, data volumes had increased by 8,000 percent by 2010. According to a report last week from the White House Council of Economic Advisers (PDF), mobile data traffic will increase twenty-fold between 2010 and 2015.

Existing networks simply cannot handle that increased demand without access to more bands of usable radio spectrum.

That would have been easy in the old days. Radio frequencies were plentiful, and users were few and far between. But as George Mason University economist Thomas Hazlett noted last week in Washington, after 85 years of handing out spectrum licenses, often at minimal charge to the licensee, the U.S. has run out.

We don't have 500 or even 300MHz of usable spectrum left to auction, at any price. Today's available inventory is closer to zero.

While technological innovation expands the range of usable frequencies, there's no doubt among engineers and policymakers that as things stand today, mobile users will soon hit a very unforgiving wall. The "frontier" is closed, just as historian Frederick Jackson Turner concluded about the American West in 1893. Going forward, spectrum will no longer be allocated. It can only be reallocated.

How have we come so perilously close to running out of spectrum? Part of the problem has to do with the FCC's increasingly outdated licensing system. Assignments have historically been based on transient and idiosyncratic criteria that favored once-promising new applications and technologies (e.g., UHF television, pagers, satellite radio).

This "command and control" model has resulted in a badly splintered and increasingly unmanageable allocation table of more than 50,000 localized licenses. Many of these licenses arbitrarily limit their use of spectrum to applications that have faded or disappeared, but there's no easy mechanism for reclaiming spectrum that could be put to better use. The FCC doesn't even have a working inventory of all its licenses.

(The federal government itself holds vast swaths of spectrum, much of it warehoused, but no central authority has the power to free up under- or unused bands.)

New auctions aim to dislodge underutilized frequencies
In the 1990s, the FCC finally shifted to an auction model, removing some of the whimsy from the process and, not incidentally, generating billions of dollars for the Treasury. But the agency still has a hard time resisting old temptations. Instead of picking winners and losers directly, the FCC now attaches conditions or limits auction eligibility to micromanage emerging markets and industries--or try to in any case. One result of this tinkering has been that several recent auctions failed to meet their reserve price.

The legislation enacted last week will curb some of these abuses. It will also test a novel approach to reallocating existing spectrum licenses. Over-the-air television broadcasters, who hold spectrum particularly well-suited for mobile broadband uses, will be asked to name a price to give back some or all of their current allocations.

If enough volunteers come forward, the agency will auction off that spectrum to mobile providers--or anyone else, including other broadcasters--who values the frequency more than the current licensee. The government will then share the proceeds of the auctions with the participants, reducing the deficit and redirecting spectrum to higher-valued uses.

New licenses will come with flexible use permission, making it easier for future market transactions to reallocate it again when future applications or technologies find a better use. (Existing spectrum licenses can be sold today on secondary markets with FCC approval, but use limitations and conditions still apply.)

This "incentive auction" model is promising, and Congress and the FCC are to be commended for passing this critical legislation after two years of logjams and tangential fights that kept even bipartisan proposals stalled.

But the law doesn't come close to solving the spectrum crunch--not by a long shot.

For one thing, it isn't at all clear that enough broadcasters will volunteer. Over-the-air viewership has fallen dramatically over the last two decades as over 90 percent of all households shifted to cable, satellite, and now broadband Internet alternatives. But the economics of local television stations are complicated. For example, federal law allows local broadcasters to force cable providers to carry their signal or negotiate a price for retransmitting it. Careful exploitation of this right often masks what are actually failed businesses.

And while the FCC will have the ability to "repack" nonparticipating channels to create contiguous nationwide licenses, that process will be long and contentious. In the lead-up to passage of incentive auction legislation, broadcasters lobbied intensely to limit the agency's ability to maximize auction outcomes. The lobbying will only get more aggressive as the FCC gears up to design the new system.

Time now for the short and medium-term solutions
At best, it will take upwards of 10 years before significant new spectrum for mobile broadband can be deployed from the incentive auctions. And we're already two years into the FCC's own doomsday clock toward spectrum exhaustion.

So now that the legislative battle is over, it's well past the time to think about short and medium-term plans to stave off an epic failure of the mobile revolution. The stakes are high. The mobile industry is one of the few bright spots in the otherwise sour economy. According to a recent Deloitte study, investment in 4G networks could range from $25 billion to $53 billion over the next four years, generating up to $151 billion in GDP and as many as 771,000 new jobs. And that doesn't count the revenue from app stores and the services they make possible.

So what can we do while waiting for the incentive auctions to get under way? Until recently, carriers in need of more spectrum could merge with other carriers to achieve economies of both scale and technology. In the past six years, the FCC approved nearly a dozen mobile mergers, nearly all of which were motivated by the need to make better use of limited mobile bandwidth.

But in rejecting AT&T's proposed merger with T-Mobile last year, the FCC sent an unmistakable signal that it will no longer allow market transactions as a work-around to its own plodding and sclerotic mismanagement of the nation's airwaves. The battle is heating up, for example, over Verizon's pending acquisition of AWS spectrum from a consortium of cable companies. T-Mobile, ironically, is now aping the familiar claim that allowing Verizon to purchase any additional spectrum will harm competition. The spectrum being transferred, however, is not currently being used for anything.

Besides more spectrum, the most significant way a mobile broadband carrier can enhance performance and capacity is to add more cell towers and upgrade antennae at existing sites to improve network density and site efficiency. Mobile carriers already spend billions of dollars each year to upgrade and expand their core infrastructure. They would spend even more--if only local zoning authorities would let them.

They won't. Despite a 2009 FCC rule requiring local authorities to decide on cell tower modification and construction requests within 90 and 150 days respectively, thousands of applications are languishing in political limbo. A U.S. Court of Appeals in Texas recently upheld the FCC rule, but it has rarely been enforced.

Areas with some of the most vocal complaints about existing network quality, not surprisingly, also have the worst record for approving applications, even to add equipment to existing towers. A 2009 study from wireless industry group
CTIA published just before the FCC's "shot clock" was imposed found that cell tower applications in the San Francisco Bay Area were regularly stonewalled for 28 to 36 months. Nationwide, according to the FCC, "of 3,300 pending zoning applications for wireless facilities, more than 760 (nearly one quarter) had been pending for more than a year and 180 had been pending for more than three years."

The new federal law authorizing incentive auctions took some modest steps toward curbing these abuses. That's a good starting point. But coordinated state and federal action will be needed to collapse the black hole of infrastructure zoning delays.

Improving spectral efficiency will also require clear-cutting generations of other encrusted and obsolete rules at all levels of government. In 2010, for example, the FCC cleared the use of the "white spaces" between television channels for unlicensed wireless technologies. The agency didn't approve the first new device to use white space until late last year, however. Quick approval of spectrum transfers, more flexible licensing, and relief from onerous wireline regulations that limit the use of fixed networks as both support for and competition with mobile services also need to happen, and quickly.

Mobile broadband providers will also have to rely on technological solutions to improve network performance. A wide range of innovations, including smart antennae that can easily switch bands, miniature cell towers, home-based femtocels, and software that allows multiple uses of the same bands without interference are all being deployed to make better use of existing allocations. Smartphones can also be programmed to switch from cellular networks to local Wi-Fi, offloading wireless traffic to high-capacity wired networks whenever possible.

Incentives for consumers, both carrots and sticks, could likewise help stave off network failure. Providers will need to offer more incentives to quickly retire older mobile technologies. Since each new generation of cellular protocol makes more efficient use of spectrum than its predecessors, getting customers off 2G and 3G networks and onto 4G (especially 4G LTE) networks will save considerable bandwidth.

LTE, for example, can handle roughly six to eight times the capacity of a 2G network. Some of those savings would be lost to users taking advantage of video and other high-bandwidth services available on LTE, but not so much as to use up all the increased efficiencies.

Graduated or tiered bandwidth pricing, likewise, discourages excessive network use by a few extreme customers, especially at peak times.

Coordinated efforts are key
This is only the start of a much longer list of important initiatives. Short- and medium-solutions to the spectrum crisis are possible, but won't come easily. Avoiding disaster in the mobile ecosystem requires a combination of smart technology investments, innovative business practices, and policy reforms likely to offend vested interests.

Each is valuable on its own, but coordination will be crucial if we are to improve spectral efficiency enough to keep mobile users going while we wait for the incentive auctions to run their course.

Even if we get through the next few years, it's clear that staving off future crises will require radical changes to spectrum management. The patchwork quilt woven by 85 years of quixotic and often political decision-making has left U.S. airwaves dangerously inflexible and unnecessarily fractured. The accelerating pace of technological innovation is on a collision course with command-and-control assignment of spectrum. Something has to give.

For the long term, we need to rethink the entire spectrum map. Given current and future advances in radio technologies and software, in fact, we may soon find we won't even need a map--or a regulator that believes it can do a better job allocating spectrum in fits and starts than a market that runs on Internet time.

That assumes we survive the current, largely self-inflicted crisis. First things first: regulators have much more work to do to clean up the current mess.

Preparing food creates a lot of waste. It's an unavoidable necessity; meats, fruits and vegetables all have parts that are inedible or undesirable. And that doesn't even bring into consideration the packaging that is necessary to get it all into our kitchens. It's what we do with that waste that we can control. Like make it grow into something beautiful (and delicious).

While it would be nice if all unwanted kitchen items (and cooking experiments) could be planted into the ground, hidden from view until they turned into something useful, sadly, that is not usually the case. Having learned to live with embarrassing burnt cookies and overdone roasts--as opposed to burying them in the back yard--it is nice to see that something that does turn into something useful when hidden underground.

The SolarMill Bamboo Cutting Board + Basil Herb Garden encourages positive results both in the kitchen and in the backyard. The company, which prides itself as being able to "produce sustainable products using 100% solar-powered machinery," uses special seeded paper in its packaging. After unwrapping the cutting board and reading the relevant information, the paper gets put into the ground as opposed to the trash or recycling bin. Soon thereafter, the seeded paper spouts and grows into a garden--one that helps with more than just the cooking.

Streaming high-definition video wirelessly throughout your home will be a major benefit of Wi-Fi 802.11ac in the next few years, says NPD In-Stat.

Expected to receive final approval by the IEEE toward the end of this year, 802.11ac will boast several improvements over 802.11n. The new wireless flavor will offer speeds surpassing 1 gigabit per second, almost three times that of 802.11n. It also promises to provide better coverage throughout an entire home with fewer dead spots.

From a technical standpoint, the new standard will use such technologies as beamforming and higher amplitude modulation to send more data faster and more efficiently than 802.11n, NPD In-Stat analyst Gregory Potter told CNET. And 802.11ac will help smartphones and other mobile devices by providing higher bandwidth and a savings in power compared with 802.11n.

As 802.11ac starts to hit a variety of gadgets, including laptops, smartphones,
tablets, and TVs, Potter sees high-definition video as the major beneficiary.

"The primary use case for consumers using 802.11ac is for video distribution," the analyst said. "One scenario would be utilizing 802.11ac in a cable or satellite set top box for distribution of video to multiple televisions outside the main viewing area. Another would be utilizing 802.11ac on a smartphone to stream HD video directly to a television."

Once 802.11ac is approved this year, it will then be ready for certification by the Wi-Fi Alliance in early 2013, Potter explained. That will then pave the way for its full adoption by technology and consumer electronics companies.

At first, though, the industry will likely release a slew of "draft" 802.11ac devices, just as was seen with Wireless-N. Several vendors already showed off some of their upcoming 802.11ac products at
CES earlier this month, including Buffalo, which demoed its first wireless router powered by the new protocol.

The first smartphones sporting 802.11ac will pop up early in 2013, forecasts Potter. At the same time, digital televisions adopting the new standard will appear next year, with NPD In-Stat projecting more than 2 million 802.11ac-equipped TVs .

But consumers will probably have to wait until around 2015 before 802.11ac really latches onto the market.

At that point, the analyst expects 802.11ac to appear in more than 18 million routers, 25 million TVs, 129 million tablets, 184 million notebooks, and 279 million smartphones. Altogether, around 1 billion devices equipped with the new standard are forecast to ship in another three years.

LAS VEGAS--Ok, maybe I meant they dance and draw better than me, but the SketRobo and DiscoRobo are some seriously skilled robots.

Showcased at the Digital Experience press event on Monday, the pair of bots are from Vietnamese robotics company TOSY. The SketRobo was the more impressive of the two. Just give the humanoid a piece of paper and a pen, and it will start drawing intricate images right before your eyes.

TOSY representatives told me that the SketRobo is currently limited to sketching objects that are already programmed into its systems. However, the plan is to equip the robot with a facial recognition system and motion sensors, so it will be able to draw portraits of people (but can it do caricatures?). The company also envisions using the SketRobo as a teaching tool for children.

Meanwhile, the DiscoRobo is a droid that loves to dance. It moves to the beat of the music, and though we've seen dancing robots before, the DiscoRobo's got more moves and attitude than anything we've seen before.

All that said, it looks like the best is yet to come. TOSY will be unveiling a new "entertainment robot" at
CES 2012, and guess who will be on hand to introduce it? None other than Justin Bieber. That's right, Bieber fever is hitting the Las Vegas Convention Center, so check back on Wednesday afternoon for the big reveal.

LAS VEGAS--USB mics aren't known for being fashion plates. Looks aren't tops on your list when you're Skyping or jockeying a teleconference. Blue Microphones is changing that with the new Tiki mic.

The Tiki portable USB mic has some pleasant specs like CD quality audio, a multicolored LED status indicator, and an extended docking cable. Also, it's less than 3 inches.

It filters background noise and can be set to a natural recording mode as well.

An intelligent mute feature shuts down all the dog barking and keyboard tapping sounds when you're not talking.

But who are we kidding? This little mic is all about the styling. It looks like a shrunken-down classic chrome mic embedded in a zig-zag holder.

I checked out this new arrival on the show floor here at
CES, and you can't help but reach out and touch it. It makes me want to softly sing Clarence Carter songs to Skype.

The $59 Tiki fits in well with Blue's lineup of studio microphones. It carries over a lot of the design cues that make the mics popular, but has the audio quality cred to make it a USB mic contender.