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Posts Tagged ‘Innovation’

Help Us Google, You’re Our Only Broadband Hope. (The Government Has No Spine.)

For the future of innovation in the United States, few things seem as important access to broadband Internet connections. The FCC seems to realize this, which is why they’ve set up the National Broadband Plan. And yet, we’re screwed.

As Harvard Law professor Yochai Benkler lays out in an excellent op-ed today in the New York Times, this new broadband plan may sound great, but it won’t go nearly far enough. The reason is that there is simply nowhere near enough competition in almost all of the markets in this country. In fact, under the new plan, some 85% of homes covered would have no choice when it comes to a provider. So while it’s great that just about everyone will potentially have broadband access in 2020, plenty likely won’t be able to afford it.

And even those lucky enough to have a choice, are probably only going to be able to choose between two options — and again, both of those are likely to be very expensive. The U.S. has the highest broadband prices among advanced nations, while countries like Japan and France get faster (and better) services, for a fraction of the price many of us pay. Again, it’s all about competition. So why do we put up with it? Because the U.S. government has no backbone and ruins its own ideas (such as the National Broadband Plan) because they give into corporate lobbyists.

As Benkler points out in his piece, Time Warner is quite pleased that it can set higher prices due to a lack of competition. Meanwhile, Comcast is raking in just about a billion dollars in profit each quarter thanks in large part to their pricing bullshit.

Is it expensive to lay down the necessary fiber for these super-fast networks? Of course. But there are plenty of ways that competitors could help the big players offset those costs if the government would simply make them open the pipes. But the big players don’t want that — they’re perfectly happy to pay the large upfront costs to ensure that they can reap the much larger rewards on the other end thanks to this lack of competition.

We may have but one hope.

While plenty are wary of how big Google is becoming, the Internet giant has so-far proved to be on the right side with regard to universal Internet access. They were instrumental in making sure the wireless spectrum would be (at least somewhat) open, and now they’re pushing the wired broadband movement in the right direction too with their insanely fast fiber push. While the FCC’s 100 Squared plan would put 100 megabit-per-second broadband in people’s homes by 2020, Google wants to put 1 gigabit-per-second connections in people’s homes much sooner.

Yes, Google is talking on a much smaller scale (500,000 homes vs. 100 million), but, if the initial response is any indication, Google may become a much, much bigger player in this space than they envision right now.

We’ve written a couple of stories about cities doing some wacky things to get Google’s attention so that they might bring the broadband to their cities (here’s Topeka, Kansas and Baltimore, Maryland, for example). But there are dozens of other cities also foaming at the mouth for access. Some examples:

• Longview, Texas has a Twitter account devoted to it and a website
• Both are true for Jersey City, NJ as well
• San Mateo, CA is issuing press releases to the media about its excitement and is getting TechCrunch 50 Red Beacon to lobby on its behalf
• Fresno, CA has a Facebook fan page for fiber with about 7,500 fans so far
• Grand Rapids, MI has a website, Facebook fan page (with over 33,000 fans), and Twitter account
• And yesterday, Greenville, SC had hundreds of citizens line up to create a huge Google logo

Those are just a few of the ones we’ve been tipped about. The reaction around the country to Google’s idea should make it very clear that the people of this country are demanding better access. And yet, the government won’t take the necessary steps to open the market up, and let it bloom because the lobbyists from the companies that stand to lose the most are actually the ones in control. If Google, one of the largest companies in this country, only believes they can afford to hook up 50,000 to 500,000 homes with their plan, how is any other company expected to compete with the incumbent players?

They won’t. Not unless the government grows some balls and backs real openness.

[photo: 20th Century Fox]

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2010 VC market outlook: No cash for clunkers

(Editor’s note: Don Rainey is a general partner at Grotech Ventures and author of the  “VC in DC” blog. He submitted this column to VentureBeat.)

Throughout the financial crisis of 2008-09, most venture capitalists wisely advised startups to hunker down. The best bet, they said, was to lower expenses and, above all else, avoid fundraising in 2009, since all eyes were on 2010 as the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. 

The advice, as it turns out, was somewhat short-sighted.

We are now 18 months past the height of the financial crisis. Back then, it didn’t require a doomsday-oriented PowerPoint presentation to know that difficult times lay ahead. The same, frustratingly, can be said today. This is a different capital environment, but it’s not necessarily any better. It’s just different – and it may be worse.

Because so many companies avoided fundraising last year, there is currently a glut of companies that likely need cash. Accordingly, the competition is fierce, and it includes many companies that didn’t grow much (if at all) in 2009. Many companies seeking funding in 2010 are (or soon will be) out of money, and as a result they’re in poor negotiating positions. Even good companies are fighting for one of history’s toughest investment pools.

For all the back and forth, thrust and parry, and plain old bitching by, between and about entrepreneurs and their investors, we all are sailing in the same boat. Most investors were once entrepreneurs and many entrepreneurs will become investors.  And, together, we are facing a great shakeout at a time when the country needs the innovation and the job growth that startups provide to the economy. It demands that we, as VCs, exercise great caution in identifying companies to back or continue backing in 2010.

In this environment, there is no cash for clunkers unless, of course, we’re talking about the government. The downward pressures of a year like 2009 push good companies (meaning ones that would have done well or reasonably well in a typical year) and the bad ones (meaning ones that wouldn’t have done well even without the downward environmental variable) into the same pool.

You could argue they’re always in the same pool and that only the great companies stand out. That’s true. It’s just truer right now. And distinguishing the two is the difficult task faced by VCs.

If your startup needs cash in 2010, present the facts to potential investors without apology and don’t gloss over the need. You may not get the deal you had hoped for, but you will keep your dream alive.

Look for investors that have complementary portfolio companies, which heighten the chances of an exit via merger or acquisition. And if you’ve previously secured initial funding, you’ll always do better staying with your current investors, since they have already supported the vision.

VCs, in the meantime, need to look forward, not back. Companies need to be judged, above all else, on their potential to succeed in the future. The past is important, but as all good investors know, past performance does not guarantee future results.  The companies that are most likely to succeed are the ones that did the most with the least in 2009. They typically have a nimble business model, a clear vision for success and an obvious market need – and those qualities should be at the fore of any 2010 investment discussion.

Photo by shawn.miller via Flickr

Tags: Venture Capital

Companies: Grotech Ventures

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Facebook Firehose May Be Released at Developer Conference F8

Facebook plans to announce the availability of a firehose of user data at its F8 developers conference in April, we believe based on research. Such an offering could be similar to the firehose that Twitter has shared with large partners and select small developers building the famous Twitter ecosystem of 3rd party applications around the web. A Facebook representative did not offer a denial, saying only that the company would not comment on speculation.

The huge social network was once private by default, then made controversial changes in December that pushed hundreds of millions of users toward publishing their information in public and now appears aimed to complete the about-face at its F8 developer conference by offering up public user data in a huge river that outside parties can consume, analyze and build on top of.

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The first F8 conference saw the unveiling of the Facebook Platform, a way for app developers to build games and utilities inside of Facebook. This announcement would represent Facebook as a platform and enable far more to be built outside and on top of the social network. Privacy concerns? For sure. Genuinely world-changing potential? There’s a lot of that too.

It’s not clear exactly what would be included in this firehose, it could be a stream of low-value Fan Page promotional content, for example. The most likely thing content to be included though is user activity data published under public privacy settings. There’s far, far more of that today than there was just a few months ago.

If you’ve participated in a supermarket loyalty program, you’re familiar with the concept of opting-in to sharing data about your activities with outside parties in exchange for benefits. In that common practice, though, consumers gain shopping discounts but get nothing from the analysis of the data they emit.

In the case of the Twitter Firehose, the much sought-after full feed of public user data from across the site, users gain access to all kinds of interesting applications and insights based on analysis of their use of Twitter.

A Facebook firehose would be much bigger. We’re hearing that there will be no launch partners in the announcement, but the imagination runs wild thinking about all the mashup possibilities. We learned last week that user location data is coming to Facebook at F8, now picture all this rich data roaring like a river into the data digesting machines of a wide range of developers all over the world.

A firehose of public Facebook user activity data could function like a living, breathing global census. Cross reference that data with any other data set and we may find an ocean of insights into the human condition, around the world, for slices of people, second by second or over time.

This is something we’ve been calling on Facebook to do for some time. I’ve sat with founder Mark Zuckerberg and discussed the importance and potential of releasing aggregate user data at length.

That, though, was before last December when the privacy policy changed.

Privacy Concerns

Just because something is posted publicly on the web, Microsoft researcher danah boyd said in her opening keynote at SXSW yesterday, doesn’t mean people want it to be broadcast more generally. Making something public is not permission to publicize it.

Is the inclusion of public activity into a firehose programatically available to outside developers a case of broadcast that violates user control and thus privacy?

I don’t think it’s clear either way. In a discussion about aggregate Twitter data analysis late last year, a representative of the Electronic Frontier Foundation told me that Twitter users had no reasonable expectation that their data wouldn’t be redistributed and analyzed in bulk because Twitter was a public forum.

Facebook used to be different. It was private by default, our actions were shared only with friends and family that we gave permission to see our status messages and photos.

Then in December the company made a dramatic shift, prompting users to re-evaluate their privacy settings and making “share with everyone all over the internet” the new default for most options. Mark Zuckerberg said Facebook was only changing to reflect the way the world was changing, but we argued that was a disingenous rationalization of Facebook’s culture-changing actions driven in part by its own profit motive. We also argued that by pushing users toward being more public the company was reducing user control over data and spreading distrust about making data available online at all. That put at risk the idea of sharing your data in a way that could be analyzed.

Is there a reasonable expectation that online social networking activity set to “public” will not be redistributed in bulk to outside parties? How can a company like Facebook respect user privacy as much as possible while still achieving the incredible things that can be achieved by making aggregate user data available for analysis?

Let’s begin to discuss it.

See also: The personal blog of Cameron Marlow, Facebook’s in-house sociologist and big data guy.
Related analysis: Twitter 2.0: API Rate Change Could Lead to a World of New Apps & Features
Chewing on the Issues: Twitter Data Dump: InfoChimps Puts 1B Connections Up for Sale

Discuss

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Weekly Poll: Is There A Place For Open-Source in the Data Center?

This week’s poll is inspired our friends at CloudAve. Krishnan Subramanian wrote a post today about open-sourcing data center design.

It’s about time, isn’t it? Subramanian best point comes down to what is happening right now in the cloud computing world. The enthusiasm for cloud computing is such that there is no time to waste.

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Subramanian writes:

“Compared to other fields of IT, the innovation on the data center front is relatively slow because the industry as a whole is slow to change. With cloud computing capturing the imagination of enterprises and public, It is important to innovate rapidly on the data center side.”

We know the role open-source is playing in cloud computing. Just look at the role that Hadoop and Eucalyptus are playing in cloud computing.

But opening up the data center is a different story. It may be the last frontier and the key for opening up the enterprise to open-source initiatives.

The Open Source Data Center Initiative seems like it sees that potential. The group is challenging the powers of the engineering world by collaborating and pooling information that goes into designing and ultimately constructing data centers.

That’s pretty interesting.

So, here’s our question this week:

Is There A Place For Open-Source in the Data Center?trends

Last Week’s Poll: What is the top threat to cloud computing?

Last week’s poll had 244 people respond.

Top response: API’s and a poor interface. API’s are causing headaches for at least one of the leading cloud service providers.

We’ll have more later about troublesome API’s. In the meantime, what do you think? Is there a place for open-source in the data center?

Discuss

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It’s Time For Microsoft To Turn Itself Upside-Down

There was recently a little skirmish on the web regarding the question of whether or not Microsoft has stopped innovating — whether the internal corporate culture there has thwarted new ideas, and so on. Well, I think we can all agree that Microsoft hasn’t exactly been an innovation machine in recent years; although, with as little currency as the word “innovation” has these days, that’s not saying much — but the fact is that its products haven’t shown as much ingenuity as its competitors in nearly every arena. And like a dragon guarding its hoard, it has striven primarily to maintain its stranglehold on enterprise, which makes up the vast majority of Microsoft’s treasure intake. Who can blame them? You wouldn’t give up a goose that laid golden eggs either. But the the goose is getting old, and people are getting tired of eggs. What’s the next step?

Gates once famously said his greatest fear was “someone in a garage who is devising something completely new.” So the solution is simple: start building garages.

Read the rest of this story at CrunchGear…

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Sony develops 11Gbps short-range wireless intra-connection

Before you get too excited about the bandwidth number, you should know that Sony’s latest wireless innovation works at a range of up to 14 millimeters. So no, it won’t be replacing your WiFi antenna anytime soon, but it may well be showing up in your next television set or other bit of Sony-branded gadgetry. Working in the 30GHz to 300GHz frequency range, this is designed to replace wired communication channels inside electronic devices, with Sony claiming it will deliver “advantages such as size and cost-reduction and enhanced reliability of the final product.” Basically, erecting 1mm antennae that can beam information at each other at a rate of 11Gbps turns out to be simpler and more reliable than printing ever wider data lanes into the circuit board. Makes sense to us. Full PR after the break.

Continue reading Sony develops 11Gbps short-range wireless intra-connection

Sony develops 11Gbps short-range wireless intra-connection originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 08 Feb 2010 02:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Flickr Find: MacBook Generations

Filed under: Apple, Macbook Pro, MacBook, Retro Mac

• Unibody 13″ 2.53Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro
• 15″ 400Mhz G4 Titanium PowerBook
• 15″ 1.25Ghz G4 Aluminum PowerBook
• 15″ 2.5Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro

Amazing stuff — think of the engineering, manufacturing work, and design arguments that went into those little bands of metal, and all of the good work and art that has since been created with them. Beautiful.

TUAWFlickr Find: MacBook Generations originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 12 Jan 2010 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Feature: The format wars: of lasers and (creative) destruction

I have this love/hate relationship with format wars.

No, it’s not reality television versus talk shows, or Top 40 radio against “the best of the ’80s — and more!” The wars I’m thinking about pit technologies against one another, usually in a battle to the death of one or more of the contestants. It’s One format to rule them all every time, and the streets are littered with the remains of the losers.

These wars are loathsome because we consumers have to pick a side or else lose out on something awesome, and then the ones who picked wrong have to pay up again for the winning technology. But format wars also keep the carousel of progress spinning and fan the flames of innovation. Join me for a brief look back at the format wars of yesteryear, and a look a head at what will replace them.

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