Month: June 2010

@NYC

Kikin: Hole Filling Is Not a Business Model

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Kikin is a NYC startup that, as their web copy says, “brings you more relevant posts, tweets, videos, and other cool stuff from popular sites,” by automatically displaying interesting links on your browser page.  Its proposition is that you trust your social network, so the Kikin software trolls your Twitter and Facebook streams for relevant content that has been contributed by friends, family, and co-workers.

This idea is especially powerful when making purchasing decisions, less so for knowledge areas  involving, say, the new FCC policy on cable set-top boxes.

This small company garnered some good press about a year ago.

Since then Google has been busy filling in a few of its holes, a platform tweak that will ultimately force  niche players to, well, find a new niche in the ecosystem.  Of course, Google has also been expanding the pond with products such as  Google Wave, Google Buzz,  and Google Predict.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Non-innovative ISPs

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A article in Wired by Ryan Singel does a nice job of explaining why the cable ISPs need regulation. As this blog has also been saying, reclassification of their services as telecommunications, the current FCC strategy, undoes a bad course steered by the Powell FCC with help from the Supreme Court.

Here’s the money quote:”The broadband barons don’t want to provide you fast internet. It’s too close to being a utility for their tastes (that’s boring and lacks huge profit margins) and requires too much investment.”

What he said! The broadband cable providers’ business model is about restricting the possibilities of the Internet. For example, I suspect your ISP is like mine (I’m stuck with Comcast) in redirecting bad URLs (“404” errors) to their own highly-skewed page of alternative suggestions. Continue reading

@NYC

And now there's a database

I had been meaning to set up a database containing all the startup companies that I’ve been following in this blog.  Finally, with enough entries and notes  in my spreadsheets, and some spare time that opened up this week and last, I was able to put something together.  You can peruse the results  of my efforts under this blog’s Up Starts category.

A word about my selection criteria:  it is not meant to  generate a list of all-the-usual well funded NYC start-up suspects (but we’ll have some of those as well).  It’s teeny start-ups, private betas, open source efforts, contest winners, or perhaps an interesting idea  that a few enterprising folks have swarmed around. Hence,  the “Up Start” label.

It will be an ongoing effort to keep this up to date. If you have a tip, email me at editor@technoverseblog.com.

Quote of the Day
 

T-Mobile continues to seek an alternative to subsidizing its two largest competitors, but today, AT&T and Verizon continue to supply the majority of T-Mobile’s backhaul …

Archaic Telecom

Is Google Voice Net Neutral?

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Not according to, er, AT&T.  “Intellectual contradiction” and “noisome trumpeter” and other mean words were lobbed at Google by AT&T in a letter to the FCC in September 2009.  You get a little dizzy reading this contrivance especially when AT&T is holding this search provider’s feet to the fire by quoting an  FCC policy statement on Internet competition: “consumers are entitled to competition among network providers, application and service.”

Wow, so does that mean AT&T is suggesting that the FCC should be regulating Internet applications to promote competition?

This would all be another day-in-the-life of squabbling service providers—read below the he-says-she-says between AT&T and T-Mobile over competitive pricing for TDM-based backhaul — but this is Google, and Google Voice is now open to the public.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom, The Rack

Twilio’s OpenVBX: Open Source Attendant

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I downloaded OpenVBX, Twilio’s bendable, programmable cloud-based unified communications platform, tried out a few call control flows, and then drifted off into a reverie about telecom start-ups before the dot.com crash.

When the CLECs and ASPs first came on the scene in the 90s, they were offering hosted personal attendants (or assistants)—which was the term used before “Google Voice-like”—that allowed subscribers to configure find-me/follow me schedules for cell, home, and office numbers,  set up voicemail notifications, and craft simple IVR menus. They would often  throw in  speech rec, and support virtual presence through local phone numbers.

Maybe $30 per month, with a cap on minutes. These personal auto attendants were  tasty telecom appetizers and considering what was available from incumbents at the time, practically disruptive.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

FCC Notice of Inquiry on Broadband Reclassification

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Let the games begin and ex parte filings flow! The FCC formally opened its proceedings yesterday on the classification of broadband Internet.   The agency released a 64 page, footnote-chocked Notice of Inquiry, Framework for Broadband Internet Service, to set this round in motion.

The document nicely explains the recent  history that led to the agency’s third-way approach and the policy considerations at stake (universal service, privacy, public safety).  I reviewed parts of this thing, especially the section covering recent legal history, and it all stands as a sobering reminder of how the FCC (under Chairman Powell) went completely off-course in 2002.

In the FCC’s 2002 Declaratory Ruling that cable modem was an information service, it called broadband cable a  “single, integrated service that enables the subscriber to utilize Internet access service,” and that telecommunications component (the transmission part) was “not . . . separable from the data processing capabilities of the service.”

Even in 2002 that clearly wasn’t the case.Continue reading

Social Studies

Pinker vs. Carr, Theory vs. Reality

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Steven Pinker
PowerPoints make you productive (Wikipedia)

Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker took up the mantle for twitter-reading, YouTube-watching, blog-scanning, email-reading multi-taskers in an Op-Ed in last Friday’s New York Times. In what amounts to a direct critique of Nicholas Carr’s recent remarks on hyperlinks and his new book, What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, Pinker says that claims that our cerebellums are being re-wired to think less and react more are overblown.

Pinker scores valid points with familiar arguments from this camp. The move to the written word from an oral tradition, for example, was thought by the ancients to be a memory crutch and would inhibit good conversations and interactions. Sound familiar?

I can’t talk about whether there is a permanent rewiring of the brain, but I don’t see how Pinker and his cohorts can deny the productivity draining aspect of too much digital interactivity.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

The AT&T-Verse

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Waves of bad news coming out of AT&T recently stand as a reminder of what life would be like if the crown was restored to this former monarch.

First there was the iPad security escapade wherein a group of hackers fooled a very insecure AT&T web form to display email addresses of iPad owners. Then the pre-order web meltdown in which customers for Apple’s iPhone 4  were faced with an AT&T back-end order entry system that stopped working. Then there’s the customer who received a terse cease-and-desist voicemail response after he emailed AT&T’s CEO Randall Stephenson to complain about the new caps on data—Zappos’s Tony Hsieh is probably smiling and FedExing a copy of his latest book, Delivering Happiness, to Randall.

Add to this brew the usual problems with AT&T’s 3G coverage (see TechCrunch’s  wireless frustrations) and barely acceptable customer service, and you’ll get a pretty good sense of how telecom was delivered in the Middle Ages (circa 1970s) when AT&T and the Bells were the only games in town.

And to rub salt into our wounds, AT&T is threatening to cut off investment in its U-verse/IPTV cable rollout if the FCC doesn’t reconsider its reclassification of cable broadband as Title II telecommunications.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Free WiFi at Starbucks Starting July 1

MIAMI - JANUARY 28: A Starbucks Coffee is see...
Image by Getty Images

Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz announced free WiFi  yesterday at Wired’s Business Conference.

Obviously, this is good news for Web-browsing-coffee-slurpers everywhere, and is another validation for Starbucks as a third place between work and home.  It is also a win for AT&T against cable operators Comcast, Comvision, and Time Warner, who were planning on offering free WiFi hotspots in the NYC metropolitan area.  AT&T provides WiFi for Starbucks.Continue reading

@NYC

Finale: Startup Weekend NYC

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I was able to catch most of the Startup Weekend NYC closing presentations, which were held this year at New York University’s Courant Institute. It was my first time as an attendee, and though I’m sorry I missed Mantrophy’s pitch, after about ten or so presentations, I definitely got a feel for the energy, industry, and the sheer fun of hatching a business.

If the rest of the events of Internet Week NY could be considered watching the early careers of startups, Startup Weekend NYC was a front row seat to witnessing the first big break for a future Foursquare or Etsy— American Idol for the tech set.

The whirlwind began on Friday evening when developers, marketers, designers, and business managers paired up to launch their plans. By Sunday, there were software mock-ups, sales projection spreadsheets, marketing roadmaps, and elevator pitches. Considering the limited time, the final PowerPoints and closing remarks were compelling enough, I believe, for most of these startups to continue with their efforts.

There were a few I liked.Continue reading

The Rack

Good News from Google: Renaming Folders

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Google may have accidentally-on-purpose scooped up data while (war)driving in Germany, and its new option to change the background on its home page is just plain silly, but they did do something right in the last few weeks.

I am a heavy user of Google products and an appreciator of the simplicity of its design philosophy, but with Google Reader they may have  moved the scalpel a little too close: until recently there was no way to rename a folder containing RSS feed subscriptions.  Once you created a folder, you were stuck with it—unless you wanted to start over with a new name and  forklift existing feed entries.

On the Official Google Reader Blog, the company announced on June 1 that users now have the ability to rename folders.

Often times, it’s the small things that make the difference.
Continue reading

@NYC

Tech City

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I took a quick peek at the Internet Week NY headquarters on 18th street in Manhattan while on the way to New York Tech Meetup’s “action packed” June event. I had just enough time to see some of the booths, grok the social media aspects of the planned discussion topics, and take a picture of Brooklyn-based MakerBot Industries’ CupCake CNC machine (also known as a 3-D printer) before I left for the Skirball Center.

My take away from IWNY: engaged communities swarming around focused content and, thanks to startups like MakerBot, custom hardware will rule the future. And it’s happening here in NYC!

Then I went to the NYTM and watched a man smash an iPad with a sledge hammer.Continue reading

Quote of the Day

AT&T gets credit for pushing the idea of a two-way video conversation back in the 1960s. They understood that this intrusive technology meant a loss …

Archaic Telecom

From AT&T Picturephone to Apple FaceTime

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AT&T Picturephone

It’s been a long standing journalistic practice that when writing about the failure of yet another video phone product, you march out AT&T’s Picturephone launch at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. I believe it’s a pretty safe bet that Apple’s new FaceTime will break the long losing streak of this concept and make video chats as natural and popular as, well, a cell phone call. Even though we finally have a video phone winner, it’s still instructive to look at that early Bell product, if only to understand why it will take a company like Apple to make it a mass success.

AT&T gets credit for pushing the idea of a two-way video conversation back in the 1960s. They understood that this intrusive technology meant a loss of privacy, but thought it would be counterbalanced  by the public’s just-under-the-surface narcissism. Their original advertising slogan was “Some Day You’ll be A Star” (see P. Coburn’s, The Change Function). This was a  bold call to arms for a pre-Internet, pre-Facebook, and pre-Youtube America.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

AT&T’s New Pricing Plan

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Perspectives from David Pogue (New York Times) and Stacy Higginbotham (Gigaom) are a good starting point to understanding what data caps, pricing tiers, and tethering charges imply about the state of wireless competition (less than thriving) and profit expectations of a big carrier (“greedy”).  The money quote from Pogue after the jump:

Continue reading

The Rack

$75 Tablet From OLPC

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The One Laptop Per Child Foundation has teamed up with chip maker Marvell to produce an inexpensive tablet computer for the education market.

OLPC XO-3 concept

OLPC , founded by Dr. Nicholas Negroponte, has committed to distributing a new family of XO tablets that will have some very desirable features, even for non-school children: based on low watt version of  Marvell’s Armada processor , multi-lingual, multi-touch soft keyboard,   multi-OSes (Android, Ubuntu, Windows Mobile), and 1080p  video. Continue reading

Quote of the Day

Other times, they’re tiny distractions, little textual gnats buzzing around your head. Even if you don’t click on a link, your eyes notice it, and …