Month: July 2011

@NYC

HTML5: Bigger and Better Than TV

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I was in NYC on Wednesday, attending part of DevCon5, a two-day conference devoted to the magical HTML5 browser standard.

As I was staring at a Pac-Man app during ‘The Power of Canvas” session— actually the  largest Pac-Man mazes in the world crafted completely in HTML5— my mind wandered back to the 1980s.

You know that time when people went to special arcades to play videos games, like Pac-Man, and returned home to get the news or watch a movie on their TV sets.

If you wanted an interactive graphical experience, you essentially rented time on an appliance that connected together cathode ray tube, CPU, and memory.Continue reading

@NYC

Our Favorite Biz Apps, Summer Edition

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Summer is here and the time is right for another Technoverse list of our favorite business apps.

Our files are stuffed with notes from the last few months of attending trade shows and meetups, quizzing CEOs, and testing software in our state-of-the-art lab. The focus of this list, as in our past enumerations, is on small-to-medium businesses.

The distribution of employers in the US is skewed towards small: most businesses—something like 98% — are considered small, with roughly under 25 employees. Even more astonishing: they hire 50% of the US workforce.

But unlike in the past, the cost of starting and running a small business doesn’t necessarily require emptying a bank account.

We have computing to thank for this, everything from cheap biz apps in the cloud, low-cost communications and collaboration, inexpensive social media marketing, the ability to crowdsource certain tasks, and on and on.

Herewith are a few apps that should help you kickstart and manage your business:Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Back at the FCC: CableCARD Returns From the Dead

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The FCC’s cableCARD initiative was supposed to crack open the proprietary set-top box provided by the cable operators and give consumers more box choices.

The idea was that you would purchase a PCMIA card for decrypting the cable signal and then have the luxury of inserting your CableCARD into a huge selection of third-party boxes, from the likes of TiVo, Roku, and zillion of others.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

AT&T 2Q2011 Results: Still Wired

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While AT&T may be boasting about the wireless side of the business in its 2Q results, Ma Bell 2.0 is still very dependent on its copper cables.

True, wireless revenue has been doing the growing, rising to $14.1 billion over the last three months and 7% ahead of last year’s numbers.

Other good news: AT&T claims over 3.5 million iPhone activations this past quarter, in spite of sharing this market with its cousin, Verizon.

Bottom line: AT&T’s operating income for wireless this past quarter was over $4 billion, compared to the wired side’s “mere” $2 billion.

As carriers and the FCC currently review pulling the plug on POTS,  it’s a good time to look again at all the revenue that remains in voice and POIS (Plain Old Internet Service). Continue reading

The Rack

Google Transit is Pretty Good.

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In 2008, Google Transit pulled up into the New York and New Jersey areas and took in a few passengers.

They launched partnerships with New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the people who run the subways and buses, and New Jersey’s own NJT, which get commuters into Manhattan and around the Garden State.

Over the last few years, my own commuting has been cut back, so I had less need for Transit.

But recently I’ve been making more trips into Manhattan and find myself forever having to download the latest NJT schedules.

I decided to try out Google Transit, letting it plot a plan of attack to get me from my house into New York City using our area’s public transportation system.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Cisco’s Internet of Things

 

Over at “The Platform”, Cisco’s Dave Evans has posted a great infographic showing that communicating things—essentially embedded sensors —have already outstripped the number of communicating homo sapiens.

That happened in 2010.

By 2050 there will be 50 billion such devices—think coffee makers, cars, trains, refrigerators, gas pumps—that will be notifying and texting each other across the Internet.  Continue reading

@NYC

Hoboken Tech Meetup 7/18/11: Entrepreneurial Planet

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One eyebrow-raising moment at last night’s Hoboken Tech Meetup was when former Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau said that in his new gig at Lerer Ventures, he funds one company per week.

It is a good time to be a startup. Or at least the kind of startup that Lerer Ventures is interested in—those with founders that want to take on huge markets.

Hippeau has led a charmed and fascinating life. This Sorbonne-educated but very worldly media entrepreneur worked his way up from running an English language paper in Brazil (when he was just 20) to taking the CEO helm at giant tech publisher Ziff-Davis.

As you might expect, his presentation on the disruptive power of software was backed up by interesting stories. Like the time he was working at Softbank trying to convince Jerry Yang, who had a company called Yahoo, to take a $100 million investment.Continue reading

@NYC

3D Tourism

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A few months ago I found myself completely captivated by a Google Street View journey I took through Rome: the Forum, Baths of Diocletian, and the Appian Way.

I had missed the last two on a recent trip to the Eternal City, and found Google’s 3D reality was not a bad substitute to actual wanderings in the real places.

A stealthy startup called 3rd Planet has taken this idea and is turning it into a money making travel planning web site that will, in the words of their brochure, “change the face of tourism forever.”

3rd Planet appears to be a kind of Second Life for vacations planners, allowing them to both step through renderings of cities, ruins, museums, etc. but also interact with “fellow online tourists”.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Is WiMax 4G? Nooo…Yes

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CNET has a nice, easy-to-drink article on telecom terminology perfect for this lazy July day. One of the terms they try to define is 4G.

In their jargon glossary, CNET includes WiMax and LTE under the “4G” umbrella, and specifically refers to Sprint “using an older version of 4G called WiMax”.

I guess you can say mobile WiMax or 802.16e is an older version of 4G.Continue reading

The Rack

New Era of Hardware Hacking?

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Maybe. MakerBot CEO and co-founder Bre Pettis sees a lot of hardware startup activity in New York City, San Francisco, and Colorado in a recent interview with Chris Dixon.

As you may recall, Makerbot is a a 3D printer based on open-source software.

I finally saw this robotic printer in action at TechCrunch Disrupt 2011 and came away from the booth with a freshly baked plastic snake.Continue reading

The Rack

A Google Correlate View of July

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Google Correlate is yet another R&D project that can be found in Sergey and Larry’s basement— the Google Labs area of the site.

I discovered Correlate in my last Labs visit, and though it has gotten some press, it’s another one of those Googley science projects that deserves more attention.

The proposition is simple: you feed Correlate a time series of your making, and it searches a galactic-size database of keyword search frequencies to find a matching pattern. Or in math speak, a time-based pattern that correlates with a fairly high R2.

For my experiment, I was interested in finding Google searches that remained level during the year but peaked in July.

What keywords would match this seasonal variation? ‘air conditioners’, ‘pool supplies’, ‘vacation rental’?

Nope. The answer is …Continue reading

@NYC

Taap.it at NYTM

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Taap.it is the geographically aware classified  buying app that I first saw at TechCrunch.

On Tuesday, the Taap.it crew were on the big stage at New York Tech Meetup.

I wasn’t there, but fortunately the video of their presentation is now on YouTube.  Take a look.Continue reading

@NYC

FanGager and Finding Fan Value

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At the beginning of my call with Eran Gefen, CEO of NYC-based, FanGager, we talked about how CRM 2.0, and even social CRM are not particularly appropriate labels to describe his company.

FanGager software lets businesses measure the frequency of wall posts, tweets, likes, and other social interactions, as well as visitors engaging with surveys, trivia questions, and actual games, like collecting virtual cupcakes.

And FanGager does, ahem, measure and reward customers who actually purchase products.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

TV Retransmission Fee Dispute: Fox vs Missouri’s KSFX

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It’s been about two weeks since I attended Consumer Electronics Week at NYC, watched 3D TV on big screens and small, and met with local TV entrepreneur Jack Perry. TV is still very much on my mind.

Perry’s company Syncbak provides a new revenue source for local TV stations and network affiliates: retransmitting their content over the Internet, but only to subscribers in the local viewing area.

And I should add, this is a less contentious source of revenue, say compared to retransmitting a TV signal over a cable network.

During the weekend, I learned from The New York Times that a Fox affiliate in the Ozarks couldn’t come to terms with the Fox parent company. At issue was KSFX’s (Springfield, Missouri) own retransmission agreement with an unnamed cable operator.

Fox wanted a greater cut of the revenue that KSFX receives for allowing its signal (local news and Fox programming) to be seen by cable viewers.Continue reading