Year: 2011

Download Speed Competition: US Is Definitely Not Number 1

By Editor June 21, 2011 October 24, 2011 itemprop="discussionURL"1

It’s not news that US broadband speeds ain’t world-class.

For confirmation, check the OECD’s (Organisation for Economic Cooporation and Development) extensive data sets culled from the advertised speeds of ISPs across many countries.

The spreadsheet I looked at, based on data from 2010, shows that US cable broadband performance is somewhere in the middle: ahead of France, Chile, Luxemborg, and Germany, but behind Estonia, Slovak Republic, Portugal and Finland.

Those last two, by the way, have the best speeds in Europe.

And let’s not even get into fiber bit rates.
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Fun with ThingLink

By Editor June 20, 2011 June 20, 2011

Image hotspots have been around for a long time—since at least HTML3—and have allowed developers to add interactivity to graphics.

You know, hover over a state in a map of the US, see the name pop up, and then click to get routed to an informational page.

And of course, Flash and Silverlight have come along to provide ultimate interactivity and media capabilities. But the emphasis has always been on developers, especially with the aforementioned tools.

ThingLink is a San Francisco startup that is bringing hotspots, which they call Rich Media Tags, within reach of HTML- and ActionScript- challenged publishers.

That means bloggers, Tumblrs, etc. can quickly add linkable, position-aware icons to their pics.Continue reading

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Visiting Wanderfly Land

By Editor June 17, 2011 September 30, 2011

Wanderfly, the travel planning site we like, has just signed up a few more media companies as curators.

It’s a mutually beneficial arrangement wherein the likes of Mashable, Jaunted (“celeb-favorite destinations”), Havaianas (“beaches that soothe your sole”), and my favorite, the History Channel, control a piece of Wanderfly’s web real estate.

From there the subject matter experts can make travel suggestions and perhaps History Channel curators can inspire readers to learn what really happened at the Circus Maximus or the Baths of Caracalla.

With this announcement, it seemed like the right time to take a deeper tour of Wanderfly.Continue reading

The Rack

Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1

By Editor June 16, 2011 June 16, 2011

I couldn’t resist.

This morning I was in New York City, near Union Square Park, which is known for its excellent farmer’s market.

And temporarily, the Best Buy on the south end of the park is one of the few places you can see and touch Samsung’s stunning Android tablet.

So I took the subway uptown and then made a beeline for the store Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Back at the FCC: Community Information Needs and Hurricanes

By Editor June 15, 2011 September 7, 2011

The FCC released another paperweight-class report.

Entitled The Information Needs of Communities, this 478 pager (with footnotes) is “an in-depth analysis of the current state of the media landscape along with a broad range of recommendations.”

Produced by journalists, academics, entrepreneurs, and led by Steve Waldman, a former editor and the founder of Beliefnet, the report has the obviousities you would expect, including newspaper revenue has dropped, local TV is a not source of investigative reporting, and the Internet has reduced the cost of gathering and distributing news.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Avaya Files IPO: S-1 Paints a Bleak Picture

By Editor June 10, 2011 September 25, 2011 itemprop="discussionURL"4

I just took a peek at Avaya’s S-1 filing with the SEC.

To these admittedly non-financial eyes, this ain’t pretty.

We learn that this legacy PBX vendor, which had pinned its hopes on something called unified communications, ended its 2010 fiscal year last September with a net loss of over $800 million.

And it appears from their income performance for the first six months of 2011 that they are ahead of schedule: dripping red ink at the rate of $600 million.

On the balance sheet, they’ve accumulated around $6 billion in debt, a result of the pricey private equity buyout by Silver Lake and TPG in 2007 and then the purchase of Nortel’s Enterprise Solutions business in 2009.

Archaic Telecom

Good Move AT&T: Free WiFi in NYC Parks

By Editor June 9, 2011 September 8, 2011

New York City’s Mayor Bloomberg announced today an agreement with AT&T to provide free public WiFi service for the next five years in 20 city parks.

They’ll soon be coverage in parts of Manhattan’s Central Park, in Battery Park, along the trendy High Line, and Tompkins Square Park.

Thank you AT&T and New York City. Now I can realize my dream of checking emails on a non-3G Android tablet while strolling in “The Ramble”.

Brooklyn residents will be able to connect with AT&T’s WiFi in Prospect Park, Brooklyn Bridge Park, and Fort Greene Park.

On a related matter, their WiFi initiative takes some of the sting out of one of Sprint’s criticisms in its lengthy petition to deny the T-Mobile acquisition.Continue reading

Lunch Hour

Hot Afternoon Diversion: Entoforms

By Editor June 8, 2011 September 8, 2011 itemprop="discussionURL"2

An email from Dutch visual artist Dolf Veenvliet arrived at my inbox just at the right time.

With August weather making an early appearance in June, Veenvliet’s exotic and slightly creepy Entoforms roused me out of my weather-induced torpor.

Entoforms are imaginary life-forms that have been designed using Blender, the open-source 3D software, and have even been a given a kind of DNA by Veenvliet, in his role as creator.

I’m assuming that unlike the story of Genesis, Veenvliet’s work took more than a day. And as far as I know the Old Testament god was not using 3D printers, which is how the Entoforms become physical realizations.Continue reading

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Wanderfly Makes Time’s Top 10

By Editor June 2, 2011 September 30, 2011

Last week at TechCrunch Disrupt, I had a chance to see the revamped Wanderfly.

Christy Liu, Wanderfly’s co-founder and Director of Marketing, put me behind the new dashboard of this visually intensive travel recommendation site as we looked for warmer spots while shivering during an unusual late May cold spell.

The photos I looked at for Italy (Rome, Venice, Sienna) are stunning. And for my next job, I’d like to be the house photographer for Wanderfly.

I learned from Liu yesterday that Wanderfly made Time Inc.’s list of “10 NYC Startups to Watch” and Entrepreneur magazine’s “100 Brilliant Companies”. Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Why Else Would You Go to the Grand Canyon?

By Editor June 1, 2011 September 7, 2011

There may be good arguments in support of AT&T’s acquisition of T-Mobile, but improved WiFi access in the Grand Canyon is not one of them.

But that’s the claim that the Grand Canyon Hotel Operators Association makes in its comment to the FCC.

In the words of this trade group: “What our beloved canyon does not have, however, is state of the art wireless broadband service.”

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Back at the FCC: Sprint Files 377-Page Petition

By Editor May 31, 2011 September 30, 2011

I’m going to review this massive petition to denial filing—redacted, though, for public viewing—over this short holiday week. Not surprisingly, Sprint Nextel is not happy with AT&T’s bid to swallow T-Mobile.

With the word duopoloy (according to my PDF search) showing up on 21 pages and anti-competitive on another 23 pages, I think you get an inkling of how this carrier feels.

And here’s a choice nugget from the beginning of this thing:Continue reading

The Rack

Quixey: Applification or Bust

By Editor May 31, 2011 September 8, 2011

I like the idea of Quixey.

It has the Google-like cyclops interface —a single search box— but instead of searching the web, it’s looking for apps from the crowded shelves of mobile app stores.

I saw Quixey for the first time at TechCrunch Disrupt last week. I discovered this well funded company—cash from Eric Schmidt’s fund— around the corner from the Startup Alley area, in the more exclusive sponsored neighborhood.

After talking with the Quixey gang, I learned that instead of searching on app descriptions alone, their software culls blogs, forums, and social media to accumulate additional descriptive content.

So how does it do?Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Twilight of Telephony at TechCrunch Disrupt

By Editor May 27, 2011 September 30, 2011

I don’t recall seeing a single wired phone at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference.

At trade shows, they’ve been exiled from the booths for awhile now with the cell phone explosion.

More surprising for me was that I didn’t even spot one at an administrative or reception area.Continue reading

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TechCrunch Disrupt: The End

By Editor May 26, 2011 September 30, 2011

My gut told me that Getaround, the peer-to-peer car rental service, should be the Battlefield winner.

It was a crowd favorite and solved the age-old problem of finding temporary access to wheels without paying any up-front fees.

However, it seemed to me that the judges found this a messy proposition with possible regulatory issues, insurance issues, and potential customer satisfaction headaches—’the car I rented smells funny’, etc, etc.Continue reading

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Tales from Startup Alley: Shoutomatic

By Editor May 26, 2011 September 10, 2011

If tweets are the short form of a blog post, then what’s the short audio equivalent for a podcast?

I found the answer at Shoutomatic’s booth talking to its co-founder and COO Michael Levy. The idea is simple: why not give give the people the power to quickly record short audio messages or shouts, and tweet out the embedded link or post it onto a FaceBook wall?

There are other, more cumbersome ways to do this kind of thing in the Web world.

Shoutomatic, though, is its owns ecosystem and social network—profiles, real-time shout stream, follow-follower model, etc.

Most intriguing to me and a powerful differentiator of this service is its celebrity shouters, which include Andy Dick, Eurythmic’s Dave Stewart, rapper Chuck D, Danny Bonaduce, and American Idol winner Bo Bice.

Celebrity and branded shouts are really the core of the for-pay business of this startup.
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