Sometimes grand visions, say the FCC’s National Broadband Plan, can depend on something as basic and overlooked by the lay person as a utility pole.
Think about it: to wire up the country with high-speed fiber, carriers need quick access to utility poles.
The Communications Act as amended in 1996 weighs in on this matter, calling for “nondiscriminatory access to any pole, duct, conduit, or right-of-way owned or controlled by it.”
Think of it as net neutrality for wiring.Continue reading
I missed yesterday’s New York Tech Meetup. I’ll be fine.
However, I would have liked to have seen the Readability demo and learned more about this company’s plans.
Their FireFox plug-in de-clutters a typical web page, removing graphics, Flash, and other visual ephemera leaving you with just the nutritious text.
The software was reviewed by David Pogue in November 2009. And it ended that year with a coveted Pogie Award.
Since the Pogie, Readability added some new features to boost the original text-centric idea. And then in a move that as far as I’m concerned nailed their dedication to the written word, they’ve installed a micro-payment system for authors. Continue reading
The New York City Economic Development Corporation is an agency tasked, not surprisingly, with stimulating the local economy. This includes our booming information economy, and in fact NYCEDC are the folks behind the BigApps competition.
Final presentations for another idea of theirs called, naturally, NYC Next Idea, were held this morning at Columbia University’s Shapiro Center. The six startups that made their presentations to the judges—as assortment of entrepreneurs, investors, and Steven Strauss, an NYCEDC director— had been winnowed from over 150 worldwide entries.
The common theme among this group of university student finalists was their desire to set up shop in NYC.Continue reading
Having declared victory over DNS (Domain Name System) for my sipXecs project, I vaguely recall that a Supreme Court justice wrote extensively about DNS in …
Two weeks ago I contracted the cloud-based telephony bug and found myself experimenting with sipXecs, SIPfoundry’s 100% SIP communications system.
I only advanced so far: just enough to visit and push the buttons on the sipXecs web-based configurator before I ran into a brick wall called DNS.
Translation: without an Internet phone book to look up addresses, I couldn’t register a SIP phone and actually use this thing
Figuring that it would be good for my soul, I decided to spend a few lunch hours last week learning just enough DNS to set up a cloud-based sipXecs system that actually was usable.
I assumed that this effort would reward itself in spiritual IT and SIP wisdom.
Now that Larry “Willie Wonka” Page has named Kansas City, Kansas the winner of the golden gigabit contest, residents there will soon be like kids in the broadband candy store.
If all goes to plan, they’ll be gorging out on super high-speed Internet goodies in 2012
You’re probably asking what the broadband situation is like in Kansas City currently, and what about a color-coded map based on the FCC’s 477 data?
We gave this project to our own oompa loompas, and they’ve cheerfully come with just the right map.Continue reading
Google announced that it will build its gigabit fiber network in Kansas City, Kansas. Pending approvals, service is planned for 2012.
With plans to be in New York City yesterday, I ended my day in Manhattan a little later by attending a two-hour pitch-fest at NYU’s Stern School of Business.
CrowdPitch’s concept is simple enough: an audience (students, would-be entrepreneurs, startup groupies, bloggers) act as angel investors with pretend dollars in which to fund startup ventures. The companies are real, though, and have four minutes to make their case for getting the make-believe moolah.
A panel of Stern professors and other industry experts are there to critique the presentations, crunch the numbers on the business models, and then offer advice for when these companies face real angels and VCs.
While the overall quality of the pitches was high, you quickly learn that to attract investors, startups should strive to be scalable, frictionless, and vertically integrated—biz speak for nice fat margins with minuscule marginal costs and no competition.Continue reading
Last week, the HBR blog turned its attention to the recent infestation of daily deal sites that are causing great harm to businesses.
After much study and multi-regression analysis, they’ve decided that sites like Groupon and LevelUp, are really offering … price promotions.
I was kidding about the multi-regression part. But HBR blogger Utpal M. Dholakia, Distinguished Associate Professor of Management at Rice University, warns that “price promotions are fraught with danger and are suitable only for very specific purposes.” Continue reading
There were all the signs of a long weekend of coding at the Converge Coworking space on the Kean University campus (Union, NJ). Stacks of empty pizza boxes, coffee cups, wireframe sketches scattered on desks, and developers staring at screen emulators on their MacBooks.
New Jersey Mobile Meetup was concluding its first hackathon, and I had arrived just as the iPhone and Android warriors were chowing down on one last hot meal before the final presentations.
The winners of this contest would gain serious boasting rights, and some Twilio and Odesk credits to be used on future projects.Continue reading
Missed Aspen Institute’s IDEA Plenary (“a transatlantic dialogue to address common interests in a free and open Internet capable of enhancing economic growth”) held in Brussels, Belgium yesterday?
Not to worry, FCC Chairman Genachowski was there to address the gathered international leaders, and his talk, “The Cloud: Unleashing Global Opportunities”, was posted on the FCC site today.Continue reading
Startup Weekend NYC is back in town next month (April 15-17). I’ll be attending the final presentations on Sunday.
I visited SWNYC last June, which was held at my alma mater, NYU’s Courant Institute, and I definitely felt the creative buzz.
There were mega-watts of entrepreneurial energy leaping between creatives, marketers, and developers. It certainly boosted my opinion of the startup scene here in the NYC Hackopolis.
Looking forward to it.Continue reading
I recently received a gentle reminder that Kikin, a browser plugin that brings additional relevant content to Google search results has been updated and is accomplishing more than, as some blogger put it, filling in feature holes.
That blogger would be me, and the Kikin version I was reviewing at the time was duplicating the functions of Google’s left navigation column—the one that, um, brings you more relevant content.
In February, Kikin revamped their Firefox plugin, it’s now called the Kikin Edge.
Time to take another look at it.
I had a lot of fun listening to Craig Kanarick, the co-founder of Razorfish, the proto-interactive agency, at last night’s Hoboken Tech Meetup.
I could definitely envision him pitching Fortune 500 companies during the dot-com years and explaining the Web to the “suits”. Did he really do a presentation once-upon-a-time with his hair dyed blue?
No matter. He’s still at it, and yesterday he radiated lots of thought beams on the current digital technology environment. As part of his talk, Kanarick delivered a completely entertaining and spot-on summary of our post-WW II consumer economy—rise of marketing, power of brands, and now the preeminence of real-time on-demand media.
One idea of his that most resonated with me, considering the context of speaking at a tech meetup and having just followed a few demos, is the challenge of being a tech entrepreneur when there is so much open and available IT.
Paging Nick “IT Doesn’t Matter” Carr!Continue reading
On Friday, I dropped by the Apple Store on the Upper West Side of NYC near Lincoln Center to touch the feathery light iPad 2.
As I approached and looked through the plate glass storefront, the interior was less than crowded, practically empty by Apple standards.
Then I noticed a sign taped to the door, which said that the iPad 2s had sold out for the day and that customers should come back tomorrow.
It just meant that I wouldn’t have to wait in line to try out this thinner, faster, and dual-camera-ed iPad.Continue reading
My curiosity got the better of me. While I’m completely content to use turn-key cloud telephony–OnSIP, in my case—the lure of DIY telecom is sometimes too enticing to resist.
This led me to SIPfoundry’s sipXecs, an open-source PBX that many are using instead of an on-premises metal-based solution.
SIPfoundry has grand goals for open VoIP solutions. They are an independent non-profit that hopes to promote “free and unencumbered” telephony. Which is another way of saying their sipXecs PBX software is 100% standards based. So if enough companies, small and large, install sipXecs on their servers, we can all communicate via SIP over the Internet and not pay a dime in per minute charges.
I thought I’d experiment with sipXecs to see what all the shouting was about.Continue reading
With the announcement that AT&T will be ending its all you can eat broadband for DSL and U-Verse customers, I decided to take a look at how US broadband compares with the rest of the world.
And I mean beyond Canada.
I perused data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which tracks broadband metrics, among many other economic indicators, internationally.
The US now joins Iceland, Australia, Turkey, Ireland, and the UK, as a place where major ISPs market monthly pricing plans with overusage charges.
From a global perspective, it appears that AT&T’s plan is (gasp) generous: a ceiling of 150 GB for DSL (250 GB for its fiber-based U-Verse) and $10 per 50 GB of additional usage.
I found them last Friday just off the Garden State Parkway, exit 131-A. The Woodbridge Hilton to be exact.
At the New Jersey Innovates Conference 2011 organized by NJ Entrepreneur, a group of Jersey-centric angels shared their business experiences and their current investing approaches with an audience spread out across the startup curve.
Based on the David S. Rose investment course I completed last month, these private investors fit the angel profile and their advice followed familiar angelic principles but with exceptions—this is Jersey after all.Continue reading
Mission Fifty, the new Hoboken co-working space, is well on the way to opening its door to NJ coworkers.
The principals involved— Michael Pierce, Gregg Dell’Aquila, and HTM’s Aaron Price—already have the space lined up, at 50 Harrison Street. It’s now just a matter of working out the details of what the coworking community is interested in, office-wise
Are you phone- or IM-centric, prefer meetings behind doors or at the nearest cluttered desk? Continue reading
As has been reported everywhere, last week Gizmo5 users learned that Google will soon be hanging up on this open-source softphone. Acquired by Google in 2009, the SIP-based Gizmo5 service will do its last “INVITE” in early April.
Now some fleeting good news: Over at OnSIP, the cloud-based PBX company, there’s an interesting post about a SIP door that opened over the weekend and then just as mysteriously closed.
For a shining moment, Google Voice numbers had associated with it a SIP address of the form: +1GVnumber@sip.voice.google.com.
In other words, it was possible for a few days to make free calls on any device that supported a SIP stack!
