« October 2007 | Main | December 2007 »
November 29, 2007
Verizon Wireless! You Beautifully Insane Peeps!
If you've been following the mobile/cellular space, the last 48 hours should make your head hurt.
First, Verizon Wireless announces that they're going open standards in 2008, allowing people to bring their own (tested and approved, however) devices to the network, and allow third-parties to deliver any apps they want over their network.
Then they wait twenty-four hours to let the "pundits" grumble and whine about how being open doesn't make a whole lotta sense because they have CDMA-blah-blah, CDMA-is-not-GSM-blah-blah, this is just a cynical ploy by The Man, blah-blah...
Today Verizon Wireless announces they're going with LTE, the broadband "open standard" successor to GSM, with trials starting in 2008 -- and every vendor under the sun agreeing to pump out LTE equipment in 2009.
LTE, on a good day, can deliver anywhere from 100 to 144 Mbps to a handset. TO A HANDSET! Currently, Verizon FiOS is "only" delivering 50 Mbps over fiber to the home (well, plus TV and voice, but voice is noise compared to the bandwidth you get from everything else).
(Of course, there's this little issue of writing off all that CDMA/EVDO equipment and running two networks in parallel, but that's not my problem :)
Yes, I will be more than happy to carry around another phone on a "trial," if it is a Verizon Wireless LTE phone... (Hint-hint)
Posted by dmohney at 11:52 AM | Comments (0)
November 21, 2007
Robot envy?
For under $150 bucks, I can get a gutter-cleaning robot. The iRobot Looj is a skinny little tracked rascal that drops into the house gutters, saving me from the task of moving around a ladder and standing on top of it for an extended period of time.
Basically, you drop the robot into where you want to clean, then remote control it back and forth along the length of your gutter. There's a hard plastic spinning "auger" to throw out big junk and smaller brushes to get rid of dirt and other stuff.
About the only drawback I can see is the NiCad battery. Takes 15 hours to charge for about 30 to 45 minutes of run time. Of course, that's 30 to 45 minutes not spent moving and standing on top of ladders, so I think I might be seeing if this turns up at Home Depot or under the tree...
Posted by dmohney at 12:47 PM | Comments (0)
November 20, 2007
Why I cry over CES Hotel Rates....
You'd think I would have learned by now to reserve my room early for January 5-8, when CES comes to Las Vegas. Nooo... so now I'm shelling out $187 a night for Sunday and Monday night in a, shall we say, less than 5 star hotel....*sigh*
But seriously, CES is one of the few shows where room rates in LostWages go UP during the week. During normal not-you-and-120,000-new-friends time, hotel room rates go down from Sunday-Thursday, go up on Friday and Saturday...
Instead, room rates get jacked across town during the week. This despite the fact that net-net at least 5,000 or so rooms per year get added onto the Vegas Strip alone (even after they blow one up...). In a normal supply-and-demand situation, there should be enough additional new hotel rooms ultimately added onto the strip to see prices go down. But (of course, duh) Vegas isn't normal.
Don't get me wrong. I love the Sahara hotel for what it gets me. It's cheap, it's got the most convenient monorail stop of any of the Strip Hotels (well, with the exception of the Hilton...), the morning buffet is adequate and no-frills.
The Sahara has one other thing going for it: Location, location, location. When (not if) the lines to the monorail backup, I can walk from the LVCC back to my hotel room.
Now, my next tough decision for CES: Do I rent a car, or not?
Posted by dmohney at 01:34 PM | Comments (0)
November 19, 2007
Kindle & Sprint - OMG!
My jaw is dropping a little bit as I read the press releases on Kindle, Amazon's new e-book reader.
Sprint is providing "Whispernet" to deliver e-books from Amazon's servers to the 10.3 ounce eInk reader via EVDO. Amazon must be writing some interesting checks to Sprint, since newspaper subscriptions come with a free 2 week trial and there's also free access to Wikipedia through the device.
It's the combination of form factor and connectivity that has me jazzed. I already use Sprint's EVDO service whenever I'm on the road, preferring it over the headaches of Wi-Fi.
Kindle has a keyboard. It would be interesting to see a derivative of Kindle as a web/e-mail reading device...I can only hope either Amazon or Sprint takes the logical step.
And I suspect that Kindle's WiMAX brother is already waiting in the wings... unless they've managed to sneak a WiMAX chip in there without telling anyone. Sound too far fetched? Well, up until this morning, the rumormill had Wi-Fi as the baseline connectivity with some sort of connectivity option through Sprint.
Those guys at Amazon, they know how to keep a secret...
Posted by dmohney at 11:24 AM | Comments (0)
November 16, 2007
Ads, Freebies, and Mobile Print
Rupert Murdoch, someone who knows a little bit about media, has said the online version of the Wall Street Journal will be free. Rup says they can make more money selling ads that reach an audience of 15-20 million freebie readers than the current model of 1 million paid subscribers.
Murdoch's announcement is "old beer" to the NY Times, according to press reports. The Times had tried to wall off their columnists in a subscription format, only to find out that their columnists were getting much less exposure and therefore lower ad clickthrough rates. Or something like that.
Exciting eh?
On the other hand, we're also starting to see a lot of non-traditional printed media migrate to the web. Marvel has opened up "Digital Comics Unlimited" up, so for $9.99 per month (and hey, I know people who used to *ahem* pay more than that for hardcopy back in the day), you get full access to thousands and thousands of classic and new titles... ahhh....
*ahem*
And if that wasn't enough fun for one day, on Monday Amazon will take its crack at the e-book reader market. Will people pay $399 for a single-function device to lug around to read both books and newspapers? Will it have a better showing than the Sony reader? Kindle will have WiFi and perhaps an option for Sprint EvDO service.
Now if I can only get rid of the Compaq laptop...
Posted by dmohney at 01:36 PM | Comments (0)
November 12, 2007
(U.S.) WiMAX Doomed? Not really...
Sprint and Clearwire couldn't come to terms on a joint buildout of a national WiMAX network. But is this doom for WiMAX? No, because WiMAX is already rolling out world-wide. Is this doom for WiMAX in the U.S.? I don't think so.
The New York Post has suggested that cable companies -- which have no wireless play to speak of -- might be Sprint's "white knight" in a nationwide WiMAX build. May happen, but Sprint may decide to just go-slow on its WiMAX deployment until the Wall Street harpies quiet down a bit.
There's also Intel looming in the works. Intel pumped $600 million into Clearwire (good news). Clearwire has lost a lot of money this quarter (Bad news). Regardless of how Clearwire does, Intel has a vested interest in the form of more chip sales to see that Sprint's WiMAX efforts don't hit a brick wall.
Posted by dmohney at 03:30 PM | Comments (0)
November 06, 2007
More "Gee, where have I seen this guy before?"
About two or three Spring VONs ago, I went out to dinner in San Jose at this dumpy pizza joint with my friend Frank McConnell and a bunch of his Silicon Valley running buddies.
One guy at the table was making jokes about hacking Paris Hilton's Sidekick and another one was trying to do something with his Danger device. "Well, I could give it to you, but I don't what you'd do to it..." said the Danger-holder.
ANYway, Frank goes to pony up for dinner (it's pizza, it's cheap), only to find the guy cracking-wise about Hilton's phone has picked up the tab and quietly left the building.
"Andy always does that..." Frank said.
The Andy in this case being Andy Rubin, he who is now the King of Open Source Handset Sets, Founder/creator/whatever of Android.
*sigh*
Posted by dmohney at 12:01 PM | Comments (0)
November 04, 2007
VON "It's a Small World" - Take 2
What do Vivek Khuller, CEO and Founder, DiVitas Networks and I have in common? The answer is more interesting than you might expect.
I met with Vivek on Wednesday morning. We went through the stock briefing and then he asked me where I lived. I said "DC" and he asked where. I said "Northern Virginia," but then indicated I had lived in Maryland for quite a while, including Greenbelt when I was working at the University of Maryland....
Turns out that Vivek was working on his Master's in EE at the University of Maryland College Park and running a lab for the Systems Research Center (SRC) at about the same time I was running the CAD Lab for Mechanical Engineering. He was over in the AV Williams Building while I had been in the Engineering building, but we started comparing where we lived and who we knew and where we ate and it got pretty scary pretty quickly.
We both lived in the Springhill Lake apartment complex at one point. He might have been my neighbor, for all I know. We also ate at some of the same restaurants and went to the "Vu," also known as the Rendezvous Inn.
Had to explain to his PR person about the "sticky shoes" you got from the beer at the Vu...
Posted by dmohney at 10:10 PM | Comments (0)
November 03, 2007
The Circle of Trust and Six Degrees
So there I was, leaving VON Fall, going through the US Airways shuttle security line at Boston Logan, and who's ahead of me but this familiar redhead.
No, I wasn't looking into a mirror. It was Danielle Deibler. (And no, Danielle didn't tell me anything cool, even though I tried really hard to convince her...)
Danielle has been working at Adobe since November of 2006 and she works with/around/for Dr. Henry Sinnreich. Henry, as you may know, has graced the front cover of VON Magazine and does all things SIP. Henry also works for Adobe. Now, there's all kinds of rumors that Adobe doing something with SIP/VoIP/whatever...
No, I can't tell you anything cool about what's going on with Adobe. I've also heard Phil Zimmermann has visited over at Adobe, but Phil wouldn't even confirm that. He told me to talk to Henry :)
Needless to say, there's something Very Cool going on at Adobe, because I doubt they're paying Henry and Danielle for show. Would some one at Adobe brief me on embargo already?
ANYway, I know Danielle from Way Back When (fall of 1993) when she and I started working for DIGEX (along with John Todd that same fall, now at TalkPlus and making guest appearances at all things Asterisk)...
Six Degrees Moment - I went to dinner with my buddy Frank McConnell and a group of his friends about two Spring VONs ago. One of the guys there had a Danger phone and was making off-hand jokes about hacking Paris Hilton's phone. He quietly picked up the tab for pizza and departed before we could offer to split the bill.
Turns out his name was Paul Rubin, who started Android, got bought by Google, and now is all the buzz for Monday's forthcoming announcement on Google's mobile phone software/ecosystem/open something or another...
Posted by dmohney at 03:49 PM | Comments (0)
November 01, 2007
Open Source, Wireless make the "Buzz," -- plus advertising
"So, what did you see new and exciting at VON?"
I get this question a lot. People reflexively ask me it and the show floor could be an hour old. Or at the end of the day, when my feet are tired and I'm likely to answer something silly.
But seriously, open source, wireless, and advertising are the three key concepts that are sticking in my head.
If you haven't already noticed, pulvermedia is doing a LOT with Open Source. VON Magazine has acquired "Open Source Telephony," (OST) the publication started by Steve Sokol. It delivered Digium Asterisk World and will be putting on AstriCon both in the States and in Europe.
It was a nice surprise when I was making my rounds and mentioning that we bought OST, people perked up. Dialogic is building an open source program. Pactulous has their sipdev.org effort; that's all open source (And *ahem* not Asterisk, they like to point out).
Sooo, net-net is Open Source is starting to snowball.
Wireless? Do I have to tell you about Wireless? I love Wireless. There was a big chunk of wireless conference sessions. I chatted with the Ericsson folks about LTE and IMS and other good things. I like what I hear about LTE, but it's not something I can get tomorrow. But I should be able to get WiMAX by the end of the year in the D.C. area, if I remember the press reports correctly.
Then there's advertising. Embarq's CEO referred to advertising as "almost like a fifth business." Or was it a fourth? I'm a little numb right now, but you get my point (quad vs triple play + advertising). Other folks are excited about the prospects of advertising in mobile, data, wherever...
Posted by dmohney at 10:45 PM | Comments (0)