« March 2005 | Main | May 2005 »
April 29, 2005
Wiki Yippee
Socialtext, for which I serve on the advisory board, just announced they have secured venture funding.
The company's founders basically came together at my first Supernova conference. It has been great to watch the startup grow, and sign on some impressive customers for its wiki-based lightweight collaboration platform. Now, the real fun begins!
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 10:26 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 21, 2005
"It would be a tragic mistake to underestimate the potential market power Skype is accumulating." So says the always insightful Martin Geddes. He's right, and yet this mistake is still quite widespread.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 7:01 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Putting the Genie Back in the Box
IBM is working with Fox on technology to limit digital television broadcasts to particular local markets. It's a variation on the "broadcast flag" the FCC is imposing on makers of TVs and other digital media devices, but with a twist.
The argument for the flag is that it protects intellectual property, by limiting unauthorized redistribution of digital content. The IBM/Fox technology, on the other hand, protects business arrangements. It's designed, I assume, to preserve local advertising dollars, by forcing users to see content intended for their local markets. Nothing wrong with companies trying to fight change in their markets. What's worrisome is when that battle has government on one side. The danger of the broadcast flag is that it will be the entry point for all sorts of restrictions that have little to do with protecting copyright.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 6:47 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 19, 2005
All in the Family
My brother Adam, who sits on the San Francisco Public Utility Commission and has an amazing record as a progressive activist, has an op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle promoting municipal wireless broadband. It's great when our professional paths cross like this. It's even better when Adam does such an effective job of making the case for municipal networks.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 10:48 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 15, 2005
Open Spectrum podcast
David Weinberger and I did a podcast last week about open spectrum that is now available on Richard Giles' site, The Gadget Show. We had a few audio issues -- we were communicating over Skype between the US and Autralia. Nonetheless, we were able to cover the major reasons why radical spectrum policy reform is such an exciting concept, and where things stand today.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 7:47 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 14, 2005
The Growing VideoNet
More evidence that video P2P usage is fueling an upsurge in global bandwidth demand.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 6:22 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 13, 2005
The Scale of Scale
Two awesome bon mots in a fantastic post by Jeff Jarvis:
"Scale doesn't scale anymore."
and
"Aggregation is the new scale."
This is what I was talking about five years ago, when I described syndication as an over-arching business model in a Harvard Business Review article. At that point, although we had blogs and RSS, the other precursors for the revolution Jeff ably describes weren't yet in place. Now they are.
Ever since I started Supernova, I've tried to explain why decentralization was such a critical trend. Now it seems that lightbulbs are going off in many places. As Jeff summarizes:
"The old days of big players in the economy collecting consumers, audience, distribution, manufacturing efficiency, buying power, or capital in the grip of centralized control are waning. That used to be the way to find efficiency and size. That used to be the way to scale. But they are being foiled by our new distributed world. And they are being replaced by a more efficient means of finding size and efficiency."
Exactly.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 7:50 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 8, 2005
Wireless Philadelphia launch
Yesterday, I attended the press conference at which Philadelphia mayor John Street (that's him in the photo) announced the formal launch of Wireless Philadelphia. This is the city-wide wireless broadband network that has been the source of both so much excitement and so much angst on the part of incumbents.
As Street, and Philly CIO Dianah Neff (the force behind the project) made clear, however, the city isn't just blindly trying to replace private connectivity providers. Philadelphia has established a separate non-profit corporation, which will contract with private companies to build the network. It will then offer the network as an open wholesale platform, with third-party service providers offering the retail connections to end users. That means carriers, ISPs, and hotspot aggregators will all benefit from the city's investment, not compete with it.
No city money will be spent on the project. All costs will be covered from revenues. That's right; the network won't be free. It will cost an estimated $16-$20/month for unlimited access, which is a bargain considering that you can pay $10 just to surf in one Starbucks for a couple hours. The city will be a customer of the wireless network for its internal communications activities, which is expected to save it $2 million per year in telecommunications costs once. And as Street and Neff pointed out, there are all sorts of potential ancillary benefits and services to be delivered on top of the connectivity platform.
It's exciting to live in the place that it pioneering something that I'm confident all major cities will want to do within the next 5-10 years.
By the way, we're organizing a workshop track at Supernova on municipal broadband. The activity around municipal wireless in particular is just too great to ignore. And this decentralization of connectivity and broadband policy is a perfect example of the Supernova themes.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 5:06 PM | TrackBack
April 7, 2005
The Mating Dance of Elephants
According to a BusinessWeek article, phone companies trying to get into the video market are running into an obstacle: movie studios and other content owners. They aren't willing to license their content for video-on-demand and other new distribution formats.
Frankly, I hope the studios continue to hold out against the inevitable transformation of the video marketplace. The telcos are pouring money into fiber and IPTV deployments because they are scared about the competitive threat from cable companies, who are getting into the voice market. At some point, all dressed up with nothing to show, they may decide to take matters into their own hands. I'd love to see the phone companies throw their resources and political muscle into the process of blowing up the existing video value chain, alongside the smaller innovators like Tivo and BrightCove.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 8:15 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Skype tipping point?
James Enck: "[M]ore than 1% of the world's broadband population is running Skype at any given time."
Sounds like a killer app to me.
Posted by Kevin Werbach at 8:07 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
April 1, 2005
Over There
Just a reminder that I'm also posting now on the Supernova conference blog. There will be some overlap between the two blogs, but I generally won't be making the same post in both places.