Smart Phones: Technology and Business Apps

RIP, IBM Cambridge Scientific Center, 1992, and Founder Norman Rasmussen, 2003

2011-07-31T18:17:00.001-04:00

The IBM Cambridge Scientific Center (CSC) closed on thisdate nineteen years ago, July 31, 1992. This tiny facility, far distant fromthe IBM Research Division HQ and IBM’s major labs, had a profound influence oncomputer hardware, operating systems, and on the Internet that continues untilthis very day.

In the past I have published a few notes on the founding of the Center. Also notes on how and whereBob Creasy came up with his concept of a virtual machine. And I intend to addmore about Ed Hendricks and his creation of the network that became known asVNET and its influence on the Internet.

But one fellow who continues to intrigue me is Norman Rasmussen,the founder of the CSC, who started Creasy and Hendricks on the paths to theirinnovations.

Recently a former CSC staff member, Lynn Wheeler, well knownfor his work on the CP time sharing algorithms, pointed me to an Obituary forRasmussen that ran in the Boston Herald some time ago. This obit is no longer available online, so Iam reproducing it there with a couple of minor corrections for technicalaccuracy, with a tip of my hat to Monica Collins for her good work.

Norman L. Rasmussen, 74,high-tech entrepreneur
by Monica Collins
Thursday, January 30, 2003

Norman Leo Rasmussen of Boston, a computersoftware innovator who pioneered IBM's first multiple user time-sharing system,died of multiple myeloma Sunday at Brigham and Women's Hospital. He was 74.

Working for IBM from the mid-1960s until theearly 1970s, Mr. Rasmussen founded the IBM Cambridge Scientific Center adjacentto the Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology. He led and inspired the team that developed the Virtual MachineOperating Systems, which later became an IBM product known as CP/CMS, an earlyentry allowing multiple users to tap into a single computer mainframe. VMopened the way for cooperative computer programming development.

With his business acumen, scientific expertise,and fiery entrepreneurial spirit, Mr. Rasmussen soared into the brave new worldof high-tech.

In 1975, after he left IBM, Mr. Rasmussen wasco-founder of GSG Inc., a company that developed applications for variousDepartment of Defense users of Arpanet, a progenitor of the Internet. From 1980 to1991, he was president and CEO of Teleprocessing Inc., a company he founded.TPI specialized in communications-based systems integration solutions forprivate sector organizations.

In 1991, he was recruited to become presidentand CEO of Softech, Inc., a troubled computer services company. Mr. Rasmussensucceeded in restoring Softech's viability before the company was sold in 1996.

Most recently, Mr. Rasmussen - whose familyemigrated from Denmark in 1947 and who spoke three Scandinavian languages - waschairman of the Swedish-based Internet equipment company, Effnet Group AB untilhe retired in 2001.

Mr. Rasmussen was also a member of theMassachusetts Governor's Advisory Committee on Information Technology from 1984to 1994.

For those who knew him, however, Mr. Rasmussenwas not the starchy scientist. He was an early feminist who worked for socialjustice and a woman's right to choose. He was active in community affairs andwas a familiar figure in his neighborhood, Boston's North End/Waterfront. Heserved on his condominium association's board of trustees.

Tall and handsome, with ramrod posture and afull head of white hair, Mr. Rasmussen was a well-traveled bon vivant. Hefrequently traveled to Europe and was multi-lingual. He and his wife, EllenParker, spent the 2001 holiday season traveling throughout Southeast Asia.

Yet, all journeys led back to his sailboat andthe sea. Mr. Rasmussen was most at home on his sailboat, Galatea, and he spentsummers sailing in Penobscot Bay.

Mr. Rasmussen is survived by his wife, EllenParker, the executive director of Project Bread; a daughter, Andrea; a son,Nicolas; and a brother, Eyvin.

Happy 47th Birthday, IBM Cambridge Scientific Center

2011-02-01T10:12:00.000-05:00

Feb 1. 1964. What became known as the IBM Cambridge Scientific Center (CSC) was born today when IBM’s Norm Rasmussen rented the fourth floor of a newly constructed commercial building at 545 Main Street, behind MIT, just across the tracks from a starch factory.

Here are some of my notes. Corrections or additions welcome.

MIT’s Project MAC had already leased floors 5, 8, and 9 of the building for professor, staff, and graduate student offices, and for computer rooms.

Here is how I recall the building in the min-1970s.

The first floor contained a restaurant, was it the Tech Square House? Also there was the Office of Michael Dertouzos, Chairman of MIT’s Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) and the LCS Reference Library.

The second floor housed the CSC Computer Room; I was on that floor, as was Fritz Giesin.

The third floor housed clandestine government offices, the CIA and perhaps others.

The fourth floor was the CSC, laid out similar to the MIT Offices above.

The MIT Floors, 5, 8, and 9 had maybe 60 offices, singles and doubles, wrapped around the elevator core. Almost all the offices had windows: none opened. The air conditioning wasn't enough for the load of people and machines in the building on really hot summer days, and failed every year, forcing them to shut down the computers before they roasted themselves. Fluorescent lights, linoleum floors, hard walls, doors that locked; they were nice offices (as recalled by Tom Van Vleck).

Other floors had varying tenants at different times. The GE Multics team, the Cambridge Information Systems Laboratory (CISL), had offices on half of the seventh floor. IBM had some other offices in the building. The programming group that developed VM/370 was originally housed there. IBM Fellow Nate Rochester and Jean Sammet were somewhere in the building.

Tech Square was reconstructed in 2001; 545 is now known as 200 Tech Square.

Online Learning vs. Face-to-Face, Who Wins? The Outsourcer.

2010-09-13T16:08:00.000-04:00

Expert opinion and cost pressures are shifting education online, according to a thought provoking post in today’s NY Times. Apparently, online learning now beats face-to-face teaching by a modest but statistically meaningful margin.

Pondering this change, by sheer coincidence I received an even more thought provoking post from my classmate Patrick Winston via the MIT Alumni Assn. blog, Slice of MIT. It was written in the first person, is brief, and the post struck me so strongly that I am reproducing it intact, something I have never done before.

Gerry Sussman burst into my office. “You were right!” he said.

“About what?”

“Twenty-five years ago, you said we should get rid of 10% of the faculty and use the money to hire unemployed, English-speaking, Indian PhDs to tutor our students individually over the web.”

“Yes,” I remembered, a little surprised that he remembered.

“Well, it’s happened.”

He had just heard a BBC report on TutorVista, of Banglore, which offers tutoring to kids at $2.50 per hour.

Now for the rest of the story. This year, my subject, 6.034, will join 40 others available from OpenCourseWare with video recording of the lectures. Many more are coming.

When I was a kid, I went to MIT because that was the only way I could have Arthur Mattuck tell me about mathematics; Tony French, about physics; Amar Bose, about circuits; and Gerry Lettvin about what the frog’s eye tells the frog’s brain.

But sitting in a lecture hall is no longer a good reason to be at MIT. You can watch today’s analogs of those great lecturers without spending $50,000 a year. In fact, if you can’t afford a computer, you can watch them for nothing at your local library. If you can spare $2.50, you can probably find someone in India to help you through the rough spots.

Of course, there still are plenty of reasons to be physically at MIT; here are a few that come to mind: working problem sets together late at night, the smaller classes, UROP, TEAL, IAP, BattleCode, and the 100K Contest.

Still, I don’t think we at MIT are thinking enough about the future, because, well, here is another prediction: twenty-five years from now there will only be 500 or so English-language lecturers. They will paid like sports stars to develop new material offered up by OpenGooggleWare, along with advertisements. Who knows what the rest of us will be doing. Maybe tutoring Indian students over the web.

I tip my scally cap to classmate Patrick Winston, now Professor Patrick Henry Winston ’65, SM ’67, PhD ’70, and I recommend his Pensées to all.

In Defense of the Infinite Corridor (MIT)

2010-08-21T14:29:00.000-04:00

Occasionally I come across challenges to MIT’s Infinite Corridor based on its length compared to other corridors that may or may not exist elsewhere in the same universe. Of course, it is intuitively obvious to even the most casual observer that at a mere 147.491 Smoots from its entrance in building seven to the exit at building eight, the apparent length of the corridor is not very great. After all, the bridge connecting Boston to MIT measures a full 374.4 Smoots +/- one ear.

For a full explanation, I’ll draw on two of my fictional characters, walking the corridor for the first time in 1961, about the time that “IHTFP” became the de facto motto of the undergraduate student body.
-------
“So this is what they call “the Infinite Corridor.” Bill said to me as we walked along the lengthy hallway from Building Seven to Building Fourteen.

“Don’t they also call it something else, Stonehenge or something?”

“ MIT-henge, I think,” he replied.

To the uninitiated, we were walking from MIT’s main entrance on Mass. Ave toward the Hayden Memorial Library. MIT people communicated largely in numbers: buildings, courses, departments, were all identified that way.

The Infinite Corridor is the hallway, 251 meters (825 feet, 0.16 miles) long, that runs through the main buildings of MIT. This corridor, which at its midpoint passes directly under the Great Dome, serves as the most direct indoor route between the east and west ends of the campus.

As for MIT-henge, on several days each year, the sun sets in alignment with the Infinite Corridor and shines along its entire length. "MIT-henge" is a reference to Stonehenge's alignment with the sun. This occurs on several days around January 31 and November 11.

Myself, I never considered it “Infinite” because of its length, as that would define infinity as linear, and we all know that, like our life stories, infinity always turns back upon itself. It was actually one of four to nine connecting corridors, one on each floor. Intersecting on each level were U-shaped corridors bending back to their start. Staircases stood in each intersection. Every serious physics student is familiar with the Möbius Strip, a model of infinity that can easily be created by taking a paper strip and giving it a half-twist, and then joining the ends of the strip together to form a loop. M. C. Escher has a famous example, “Möbius Strip II”, featuring ants crawling endlessly around the surface of one. Add his “Ascending and Descending” to represent the staircases and you have a well decorated dorm room. Escher’s prints were popular items at our bookstore, “The MIT COOP.”

These corridors and stairways of MIT, with pipes exposed overhead and radiation and electrical warnings on many doors, were all painted a drab grey-green, giving MIT an industrial era appearance contrasting starkly with the classical architecture of Harvard and Wellesley. Some of my classmates would dream they were lost forever in this maze. My nightmare was that the corridors were bones, and that the buildings had decayed away, leaving only the rib cage of a vast evil leviathan to bleach on the muddy shores of the Charles. And rumors persist that on moonless nights you may still encounter the ghost of Claude Shannon on his unicycle, juggling as he propels himself through the maze.

You might note that today MIT has many new buildings on campus, many connecting with the original network of corridors. But remember, if the corridor is already infinite, adding all those new connections doesn’t increase the length at all.

You can find an interactive map of the current MIT campus here.

The explanation above is drawn from “Killer App –A Murder at MIT,” my novel in progress.

MIT and India Build a Global Force in IT

2010-07-10T09:10:00.000-04:00

I never once suspected how large a role MIT played in building India into the force it is today in the global IT industry, despite my having attended many meetings stressing the symbiotic relationship between MIT and Entrepreneurship. Recently, Professor Ed Roberts described the significant contributions to the US economy made by foreign students who attended MIT and subsequently started companies here. Then I received the following invitation to a lecture at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA:

“In the last fifteen years the very names Bangalore and Silicon Valley have become evocative of the important connections between India and the United States in the global IT industry. Historian Ross Bassett argues that the linkages between the two countries are far older and deeper than is widely known. In the course of his research, he found that Indian graduates of MIT, to a remarkable extent, significantly influenced the creation of modern technological India. In the colonial period, a small group of Indians, including some associated with Gandhi, went to MIT as an anti-colonial act and as a way to develop technological capabilities for India. Indian graduates of MIT played a key role in the founding of the Indian Institutes of Technology (IIT), and in the years after 1947, were central figures in the Indian steel industry, the atomic program, and the space program. The Indian IT industry today is to an astounding degree the product of Indian graduates of MIT. Since 1965, Indian graduates of MIT and graduates of MIT once removed---that is graduates of the IITs---have also played an increasingly important role in American technology and computing.”

Alas, I won’t be able to attend this lecture, which is being held on Thursday, July 15. The Museum runs a variety of intellectually stimulating events such as this one. At the very least, I would recommend you visit their web site and subscribe to their electronic newsletter. Having been one of the founders of the original Digital Computer Museum, located here in Boston on Museum Wharf, it continues to sadden me that it moved to California. You can view a video describing the origin and goals of the museum here.

One museum function that I did attend was celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the IBM System/360. That night’s entire program can also be seen on video, although they stopped filming just as Bill Worthington and I joined Gene Amdahl, Fred Brooks, and many other members of the original team cutting the birthday cake.

Now about that outsourcing............

The iPad's Impact On Other Devices

2010-07-10T06:50:00.000-04:00

Resolve Market Research has just completed a comprehensive study that looks at how the iPad is being used, and how the iPad is impacting other technology devices like e-readers, portable gaming consoles and netbooks. You can read more about it here.

The Boston Regional Entrepreneurship Week 100

2010-06-25T15:41:00.000-04:00

Yesterday, I wrote that Joe Caruso was hoping to recruit 100 thought leaders for a Boston Regional Entrepreneurship Week (BREW) to be held the week of Oct. 12, 2010. Joe was concerned that time was short to plan and organize this event.

Joe just got his 100th member, just 24 hours after he asked. It is quite an impressive group. Opinion leader or not, you can join the group here. Should that fail, go to Linkedin and look up “Boston Regional Entrepreneurship Week.”

I tip my straw hat to Joe Caruso and his 100 BREW volunteers.

Internet Trends 2010 by Morgan Stanley Research

2010-06-25T08:27:00.002-04:00

The last time I wrote about Morgan Stanley presentations, they had just published their report on the mobile internet. Now, just seven months later, the mobile internet has become just the internet. These reports contain great data for anyone who is preparing a business plan for a new venture.

Internet Trends 2010 by Morgan Stanley Research

View more presentations from CM Summit: Marketing in Real Time.

A new BREW: the Boston Regional Entrepreneurship Week in October

2010-06-24T13:57:00.000-04:00

A number of our very active local Angel Investors have cooked up a plan to designate the week of Oct. 12 as Boston Regional Entrepreneurship Week. Present at the inception were Angel-at-Large Joe Caruso and Unconference Disorganizer Bill Warner, joined by Chris Sheehan, Dharmesh Shah, John Landry, and Jean Hammond.

“We're trying to expand Bill Warner's Unconference into a week of activity and celebration for entrepreneurial activities in Boston. We were just talking about the idea, and suddenly it has taken on a life of its own,” says Caruso, who hopes to involve Angel Groups, Venture Capitalists, technology-based corporations, and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

“We are hoping to get 100 thought leaders onboard very quickly,” says Caruso. He’s off to a good start. He set up a Linkedin group this morning and by midday he had 23 members.”

Opinion leader or not, you can join the group here. Should that fail, go to Linkedin and look up “Boston Regional Entrepreneurship Week.”

You can also contribute to discussions on Linkedin. I suggested to Joe that they expand the boundaries of the group beyond those regularly honored, running roughly from Microsoft NERD to the Longfellow Bridge, then West to the Kendall Square Red Line Stop, and South to the Stata Building at MIT. Using Saul Steinberg’s famous New Yorker Poster, “View of the World” as a guide, Joe promises to consider the idea.

New Hampshire’s New Start-Up Accelerator

2010-06-24T06:49:00.001-04:00

A team of technology entrepreneurs led by Mark Galvin has partnered with the University of New Hampshire (UNH) to launch a new startup business accelerator - the New Hampshire Innovation Commercialization Center (NH-ICC). The goal of this nonprofit center, located at the Pease Tradeport, is to create new jobs in the region by selecting high potential early stage companies and providing them with a combination of business resources, seed capital and “hands on involvement” by seasoned startup executives.

UNH, which has developed a strong entrepreneurial culture through spin-off companies, by housing the internationally respected Center for Venture Research, and through its campus-wide Holloway Business Plan competition, provided startup capital for the NH-ICC as well as expertise in creating the unique public-private relationship. The NH-ICC will work to facilitate the use of university research by its resident companies through licensing and royalty agreements. UNH will also provide resident companies with student research assistants and mentors from its colleges, including the Whittemore School of Business and Economics.

“This is a great opportunity for the university to support technology entrepreneurship both on our campus and in our community, while at the same time leveraging our resources to help support the creation of private sector jobs in the state,” said UNH President Mark W. Huddleston. “Turning the university’s intellectual capital into commercial opportunities as a way not only to expand revenue streams but to enhance economic development and job creation in the state is a key component of the university’s 10-year strategic plan and I’m pleased we are well on the way to seeing results.”

“The economic downturn of the past two years has taken a significant toll on the New Hampshire startup community, where a host of innovative new technologies – not to mention local jobs - are languishing on the sidelines because of the lack of a viable path to commercialization,” said Mark Galvin, the founder of Whaleback Systems in Portsmouth, Cedar Point Communications in Derry and managing director of the NH-ICC. “The NH-ICC will provide a path for promising early stage companies to bring their products to market while also creating sustainable, high-value private sector jobs in the state.”

Added Galvin, “UNH has played a critical role in getting this initiative off the ground, providing both resources and funding. We look forward to helping the university accelerate the commercialization of its research, inventions and technology while also using the NH-ICC to attract entrepreneurs from throughout New England to build their startup business in New Hampshire.”

The NH-ICC will select up to 12 seed stage technology companies on a rolling 12-month basis and “graduate” resident companies after 18 months with the expectation that they will remain in New Hampshire, grow rapidly and create new jobs. The NH-ICC’s operations will be funded through a seed investment from UNH, private investment fund management fees and carried interest, and matching business development grants. Selected resident companies will receive $100,000 to $250,000 in seed funding from the private investment fund.

UNH has had a strong entrepreneurial focus since at least 1984, when the Center for Venture Research was created within the Whittemore School of Business and Economics. Currently led by Director Jeffrey Sohl, the Center studies early stage equity financing for high growth ventures.

The Whittemore School Holloway Prize Innovation-to-Market Competition, established in 1988, is designed to stimulate entrepreneurship throughout the University System of New Hampshire. A short video of this year’s final round is available on WMUR's Chronicle.

In 2001, the first company was spun off from UNH. Chaoticom, a joint project of the Math Department and the Whittemore School, received seed funding from the eCoast Angels Investment Network.

Now, in 2010, we have NH-ICC. AT IBM in the 1960s, we knew it was summer when the Branch Manager switched to his straw hat. This summer, I tip my straw hat to Mark Galvin for getting this accelerator launched.

Angel Investors, Measuring Their Added Value

2010-06-08T15:49:00.000-04:00

Can you measure the value that angel investors add toward the success and growth of new ventures?

Following a recent Tweet from CommonAngels (aka James Geshwiler) , I uncovered a working paper on this topic authored by William R. Kerr and Josh Lerner of HBS and Antoinette Schoar of MIT. Their conclusions:

• Angel-funded firms are significantly more likely to survive at least four years and to raise additional financing outside the angel group,

• Angel-funded firms are also more likely to show improved venture performance and growth as measured through growth in Web site traffic and Web site rankings; The improvement gains typically range between 30 and 50 percent,

• Investment success is highly predicated by the interest level of angels during the entrepreneur's initial presentation and by the angels' subsequent due diligence,

• Access to capital per se may not be the most important value-added that angel groups bring. Some of the "softer" features, such as angels' mentoring or business contacts, may help new ventures the most.

Another interesting conclusion: “Angel investors as research subjects have received much less attention than venture capitalists, even though some estimates suggest that these investors are as significant a force for high-potential start-up investments as venture capitalists, and are even more significant as investors elsewhere. This study demonstrates the importance of angel investments to the success and survival of entrepreneurial firms.”

I am particularly intrigued by the authors’ conclusion that mentoring and business contacts may be more valuable than money. Entrepreneurs never make me feel that way, which is unfortunate, as I have lots of advice available.

The study is based primarily on data provided by the Tech Coast Angels and the Common Angels. Cooperating with the authors were some of the usual suspects: James Geshwiler of CommonAngels, Warren Hanselman and Richard Sudek of Tech Coast Angels, and John May of the Washington Dinner Club. The Kauffman Foundation partially supported this research.

You can find a summary of this paper, The Consequences of Entrepreneurial Finance: A Regression Discontinuity Analysis, right here. The full paper is also available online.

Open Angel Forum to Slay Chimera, June 18

2010-06-02T10:53:00.000-04:00

The Open Angel Forum is coming to Boston on June 18, and they will be very welcome. I do wish, however, that they would either change the way they present themselves or that our local journalists would do a better job of providing perspective so as not to undermine the very values the OAF claims to promote.

For example, Scott Kirsner, one of the most vigorous and talented journalists covering the technology scene, writes in his blog: "Peeved about events that charge entrepreneurs an entry fee to present their businesses to angel investors, Jason Calacanis decided to create Open Angel Forum earlier this year. The series of events, held so far in places like San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles, is 'dedicated to providing entrepreneurs with free and open access to the angel investors that they need,' according to the Web site."

I cannot understand how local entrepreneurs, particularly inexperienced ones, can read that description without inferring that they do not currently have "free and open access" to our local Angels and Angel groups, while in fact we have the world's longest continuous tradition of open access. And I hate to think that even one prospective entrepreneur would be discouraged from applying to our local groups because he has been warned off by assertions of "high charges."

In this isolated case of misreporting, Kirsner doesn't stand alone, as similar notices have appeared in Xconomy, Mass. High Tech, Boston Business Journal, and will undoubtedly be repeated many times in the next few weeks. Here is what Mass High Tech has to say: "Calacanis launched the Open Angel Forum in December out of anger over so-called “pay to play” angel groups, which charge startups a fee to present their pitches."

And while I applaud the attempt to make Angel capital more accessible to entrepreneurs, I feel a need to point out that in not charging presenters the Forum is not innovating, but is just following the tradition of most existing angel groups.

New England has a long tradition of Angel Investing without charging fees to entrepreneurs. To my own knowledge, the first of our regional Angel Groups was the Breakfast Club, formed in 1976 by Mort Goulder, Dick Morley, George Schwenk, and Doug Drane. Still operating, The Breakfast Club reviewed about two business deals a week, investing in about four companies a year. Morley and Schwenk estimate that the club has boosted more than 100 startups. To many, the face of the breakfast club was the late Mort Goulder. “He was a great inspiration to a lot of companies,” Schwenk said. “It’s interesting how many e-mails have been written about him in the last two years. I didn’t know techies could write so well.”

One well known startup that benefited from The Breakfast Club was Carbonite, a Boston firm that provides back-up systems to computers. “Mort is just one of these guys who just makes things happen,” said David Friend, president of Carbonite. “He was just busy, busy, busy. For a guy his age to be running around like that was amazing.” The Common Angels was another seed round investor.

Another example is VKernel of Andover, a joint project of the Breakfast Club and the eCoast Angels."Mort was both a mentor and friend. A true inspiration to the high tech entrepreneurial spirit of New Hampshire," founder Alex Bakman said recently.

Some angels who learned from the Breakfast Club and went on to form other Angel groups include Jean Hammond, a founder of Golden Seeds , and myself, co-founder of the eCoast Angels.

Angels tend to invest locally, so the first thing an entrepreneur should do is check group listings on the Angel Capital Association (ACA) web site. The ACA, under the leadership of Common Angels Managing Director James Geshwiler, began discouraging members from charging presentation fees and continues to do so today. On the ACA site, a local entrepreneur will find 16 New England Based Angel groups. Polling these groups earlier this year, I found only one, Golden Seeds, charged, and that the charge was minimal, $100.

Many groups of Angels, such as The Breakfast Club, are not members of the ACA. In New Hampshire alone, I know there are such groups in Nashua, Hanover, Keene, and in the Mt. Washington Valley. Additionally, not all Angels are in groups. The number of active Angel Investors in 2009 was 259,480 individuals, according to the best source available, the Center for Venture Research at UNH. Collectively, these Angels invested $17.6 billion last year, spread over a total of 57,225 entrepreneurial ventures. Expressed as a round number, I estimate that the number of these Angels who charged presentation fees is zero.

Finding these unaffiliated groups and individuals can be more difficult for the entrepreneur, but it is relatively easy for anyone who is wired into her local technical and business community. Ask other entrepreneurs, as well as attorneys, accountants, and bankers. They'll know.

Talking recently with Jeff Sohl, Director of the Center for Venture Research, we discussed two actual problems limiting the growth of Angel investment. The first is encouraging more people to become Angels. There are lots of individuals with sufficient resources to be Angels, but they never see any deals, have no clear idea how to find and evaluate them, and are thus in the bleachers rather than on the field. The other real problem is what Jeff calls "latent Angels." Latent Angels join a group or attend investment presentations, but they can never quite bring themselves to actually make an investment, thus relegating themselves to the dugout.

Perhaps Jason Calacanis' Open Angel Forum, leaving the slaying of the Chimera to Bellerophon, could use its magnificent publicity machine to get more Angels onto the field and into the game.

Mobile Startups at the MIT Museum - June 7th

2010-06-01T12:50:00.000-04:00

If you can make it into Cambridge, Mobile Monday is taking over the MIT Museum for a night of mobile exhibitions, food, and drink on June 7th. Come see new mobile startups including Springpad, Peekaboo, RaizLabs, Zazu, Vendee, Two forty four am, LiquidBits, uGuideMe, Delfigo Security, Hello Vino, Tweetworks, Adva Mobile, Sayagle, and many more.

Date: Monday, June 7th from 6.30pm to 9pm.

Location: MIT Museum in Cambridge.

Register at the Mobile Monday Boston Web Site.

As you enter the MIT Museum, directly across Windsor Street is MIT's Barta Building (now building N42) which housed the famous Whirlwind project, which I described in an earlier post. Built in 1904, the building was restored to its original brick exterior with its distinctive gargoyles in 1997-8. It is neigh impossible to overstate the significance of Whirwind to the development of Route 128 as a center of computing technology and venture capital.

Two million iPods sold, Apple Self-Esteem Hits Record High

2010-05-31T18:09:00.000-04:00

Apple® today announced that iPad™ sales have topped two million in the less than 60 days since its launch on April 3. Originally available only in the US, this weekend Apple began shipping iPad in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Spain, Switzerland and the UK. iPad will be available in nine more countries in July and additional countries later this year.

"We are working hard to build enough iPads for everyone“ said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “We appreciate their patience."

In today's press release, Apple modestly describes itself as follows: "Apple ignited the personal computer revolution with the Apple II, then reinvented the personal computer with the Macintosh. Apple continues to lead the industry with its award-winning computers, OS X operating system, and iLife, iWork and professional applications. Apple leads the digital music revolution with its iPods and iTunes online store, has reinvented the mobile phone with its revolutionary iPhone and App Store, and has recently introduced its magical iPad which is defining the future of mobile media and computing devices."

High self-esteem can be a wonderful thing to behold. It is very hard to argue with great sucess.

Virtual Machines for Harvard Commencement

2010-05-31T17:32:00.000-04:00

Dear Reader: each year at the Harvard Commencement, three graduating students speak to approximately 32,000 students, faculty, parents, alumni/ae, and guests. As the first anthem concludes, a senior strides to the microphone and announces, "Salvete omnes!" What follows is one of the oldest of Harvard traditions - an oration in Latin. Although we had no similar tradition at MIT, I thought I would contribute this modest effort to the cause of improving communication between layabouts studying long-dead topics and superheroes developing exciting new technology.

Salavete omnes! VM est omnis divisa in partes tres, placitum et inventor Bob Creasy. Primary component eram hypervisor. Alter CMS , sermo monitor ratio. tertius eram RSCS , Longinquus Spooling Defero Subsystem. Horum omnium fortissimi sunt Hypervisor. Dissimilis alius IBM operating ratio VM /370, quod suus decessor CP -40 quod CP /67, postulo proprius intentio repono tutela quod relocation hardware. Creasy had seen mane in et relocation hardware could soleo suggero rectum apparatus pariter et rectum memoria. Is insight venit et him dum inrideo MBTA LXXVII bus ex Arlington ut Cambridge.

EGO propono a toast ut IBM Cambridge Scientific Center quod et suus farsighted procurator , Norm Rasmussen.

Bob Creasy Invented Virtual Machines on the #77 Bus

2010-05-11T08:10:00.000-04:00

Don Dodge reveals “How to unlock your creative genius” on his blog this week. “We are all creative but our human experience filters, and conscious mind, block out creative bursts,” writes Don. “We are much more creative while sleeping…artists, song writers, poets, comedians, and entertainers of all kinds have that amazing creative ability while they are awake.

Last week, while driving from Arlington, MA into Cambridge, I was stuck behind the #77 bus (colloquially known as the Mass. Ave. bus).

I recalled that Bob Creasy invented the concept of the virtual machine on this bus. I don’t know if he was awake or asleep at the time, but it was most likely in the morning.

Creasy had been working as a programmer on CTSS when MIT awarded the project MAC (Multics) contract to GE. In contrast, Creasy was impressed with IBM’s new S/360 product line. Creasy had, of course, spotted the most important attribute of the System/360 - that programs written for one model of S/360 would run on any other model.

Since he was disappointed with the direction of MAC, when he heard that Norm Rasmussen, Manager of IBM’s Cambridge Scientific Center, intended to build a time sharing system based on IBM’s System/360 and needed someone to lead the project, Creasy left MIT to join IBM.

Creasy had decided to build what became “CP-40” while riding the Metropolitan Transit Authority. “I launched the effort between Christmas 1964 and year’s end, after making the decision while on an MTA bus from Arlington to Cambridge. It was a Tuesday, I believe,” Creasy said in a later interview with Melinda Varian.

Creasy and a colleague, Les Comeau, spent the last week of the year excitedly brainstorming the design of CP-40, a new kind of operating system, a system that would provide not only virtual memory, but also virtual machines. They had seen that the cleanest way to protect users from one another (and to preserve compatibility as the new System/360 design evolved) was to use the System/360 Principles of Operations manual to describe the user’s interface to the Control Program. Each user would have a complete System/360 virtual machine (which at first was called a “pseudo-machine”).

The idea of a virtual machine system had been kicked around before then, but it had never really been implemented. The idea of a virtual S/360 was new, but what was really important about their concept was that nobody until then had seen how elegantly a virtual machine system could be built, with very minor hardware changes and not much software.

Rasmussen approved the project, but described it to his bosses as a research project to help the troops in Poughkeepsie (home of “Time Sharing System/360,” IBM’s official effort). Specific technical objectives were always emphasized in order to disguise the “counter-strategic” nature of the activity. But the project’s real purpose was to build a time-sharing system superior to TSS and MULTICS. Luckily for IBM, for us, and for Cloud Computing, it succeeded.

The combination of CP-40 and a single user operating system called CMS evolved into CP/CMS which was made available to IBM customers in 1967. In 1972, a revised version was released as IBM’s VM/370 product.

Feeling that his contribution to computing has yet to be fully recognized, I recently added a short biography of Creasy to the Wikipedia.

iPad parts cost at least $259, what about new iPhones?

2010-05-10T17:33:00.000-04:00

For innovative products, price and cost may at first not be directly related, but, as Damon Runyon says, "The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that is the way to bet."

I enjoy reading how iSuppli and other firms dissemble products to determine their cost. For example, Apple's iPad tablet computer costs as little as $259.60 to build.

Materials for the iPad, which went on sale Apr. 3, include a touchscreen display that costs $95 and a $26.80 processor designed by Apple and manufactured by Samsung Electronics, according to El Segundo (Calif.)-based iSuppli. This analysis means that the components of the lowest-priced iPad, which includes 16 GB of memory, constitute 52% of its $499 retail price, on par with other Apple products including the iPhone 3GS. You can find more details on the costs in an article by Arik Hesseldahl in Business Week.

Will the iPad price trend resemble the iPhone? Back in 2007, early iPhone adopters paid $600 for a phone. Two months later, Apple dropped the price to $400. Then, in June 2009, it introduced a better version, with twice the storage, for $200, one-third the original’s price. Now as we anxiously anticipate a new iPhone, we all wonder what the price will be.

Back to the iPad, will the cost drop significantly? Probably so. And when it does, we should follow the advice of DAMON DARLIN, “Applause, Please, for Early Adopters,” as related in the NYTimes.

“WHY would anyone rush to buy a product knowing full well that it would be cheaper — and probably better — in a matter of months?

”What is truly remarkable about this surge in consumption is that early adopters — those who simply have to own a new gadget right away — cheerfully exhibited what might seem to be irrational behavior. These ardent consumers will stand in long lines, if that’s what it takes, to get an overpriced gadget ahead of everyone else they know.” In my own case, I want to thank my former student, Rick Genter, the first person to show me an iPad.

If you are an entrepreneur contemplating product development in the iPad/iPhone arena, or represent a large volume purchaser of similar products, it would be very helpful to have direct access to the reports from iSuppli. “Unfortunately iSuppli does not allow for public posting of our report pricing,” says Debra Jaramilla, Manager, Marketing. “However, please do direct them (you) to info@isuppli.com or 310.524.4007 for more questions.”

Len Kleinrock, Gordon Moore, and Michael Rabin Receiving Dan David Award

2010-05-09T11:41:00.001-04:00

Three great pioneers of the information age are being honored today, receiving the international Dan David Prize, endowed by the Dan David Foundation and headquartered at Tel Aviv University. The prize includes a $1 million award, which these three honourees will share.

"I am humbled and tremendously thankful to be receiving this great honor," said Kleinrock of the prestigious award, which annually recognizes individuals whose achievements have had an outstanding scientific, technological, cultural or social impact on the world. Previous winners have included Tony Blair, Yo-Yo Ma, Zubin Mehta, Al Gore and Tom Stoppard.

The Dan David Prize recognizes and encourages innovative and interdisciplinary research that cuts across traditional boundaries and paradigms. It aims to foster universal values of excellence, creativity, justice, democracy and progress and to promote the scientific, technological and humanistic achievements that advance and improve our world.

"To be able to also donate a portion of my Dan David Prize to worthy doctoral students pursuing research in my field of networking is a delight. The field of networks is continually expanding, and the opportunities to make an important contribution to the field are manifold. I look forward to being able to provide guidance in these students' research," said Kleinrock, who plans to recommend a recipient and will consider students from UCLA.

I know Len is attending the award ceremony, he sent me a note from there this morning. Len is sometimes called “the father of the internet” (though not by himself). Click here to read his bio on the Dan David site.

Gordon E. Moore’s prediction in 1965, widely known as "Moore's Law", stated that the number of transistors on a chip will double about every two years. Moore's Law has become the guiding principle for the semiconductor industry to deliver ever-more-powerful chips while decreasing the cost of electronics. I have read that there are two billion transistors on Intel’s latest Itanium Chip, but I didn’t actually count them myself; Moore bio here.

Michael Rabin has distinguished himself with his groundbreaking work on ways to improve privacy and create unbreakable ways to encrypt data, bio here.

This year’s honourees in other fields are:

Giorgio Napolitano, President of the Republic of Italy, known for his dedication to the cause of Parliamentary democracy and his contribution to the rapprochement between the Italian Left and European Socialism.

Margaret Atwood, a prolific Canadian writer who has produced more than forty volumes of poetry, fiction, children's books, political essays, and cultural criticism. Her work enabled, for the first time, the emergence of a defined Canadian identity.

Amitav Ghosh, is an lndian-Bengali novelist whose work offers a panoramic treatment of twentieth-century history from a postcolonial perspective.

The awards ceremony is taking place about the time I post this blog. Congratulations to all of these awardees and may the wind be always at their back.

Addendum: You can view a video of the actual awards ceremony here; it is quite an elegant show and clearly a moving experience for the honorees. If you are only interested in the technology awards , fast forward to about 1:21 where Len tells you how the variable capacitor in his crystal radio lured him into a lifetime of invention.

Build your own cloud, why not?

2010-05-01T10:03:00.000-04:00

Three huge global banks are about to announce the formation of an IT buying consortium intending to not only drive down their costs but also giving them the option of creating their own highly secure global cloud infrastructure and network.

"Commonwealth Bank of Australia has teamed with Bank of America and Deutsche Bank to create a global technology buyer's consortium that will strip away billions of dollars in back-office computing costs by combining the purchasing power of the three institutions,” according to the Australian Financial Review.

"To be launched on May 17, the formation of the bank-owned purchasing syndicate poses a formidable challenge to technology heavyweights including Microsoft, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, and Oracle which, for the last 20 years, have reaped huge profits collecting the equivalent of annual rent for their products."

Reflecting back on my time at IBM CHQ, I can envision a whole flock of market planners assuming that customers would buy their cloud services from IBM, and that these services would be rolled out in a manner that increased IBM revenues by stressing new cloud services over displacement of existing software and equipment. Offering cloud services that would reduce IBM’s revenues would be highly unpopular. Most likely, planners at Microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, and Oracle had similar thoughts.

Reducing expenses is clearly more attractive to the customers than to their current vendors. "We've got 50 per cent to 80 per cent of all what we spend a year tied up in infrastructure and that infrastructure isn't conferring any strategic advantage, it's just a cost of doing business," says Michael Harte, CIO of Commonwealth Bank..

“Just goes to show: whenever we think that this business is all grown up, and that all the drama is past, and that things are quieting down, something unexpected happens and the competitive balance gets turned upside down. It's just hard to imagine that when the executives at Oracle or HP or IBM looked out at the world to assess where the next wave of competition would come from, that they decided it would come from three very large and very impatient global customers,” writes Bob Evans in Information Week.

“This one's going to be very fun to watch.”

Happy Birthday, Claude Shannon, the Juggling Scientist

2010-04-30T17:03:00.002-04:00

A man of great intellect and playful fantasy …….

“He was one of the greatest geniuses of the 20th century, the father of the bit, and the pioneer of the information age in which we live. But Claude Shannon not only stood out by virtue of his perspicacity and ingenuity; he also possessed great humor and originality to boot. The founding father of information theory spent his spare time building juggling robots, chess computers and programmable tin mice. He was often seen riding a unicycle or juggling clubs in his office.”

Shannon was born on this day, April 30, 1916. Walking around Portsmouth today, I asked some of the more senior technical people I encountered (including JV, JC, AM, and KD), about Shannon. They didn’t recognize him. Yet his work with digital information laid the groundwork for the video games, YouTube, MySpace, iTunes, and digital telephony these guys work with daily.

While I was at MIT, I heard stories that Shannon had unicycled down the Infinite Corridor, juggling as he went. I have yet to find anyone who actually saw this event, but I’m still asking. Meanwhile, I asked my friend Len Kleinrock, the Internet pioneer, one of Shannon’s first two PH.D. Students.

“When I first met Shannon in summer of 1958, it was at his home. I remember the huge library he had with a ladder on a track to reach the high books. I was sitting on his porch and he showed me the wire-tracking lawn mower he had installed. He also loved automatic chess playing machines; once in LA with him, before dinner, we went to a chess shop and bought this neat chess game which would move the pieces by actually lifting them up with an arm and moving them - if the piece was not there (when it thought it should be there) the arm went into a catatonic fit,” says Len.

The quotation heading this blog post is from the just ended “Codes and Clowns” exhibition at the Heinz Nixdorf Museums Forum in Paderborn, Germany. The exhibit showcased a selection of his inventions, ranging from the highly practical to the downright useless. The presentation set Shannon’s inventions in the context of his biography and the history of information technology

To see an excellent five minute video on Shannon, click here then select “Video about the exhibition.”

So, Happy Birthday, Claude Shannon. And, as Len Kleinrock proposes, “Let’s all raise our glasses to toast the man I admire the most in my professional life.”
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And good news: the Nixdorf Exhibits are on loan from the MIT Museum, the first time that they have been displayed at a different location.The Heinz Nixdorf Forum exhibition has just closed but this exhibition is en route to Berlin and then Linz, Austria. There is a longer proposed itinerary among museums in German speaking countries but those venues have not yet signed contracts. The tentative plan is for the exhibition to return to the US in late 2012, according to Deborah Douglas, Curator at the MIT Museum.

AWS Launches Cloud Computing In Asia Pacific Region

2010-04-29T10:56:00.000-04:00

Amazon Web Services (AWS) provides developers with access to in-the-cloud infrastructure services based on Amazon's own back-end technology platform, which developers can use to enable almost any type of business. AWS continues to expand the range of services offered and the geographic areas served. AWS now offers its suite of web services from new Singapore datacenters to serve customers desiring an Asia Pacific presence

Developers and businesses can access AWS services from the new "Singapore" Availability Zones beginning today. Available services now include Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS), Amazon CloudFront, Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS).

If you haven’t checked out the list of AWS services recently, more details on each of these and other services and specific pricing for each is available at the AWS website. Take a look.

Open Angel Forum now in Silicon Valley, Thinking Nationally

2010-04-20T09:31:00.000-04:00

Don Dodge posted some interesting updates on the Open Angel Forum on his blog today. Don attended the first meeting of the Silicon Valley Chapter and reports that the founder has plans to take the organization both national and global.

Says Don: “Open Angel Forum came to Silicon Valley last Friday night. Dave McClure and Shervin Pishevar are the Silicon Valley chapter leaders for OAF. Jeff Clavier, Andrea Zurek (XG Ventures), Cyan Banister, Pejman Nozad, Chris Yeh, and others attended the first meeting. This is an invitation only group, and these Angels all write checks. Each Angel listed some of their most recent or notable investments to start out the meeting. Some of the biggest names in tech were mentioned, and many of the current hottest startups. It is an impressive group.”

There was a lively discussion about how to make the investment process flow more smoothly, and specifically around how to structure convertible notes that are simple, fair, fast, and inexpensive to put together. Neither Don nor I favor convertible notes, so I’ll refer you to his earlier post on this topic..

And while I applaud the attempt to make angel capital more accessible to entrepreneurs, I feel a need to point out that in not charging presenters the Forum is not innovating, but is just following the tradition of most existing angel groups, including those located here in the Northeast, as I wrote earlier this year.

Says Don: “See Open Angel Forum for news on future meetings and locations. Jason Calacanis never thinks small. He wants to take this nationwide...and global.”

Stephen King, Book Pricing, Kindle, and RiverRun

2010-04-20T08:35:00.000-04:00

I just received a press release from Amazon announcing that Stephen King’s new novella, Blockade Billy, is available now on Kindle for $7.00.

Since I’ve been following the debate about electronic vs. traditional book pricing, I checked on the Amazon site and found that a hardcover version of the novella is available for pre-order: price, $10.11, shipping date May 25.

So the Kindle version is available five weeks earlier and costs 21% less. And, of course, the book needs shipping. I have Amazon Prime, so the apparent shipping cost is free. If you already have a Kindle, the apparent cost for that is also free. The actual costs are higher of course but difficult to calculate so most users won’t bother.

Just for fun, assume that I buy 36 books in a year (one every ten days), at an Amazon price of $20.00 each. Assuming the same discount as the King novella, I would pay $720 for hardbound books and $570 for Kindle versions. A basic Kindle costs $259, or $86 annually, assuming three year depreciation. Free two-day shipping with Amazon Prime is $79 annually.

So who is the big winner: The Kindle ($656 vs. $849) by almost $200 plus earlier availability.

Who is the big loser? Alas, my favorite local book seller, RiverRun Bookstore, which needs to charge full price: $14.99 for the new novella, almost $1100 for my 36 books.

Sorry Tom, but please keep up the book signings and author readings for us.

KPCB Doubles iPhone Fund, Steve Jobs Happy, But Boston Developers Prefer Android

2010-03-31T14:36:00.003-04:00

Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) just announced the doubling of its venture capital iFund to $200 million for companies developing applications for Apple's iPhone OS family of products, including iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad.

"Kleiner Perkins has done a terrific job at finding, funding and supporting great iPhone app developers," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "We are thrilled that they are doubling the size of their fund, along with expanding it to now include iPad developers too."

Established in 2008 as a $100 million investment pool, fourteen iFund backed companies have been supported by an additional $330 million from follow-on investors.

KPCB also announced iFund-supported companies have more than 20 applications in development for the soon-to-be-released iPad, with 11 available at first ship on April 3. KPCB noted the iPhone has created an inflection in mobile content consumption and the iPad will lead the next wave of innovation in mobile computing. The iFund is increasing its investment dollars to back entrepreneurs and build companies that focus on these areas. Particular areas of interest on iPad include entertainment, communication, social networking, commerce, health care, and education.

"Welcome to the brave new post-PC era where a swoosh of fluidity replaces the traditional mouse-bound GUI. A new, truly revolutionary platform is rare, and a prize for entrepreneurs," said John Doerr, KPCB Partner. "We expect all ventures to have an iPad strategy. We will fund many more ventures for iPad, and the iFund will accelerate their success."

In Boston, developers prefer Android. As Erin Kutz wrote in Xconomy last month, “So the iPhone may be the prettiest, the Blackberry may boast the biggest smartphone market share, and the Windows Mobile platform is, um, around, but it’s Android that’s best for developing apps. Or at least it was the Android developers who best defended their platform at the smartphone smackdown during our Mobile Madness event.”

Of course, many new applications under development will likely be available on both platforms.

IBM offers cloud for developers, not yet for mainframe developers, PayPal using it

2010-03-18T10:07:00.000-04:00

Tuesday, IBM announced the availability of Smart Business Development and Test Cloud on the IBM Cloud, the commercial version of cloud services for software development and testing. These new services allow clients to do test and development on the shared IBM Cloud. Beta clients of these services include the Computer Software Initiative and PayPal.

At first, I found this announcement confusing. The reason for my befuddlement was that IBM previously delivered the similarly named Smart Business Development and Test Cloud, a private cloud. In this previous version, the cloud is built and managed by IBM, but located on the client premises and behind the client’s firewall.

Jennifer Knecht from IBM was nice enough to help me with a few questions.

Q. Are these cloud services available to entrepreneurs and new companies?

A. IBM is focused on delivering enterprise-class cloud services that are highly secure, flexible and reliable, and built for use with development teams. Small companies can certainly take advantage of these new services, and you'll see that we've announced partnerships with a number of small organizations and venture-backed companies today. Since the IBM cloud services are delivered in a flexible, consumption-based model, it gives smaller organizations a more predictable view into the costs they incur.

Q. Can these services be used for mainframe development?

A. George -- the initial version of Smart Business Development and Test Cloud on the IBM Cloud doesn't yet include support for mainframe development, but we're still in early stages. We'll share details about additional partners and technology support in the coming weeks and months. Let me know if you have any questions in the mean time.

From what I know today, the IBM Cloud with all of the Rational development tools available sounds like an excellent product. To me, the mainframe issue remains relevant. On the LinkedIn Mainframe Experts discussion group, this topic is arises repeatedly.

For example, just a month ago I read this post which generated 32 replies: “Being out of the work force for two and half years, is there a site where I can practice COBOL, DB2, CICS, JCL ?”

One suggestion was to download a copy of Hercules, an open source implementation of System/370, ESA/390 architectures that runs on Windows, Linux, and even Mac OS X platforms. A better solution would be to buy time in the cloud. As far as I know, no cloud available today supports mainframe development, still a superior technology for transaction processing and for massive data operations. For IBM, the opportunity should be obvious.

Celebrate St. Patrick’s Day using a free Irish translator on your smart phone

2010-03-16T10:19:00.000-04:00

To celebrate St. Patrick’s Day and Seachtain na Gaeilge, Maithu, a small Irish company, has launched two FREE Irish language applications for the iPhone and Google Android App stores.

The 'Get the Focal Irish Translator' is a two way Irish-English, English-Irish Translator with a database of over 13,000 words and terms which live in your pocket. It is quick and accurate, can be used for completing that Irish assignment, reading articles as Gaeilge, or filling in a ‘cúpla focal’ here and there. If you're looking for help with speaking Irish, Muithu also offers a full version which contains pronunciations for all translations.

According to Kerrill Thornhill, “We launched the free version of the 'Get the Focal' app for the iPhone and Android app stores about 6 days ago, there have been over 350 downloads of the free app to date: 280 on the iPhone, over 70 on Android. The paid version of the 'Get the Focal' app was launched in September last year. There have been several hundred downloads of the paid app to date, generating reports from iTunes account is not very user friendly so that's about as accurate as I can be at the moment.”

Kerrill tells me you can download the iPhone version here. I tried it, it is indeed very easy to use.

You might try it for your next speech at South Boston’s Saint Patrick’s Day pre-parade political roast. The best received speaker on Sunday was Gerry Adams, Sinn Fein president, who spoke of the long struggle for peace in Northern Ireland, opening and closing his remarks in Irish.

“We want equality. We want peace, we would not have progress, which we’re making in the process back home, if it wasn’t for the encouragement, assistance, and support of people here,’’ said Adams, who received two standing ovations.

Go raibh míle maith agat, (Thanks a mil), to Kerrill for this free app.

Bad joke: Back when the Irish Tiger was growling loudly, some wits suggested that Ireland was indeed becoming bilingual: English and Polish. Now that the recession has reduced immigration; we might need a new joke.

Mobile Monday Boston 2009 Investment Report

2010-03-09T09:08:00.000-05:00

I’m rushing off to the event, but here is a preview of a new report that Kate Imbach, of Skyhook Wireless, plans to present today at Xconomy ‘s Mobile Madness.

Kate, one of the organizers of Mobile Monday Boston, first unveiled the investment data at Monday night’s meeting of the group.

This report evaluates the 100 Massachusetts mobile and wireless companies that saw venture capital funding and acquisition activity in 2009. The data reveals that mobile has now been a billion-dollar a year sector in Massachusetts for the last two years, despite recent drops in venture funding fueled by the current economic climate. Read the report here.

Ride the Red Line, Reap the Whirlwind

2010-03-04T12:48:00.000-05:00

It would be impossible to overstate the significance of MIT’s Whirlwind Computer on the history of technology, computer engineering, software and programming, venture capital, the development of 128 as “America’s Technology Highway”, and America’s success in the ”Cold War.”

Consequently, when Scott Kirsner asked for suggestions for “The Red Line Tour of Innovation in Boston,” I tried to reap the Whirlwind.

Eons ago, when IBM and DEC were the world’s largest computer companies, you could trace their technological successes directly back to Whirlwind.

In 1954, IBM won a contract to implement SAGE (air defense) for the United States Air Force using technology developed for Whirlwind, the world’s first real-time digital computer. IBM built fifty-six SAGE computers at the price of US$30 million each, and at the peak of the project devoted more than 7,000 employees (20% of its then workforce) to the project. This gave IBM insight and experience with computer technology advancements such as magnetic core memory, a large real-time operating system, an integrated video display, light guns, the first effective algebraic computer language, analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog conversion techniques, digital data transmission over telephone lines, duplexing, multiprocessing, and geographically distributed networks). By 1960, IBM was clearly the technological leader of the computer industry.

DEC’s connection was even more direct. DEC was founded in 1957 by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson, two Whirlwind engineers who wished to make small, transistorized computers (Whirlwind and SAGE used vacuum tubes). Harlan Anderson’s recently published autobiography provides substantial insight into these events: Learn, Earn, & Return, My Life as a Computer Pioneer. I very much enjoyed this book.

Venture capital of $70,000 was invested in DEC by Georges Doriot of American Research and Development Corporation. AR&D later sold its investment in Digital for approximately $450 million, certainly the best VC return ever to that point, which is why the DEC investment is considered the birth of the modern VC industry. Olsen, of course, stayed on at DEC, but Anderson moved on, investing on his own in new companies. Two people he helped get started were Bill Wolfson, who advised me when I left IBM to found Spartacus, and Dick Morely, who as co-founder of the Breakfast Club made a vast number of early stage investments and helped pave the way for today’s Angel Investors.

So Whirlwind led both to inventions and to capital to commercialize them. Programming as a profession started with SAGE, located in Lincoln MA, boosting “Americas Technology Highway.” SAGE continued in service until 1984.

MIT's Barta Building (now building N42) which housed Whirlwind during the project's lifetime is now home to MIT's campus-wide IT department, Information Services & Technology. Built in 1904, the building was restored to its original brick exterior with its distinctive gargoyles in 1997-8, It can be found at 211 Mass. Ave., Cambridge, directly across Windsor Street from the MIT Museum, which is on Kirsner’s Red Line Tour.

The information above comes courtesy of Jessica Holmes in the MIT News Office. Unfortunately, there is no public access to building N42 and I have been told that the interior has been so modified that it would no longer be recognizable.

So photograph the gargoyles with your iPhone, send us a copy, then cross the street to the MIT Museum, where Kate Porter says “We have a small display about Whirlwind here in our Mind & Hand gallery. These items will be on display through mid-June. Whirlwind will be featured in our MIT150 exhibit slated to open in January of 2011. Our archives here at MIT have plenty of materials on Whirlwind and you can access them online.”

If you would like to see more, you can find a YouTube video of Whirlwind here, and a SAGE video there.

Next stop: Where we invented time sharing and virtual machines.

Twitter Postings Up, Up, Up…..

2010-03-02T09:40:00.000-05:00

Twitter postings appear to be growing through the roof, and some days I feel like I am receiving them all. Not so, says Kevin Weil, writing in the twitter blog.

All y’all were tweeting 5,000 times a day in 2007. By 2008, that number was 300,000, and by 2009 it had grown to 2.5 million per day. Tweets grew 1,400% last year to 35 million per day. Today, Weil is seeing 50 million tweets per day—that's an average of 600 tweets per second.

Deliveries are a much higher number because once created, tweets must be delivered to multiple followers. Weil has a nice chart that won’t copy into this blog, so take a look at his original post.

Can you make money writing Smart Phone Apps for Android?

2010-03-02T09:08:00.001-05:00

Apparently so, says Edward Kim, who released his “car locator” application five months ago and now has sales of $13,000 a month.

“I was a really happy camper because what started as a little side-project while I was vacationing with my family, turned into a few extra bucks for lunch money every day. I feel incredibly lucky to be able to say the app has continued its upward trend and is now beyond my wildest fantasy of what could have been possible.” says Kim

Kim's Numbers:

• About 70,000 downloads of the free version

• 6,590 downloads of the paid version

• Price of the app was raised from $1.99 to $3.99

• The app steadily climbed the charts, briefly reaching a peak of #4 in the Travel category for paid apps.

So the gold rush isn’t over yet, in fact, it may be just beginning. My thanks to Kim for sharing his numbers with us. For more detail, check his post.

Developing iPhone Apps, a Virtual Workshop

2010-03-01T09:48:00.001-05:00

Scanning the list of events for MassMobile Month, I found one that might appeal to you even if you are not convenient to the Boston area.

It’s a two hour virtual workshop covering the business of developing iPhone applications. The presenter will be Gregory Raiz, the founder of Raizlabs, who has worked on over 20 iPhone projects. It takes place on March 8. You can sign up and attend online.

The target audience for this talk includes individuals or businesses considering building an iPhone, iPad or mobile application or planning on having a product developed. No technical expertise is required; however, a familiarity with the iPhone and the app store is recommended.

I myself signed up, even though I normally dislike online tutorials.

You can sign up here on eventbrite, where the workshop is described as follows:

This workshop will cover the business of building iPhone applications. It will address the risks and the potential rewards of producing an application and having it for sale in the iTunes App Store. The workshop will cover the following aspects of the business including:

• How to pick an application concept

• What makes an application successful

• Building a business vs. building an app

• The highs and lows of success

• Getting noticed in a sea of 180,000 apps

• Apps that compliment your core business

• Pricing your application and App Store business models

• Designing and developing - what to expect

• Is your app social? (Email, Facebook, Twitter, etc.)

• Costs of building applications

• Marketing app basics

• Application Rejections

• Resources and Tools

• Beyond the iPhone (Android, Blackberry, Web)

Mobile Madness, March 9, Should Attract Both Inventors and Investors

2010-02-26T11:46:00.000-05:00

Full details describing Xconomy’s next big event, Mobile Madness: The New Future of Computing, are now available online, reports Chief Correspondent, Wade Roush.

Headlining the afternoon are keynote speakers from leading global, national, and regional organizations: Jhonatan Rotberg, executive director of the MIT-based Next Billion Network, will talk about the role mobile technology can play in solving social and economic challenges in the developing world; and Kate Imbach, Co-Founder & Organizer at Mobile Monday Boston & Silicon Valley and vice president of marketing at Skyhook Wireless, will walk us through the latest facts and figures on venture investment in the mobile technology sphere in New England (full agenda here).

Of special interest to Angel and VC investors will be a Mobile Showcase featuring 10 mobile startups. Presenters will give one-minute lightning presentations, and then the whole audience will adjourn to the lobby area at Microsoft, where representatives of the showcase companies will be available for one-on-one conversation around tables supplied with a variety of demos and handouts. Those presenters include Apperian, Appswell, bitHeads (from Ottawa, Ontario), Illume Software, the Public Radio Exchange, Roam Data, Rummble (from the United Kingdom), Sand9, SparkCloud, and WherePhone.

You can register here.

Angel Investor Groups, Still Here, Still Helpful, Still Free

2010-02-23T16:29:00.003-05:00

As someone who has had the rare opportunity to know personally many of the leading Angel Investors active today, I have been distressed by some of the comments I’ve read lately disparaging angels. To be fair, many are also disparaging VCs. And many of the irritating posts are on blogs and tweets, not widely read, but some of this nonsense has even made its way into the NY Times.

The catalyzing issue lies in charging large fees to entrepreneurs.

To start, you might look at a post this Monday by Dan Primak in his widely respected and circulated newsletter, PEHub.

Says Primak: “Last week, a Silicon Valley investor named Hugh Sloan III came across a startup that had received a minor award from Microsoft. He emailed the company founders, saying he had “3 ex Google angels and two Tier 1 venture funds who would be looking at this opportunity with me.”

“Sounds great, except there was a giant catch: Sloan wanted $7,500 up-front, in order to set up the meetings. No refunds if the investors didn’t offer term sheets.”

You can find Dan Primak’s article, plus comments including replies from Hugh Sloan III, right here.

Primak is following up on an earlier post by Jason Mendelson, “Watch Out Boston, A Rip-Off is Coming to Town”. Jason is concerned by the following event:

• Name: Young Startup Ventures

• Date and Location: April 21st, at the Microsoft New England Research & Development Center in Boston, MA.

• Cost: $4,500.

Quoth Mendelson: “Now unlike some other events like this, there are a list of credible VCs attending and it is being held at Microsoft. This makes it all the more worse. I bet that some are unaware of the payment mechanism.” Read the comments on this post also.

So what’s my gripe? I think Primak and Mendelson, as well as Jason Calacanis, who has been leading the charge against these practices for some time, are doing a good job both for us for us and for the entrepreneurs. The problem is that some reports take these isolated instances and turn them into a trend. Should you doubt me on this, read “Angel Investors Become Less Available” from the NY Times.

To check what’s really going on, I contacted some of the active and respected Angel Groups here in the Northeast. My findings: fees to entrepreneurs are rare or de minimus.

The four oldest active Angel Groups in the Northeast do not charge. These are: The Breakfast Club, Common Angels, eCoast Angels, and Walnut Group. Others with no charge include River Valley, Angel Investor Forum, Boynton Angels, Hub Angels, Cherrystone, Beacon Angels, Launchpad, ECS Angels, Maine Angels, Rochester Angel Network, Race Point Capital, Bay Angels, Granite State Angels, and North Country Angels. One group, Golden Seeds, charges $100 to apply.

I also received a note from Marianne Hudson, Executive Director of the Angel Capital Association, who writes “basically ACA is in favor of no or very small fees, as well as transparency to the entrepreneur if there are fees.”

If I can determine this in a day, imagine what the NY Times could have done to encourage entrepreneurs to seek out ethical angel groups if they had spent some time researching this topic.

If you want to contact any of the groups mentioned in this post, most are listed in the ACA Directory, along with many other groups throughout North America.

My conclusion: reputable and established Angel Groups are not charging entrepreneurs any significant amount to apply or to present to the group. This means a lot of experienced and successful people are contributing their time as well as their capital to launch new companies and build our economy.

Why do they do it? I’ll quote my friend Mort Goulder, now deceased, co-founder of The Breakfast Club, one of the first and foremost Angel Investment Groups in the World. “Here’s why I do it. I figure this system we have, this start-up economy, has been really good to some of us, like you and me. I feel in return we have the obligation to see that the other guy gets his chance too.”

Conflict alert: I am co-founder of the eCoast Angels Investment Network, an achievement of which I am particularly proud. With special thanks for prompt responses to James Geshwiler, Paul Silva, Charles Cameron, Liddy Karter, Chris Golden, Peter Dorsey, Joe DeMartino, Lucinda Linde, Bill Swiggart, Ham Lord, Charles Sidman, Ralph Wagner, Marianne Hudson, Jean Hammond, Christopher Mirabile, Jim Senall, Fred Wainwright, Corey Silva, and Robert Lamkin.

The chip wars are about to become even more bloody...

2010-02-22T12:49:00.000-05:00

In this next phase, the chip manufacturers fight a "Battle Royal" to supply the silicon for one of the fastest-growing segments of computing: smartphones, tiny laptops and tablet-style devices.

The NY Times analyzes the match. “The fight pits several big chip companies — each trying to put its own stamp on the same basic design for mobile chips — against Intel, the dominant maker of PC chips, which is using an entirely different design to enter a market segment in which it has a minuscule presence.”

Intel remains the last mainstream chip maker to both design and build its own products, which go into the vast majority of the PCs and servers sold each year. Most other chips are built by a group of contract manufacturers, based primarily in Asia, to meet the specifications of other companies that design and market them.

Intel’s Atom line of chips, used in most netbooks and now coming to smartphones, can cost two to three times as much as competitive chips. In addition, the Atom chips consume too much power for many smaller gadgets.

Intel executives argue that consumers will demand more robust mobile computing experiences, requiring chips with more power and PC-friendly software, both traditional Intel strengths.

“As these things look more like computers, they will value some of the capabilities we have and want increasing levels of performance,” said Robert B. Crooke, the Intel vice president in charge of the Atom chip.

I tend to be with Intel here, but I fear they may be making a dangerous mistake. The original Atom chips could support Intel’s Virtualization Technology. Those features seem to be missing from the newest Atom chips, making it unlikely that you can use virtual machine technology on a smartphone to make that phone a full participant in Cloud Computing.

…….
Interestingly, articles from the NY Times are not available online unless you are a subscriber. But the same information is sometimes posted on the NY Times blogs, which are at present outside the “paywall.”

Find Ashlee Vance's article about the forthcoming battle here. You might also take a look at a blog post by Nick Bilton with a wish list of features for future cell phones A second advantage of reading the blogs is that you can also read the comments; the wish list attracted quite a few.

Vanishing Public Companies Shrinking Silicon Valley?

2010-02-18T11:42:00.000-05:00

Very occasionally I find a blog post that provokes sufficient thought that I want to reproduce it in its entirety, hoping that a) the original author will be flattered rather than offended, and b) the readers of this blog aren’t reading exactly the same things I am.

SiliconBeat, a blog from the San Jose Mercury News, postulates that the reduction in the number of public companies has led to a shrinking of Silicon Valley. I myself don’t have the data or resources to perform a similar study for the Boston area, but I would be delighted if someone at the Globe or Xconomy does.

The post by Chris O’Brien: Vanishing Public Companies Lead To The Incredible Shrinking Silicon Valley

“One of the most significant trends I’ve been watching over the past decade is the dramatic drop in public companies in Silicon Valley. Naturally, that number was artificially inflated during the dot-com bubble when it reached 417 in 2000. For our purposes, Silicon Valley includes San Mateo and Santa Clara counties, and the southern half of Alameda County.

“But the number of public companies has dropped for nine straight years now. Even when IPOs briefly reappeared in 2006 and 2007, they weren’t enough to overcome the net loss of public companies through acquisitions or bankruptcy.

“In 2008, the number had fallen to 261. We just updated our records and the latest figure is 241.

“That’s not just less than the dot-com era, that’s well below the 315 public companies the valley had in 1994 when the Mercury News started keeping track.

“Here’s why I think this is a big deal.

“First, it points to the massive consolidation at the top of the pile. The biggest companies continue to get bigger, in large part through acquisitions. This includes Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Cisco Systems and now Google. We’re known for our start-ups, but increasingly the valley landscape is becoming dominated by these big enchiladas. That’s bound to have an impact on the rate of innovation.

“Next, the IPO remains a lost dream. Yes, it briefly reappeared last decade, but even in the good times last decade, they were nowhere near the pace of the early and mid 1990s. The IPO is dead, and it’s time to let go and rethink the way innovation gets funded and rewarded.

“Increasingly, venture capitalists have to look to acquisitions as the best hope for an exit. And these simply don’t produce the returns that an IPO homerun does. That means a big shakeout in the VC community is inevitable. Though it will unfold over many years, in a kind of slow motion implosion.

“Each year, we publish our SV150 section that looks at the top 150 public companies in the valley. At the pace we’re going, by the end of this decade, we won’t even have that many public companies.

“The valley has always managed to adapt to such fundamental changes. But I think the continued disappearance of public companies will pose one of the valley’s greatest challenges. If the valley remains on top in 10 years, it will be because the innovation economy looks far different than it does today.”

March is Mass Mobile Month: Celebrating New England Innovation

2010-02-11T14:55:00.001-05:00

Its official, March is Mass Mobile Month in Massachusetts with a mind boggling array of events planned. That’s Mass as in Massachusetts, but it’s also mass as in huge, because it’s going to be a gigantic month of mobile-related activity around town and around the world. The list of events is too long to include here—which is exactly why our friends at Xconomy have created the Mass Mobile Month website, a clearinghouse for information related to the all of the mobile conferences, camps, seminars, showcases, and networking events going on in New England.

Wonder what makes it official? Check today’s post by Wade Roush on Xconomy Boston for the official word.

I have signed up for two events already.

First is the Xconomy Forum: Mobile Madness, scheduled for Tuesday, March 9, 2010, 1:30 - 6:00 pm at Microsoft NERD in Cambridge. From the invitation by Bob Buderi:

“As computing enters what many analysts agree is its fifth great historical cycle (after mainframes, minicomputers, PCs, and the desktop Internet), New England companies are poised to lead in many areas--including mobile application development, infrastructure, and advertising. But the platforms and markets are evolving fast. At Xconomy's Mobile Madness conference, keynoters and panelists from the region's leading mobile technology companies will help participants make sense of the chaos and separate the solid innovation opportunities from the hype.”

Confirmed Speakers & Participants Include:
Wendy Caswell, CEO, Zink
Walt Doyle, CEO, uLocate
Chuck Goldman, CEO, Apperian
Will Wang Graylin, CEO, Roam Data
Kate Imbach, Vice President, Marketing, Skyhook Wireless; Organizer, Mobile Monday Boston
Mark Lowenstein, Managing Director, Mobile Ecosystem
Dan Olschwang, CEO, Jumptap
Greg Raiz, CEO, Raizlabs
Jhonatan Rotberg, Executive Director, Next Billion Network
Jake Shapiro, Executive Director, Public Radio Exchange
Dan Sullivan, Founder, Appswell
Mark Thirman, Vice President, Business Development, Illume Software

I have also signed up for the Tech Tuesday mobile event which immediately follows the Xconomy forum and showcase reception. Tech Tuesday requires separate registration.

So it is official, Mad Mobile races the March Hare, in Mass., in March. Be there.

Nicera, a New Virtualization Company to Follow

2010-02-10T10:14:00.000-05:00

VMware’s founder Diane Greene has resurfaced, writes Alessandro Perilli in Virtualization.info. Greene appears as an investor in a startup named Nicira, along with Andy Rachleff, Partner at Benchmark Capital.

In July 2008, the VMware Board of Directors removed founder Diane Greene as CEO. Greene was offered another position that she declined, leaving the company that she created and led through one of the most impressive IPOs in IT history.

Nicira, founded in early 2009, is in stealth mode at the moment but its website reveals its mission is to virtualize networks. The company is managed by Steve Mullaney, who comes from Palo Alto Networks and Blue Coat Systems, where he was Vice President of Marketing.

According to Rachleff, Nicira appears to be working on a “Network Operating System” or NOX.

A number of employees, along with Stanford and Deutsche Telecom researchers, published a couple of research papers (one and two) about this topic in late 2009. The team advocates the need for a centralized programmatic interface to observe and control large scale networks. The NOX would provide such API while 3rd party vendors would build applications that leverage the API.

I'm looking forward to reading these technical papers and on learning more about Nicira.

Larry Ellison, Cloud Contrarian

2010-02-03T23:10:00.000-05:00

We cloud believers should find it intellectually refreshing to confront a heretic. We find a famous one in “Larry Kills Sun's Cloud: A Sign or Spleen?" by Michael Neubarth in CIOzone(TM):

“After Larry Ellison’s public displays of ridicule and contempt towards cloud computing, it came as no surprise when Oracle, in its recent briefing event to disclose its plans for Sun’s technology, listed Sun’s Open Cloud initiative among the casualties.

“’We don't plan on being in the rent-by-minute computer business,’ Oracle chief corporate architect Edward Screven was widely quoted as saying.

“Meanwhile, it’s unclear whether cloud computing is a major disruption or an overhyped fad that will blow over. The predominant view of analysts is that the traditional software business of Oracle and other vendors, including IBM and Microsoft, is threatened by the cloud. Gartner recently made the bold prediction that 20% of all businesses would have no IT assets by 2012 because of movement to the cloud.”

Competing with Amazon and Google in the cloud certainly threatens profit margins. Yet unlike Oracle, other major vendors that have reason to be threatened are fielding cloud offerings and presenting themselves as pro-cloud—including IBM with Blue Cloud and Microsoft with Azure.

And the cloud isn’t the only threat to current industry practices. Here in the Boston region, Xconomy has taken a leadership role in cloud advocacy. Xconomy also organizes seminars on mobile computing, which certainly presents an even greater threat to traditional software pricing and delivery than does the cloud. If the triad of smart phones, the cloud, and virtual technology are truly IT's Perfect Storm, then Ellison’s yacht, however large, may well be sailing toward perilous conditions.

Although Oracle has announced the termination of Sun Open Cloud, the technology has already been developed, so it could simply be put on ice and, if the cloud does take off, be resurrected in the future says Neubarth.

“Was killing the Sun Cloud a savvy move on Oracle’s part, a deep reading of the market’s pulse by Ellison, or an act of spite, born of frustration? Will Larry be vindicated when Oracle conquers the data center, or will his animosity towards the cloud come back to bite Oracle?”

Xconomy Cloud3 Presentations Available

2010-02-03T10:18:00.000-05:00

I attended Xconomy’s Cloud3 Forum last month (December 10). Once again, they attracted a sellout crowd of 220 professionals. To reduce the strain of taking detailed notes, I asked moderator Wade Roush if he could post the presentations online. Seven companies allowed this; you can download and review them here.

Posted are presentations from seven speakers :Tom Leighton at Akamai, Joe Chung at Allurent, Michael Feinberg at EMC, Jim Cuff from Iron Mountain, Hasan Alkhatib at Microsoft, Anand Rajarem at Pixily, and last, (but very far from least) Greg Arnette from Sonian.

During the lectures, we used the Twitter “backchannel” to collect audience comments. Here are a few from a well respected local technologist you can use as a guide to the presentations:

“#xcloud EMC's Feinstein describing Atmos hybrid/federated cloud strategy.. damn good ideas.. from a Mass co.. How come nobody knows?

“#xcloud Conf terrific after coffee break.. Caffeine got the animal spirits stirring! EMC Cloudman Feinstein giving meaty talk'

"#xcloud Ex-Microsoftie, now Googler @dondodge blogging on his new Mac! .. no Win VM methinks

"#xcloud Breaking News! Microsoft's Vision detailed in today's presentation!

"#xcloud. 25 min into Azure prez and finally substance.. Azure GA on New Years Day, billing on Feb 1, 2010. But WHAT is still mystery.

"#xcloud MS Azure speaker giving Cloud 101 speech to Cloud grad students. Instead of pablum, how bout substance. What will it be? When?

"#xcloud Greg Arnette fm Sonian speaking.. Probably the sharpest cloud tech East of the Valley

"#xcloud Conference: Iron Mountain speaker.. Nothing new here... Next!"

* * * *

I am currently reviewing the Azure presentation. If you are interested in Microsoft’s Azure, a new paper by David Chappell, "Introducing Windows Azure",was posted on the Azure Website in December.

Thin margins in mobile broadband too

2010-02-01T20:48:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I cautioned entrepreneurs to beware of thin margins for smart devices. Of course, the margins need not be thin if you can get someone else, say AT&T wireless, to bear much of the sales, marketing, and support expense. A short comment by Graham Lawler in today’s NY Times Business Section lets the helium out of that dirigible.

Regarding AT&T’s Q4 results, Lawler opines that “Network usage increased 200 per cent but wireless data revenue increased only 26 per cent. Seems like great evidence of declining margins in mobile broadband.”

Beware thin margins for smart devices

2010-01-31T12:44:00.000-05:00

Before you and your partners launch a new company to compete with the iPad, iPhone, Nexus One, Droid, or similar smart networked devices, be sure you understand the cost structure underlying this marketplace. Margins appear to be slim today and promise to be slimmer tomorrow.

Companies keep these figures secret, very secret, declining thereby to provide a road map for competitors. Thus a small industry has developed, teardowns, whereby specialized firms rip devices apart, analyze their design, identify their components, and calculate how much they cost to manufacture.

Last week The Economist published the parts cost for four well known phones.

Note that the iPhone 3GS with 16MB of memory has a parts cost of $170.07 and an assembly cost of $6.60. Neither ATT nor Apple quotes online a price for the phone without a wireless plan, but while I was writing this post a 3GS with 16MB sold on eBay for $550. ATT sells the same phone for $199, but requires a two-year service contract.

Like all chip-based devices, component prices, particularly memory, tend to fall in accordance with Moore’s Law. Components for the original iPhone cost $218, a full 28% higher than today. Absent competition, falling prices would mean larger margins, but smart phone competition this year should be fierce.

A better target might be the iPad. Until one of the teardown companies acquires and analyses a production model, we will just have to guess at cost. Based on the figures above, the parts cost of current iPhone is about 30 per cent of list price. Assuming the same for the iPad, a $499 model would have a parts cost of $150.

Still want to compete? Do what David Dell did for PCs and discover a dramatically more efficient sales and distribution channel.

Today’s Economist (9/30) calls the new device “The book of Jobs” and predicts great competition from many sources.”Different industries are already converging on this market: mobile-phone makers are launching small laptops, known as netbooks, and computer makers are moving into smart-phones. Newcomers such as Google, which is moving into mobile phones and laptops, and Amazon, with the Kindle, are also entering the fray: Amazon has just announced plans for an iPhone-style ‘app store’ for the Kindle, which will enable it to be more than just an e-reader.”

The soft spot for entrepreneurs: apps and content, where there are already multitudes of competitors, none yet dominant. And if you use a spell checker, add “iPad” to your dictionary.

Rising "Clouds" Attract Venture Funding

2010-01-28T12:46:00.000-05:00

Smart Phones and related devices are clearly a hit within the investment community, as evidenced by the dramatic interest in yesterday’s iPad announcement from Apple. And anything with “Virtual” in its name was a magnet for VC funding last year. That said, can “Cloud Computing” be far behind?

Blogging on the PEHub Forum today, Joanna Glasner discovers "Rising “Clouds” Within The VC Downturn."

“Venture investment may have nosedived last year. But not for startups with the word “cloud” prominently featured in their company description.

“That was one of the findings of a late-afternoon database search hastily orchestrated to come up with something for a blog post. The search unearthed that, in the past 12 months, 39 cloud computing-focused companies got funded, up from 22 in the same period a year ago.

“It’s unclear at this point whether the funding uptick was due to heightened venture interest in cloud computing companies, or due to more companies saying they do cloud computing in the expectation it could help raise more money. Another possibility is that some companies had something to do with actual clouds, although this is unlikely as little venture investment historically has gone to the meteorological sector.

“Other buzzwords that seemed hot in venture circles over the past year did not result in higher funding volumes for companies whose business descriptions included them. For example, 87 companies with “virtual” in their description got funded in the past year, compared to 105 a year ago. And 72 with “analytics” raised capital, down from 89 a year ago.

“However, it’s worth noting this occurred during period in which overall VC investment got hammered even more severely. In 2009, VCs invested a total of $17.68 billion in 2,795 deals, according to the PricewaterhouseCoopers/National Venture Capital Association MoneyTree Report, which uses data from Thomson Reuters. That was way down from 2008, when VCs invested $27.99 billion in 3,985 deals.

“Currently, I’m wondering what the up-and-coming buzzwords will be for 2010. Private shopping clubs seem to be closing a lot of rounds lately. I could also see a resurgence in businesses with “location-based” in their company description.”

Note: I often post excerpts from other blogs, but I very seldom reproduce the post in its entirety. Joanna was so concise and witty here, I couldn’t figure out what to leave behind. And I agree with her that “location-based” may be among the hot keywords in 2010. Check her blog.

Mobile Cloud Computing As A Disruptive Force

2010-01-20T11:23:00.000-05:00

“Mobile cloud computing is poised to become a disruptive force in the mobile world,” with the biggest changes occurring at the intersection of mobile computing and cloud computing, reads the invitation to “The First International Workshop on Mobile Cloud Computing & Services: Social Networks and Beyond.”

By coincidence, this notice arrived just after I completed yesterday’s post, IT's Perfect Storm: Where Smart Phones, The Cloud, and Virtualization Meet. Since our views, while not identical, are in harmony, I was most interested in their rationale and in their suggestions for research.

The rationale: “Mobile phone applications demand greater resources and improved interactivity for better user experience. Resources in cloud computing platforms such as Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, and Google AppEngine are a natural fit to remedy the lack of local resources in mobile devices. Mobile cloud computing refers to an infrastructure where data storage and data processing happen outside of the mobile device enabling a new class of applications previously not possible, e.g. context-aware mobile social networks.”

Suggested topics for research and paper submissions are:

• Mobile cloud computing programming model
• Mobile social networks: applications and experiences, system design and architecture
• Data services and architectures
• Cloud-assisted energy management of mobile devices
• Mobile device virtualization
• Fairness and isolation of mobile devices in the cloud
• Large scale mobile cloud applications
• Data privacy and security
• High availability and reliability
• Economic considerations in offering mobile cloud computing services
• Distribution of resources and computation between mobile devices and the cloud
• Data mining and machine learning in mobile cloud computing
• Context-aware services and computing

PROGRAM CO-CHAIRS are Richard Han, University of Colorado, and Li Erran Li, Bell Labs.

IT's Perfect Storm: Where Smart Phones, The Cloud, and Virtualization Meet

2010-01-19T11:25:00.000-05:00

Last month I cited a Morgan Stanley Report on the prospects for "the mobile internet." Upon reflection, I believe the Morgan Stanley view misses some of the key forces remaking the IT industry today. I am now preparing a lecture series on this topic and would appreciate your thoughts.

Proposed Lecture Series: Information Technology’s “Perfect Storm”

Accelerating information technology is having a disruptive influence on our economy, but the underlying forces causing this disruption are yet to be identified and understood by the vast majority of business leaders, government officials, and technologists themselves.

Like the Perfect Storm, three fundamental technologies: smart phones, cloud computing, and virtualization; are changing the face of our society and changing business as we understand it. The greatest effects are most visible at the points where the three intersect and merge. This combination threatens massive restructuring not only in computing and information technology, but in financial markets, entertainment, news, politics, education, societal values, and in the very ways we come to learn and understand things (epistemology).

In a March, 2009 blog post, the iPhone as a Murder Suspect, this author attributed many of the following deaths to the ever evolving smart phone: phone booths, pay phones, the phone on the kitchen wall, landline phones, the home phone number, paper address books, the “ month at a glance” calendar, wristwatches, PDAs. Also threatened are airline boarding passes, paper coupons, TV remote controls, garage door openers, point and shoot cameras, Walkman and MP3 players, and handheld gaming devices

A very recent and extremely visible disruptive effect of this Perfect Storm was its impact on the market for handheld and dashboard mounted GPS devices. Smart phones with location detecting chipsets and large color screens can do everything that dedicated GPS units from Garmin, Magellan, and Tom Tom can do. Smart phones are leading this attack, with the Cloud providing reserve troops. By using the smart phone for directions and display, while accessing continually updated maps and directions from the Cloud, supplemented by traffic reports, weather updates, parking advice, and shopping information, the phone becomes a far superior functional device and its multi-purpose nature provides an insurmountable cost advantage over dedicated GPS devices.

Moreover, the low cost and ease of writing and distributing applications for the smart phone and Cloud encourages vast numbers of entrepreneurs to extend the capabilities of these technologies in yet-undiscovered ways. Google’s Q4 2009 introduction of a free navigation application wiped 16 per cent off the valuation of Garmin and 23 per cent off Tom Tom.

And the story will grow more dramatic. Our three technologies have a long history, but recent advances have brought them to the fore. These pivotal events over the past couple of years have wrought fundamental changes:

Smart Phones: The July, 2008 introduction of the iPhone 3G with its application library made the smart phone a true general purpose computing device. Within 16 months, developers had created over 100,000 apps for the revolutionary App Store, making it the world’s largest applications store. App Store users have downloaded well over three billion apps, clearly making it the world’s most popular applications store. Google just introduced its own smart phone, the Nexus One, in Jan., 2010. A variety of smart-phone like devices of varying sizes and capabilities, sometimes called netbooks or tablets, are being delivered this year.

Cloud Computing: The 2008 publication of “The Big Switch” by Nicholas Carr brought Cloud computing to public attention, Amazon had launched its pioneering service, the Amazon Elastic Cloud, or EC2, in August 2006, primarily to monetize the extra capacity Amazon had purchased to handle peak loads for holidays. Microsoft will introduce a competing service in 1st Quarter 2010. Other major cloud providers include Google and IBM, as well as several smaller companies.

Virtualization: First a bit of history - IBM’s mainframe based VM (Virtual Machine) operating system was the most versatile, responsive, and secure system of its day. First prototyped in 1966, the VM System required both special hardware features and its own software. VM systems developed for microprocessors were far less robust until 2006, when both Intel and AMD delivered chips that support a full virtual machine implementation. Now processors can run unmodified guest operating systems with minimal performance degradation. VMware’s IPO in August, 2007, brought these developments to the attention of the investment and user communities. Virtualization, in the form of Virtual Machines and Virtual Operating Environments, provides the technological foundation for Cloud Computing. It has been successfully demonstrated on smart phones, and provides the likely basis on which future business, government, and social applications will be designed and developed.

3,000,000,000 Downloads, App Store Growth Boggles The Mind!

2010-01-05T15:33:00.001-05:00

While preparing a proposal for a series of University lectures, over the weekend I looked up some figures for the growth of the Apple App Store. I wanted the numbers to be solid and verifiable; what I came up with was 100,000 Apps leading to 2 billion downloads. This morning, I sent off my proposal to several of my colleagues for review.

This afternoon Apple announced that it is now 3 billion downloads. I’m not hurt by the increase, other than to worry that the industry is changing faster than I can update my presentation.

Last time I talked to my former IBM colleague, Jim Maguire, he was still travelling the world teaching a course on IBM OS/360 Job Control Language that he had first prepared in the 1960s. His comment: “the best thing is it never changes.”

The essence of Apple’s press release is here:

CUPERTINO, California—January 5, 2010—Apple® today announced that more than three billion apps have been downloaded from its revolutionary App Store by iPhone® and iPod touch® users worldwide.

“Three billion applications downloaded in less than 18 months—this is like nothing we’ve ever seen before,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “The revolutionary App Store offers iPhone and iPod touch users an experience unlike anything else available on other mobile devices, and we see no signs of the competition catching up anytime soon.”

iPhone and iPod touch customers in 77 countries worldwide can choose from an incredible range of apps in 20 categories, including games, business, news, sports, health, reference and travel.

Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Today, Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning computers, OS X operating system and iLife and professional applications. Apple is also spearheading the digital media revolution with its iPod portable music and video players and iTunes online store, and has entered the mobile phone market with its revolutionary iPhone.

Note: The first version of this post left out three zeros, claiming downloads in millions, rather than billions. It is always dangerous to be both the writer and the editor.

Use The Cloud, Conserve Capital;

2010-01-05T14:33:00.000-05:00

Many people are asserting that Cloud Computing dramatically reduces the cost of starting a company. On behalf of the many entrepreneurs reading this post, I sincerely hope this prediction is correct, because capital will be tight for at least the next couple of years.

Writing in Xconomy, Michael Greeley describes the depressed state of the venture capital environment here in New England. Michael is a General Partner at Flybridge Capital Partners and Chairman of the New England Venture Capital Association (which has lost 22 per cent of its members in the last two years).

I suspect that Angel investing has also declined. I’ll ask James Geshwiler and Marianne Hudson of the Angel Capital Association if they have any quantitative information for us. The lack of liquidity (see below) continues to be a barrier for Angels.

Here are some excerpts from Greeley’s posting:.

The venture industry weathered a swift-yet-painful contraction in 2009, which shows little sign of letting up. In 2008, the U.S. venture capital industry raised nearly $30 billion; although the 2009 data are yet to be compiled, it appears that last year the industry will have raised less than $15 billion—which may be the new annual reality. For entrepreneurs, this contraction will continue to make capital precious and hard to access.

New England-based companies raised nearly $3 billion in 2008; my guess is that this number will look closer to $2 billion in 2009. The New England Venture Capital Association, which I currently chair, had 138 dues-paying members two years ago; right now, we have 108 members. Fortunately for New England, more than 20 percent of all venture capital is managed by firms based in Massachusetts.

I continue to see great opportunities in the convergence of the IT and life sciences sectors, which New England is uniquely positioned to exploit. There are also wonderful opportunities in cloud computing and with new advertising technologies, but all of this is complicated by the absolute dearth of liquidity.

The real economic recovery is still a few years away. All of us are desperate for predictable, sustainable, and meaningful liquidity. Many of our portfolio companies are at a point of maturity, where in more normal times they would either go public or be sold at attractive M&A prices. Average holding periods have extended to more than eight years, which is unprecedented; normally VC’s expect this to be between four and six years. There will be around a dozen venture-backed IPOs in 2009; this would be closer to 100 in more normal years.

Best New Claim for Google's Nexus One Phone

2010-01-02T12:15:00.005-05:00

"This is not just a phone. It is a transporter. Google is being underestimated again. Basically, you use the Google mapping service, click the location you want to go to, face the phone toward you, and, in less than a second you are there."

Undoubtably inspired by Star Trek's Captain Kirk, this was posted as a comment on one of the NY Times blogs by Lyle Vos, NY, NY. I was most amused. Many bloggers think we'll see an Android phone announcement from Google next week, maybe Jan. 5.

Why ballerinas don’t fall over

2009-12-30T17:10:00.001-05:00

“And, since you ask, this is exactly how pirouetting ballerinas avoid falling over as they spin on their toes - while their bodies spin their heads stay focused on a fixed point. As we look at the dizzying array of technologies that are becoming available now, we need to keep our eyes fixed on our objective - creating a managed personal computing platform that users will accept. That means standardizing software components and personalizing with user environment management.”

This quotation comes from from Martin Ingram, Vice President of Strategy at Appsense , appearing in Virtual Strategy Magazine . Published nearby in Bedford, NH, electronic subscriptions are free.

Those of you who have met me might unfairly surmise that I have never studied ballet. A couple of decades ago I was both kickboxing competitively and dating a ballerina (actually two, mostly sequentially, with a slight but embarrassing overlap). On a typical week, the ballerina was far more likely to be bruised and battered than I. The reason: she was trained to rely on the actions of the others in her ensemble, while I was trained to defend myself at all times.

So, to anyone who is installing or integrating new products, I propose the Ingram-McQuilken approach: focus on a fixed point but always be prepared to defend yourself.

With a tip of my hat to my wife, Lee-Ann, who studied ballet, to my granddaughter, Nellie, who studies it today, and to former World Kickboxing Champion Dick “The Destroyer” Kimber, who taught me to keep my guard up.

Morgan Stanley Acclaims the Mobile Internet

2009-12-27T14:34:00.003-05:00

Morgan Stanley has just released “The Mobile Internet Report” containing lots of great financial and market data along with some well-designed PowerPoint slides. For a flavor of the report, here are a few excerpts from a truly extensive document.

Material wealth creation / destruction should surpass earlier computing cycles. The mobile Internet cycle, the 5th cycle in 50 years, is just starting. Winners in each cycle often create more market capitalization than in the last. New winners emerge, some incumbents survive – or thrive – while many past winners falter.

A single galvanizing event – like Microsoft's Windows 3.0 launch in 1990, Netscape's IPO in 1995, or Apple's iPhone debut in 2007 – jolts the industry forward and captures the hearts and minds of consumers;

Make no mistake; Apple (and others) are not just trying to upset the cell phone market. They are aiming to transform how communications works, how entertainment and news are distributed, how goods and services are purchased... and how we control all this stuff from the ever-expanding, rechargeable remote controls we carry in our hands. To date, Apple's products and timing have been impeccable.

The US has grabbed the leadership, after being a global mobile laggard for more than a decade – thanks to the likes of Apple, Google, Amazon.com, and many others (including a bevy of startups)… and Silicon Valley competitive juices show no signs of letting up.

According to Morgan Stanley’s model, tech cycles tend to last ten years. We entered the Next Major Computing Cycle – Mobile Internet – 2 years ago.

Big winners in the four previous cycles include the following:

Mainframe Computing (1960s)
IBM
NCR
Control Data
Sperry
Honeywell
Burroughs

Mini Computing (1970s)
Digital Equipment
Data General
HP
Prime
Computervision
Wang Labs

Personal Computing (1980s)
Microsoft
Cisco
Intel
Apple
Oracle
EMC
Dell
Compaq

Desktop Internet Computing (1990s)
Google
AOL
eBay
Yahoo!
Yahoo! Japan
Amazon.com
Tencent
Alibaba
Baidu
Rakuten

Mobile Internet Computing (2000s)
Still in the early innings; opportunities abound.

Smart Phones Crying in the Rain

2009-12-23T14:54:00.004-05:00

Today I met with Kevin Short of UNH to discuss a lecture series I am preparing on Smart Phones, Virtual Machines, and Cloud Computing. Kevin was the founder of Chaoticom, one of the first companies to successfully build a business downloading music to cell phones. Chaoticom was started in 2000 as a spin off from UNH, and provided me with my introduction to programmable mobile phones. After VC investment, the company was renamed Groove Mobile; it operates today as LiveWire Mobile, which was recently ranked by Deloitte as the 49th fastest growing company in North America.

For the first few years, Chaoticom was a great technological success, but partnerships with the cell phone carriers were hard to come by, particularly in the US where Sprint finally subscribed to the service. Consumer demand grew slowly.

This week I read a post from the Startup Swami that explains this phenomenon. The Swami says: "Our job is to sell umbrellas on every street corner when it is raining. We can't make it rain."

“Allow me to explain. A few months ago, I was in New York City when it began to drizzle. Although I was wearing a nice suit, the drizzle didn't bother me much. However, by the time I had walked a few more blocks, it was pouring. As I waited on the street corner for the walk sign, I spotted a man selling umbrellas on the opposite side of the street. I made a beeline across the street to purchase an umbrella. I didn't care how much the umbrella cost -- he had my solution, and I needed it bad.

“As I continued my walk now with an umbrella in hand, I noticed that there were umbrella salespeople on almost every corner. And almost every single seller was surrounded by people who were waving their cash around to try to get one of those precious umbrellas. A few blocks later, most of the umbrella sellers were sold out.

“Every time I come across a new startup, I ask myself a fundamental question: are there lots of people in the world that are looking for this solution or is the startup trying to create demand? It is very hard for marketing folks to create demand (that's the job of salespeople) -- and it's almost impossible in consumer markets.”

I intend to incorporate this anecdote into my guest lectures on Entrepreneurship and Raising Angel Capital at UNH.

The Startup Swami is Matt Douglas, Founder & CEO of Punchbowl Software. You can find his full blog post here.

iPhone most popular mobile phone in the US, says Nielson

2009-12-23T14:20:00.004-05:00

Nielson Wire market research just announced the most popular mobile phones in the US. The iPhone topped the list, no real surprise; among the missing: Nokia. The most popular sites visited were topped by Google Search, Yahoo! Mail, and Gmail. The most popular video site was YouTube. Click here to view all their data, followed by a barrage of comments.

Their list:

1. Apple iPhone – 4%
2. BlackBerry 8300 series – 3.7%
3. Razr V3 series – 2.3%
4. LG VX9100 enV2 – 2.1%
5. LG Voyager – 1.7%
6. Samsung SPH-M540 – 1.5%
7. BlackBerry 9530 series 1.4%
8. LG VX9700 – 1.3%
9. LG Vu series – 1.3%
10. BlackBerry 8100 series – 1.2%

Don Dodge on the Future of Computing

2009-12-18T14:09:00.004-05:00

Today, in his very influential blog, “Don Dodge on the Next Big Thing”, Don both writes about the work environment at Google and speculates on the future of computing. I’ve known Don for several years; we are both members of the eCoast Angels Network and we have often worked together advising start-up companies such as VKernel. From his post:

“The future of computing – I think Google has made three big bets on the future of computing; Chrome OS (browser), Google Apps (cloud), and Android (mobile). The trends are pretty clear. All the exciting new applications are running in the browser, with application code in the cloud, and the cell phone as the platform. Your cell phone will become your primary computer. I think in the near future there will be docking stations everywhere with a screen and a keyboard. You simply pull out your phone, plug it into the docking station, and instantly all your applications and data are available to you. Chrome OS, Google Apps, and Android make this vision possible.

“Think about the cell phone you had 10 years ago, in 1999, and compare it to the phone you have today. More power, more memory, better networks, more applications, etc. Now project 5 or 10 years ahead. The vision of your phone as your computer is not far off. You will be able to decide which applications and data you want resident on the phone and which you want in the cloud. You will be able to plug it in anywhere; in an airport, hotel, airplane, office lobby, etc, and have instant access to everything you need.

“2010 the turning point - I think 2010 will be the year that enterprises of all sizes start their transition to Gmail and Google Apps, and take their first steps towards the vision of the future. The move towards Cloud Computing is obvious. Gmail and Google Apps are the easy first steps in that direction. The cost savings are enormous,over $500 per user per year. Compare that to buying software licenses and maintenance from the old style software giants, and add the costs of server hardware, and IT managers to run them.

“The next 5 years are going to be exciting. There will be big changes in the software industry. I am thrilled to be at Google and look forward to being a small part of the movement to the future of computing.”

Don was also interviewed by VentureBeat where he talks about many things, including his new Google phone. Attracting the most vehement comments are his views on Microsoft.

“VB: Now that you’ve left Microsoft, how do you feel about the company’s future?”

“DD: At a high level, Microsoft today is where IBM was in late ’80s, early ’90s. When I was just starting my career, IBM ruled the world. IBM was the dominant computer provider in the world — hardware, software, network, you name it, IBM was king. I think in the late ’80s and early ’90s, we saw that shift and Microsoft became king of the hill. And in 2009, 2010, going forward, Microsoft is sort of like IBM. It’s a longtime company with a great tradition and still very profitable, but it’s not the leader. Microsoft is not making the innovative leaps and coming out with the new stuff. People used to fear IBM and they don’t anymore. More recently, startups and competitors feared Microsoft, and I think over the past five or 10 years since that consent decree, I think that changed the company dramatically. I don’t think startups and competitors fear Microsoft the way they did 10 years ago. Part of it is the natural evolution of companies, part of it is the changing culture from that consent decree”.

VCs still fond of Wireless and the Cloud

2009-12-16T12:46:00.005-05:00

If you plan to raise Venture Capital for your Smart Phone or Cloud Computing start-up in 2010, you may be in one of the rare sectors where VCs are optimistic. A survey of US VCs shows the percentage expecting increased investment in these sectors:

Internet 46%
Software 25%
Wireless 30%
Media 33%

Topping their list overall is Clean tech, where 54% predict
increases.Writing in peHUB Wire, Deborah Gage says “Venture funds will shrink and the number of firms will shrink, said a majority of the 325 VCs surveyed, although they do expect to invest a few more dollars in more companies.

“They also plan to invest more in clean tech and Internet companies along with companies in China and India. They favor later stage investments over seed and early stage — a fact that concerns NVCA President Mark Heesen, who worries about innovation — and they expect exit markets to improve slightly, with more mergers and acquisitions and a few more IPOs.

“As a new feature, the NVCA included a list of Tweets provided by VCs on what they expect to do differently next year. Here’s a daring one — ‘More risky.’”

Get all the data here: VentureView 2010 charts

Smartphone Market: A Rugby Scrum?

2009-11-19T11:02:00.004-05:00

The fast pace of change in the Smartphone space presents great opportunities for entrepreneurs and developers, but creates a great new risk I’ll call “choosing the wrong platform.” Anyone preparing a business plan must be prepared not only to choose which platforms (phone and OS) to develop first but must be prepared to convincingly defend these choices to investors or managers less well informed than they are.

Writing in today’s NY Times, AZADEH ENSHA says the Smartphone marketplace increasingly resembles “a rugby scrum (the Verizon Droid versus the BlackBerry Storm versus the Palm Pre versus the HTC MyTouch versus the Apple iPhone ).” Market survey numbers don’t just change dramatically year by year, but quarter to quarter. Gartner has just published Q3 figures on Smartphone sales. Some excerpts:

Smartphones continued to represent the fastest-growing segment of the mobile-devices market and we remain confident about the potential for Smartphones in the fourth quarter of 2009 and in 2010.
Nokia’s share of the worldwide Smartphone market reached an all time low in the third quarter of 2009 at 39 per cent, compared with 45 per cent in the second quarter of 2009. Research In Motion reached 20 per cent share, its highest yet.

Apple’s worldwide Smartphone share reached 17 per cent as iPhone sales totaled 7 million units in the third quarter of 2009. Sales in the fourth quarter should be even stronger as Apple starts selling in China, through one additional carrier in the UK, and in an additional 16 countries.
In the Smartphone operating system (OS) market,Android picked up momentum but with only a handful of Android devices available, its share remained modest at 3.5 per cent. Windows Mobile 6.5 only became available in October, too late to have an impact on the third quarter, so sales of Windows-based Smartphones saw another decline.

Interpretations of these results vary, but I did enjoy “How Microsoft Blew It With Windows Mobile” by Brian X. Chen in Wired:

“Microsoft Windows continues to dominate the PC market with a 90 percent market-share stronghold, but when it comes to Smartphones, Microsoft is getting beat up worse than a mustachioed villain in a Jackie Chan movie.

“Windows Mobile has lost nearly a third of its Smartphone market share since 2008, research firm Gartner reports. Windows Mobile had 11 percent of the global Smartphone market in the third quarter of 2008, according to Gartner, and last quarter Windows Mobile’s market share plummeted to 7.9 percent.

“Meanwhile, Apple’s global market share grew from 12.9 percent to 17.1 percent, and RIM saw a rise from 16 percent to 20.8 percent, according to Gartner’s figures.”

The Dinosaur vs. The Cloud

2009-11-18T05:50:00.004-05:00

“Why is it so hard to kill a web 1.0 dinosaur” asks Scott Kirsner in his blog this week? To investigate, Scott interviews Matt Douglas, founder of MyPunchbowl.

If you are not familiar with MyPunchbowl, it is a great party planning site. I will be using it to send out both ecards and invitations to our holiday parties, although it can do much more.

“In many ways, they've built a site that has surpassed the Web 1.0 dinosaur of party planning, Evite” writes Kirsner. “MyPunchbowl makes it much easier to decide upon the best date for a gathering among a group of friends, or organize a potluck where everyone brings a different dish, for instance… but MyPunchbowl (founded in 2007) still lags way behind Evite (founded in 1997) in terms of usage.”

Yet MyPunchbowl forges ahead, announcing this week the acquisition of some assets from GroupGo of Waltham to help party hosts find local vendors, such as a flower shop, a balloon-delivery service, or a Mexican restaurant with a private dining room.

I asked Matt Douglas if had a technological advantage over established competitors? “Yes, absolutely -- we're heavily involved with Cloud Computing. In fact, you can mention that the new MyPunchbowl local vendor portal is built off of the Amazon EC2 cluster. Fast, robust, and scalable; perfect for a project like the local vendor portal and for a startup like MyPunchbowl.”

So we have here not just a clash of applications, but a clash of technologies. My bet is on Cloud technology and on MyPunchbowl.
-------------------------
Full disclosure: the eCoast Angels, of which I am a member, participated in the original financing of MyPunchbowl.

Metcalfe’s Law, let me count the ways…

2009-07-11T13:23:00.004-04:00

I keep pondering the implications of a billion connected people and a trillion connected devices. These estimates, from my post on IBM and Cloud Computing, originated with IDC market research, predicting that by 2011, there will be one trillion Internet-connected devices, up from 500 million in 2006.

But if that is the size of the network, what is the value of this network?

Metcalfe's Law states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users. Using Google, I determined that one billion squared is a quintillion, a one followed by 18 zeroes.

But are users just people? According to the Wikipedia, Metcalfe's Law was originally presented, circa 1980, not in term of users, but rather of "compatibly communicating devices." Is the value of the network going to be a trillion squared, which is a septillion, a one followed by 24 zeroes?

I suspect that if we toss out a quintillion here, a septillion there, eventually it will add up to real money.

For more discussion of Metcalf’s Law and its relevance, read Simeon Simeonov’s “Metcalfe’s Law: more misunderstood than wrong?”

Cloud Briefing in Technology Review

2009-07-10T08:20:00.002-04:00

MIT’s Technology Review Magazine this month contains an excellent 11-page briefing on Cloud Computing. This briefing, with interactive diagrams, can be viewed by clicking here.

A few tidbits:

Key players in this field include: Werner Vogels, Amazon; Jim Blakley, Intel; Reuven Cohen, Enomaly; Dave Douglas, Sun; Kevin Gibbs, Google; Kristof Kloeckner, IBM; Ray Ozzie, Microsoft; and James Urquhart, Cisco.

Private companies to watch are 10Gen, 3Tera, Appistry, Elastra, Enomaly, XCalibre, ServePath, Heroku, RightScale, and Joyent.

Is Zipcar leading a second generation of iPhone Apps?

2009-07-03T08:20:00.005-04:00

Fully one quarter of Zipcar members use iPhones, according to Zipcar’ s Luke Schneider, who unveiled a new iPhone app at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference. Scott Kirsner reports “it got me salivating (I'm a Zipcar member): it offers GPS help finding cars that are available, and can even honk the car's horn to help you locate it in a parking lot. See the video demo here, wherein Schneider shows off their use of Apple’s 3.0 SDK mapkit and demonstrates the Honk icon to spontaneous applause.

From Kirsner’s Innovation Economy blog: “Zipcar CEO Scott Griffith told me today that he has already been testing the beta version on his iPhone, with a few of the company's cars here in Boston. ‘We're finishing the app now, and then we have to do a complete new software download to our whole car network, so that iPhones will have the ability to honk the horn and unlock the car for you,’ Griffith said. The app will be free. Griffith estimates that it'll be available in about four weeks. Future versions of the Zipcar app, he added, might give Zipcar members discounts on music, or deals on iPhone navigation apps or other travel-related apps.

Could this be the start of a new wave, the Second Generation of iPhone Apps? It took fifteen years to get to third generation computers (IBM/360). Can an iPhone generation be less than a year?

Skyhook included in Dell Netbooks

2009-07-02T09:53:00.002-04:00

Skyhook Wireless Inc. , one of the companies we follow, has closed a deal with Dell Inc. to supply its hybrid Wi-Fi and geographical positioning system for integration into Dell’s Mini 10 netbook.

“I think what’s really neat about this is that this is the first time we have seen this new category of netbooks looked at as a purely mobile device. They look at it as more of an enriched Smartphone” says Skyhook founder and CEO Ted Morgan.

Initially, two Skyhook applications will be offered with the Dell Wireless 700 location solution: CoPilot and the Loki Dashboard. CoPilot is a navigation application that gives turn-by-turn driving directions as well as local search of key points of interest. The Loki Dashboard is a web portal that uses the netbook’s Skyhook-based location engine to customize widgets for news, weather, tweets, photos and events around you.

For more information, try Mass. High Tech. A description of Skyhook’s technology can be found here in my blog.

Intel Capital Still Investing Aggressively

2009-07-01T12:56:00.004-04:00

So many articles have appeared recently describing how venture capitalists are NOT investing that we can forgive the entrepreneurs among us for thinking it rains every day here in NH.

In contrast, Intel seems to be a pretty optimistic company, and not just because Intel CEO Paul Otellini recently said he saw quarterly sales at the chip giant return to "normal" levels. While many venture capitalists have been hunkering down since last October, Intel's venture capital unit has been actively looking at deals.

Lucy McQuilken, Investment Manager at Intel Capital, confirms that she is aggressively looking for investments. "We're very active," she said. "It's an excellent time to invest. We invested through the last downturn in 2001 and I think we wished we invested more. Some great companies were built during that time."

To learn more, click here to view Bambi Francisco’s interview with Lucy on Vator TV News.

IBM investing $100 million advancing mobile services

2009-06-18T11:44:00.003-04:00

WOW!

IBM just announced plans to shift $100 million investment over the next five years into a major Research effort which aims to advance mobile services and capabilities for businesses and consumers worldwide.

"Mobility and the associated analytics will change virtually every enterprise business process," said Paul Bloom, chief technologist, IBM Telecom Research. "It will change the relationship between enterprises and their customers, their employees and their partners, enabling them to do business in more intelligent, efficient ways."

When I created this blog, I saw little attention being focused on the area where smart phones and business apps intersect. Once again, in our field, change can be rapid. In the future, I intend to concentrate this blog on analysis and interpretation, rather than breaking news. Journalists from the trade press have more timely, complete and accurate information and better access to company executives than I have.

The NY Times broke this story about mobile services this morning, but if you are interested in more details, I’d suggest you read today’s press release directly from IBM.

With its “cloud” announcement tuesday, and its “mobile” announcement today, IBM has once again revised the rules of the industry without consulting the other players. Competitive advantage: IBM. Exciting times lie ahead.

IBM’s “Cloud for Business”

2009-06-16T12:48:00.003-04:00

IBM today introduced the industry’s first set of commercial “cloud” services and integrated products for the enterprise, claiming “this will give clients a reliable way to standardize IT functions that are rapidly becoming too costly or difficult to use.”

IBM endorses the prospect of a billion connected people and a trillion connected devices. This estimate originates with IDC, predicting that by 2011, there will be one trillion Internet-connected devices, up from 500 million in 2006.

An early analysis of the announcement, “I.B.M. to Help Clients Fight Cost and Complexity,” appeared in the NY Times yesterday.

This announcement is complex, we’ll all need time to evaluate it, so I’ll just include a few selections from the IBM Press Release, which you can find right here in its entirety, and which contains links to additional material:

Based on nearly two years of research and hundreds of client engagements, the IBM Smart Business cloud portfolio is meant to help clients turn complex business processes into simple services. To accomplish this, Smart Business brings sophisticated automation technology and self-service to specific digital tasks as diverse as software development and testing; desktop and device management; and collaboration.

From utility grids to roadways, water systems and financial instruments, the world’s physical infrastructure is rapidly becoming more instrumented and IT-enabled, and corporate data centers will have to deal with a new flood of transactions and data coming from a billion connected people and a trillion connected devices. These offerings are aimed at helping clients deal with entirely new kinds of tasks and the colossal data burdens facing the data center.

“Cloud is an important new consumption and delivery model for IT and business services. Large enterprises want our help to capitalize on what this model offers in a way that is safe, reliable and efficient for business,” said Erich Clementi, General Manager, Enterprise Initiatives, IBM. “Today’s Smart Business announcement demonstrates that we take this responsibility seriously with cloud investment and solutions targeting the early opportunity. We are responding today as we did assisting enterprises with the shift to e-business and in the embrace of open source and Linux.”

The IBM Smart Business portfolio includes three “on-ramps,” or ways to quickly deploy the cloud model:
· IBM Smart Business standardized services on the IBM Cloud;
· Smart Business private cloud services behind the firewall built by IBM (run by IBM or the client);
· and IBM CloudBurst workload optimized systems, for clients who want to build to their own cloud with pre-integrated hardware and software.

All three offerings include IBM’s service management system – a kind of air traffic control system for IT – that automates self-service, provisioning, monitoring as well as managing access and security for the cloud. This reflects IBM’s leadership and more than $10 billion in investments over the last five years in control and automation technologies, which become critical as the digital and physical infrastructure converge.

Let us now praise iPhone users

2009-06-13T13:20:00.006-04:00

Forrester Research says iPhone users are richer, younger, and perhaps even more productive at work than those who use competing smart phones. Few of you will believe that I am richer, younger, and more productive than Dan Bricklin, who uses a G1; although he also has an iPod touch so he can experiment with the interface.

Neil Hughes reports on the study in his blog on Apple Insider:

iPhone users are younger: 30 percent of iPhone users in 2008 were of Generation Y, a larger portion than the rest of the smart phone market,

iPhone users are more educated and affluent: 49 percent of iPhone users have a college education, and 67 percent earn more than $70,000 a year,

iPhone customers spend more on their service: the average monthly phone bill for an iPhone user was $87, compared to $76 for the smart phone market, and $66 for traditional mobile phone users,

Employers are slightly less likely to subsidize an iPhone: 24 percent of respondents with an iPhone said they are compensated by their employer for their phone bill, while 28 percent of smart phone users have their employee pay all or part of it.

Comparing customer Internet usage, the study shows that the iPhone blows away its competitors: 78 percent of iPhone users reported they access the Internet at least weekly on their phone, while only 38 percent of the rest of the smart phone market were on the mobile Web that often.

The study was performed last year, since which I have become neither younger nor more affluent. Disregarding Generation Y, Dan is a Baby Boomer, and I modestly describe myself as a member of the Greatest Generation.

I continue to recommend Dan's book: "Bricklin on Technology." One of his chapters: “What Will People Pay For?” has been reprinted in the Harvard Business Review. You can read an excerpt here.

Itanium Awards: I'll be a Judge

2009-06-10T14:29:00.003-04:00

The Itanium Solutions Alliance has just announced my selection as a judge for its third-annual Innovation Awards competition. “We are very pleased to have secured such a strong caliber of judges for this year's Innovation Awards," said Joan Jacobs, president and executive director of the Itanium Solutions Alliance. "The fact that this year's entries will be carefully evaluated and the winners selected by this distinguished panel of industry leaders adds another dimension of credibility to this prestigious awards competition."

The Itanium Solutions Alliance Innovation Awards were designed to recognize and reward end users and developers for outstanding use of Intel(R) Itanium-based servers in their applications. Individuals or organizations with Itanium-based solutions may enter, at no cost, in one of four categories: Mission-Critical Data, Data Center Modernization, Computationally Intensive Applications, and Humanitarian Impact. Winners will be honored at a special event during the Intel Developer Forum, September 23rd, 2009 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the winning submission in the Humanitarian Impact category will receive a $50,000 cash award.

The Itanium Solutions Alliance Innovation Awards judges for 2009 are:
Joe B. Alexander, strategy and technology consultant; educator
Ken Cayton, president, Systematic Market Analysis
Jon Erickson, editor in chief, Dr. Dobb's
Sverre Jarp, chief technology officer, CERN openlab
Dr. Rinaldo Jose, president and co-founder, Lakeway Technologies
George McQuilken, co-founder, eCoast Angels Investment Network
Michelle (Mickey) Pierce, senior product manager, Mainframe Migration Alliance, Microsoft
Dr. Andrew Razeghi, lecturer, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University
Clay Ryder, president, The Sageza Group
Dr. Mark K. Smith, executive director, Universal Parallel Computing Research Center, and managing director, Gelato Federation
Michael Vizard, director of strategic content, Ziff-Davis Enterprise

About the Itanium Solutions Alliance
The Itanium(R) Solutions Alliance is a global community of hardware, operating system and application vendors dedicated to accelerating the adoption and ongoing development of Itanium(R)-based solutions. Formed in September 2005, the Alliance comprises some of the most influential companies in the computing industry with a shared, strategic commitment to delivering mission-critical computing solutions based on the Intel(R) Itanium(R) architecture. http://www.itaniumsolutions.org/

RIP: IBM Systems Journal (1962-2009)

2009-06-02T14:20:00.002-04:00

This Spring, without Obituary Notice, Memorial Service, or 21-gun salute, IBM quietly interred the venerable IBM Systems Journal, thereby laying to rest one of the great artifacts of the company that built the modern computer industry and laid the foundations for our modern connected world. I served as Editor of the Journal from 1974 to 1977, the best job I had at IBM, so I’d like to say a few words.

Having seriously underestimated the market for computers in the 1950s, IBM entered the 1960s with a burning zeal to create a great company and a great industry. One barrier was education; it was becoming apparent that the optimal use of digital computers in the enormously varied situations in which they were to be applied would require significant knowledge of many areas and an over-all systems approach.

At the time, there were almost no systems science or computer science departments in universities. To fill this void, the IBM Systems Research Institute was established as a graduate-level academy for IBM employees. Shortly thereafter (1962) the IBM Systems Journal was founded as an adjunct to the institute to disseminate information about computing systems, programming, and applications. The great John McPherson, one of the true pioneers of our industry, served as the first Director of the institute and as the main advocate for the IBM Systems Journal (SJ).

As the industry grew, so did the number of overlapping professional journals, and by the early 1970’s IBM considered eliminating the SJ. When I became Editor in 1974, it was with the understanding that we were to continue refocusing the journal to what I came to call “advancing the current practice of computing,” while most journals chose to focus on theory.

The results were heartening. Circulation increased to 65,000 making the IBM SJ the most widely read technical journal in the computing industry. Despite our emphasis on practice, a study based on the Science Citation Index showed us to be the fourth most referenced journal. Other changes included efforts to put the journal closer to a paying basis by increasing the number of paid subscriptions and selling reprinted articles for use in classes and seminars.

But the real value of the journal was not its weight at the postage meter, but its effect on the computing industry.

A foundation element in modern software engineering is software inspections, consisting of a peer review of any work product by trained individuals who look for defects using a well defined process (see Wikipedia definition). The origin of this now-common practice was work done by Mike Fagin at the IBM laboratory in Endicott NY. Fagan had published a lab report describing inspections, which Associate Editor Al Davis found and presented to me. Despite a perceived lack of scientific rigor in the original report, Davis worked closely with Fagan to produce “Design and code inspections to reduce errors in program development, published in 1976. This paper is probably the most widely read and reprinted article ever published in any IBM journal.

Another effect on the industry was our role in promoting relational data bases. I tried very hard to interest Ted Codd, inventor of the relational model, to prepare a paper for us, but he preferred the professional society journals. We did, however, discover an IBM research project in San Jose named “System R” and we worked diligently with the research team to record these developments, publishing significant papers in 1977 and 1981. Larry Ellison read about System R in our journal and proceeded to develop the Oracle relational data base, thus transforming the IT industry and making himself (today) the fourth wealthiest man in the world.

So now, with the help of YouTube, it is time to organize our wake. I’ll play the Pogues’ “Body of an American.” You can join them singing “Danny Boy.” And perhaps we can all share A Wee Deoch-an-Doris for the IBM Systems Journal, for the many fine folks who contributed to it, and for Auld Lang Syne. (Warning –consuming this beverage would be cause for dismissal from the old IBM).

Footnote: for more detail, refer to ”A History of the IBM Systems Journal “ by George C. Stierhoff and Alfred G. Davis, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Vol. 20, No. 1, 1998.

Skyhook Locator System in NY Times today

2009-06-01T14:23:00.005-04:00

A concise and informative article on Skyhook and its Locator System appears in the Business Section of Today’s NY Times. Whereas the Times does not make its site available to non subscribers, you can find some of the same information on my earlier blog post on Skyhook’s CEO, Ted Morgan.

I do find certain confusion in the industry about location sensing, its capabilities and how it works. On the iPhone, location sensing takes place as follows.

When the owner selects an application involving location, such as Tides, Latitude, Yelp, Loopt, Car finder, or Taxi Magic, the iPhone calculates whether it is likely to get the best and fastest information from its own GPS chip or from Skyhook’s system.

GPS searches for Satellites. Skyhook checks a list of nearby Wi-Fi access points and cell towers against its database and triangulates the device’s location within 30 to 60 feet. Skyhook claims its system, XPS, is superior whenever GPS signals are blocked by walls or trees, and that XPS responds much more quickly than GPS. The Skyhook data base now includes more than 100 million wireless networks and 700,000 cellular towers.

Skyhook’s XPS is now installed on 37 million Apple iPhones and iPod Touches worldwide, as well as a variety of other devices. The company says it handles 250 million location requests a day. Good show, Skyhook!

Reading Dan Bricklin on Technology

2009-05-26T12:38:00.004-04:00

I’ve been fascinated by a new book, Bricklin on Technology. I’m not the only one. The omnipresent Scott Kirsner tweeted that reading this book “is like downloading a few gigs of Dan directly to your cerebral cortex.”

Rather than concentrate on one review, I think I will work some of his thoughts into a number of posts, this one stressing the importance of Apps for the PC and the Smart Phone. Then again, perhaps these are my thoughts, but he provoked them.

VisiCalc, introduced thirty years ago this month at the1979 West Coast Computer Faire by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, went on from there to change forever the computer industry. For the arrivistes among us, VisiCalc was the world’s first spreadsheet, progenitor of today’s Excel and many programs in between.

Personal Computers were available in 1979 (though not the IBM PC), but, before VisiCalc, there was no compelling reason to buy one. VisiCalc’s ability to update rows and columns in real time not only gave the user a way to revise financial statements but provided a superior solution to that offered by alternatives such as mainframe-based time sharing systems. Typically, a mainframe would have to upload an entire screen from a remote terminal, perform the update, and then rewrite the entire screen, far less timely and user friendly than VisiCalc on the Apple II.

Moreover, VisiCalc was a tool that could be adapted to many purposes, such as developing a complete financial model of a business. And, as a business tool, the purchaser could likely deduct the cost of VisiCalc and a home computer from his income taxes.

The other general purpose tool introduced at the time was word processing. The Apple II was never a great word processor, due in part to the keyboard and display. The preeminent word processor of its day was the Wang Word Processor, a cluster of microprocessor controlled screens sharing a disk drive. This product line was so successful that, at its peak in the 1980s, Wang Laboratories had annual revenues of $3 billion and employed over 40,000 people.
Enter the IBM PC (1981) with spreadsheets and word processing; exit Wang and the minicomputer companies, DEC, Prime, Data General, Nixdorf, and more.

The great strength of computers is that they are general purpose machines. As such, they don’t really solve any specific problem; it is the software that provides the solution. PC manufacturers understand this. Before the Apple App store, cell phone makers tended to develop proprietary software that served a few purposes, all related to being a cell phone, not a general purpose problem solver.

My conclusion: in the marketplace derby, the general purpose programmable device always comes from behind to overtake and defeat specialized (and therefore arbitrarily limited) implementations. Cell phone manufacturers, beware.

How VisiCalc and the early word processors evolved into Excel and Word is a fascinating story, a business and legal story as well as a technological one, but to tell it would take a big book, not a blog.

Historical footnote. Dan Bricklin received his first IBM PC prototype from my former colleague at the IBM Cambridge Scientific Center, Fritz Giesin. I had left IBM in January, 1981, and never knew this. It was a circuit board on a piece of plywood with sockets to plug in a keyboard, etc.

New England Innovation Month

2009-05-25T12:17:00.001-04:00

A flock of unnamed local activists has conspired to designate June as “New England Innovation Month,” complete with a web site. Check out the Innovation Month homepage for a list of events and happenings.

I consider this a great idea, and early responses are encouraging. “ New England’s innovators and innovative companies, we believe, will be key players in economic recovery and the long-term economic strength of the entire country. And forging new connections between diverse people with fresh ideas is a critical part of the innovation process—and a fundamental part of Xconomy’s mission. So we’re proud to be part of a month in which there will be so many opportunities to do just that,” says Rebecca Zacks.

One session I’ll attend is on June 25, moderated by Scott Kirsner: "What's Next in Tech: Exploring the Growth Opportunities of 2009 and Beyond."

“The idea is to provide a picture of the tech clusters that are going to drive the next waves of growth here in Massachusetts, from cloud computing to robotics to videogames to energy efficiency to social media,” says Scott. “Speakers include venture capitalist Bijan Sabet from Spark Capital, iRobot co-founder Helen Greiner, Brian Halligan of HubSpot, and Tim Healy, who runs the publicly-traded EnerNOC.

“One goal leading up to the event is to start some blog conversation about the high-potential areas in tech right now... a discussion we'll obviously continue at the event on June 25th.”

My colleague Don Dodge and others have already joined the conversation. Don sees the next big things in tech as Cloud Computing, Mobile Applications, Social Networks, and what he calls “Hyper local News, Search, Community.” Don explains his reasoning in his blog. Read Don’s post here.

Cell Phone Design, 1983 to 2009

2009-05-23T13:26:00.001-04:00

Guy Kawasaki sent a Tweet this weekend about the evolution of Cell Phone Design between 1983-2009. The collection of photos is most impressive.

I was introduced to the first of these phones, the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, by Al Berkeley, then a General Partner at Alex. Brown. Alex. Brown, who had unwritten the first IPO in America back in 1808, brought public some of the most exciting growth companies of those times, including Microsoft, Oracle Systems, Starbucks, and United Healthcare. Al himself was instrumental in creating a public market for software stocks and, later, cell phones.

That day, we were looking for a cab to the airport; Al took us outside and called the dispatcher of an empty cab that was driving by. I’ve never forgotten this particular demonstration.

If this was my list, I would have included the recently announced Nokia 6216 since it is the first commercially available cell phone with Near Field Communications capabilities. You can read about it in Gerald Madlmayr’s blog.

Videos, humor, Ballmer disses the iPhone

2009-05-16T12:55:00.001-04:00

It being a dreary Saturday, I’m looking around for amusing items. This brief video poking fun at iPhones, iPhone Apps, and social networks uses language no worse than my Granddaughter uses on Facebook, so it must be OK.

I’m less amused by Steve Ballmer’s recent comments. “There’s still, in my opinion, more venture capital than there are good ideas to support the venture capital,” Ballmer said in a speech to Stanford students studying entrepreneurship as part of the school’s “Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders” series. As the worldwide economy contracts, fewer mediocre business ideas will get funded, he said. That will result in a healthier startup environment than exists now, when “too many companies can hang on for almost too long with too much money.”

Of course, the flaw in his argument lies in our imperfect ability to separate the good ideas from the bad in their early stages. If you would like see an amusing but significant example, look at this video from 30 months ago, Microsoft CEO Ballmer laughs at Apple iPhone. A sample, “We’re selling millions and millions and millions of phones this year, Apple is selling zero.”

Parking, FasTrak, and Wireless Payments

2009-05-10T21:09:00.002-04:00

Whereas payments are central to business Apps for smart phones, I thought I’d describe some wireless methods that are currently under consideration. I was inspired to do so by the following news from the left coast.

Parkers at San Francisco's International Airport can now use their FasTrak transponder to pay for their parking. They have been testing it on a few lots at the airport and get about 200 transactions a day. This month, the system will expand to all the parking area at SFO. If it becomes popular the concept will be extended to Oakland and San Jose.

California’s FasTrak system, typically used for highway and bridge tools, is called the E-ZPass here in the East, and goes by other names in other regions. Think of it as an RFID chip used for Transportation payments.

“This is the beginning of the end of cash usage at parking lots, opines John Van Horn, founder, editor and publisher of Parking Today Magazine and blogger at PT’s Parking Blog. “ Soon (five years) cars will have transponders and they will be linked to your credit card, and queuing for entry tickets or exit payments will be a thing of the past. It may be even reasonable some day to not have gates at all, like on many toll roads.”

At least three payment methods are currently being considered for smart phone implementation.

FasTrak (E-Zpass). These and similar systems rely on a transponder in the car and a reader located at the tollbooth, both typically provided by Mark IV Transportation Technologies. The transponder consists of an RFID chip packaged with a battery. When the transponder comes within range of the reader, the ID is transmitted and verified at the reader. Processing is offline. When the motorist purchases the transponder, funds are deducted from her credit card ($30 here in NH) and transferred to the FasTrak operator. Tolls are deducted from this amount until a minimum threshold is reached, when another $30 will be charged to the card by the operator.

Tap and Go. An RFID chip with an antenna is embedded in a credit card. When the card comes in close proximity to the reader, an electrical current is created and the ID (credit card number) is transferred. Further processing, including authorization and payment, takes place online as it does with any credit card. The official name for this is Near Field Communication, as described in my earlier post.

Stored Value. Funds are actually stored on the card, in memory, and the amount is reduced as the card is used. One good example, from the pre-RFID days, is the Parcxmart Card used to pay for parking and miscellaneous small dollar purchases in New Haven and other Cities. Cards are sold and funds are added by participating merchants, paid by either cash or credit.

Smart phones have batteries, have processing power, and have far better transmission capability than any of the methods described above. Smart phones are user programmable, so major portions of the application could be shifted to the phone itself. Moreover, smart phones could allow direct two-way communication between the parking operator and the consumer. So why don’t we have better payment methods for smart phones? Watch this space and ask me later.

Nokia App Store This Month?

2009-05-08T11:46:00.002-04:00

Forbes is reporting today that Nokia is preparing an App Store second in size only to Apple's for roll out later this month, thus opening up vast opportunities for a new group of independent developers.

Though Apple, Research In Motion and Google already offer similar services, Nokia's launch promises to be the biggest app store opening yet and could re-shape the mobile applications market writes Elizabeth Woyke,

The store, which the company is calling Ovi Store after the Finnish word for "door," will debut with a catalog of 20,000 items. In comparison, Apple and RIM launched their stores with a few hundred apps, although Apple claims 35,000 apps today. Google's store opened with a few dozen.

“Users can access the store two different ways. It will ship pre-loaded on the company's new flagship handset, the N97, before July, and be included in phones released in the future. Consumers who own other, recent Nokia phones will also be able to download the store from the Web onto their handsets. The idea: People will buy more Nokia devices if they are paired with great services.

“The store is so large because Nokia is stocking it with a broader selection of digital content. The company says there will be lots of entertainment and media files, including an entire category of short videos and "mobisodes." The store's 20,000 items will be across all of these categories, not just apps.”

Making Money Selling Free Apps?

2009-05-06T20:21:00.002-04:00

How much money can you make from a free iPhone application? Quite a bit says Jason Kincaid, writing in TechCrunch.

A report from AdWhirl says that applications that crack the top 100 in the Free Apps list make $400-$5000 a day - a wide range, but even at the low end that works out to around $12,000 a month. And while applications that do reach the top positions in the App Store eventually lose steam, after the initial dip revenue tends to remain consistent over time. Of course, making it to the top of the Free Apps list is easier said than done, and most developers make far less than $400 a day. But the same is also true of the vast majority of paid applications - in fact, there’s actually less competition on the Free side of the store.

As for AdWhirl, the company allows developers to tap into multiple iPhone ad networks at once. It is obviously in AdWhirl’s interest to promote iPhone advertising, since that’s their business. But it’s clear that there are definitely quite a few free applications making good money.

Anyway, cheapskates such as myself no longer have to feel guilty about selecting free Apps. And when Blackberry and Nokia open their own App stores, it will certainly unleash the creativity of lots more application developers.

The Smart Phone as your Mainframe?

2009-05-05T14:48:00.001-04:00

The emergence of the Mobile Computing Cloud (McCloud) may lead to surprising innovations; here is one effort to give superpowers to your smart phone. Researchers at Intel in Berkeley create a supercharged clone of your smart phone that lives in "the cloud" and lets it do all the computational heavy lifting that your phone is too weak to handle.

CloneCloud uses a smart phone's high-speed connection to the Internet to communicate with a copy of itself that lives in a cloud-computing environment on remote servers. The prototype runs on Google's Android mobile operating system and seamlessly offloads processor-intensive tasks to its cloud-based double.

Of course, one could imagine an alternate implementation including smart phone and cloud based VM hypervisors that shift the workload automatically, no double required.

“But CloneCloud wouldn't just make smart phones more efficient: it could also make them more capable. A test application developed by Chun performs face recognition on photos. It required 100 seconds of processor time on a standard Android phone, but it finished in only one second when run by a clone of the phone running on a desktop computer. Because the software runs on a cloud-computing platform, it can be scaled in terms of the amount of both memory allocated and processing power, both of which increase performance on computationally intensive tasks.”

This work, developed by Byung-Gon Chun, a research scientist at Intel Research Berkeley, and his colleague Petros Maniatis, was recently reported by Christopher Mims in Technology Review and will be presented HotOS XII conference in Switzerland later this month.

Choose the Cloud, Lose Money, Who Says So?

2009-05-04T21:00:00.003-04:00

Shortly after blogging about the MIT Symposium featuring Amazon’s approach to cloud computing, I found a report , McKinsey: Adopt the cloud, lose money, in the Register, which I put aside for additional thought and later comment. I had opined that victory in the Cloud market eventually goes to the low-cost producer.

When virtualizing private data centers, a company takes a powerful server and subdivides it into many servers to increase efficiency. This consolidation provides the necessary cost justification for the switch to virtual machines, leading to the current great success of VMware and others. This is the approach favored by McKinsey. Google, in contrast, does the opposite by taking a large set of low cost commodity systems and tying them together into one large supercomputer. At this level, the Amazon and Google approaches are similar.

Recently, the Official Google Blog helped clarify the issues. “While most discussions of cloud computing and data center design take place at the hardware level, we offer a set of scalable services that customers would otherwise have to maintain themselves in a virtualization model. For example, if a company wanted to implement a typical three tier system in the cloud using virtualization, they would have to build, install, and maintain software to run the database, app server, and web server. This would require them to spend time and money to acquire the licenses, maintain system uptime, and implement patches.“

In contrast, with a service like Google App Engine, customers get access to the same scalable application server and database that Google uses for its own applications. This means customers don't have to worry about purchasing, installing, maintaining, and scaling their own databases and app servers. All a customer has to do is deploy code, and we take care of the rest. You only pay for what you need, and, with App Engine's free quota, you often don't pay anything at all.”

My view so far: the benefits of the Cloud cannot be beat for new companies and new applications. For legacy applications McKinsey may have a good point, but the data is unclear. So for now, I agree with this approach:“As companies weigh private data centers vs. scalable clouds, they should ask a simple question: can I find the same economics, ease of maintenance, and pace of innovation that is inherent in the cloud?” asks Rajen Sheth, Senior Product Manager, Google Apps.

Clouds, Smart Phones, and Virtual Machines

2009-04-28T03:11:00.004-04:00

Having recently participated in forums on both Mobile and on Cloud Computing, both well run, intellectually stimulating, and attended by hundreds, you might infer that I have been discussing which technology will be more significant. The forums, in Cambridge MA, were held only eight days and 12 minutes walking distance apart, yet appeared to attract disparate audiences. Outside of myself, the only person I saw attending both forums was Mike Werner, Platform Strategy Advisor- Cloud Computing, Microsoft.

Ask me to declare a winner, I say virtual machine concepts. The combination of Smart Phones and Clouds, connected through a revived belief in virtual machines, will be the new paradigm. It needs a new name, maybe McCloud (the Mobile Computing Cloud).

Meanwhile, some parties are battling over ownership of the old paradigms. From CIO.com:

VMware CEO Paul Maritz took another jab at IBM, sometimes called a pioneer of virtualization because of its use of the technology in its mainframes.

"Even IBM, which likes to claim to be the inventor of virtualization, didn't fully realize and anticipate what could have been done with this technology," Maritz said. "It's not about individual machines but about how groups of servers relate to each other."

First and foremost, Virtual Machine operating systems were invented at IBM’s Cambridge Scientific Center by a team led by Bob Creasy. I would give much of the credit for extending the virtual machine outside the bounds of its host to my friend Edson Hendricks, who developed the RSCS networking subsystem, which he described in a seminal paper in the IBM Systems Journal. Ed’s subsystem became the basis for VNET, IBM’s internal network which in the 1970s became one of the largest computer networks in the world.

This is not to disparage the fine work done by VMware and others extending the virtual machine concept, but putting the virtual devices on the network opened up many of these possibilities. You can do more today with a multi-gigabit packet switching network than you could with a 2400 bit dial-up line.

I referred to Ed’s paper recently while I was preparing an SBIR proposal for a virtual machine security subsystem; his approach holds up very well, thirty years later.

The scramble for credit reminds me of my old friend, Eddie Bernays, who organized a festival commemorating the 50th anniversary of Edison’s invention of the light bulb. Attendees included President Hoover, Henry Ford, Orville Wright, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and Madame Curie.

I fondly anticipate that most of you will participate in the 50th anniversary of Cloud Computing, honoring me as the inventor of the concept. What’s that you say: I didn’t invent Cloud Computing? Well, Edison didn’t invent the light bulb either; you can look it up in your Wikipedia. Then again, Thomas Edison and I both knew Eddie Bernays, the Father of Modern Public Relations; Long life to all.

What is Near Field Communications?

2009-04-24T11:03:00.003-04:00

Near Field Communication or NFC is a short-range high frequency wireless communication technology enabling the exchange of data between devices over about a 10 centimeter (around 4 inches) distance. NFC is primarily aimed at usage in mobile phones. The technology is a simple extension of the proximity-card standard. An NFC device can communicate with existing contactless smartcards and readers, and is thereby compatible with the contactless infrastructure already in use for security, public transportation, and payment.

Plenty of applications are possible, such as:

Mobile ticketing in public transport — an extension of the existing contactless infrastructure,
Mobile payment — the device acts as a debit/ credit payment card,
Smart poster — the mobile phone is used to read RFID tags on outdoor billboards in order to get info on the move.

Future applications could include:

Electronic ticketing — airline tickets, concert/event tickets, and others,
Electronic money -- stored on the card and used like cash,
Travel cards—parking, museum discounts, tourist passes,
Identity documents -- student IDs, recreation pass, dump sticker,
Mobile commerce -- ads, coupons, payments, gifts, loyalty programs,
Electronic keys — car keys, house/office keys, hotel room keys, etc.,
NFC can be used to configure and initiate other wireless network connections such as Bluetooth or Wi-Fi.

The MIT Mobile Experience Lab recently issued a 45-page report on NFC and student life:

“We developed the following directions in which new innovative ways of using NFC with the mobile phone could be developed: Ubiquitous information, Health/Safety, Networking, eMoney, Smart Mobility, Entertainment, and Smart Objects. An example of ubiquitous information would be a virtual tour guide where the user could tap his/her phone on the tags as they toured a place, and thus consult the information pertaining to the site, as well as receive information about next items on the itinerary, where to eat/drink, and also the main commercial activities in the area. This system could easily be ported to libraries, museums, stores, etc. In regards to Health, a person could easily use NFC to record their workout data from exercise machines, as well as monitor their daily calorie consumption when ordering from smart menu boards. With this information, your phone could give timely diet suggestions, gym programs, and doctor alerts.”

The hot application for NFC, which some believe will be the killer app, is using the cell phone as a credit card. VISA and MasterCard have both recently announced a number of large-scale pilot implementations worldwide. Nokia has announced new NFC enabled phones. Blaze Mobile has announced the Blaze Mobile Wallet as an iPhone App, while also announcing a joint effort with MasterCard Worldwide to promote an NFC based mobile payment sticker that can be affixed to any cell phone, allowing “Tap & Go" purchases at any of the over 141,000 merchant locations currently accepting PayPass. To my surprise, there are already 20 PayPass locations in Portsmouth, NH, and 30 in Portland, ME. You can search for merchants in your own town here.

iPhone: the Dreadnought of the 21st Century?

2009-04-23T14:10:00.001-04:00

I found such a well written post on the iPhone by MG Siegler in TechCrunch that I felt a need to send you a couple of excerpts.

First a few facts: “People can downplay the actual number of iPhones in circulation all they want — the fact of the matter is that it has changed things. While there were some third-party mobile app developers before Apple’s App Store, they received almost no attention, and as such, it wasn’t really a viable business. Now, everyone and their mother is flocking to develop for the App Store. And every major mobile player is rushing to make their own app stores. But Apple’s already has over 35,000 apps — and in a few short hours, there will have been one billion apps downloaded in just 9 months.”

Now a strong opinion: “The fact of the matter is, that iPhone is simply the best all-in-one device that I’ve ever owned. I cannot imagine my life without it now. I would be lost — sometimes literally — without it. I say that because I know that of the 21 million iPhone owners out there — there are a great deal who feel the exact same way. That may be annoying, and may even sound pretentious to those who don’t own an iPhone — but I’m giving you my honest take as someone who has owned and/or tried a lot of the so-called “smartphones” out there.”

As I write, MG’s post has generated 125 comments, some of which are very insightful. Take a look.

As for Dreadnoughts, The British battleship HMS Dreadnought had such an impact when launched in 1906 that battleships built after her were referred to as 'dreadnoughts'. The arrival of the dreadnoughts sparked a technology-based arms race, principally between Britain and Germany but reflected worldwide, as the new class of warships became a crucial symbol of national power.

What is a Smart Phone?

2009-04-20T11:06:00.002-04:00

I wish to post some thoughts on smart cards as payment devices: possible replacements for credit cards or even a possible electronic wallet. To do so, I feel I have to write about Smart Phones, about NFC (Near Field Communication), and about the two in combination. Rather than prepare one long multi-topic post, I’m dividing this topic into three parts to make it more reader friendly. The three parts will be:

What is a Smart Phone?
What is Near Field Communications?
My Quest for a Smart Phone with NFC

Here is the easy part. By my definition, a “Smart Phone” contains at least the following elements:

· Powerful hand-held computer, with integrated keyboard and display,
· User programmable, with a large library of applications available,
· Allows attachment of a wide variety of input and output devices (e.g. Bluetooth),
· Attaches to multiple high-speed networks selecting the best for the job (e.g. GSM, 3G, WiFi),
· Can sense its location,
· Battery powered,
· Can back-up data or synch data with a computer,
· Can be linked to a computer for data and program downloads.

I recognize that some of these terms are subjective. For example, “powerful” and “high speed” are clearly defined by the alternatives available today. Kevin Short from UNH helped me with this definition.

Another view can be found here in the Wikipedia. This is my blog, we’ll use my view. Comments encouraged.

Silver Lining in the Cloud

2009-04-16T14:09:00.002-04:00

A standing room only crowd approaching 400 crammed the auditorium of MIT’s silliest looking building last night for the Innovation Series program on Cloud Computing featuring Amazon’s Adam Selipsky, VP Product Management and Developer Relations, Amazon Web Services.

The full title of the event was “Sunny Days Ahead for the Cloud Environment: What’s Real for You,” and Amazon certainly appears to have found the silver lining in the “cloud ecosystem.”

Rather than a standard sales presentation, wherein the speaker provides a self serving definition of cloud computing, to which his products compare favorably, Adam Selipsky very credibly built his case from the bottom up.

At Amazon, they felt they were very good at developing loosely coupled systems and applications, using low-cost hardware, and were clearly very experienced at eCommerce applications. Building on that base, they set the following design principles for their cloud offering:

· Reliable
· Elastic
· Low-Latency
· Secure
· Easy-to-Use
· Pay-as-you-Go

Adam cited the two major advantages the Amazon cloud offers are speed of development and low cost. Speed of development comes because Amazon provides self-service interfaces to their modules that are both simple and intuitive. As for cost and pricing, Adam points out that buying services rather than hardware allows a young company to turn potential capital expenditure into variable expenditure. And pay-as-you-go allows users to start small, confident that capacity will be there when needed.

Even today, Adam feels that his cloud can provide capacity, such as disk storage, at very favorable rates compared to the industry at large. From what I have seen, I agree. But to continue to provide competitively low prices, Amazon will have to become a low cost provider of cloud services and capacity.

I recall once seeing a framework, based on Michal Porter’s writings on competitive advantage, mapping the growth of a company through four stages:

· Technology Leader
· Market Leadership
· Financial Leader
· Low Cost Producer

Were I a financial analyst, I would wonder if Amazon can truly become and maintain a position of low cost producer. As an entrepreneur, I worry that the low cost producer is seldom much of an innovator. But perhaps the Amazon cloud and its 540,000 developer accounts is an innovation engine not seen before in industry. And the developer number grows by 50,000 every quarter.
------------------------
Local companies, speakers, and panelists included:

Chair: Sim Simeonov, Polaris Venture Partners
Fumi Matsumota, CTO, Allurent
Spike Washburn, CEO, Stax Networks
Frank Gillett, VP, Forrester Research
Roman Stanek, CEO, GoodData
Richard Reiner, CEO, Enomaly
Josh Fraser, VP, RightScale

It’s 9PM, do You know where YOU are?

2009-04-15T14:45:00.003-04:00

Today, 1500 iPhone apps use Skyhook’s XPS for location-finding service. Ted Morgan, CEO of Skyhook Wireless, described the rapid growth of his company to the recent Xconomy Forum on Mobile Innovation.

XPS is the world's first true hybrid positioning system. By combining the unique benefits of GPS, Cell Tower triangulation, and Wi-Fi Positioning, XPS delivers the same level of location quality whether indoors or outdoors, in the country or downtown.

The key advantages of XPS are that it is:

Fast:1 second location lookups,

Accurate:Ranges of 10m - 20m, indoors and outdoors,

Dependable:Everywhere you live, work and play.

To build its location data base, Skyhook today employs 500 contract drivers roaming the planet mapping Wi-Fi access points. Their location base has grown from 50 thousand to over 100 million points.

Skyhook had been struggling along on a combination of bootstrapping and angel financing until the day that Ted Morgan received a call from Steve Jobs. Actually, Ted was out of the office, so what he received was a phone message, which he was convinced was a prank. At the urging of his employees, Ted returned the call several hours later. Skyhook had a deal with Apple in six weeks and XPS was running on the iPhone in a few months. Today, XPS can run on most smart phones, but Apple still provides ninety per cent of Skyhook’s business.

iPhone: a billion application downloads!!

2009-04-13T11:47:00.001-04:00

The Apple APP Store is rushing toward one billion downloads; you can watch the countdown here.

My mind boggles at the thought. My imagination staggers. Congratulations to all involved.

"Mafia Wars" now available on iPhone

2009-04-10T13:33:00.003-04:00

I spend very little time playing games on my computer or my iPhone, but the blogs were flying this week about iPhone availability for “Mafia Wars.”

Social gaming developer Zynga released “Mafia Wars” on Apple’s App Store, bringing the company’s incredibly popular game, which has over 9 million monthly users on Facebook alone, to the iPhone. You can grab the free game here (iTunes Link).

The game revolves around building up a virtual mafia family with other members, earning virtual cash to buy weapons, and performing ‘jobs’ to earn more. While the game play is primarily text based, Mafia Wars has an impressive interface and array of graphics that make it feel very polished.

Should I apologize to my grandson, Nicolai Innocenzia Agosta, for blatant ethnic stereotyping? Or should I just lie back, play the Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra channel on Pandora, and celebrate diversity?

More if you need it on TechCrunch.

Report from the Mobile Innovation Forum

2009-04-08T13:47:00.002-04:00

Yesterday’s Forum on the Future of Mobile Innovation in New England attracted an enthusiastic standing room only crowd. Organizer Wade Rush describes the program in his post, Exciting but Tricky Times for Mobile Entrepreneurs.

Some personal observations:

First, I had no idea that the New England Region was so prominent in the emerging Smart Phone applications industry. Although the cell phone was invented in the US, leadership quickly passed overseas. When Kevin Short founded Groove Mobile to download music, he signed up half a dozen European carriers before Sprint followed along. Not so with Smart Phone applications. The US is the leader, with New England a top regional contender.

Second, Harvey Tuch from VMware both announced and demonstrated MVP, the Mobilization Virtual Platform, a virtual machine implementation running on a Smart Phone. Harvey was able to load two operating systems and run two applications simultaneously. My prediction: this may be an extremely significant advantage for Enterprise Applications, a segment that was much praised but little discussed at the Forum.

Third, not one speaker mentioned Near Field Communication as the technology that may propel the cell phone and the smart phone into the commercial marketplace. NFC is an adaptation of contactless smart card technology to the cell phone, allowing applications such as transit payments, credit card transactions, building access, and numerous others to reside on the phone. The MIT Media Lab recently produced a white paper and a video on potential NFC applications.

I’ll post more on these topics in the future.

SecureID on the iPhone, and it's Free!

2009-04-06T13:42:00.003-04:00

For a quarter century now, the security standard for logon access control has been the SecurID card from RSA Security. The card generates a random number, which when combined with your password, provides what is called two-factor authentication: the password being something you know, and the random number proving you have the SecurID card in your possession. This random number, sometimes called a passcode, changes every minute so even a man-in-the-middle attack is likely to fail.

You can get make your iPhone into a security card by downloading a free application, VIP Access, developed by VeriSign. And VeriSign has already signed up AOL, PayPal, and eBay as sites that will verify both your password and passcode when you log in.

When I read about this new application in the NY Times I immediately called Ken Weiss, the inventor of the SecurID card, and we both downloaded it. The installations went flawlessly. I also checked the comments on the iTunes site, and almost every reviewer gave it five stars.

VeriSign’s strategy is to provide the iPhone software for free. They intend to sell the server-side software to banks and other consumer oriented sites that demand extra identity verification. If you are developing your own application with both a server and smart phone component, you could do the same thing.

When introduced, the SecurID cards cost $50 each; the price has come down, but still far exceeds zero. How can VeriSign support this price breakthrough? Easily, because the SecurID cards are provided by RSA Security, a division of EMC Corp. But the original patents have expired, so VeriSign is now free to exploit the technology.

Incidentally, as the mathematically trained know, no machine-generated number is truly random, but it can be truly unpredictable, which the passcode is. Another application would be for you to start your own lottery, with a payoff every sixty seconds. Give it a try.

Dr. Kenneth Weiss was the inventor of the SecurID card and developed the framework of one, two and three factor authentication which is almost universally used today. Ken was the founder of Security Dynamics; I was the original CEO. Security Dynamics later purchased RSA Corp., the inventor of Public Key Encryption. The resulting Company was renamed RSA Security, which became the first computer security company to have a public stock offering.

iPhone: "Stop Me Before I Kill Again"

2009-04-06T10:08:00.002-04:00

Everyone seemed to have so much fun with my earlier post, “The iPhone as a murder suspect,“ that I thought I’d give more scrutiny to this topic. The death of the phone booth pales in significance compared to the possible death of the PC industry.

Based on its success with the iPhone, AT&T now wants to sell “netbook” computers on a subsidized basis, bundled with a service plan, similar to the way it sells iPhones and dumb phones.

And, as is obvious, these netbooks could easily be extended to notebook and even desktop computers.

Were AT&T and other carriers to succeed in this approach, it would kill the personal computer industry as it exists today. Say goodbye Dell, Lenovo, HP, and others.

One Blogger, Faultline, questions whether or not Apple itself will bother with a netbook. “(Steve Jobs has said the iPhone does everything a netbook does anyway, and was reported as saying ‘We don’t know how to build a sub-$500 computer that is not a piece of junk’), the issue really is whether or not you belong to the school of thought which says every network needs to have specialist operator supplied equipment or whether instead, you are a believer in open networks.” You can find Faultline’s entire post here.

Meanwhile, AT&T is rushing to rollout a major upgrade to its 3G mobile data service in anticipation of a tenfold increase in network traffic from new iPhone hardware expected to go on sale in June, as reported here by appleinsider.

Last month, AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph de la Vega said in an interview that "we have the infrastructure capability to go to 7.2 [Mbit/s], and we'll have the capability to go 14.4 and 20 in the next couple of years, so I think there's coverage we're going to improve, there's quality we're going to improve, and there's speed that's also going to get improved."

The current iPhone 3G only supports a maximum of 3.6 Mbit/s, so these plans would require you to purchase a new iPhone.

Learn iPhone Programmng

2009-04-03T08:45:00.002-04:00

If you agree with my comments regarding the importance of iPhone software, you might want to consider taking a free Stanford course on developing iPhone software.

From Dan Stober of the Stanford News Service:

“Want to know how to write programs for the iPhone and iPod touch? Beginning this week, a Stanford computer science class on that buzzworthy topic will be available online to the general public for free.

“The 10-week course, iPhone Application Programming, is a hot ticket. It begins today and videos of the classes will be posted at Stanford on iTunes U two days after each class meeting (http://itunes.stanford.edu). Copies of the slides shown in class will be available there as well.

“The proliferation of third-party applications for Apple's iPhone has changed the device from a popular cell phone to a miniature computer. The Apple App Store offers more than 25,000 titles, dealing with everything from maps to business tools, games, photography, fishing and restaurant recommendations based on your location.”

For more, click on the link above.

You can do more with Steve Jobs and $100 million than you can without either

2009-04-02T15:17:00.002-04:00

One of the most amazing aspects of the iPhone is its ability to attract developers and applications. For perspective, Apple sold 11,000,000 3G iPhones in 2008, while 500,000,000 applications were downloaded.

Since smart phones are really powerful and compact hand-held computers, it should come as no surprise that users wish to develop or install new applications. Why did things seem so different before the iPhone?

In 2001, Kevin Short of UNH founded one of the first companies to build a successful business downloading and playing music on cell phones. Preparing software for the cell phones was very difficult. “There was a standard for the Java phones” recalls Short, “but there was enough wiggle room in the standard that no two phones were alike. We had to develop a new app for every phone. This was a bankrupt yourself situation. “

Short remains proud of his company’s technical achievements, starting with his propriety compression and transmission scheme. “We had the first touch screen phones, but the carriers wouldn’t even acknowledge it as a phone unless it had a keyboard. We also developed the capability in the software to select the best available network, but the management brought in by the V.C.'s made us drop that approach.”

Kevin’s company, originally named “Chaoticom,” later “Groove Mobile,” received its seed funding from the eCoast Angels and Kodiak Venture Partners. Groove Mobile was sold in 2008 and operates today as LiveWire Mobile.

As the original Chairman of Chaoticom, I take my hat off to Steve Jobs for taking a proprietary transmission scheme, touch screens, and network selection software and transforming the IT and communications industries, if not the world.

Office on your iPhone?

2009-04-02T08:53:00.001-04:00

Blogging from the Web 2.0 Expo keynote, Jason Kincaid reports that Stephen Elop, President of Microsoft Business Division, hinted that we may be seeing Microsoft Office make its way to the iPhone sometime soon. After his interviewer Tim O’Reilly caught him on the comment, Elop backtracked a bit, stating “not yet, keep watching”. But it’s clear that an iPhone version of Office is on his mind.
Rumors of an Office client for the iPhone have been circulating as users clamor for a way to edit their Word and Excel files on the go (the iPhone allows them to view them, but doesn’t include any editing functionality).
I found Jason’s post on TechCrunch this morning; you should check it out for the comments, which were mostly unfavorable to Office. For more levity, you should check out this flickr mock up proposing what Office might look like on your iPhone.

The iPhone as a Murder Suspect

2009-03-31T16:39:00.000-04:00

Ever since my sister Joyce and her friend, Steve, gave me an iPhone 3G for my birthday last July, I’ve been searching for ways to explain to my more conservative peers, particularly members of the eCoast Angels, why I think the iPhone is such a revolutionary device. Here is a fine explanation.

“You may not realize it, but your mobile phone is a cold-blooded killer,” writes Dan Shapiro.

“The first victim, the phone booth, wasn’t particularly well-loved, and nobody was expecting a complete extermination.

“The next victims were just “accidents.” Seen anyone whip out a paper address book lately? And who would have thought that a little thing like the clock on the phone’s home screen could cause so many business professionals to stop wearing watches? Just who, exactly, is next?”

Dan proposes the following framework for evaluation.

1. Every phone’s got it. Until a feature is a part of every phone, mainstream, non-tech-savvy America won’t notice that it’s there—camera phones only penetrated everyone’s consciousness when they were everywhere.
2. The user experience really works on a phone. Mobile TV is coming. SMS remains the definitive mobile success story, but don’t wait for the end of email.
3. It crosses the Good Enough Threshold. The “GET” is the point where the best phone experience exceeds the minimum consumer bar for the feature.

You can read Dan directly and see his list of likely murder victims by linking directly to his post. And thanks again, Joyce and Steve.

Mobile Computing Forum on April 7 in Cambridge

2009-03-31T15:31:00.000-04:00

On April 7, Xconomy will hold its first-ever Forum on the Future of Mobile Innovation in New England. CEOs, engineers, analysts, and investors from more than 15 local companies and venture firms will be on hand at Microsoft’s New England Research and Development Center to share their insights and predictions and to tackle the audience’s questions.

For more details on the Forum, for registration, and to see a list of companies wanting to show off their technologies, go to Xconomy by clicking here.

2009-03-30T13:55:00.000-04:00

My photo should appear now.

2009-03-30T13:53:00.000-04:00

2009-03-30T13:33:00.000-04:00