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Google makes Chrome OS open source
Google made the early code available to the open source community and claims external developers will have the same access to the code as internal Google developers.... Continued »
Category: wireless
November 18th, 2009
Competition made Microsoft open source embedded .NET
Regular readers here have probably guessed why Microsoft decided to open source .NET Micro under the Apache 2.0 license.
Competition.
Makers of embedded devices have been moving strongly into open source, especially Linux, and Microsoft was at great risk of being left behind. The announcement was made at the company’s Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles.
The news comes against the backdrop of falling market share for Windows Mobile, and increasing market share for Microsoft open source, as revealed in the latest Black Duck figures. They’re not being nice here, they’re being practical.
Here is how Microsoft community development manager Peter Galli put it on his blog:
The result of this is that the .NET Micro Framework has become a seamless development experience, bringing a single programming model and tool chain for the breadth of developer solutions, all the way from small intelligent devices, to servers and the cloud. There are also no more time-limited versions.
Note that Microsoft is not open sourcing the TCP/IP stack that .NET Micro links to. That’s someone else’s. But the news will let developers create Internet-linked device networks using .NET. It gives Microsoft an in to a technology open source, and Linux, were threatening to run away with.
The handwriting was probably on the wall here years ago, when Linux bought Wind River, and when innovative start-up Cavium bought MontaVista resistance became futile.
It must be noted that software is just a small part of any embedded, Internet-linked solution. It doesn’t mean you’re getting something for nothing, because the chips the software is expressed in are sold as part of larger devices.
It’s all part of a vision I covered early this decade of wireless networks acting as application platforms, using Internet standards to create systems for home automation, medicine and entertainment that are always on and live in the air.
Now Microsoft has a viable play in this game, and this is very good news for .NET developers.
November 17th, 2009
Five ways Android could get into trouble
On the surface these are happy days in Android-land.
Going into the key Christmas selling season, Android is eating Windows for lunch. New (non-Google) development centers are continuing to open, new manufacturers are coming on stream.
What could possibly go wrong?
Knowing that rising markets need a wall of worry to keep going up, here are some possibilities:
- Momentum must be maintained. Once you start gobbling market share you have to keep doing it. Even a slowing of momentum can be read as failure.
- Developers must be kept happy. Some are complaining they’re working full-time getting apps written for the Android operating system running on multiple phones.
- The Android app store has some catching-up to do, especially in the user experience area.
- When will Android get a “killer app” that the iPhone can’t match, or one it hasn’t already matched?
- Can Google ride herd on its complex ecosystem? Everyone knows who the boss is with the iPhone. Not so with Android. (UPDATE: Rich Sands writes to say this article from his site is more to the point.)
We shouldn’t get too excited about Android’s early success. A 3.5% market share is still a gnat on Apple’s elephant. Early buzz does not make for victory — as President Howard Dean will tell you. (Or President Huckabee, if you prefer.)
Google has set itself a more complex task than that which faced Apple when it introduced the iPhone a few years ago. Google is using an open source approach, which means there are more hands on the steering wheel. And Google is trying to overcome an established leader, leading to charges of me-tooism.
A good start is not the race.
November 12th, 2009
Broadcom goes open source and hell freezes over
When the rock group Eagles broke up in 1980 they said they would get back together “when hell froze over.” They did get back together, in 1994. The album was called Hell Freezes Over.
Point is you can promise you will never do something — never, ever, ever — but business is business.
It’s with this in mind we find Broadcom making its BroadVoice voice codecs open source and royalty free under GPL V. 2.
GigaOM is wondering whether Broadcom isn’t just pushing for higher priced, higher quality voice from service providers using the codecs. I have another theory.
Broadcom saw its greatest success in pioneering relationships with Taiwanese OEMs. When other chip companies were offering these firms software and ecosystems, Broadcom offered them solutions, complete designs from brand names they could bang out for a quick profit.
What I saw at CompuTex this year was an enormous interest from these OEMs, whose ties to Chinese manufacturing are incredibly strong, to go “up the stack” of value, to own their own designs and create their own brand names.
They see this as an impossible dream on the desktop, but very possible in the handset business, a Broadcom niche. Systems like Android, LiMo and Symbian are open source, so the components going into them should also be open source. It’s the most effective way to compete with Apple.
In taking this route, the OEMs are explicitly rejecting Microsoft’s Windows Mobile, and this is a very big deal. This has nothing to do with the sales world they desire. They gave Microsoft all of the Netbook market and stuck Linux in a corner.
This Broadcom announcement is the best proof yet that the future of the handheld market is Linux.
November 4th, 2009
LiMo has a second phone
The LiMo Foundation has delivered its second mobile phone to the market under the second release of its software.
The Vodafone 360 Samsung M1 looks uncomfortably like an iPhone, only with three buttons below the screen. The name is a hybrid — Vodafone 360 refers to the carrier’s service platform, Samsung M1 the phone manufacturer.
And it’s the Vodafone 360 that is at the heart of it all. The company calls this its “web services strategy.” Vodafone owns 45% of Verizon Wireless of the U.S.
Version 2.0 of the LiMo platform was announced in September alongside another Samsung phone, the H1. While Android stories revolve around developers and phone makers, LiMo seems proudest of its agreements with carriers.
The M1 itself seems to be a dumbed-down version of the H1, with less memory, a smaller screen, and presumably a lower price. It seems the idea is to hit the low-end of the market with something that looks like an iPhone, but isn’t, and a network that seems like the Internet, but isn’t.
LiMo press announcements also tend to carry a breathless quality that hasn’t been seen in America since the 1980s, except among recent college graduates. Here’s a taste:
This latest handset developed by Samsung offers mobile consumers a unique mobile experience presented through Vodafone’s stunning feature-rich, highly customizable Vodafone 360 user interface (UI) – providing a new set of Internet services for the mobile and PC that gathers all of a customer’s friends, communities, entertainment and personal favorites in one place.
You would think these people invented the handset.
Snark aside we are starting to see the dimensions of contrasting strategies among the various Linux handset groups. Android is about the makers, LiMo the carriers, and Moblin the developers.
Which will win the customers?
November 4th, 2009
With Zapatec Funambol has one stack to rule mobile open source
Funambol, now billing itself as the leader in mobile sync, has bought Zapatec, which creates Web 2.0 solutions using AJAX.
The result, the company believes, will be a one-stop shop for building mobile applications that run as well as native apps across multiple platforms.
Funambol has its developers in Italy, Zapatec in the Ukraine, but both have operations in Silicon Valley that will be consolidated in Redwood City. Zapatec CEO Dror Matalon will become vice president of emerging technologies for the combined company, said Funambol vice president of worldwide marketing Hal Steger.
The combined company is focused on a tough problem for mobile developers, namely how do you create apps that integrate with native apps, yet don’t have to be completely rewritten for each platform.
Steger said Funambol’s sync technology solves part of the first problem, Zapatec most of the second, and the combination will enable a total solution.
“A lot of people think the future of mobile apps will be like Web apps, like AJAX apps on desktop browsers,” said Steger. “If you can build a Web app that works on a lot of phones you can just build one version.”
Not exactly. “Mobile is different from desktops because two of the most important things you need to do are integrate with the core apps on the phone, like the address book and calendar, because other apps do.” This makes it harder to build a single app for multiple platforms and carriers.
Funambol solves part of the problem since its mobile sync is designed to be cross-platform and cross-carrier. Zapatec solves the coding problem.
You can call this innovation, but then it’s all based on an open source core. Developers will want to do business with Funambol, not just download its stuff, to get the full effect, Steger said, but the effect should be cool.
November 3rd, 2009
Skype plays footsie with open source
As I wrote earlier today, when something goes open source we should ask how.
So in contrast with Yahoo’s open sourcing of Traffic Server, let’s talk about Skype’s “open source” move.
Yahoo was trying to build value from community. Skype is trying an embrace and extend strategy like that of Blackboard.
To its credit Skype is being frank on that.
Yes, there’s an open source version of Linux client being developed. This will be a part of larger offering, but we can’t tell you much more about that right now. Having an open source UI will help us get adopted in the “multicultural” land of Linux distributions, as well as on other platforms and will speed up further development. We will update you once more details are available.
It’s a half-cheer for open source.
All Skype really plans to open source is a Linux version of its client. The protocol remains proprietary. So if you have a Linux phone (Moblin, Android, etc.) and want to support Skype’s proprietary protocol on your new hardware, you can.
This is the first technology move by Skype since eBay sold it to private investors for $2 billion , followed by assorted legal shenanigans. Everyone involved in that deal wants to protect that value.
But telephony is a low-bandwidth application. Its value going forward shouldn’t be voice as-such, but the integration of voice with other computer applications. In that world being wholly proprietary is a disadvantage. But opening up completely may be seen as giving away the goose that lays golden eggs.
Skype is caught east of the rock and west of the hard place. It knows it needs an open source strategy, but it fears giving itself away.
My view is this is not going to end well.
October 29th, 2009
Qualcomm joins open source movement at head of parade
Qualcomm, which has long had a major position in mobile chip sets and standards, has joined the open source movement with an eye to leading it. (Picture from Whenpigsfly.info.)
The company formed a new unit called Qualcomm Innovation Center (QuIC), under a senior vice president, and it joined the board of directors of the Symbian Foundation.
The idea behind the QuIC is to push open source, including systems like Chrome, Webkit and Android as well as Symbian, the company said.
Qualcomm is doing this to support its Snapdragon chip set, a CPU and graphics chip package designed for low power and handheld devices, most based on Linux. These include what Qualcomm calls “smartbooks,” netbook-phone hybrids on which Chinese manufacturers like Acer, Asus and HTC are already working.
The move should also be seen in light of recent moves by Intel to support mobile open source. Matt Asay writes that “pigs are beginning to fly” and he’s right.
But where are they heading?
The efforts of Qualcomm surrounding Snapdragon seem to prove that the “waiting for Godot” story of “desktop Linux” may finally get an appearance by its title character appearing on the stage in the form of a telephone-laptop hybrid.
But open source advocates should also take a jaundiced view of this, not just because it has been delayed for years. As Matt notes, combining open source and proprietary technology in the way Qualcomm wants to do, while legitimate, does threaten to maintain the vendor lock-in that open source is meant to fight.
Just because you draw a picture does not mean the pig is really flying.
October 15th, 2009
Should Google spin Android into a foundation?
How does it maintain control of Android and at the same time build a community of interests in which developers can seek profit?
The easy answer is to turn the Open Handset Alliance into the Android Foundation. (Fans of the late Isaac Asimov will recognize this fellow even in French.)
Critics love to claim that Eclipse is just an IBM front, but that’s a cheap shot, based on the fact that IBM gains huge benefits from Eclipse without having to pay all the bills there.
Foundations can be a great way to organize vendors who have a common purpose but divergent business plans. The Linux Foundation is a good example of this.
But there are risks in an Android Foundation, as Symbian’s David Wood said when they were going open source a year ago.
Forks are one.
Foundations lead naturally to forks. Every vendor who sells an “enhanced” version of Eclipse tools is pushing a proprietary fork. There are dozens of Linux distros, each of which forks the code in some way to provide added value.
How much Android forking can Google stand before the value starts dribbling through its fingers? Like to see some stuck-up Microsoft search engine sitting on an Android phone? (Make your blood boil? Well I should say.)
There is, of course, another risk in going the Foundation route. It doesn’t always work. Witness LiMo, which Motorola recently abandoned for Android. Witness Moblin, which Intel gave to the Linux Foundation. Witness Symbian itself for that matter.
The difference between the OHA and a conventional software foundation is that for Android to move forward it must first be expressed in phones, in hardware. The chicken-and-egg question here yields an easy answer. It’s the chicken. An egg, the software, is pretty meaningless if it’s just sitting on a server.
This fact reduces the threat of a fork. The value of any Android handset lies in its compatibility. Without that it might as well be a Windows Mobile set.
So long as Google is the biggest investor in Android, then, it’s probably doing the right thing by avoiding the foundation model. But at some point the rest of the ecosystem needs to grow up for Google to get its investment back.
So if Google does set up an Android Foundation some time down the road, know that it’s a sign of success, and that it no longer has to push this rock up the hill all by itself.
October 12th, 2009
Why the big Android bandwagon?
We have had open source mobile platforms for years. Why has Android become a bandwagon, one big enough that people are wondering if it’s not growing too big for its britches.
One word: marketing.
Thanks to its low-cost structure, Google can subsidize the marketing of its products to a degree even experienced rivals can’t match. As I have said before there is a price lower than free, and Google is uniquely positioned to pay that price.
Why? Look at the ad above, for the HTC myTouch, from Vimeo. All those celebrities aren’t just selling T-Mobile, or HTC. They are also selling Google. Android gave Google an excuse to do TV ads, with others’ help. Even if it doesn’t sell phones it sells the Google brand, and Google benefits from that.
It’s all about the sharing. By spreading the development effort through open source, Google also spreads the marketing cost as various players vie for position. But Google’s size and budget are what make this a good deal for everyone else.
Symbian and RIM can’t pay this price to the degree Google can. Symbian was spun-out to become self-sustaining, and its developer outreach efforts may be all it can do. RIM has a proprietary background, and proprietary profits, so for it to grab open source may easily be seen as desperation.
Google has both the money and the reputation to push product through the channel that has its roots in open source. Its multiplicity of developers means all of them have an incentive to drive down the open source incline and the open source development incline.
Google may eventually seek to monetize all this with online services, but it is developing the market before showing its hand in that area. Meanwhile, the ad revenue from having Web pages appear on more mobile kit is all it really needs. (Yes, this means the iPhone is subsidizing Android.)
Google’s cost structure gives it the power to be patient, something no other market player has. The Android bandwagon is built on this patience.
To succeed, however, it will have to deliver products as good or better than the iPhone, at the same or less cost, with just as many apps. That risk to its reputation is all Google is laying on the line here, but since failure will also hurt open source that risk is also shared.
October 12th, 2009
Netgear slammed for doing the right thing
Over the weekend a controversy erupted over Netgear’s shipping some proprietary software with its GPL router, the Rangemax Wireless-N.
This is one of those stupid kerfluffles that give open source a bad name.
Harald Welte, one of the good guys, got things started with a blog post titled Netgear trying to fool their users with “Open Source Router,” (Picture from Wikimedia Commons.) The text doesn’t match the intensity of the headline.
Welte’s complaint is that Netgear did not “study the Open Source market that they’re trying to address.” The company ships proprietary software with the router, then lets users download open source replacements if they wish.
This doesn’t please open source advocates, but they’re not the whole market for this product. Addressing multiple markets with one router is called marketing.
Netgear’s Pat Choudhury explained the company’s position at its Myopenrouter web site.
What makes the router open source is that Netgear lets you flash open source onto it. In fact they give you tools for this, and software. They’re happy if you do, and happy if you then build applications on the open source software you flash.
But if you don’t care, if you just want a super-fast router you can use out of the box, then Netgear wants to have its own software there, software it supports, software it understands. Yes, that’s proprietary software. So what? If you don’t care where’s the harm?
Santa Claus, who does his online business under the name megacoder, immediately chimed in under Choudhury’s post with an attaboy, but I wonder how many times open source advocates need to cry “wolf” when there is no wolf before people stop listening when there is a wolf?
Harald Welte has more power than I do, power he has earned over many years with good works. It doesn’t matter much when I shoot from the lip. It matters when he does.
October 8th, 2009
Google plays a hand of Ogre with Apple
Those of a certain age will remember an early Steve Jackson game called Ogre. It was a two-player game where one player had a single piece, a powerful piece called the Ogre. The other player had everything else.
This pretty much sums up Google’s Android strategy against the Apple iPhone. Apple in this case plays the Ogre. (Picture from Steve Jackson Games.)
The combination of Apple’s proprietary iPhone design and its exclusive deal with AT&T has proven financially powerful. Apple created a market no one thought existed for a data-driven mobile Internet client and everyone else is playing catch-up.
With Dell now agreeing to supply AT&T with its version of the Android, Google now has game pieces on all four major U.S. carriers, including the one Apple plays on. T-Mobile was the first carrier to carry Android kit, Verizon is being promised a bunch of it. Sprint and Samsung will be in on the game in a Moment.
Everybody gets to play the way they want. Carriers can get exclusives on designs, and negotiate any deal on the resulting data flow they wish. Both new and old manufacturers get to play in the phone game and try to innovate on the margins.
All this work feeds back into the Android ecosystem, and all content sales feed into the Android marketplace. Google just wants a place to advertise alongside the content.
It’s a fun game, whose knock-on effects are a direct challenge to Microsoft, Symbian, and the Blackberry folks. Google seems destined to be the market’s #2 player by early next year, #2 with a bullet.
But please note this. All Google’s pieces taken together don’t yet add up to the power of Apple’s iPhone. The Ogre still has the power. But Google has the dice.
October 6th, 2009
How Verizon might ruin Android
Verizon makes Apple look open.
But they are one-half the U.S. mobile phone duopoly (T-Mobile and Sprint are minor players) so the kids at the Googleplex are doubtless celebrating news that Verizon will be working on bringing Android phones to market.
Verizon has a ton of incentive to make this work. Apple’s iPhone is the 800-pound gorilla in the wireless room, and since it’s exclusive to AT&T Verizon has been hemorrhaging market share (especially on the high end) for many months now.
Both sides were saying the right things today, but Verizon Wireless has based its corporate identity on maintaining control of its wireless environment.
Old habits will be hard to break.
Top management at Verizon seems to have decided that in its pursuit of market share it will throw everything it can at the wall and hope something sticks.
But what if Verizon succeeds? What if it starts selling a lot of Android kit, and those users start making heavy use of apps for which Verizon isn’t getting its usual cut?
What happens when those in Verizon middle management, raised on the iron belief that Verizon must get a cut of every bit on its wireless network, see Google spreading its open source gospel on its network?
I think I know. And I don’t like it.
It will take more than a few words at a press conference to remove my suspicions. How about you?
October 6th, 2009
Netgear offers an open source router that is an applications platform
Netgear launched a new open source router called the RangeMax Wireless-N, a Linux-based unit with both Gigabit Ethernet ports and ReadyShare USB storage access.
The company is supporting the downloading of firmware and community development around the router at a site called MyOpenRouter.com.
This is precisely what I wanted to see when I started writing my blog posts about “Always On” at Corante in 2003.
The idea is that with storage and processing at the router, applications can live in the air independent of the PC. Clients on such a network might include security systems, RFID chips so you could find your stuff, and medical applications living on your body.
I was allowed to speak about this vision at the 2004 Accelerating Change conference at Stanford, and it is gratifying to see it finally being supported.
Unfortunately, router vendors resisted this concept for a long time. Early Linux routers seemed to emerge by accident, after programmers found they were using open source code without releasing it, and they were not supported by marketing.
Now things are changing. It will be fun to see where it goes from here:
- Security systems that can let police watch your break-in in progress, even from their police cars.
- Home automation systems that know when to water the plants and turn the lights on-and-off while you’re gone.
- Music systems that find you and deliver your tunes to the nearest speakers.
- A way to find your keys, your wallet, and your hat if you’re senile or just have ADHD.
- Systems that monitor the aged so they can age at home, not a nursing home.
- Medical systems that monitor your heart and blood sugar while you sleep, so ER techs are there as you have your heart attack instead of your getting the victory hug from the fellow in the brite nitegown.
All this, and more, can be developed on a platform where routers act as servers, wireless does the work of wires, and clients can be as small as a single RFID chip.
Now get to work and make yourself some money.
September 11th, 2009
Will new Motorola Google phone Cliq?
The code name for what is now the Motorola Cliq was Morrison, and I’m sure during its development some Chicago wags were asking “Tommy or Marion?” (This is Tommy. Use the link to find Marion.)
Its release, as a T-Mobile device, revealed the Android strategy. The phones may run open source, but they are being sold as Google proprietary.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Brands sell. Brands are a shorthand for all sorts of features and benefits, and when you’re marketing millions of units priced at just a few hundred dollars in a mature marketplace you need a brand to push through the clutter.
Motorola was once such a brand. It’s not any more. The hope is that Google is. So on Google Maps, on Google Voice Search, on Google Picasa and GTalk.
That last is also a hint as to where this goes. You release by Labor Day and you’re selling heavily for Christmas. The units sold at the Mobilize show yesterday were black, but expect them soon in red and green.
For carriers, the key question remains the data load this phone delivers, and the money they might make from that data. It’s called ARPU — average revenue per user. But these days it should called ABPU — average bandwidth per user.
By that measure, of course, the iPhone is John Wayne. What will Morrison be?
September 2nd, 2009
Will new Skype owners deal differently with open source?
There is growing speculation, especially given its deal with Digium, that the new owners of Skype may take a different attitude toward open source.
That would be a good thing.
Skype has long been the most popular Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP) client, but it is also closed. It was proprietary, not just in terms of its coding but in terms of eBay’s attitude toward doing business.
Its proprietary nature gave Skype the marketing budget it needed to win in the marketplace. But it also hampered VOIP efforts to go beyond voice.
While VOIP gained popularity as a telephony replacement its importance goes well beyond that. Once voice is integrated as a normal Internet service, it can be combined with other services in any number of ways.
The difference between a VOIP program and a Web conferencing system is not that large. You can not only mimic all the common voice services using VOIP, but add more as you need them or imagine them.
This has not happened up to now, partly because much of our voice traffic has moved to cellular networks which digitize it as a matter of course and monitor their networks to gain the most revenue they can out of every bit. For cellular, VOIP is just a way of squeezing more calls into limited bandwidth.
So the question becomes, what can Skype offer, alongside the open source movement, that will make it part of a compelling suite of services rather than just a way to get around telco gatekeepers? How, if Skype is to become part of the open source movement, will we get the word out to the mass market?
Vonage has shown a way to reach the mass market with a service based on open source, but investors are turning away from it due to coming competition from Skype and Google. So can Google deliver an open source VOIP service worth advertising, and what might it add to one?
What is the future of VOIP, and what part will open source play in it?
August 24th, 2009
Nokia brands a netbook
One thing I learned at CompuTex is that any brand can have a Netbook.
All you need is marketing and a supplier. Suppliers are thick on the ground. You can do your business from Taipei and have gear with your name on it coming out of Shanghai within a month.
Nokia is just the latest to follow this strategy. (Picture from CNet’s Crave blog.) There is nothing terribly special about the unit being offered — an aluminum case, an Intel Atom processor, weight under 3 pounds.
So why do it? For the same reason AT&T has former newsman Bill Kurtis sitting in a motorcycle with an HP Mini — to sell services.
In Nokia’s case, it’s to sell its Ovi data services, Maps, photo exchanges, data syncing — sure sounds like PC data. So why not put it into a PC while you work on a handheld people will buy?
It’s the connection between hardware and services that makes this story of interest to open source users. Services are the key open source business model. You can’t make someone buy a support subscription, but if they are buying the services provided by your software their checkbook is open to you.
This is what Moblin is about, what Android is about, and what Nokia’s own open source Symbian is about. Service revenue driving open source adoption.
But it’s going to be a multi-corner race among open source, Apple, Microsoft, and RIM. The Netbook gets Nokia into that game. Can open source win it?
August 14th, 2009
Will mobile Linux distros hang separately?
HTC has had its Android phone out for months now, and there’s great excitement over the coming kit from Motorola.
Panasonic and NEC are out with new LiMo gear. Intel and Novell are both pushing the Moblin platform. Nokia is pushing Linux in the new Maemo phones.
But what are the chances you will be able to move software among these various phones? (Tux is holding a Treo in this picture from Palminfocenter.com.)
I am not a programmer. The job may be trivial. But until we know what is involved in doing the job the job cannot be done. And right now we don’t know what will be necessary.
The question for this weekend is, are these mobile Linux vendors making a big mistake by not collaborating more? Apple is still killing them, developer attention is not unlimited, Microsoft hearts developers, and Palm is still in the game.
Even taken together, the market share of all these Linux phones by the end of next year may be trivial next to what is being piled up by the competition. But these Linux phones can’t be taken together. They are all tied to different distributions. They all stand alone.
This is just what happened with Unix back in the day. The software was great, but each vendor had their own way of doing things, so the market never really developed. Unix did not hang together and so each vendor hung separately.
Is this about to happen with mobile Linux?
August 4th, 2009
Funambol to monetize cloud sync for mobile VOIP
How’s that for a headline, if you just came here from Google News? Let’s break it down:
- Funambol is an open source software company. They specialize in software for synchronizing mobile devices, and claim they serve over 2 billion of them.
- Monetize is a verb form of making money. But it doesn’t just mean making money for yourself. In technology it often refers to turning on some invention so it can make money for lots of people.
- Cloud. A cloud is a big hosting center. Your stuff no longer runs on a particular computer using a specific operating system. It’s just in the system somewhere. It’s in the cloud.
- Sync is short for synchronize. Synchronizing, in this case, means making two things the same. The file here is the same as the file there, and they’re kept the same even after one side changes.
- Mobile is what Europeans call cell phones or cell-like devices. Funambol was originally Italian, but they’re now based in Redwood City, Calif. I think there is an Olive Garden in Palo Alto.
- VOIP is an acronym, short for Voice Over Internet Protocol. Make a phone call using your Internet connection rather than a regular phone line and you’re making a VOIP call.
Now, dear visitor, what does this mean to you?
Let’s say you’re traveling to Toronto or Taiwan. To avoid your carrier’s hefty “gotcha” fees, you call home using a local number and an Internet connection through a service like PennyTalk. You’re doing big business so you collect a lot of business cards, and put those contacts into your phone.
With Funambol software, you can now synchronize those contacts with a big system somewhere on the Internet, and share that synchronized file with co-workers, who may start calling those contacts before they even get home, before they have had time to deal with your competitor.
Or, when you’re visiting grandma in India, you can take some pictures of her and share them immediately with the whole family back in Duluth, Georgia.
This is a valuable capability. Funambol hopes enough money is made from all this that its software can earn a chunk as well. You may never know Funambol is involved in this, or (if you use their myFunambol portal) you may indeed know their name.
It’s a business model, and if you want another acronym it’s SaaS, which stands for Software as a Service. You don’t pay for the software, but what the software does.
By saving you money and making profitable new services possible, companies like Funambol keep their open source projects alive. You may not pay for that open source package directly, but you do pay for it, and they make money on it.
And that’s what makes the world go around.
August 3rd, 2009
What the FCC can do for open spectrum
Larry Dignan is afraid the FCC may be doing too much, just looking at possibly anti-competitive deals, trying to stay on top of the news instead of sleeping in a corner, as it did for a decade before Julius Genachowski (right) came to town.
It’s a mark of just how knee-jerk the opposition to government action in markets has become, that a mere investigation can lead reporters to fingering their worry beads.
To most people it’s pretty obvious why Apple shut down Google Voice. VOIP is competition with cellular minutes, just as it was competition for wired phone minutes, which it destroyed.
I’m old enough to remember the monthly chore of auditing my phone bill each month, creating expense bills for various publishers, with the cost of each call written down and photocopied. I don’t do that any more. The cost is rolled into my cellular plan as minutes which neither I nor my publisher has to see.
But running phone calls — a low bandwidth service — over the Internet rather than the wireless network is still a cost savings, which some customers would like to capture. Only the cell phone companies don’t want them to.
This is just one of many ways in which companies have succeeded in frustrating Moore’s Law over this decade. There is no technical reason why the price to move bits should not be going down, going down constantly, and going down rapidly. The cost of equipment, the efficiency of technology, it’s all there to make it happen.
What isn’t there are competitive markets with incentives for investment and no tolerance for monopoly.
Politics has squandered the advances of Moore’s Law, and it will take more than the FCC’s meager politics to bring them back.
So let me offer a simple guideline. Call it Dana’s Law of Technology Regulation:
Regulation should conform to the trends of Moore’s Law and maintain maximum competition in the market.
It will take real changes, not just investigations, to make that happen. We need more unlicensed channels, we need wholesaling in the last mile.
Bits may not be free, but they should be as cheap as the technology creating them allows. The goal should be encouraging the market to expand opportunity, and not making anyone’s life easier.
August 3rd, 2009
Why Clear is toast
Clear, the WiMax project backed by cable operators, Sprint, and Google, has hit Atlanta with plans to hit more cities.
It’s doomed.
It’s doomed because of bundling and long-term contracts, policies our politicians and regulators have been enabling so long most people can’t imagine business being done any other way.
I would love to try out Clear. I have an extension being built on my home. With Clear I wouldn’t have to run wires to connect it with my existing LAN. I would love to get true broadband from any office I visit.
Imaging combining what is now your wired and wireless Internet access into one fixed monthly charge. Almost makes me want to download a movie.
But it’s not happening. My old cellphone broke a few months ago. It’s the main line for the house, so my dear wife insisted we get a new wireless contract. Now I’m obligated for two years.
The same problem occurs with the wired connection. My Internet access is bundled along with my television bill. (There are too many trees here to reach the satellite.) The savings just aren’t there.
My guess is much of the market, perhaps most of the Atlanta market Clear is trying to reach, is in the same straits. Long-term contracts, bundling of equipment and service, and monopolies all conspire to make switching carriers tough.
Then there’s the cost. WiMax does not necessarily need licensed frequencies. But it was the only way Intel could get spectrum for its technology. The costs of securing that frequency are bundled into every Clear bill. It makes the price much higher than it should be.
That’s why Clear required so many partnerships, carefully negotiated over many years, to get going. The current list includes Intel Capital, Comcast, Sprint, Google, Time Warner Cable, and Bright House Networks.
By selling our electromagnetic frequency for cash, nearly all of it to the same small number of companies, the government and those companies conspired to make it impossible for new technologies to emerge, for true competition to commence.
Clear is a great example of that. It took a decade to reach the market, and it’s going to fail.
Because government and monopolists were in bed with one another, Moore’s Law was frustrated. Watch and see.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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