Mereja

Category: Wireless

  • The Apple iPad’s Impact on Mobile, Gaming, and E-Books: Local Techies and Startups React

    The Apple iPad
    Gregory T. Huang wrote:

    [Updated 1/28/10, see below] The wait is over, but the endless mulling of the details and implications is just beginning. As Apple unveiled its long-rumored tablet device, the iPad, at a press event today in San Francisco, mobile industry insiders in Seattle, Boston, and elsewhere were watching closely. Which is exactly what you would expect, given Apple’s track record of disrupting industry after industry with previous iProducts like the iPod, iTunes, and the iPhone.

    After all, long before Steve Jobs lifted the cloak of secrecy, the iPad was both feared and revered—feared because of the possibility that it will once again upend the way people consume digital content such as music, movies, TV shows, games, books, newspapers, and magazines, and revered because it could provide creators and distributors in each of these media with new ways to reach customers.

    In case you’ve been offline all day, the iPad is basically a giant iPod Touch. It’s a 1.5-pound media device with a 9.7-inch LCD multitouch-sensitive screen and, according to Apple, up to 10 hours of battery life. It will have Wi-Fi Internet connectivity and will come in no fewer than six versions priced from $499 to $829, depending on whether you want 16 gigabytes, 32 gigabytes, or 64 gigabytes of flash memory, and whether you want 3G connectivity in addition to Wi-Fi. 3G data plans, available on a month-to-month (not contract) basis from AT&T, will cost $14.99 per month for up to 250 megabytes of data, and $29.99 per month for unlimited data. The Wi-Fi-only version of the iPad will be available in late March, and the 3G version will be available in April, according to Apple.

    Those are the basics—but what will the device mean for consumers, entrepreneurs, application developers, and Apple’s competitors? To start the search for answers, Wade and I pinged a bunch of our favorite tech experts in Seattle and Boston, and below we’ve summarized their early reviews. So far we’ve gathered comments from Bill Baxter and Robbie Cape from Seattle-based Cozi (which makes family software for the home); John Chuang from Boston-based internet appliance maker Litl; Steve Hall, managing director of Seattle’s Vulcan Capital (Paul Allen’s investment firm); Todd Hooper, founder and CEO of Seattle-based Napera Networks; Mark Lowenstein of Brookline, MA-based wireless industry consultancy Mobile Ecosystem; Mike McSherry of Seattle-based Swype; and Greg Raiz, founder and CEO of Raizlabs, a mobile application development firm in Brookline that focuses on iPhone apps.

    Our sources expressed a variety of opinions about the iPad, ranging from adulation to surprise to disappointment. One thing is certain: the device is kicking up serious dust in some very diverse consumer markets, including e-books, gaming, music, and video. That means it probably stands to gain much better traction than any tablet computer that has come before (sorry, Microsoft—though we know you have something in the works too).

    Without further ado, here are our expert reactions:

    Bill Baxter, chief technology officer, Cozi, Seattle:

    The iPad is a game changer. The single-minded focus on enterprise was the mistake Microsoft made with Windows Mobile. It is the same mistake they made with the tablet PC. Now technology is such that iPad is a realistic possibility for consumers and nobody is positioned as well as Apple to make it happen.

    The impact of this has already begun to ripple through the PC OEMs [original equipment manufacturers]. They are going to have to scramble to …Next Page »

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  • Inside Seattle Genetics’ Big Partnership, Motricity Files for $250M IPO, VC Stats for 2009, & That’s About It for Seattle-Area Deals News

    Gregory T. Huang wrote:

    It was a quiet week for deals in the Northwest—too quiet. Maybe companies are steering clear of breaking news so they don’t get drowned out by all the big quarterly earnings news and Apple’s much-anticipated product announcement tomorrow. Probably there’s a storm coming.

    —Ryan took us inside a major partnership between Bothell, WA-based Seattle Genetics (NASDAQ: SGEN) and Millennium in Cambridge, MA. The deal, which we originally reported last month, calls for Millennium to sell Seattle Genetics’ experimental drug for Hodgkin’s and other lymphomas in all markets outside the U.S. and Canada. Millennium, which began a research collaboration with Seattle Genetics back in 2003, is acting as the Bothell firm’s global development and marketing partner, thanks to Millennium’s global parent company, Japan-based Takeda Pharmaceutical.

    —Wade reported that Harvest Power, a Boston-area renewable fuels company that has operations in Seattle and Vancouver, BC, has formed a partnership with Waste Management (NYSE: WM), the Texas-based waste hauling giant. Waste Management has invested an undisclosed amount to help Harvest Power expand to more cities, starting with the East and West Coasts.

    —Dow Jones VentureSource broke out VC data for Washington state in the fourth quarter of 2009, as Bruce reported. The venture dollars invested shot up almost three-fold in the quarter, when $239.4 million was invested in 25 companies, compared with the same quarter in 2008, when less than $85.6 million was invested in 18 companies. For all of 2009, however, Dow Jones showed a 9 percent decline, with $793.4 million invested in 107 companies, as compared to $875.6 million in 97 companies the prior year.

    —Bellevue, WA-based Motricity, a software firm that helps wireless carriers and media companies deliver mobile data services to customers, filed a form S-1 with the SEC, saying it plans to sell up to $250 million in an initial public offering. The company was founded in 2001 and is backed by more than $400 million in venture funding; it moved headquarters from North Carolina to Washington following its $135 million acquisition of the mobile services unit of InfoSpace (NASDAQ: INSP) in 2007. Motricity generated revenues of $117.1 million in the 12 months ending on September 30, 2009, but is not profitable.

    —Lastly, we had a fascinating guest post from entrepreneur Jasper Kuria, a former Microsoftie, on the reasons behind the “evil” term sheets that VCs negotiate with startups they want to fund, and the ensuing strategy discussions about company growth and exits.

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  • Did Apple’s Latest Keyboard Update Make Things Worse?

    Barely a week into the New Year I wrote an article entitled Magic Mouse Drains Keyboard Batteries. The clue is in the title. According to reports on the Apple Support forum, people were discovering that their diminutive Apple wireless keyboards were suddenly chewing through battery life faster than a first generation iPod in 2010. The Magic Mouse was blamed, and naturally, we wailed and gnashed our teeth.

    Well, last night, Apple released version 1.1 of the Aluminum Keyboard Firmware via Software Update. And as a man almost ready to buy Energizer shares (anything to try to win back the cost of paying for high-performance batteries every week) its description sounded very promising.

    “This firmware update improves battery performance of the 2007 aluminum Apple Wireless Keyboard when used in combination with other bluetooth devices (eg. Magic Mouse, some bluetooth headsets) and addresses an issue with the 2007 aluminum Apple Keyboard and the 2007 aluminum Apple Wireless Keyboard where a key may repeat unexpectedly while typing. The update also addresses other issues.”

    Promises Promises; the Aluminum Keyboard Firmware Update

    I can’t say I’ve ever experienced the “key repeat” problem but I most certainly have watched in dismay as my keyboard greedily depleted — in record time — every expensive battery I put in the thing. (Remember that scene in My Stepmother is an Alien when Celeste sucks the flashlight batteries dry? Exactly the same.)

    Coincidence?

    Not unexpectedly, the update required a restart — but that was a trifling inconvenience in return for longer battery life! In fact, it was only a few days ago I put in a fresh set of expensive Lithium batteries and I wasn’t eager to have to buy more any day soon. Imagine my surprise when the following message popped-up.

    Shocking! Annoying, too. Prior to the update I could coax 9-14 days out of my batteries. The current batteries have been in for only three days and I’m being told they’re on the way out? Surely that’s no coincidence.

    So what’s happening here? Bad batteries? Or could it be that Apple’s update has made things worse?

    Mixed Results

    I headed back to the Apple Support pages to see what was being said. The experience of other Magic Mouse / Wireless Keyboard owners is so far somewhat mixed. Here’s what Creator2456 reports:

    Did the firmware update […] The keyboard also REFUSES to stay powered on after the update. Already tried several batteries so it is not a power problem. The LED will light when I press the power button and then turn off within 5 seconds without pairing or anything.

    Conversely, here’s a more ebullient comment from Xorgoo:

    It works ! My alu keyboard (3 batteries) is reborn! 1% lost during the night, compare to 10% before.

    And then there’s this warning from Freekarrot:

    This update won’t work on recent 2-cell AWKs, which are heavily affected by the bug as well. Letting out an update just for one of the affected devices is ridiculous. It means they know what the problem is and how it is solved, but they either don’t know or refuse to acknowledge that ALL AWKs are affected!

    Conspiracy theories aside, I really don’t know what to make of this sort of incompatibility. (I’m not sure what else to call it — ‘Not Playing Nicely Together-ness” doesn’t sound very smart; perhaps “malfunction” is better?)  I understand Apple doesn’t develop its own Bluetooth drivers (that responsibility is left to Broadcomm, the manufacturers of all Bluetooth radios in Apple’s machines) but even so, for their own equipment to behave in such a flaky, unreliable manner really isn’t the ‘Apple Way’ to which I have become accustomed. It’s all supposed to ‘Just Work’, right?

    Think about it; if Microsoft were to build a bluetooth keyboard and mouse that, individually, worked just fine but, together, played very silly games with battery-life, we would be so quick to tut-tut and shake our heads. We would chuckle, too, adding ever-so-smugly (in the manner many Mac-heads are wont to do when commenting on Windows-PC-based problems) “Well, what do you expect from Microsoft?”

    Just prior to the Firmware update, the now-very-happy Xorgoo complained;

    More Than 100 days, more than 300 posts, and… nothing.
    Apple, you have to do something.
    And you should at least give us some news.
    Do you think time will cure the trouble ? It won’t…

    Well, Apple has done something. We now we have an update, but judging from my own initial experience and fresh comments on the Apple support pages, problems remain. Of course, one is a poor sample — my batteries may have already been too far-gone to benefit from the updated firmware. Maybe.

    So now it’s over to you. Have you tried updating your firmware? Has it made any sort of difference? Share your findings with me in the comments below. And please… no comments about how we should ditch our Apple keyboards. I don’t care how shiny your Logitech is.

  • Free Report: A Look Inside Clearwire’s Network

    After a year of aggressive market launches across the U.S., Clearwire Corp. is becoming fairly well recognized for its pioneering use of the wireless broadband technology known as WiMAX, the “Wi-Fi on steroids” technology that allows providers like Clearwire to build “hotspots the size of a city.”

    While WiMAX’s ability to provide broadband Internet access with cellular-like mobility is certainly the most recognizable attribute of Clearwire’s deployments, there is a lesser-known but just as important level of innovation taking place inside the company’s network, from the connections to the Internet’s core out through the radio towers and down to the end-user devices.

    Those internal-network achievements, including Clearwire’s primary use of microwave for traffic “backhaul” and its open, Internet Protocol-based core infrastructure, are not only providing Clearwire with an instant competitive advantage, but are perhaps part of a burgeoning blueprint for next-generation service providers looking for ways to cut costs while providing bandwidth to a user base that is more demanding and more mobile with every passing day.

    There’s no way to explain all the details of Clearwire’s network innovations in a simple blog post — but for the amazing cost of FREE, you can download our latest report, titled Inside Clearwire: A Network Report. Our latest deep-dive research and analysis provides a thorough explanation of the design of Clearwire’s internal networks, how different technologies affect its deployment, and how cost savings can be achieved by adhering to an open-Internet idea. Click here to download your free copy today!

    What’s inside the “Inside Clearwire” report? Glad you asked. Here are some handy bullet points of what kind of info you will find inside:

    – How Clearwire’s emphasis on using microwave backhaul gives it a cost-savings and flexibility of deployment edge over traditional wireline systems

    – Why using an open-standards approach to infrastructure allows Clearwire to select “best of breed” suppliers and avoid monopoly lock-ins

    – How Clearwire’s spectrum portfolio gives it room for future bandwidth demands while keeping tower-site expenditures to a minimum

    – How Clearwire’s current network infrastructure decisions might lead to a more open environment for device and application development in the future

    Click here to download your copy today!

  • The Apple Paradox: How a Company That’s So Closed Can Foster So Much Open Innovation

    World Wide Wade
    Wade Roush wrote:

    [Corrected and clarified, 1:30 p.m. 1/25/10, see page 2] Come Wednesday, we’ll learn a lot more about Apple’s presumed slate device. What we know right now, first hand, is a big fat nothing. Apple keeps a famously tight lid on its employees, suppliers, and partners, the only exception being the occasional strategic leak designed to spur excitement around its product launches. Even after products come out, the company controls who gets to see and monkey with them; I remember my frustration back in the spring of 2008, in the months between the announcement of the iTunes App Store and the actual launch, when I knew that dozens of local developers were writing apps for the iPhone but none of them were allowed to show their apps to journalists, on pain of ejection from the program. To this day, there’s still a rigorous and unpredictable process for getting an app into the store (though there are signs of relaxation in that department).

    And yet millions of designers, artists, musicians, writers, programmers, and other creative professionals love their Apple products, myself included. The Apple brand is almost synonymous with free-thinking creativity. The programs people are inspired to write for the Mac OS X operating system are routinely more elegant and useful and less annoying than their Windows counterparts. And the advent of the App Store, which allowed thousands of third-party developers to exploit the iPhone’s exceptional capabilities, has fostered a stunning amount of experimentation in software design, dramatically increasing the expectations we place on our mobile computing devices.

    In short, there’s a big gap between the way Apple sees the world and the way most of its customers see things. This is especially true when it comes to the relationship between power and knowledge. To all outward appearances, Steve Jobs believes that knowledge and information confer power only if they are carefully guarded. But for most of the creative types who use Apple products, the big rewards in life—the opportunity to gain reputation, advance professionally, and earn money—come from sharing knowledge. The reason I use Apple hardware all day long is not so that I can be like Steve, but because the company makes the best technology I’ve found for staying informed, synthesizing what I learn, and passing it along to others.

    A blog post this month by photographer, designer, and career coach Tasra Mar, who spent a year working at Apple, puts the attitude gap in stark, visual terms. Mar shares several photographs of a simple length of rope. In one picture, the rope is tightly coiled; in another, one end of the coil is unfurled; in a third, the coil has been loosened into a spiral, opening a path to the center.

    The tight coil, for Mar, represents the belief many people hold “that there is scarcity of knowledge or that they will be harmed or impacted by sharing that knowledge.” Having worked at Apple, Mar writes, “I know firsthand about the tight hold that is placed on knowledge and information—basically everything is on a need to know basis. No open discussions, forums or free conversations.”

    Not that there’s anything wrong with that, Mar hastens to add: there are times, she says, when guarding information is appropriate. That’s why we have NDAs and laws protecting trade secrets. Mar is absolutely right when she points out that this closed philosophy has “paid off handsomely” for Apple.

    The paradox—and it may be one that goes to the heart of digital-age capitalism—is that Apple’s style of closed innovation results in technology that is so conducive to open innovation. Even more conducive, in fact, than its makers may have intended. Shortly after the iPhone was announced in January 2007, Steve Jobs told the New York Times: “We define everything that is on the phone. You don’t want your phone to be like a PC. The last thing you want is to have loaded three apps on your phone and then you go to make a call and it doesn’t work anymore. These are more like iPods than they are like computers.” By 2008, though, Jobs had apparently realized that in its quest to “define everything,” the company was leaving a lot of money on the table. The 120,000 apps you’ll now find in the iTunes App Store—with Apple collecting 30 percent of every paid-app sale—are testimony to the wisdom of the shift.

    Given the smashing success of the App Store, you have to wonder why Apple has reverted to its black-ops secrecy culture for the iSlate (or the iPad, or whatever it’s going to be called). Presumably, Apple wants the device to be part of the larger ecosystem it’s building around digital content—music, movies, TV shows, apps, and soon books and magazines, if all the reports of Apple’s talks with publishers are to be believed. Wouldn’t the company have been better off working with its existing community of developers to figure out what features a tablet-style device should have? Couldn’t it have given iPhone developers a few hints about how the iSlate will work, allowing them to …Next Page »

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  • Ground Truth Emerges from Stealth, Provides New Window Into Mobile Internet Usage

    Ground Truth
    Gregory T. Huang wrote:

    It’s been hard to keep a company like Ground Truth under wraps for this long. The secretive Seattle startup, led by prominent entrepreneurs Sterling Wilson and Michael “Luni” Libes, is emerging from stealth mode today, after raising $2.6 million in venture funding from Voyager Capital and Steamboat Ventures last summer. Although many in the startup community already know (or think they know) what Ground Truth is building, the company has just released some interesting details—while withholding many others.

    The problem Ground Truth is solving is a big one. Everyone from marketers to media companies to wireless carriers wants information about things like how many mobile users are accessing which websites on their smartphones. The mobile Web has long been considered the next frontier for advertising and publishing, but nobody has had access to reliable and complete data on mobile users’ behavior. That’s because measurement methods from companies like comScore, Nielsen, Hitwise, and Google, while useful for the traditional Web, are limited for the mobile Web in terms of their scope, detail, and timeliness.

    “The market needs a precise map of the landscape and a reliable route to navigate, and Ground Truth’s reliable, actionable data provides it,” said Wilson, the company’s CEO (and former president of Seattle mobile commerce firm Qpass), in a statement.

    “The only data source that can provide precise measures of mobile media usage is the mobile network itself,” added Libes, Ground Truth’s founder and chief technology officer, also in a statement. Libes started building the patent-pending technology while at the mobile search firm he previously co-founded, Medio Systems.

    Using extensive data from mobile operators and other providers, Ground Truth has analyzed the weekly mobile Internet usage of 2.5 million subscribers in the U.S. It has what it thinks is the most accurate and complete dataset so far on mobile Web use—including mobile traffic estimates for a large number of sites (unique visitors, pageviews), length of browsing sessions, and where a given site’s traffic comes from and where else it goes. In doing so, the company apparently has solved some difficult technical problems while keeping individual mobile subscribers’ privacy intact.

    Ground Truth’s timing certainly seems good. The field of mobile Web metrics looks wide open, even as more and more people use their iPhones, BlackBerries, and other mobile devices to access the Internet. And with giants like Amazon, Apple, Google, AT&T, and Verizon (just to name a few) increasing their focus on mobile content and advertising, a company that makes tools that help …Next Page »

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  • New Surveys Suggest Venture Investing Reset at Lower Level in 2009; We Break Out Data for Boston, San Diego, & Seattle

    DowJones4Q09
    Bruce V. Bigelow wrote:

    The picture of venture capital investments in U.S. startups filled in a bit this week, with the results of two more VC surveys aligning generally with the findings we reported earlier this month from ChubbyBrain, the New York data services company that tracks the innovation economy. New surveys from Dow Jones VentureSource and the MoneyTree Report indicate overall venture investing has reset—after falling by roughly a third since 2008—with VC activity strengthening toward the end of 2009.

    The differences are in the details, and one of the benefits of multiple data sources is a clearer perspective on what the differences really mean. Dow Jones VentureSource says the definition it uses for a venture capital deal “is the clearest and best tested in the industry.” Dow Jones includes equity financings and cash investments by professional venture capital firms, corporations, diversified private equity firms, and individuals into companies that have received at least one round of venture funding. ChubbyBrain says it only counts investments by venture capital firms, including corporate venture groups. It does not count angel investments (unless the angels invest with VCs or corporate venture funds), and it does not count contingent funding, strategic corporate funding through R&D partnerships, so-called “venture loans,” or incubator investments.

    Differences in the way each survey defines venture investments can translate into differences in the way data gets counted, which sometimes results in disparate and even contrary findings. What follows is a breakout of the highlights from three nationwide VC surveys (as well as regional data and trends for New England, Washington state, and San Diego) for 2009 and the fourth quarter that ended in December:

    —ChubbyBrain noted a dip in VC dollars invested nationwide during the fourth quarter compared with the same period in 2008, with venture investments in cleantech and energy companies showing substantial drops while VC funding for early stage companies—especially Internet startups—increased sharply. ChubbyBrain said nationwide VC investments during the three months that ended in December totaled $5.5 billion in 687 deals (a year-over-year decline of 7 percent). For 2009, which seems to rank as the year VCs would prefer to forget, ChubbyBrain said VCs invested $20.8 billion in 2,461 companies.

    —Dow Jones VentureSource said an overall bad year ended on a high note, with VC activity during the last three months marking the strongest quarter since …Next Page »

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  • Bluesocket Wraps Up $8M

    Erin Kutz wrote:

    Bluesocket, a Burlington, MA-based developer of mobile access and security products, has raised $8 million in equity-based financing, according to an SEC filing. The company, whose products include a virtual wireless LAN technology, declined to provide further details on the equity round.  Bluesocket’s Bay State investors include Vesbridge Partners,  Ascent Venture Partners,  Ironside Ventures, and Osborn Capital, according to company’s website.

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  • Stream 500Mbps Over LED Light [Research]

    In some interesting research by Siemens, wireless data has been successfully, wirelessly transmitted at 500Mbps using white LEDs.

    (The former record was 200Mbps.)

    While light data transmission sounds less convenient than RF, there are many instances, like hospitals, when you don’t want extra radio frequencies floating around. As for the system’s range, apparently five LEDs can combine to beam data over “long distances,” though we’re not really sure what that actually means.

    Still, it’s interesting to see more and more uses come from LEDs. [Siemens via Engadget]






  • Is Verizon’s Network Ready for Apple’s Tablet and iPhone?

    We’ve documented here at Sidecut Reports the ongoing struggles AT&T has had keeping its iPhone customers from congesting its wireless networks. Now apparently it’s Verizon’s turn to see how good its network is, if the rumors about Verizon getting the 3G contract for the also-rumored Apple tablet and Verizon getting the iPhone in June turn out to be true.

    While there’s still a lot we don’t know — for instance, how much data plans for the devices might cost, what the data download limits might be, etc., etc. — our initial guess is that Verizon might be better equipped to handle a bigger traffic load, if only because Verizon has been aggressively building out for its Long Term Evolution (LTE) launches, still theoretically scheduled to start happening this calendar year. Since LTE installs will likely take place in a lot of the same 3G tower locations, it’s a good bet that Big Red has been beefing up cell-site backhaul in advance of these launches — instead of having to play catch-up like AT&T recently admitted it is now doing. If the rumored tablet appears and is as successful as the iPhone was, Verizon will find out very quickly how good its network really is.

    Where is Clearwire, Sprint and WiMAX in all the tablet hulaballoo? Our finely tuned WiMAX radar hasn’t heard any hints of a WiMAX chip being inside the iTablet, not really a surprise given the still low market penetration of WiMAX services. Could that change later in the year or next year, if and when Clearwire launches services in San Francisco, New York and LA? Perhaps… but until then we might suggest that iTablet users take a look at Sprint’s Overdrive as a connectivity option — even if the tablet doesn’t have WiMAX it will almost certainly have Wi-Fi, allowing Sprint’s pocketspot (or the Clear Spot from Clearwire) to provide a 4G “local backhaul” where it is available. Just in case Verizon’s network isn’t as fast as you might like.

  • Apperian Buys DS Media Labs

    Wade Roush wrote:

    Apperian, a Boston-based developer of consumer and enterprise iPhone applications, announced today that it has acquired DS Media Labs, an 8-employee interactive design and development agency in West Palm Beach, FL. Apperian said the acquisition would give it the ability to develop applications for all major mobile platforms. “This team will also allow us to accelerate our investment in creating Apperian’s enterprise app deployment and management solution for large organizations deploying hundreds or thousands of iPhones and dozens of internal apps,” Apperian CEO Chuck Goldman added in a statement. The terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

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  • Verizon: Don’t Worry Guys, That Super High Early Termination Fee Only Applies to Phones You Like [Verizon]

    After making lame excuses to the FCC for their suddenly doubled ETF, Verizon has now partially backtracked: The ETF is only doubled for phones people actually like! Cancel those dumb featurephones whenever you want! You’re welcome, America.

    Basically, the new $350 ETF applies only to smartphones, which they seem to have trouble defining but which is easy for you and I to understand. The Droid, Droid Eris, and all BlackBerry handsets are subject to the hiked fee, while dumbphones with dumb names like the EnV and Krave will stick with the old $175 fee.

    It’s still ridiculously high: As Adam wrote,

    What they don’t address is why they’re justified in charging a fee that ends up being far higher than the difference between the actual cost of a phone and the subsidized price, especially if the contract is cancelled many months in. Isn’t that all the ETF is supposed to cover?

    So thanks but no thanks, Verizon. Charging less for phones we don’t care about doesn’t help your case. [Electronista]






  • Tantalus Raises New Financing for Smart-Grid Wireless Technologies

    Tantalus
    Gregory T. Huang wrote:

    [Updated 1/20/10, 10:10 am. See below.] Cleantech wireless networking firm Tantalus, based in Burnaby, BC, has raised about $13.5 million in new equity financing, according to a regulatory filing. The round was led by the Silicon Valley firm Redpoint Ventures, and other existing investors also participated, according to a press release issued by Tantalus after the initial publication of this story. The company says the new funding round is worth a total of $14 million. [Previous two sentences modified on 1/20/10 with new information from the company—Eds.]

    Tantalus makes wireless communications and networking technology that helps electric, gas, and water utilities monitor consumption and manage their resources. The company’s wireless network is used in parts of North America, and is meant to help both utilities and consumers manage their electricity use more efficiently by connecting devices like smart meters and thermostats to utilities’ control systems.

    Tantalus was founded in 1989 and originally focused on radio frequency engineering for industrial automation and process control. In 2000, the company shifted its strategy to develop a wireless communication network for utilities, according to a company analysis in GigaOm. In 2007, the report says, Tantalus raised more than $18 million from European investors.

    In 2008, the company formed a partnership with Itron (NASDAQ: ITRI), the Liberty Lake, WA-based energy technology company that makes smart meters for electricity, gas, and water, and other data collection and communication systems. The partnership combines Itron’s meters with the Tantalus wireless network, to support smart-grid and energy-efficiency applications.

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  • CDG’s LaForge Joins AirHop’s Advisory Board

    Bruce V. Bigelow wrote:

    San Diego’s AirHop Communications, a 2007 startup that specializes in SON, or self-organizing networking technology, says CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) industry leader Perry LaForge joined AirHop’s advisory board. LaForge is founder and executive director of CDG, the Costa Mesa, CA-based CDMA Development Group, a trade association comprised of more than 100 of the world’s leading wireless operators and manufacturers. As I reported in November, AirHop’s technology is intended to simplify and coordinate the operation of 4G wireless networks while minimizing radio interference and maximizing mobile data rates.

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  • Wireless Onzo Smart Energy Kit Enables Portable Power-Nagging [Usage]

    The Onzo Smart Energy Kit sure looks handy, providing to-the-second energy usage updates from anywhere in the house. It’s UK-only, but there’s nothing about its wireless display that we couldn’t (or shouldn’t) do right here in the US of A.

    Not only can you take the display with you around the house to mind watts, you can also upload up to 10 years of historical energy use data to a web portal that issues more detailed information and conservation tips. If you’re goal-oriented, you can the Smart Energy Kit to set a usage target and keep track of how you’re stacking up.

    I love the functionality, but would I ever use it? Actually, sure! If only to create elaborate betting scenarios with my housemates. And, you know, to help the environment and lower my energy bills and junk. [Onzo via UberGizmo]







  • Five Top Innovations to Look for in Search-Based Marketing in 2010

    Russ Mann wrote:

    —Personalization based on predicted intent instead of past behavior (based on cookie).

    —More robust “universal search:” Better results for text and descriptive searches on videos, pictures, inside games, and applications.

    —GPS-based hyper-targeting of search results and advertising on smartphones.

    —Ubiquitous and non-text search: Search as an integrated activity rather than a separate activity into videos, music, etc. Search on images, tones, smells, and not just text-based phrases and descriptions.

    —3-D search: Search will have new display and navigation metaphors beyond text and html links on a flat white background.

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  • Track your Electricity usage with Onzo

    onzo1.jpg
    The start of every month always gives me the shiver since that is the time we get all sorts of bills for the previous month. Electricity is a very important and dicey subject of any conversation and I am always guilty of having over used power. With the present ‘green’ vogue that is going around, Onzo has come up with this amazing energy saving kit, that doesn’t really save energy, but subtly prompts you to do it. This smart energy saving kit is a small cool looking wireless device that can be placed anywhere in the house. With its ultra cool technology it senses the amount of electricity being used around the house and displays it onto the screen.

    It tracks the Watts used in real time and thus alarms you if you are over using or rather wasting the precious resource. It stores data for up to 10 years for reference and can even be plugged onto the computer to upload the statistics. The only question I have in mind is how the sensors in the device actually track the electricity used without being attached in some way to the device.
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    [Designboom]

  • FitnessKeeper Announcement Gives New Meaning to “Scalable”

    RunKeeper Logo
    Wade Roush wrote:

    I caught up the other day with Jason Jacobs, the hyperkinetic founder and CEO of Boston-based FitnessKeeper, which is best known for its RunKeeper GPS fitness-tracking app for the Apple iPhone. That’s no mean feat, as Jacobs is one of those guys who walks the talk—he’s training to run in the Boston Marathon for the second time (whether he’ll do it in an iPhone costume again, he isn’t saying yet).

    I wanted to hear more about two recent milestones at FitnessKeeper. The first came last weekend, when FitnessKeeper passed the 1-million-downloads mark with RunKeeper. The second, announced January 11, is that RunKeeper users who happen to own the Wi-Fi-connected BodyScale bathroom scale from Withings (pronounced Why-things) can now track their weight and body-mass index right alongside the online records of their runs at the RunKeeper website.

    Jacobs says the RunKeeper-Withings integration is just the first step toward realizing what he calls “the initial vision” for FitnessKeeper—a kind of online fitness data empire, with tracking data coming in from numerous Internet-connected devices, all helping users work toward fitness goals.

    On the downloads front, Jacobs says the combined count of iPhone users who have downloaded the free and $9.99 “pro” versions of RunKeeper passed one million last Saturday, January 9. And very soon—this month, Jacobs says—downloads of the free version will pass one million all on their own.

    “Those are important numbers because they show the amount of leverage you can get from the iTunes App Store as a platform,” Jacobs says. But an even more significant number, he says, is the count of active users, defined as people who post at least one activity per month to their RunKeeper Web accounts. That number “continues to climb significantly, even through the winter,” which means RunKeeper isn’t one of those apps that people just download and forget.

    The iPhone experience has been so important for the company that it will soon announce versions of RunKeeper for other smartphone platforms, Jacobs says. Android phones will probably come first. “We expect that the showdown between iPhone and Android this year is going to be epic,” he says. “I don’t think that either can be underestimated. Anybody that emerges as a viable smartphone competitor, we want to be there and be the leaders.”

    But FitnessKeeper’s Withings announcement has bigger implications, overall, than the million-download milestone. If you happen to be a Twitter follower of Bob Metcalfe, the Boston-based venture capitalist and Ethernet co-inventor, then you are already treated to a daily report from Metcalfe’s own Withings scale. (Today’s update: “My weight: 224.7 lb. 46 lb to go. Goal is 179, as in 1979. http://withings.com.”) Jacobs says the Withings scale can be programmed to send its data to any online destination—including, now, the RunKeeper website, which will track users’ weigh-ins alongside the record of their runs.

    That’s useful not just because it will help RunKeeper users track their weight over time, says Jacobs, but because the RunKeeper app needs up-to-date weight information in order to accurately calculate the number of calories users burn on their runs. And in the near future, the weight data will have many other uses.

    “We are going to rolling out, quite soon actually, our first optional premium service,” says Jacobs. “We haven’t said a lot about it yet, but it’s called FitnessReports, and one thing that’s in these reports is powerful charting and analytics around your data. So you can see how your weight data is trending over time, and it can be correlated against other input types, such as weekly mileage or pace, so you can actually gain some insights into how your weight affects your fitness and how your performance affects your weight.”

    For example, you might be the kind of person who loses weight faster by going on longer, less frequent runs, as opposed to shorter, more frequent ones. FitnessKeeper’s fitness reports would help you suss out that type of trend, Jacobs says. “It’s intelligence that helps you make meaningful changes to your routine,” he says.

    Which gets at the really big picture for FitnessKeeper. From all outward appearances, the startup might appear to be just another iPhone app development house—but Jacobs says that’s just an accidental result of the company’s early product strategy decisions.

    “The initial vision was, let’s get the data, no matter what the input is, and build a system to help people achieve specific fitness goals,” says Jacobs. “When the iPhone came along, we said, ‘Wow, this is a really powerful place to start,’ because it enables you to do things that you couldn’t do without these smartphones coming along. But now that we are expanding our reach to other platforms like Android and starting to integrate with other types of devices that give data, like the scale, you can see how we are going to have all kinds of different services wrapped around the data on the Web.” So keep an eye out for more device-integration news from FitnessKeeper.

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  • Going nuTsie: Melodeo Looks to Beat Apple to the Punch with New Cloud-Based Music Service

    nuTsie (courtesy of Melodeo)
    Gregory T. Huang wrote:

    Things have been crazy busy over at Melodeo for the past month. I don’t think any of those guys took time off during the holidays this year. As I detailed in a story earlier this week, the Seattle-based company has been ramping up its long-standing efforts in cloud-based music delivery ever since Apple acquired its closest competitor, Palo Alto, CA-based Lala, last month.

    Yesterday, Melodeo upped the ante on the whole field of streaming music, which, besides Apple, includes players like Pandora and Rhapsody (from RealNetworks). The company officially unveiled the details of its next version of nuTsie (3.0), its flagship software application that works with Apple’s iTunes. It sounds like the company’s most ambitious offering to date, and the service is supposed to launch on Google Android—and presumably other platforms—sometime this quarter.

    As Melodeo executives explained it to me, nuTsie 3.0 gives any smartphone or Web-connected device the full capabilities of an iPod music player. So what? First of all, there is a big market for people who use iTunes but don’t have an iPod or iPhone—more than 200 million consumers, according to Melodeo. So nuTsie can give these people access to their music wherever they are, for far cheaper than an iPod, and on their existing device.

    Second, nuTsie 3.0 is supposedly better than an iPod, for three reasons: it wirelessly syncs with consumers’ iTunes libraries (add a new song and it shows up on all devices—“nobody has really cracked that,” says Melodeo vice president Dave Dederer); it does “smart caching” of songs, meaning it accounts for limited storage space on devices and makes a consumer’s top songs available for plane rides and other off-the-grid times; and it lets users discover new music in an unlimited, full-track way.

    nuTsie song list on Nexus One

    “We’ve taken recommendations, top 100 radio, and your friends, and brought them together,” Melodeo CEO Jim Billmaier told me recently. He also mentioned that the new service will extend to video, podcasts, e-books, and other digital media.

    In terms of the technology, the new version of nuTsie is different from the previous version in that it takes consumers’ actual music files and puts them in a “private cloud,” Dederer says. So people will have full control over their iTunes, instead of having their playlists streamed to them in “shuffle” mode.

    With its new product announcement, Melodeo is looking to beat Apple to the punch in offering a full-service Web-based platform for music and other entertainment. We’ll be watching closely to see what happens between these two companies, and others, in the months ahead.

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  • Is Sprint Putting a WiMax Tower On Every Walmart? [WiMax]

    This seems pretty out-there, but an Android Guys tipster reports that Sprint and Walmart are working together to build Sprint’s WiMax network. Sprint’s been rolling out 4G slowly but surely, but this partnership would mean especially thorough coverage. [Android Guys]