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- Humans Are The Routers
- Burning Chrome
- Memes Could Hit The Silver Screen In “The Chronicles of Rick Roll”
- The Separation of Church And Zynga: Wedding Chapels Stripped From CityVille
- What’s The Real Deal With AngelList?
- Apple’s iPad Still Has No Competition
- Fly Or Die (Tablet Edition): The Motorola Xoom And The Kno
- Gillmor Gang 2.26.11 (TCTV)
| Posted: 27 Feb 2011 07:30 AM PST
Editor’s note: Guest author Shervin Pishevar is the founder of the OpenMesh Project, SGN and an active angel investor. On January 7, 2010 I was ushered into a small private dinner with Secretary Hillary Clinton at the State Department along with the inventor of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google and a few others. We were there to talk about technology and 21st Century Diplomacy. As we mingled I noticed next to me the small table that Thomas Jefferson wrote the first drafts of the Declaration of Independence. I was inspired by the history around us as we discussed the unfolding history before us. I was sitting in front of Secretary Clinton and when she asked me a question I said, "Secretary Clinton, the last bastion of dictatorship is the router." That night seeded some of the ideas that were core to Secretary Clinton's important Internet Freedoms Speech on January 21, 2010. Fast forward almost exactly one year later to January 25, 2011—a day that shall live in history in the company of dates like July 4, 1776. Egypt's decision to block the entire Internet and mobile telecommunications network was one of the first salvos in a war of electronic munitions. In this new frontier humans are the routers and armed with new technologies they can never be blocked or silenced again. I was staying up for days sharing and tweeting information as they happened. I had two close personal friends of mine in Egypt who were passing me information when they could. The day Egypt blocked the internet and mobile networks my mind went back to what I had said to Secretary Clinton. The only line of defense against government filtering and blocking their citizens from freely communicating and coordinating via communication networks was to create a new line of communications technologies that governments would find hard to block: Ad hoc wireless mesh networks. I called the idea OpenMesh and tweeted it.
Within hours through crowdsourced volunteer efforts the OpenMesh Project was alive complete with domain name, website and forum. One volunteer, Gary Jay Brooks, a tech entrepreneur from Michigan, stepped up to lead the effort as a volunteer Executive Director. Another company from Canada volunteered to donate their specs for a tiny mobile router, that could be hidden in a pocket, and would cost only $90 per unit for us to make. Another well known communications pioneer stepped up to donate some important patents in this space. OpenMesh's basic idea is that we could use some new techniques to create a secondary wireless Internet in countries like Libya, Syria, Iran, North Korea and other repressive regimes to allow citizens to communicate freely. By create mobile routers that connect together we could create a wireless network that mobile phones and personal computers can connect to. The first priority would be to have the people connect together and the second priority is for them to connect to the world. One the second front, we could use intermittent satellite internet connections so people in those nations could upload and download information with the rest of the world. Openmesh aims to be a clearinghouse for the best ideas out there to connect and get products out into the hands of people.
Open Mesh networking is a type of networking wherein each connected node in the network may act as an independent router or “smart” device, regardless of whether it has an Internet connection or not. Mesh networks are incredibly robust, with continuous connections that can reconfigure around broken or blocked paths by “hopping” from node to node until the destination is reached, such as another device on the network or connecting to an Internet back haul. When there is local Internet available, they can amplify the number of people who can connect to it. When there isn't, mesh networks can allow people to communicate with each other in the event that other forms of electronic communication are broken down. Devices consist of most wifi enabled computers and run on existing Microsoft Windows, Apple OS X, and Linux systems along with iPhone and Android mobile devices. An open source mesh network further offers a scalable solution that retains low costs while avoiding path dependencies and vendor lock-in. Combined with open hardware, these networks facilitate long-term maintenance flexibility and improvements. We will be establishing, building, maintaining, and distributing a common Open Source Mesh software/firmware that will allow citizens of the world to commonly communicate without telephone or cable companies. The raw product OpenMeshProject.org will free to download and free of charge. The technology will be released and maintained as Open Source GPL V2 project. This means that anyone can use or change the software. Our job as a community will be to maintain this project. We will help to build standards. We will help communities build mesh networks. We will lobby equipment manufactures to join the Open Mesh Project initiative. The idea all revolves around wireless technology that will allow us to connect and communicate with each other without telephone lines, cable, or fiber. We will build private networks that can span countries. We will empower the citizens of tomorrow. At the end of the day a grandmother might find this disk on the street, walk into the house, install a CD on her laptop and join the mesh cloud with 2 clicks. After joining the mesh she starts to see others in her network, clicks to call others in the mesh, joins group calls, or searches for friends online to dial. We as the OpenMeshProject.org community will facilitate the building, offering, and support for this project. We will all build 1 common mesh. We invite people to participate and to offer new innovations. Working together we can secure tomorrows communications needs. Free communications is an essential human right. The 21st Century will be defined by the idea that no Government, no power shall ever block or filter the right of all men and women to communicate together again. It is my dream that within my lifetime that dictatorship shall be banished from this planet and unfiltered and true democracy shall flourish everywhere. It is time that our Faustian bargains with brutal dictators for short-term concerns end and a new covenant directly made with citizens everywhere seeking freedom will take its place. OpenMesh is a first step to help create a world where such a covenant can take hold in a world where brave people armed with new electronic tools can never be blocked or silenced ever again. Photo credit: Joel Carillet/Getty Images.        
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| Posted: 27 Feb 2011 07:23 AM PST
Google made a few interesting announcements this week. First, Google Docs Viewer support for a sheaf of new document types, including Excel, Powerpoint, Photoshop and PostScript. Second, Chrome’s new ability to run background apps that run seamlessly and invisibly behind the browser. Third, they released Google Cloud Connect, which lets Windows users sync Office documents to Google Docs. They also announced the Android 3.0 SDK – but despite the ongoing tablet hysteria, in the long run, the first three are more important. Little by little, iteration by iteration, the Chrome browser is quietly morphing into a full-fledged multitasking operating system in its own right. Oh, sure, technically it’s actually running on another OS, but you increasingly never need to launch anything else. View and edit documents in Google Docs, watch and listen to HTML5 video and audio, communicate via Gmail and its Google Voice plugin, use Google Docs as a file system – and the line between “Chrome OS” and “Chrome on any other OS” suddenly grows very fine. Google’s long-term strategy seems to be to supplant Microsoft by first building the best browser, then making it easy to move your files to Google Docs … and finally, slowly but inexorably, making Windows and Office irrelevant. Obviously no one will abandon Microsoft products wholesale anytime soon; but as cloud computing grows more ubiquitous, Google steadily iterates feature after feature, and people grow accustomed to working in the browser, then one day, maybe only a couple of years from now, a whole lot of people – and businesses – will begin to think to themselves “Hey, we haven’t actually needed Windows or Office in months. Why do we even have them at all?” The “network computer” dumb-terminal approach has failed many times before … but so did Six Degrees, Tribe.net, Friendster, and (eventually) MySpace, before Facebook came along. The original iMac was roundly criticized because it didn’t have a floppy drive, criticism that now sounds hilariously stupid. We might look back at the first Chrome OS notebook in much the same way. Of course, Chrome can’t actually compete with Windows until always-on broadband Internet access reaches the same level of reliability and ubiquity as electricity itself; but that’s only a matter of time. In the early days of electricity, every factory had its own power plant, and its managers would have been appalled by the notion of outsourcing that vital engine – but soon enough those inefficient installations were replaced by today’s electrical grid. Computing power is the new electricity, and cloud computing is the new grid. Unlike most companies, when Google says “cloud”, they mean it. Compare Amazon’s cloud-computing service to Google’s. With the former, you essentially call up and configure one or more servers with the OS and specifications of your choice; but with Google’s App Engine, you don’t know anything about its hardware or operating system, because that no longer matters. It just runs the code you give it, and you don’t much care how. Similarly, Chrome is being built for a future where the ambient, omnipresent wireless Internet connects everything from clothes to computers to cars (which explains how their self-driving cars fits into their strategy) and it doesn’t much matter what OS any given device is running. I’ve criticized Google pretty harshly of late, but credit where it’s due: they still think bigger and further than anyone else. The problem is that all these brilliant strategies are predicated on their continued dominance of the search space, whose users are forever just a whim away from jumping ship to an alternative, and they’ve taken their eye off that ball of late. But at least they’ve finally started cracking down on search spam. It’s a start. Maybe they haven’t grown too bureaucratic and sclerotic to make the Chrome future happen after all.        
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| Memes Could Hit The Silver Screen In “The Chronicles of Rick Roll” Posted: 26 Feb 2011 08:38 PM PST
The title, as you probably know, is derived from the meme to rule them all: the music video for Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up”, which became the source of a viral prank, called “Rick Rolling”. Thanks to Rick Rolling, never again will you be able to say to your friend, “hey, you should check out this amazing video of Steve Jobs singing karaoke,” without being suspected of collusion with Rick Astley. Of course, with a title like this, it would only be fitting if the film itself were one large prank. However, it seems that Fischer is serious. Though he hasn’t yet secured distribution, there is a website, a script, and apparently the actors will be paid. According to a press release, Antoine Dodson has actually seen the script. His response: “They sent me like a piece of the script and I read it and I was like, oh my god, this is going to be so epic”. Will it be a Shakespearean tragedy? A coming of age tale? Will “Sad Keanu” find redemption? Based on the trailer, it’s hard to imagine how the plot will play out, but it seems very unlikely that this will be a documentary in which the YouTube sensations all have frank discussions about why they are famous. But, needless to say, I’m intrigued. Very intrigued. The Web has created a vibrant culture of memes, many of which have already migrated to other media, so it was only a matter of time before a “best of” hit the big screen. And, to be honest, I’m glad the gathering is taking place there rather than in a reality show format — or on the Island of Dr. Moreau. Regardless of how we feel about web celebrities, it’s important to remember that it’s only a matter of time before Keyboard Cat plays us all out. Check out the trailer below and let us know if you would see this movie.         
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| The Separation of Church And Zynga: Wedding Chapels Stripped From CityVille Posted: 26 Feb 2011 04:40 PM PST
Err, ok. I asked Zynga if this was in response to complaints, or otherwise why they did this. No comment from them so far. They could, of course, simply add other icons for other religions, and let people choose. But perhaps even that would be too insensitive. Players who had previously purchased the Wedding Chapel still have it, but it’s also been renamed to “Wedding Hall.” Presumably friends visiting the city might get offended. I also asked Zynga if they plan to remove farm and pet animals from their various games to please P.E.T.A, or offer non-genetically modified and pesticide-free crops for Organic-loving FarmVille players. Again, no word back from them. I don’t know why this bothers me so much, since I’m not very religious myself. But it just seems so artificially politically correct. The company has come a long way since the rough and tumble Scamville days, it seems.        
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| What’s The Real Deal With AngelList? Posted: 26 Feb 2011 03:09 PM PST
Editor's Note: This is a guest post by Mark Suster (@msuster), a 2x entrepreneur, now VC at GRP Partners. Read more about Suster at Bothsidesofthetable There’s lots of discussion out there about a new and much-loved service called AngelList that connects entrepreneurs to angel investors. I was reluctant to write about AngelList because the debate on pros / cons is pretty nuanced. But with some heat flying I felt it worthwhile to give anybody on the sidelines a better understanding of the issues.
Where do I stand on AngelList? 1. My personal use I have no reason to delete my account. As Shervin said, it’s just email. I have now put a filter on my email so it is auto-filed in Gmail. I mostly don’t look. It has become too much noise, not enough signal. This is what I feared up front. If Nivi ever sent me a deal I’d meet the team without any question or pre-review. But AngelList is now a place where many people post deals. That’s less interesting for me as a VC. I’m still assuming these are all pretty high-quality intros but the top end of my funnel is already full of interesting dealflow. I’m pretty easy to get in touch with. I don’t do very well with unsolicited because my volume of email is too high. Still, I live in public and am pretty easy to get introduced to. 2. My view for entrepreneurs AngelList is a great way to market your deal. Lots of people will see it. So as I said, for this I’m grateful to Nivi and Naval for having started the service. I cannot stress enough, though, that I believe getting access to the right investors in critical and spending time getting to know who these investors are is equally critical. Far from being a waste of time, the fund-raising process introduces you to a lot of experienced entrepreneurs and VCs who will offer opinions on your business and approach. It should be a continual process. “Filling out a round” with extra investors you don’t know well to take a round from $500k to $750k is fine as long as those additional investors don’t have significant rights and aren’t PITAs. Just don’t use AngelList as a short-cut for the hard work. But to be clear, used properly there is NO downside to AngelList for entrepreneurs. 3. My view for VCs Where I think Robert’s comments are slightly wrong is that AngelList is a net positive for VCs. Most VCs fund companies with a degree of traction. If we have way more companies to observe who have money from angels to get to a point where they prove traction (or don’t) that’s a gift to the VC community. I don’t think AngelList hurts VCs at all. If anything it’s complementary. 4. What about “seed” investors? I don’t believe AngelList hurts seed investors either. I believe that AngelList will increase the total number of deals funded in the same way that YCombinator does. Great seed investors like Bryce Roberts / OATV (and other great ones like Floodgate, Founder Collective, IA Ventures or Rincon Ventures) still get all the dealflow the need. If I were a founder I would personally start with these kinds of seed funds. They bring specific expertise (e.g. Floodgate / Information Arbitrage do “big data” amongst other things), or Founder Collective (consumer and ad-tech knowledge of people like Chris Dixon) or geography (Founder Collective is in Boston / NY, Rincon is the best early-stage in Southern California). I would consider supplementing with AngelList to see whether you can bring on additional value-added angels. That way you can have the best of a fund that has deeper pockets and angels so you can have more people helping. If you haven’t read my post on “how many investors are too many” I describe it all here. 5. What about “angel” investors? Here is where I actually worry the most. There are many sophisticated angels and I suspect AngelList is a perfect tool for them to organize dealflow. Nivi and Naval are doing a great job of making it more useful by adding geographies and such. It will be a great way of organizing your dealflow as a sophisticated angel. But there are many angels who either don’t have enough money to allocate to this class of investment or don’t have the experience to drive real returns from angel investing. Let’s just say this: if you’ve invested through boom and bust cycles then you have a realistic perspective. If you’ve been in only boom cycle or have invested less than five years you’re in for some surprises. I wrote a series on angel investing in direct response to my fear that everybody was becoming an angel investor and I felt I had seen this movie before. I feel angels need:
My biggest fear is that people confuse the “social proof” of other prominent investors on AngelList for real insight. Indeed, in a bubble people generally chase what other people are chasing leading to group think. The most innovative ideas are the ones that other people aren’t doing yet. How’s that for irony? Still, we’re nearly 2 years into a bull market for angel investing (read: bubble) and 1 year into a VC bubble. Prices are crazy, behavior is turning herd-like and deals are being evaluated too quickly and terms are skewing toward the inane. I decided to stop talking about this publicly because I realized that nobody likes to hear this. But privately here is what I say every week,
That’s how I feel. Enough said on that topic – enjoy the party. And I worry that there are too many angels out there who have never felt the morning as angels. So they’re sprinkling their money. Let me turn once again to the wisdom and knowledge of Nivi and Naval in their angel investing guide.
Hear, hear. On Bryce’s post: It was a thoughtful and legitimate contribution to the debate. Jason’s response was not only unnecessarily bullying but it was wrong. There is a transformation in startup land – it is cheaper to launch a company. But this doesn’t negate the benefit of having valuable investors with real experience. I have come to accept that combining higher-volume investors like Dave McClure with focused investors like Bryce or similar can be a smart strategy. But to his point that, “Today things like Angel List have boxed out VC–especially small ones like your firm–to the point at which you are not needed in the food chain” is inaccurate. To encourage people to run from skilled investors is bad advice. Ask anybody who has worked with a hand-on early stage investor (Fred Wilson, Josh Kopelman, Jon Callaghan) and they’ll tell you they wouldn’t do it any other way.        
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| Apple’s iPad Still Has No Competition Posted: 26 Feb 2011 12:00 PM PST
Editor’s Note: Jim Dalrymple has been writing about Apple for more than 15 years. You can follow him on Twitter @jdalrymple and on his Web site at The Loop. It’s been almost a year since Apple released the iPad and we’re less than a week away from the unveiling of the iPad 2, and still there’s no competition. There are a few very good reasons for Apple’s success and why its competitors are finding it difficult to gain any traction against the king of digital devices. There’s the infrastructure, the combination of hardware and software, and the fact that its competitors are content to settle for second best. Let’s look at these separately. Apple didn’t invent the tablet, but it did popularize the concept and how it fits into our lifestyle. Clearly the evidence of this is that every tablet announced or released since the iPad looks just like it. The fact that every company making a tablet is trying to compete with what Apple offers means that they aren’t looking to make something better than the iPad. They are just trying to catch up. Apple has done everything it can to make sure they are No. 1 in the tablet market, but the competition is ensuring they will stay there. There’s a saying in hockey: Don’t go to where the puck is, go to where the puck is going to be. Nobody is willing to make a bet on where the market is going to be, so they go to where the market is and, right now, Apple controls the puck. Until someone decides to step outside of Apple’s shadow, they will never be better than No. 2. That’s where the fight is right now. Since the tablets are all very similar, how do companies set themselves apart? It’s not the operating system. No matter how good Google makes Honeycomb, the fact is, almost every company out there will be using it. On the other hand, Apple controls the operating system and hardware. If Apple makes advances in iOS, they are Apple’s to share with their customers and nobody else. There are two companies that stand out in the tablet market that make their own hardware and operating systems: HP and RIM. The problem is that they haven’t done anything. RIM announced its PlayBook last September; they announced the PlayBook 4G in January; and they announced the PlayBook 4G LTE, HSPA+ and Mobile WiMAX models in February. So far, not one has hit the market. I think RIM needs to settle down and ship something. HP has an interesting offering with WebOS. From everyone I’ve spoken with, WebOS has the biggest potential to be a hit among consumers. However, HP wasn’t exactly forthcoming with detailed information during its TouchPad event, so it’s hard to know where the product will land once pricing information is available. Motorola has the Xoom, but so far the reviews haven’t been the best. Honestly, I’m not sure consumers will flock to Motorola anymore, certainly not like they did in the days of the RAZR. Even if Apple’s competitors were able to get past the hardware and operating system issues, there is still one component that can’t be overcome—the infrastructure. Apple didn’t create the iPad in a year or two. They have been working on it for almost a decade. Around the same time they started working on the iPad, they released iTunes, which created a music and video foundation that continues to dominate today. With iTunes and the ability for users to purchase music, movies, TV shows, and educational content, Apple is giving its users a one-stop shop. Buy, download, sync, and take everything with you. If you add the App Store to that equation, Apple has the bases covered. There doesn’t seem to be a piece of the puzzle that’s missing. Over the next six months, iPad competitors will be coming, and there will be a lot of them. Unfortunately for them, as they release some worthy competitors to the iPad 1, Apple will be releasing the iPad 2 and then moving on to the iPad 3. Apple’s R&D is already years ahead. It’s hard to imagine that they will be brought down anytime soon.        
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| Fly Or Die (Tablet Edition): The Motorola Xoom And The Kno Posted: 26 Feb 2011 10:00 AM PST In this week’s episode of Fly or Die, CrunchGear editor John Biggs and I do a special tablet edition where we take on the new Motorola Xoom and the Kno. (Watch the video above). The Xoom is the first tablet to come out with the Android Honeycomb operating system, which is optimized for tablets. So you can basically forget about all of those other Android tablets that came out in January at CES. Those run the Android OS built for phones. What you want is Honeycomb, and the Xoom is your first chance to get it. Still, with the iPad 2 set to be announced next week, you might want to wait to see if there is anything the Xoom will still have over the next-gen iPad. Check out John’s in-depth review and the video below, which shows its speed and what it looks like in action. The second product we tackle is the Kno, a textbook tablet aimed at college students which is yet to be delivered. Rumors surfaced this week that Kno is looking to sell off its hardware business and concentrate on software instead. Shifting strategies would make a lot of sense. It’s just too challenging to make great software and go up against both the iPad and Android at the same time. College students are only going to buy one tablet, and chances are it is not going to be a general purpose tablet like the iPad or an Android tablet instead of one that only serves as a textbook reader.        
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| Posted: 26 Feb 2011 09:30 AM PST Every Gillmor Gang begins with a mysterious blend of serendipity and confusion. This episode is no exception, as Robert Scoble attempts to discuss the Motorola VaVaVoom or somesuch. The only problem with that (or any other Android tablet) is that Gillmor himself could care less about anything other than waiting for next Wednesday’s rollout of the iPad II. John Taschek is an Android fanboy, and Kevin Marks used to work for Google and has not yet shaken the mindset off. I am trying to think of things to keep me occupied until Wednesday. In other news, we discuss pricing for the iPad I on launch day, which Scoble’s spies say is coming in [redacted.] The Gang runs the gamut of predictions, but unfortunately that tangent only lasted some 20 minutes or so. An attempt at Oscar picks crashed and burned. A multiple plug aggregator was offered as a solution for the iPod Touch’s missing USB/electric plug connector. My iPhone bumper is disintegrating, which like the groundhog’s shadow, indicates another 6 months until iPhone 5. Only five more days to go. I need help. @scobleizer @stevegillmor @kevinmarks @jtaschek        
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“A good player goes where the puck is. A great player goes where the puck is going to be”—
Zynga made a small but fascinating change to its young-yet-ubiquitous game CityVille over the weekend. Players could previously buy “Wedding Chapels,” which looked like small country churches but without a cross or other religious symbols, to add to their city. But the virtual item has been removed and replaced with the more secular and nondescript “Wedding Hall.” With two gold ring things that somehow makes me think only of McDonalds.
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