DigitalBridge Communications, a provider of WiMAX-based broadband-to-rural communities, announced a $20 million Series B round of financing Monday, showing that some investors believe there might be gold to mine in them thar rural broadband markets. The new funding (which PE Hub says is closer to $23 million) joins the $17 million or so the company had raised previously. DigitalBridge CEO Kelley Dunne, contacted via phone Monday night, said the latest round should let the company “fully fund” its planned rollout to 15 markets, beyond its current list of served communities that includes the Idaho locales of Rexburg and Pocatello, along with Missoula, Mon., and Washington, Ind.

Dunne, a telecom veteran who spent time both at a CLEC and at Verizon, said that capital expenditures for a WiMAX provider today are “about one-tenth” of the costs that a wireline CLEC might need. Combining WiMAX with low-cost fiber agreements and easy-to-install customer-premise gear from Alvarion is a recipe that is already producing cash-flow-positive results in Rexburg, Dunne said.

What will be interesting is to see how smaller, more focused WiMAX upstarts like DigitalBridge and Towerstream perform in comparison to bigger players like Clearwire or the ailing Sprint Nextel, which is reportedly close to unveiling another round of layoffs. Dunne acknowledged that DigitalBridge’s strategy is to “build around Clearwire and Sprint,” aiming at underserved markets with 150,000 residents or less.

According to DigitalBridge, the latest funding round was led by Paladin Capital Group, and includes previous investors Redshift Ventures, CNF Investments and Novak Biddle Venture Partners. Though DigitalBridge is based in Ashburn, Va., the company is targeting underserved rural areas in many geographical markets, especially in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming, where the company owns licenses or leases to 193 MHz of spectrum.

Paul Kapustka, former managing editor for GigaOM, now has his own blog at Sidecut Reports.

]]> http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/million_into_rural_wimax/feed/ http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/acquire_mysql/ http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/acquire_mysql/#comments Wed, 16 Jan 2008 17:33:20 +0000 www.corigin.com Open Source http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/acquire_mysql/ By Tim O’Reilly

Sun Microsystems announced this morning that it has agreed to acquire open source database leader MySQL AB for $1 billion in cash and assumed stock options. (Disclosure: I am on the board of directors of MySQL, and O’Reilly co-produces the MySQL User Conference with MySQL. In addition, O’Reilly produces the java.net community site for Sun.)

This seems to me to be a great deal both for Sun and for MySQL. Anyone who follows this blog or has heard my talks will have seen me say “Data is the Intel Inside” of the next generation of internet applications, the very heart of Web 2.0. And of course, most of those Web 2.0 applications are built on the LAMP stack, where M stands for MySQL, far and away the leading open source database.

Years ago, John Gage, Sun’s chief scientist, made the provocative statement “the network is the computer.” And bit by bit, the industry has been realizing that dream. What we didn’t understand when we first started thinking about that emerging network operating system was just how much it would be a data-oriented system, such that you might more accurately say, “the network plus the database is the computer.”

The acquisition is also a great fit because Sun has staked its future on open source, releasing its formerly proprietary crown jewels, including Solaris, Java, and the Ultra-Sparc processor design. But even beyond those relatively recent moves, Sun was arguably the first great open source success story, co-founded by Bill Joy, who not only led the Berkeley Unix project but wrote the open source TCP/IP stack on which so much of the internet was built. And even leaving out other open source projects at the company such as openoffice.org and netbeans, Sun has long been the single largest corporate contributor to the open source ecosystem. (For further support for that claim, see page 51 in last year’s EU study on open source software [pdf].)

This has been a bit of a lightning courtship, and I haven’t had a chance to discuss yet with Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz just how he plans to take advantage of MySQL’s leadership position in the open source and internet-connected database market, but I do think that there is great potential for both companies. With one bold stroke, Sun has reshaped both the database and open source landscape. We’re all going to be chewing on the implications for some time.

Update: Jonathan’s blog includes details on Sun’s plans for MySQL. Zack Urlocker, MySQL’s Executive VP of Products, has a blog post on Infoworld explaining the vision from the MySQL point of view.

As expected, Steve Jobs in his keynote at Macworld unveiled iTunes movie rentals. Library titles will cost $2.99 each, new releases will be $3.99. Jobs also announced Apple TV Take 2 and other product news. NewTeeVee editor Liz Gannes is at the conference and is liveblogging all the details.

]]> http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/apple_unveils_itunes_movie_rentals/feed/ http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/macbook_comes/ http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/macbook_comes/#comments Wed, 16 Jan 2008 17:33:08 +0000 www.corigin.com Live http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/macbook_comes/

In addition to unveiling a movie rental service for iTunes and an updated version of Apple TV (with a lower price), Steve Jobs in his Macworld keytnote today announced the MacBook Air, which at a maximum thickness of 0.76 inches (and 3 lbs), is the world’s thinnest notebook.

It sports both a full-sized keyboard and a 13.3-inch widescreen, LED-backlit display, and five hours of battery life. The Air will sell for $1,799 (for 1.6 GHz standard version) and $3,098 (for 1.8 GHz version, ouch) and will start shipping in two weeks. Additional specs include: a built-in iSight camera; built-in multitouch gesture support; 1.8-inch drive; USB 2, micro-DVI and headphone via a flipdown door; 802.11n, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR.

The machine was built to be wireless, Jobs said. There’s no optical drive. There’s a “remote disc” feature built right into the operating system that will show all Macs or PCs in the vicinity — you can just click on a machine and ask to borrow its optical drive. That’s pretty cool.

Head over to Earth2Tech for a rundown of the Air’s green qualities.

(thanks to Carolyn for writing this up on my behalf)

]]> http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/macbook_comes/feed/ http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/first_scareware/ http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/first_scareware/#comments Wed, 16 Jan 2008 17:33:05 +0000 www.corigin.com Security http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/first_scareware/ I Don’t Believe in Imaginary Property sends us news from F-Secure of what they claim is the first rogue cleaning tool for the Mac. MacSweeper is a Mac version of Cleanator, hosted from a colo somewhere in the Ukraine. The article points out that the company’s About page is lifted verbatim from Symantec’s site. With the Mac’s market share closing in on double digits, perhaps it’s not surprising to see the platform targeted with crapware as PCs have been for years. The F-Secure author adds as a footnote that a journalist said to him something you don’t hear every day: “I visited the macsweeper.com website. I know I probably shouldn’t have but I used a Windows PC so I knew I wouldn’t get infected.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With its $265 million deal to buy TicketsNow, Ticketmaster has finally succumbed to the siren song of ticket scalping. The ticketing giant had long complained about online ticket brokers, but perhaps eBay’s success after buying StubHub back a year ago, the grim performance of its online TicketExchange platform, and its upcoming spin out as a public company convinced TicketMaster that the fat margins associated with online ticket brokers would be a nice addition to the portfolio.

]]> http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/ticketmaster_wants_online_ticketsnow/feed/ http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/things_need_know_about_future_broadband/ http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/things_need_know_about_future_broadband/#comments Wed, 16 Jan 2008 17:32:58 +0000 www.corigin.com Live http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/things_need_know_about_future_broadband/

Written by Martin Geddes, chief analyst at STL Partners, which is responsible for the Telco 2.0 Initiative. More about this research project and the results can be found here.

“[O]ur business is about scope and scale and having superior incremental margins. If you are looking to tax content and bundle device, application and network, it isn’t going to work. You had better be good at moving information if you want to be a network service provider.” – Jim Crowe, CEO of Level 3 Communications, at Citigroup 2008 Global Entertainment, Media and Telecommunications Conference.

We’ve just completed a major 6-month study into the future of broadband, including an online survey responded to by over 800 industry insiders, interviews with leading figures and actors in the industry, and desk research into comparable networked industries like container shipping and power distribution. Below are some of the key findings, which very much echo Jim Crowe’s comments above.

1. Telecom is a logistics business for valuable data. It’s about providing personalized delivery of that data, and removing the “customs barriers” (such as network provisioning, authentication) to that delivery. This is much more complex (and profitable) than being a “dumb pipe,” but doesn’t mean being an applications or media business (something telcos are notoriously bad at doing).

2. Broadband is just one of many distribution systems for data. Others include broadcast, physical media, circuit voice, SMS, content delivery networks, and edge caches (which capture and retransmit broadcast content, e.g. networked DVRs). The successful broadband services provider of the future will be able to mix and match multiple delivery systems, just as logistics companies blend road, sea, rail and air.

3. A key enabler for this will be home hubs, media servers and set-top boxes — whoever gets to deploy and manage these boxes will emerge as the winner in the space. As these boxes are the “ports” at which all the different delivery systems must dock, they will be critical to being a “logistics solutions” provider. The best examples today come from Iliad and Sky in Europe, which have the best blend of multiple-delivery systems, features and content. Mobile devices and networks will also need to evolve new provisioning, authentication, policy and retail models.

4. Telcos will make increasing amounts of money from wholesale, not retail. Media companies, employers, merchants and government will pay BSPs to deliver content and applications on their behalf. So you’ll watch YouTube without worrying about fair use limits (on “unlimited” ISP plans), or going over your usage cap. Google wants you to watch and watch without having to worry if there’s a meter running. Wholesale markets tend to be concentrated, since the whole point is that buyers (like Google) don’t want to have to personally interact with dozens of sellers (like telcos). That means only a few large telcos or aggregators will prosper.

5. The ISP product suffers from severe economic problems. A few users are diverging in their usage from the rest, driving capital and operational cost. These users are different from day to day, so you can’t shed them. Attempts at traffic shaping to manage cost only work with a policy of “radical honesty,” such as that from PlusNet in the UK. Retail prices are falling to the point where additional usage is being priced below the cost of transit for that traffic.

6. Nonetheless, the ISP product will continue to grow, but the emphasis will move elsewhere. Users will increasingly buy (or use ad-funded versions of) applications with all “postage and packing” charges included, for all the networks and places they wish to use that application or content. Amazon’s Kindle
   is just the start of a major shift in how we retail broadband services.

7. Voice will be the catalyst. There will be a rapid rise of non-traditional voice services as voice is embedded into the general online experience. You’ll be able to call your date from your mobile dating application, without knowing your date’s mobile number, and the whole cost of the call will be borne through your dating application subscription.

8. Telcos will move towards “two-sided” business models, which involve not just wholesaling bulk capacity, but increased personalization of delivery to their own retail ISP end users on behalf of their “upstream” partners. This will include using location and presence to enable everyday business processes (e.g. parcel delivery, health-care services), ad insertion, or ecommerce services like credit checks.

9. This is part of a larger “platform” business model that involves opening up the telco to exploit underused assets. This is a much bigger activity than just enabling a few APIs, and requires considerable restructuring to achieve. For example, you need a sales force to find these new wholesale customers!

10. Network neutrality is a completely mis-framed debate. It assumes that the user has access to a single telco product: pre-paid (by the user) ISP access. The real market will be vastly more complex, with users having access to many “virtual” networks — some overlaid on the Internet, some private. All the bogeymen making noise about blocking and throttling are just the shadows of welcome improvements in the wholesale markets. This exactly mirrors what has happened in the financial markets over the last 20 years, where vertical integration ended and lots of wholesale markets grew up to repackage and resell debt and other financial instruments.

]]> http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/things_need_know_about_future_broadband/feed/ http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/study_touting_ooxml_over_debunked/ http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/study_touting_ooxml_over_debunked/#comments Wed, 16 Jan 2008 17:32:57 +0000 www.corigin.com Live http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/study_touting_ooxml_over_debunked/ The Burton Group, an IT research company, published a study urging that enterprise organizations adapt OOXML rather than ODF. Their reasons include things like “ODF is controlled indirectly by Sun,” “MS Office is cheaper than OpenOffice.org,” and “OOXML improved many problems of DOC.” The Burton Group also claims that although ODF is well-designed, OOXML is better suited for the specific needs of enterprise organizations. The study claims to be impartial in that Microsoft didn’t pay for it. Ars Technica now has up a pretty thorough debunking of the Burton study. Ars wonders how the Burton authors can so blithely overlook Microsoft’s vote-buying in Sweden, while wielding unfounded accusations of chicanery in Sun’s direction.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Many
of the tickets that scalpers, er, brokers, sell on these secondary
marketplaces are initially purchased from the Ticketmasters of the
world. So the markup is a missed opportunity for Ticketmaster, whose
own TicketExchange has shown lackluster performance.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Unless you’re an information technology manager or a Wall Street banker still drooling over VWware’s $32 billion market cap, virtualization is not sexy. But it soon might be, with VMware’s agreement to buy desktop virtualization startup Thinstall. Bringing virtual software to the desktop for employees and consumers effectively makes the portable desktop a reality.

Yes, I know web applications and software as a service can make applications portable, but I’m talking about replicating your enterprise applications on a thumb drive, plugging that into a home or remote computer, working on something, saving it, and then bringing it back to the office. Thinstall enables that entire process; it also offers as a version of what the tech world used to call thin-client computing. Virtualization has more cachet, though.

For VMware, this deal pushes them deeper into the software side of virtualization, which is good considering the company’s dominant market share on the sever side. To feed that huge market cap, VMware needs to grow, so buying Thinstall is a logical step. The move also follows on the heels of VMware’s purchase of small independent software integrator Propero. The company will likely make additional buys to stay ahead of its competition.

As for the competition, it’s not standing still. Last summer Citrix bought server virtualization company XenSource for $500 million; Microsoft purchased desktop virtualization provider Softricity the year before. Today’s move by VMware may put Thinstall competitors such as Endeavors Technologies Kidaro, and InstallFree in play.

]]> http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/vmware_acquires_thinstall_take/feed/ http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/auction_update/ http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/auction_update/#comments Wed, 16 Jan 2008 17:32:50 +0000 www.corigin.com Live http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/auction_update/

So 214 bidders have been approved for the forthcoming 700 MHz spectrum auction, which starts on Jan. 24. The big bidders include AT&T, Verizon and Google. These bidders will go after 1,200 licenses.

The bidding will conclude on March 24; down payments will be due by April 11. A third of the spectrum is subject to “open access” rules — the winner will have to allow access to the spectrum to any device or application. This part of the spectrum carries a reserve price tag of $4.6 billion.

For previous coverage of the auction, see:

• Wireless Auctions Aren’t For Wimps
• Frontline Out of 700 MHz Auction
• So Google Will Bid for Spectrum, Will It Play to Win?
• 700 MHz Explained in 10 Steps

]]> http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/auction_update/feed/ http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/julies_gear_diary_survived_first/ http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/julies_gear_diary_survived_first/#comments Wed, 16 Jan 2008 17:32:50 +0000 www.corigin.com Live http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/julies_gear_diary_survived_first/ I had planned to post a trip report article about Macworld Expo tonight, but the wifi in my hotel room is horrendous. As a result, there’s no way I’ll be able to upload pix. So a report will be posted after I get home Friday.

This was my very first Macworld, so I can’t really compare it to anything. Really, the only new and exciting product that I saw was the Macbook Air notebook and the iPhone software update. I was also able to briefly play around with the Modbook. Everything else was just a blur of iPhone / iPod case after case after case and iPod speaker after speaker after speaker. Lots of laptop bags were shown as well. Of course there was an abundance of Mac software, but since that isn’t a topic that I typically cover, nothing jumped out at me. More when I get back to good old Columbus, Indiana.

Turns out Oracle really wanted BEA Systems after all, enough to pay a 24 percent premium over Tuesday’s closing price for BEA shares. The database giant said today it would pay $19.38 a share in cash, which values the deal at $8.5 billion including the $1.3 billion in cash BEA already has on hand.

BEA (BEAS) and Oracle (ORCL) got into an intense game of chicken back in October, starting with a $17-per-share offer from Oracle. BEA scoffed at the price, asking instead for $21 per share. Oracle CEO Larry Ellison said he wouldn’t offer more for the middleware provider, and Oracle walked away.

But the reality of software consolidation and pressure from activist shareholder Carl Icahn appears to have pushed BEA back to the negotiating table. And Oracle’s offer was…well, the only one out there. BEA shareholders seem happy, though: At last check, shares of BEA were up more than 19%, at $18.56; shares of Oracle had added 8 cents to change hands for $21.39.

]]> http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/oracle_finally_gets/feed/ http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/high_school_sophomores_discover/ http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/high_school_sophomores_discover/#comments Wed, 16 Jan 2008 17:32:49 +0000 www.corigin.com Live http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/high_school_sophomores_discover/ Several readers sent us the story of three high school sophomores in Racine, Wisconsin who were just notified that a celestial body they had discovered during a science project has been verified as an asteroid. The students at Racine’s Prairie School will be given the opportunity to name the asteroid in about four years. They used a telescope in New Mexico, belonging to a college in Michigan, that they controlled over the Net.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Fabrik, a vendor of physical and on-demand storage products, said at Macworld today in San Francisco that it has made a deeper foray into the consumer storage market by purchasing G-Technology, a vendor of attached storage products for Macintosh computers. The acquisition comes less than a year Fabrik acquired SimpleTech. G-Tech gives the company a foothold in the Mac market, where design and multimedia applications drive large-scale storage purchases.

Today’s storage consumers have a wide range of options, from plug-in drives to LAN-attached storage to on-demand services. At the same time, an explosion of personal content, from photos to videos to music, is driving demand.

Backed by investments from Comventures, Intel Capital, and — most recently — a $24.9 million Series D investment round that was led by 3i, Fabrik is trying to tie together these options, offering physical storage, on-demand storage, disaster recovery and content-sharing services.

If the company can capture an installed base of locally attached storage users, it may be able to migrate those users to in-the-cloud storage. For one thing, the predictable, recurring revenue streams of a service model are more likely to appeal to investors. On-demand storage is also a good way to fight the commoditization of basic physical storage, since customers are more likely to stick with one service for all their storage needs.

Fabrik won’t be the only one going after this opportunity. The company will compete head-to-head with storage giants like Seagate (whose eVault service uses a SaaS model) and pure-play storage companies like XDrive. Computer makers like Dell are also moving in: Dell said back in November that it plans to acquire storage vendor EqualLogic for $1.4 billion in cash, and it already offers an on-demand backup solution called DataSafe.

]]> http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/fabrik_buys_tech_consolidate_consumer/feed/ http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/google_beefs_iphone_interface/ http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/google_beefs_iphone_interface/#comments Wed, 16 Jan 2008 17:32:47 +0000 www.corigin.com Live http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/google_beefs_iphone_interface/

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I see you guy had to do some serious mac ass kissin after the last few bland posts about them.

Ultraorange

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

After finally admitting that the company did a poor job with the Apple TV, Steve Jobs in his Macworld keynote today unveiled a totally new interface with loads of functionality that should be enough for any Apple zealot to jump for joy. But how much faith do people really have in Apple to make its new offering a success when the product was relegated to the shadows and generally ignored over the past year? Read more over at NewTeeVee.

]]> http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/apple_hello_apple/feed/ http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/facebook_intel_tale_frenzies/ http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/facebook_intel_tale_frenzies/#comments Wed, 16 Jan 2008 17:32:34 +0000 www.corigin.com Facebook http://www.corigin.com/2008/01/16/facebook_intel_tale_frenzies/ These companies couldn’t be more different: Intel, the big chipmaker whose stock in trade is billions of silicon chips, and Facebook, the online social network whose business is–well, not very much yet, but ultimately getting its members to take on…

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Last week I had the opportunity to get hands-on with the Dash’s new interface and learn about its upcoming API (previous Radar post). The internet-connected GPS has gone through quite a few changes since the Beta unit was released.

The first thing I noticed is that the interaction with the device is very different. The search interface now has a QWERTY keyboard (instead of alphabetical). When you search you are given the choice of searching Yahoo! Local or the on board data (the locations of airports, gas stations, food, hospitals and other POI types). The new hardware is much, much slicker.

The maps on the device now always show traffic. They are using data from Inrix to get down to arterial side streets. They are also pulling from their own historical records (gleaned from Dash users like yourself) when calculating routes and where realtime data is unavailable. When looking at the map the realtime traffic is in a solid line and the historical (predictive) is dashed.

The web portal (called My Dash) has also received a refresh not the least of which are custom Placebase maps designed to highlight traffic. On the portal you can create (and share) new sets of POI, import KML, and send it all to your car. This will be very handy for taking all of your Platial and Google My Maps in the car with you.

At the end of the month the Dash will get a RESTful API. At the user’s initiative lat/long coordinates can be sent to a server. The Dash will consume a GeoRSS feed. This is just the first release. In the future they may add HTML pages, search and even the ability to poll. The device I saw did not have any API-driven apps loaded, but I can imagine great ones (update my location and finding out who from my YASN contacts are nearby).

I am excited for the Dash. I want to be able to send content to and from my car. I relish the idea of being able to sync geo-content between my computer and my car. The devices are spendy (at $599 with a monthly charge of around 10 for the GPRS) and available for pre-order. It’ll be shipping in Q1.

The Dash has reinforced two trends for me. One is the need for multi-touch on an screen-based device. As I navigated menus and maps I kept trying to flick and expand like I would my iPhone. It only worked on one screen. The rest are button or slider based. As Tim commented about the Kindle, the interface felt dead. In the Dash’s defense the product team realizes this. They are concerned that multi-touch requires too much attention whereas the buttons and sliders, while less sexy, are more precise

The second is the need for a ubiquitous internet connection. My phone has it. The Kindle has it. My camera (when equipped with an Eye-Fi SD card) has one when wifi is around. The new Garmin Forerunner 405 will also take advantage of wifi. Now my car will (Radar post). More and more the internet is going to be needed for every device.

(Image courtesy of Dash, more on Flickr)

Seems this would work better in a place like downtown Chicago.

Jason

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

But having to send the machine in for repair every time the hard drive or battery dies is a kill point. Battery will be dead in less then two years. And a hard drive, while not having a set lifespan, does fail often in a business setting.

…way too expensive also.

newgalactic

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

beyondthetech2007