The NVA Blog

Check out labruinbear.com, an insightful blog penned by my brother in-law, Steven Sesar, who is on a quest to find the next great gig. Steve is, as we say, “in between projects” and documenting it. He’s been blogging about his experiences interviewing in LA and the valley with startups and VCs. Following his experience is really interesting (not just because he’s married to my sister, either) as Steve is being very transparent with his experiences and opinions. Turns out he’s a great writer also! Keep it up Steve. It’s not everyday I get to plug a family member while staying on-topic here…

Over at Tru.Vu we’ve been cranking away on core functionality for the last few weeks and are making some nice progress. We are delivering an “internal” demo of what we’ve got to the other TechStars teams on Tuesday which is a big milestone for us. We are now at a point where we really need a front-end web developer to help us with the UI/site/application so I’ve been putting some feelers out there in the network looking for a lead or two.

Now, we’ve only been looking for a week, but based on all of the conversations I’ve had so far it looks like it’s a darn good time to be a web developer in Boulder. It appears Me.dium, Lijit, TextureMedia, Confluence Commons, Crispin Porter and and several other well-funded web app companies in town have been gobbling up the freelancers and otherwise available talent. It’s no coincidence that the latest Boulder County Business Report has a cover article on VCs and investors sinking money back into Internet companies again. This is all great news on a macro level for the local tech community as the combination of capital and cool projects makes for a hot market. It will be interesting to see if the collective market demand can pull in the talent thats needed.

Perhaps there are a bunch of highly qualified web developer/designer types in town looking for work and we just aren’t in the loop. We’ll see what the usual job boards and craigslists of the world turn up when we post the position. I know it’s hot out there, but this might be a new kind of drought for the Rockies…

If you are one of those people on the fence about switching to a Mac but you have PC only software or are an addicted gamer hanging on your Dell XPS, check this out. The new version of Parallels, which enables you to run XP or Vista on an Intel based Mac within a window is now going to support OpenGL and DirectX for 3D graphics. Check out this blog post from Ben @ Parallels where he shows Doom running full-speed on his Mac. Another super-cool feature is SmartSelect. Lets say you really like Word/Windows better than Word/Mac. You can assign Word compatible file types to open in any app on either the OS X or Windows side. Run your Exchange client and Office suite in Windows, and do everything else in OS X. Or, this means you can be reading email in Apple Mail, click on the attached Word doc and Parallels can open it in Word in your Windows VM. Brilliant! A better alternative to BootCamp also since you don’t have to reboot to jump to Windows…

I’m pretty excited about making it to two BOCC events in a row. They are fun and interesting. This weeks’s topic was wireless, and Brian Coughlin from Sprint gave a great overview of what the company is doing around 4g. Brian covered way more than I could capture in my notes. There are pictures and video (see below) too. Here are some nuggets of goodness:

• 4G is really WiMax, for Sprint at least. Other carriers may not agree, especially if they are not going to adopt WiMax as their 4G standard. Brian noted that Sprint’s use of 4G as shorthand for WiMax is a bit of a misnomer since it will run concurrent with the 3G CDMA network for a long time. (see next point)
• Sprint’s 4G strategy is to have it coexist with 3G. 3G is designed for voice and ubiquity (coverage), whereas 4G is for mobile data where voice would be VoIP. Seems a bit redundant at first but makes sense. 4G will have higher bandwidth and thus be able to support a whole new generation of services. Device types will have overlap but could be different as well.
• In case you are thinking…”um, 3G isn’t even fully rolled out yet, what’s this noise about 4G”, Brian and Sprint see them both running together and reiterated that 4G is going to take years to roll out and there is still lots to figure out like upstream bandwidth from the towers, etc.
• Sprint believes 4G/WiMax ecosystem should be more “open” and the network provider should be viewed as a value-add onramp or ISP rather than traditional lock-in carrier.
• Further to the point about openness, I think the more interesting news here is that Sprint is bucking the trend and leading innovation in the mobile space by embracing more of an Internet service model with 4G. Acting and thinking more like an ISP is part of their philosophy around 4G, which is pretty cool. Check out this interview with Sprint VP Atish Gude, where he talks about building the “mobile Internet” and how they are following the open model of the Internet. I hope this means goodness for us consumers, and that when my 2009 iPhone which of course has WiMax support sees a sprint network, I can hop on just like I do at a WiFi hotspot. (No lock-in between device and network or 2 year contract to get online)
• The chipset for 4G is lower cost and higher bandwidth than 3G. Good for consumers! I heard 1Mbps upstream mentioned.
• Sprint has a number of public 4G partnerships in place including deals with Nokia, Samsung, Motorola and Intel. Intel is working on adding WiMax to the next gen Centrino chipset. Check out their presentation on it here. It’s pretty clear from what Brian said, and what you can find on the Sprint site that they are really encouraging device manufacturers to start adopting WiMax and take a leadership role for the broader market of independent hardware producers and mobile app developers.
• Talk of next-gen location based apps also. There are three ways to do mobile location based services currently; single cell-tower location, cell-tower triangulation, and GPS. GPS is the most precise but also the most expensive and only works outdoors. Some interesting discussion around privacy issues came up when we started talking about location based services. The specter of a legal subpoena for cell network records to verify someone’s physical location at a point in time came up. Scary…How do you know who’s holding the phone?

Brian also mentioned the Sprint Innovations Portal and the Sprint Developers Portal as a places to learn more and share application ideas with Sprint. BTW, I’m sure I missed some good stuff so feel free to add comments or send in corrections. Uploading some video now.

Google Video of Brian talking about 4G bandwidth here