The NVA Blog

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

Just got back from a great Boulder Open Coffee Club meeting this morning. The format of the event has evolved to having a semi-structured discussion at the beginning on a hot topic. The usual networking and schmooze-fest ensued after the discussion.  Today’s topic was open source and various GPL licenses, presented by Doug Young of Morphlix. Very timely as a bunch of the TechStars folks were in attendance and many of us are using open development platforms and GPL code within the apps.

A few of the nuggets of advice I heard:

• There are a number of open source license models to be aware of. Mozilla, GPL, LGPL, etc. Be aware of which license is attached to the code you are using because it will matter at some point if you are successful.
• The mozilla (MPL) license is the simplest/weakest of the reciprocal (GPL-style) licenses and is gaining popularity.
• If you are building an application or web based service with GPL code, keep track of what you are using very carefully. One suggestion was to keep in your repository separate libraries for 100% internally developed, pure 3rd party, and modified GPL code to ensure you have it all straight.
• GPL v3 is being drafted and has some important changes that should benefit everyone, but also has new implications for usage. I won’t try to outline it all here. Richard Stallman gave a talk in Brussels, Belgium back on April 1st on the latest draft (discussion draft 3). The transcript does a great job outlining the major differences between v2 and v3.
• Many early-stage startups either ignore completely or poorly track their usage of open source components. While ignorance can be bliss for awhile, be aware that your GPL compliance will come to the forefront if you get off the ground. The last thing you want is to have auditors crawling through your source code to find tons of 3rd party stuff in there that wasn’t documented or tracked. This has the potential to cost you a ton of time and money, or worse derail the acquisition all together.
• Compliance is more important than perfect tracking. Ensure that what you use, you adhere to the terms of the license to maintain your IP rights and ownership over what you create. It sure would suck to find out weeks before a supposed acquisition you don’t actually own the software you made because you violated GPL terms.
• FYI - for companies using GPL/open components in their projects, check out OpenLogic, a Boulder-area company who provides both software and services for enterprise-grade open source deployment. This is going to become a must-have pretty soon.

The BOCC is turning into a pretty solid and useful event and everyone is really friendly. There are a good number of experienced techies and entrepreneurs in attendance typically, so in addition to interesting and educational discussions it’s an opportunity to get good advice for the price of a latte.

2007 is off to an exciting start! In addition to working with clients at NVA, I’ve been working hard on getting a new business off the ground. Tru.Vu was born out of frustration with the tools currently available to monitor and track online content and news topics. Managing alerts, RSS feeds, email notifications, search results, and the like might work for techies and power-users…but we (the collective WE of the software world) can do better and Tru.Vu intends to make it happen.

We got a functional prototype built quickly (as in just over a week) and submitted the project to TechStars, the Boulder, CO startup incubator I’ve previously blogged about. Just the other day we got the great news that Tru.Vu was accepted into the program. Only 10 applicants out of 300 got in, so we take this as a compliment but it means we need to work even harder to deliver on our vision. Out of the 10 teams in the program, Tru.Vu is the only Boulder-based company, and No Sleep Media in Denver round out the Colorado-based teams. No Sleep Media has a promising notification service called Loopnote. It’s great to see strong CO-based representation in TechStars, and is an indicator of the talent here.

The Tru.Vu website is up and we have started blogging there. It’s early days still so we are not releasing all that much detail on the product, but we’ll share info and insights as we make progress (so subscribe to the blog!)

The stats are from the reporting package used on newmanva.com, Mint. Even though IE owns much more market share than Firefox, this clearly isn’t the case here. What does this say about our site visitors? Are they more technically evolved than the “average”? Or does it mean nothing at all?

I just upgraded this blog’s WordPress installation from version 2.0.2 to 2.1. The upgrade went smoothly and took about an hour really. Some minor plugin wrangling was necessary to get everything humming again, but so far so good. HTML-edit mode wasn’t working in 2.0.2, and the new implementation in 2.1 fixes that. Aaah.

I use Mint for stats and just upgraded from version 1.x to 2.0 as well. That was equally easy to upgrade, and there are some cool new peppers (er, plugins in Mint-land) for 2.0. It’s a paid upgrade but is worth it. The author, Shaun Inman, has done a fantastic job with the software and there is quite the user & developer community growing around this product. I’m happy to support their efforts! BTW, there is a WordPress plugin for Mint that automatically adds the Mint code to every blog page.