GigaOM

Indian incumbent BSNL plans to spend about $750 million on a nationwide WiMAX network that will primarily target rural areas and small towns and cover a sixth of the country’s ever-growing population. This has to be one of the largest WiMAX rollouts anywhere on the planet.

The funds for the first phase of deployment are coming from a universal service fund set up for broadband access. BSNL will roll out the WiMAX network in large cities later as a separate buildout. The initial network will connect schools and telephony kiosks in villages. Continue »

We’re written several times now about why the prospects for the U.S. economy suggest today’s founders might want to establish a global perspective for their startups. We’ve considered rising oil prices, the housing market collapse, the credit crisis, and the strength of emerging consumer bases in countries like India and China. (Sample posts here and here.)

One issue of a prospective “global play” that we’ve not yet addressed is the weak U.S. dollar. Today the dollar fell to a record low for the year against the euro: $1.00 = € 0.67. (See chart.) But a weak Greenback isn’t all bad for U. S. companies. Continue »

Verizon is rolling out major speed boosts for its FiOS broadband subscribers across its entire service area. These new tiers offer up to 50 Mbps/20 Mbps or up to 30 Mbps/15 Mbps, depending on the state in which the service is sold, at costs ranging from $89.95 to $139.95 a month. (I seriously want the 50Mbps connection, but sadly the service isn’t available in San Francisco.)

It has also rolled out symmetrical connections in the entire 16-state region it currently serves. The symmetrical connections have up and down speeds of up to 20 megabits per second. The symmetrical services were first launched on Oct. 23 in the New York Tri-State Region. Today, Verizon (VZ) launched the service in the remaining 13 states.

In Florida, Massachusetts and Rhode Island, offers the option of a FiOS Internet service with downstream and upstream connections of up to 20 Mbps. In California, Delaware, Indiana, Maryland, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Texas, Virginia and Washington, the company has added a new FiOS Internet service with downstream and upstream connections of up to 15 Mbps.

These services start at $64.99 a month. More details are here.

YowTRIP will demonstrate its social networking site for frequent travelers next month at The Silicon Valley NewTech Meetup. Yes, Dopplr is already doing social networking for travelers, but YowTRIP uses destinations to create new social connections rather than just enhancing existing ones.

Dopplr works well for people who travel frequently for business and want to meet up with people they already know. YowTRIP, on the other hand, is for people who are interested in travel for its own sake and want to make the most of it by finding in-the-flesh or online travel buddies. YowTRIP puts the destination first, and lets the social connections flow from there.

While Dopplr limits who can view your trips to those you invite, YowTRIP makes it possible for you to find people that either have matching travel plans or have recently been to cities you’re considering visiting. Then, if you become buddies, you can view each other’s photos, videos, travelogs (blogs about your travels), tips and upcoming travel plans.

YowTRIP isn’t the first site aimed at building a community of passionate travelers looking to swap tips and stories. Vcarious, Virtual Tourist and myTripz are just three of the many other options targeting pleasure travelers rather than the professional crowd Dopplr suits. YowTRIP, however, puts the emphasis squarely on creating social connections.

It was sort of a good-news-bad-news kind of email. Toby Padilla, founder of MusicMobs, wrote in to let me know that he was joining Last.fm as VP of desktop & client software, and will be working on developing cool products for the social music company based in London. The bad news: MusicMobs, well-known for their Mobster recommendation software, was shutting down. (See, Mobster in the iTunes Hood.)

Almost four years old, MusicMobs never really hit the mainstream, even though some of us with terabytes of music always appreciated Mobster’s ability to find songs in our libraries. In many ways, it was too early to the social music game. Toby pretty much says so on MusicMobs.com.

Over the last couple of years things have begun to change. … Many competitive services were launching and our own costs were starting to grow beyond our ability to support them. I ended up spending less and less time developing the site and more time looking into ways we could survive and grow into a service everyone could use.

Toby tells us all playlists are available for download. “There was just too much overlap between what I had built and what they have. It was really taxing my resources as well. I felt that I could focus 100% on creating cool products if I didn’t have to maintain the legacy codebase/site. I am a bit sad about it though,” he wrote in an email. So are we.

When your company‘s a start-up, you care a lot about economy and simplicity. And when rapid growth kicks in, for many businesses, the amount of attention paid to energy efficiency and maintaining a small carbon footprint drops in priority.

I’ve held positions at startups and large corporations, including a non-profit arts organization where I was employee # 1 (of 2!) and an energy utility where I was one of 20,000 people. From this wide range of experience I’ve found that there are many ways to make your business sustainable. The good news, for bootstrappers and Fortune 500 corporations alike, is that sustainable practices can cost your company very little, or nothing at all. Continue »