In honor of Earth Day, we’re borrowing from our friends over at Earth2Tech in order to celebrate the infrastructure, gadgets and web sites that can help GigaOMers go green. Whether it’s chips that make your servers run cooler or web sites that will help you cut down on energy consumption (no, not Blackle), these topics are not only near and dear to our readers’ hearts, but a geek-friendly shade of green.
Get Your Surf On: These sites can help make the world (and the web) a greener place.
Not a day goes by without someone bemoaning the evils of peer-to-peer networking. This week, however, we came across a set of numbers that show more traditional video sources (streaming and flash video, for example) are now an increasing component of bandwidth on consumer-focused broadband networks.
Intel’s Mash Maker application, which launches today, isn’t exactly a new idea; Yahoo Pipes and Microsoft’s Popfly are similar. But Mash Maker marks the first time Intel has launched a software effort with no hardware attached. Presumably you can run Mash Maker on a computer with an AMD inside without melting your motherboard.
I was super skeptical at first and frankly, still am. According to Robert Ennals, senior researcher at Intel Research Berkeley and the architect for Mash Maker, the goal of Intel Research is to make the computing experience better. He said Intel Research and Intel Capital are the only divisions at Intel who have the freedom to think outside the PC box, as it were. Fine, Intel launched Mash Maker to make the Internet a better place. Does it? Continue »
AT&T reported solid earnings this morning, with income of $3.5 billion on sales of $30.7 billion for the first quarter. Like last quarter, wireless revenue drove growth, but U-Verse data looked pretty good too. As Om wrote yesterday, AT&T affirmed that it’s on track to add 1 million U-Verse subscribers by the end of 2008. At the end of March AT&T counted 379,000 subscribers for the IPTV service with 148,000 net adds in the quarter. Maybe when AT&T files its 10-Q we can see what the U-Verse churn looks like.
Last Friday, four executives of satellite holding company TerreStar Networks suddenly resigned, leaving just three people behind to fill the void. I don’t expect this lack of management to last for too long, but until TerreStar calls me back with details, I’m betting that the change in management signals a change in TerreStar’s strategy in that it’s no longer looking for a larger partner to help it build and finance a combined 4G satellite and terrestrial network, but is preparing to move ahead alone.
TerreStar is the new name of a former pager company called Motient. In 2004 Motient scored the regulatory jackpot when, despite protests from the cellular carriers, the Federal Communications Commission approved plans for an ancillary terrestrial component (ATC) network. Since then, it has found itself tangled up in a web of financial transactions designed to maximize the value of its two bands of satellite spectrum.
I went to Y Combinator’s Startup School on Saturday (that’s YC-founder Paul Graham, in case you don’t know) even though most people in Silicon Valley see the material there as “too basic.” My goal is to perpetually learn and apply and to learn as much from the audience as from the killer line-up of speakers Y Combinator recruited.
What I learned I posted to Twitter. My notes are in my facebook album. 
Anyway, these are The 9 YC-Types that I met that day — and a fewof the things you can learn from them:
1. Mr. Never Woken Up Before Noon. Codes and compiles well into the early morning. Only wakes up at 9AM for killer content. Fresh in from Europe. Is full of wonderment that 12 zip codes in Northern California contain 90% of venture money. Doesn’t know about the 9 VCs you’ll want to avoid meeting, but gosh darn they have great accents.
2. Mr. Silver Bullet Detector. A.K.A, a VC. Wants to find the next Google, Myspace, Yahoo!,
and get his carry (you-know-what) popped with the this 3rd fund.
3. Mr. DDSS Founder Presenting. DDSS stands for Dumb-Down-Sandbag-for-Success. During AM presentation said stuff like, “money matters with how many people you hire. The more money you have the more you can hire.” No where near as dumb as the things he says — even though he pretends he didn’t present during lunch. Continue »
Back in October 2007, we reported that Comcast wasn’t the only broadband service provider messing with P2P traffic by delaying the P2P packets. We got a quasi confirmation from Cox Communications, but others denied doing any such thing.
Those denials won’t work for long; soon, there might be network traffic data to prove that “traffic shaping” is commonplace and messing with P2P is an everyday occurrence. Vuze, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based P2P company has been collecting this information, thanks to a plug-in they released last month.
While it’s not clear how many people downloaded the plug-in, Vuze’s BitTorrent client, Azereus, is quite popular. The plug-in allows Vuze to keep an eye on network interference and collect data to prove that other ISPs are indulging in traffic shaping. The plug-in basically “measures the rate at which network communications are being interrupted by reset (RST) messages.”
Continue »
Motorola Ventures today put an undisclosed amount of money into Sunnyvale, Calif.-based startup VirtualLogix, which aims to do for communications equipment and mobile devices what VMware has done for the server. I’m pretty leery of companies throwing around the v-word, but with its take on virtualization, VirtualLogix is actually creating value.
For proof, check out the plans for a sub-$100 multimedia 3G phone developed by Purple Labs using NXP chips running VirtualLogix’s software. The software allows a processor to run a rich operating system on the same chip that controls the baseband access. (In a typical smartphone — depending on the applications and radios needed — this takes two or more chips.) The end result is a high-end feature on a low-end phone using fewer chips. That’s excellent for device makers, but VirtualLogix counts among its investors TI and Intel, two companies that want to sell more chips.
VirtualLogix CEO Peter Richards explained this contrast away by saying the chip vendors just want to make customers happier. But while that may be true, what’s really behind the chip firms’ interest is VirtualLogix’s ability to take software written for single-core chips and run it on multicore chips by virtualizing the multicore hardware. Multicore chips aren’t in phones right now, but given how much we want our handheld devices to do, they will be.
The other beneficiary of virtualizing a communications device is the gear market, where VirtualLogix customers such as Alcatel-Lucent are using the software to combine multiple products, like call routing servers, call management servers, etc., into one box rather than four or five. Virtualization as offered by VMware and Xen is creating a lot of savings by allowing companies to reduce the number of servers they use in data centers, so it stands to reason that it can do the same in the telecommunications world.
GameRail, a startup purporting to optimize latency for gamers, has closed up shop. An announcement posted on the company web site says that: “[T]he market does not appear to be ready to support a standalone network for gaming at this time.”
I never had a chance to check out the service, though early consumer reports were decidedly mixed. Still, GameRail’s death notice suggests a broader reason: There are probably very few gamers out there willing to pay extra to become what’s colloquially called an SLPB, or “super low ping bastard.” Continue »
This morning I had the chance to play my favorite game, “Is it just me, or is Site X down?” Turns out it was just me, or rather, my ISP, since a couple of fellow Time Warner Internet customers I called were experiencing difficulties as well. Plus, once I moved onto an AT&T DSL network, Google, Yahoo and WordPress all loaded just fine.
It’s not that they weren’t loading at all on the Time Warner network, it’s that they were loading intermittently. As someone who uses a lot of web applications, this isn’t a good thing. I have very little recourse when this happens, other than turning off my modem, router and computer and rebooting.
I thought cleaning out my cache would help, so I did that. I ran a traceroute program to see if I could spot any troubles, but with limited experience at detecting them, I didn’t find anything noteworthy. I tried to check out Down for Everyone or Just me?, but couldn’t get there. I called Time Warner for help and was told to reboot. So I did. And it worked. And then, just as suddenly (you know, right after I got off the phone) it stopped working.
So here I am in the conference room of my husband’s company, using their DSL access to blog. Any suggestions, thoughts or magic spells that might help me figure out how to fix my home network would be greatly appreciated. At this point I’m just hoping that in a few hours it will somehow fix itself. Because on the Internet, that actually happens.
Photo courtesy of Tailored Consulting
