Author Archive for Katie Fehrenbacher

Katie Fehrenbacher, Editor, Earth2Tech. Prior to Earth2Tech, she was a Senior Writer for GigaOM, covering wireless and broadband technologies. She has also been a writer for Red Herring, Engadget, the Yomiuri Shimbun, and ReadyMade Magazine.

Smart Meters That Can Tweet, From a Utility That “Gets” Broadband

Katie Fehrenbacher | Thursday, July 2, 2009 | 12:27 PM PT | 4 comments

yellostrom3Germany’s Yello Strom might be the coolest utility in the world — it’s embraced the intertwining of energy and home broadband connections and is one of the few that manages its smart meter service directly via its customers’ broadband link. That means it can easily offer consumers web-style smart meter applications, including Google’s PowerMeter energy management tool, and potentially a twitter feed of energy consumption.
Continue »

Structure 09: What Will Broadband Unveil In A Decade?

Katie Fehrenbacher | Thursday, June 25, 2009 | 4:09 PM PT | 2 comments

Faster, cheaper, more ubiquitous bandwidth has spawned a decade of new applications that depend on it as a platform: Google, YouTube, Twitter, Hulu. The bigger pipes, the richer the application. What will higher bandwidth speeds, wider-reaching networks and cheaper access to connections produce in another decade? Well, if the panel made up by service providers and infrastructure gear makers at Structure knew for sure, they’d be on their way to producing the next Google. But a decade of bandwidth growth “will change the world another time,” said Kenneth Duda, VP Software Engineering Arista Networks. “We cant even imagine the possibilities,” said Tobias Ford, Assistant VP of IT AT&T, but suggested possibly bandwidth-needy applications like telepresence and telemedicine.

In a decade, the panelists, and members of the audience, said they hope that the bandwidth discussion moves away from focusing on speed — basically the speed is so high it’s no longer an issue — and moves towards the user interface and applications. In that world, when as much bandwidth as possible is readily and instantly available, service providers could start offering “broadband as a service.” David Yen, EVP and GM of the Data Center Business Group, Juniper Networks, thinks broadband as a service is on its way as service providers face a challenging market of escalating traffic and flat sales. Service providers need to offer more services to recoup the investment of the network buildout, said Yen, and “broadband as a service” can provide that. As soon as it does get here it will be “enormously valuable,” noted AT&T’s Ford.
Continue »

Structure 09: Akamai’s CEO Explains Why the Middle of the Net Is Such a Drag

Katie Fehrenbacher | Thursday, June 25, 2009 | 10:49 AM PT | 3 comments

Structure-090625-1004-D71_4630Running the 11-year-old content-distribution kingpin Akamai, which manages nearly 50,000 servers and optimizes the world’s overtaxed web services, might be a high-profile job for some. For Akamai CEO Paul Sagan, it’s actually his second act — the cousin of science writer Carl Sagan was formerly an Emmy award-winning producer at CBS Interactive. As broadband starts to enable everything from media to communications to commerce, clearly moving from helping produce the content to helping quickly and efficiently move it around is a good transition (um, except for innovative new blogging media companies).

Akamai helps its web customers maintain fast connection times, even under the biggest traffic spikes (Obama live streaming inauguration) and halfway around the world. What Sagan has found is that it’s actually the middle of the Internet that contributes to the most drag. Think about it: From the user through the firewall to the database is relatively fast, and the last mile to the user is just a fraction of a second. But the middle of the public Internet, with it’s chatty web services and redundant connections, can add on lengthy delays — as long as 8.2 seconds in Sagan’s example. Akamai solves this problem by effectively creating its own private tunnels on the public Internet and doing other optimizing and overlaying techniques.
Continue »

Structure 09: How to Scale Up With Distributed Data Storage

Katie Fehrenbacher | Thursday, June 25, 2009 | 9:18 AM PT | 0 comments

Structure-090625-0847-D71_4450The emergence of cloud computing has forced companies to re-think about where their data is stored, as well as which technologies are best to support a distributed data storage model. The ideal scenario is storage that’s cheap and quickly scalable — just keep on adding storage in the cloud as your data needs grow. Facebook’s Avinash Lakshman says that over the past year the social networking company has tripled its storage nodes. Cloudera’s Chief Scientist Jeff Hammerbacher says he’s seen systems as large as 4,000 nodes in the cloud. Continue »

Microsoft Enters the Smart Hohm

Katie Fehrenbacher | Wednesday, June 24, 2009 | 8:03 AM PT | 0 comments

As Earth2Tech pointed out earlier this week, everyone and their mother is building home energy management tools these days, including Google. Today, Microsoft unveiled its new home energy management software: Hohm (not to be confused with Sprint’s WiMAX network, Xohm). Announced this morning by Microsoft Chief Strategy and Research Officer Craig Mundie at the Edison Electric Institute conference in San Francisco, the online software will enable consumers to monitor and manage home energy consumption.
Continue »

The Incredible Importance of Being a Founder

Katie Fehrenbacher | Sunday, June 14, 2009 | 7:00 PM PT | 2 comments

The recent lawsuit filed last month by Tesla founder Martin Eberhard alleging the company’s CEO, Elon Musk, is trying to appropriate the legacy of being the electric car startup’s founder, might be the equivalent of Silicon Valley’s version of the McDonald’s coffee lawsuit, but it raises some interesting questions: What does it mean to be a founder, and why is the status of a founder so important to entrepreneurs?

A founder isn’t just a concept — someone who created or invented a company — it’s also a title that can be negotiated. It’s not so uncommon for someone who joins a company shortly after the original founder to request a co-founder title. Companies are often created by groups of co-founders who have agreed to share the title, regardless of whether one of them pulled more weight with the kernel of the idea. But if there ends up being bad blood among original team members, then the odds naturally increase that there will be a debate over who are considered to be founders.

That’s because the status of a founder carries all sorts of weight financially — for both increased equity and the person’s future ability to start more companies and generate wealth — and socially, in terms of reputation and the notion of how much the person has contributed to society. Founding companies is attached to creating progress (either in a niche market or on a larger scale), and that’s something that is highly valued, particularly in U.S. culture — going as far back as the Founding Fathers. While we won’t pretend to know the technicalities of the Tesla lawsuit, the passion behind founder status is something a lot of entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley can understand. Read the full story on Earth2Tech.com.

Why the Smart Grid Won’t Look Like the Internet Anytime Soon

Katie Fehrenbacher | Friday, June 5, 2009 | 9:44 AM PT | 0 comments

If you thought the consumer portion of the smart grid would look a lot like the Internet — a real-time, two-way network with innovative services and applications — think again. Most of the utilities’ smart meter rollouts are designed around networks that collect smart meter data in 15-60 minute intervals, and then can only deliver energy consumption information back to the customer a good 24 hours later. That’s not exactly a smart network, and even worse, without real-time functionality (whereby a consumer can see the cost of energy rise, in real time, during peak use hours, or how much energy an appliance consumes, in real time) it will be more difficult to change consumption behavior, which defeats the purpose of installing the smart meter systems in the first place. Sure there will be home energy management products that bypass the utility systems, but without utility support, they’ll be a long time coming.

Screenshots: Google’s Online Energy Tool PowerMeter

Katie Fehrenbacher | Tuesday, June 2, 2009 | 12:53 PM PT | 3 comments

googlepowermetersly1 If you’ve been wondering what Google’s online energy management tool PowerMeter will look like, then we’ve got a treat for you: The company showed off PowerMeter as an iGoogle gadget that manages home energy data this afternoon to participants of a demo call, including what the gadget looks like embedded on the iGoogle home page, as well as in a more expanded version. Notably, Google exec Tom Sly said on the call that Google has no intention of charging utilities, customers and third-party vendors for it — in other words, it has no business model for PowerMeter.

Muni Wi-Fi Firms Find New Life In Smart Grid

Katie Fehrenbacher | Thursday, May 28, 2009 | 9:18 AM PT | 2 comments

Back when municipal Wi-Fi was all the rage, EarthLink still had its shirt and Kelly Clarkson was leading the charts. Companies like Tropos, Skypilot Networks and Strix were providing gear for high-profile city networks that promised to disrupt the established telecom paradigm and free us from the chains of the phone company/cable duopoly. Well, as we know now, it didn’t work out that way, and as Om declared two years ago, muni Wi-Fi turned out not to be “the third pipe.” So what’s become of these former municipal Wi-Fi gear makers? Continue »

WiMAX Gear Maker Alvarion Moving Into Smart Grid

Katie Fehrenbacher | Tuesday, May 26, 2009 | 9:05 AM PT | 1 comment

WiMAX might be losing broadband mindshare in the U.S., but when it comes to adding digital intelligence to the power grid, it’s suddenly emerging as an early contender. WiMAX gear maker Alvarion, which is one of the top three manufacturers in the industry, along with Alcatel-Lucent and Motorola, told Earth2Tech that it has been doing a couple of pilot projects using WiMAX gear to connect energy data in smart meter deployments. Alvarion wouldn’t disclose its partners, but said it plans to do so shortly. Continue »

Page 1 of 5912345Older Posts »Oldest

Editorial Masthead

Carolyn Pritchard
Managing Editor
Celeste LeCompte
Special Projects Editor
Desiree DeNunzio
Copyeditor
Om Malik
Senior Writer
Stacey Higginbotham
Staff Writer
Jennifer Martinez
Staff Writer
Wagner James Au
Contributing Editor
Liz Gannes
Staff Writer
Chris Albrecht
Staff Writer
Katie Fehrenbacher
Staff Writer
Josie Garthwaite
Staff Writer
Close
E-mail It