What does Google have up its sleeve? Taken together with other Google wireless and broadband initiatives, this network could be a piece of a larger plan to build a future heterogeneous network, or HetNet, that combines both cellular and Wi-Fi technologies into a single extremely flexible and high-bandwidth system. HetNets will become the mobile carriers’ future network architectures, but there’s nothing precluding Google from deploying one, as well, using all of the Wi-Fi, small cell and unlicensed spectrum at its disposal.

Google’s small cell experiment

Though Google made portions of the application confidential so they’re not viewable by the public, Crowley was able to glean some interesting details from the document, which he then posted in his blog.

A Ruckus Wireless Wi-Fi hotspot/small cell

Essentially, Google wants to build and operate over two years a very dense network of 50 low-power small cells in both indoor and outdoor locations. The total breadth of the network would only be two miles so this would be quite a high-capacity concentration of cells indeed. It would use the same 2.5 GHz spectrum currently used by Clearwire for WiMAX and its forthcoming LTE network, but Google did not reveal the specific radio technology it would use, nor did it reveal the manufacturer of its base stations.

This isn’t Google’s first request to the FCC for to test a new wireless technology. Last February Google filed an application with the FCC to experiment with a new residential gateway that used advanced Wi-Fi and Bluetooth technologies to redistribute Google Fiber’s high-bandwidth connection. My colleague Stacey Higginbotham wrote that Google could be eyeing longer-range gigabit-Wi-Fi as a means of blanketing towns and cities with untethered broadband.

In addition, Google is a big cheerleader for the unlicensed TV white spaces, which would expand the free-to-access model of Wi-Fi to the wider mobile network. It’s also a backer of the FCC’s proposal to designate 3.5 GHz a shared band over which any company could deploy small high-capacity cells. Google wants to test its new small network over licensed frequencies, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t shift over to the shared small cell band when it becomes available.

Google Mobile?

Despite all of the rumors about Google teaming up with Dish Network or T-Mobile, I have serious doubts Google wants to become a full-fledged license-owning mobile operator. But the more details emerge about the Google’s wireless experiments, the more I suspect that Google plans to get into the mobile business – or at least the mobile broadband business – in a very non-traditional way.

Instead of building towers, buying nationwide 4G licenses, and offering voice and SMS plans, Google could build tightly integrated, multi-technology, small cell mobile data networks around the country. Starting with Google Fiber cities, it could use its install base of residential and business connections to deploy a shared gigabit Wi-Fi network that any other Google Fiber customer could access (similar to the residential hotspot approach Free Mobile uses in France).

Second, Google could build a network of indoor and outdoor LTE small cells, either tapping into the new shared 3.5 GHz band or by leasing airwaves from a company like Clearwire, and those cells could be backhauled again with Google Fiber links. In rural or less densely populated areas it could extend its networks range by using white spaces. All of those parts wouldn’t exist as separate networks. HetNet would glue them all together, allowing customers to seamless move between Wi-Fi connections and cellular links and in many cases access both radio technologies simultaneously.

“The most recent Google application might be part of a larger plan leading to HetNet architectures in which, say, licensed and unlicensed wireless networks would be combined,” Crowley said when I asked him about the possibility. “Backhaul for such networks is technology agnostic but Google Fiber could be made to handle it.” Crowley, however, was quick to point out that there is nothing in Google’s numerous FCC applications that indicate it has HetNet plans in the works.

If Google were to take the HetNet approach to mobile broadband, it would have to ask itself a key question. Would it want to focus solely on dense urban zones – where most mobile data user congregate – or would it want to fill in all the gaps in between? If it’s the latter case, then Google would have to start playing the mobile operator’s game. You simply can’t provide 4G coverage on a freeway using small cells and Wi-Fi.

Google wouldn’t necessarily have to buy another operator or build its own big-tower macro network from scratch though. It could become a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) leasing capacity off of a T-Mobile or a Sprint’s network in areas where its HetNet couldn’t reach. As I’ve written before, the carriers are now much more open to the idea of selling network capacity to potential competitors. But then again, the carriers have never dealt with an MVNO that would be as powerful and threatening as Google.

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In partnership with a local start-up, Palo Alto today launched a service called Open Budget that pulls up the hood on the city’s finances and lets people see how it runs. While towns across the country are making efforts to share their documents, Palo Alto’s new tool stands out for its clean, comprehensive charts.

The tools let people use filters to view the revenues and expenses for different departments and see how they change year over year. For example, here’s a quick look at Palo Alto’s recent expenses for city officials:

And here’s a look at the city’s growing obligation to retired workers;

The Open Budget tool also provides ways to examine budget items like capital expenses or debt servicing in a ways that PDFs do not. The numbers will be updated to reflect changes during a fiscal year, and users can easily download the data to a spreadsheet.

The city as platform

The open budget project is just one way that Palo Alto uses data and technology to remake its civic infrastructure. The city has also worked with cloud service, Junar, to harness its data on everything from zoning to street sweeping to water levels and offer it up as an API. In practice, this means someone could use the API to make an app to help explore the city’s parks or real estate.

“It’s about building and enabling a leading digital city by eliminating barriers between government and citizens,” said Jonathan Reichental, a longtime O’Reilly Media executive who became Palo Alto’s CIO last year. In a phone interview, he explained that cities can use the data they possess to become a “platform” for their citizens and that financial data is a “sweet spot” for such initiatives.

To make Open Budget a reality, Palo Alto entered a public-private partnership with Delphi Solutions, a company launched by Stanford students that aims to improve government performance. Reichental says that some of the information can be offered through its existing Junar API, but that Palo Alto turned to Delphi for Open Budget because of the complexity of financial data.

According to Reichental, Delphi’s tools not only provide transparency but offer an opportunity for cities to save money in managing their data.  Delphi is also working on benchmarking tools that will make it possible to compare the performance of different cities, he added.

Can data save California’s cities?

Palo Alto may be an inspiration but it could also be an outlier. While its citizens revel in digital plenty, their counterparts in bankrupt Stockton and Vallejo face the prospect of turned-off traffic lights. And in blue collar Bell, California, city officials await trial for pocketing the town’s budget.

If these cities can’t even manage basic services, is it realistic to expect them to embrace new-fangled data tools? And could places like those in the hard luck Central Valley even find people like Reichental to implement them?

They may have to try. As my colleague Derrick Harris has reported, cities who can collect and analyze data have been able to improve efficiency and save money on everything from streets to sewers.

• See also: Managing sewage like traffic thanks to data

There is also hope in the fact that tools like Open Budget provide citizens and journalists with unprecedented opportunities to demand accountability from city leaders. Even in an age when newspapers can no longer afford to send reporters to council meetings, the power to parse reams of data with the click of a mouse is as a check on power.

If Open Budget spreads to cities across the state, citizens may soon be able to compare their towns’ respective police and library budgets and create a virtuous cycle of civic improvement. Alternately, we may see yet another form of the digital divide in which Palo Alto residents get apps while Stockton residents work to keep the street lights on.

(Image by DJ40 via Shutterstock)

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LiquidSpace has partnered with Santa Cruz, Palo Alto and San Francisco to list 27 workspaces in 16 government buildings (mostly libraries), including previously and independently listed Bay Area government spaces from Sonoma to San Mateo. The aims of the partnership are twofold. Firstly, the city governments believe that keeping more commuters closer to home will mean more dollars spent in the local community.

“Over 30 percent of our local work force commutes to Silicon Valley on a daily basis, and so we’ve recognized the tremendous opportunity to create more opportunities for our citizens to work closer to home. Supporting mobile working is absolutely vital to the economic health and well being of the community,” said former mayor of Santa Cruz, Ryan Coonerty. And Sid Espinosa, the former mayor of Palo Alto agreed:

Here in Palo Alto we’re specifically engaging in a number of public and private partnerships with local tech companies like LiquidSpace. We not only want to support the companies that keep the Bay Area at the forefront of the technology industry, but want to use their unique products and services to support other entrepreneurs and the community as a whole.

The second goal of the program is environmental. “City governments are recognizing the opportunity to make taxpayer purchased real estate assets work smarter and harder,” said Mark Gilbreath, CEO and co-founder of LiquidSpace, who noted, “we have enough built-out office space on the planet to meet all of our collective needs for the next fifty years.” By putting what’s already out there to better use, the partners aim to reduce waste and the carbon footprint of their communities. The director of the City of San Francisco’s Department of the Environment Melanie Nutter explains:

We, as government entities, must lead by example in the area of sustainable economic development policies and practices. Commercial real estate accounts for 55 percent of our carbon footprint, and when mobile workers can leverage spaces nearby, we can optimize that building use and shorten commutes.

Do you see more collaborations between the coworking movement and government planners coming in the future?

Image courtesy of Flickr user San Jose Library.

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Shareaholic's survey (click to enlarge)

Pinterest is now driving more referral traffic on the web than Google+, YouTube, Reddit, and LinkedIn — combined. That’s according to Shareaholic’s January 2012 referral traffic report, which is based on aggregated data from more than 200,000 publishers that reach more than 260 million unique monthly visitors each month.

In January Pinterest was responsible for 3.6 percent of referrals tracked by Shareaholic, up from 2.5 percent during the previous month. That means the site is quickly gaining ground on Twitter, which drove 3.61 percent of referral traffic in January, down from 3.62 percent in December. Pinterest’s ascent has been especially rapid when viewed through a longer lens: The site owned just .17 percent of the traffic in Shareaholic’s July survey.

Not surprisingly, Facebook is holding steady at the top of Shareaholic’s survey, as it was responsible for more than a quarter of all referral traffic in January. Next in line was StumbleUpon, with 5.07 percent. It bears mention that while the Shareaholic survey is global, in the United States market alone StumbleUpon has in the past unseated Facebook as a top driver of referral traffic.

It’s exciting to see a relative newcomer growing so quickly in the web space. While the web’s more established companies are quite powerful these days, the fact that a startup like Pinterest has successfully established its own foothold shows that the competitive landscape is still alive and mainstream users are open to trying things from new players.

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It was also the year that direct current (DC) took a back seat to alternating current (AC) after Niagara Falls Power Company chose AC transmission for its power plant.

Although we live in an AC-dominated world, DC seems poised for a comeback, particularly in data centers. Facebook adopted a DC architecture in its Prineville, Ore., data center. SAP spent $128,000 retrofitting a data center at its offices in Palo Alto, Calif., to rely on DC power. In 2010 it cut SAP’s energy bills by $24,000 per year.

ABB, the Swiss-Swedish conglomerate, bought a controlling interest last year in Validus DC Systems, which specializes in DC data center equipment. ABB also opened a factory in North Carolina to produce HVDC (high voltage DC) equipment for delivering power from solar and offshore wind farms to the grid. The Tres Amigas “superstation” will rely heavily on HVDC.

General Electric, meanwhile, bought Lineage Power, which produces DC equipment, and it has talked about using DC to power mining shovels and other heavy-duty equipment.

Nextek Power Systems and the EMmerge Alliance are also promoting DC as a way to cut power in buildings.

Behind the DC drive

What’s driving it? Although AC became the standard for electronic transmission, DC didn’t disappear. It just hid. Servers, large numbers of electric motors, batteries, even ships and airplanes run on DC. Solar panels produce DC power. Wind turbines can produce AC or DC power, but the extreme variability of wind power means that electricity generated by turbines has to pass through battery banks before it gets to the grid. As a result, wind farms are effectively DC.

The landline telephone system runs on DC too, notes Brian Fortenberry, a program manager at the Electric Power Research Institute.

To solve the mismatch, a whole industry of AC-DC converters has been developed. National Semiconductor sells billions of dollars’ worth of chips to convert power. Inverters in the solar industry exist to convert DC from solar panels to AC that can run on the wires in your home.

In data centers, the AC-DC gymnastics top the charts. Typically, AC from the grid has to be stepped down in voltage so it can be routed safely in building equipment. Lower-voltage AC then gets converted to DC so it can go to an uninterruptable power supply (UPS). DC power from the UPS then gets converted to AC so it can go over the wires in the building. Then it gets converted back to DC. Usually five conversions, or steps, downward take place.

By converting grid AC at the door of a data center to medium-voltage DC or converting stepped-down AC to DC at the last possible moment, a data center can cut utility bills by 10 to 20 percent or more, according to Trent Waterhouse, the VP of marketing for power electronics at General Electric.

Validus and others have also eliminated some of the technological hurdles involved in transmitting via DC, namely the monster-sized copper cables.

The same dynamics work in buildings. In a retail establishment, DC power from solar panels could go directly to DC-powered LED lights with not-intermediate conversions that sap energy, according to Nextek. Perhaps not coincidentally, Redwood Systems, the lighting networking company, touts that its technology is actually an example of DC networking.

More savings comes in real estate. DC data centers require 25 percent to 40 percent less square footage than their AC counterparts, largely because computer equipment can connect directly to backup batteries.

In a hypothetical example, a 2.5-megawatt data center power module in the AC world might need 7,295 square feet, Ronald Ranaldi, the VP of sales at Validus, told me last year. An equivalent DC power module might occupy only 5,102 square feet, a savings of 2,193 square feet. What’s more, a single data center might consist of several 2.5-megawatt modules.

“Real estate is often greater than the energy savings,” says Ranaldi. “In large, green field data centers, you are literally eliminating buildings.”

DC won’t take over the world. And not everyone is sold. Google is not taking DC for its data centers in part because of the cost that would be involved in retrofitting their existing architecture. But it seems that an idea that was current when Grover Cleveland was in the White House and Japan was just adopting the Gregorian calendar could make a comeback.

Image courtesy of The Planet

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Piazza founder and CEO Pooja Sankar

Piazza, the social network that lets college students and instructors discuss material online, has closed on $6 million in new funding.

The funding round, which serves as the Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup’s Series A, was led by Bessemer Venture Partners with the participation of previous investors Kapor Capital and Felicis Ventures. This brings Piazza’s total outside investment to approximately $7.5 million.

Growing beyond Q&A and STEM studies

Piazza will use the money to expand its service to more schools and add more features beyond its existing Q&A format, said founder and CEO Pooja Sankar in an interview this week. Such growth initiatives mean hiring more people: Piazza currently has around 10 full-time employees, and the company expects to double its staff by the end of 2012, Sankar said.

Another priority in the months ahead will be making Piazza friendlier to disciplines beyond science, technology, engineering and math (also referred to as STEM fields.) “There’s a different structure in [humanities] majors such as the arts, literature, and history. A lot of our focus going forward will be in understanding their needs,” Sankar said.

Taking on study group snobbery

Piazza aims to provide a single place where students can ask each other and their instructors questions about their studies and homework assignments. Students can opt to post to Piazza under their real names, or anonymously — which is meant to eliminate fears of asking “a stupid question.” Professors and teaching assistants, meanwhile, can help guide the Piazza discussions and access workflow and stats on the service.

Sankar says she was inspired to create Piazza after feeling excluded from study groups while she was earning degrees in computer science from IIT Kanpur and the University of Maryland, College Park. “I noticed all my classmates were in the computer lab working together, but I was too shy to ask to be included,” Sankar said. “They would all be done with an assignment by 2 a.m., and I would be working on it until 6 a.m…. Google and other search engines on the open Internet would have been too general for my purposes and the questions I had.”

Screenshot of Piazza questions and dashboard

Once Sankar joined the working world — before founding Piazza, she held developer positions at Kosmix, Oracle, and Facebook — she discovered that many other people had similar feelings of exclusion while studying engineering. “Sheryl Sandberg held an interesting event while I was at Facebook for women in technology, and I found that many of the people there said the exact same thing: They didn’t feel they had a support group in their studies.” In mid-2009, while pursuing her MBA at Stanford University, Sankar developed a working prototype of Piazza to help solve this problem.

Big growth, but no revenue yet

During its first few months, Piazza kept a low profile, operating only at Stanford in private beta. But in December 2010, the company opened its service to all universities, and 2011 brought fairly explosive growth: Piazza started the year with 4,000 student users and ended it with more than 100,000, Sankar said. Today, Piazza counts such schools as Berkeley, Columbia, Cornell, Duke, Harvard, Princeton, the University of Michigan, the University of Texas and Virginia Tech among the hundreds of schools worldwide that utilize the service.

For all that growth, however, Piazza doesn’t make any money. It doesn’t charge universities or students for access to its service, nor does it serve advertisements. Sankar tells me revenue generation will probably not be on the agenda until mid-2013. “For the next 1.5 years, our focus will probably be to continue to grow our user base and expand the product,” she said.

Piazza is by no means the only company vying to be the social network of choice for college study services. Blackboard is hugely successful with its educational software; college textbooks now often come with their own social and online components; and many universities have their own white-label services to help students keep up on coursework. But Piazza’s growth over the past year shows there are still big needs that haven’t been fulfilled by these existing offerings, and instructors and students are willing to try out a free new service. Its challenge now is proving it has staying power as a truly must-have tool for professors and universities for many semesters ahead.

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