It’s the network, stupid

When considering washing machines that tweet, inventory-tracking sensors that send a few pieces of data or home health monitoring systems that are tracking someone’s heartbeat, most people assume the data is so small that the network can handle it. But today’s networks are designed to fulfill very different scenarios.

However, Joe Weinman, the SVP of cloud services and strategy at Telx, noted that the old broadcast model employed by cellular networks (and even to an extent wireline networks) focuses on sending a piece of content down to many. In some cases it’s one piece of content down to one person, but with the internet of things the devices at the edge are sending many different chunks of data up to the core.

That could require new ways of designing networks with a focus on uploads. There’s another element as well that wasn’t discussed too much at the panel, and that was the issue of quality of service and latency. In the heart monitoring example, that’s data that should have priority over other network traffic because it needs real-time monitoring. However, if it’s just gathering information for diagnostic purposes, then it’s fine if that traffic takes a back seat to other bits.

Processing may find a new home

The network is probably the most important (and is definitely the most expensive) element of the internet of things infrastructure, but another ongoing debate is about where the information collected by the thousands (millions?) of sensors we’ll connect will be turned into action or aggregated to form meaningful insight. Namely, will the processing happen in the cloud, or will it happen locally?

Wael Diab, senior technical director at Broadcom’s infrastructure and networking group, noted that the pendulum has swung back and forth between centralized and distributed processing since the mainframe. But what’s worth noting about the internet of things is that there will need to be both — and where the processing takes place will be dynamic depending on several factors.

For example, if the promise of a truly universal internet of things ever occurs (as opposed to siloed areas of connectivity in the medical space, the home, the car etc) then devices might send certain types of data to a local hub in a medical or automotive setting because it’s more secure or cheaper, but take advantage of the cloud and wireline broadband in the home or work setting.

What’s almost universal among people I’ve discussed this with is that the technology to make the internet of things possible has been around for a while. The big change is now that people are able to mediate the lack of standards and interoperability in the underlying technologies using the web via a smartphone.

But that won’t be enough to truly created a connected world with services that span different devices — the promised internet of things.

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The acquisition is the latest piece of an aggressive international expansion that has been underway at Airbnb over the last year. Last summer, it acquired German competitor Accoleo and opened a European office in Hamburg. Since then, it has largely taken a build-versus-buy approach, opening regional offices throughout the world in places like London, Berlin, Barcelona, Copenhagen, Milan, Moscow, Paris and São Paulo.

Apparently the Olympics opportunity was too big to pass up, however, and Airbnb decided to boost inventory by swallowing up its closest competitor in the U.K. As part of the deal, Crashpadder will shut down, but hosts on its system will be able to list on the Airbnb.com site instead. Crashpadder currently has 1,700 listings in London, but there’s no way to tell how many will transition over to Airbnb, since that’s entirely up to the hosts. To entice them to join, Airbnb will extend its 24-hour customer service, £30,000 ($47,572) host guarantee and free professional photography for Crashpadder hosts.

In a blog post last week, Crashpadder said that London hosts typically charge between £35-£175 per night, depending on location, room quality and how many people they can accommodate. But as with any basic case of supply and demand, the amount that places listed wind up costing could vary pretty substantially.

During South by Southwest in Austin, Texas, for instance, anecdotal evidence suggests that some places were being booked at two or three times the normal rate. Granted, London is a much larger city, with a much greater supply of hotel accommodations. But for an event as large as the Olympics, there’s no telling how much some centrally located places will command.

While the Olympics should offer a huge short-term payoff to Airbnb, the bigger picture is that the San Francisco-based startup is increasingly an international business. About 75 percent of all its bookings have some international component — whether that’s U.S. users staying in international locales, international travelers booking lodging here, or international tourists staying in other international locations. Having a larger base of operations in London will surely help that growth.

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It works like this: Once a user has downloaded the PayDragon app, he or she can add items from a vendor’s menu simply by scanning a QR code. Which is great, except that I hate QR codes. And I’m pretty sure everyone else does as well.

That’s why it’s good that PayDragon not only has the QR capabilities, but also enables vendors to create menu listings in the app itself, and allows consumers to add and delete menu items without having to scan anything at all. Frankly, this is the more likely use case for most consumers when they go about choosing what they want to eat from their offices or other locations anyway.

Once an order has been placed, PayDragon bills you automatically, using one-click payment from a credit card you’ve entered into the app. Once it’s on file, there’s no need to re-enter credit card information or pay with cash once you arrive at the vendor’s location. Simply show up and pick up whatever you ordered.

To show off the app at South by Southwest, PayDragon partnered with eight different food truck vendors in Austin. During the promotion, users were encouraged to download the app and order with it. If they did so, they’d also receive additional goodies at no extra charge.

Some food truck vendors already have these types of apps available. Curry Up Now, my favorite Indian street-food vendor in San Francisco (hooray Tikka Masala Burritos!), has an app that lets you place an order, skip the line and go straight to the payment window. And some major food retailers — like Chipotle, for instance — let you do the same. But each has its own individual app, which isn’t entirely useful if you’re not sure what exactly you want.

And there’s no guarantee that those apps will have great workflow processes built in for the staff at the food vendors and trucks. Eric Silverstein, owner of The Peached Tortilla, one of the apps that partnered with PayDragon for its SXSW app promotion, said that the web-based backend for PayDragon was much better than the branded app his truck currently uses.

However, few small vendors have the money to invest in building new apps or updating the ones they might already have. For those without the resources, being on an app like PayDragon also has the potential to get exposure for vendors who don’t have their own apps.

All that said, PayDragon faces an uphill battle against serious competition from major players in the mobile payments space. Square is trying to simplify purchasing with its own suite of mobile applications. On the business front, it has improved its product listings and management for vendors through its Register product, while also enabling seamless payment for consumers with Card Case. And PayPal just launched new small-business and consumer apps along with the release of its PayPal Here card reader and apps that let users transact business with either a credit card, cash, check or even in-app payments.

PayDragon was born out of PaperLinks, a mobile QR code startup focused mostly on enabling ad- and marketing-campaigns for brands. But it’s extending that technology out to consumers and small businesses. The startup is backed with funds from YCombinator, SV Angel and the Start Fund, among others.

For a demo of PayDragon, check out the video below from the App.net mobile showcase:

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Tubs of free beer at SXSW 2012.

You know what? You should have come down to Austin Texas for South by Southwest Interactive. I know it’s too big and it was wet and cold. And sure it was overrun by stupid startups pitching me-too apps and corporate brands, but it was also a celebration about what makes the web awesome, if you knew where to find it.

SXSW isn’t just the place where Twitter or FourSquare achieved mass adoption, it’s also where real debates of around OAuth or microformats take place. Where folks get together to help charities and where this year I saw the creation of an open data format for food. The show itself tries hard to balance the corporate and startup focus it has with its mission to use tech in ways that benefit the community.

A SXSW panel on data in politics.

Kevin Marks the VP of OpenCloud standards at Salesforce, who didn’t attend this year but has been a fixture at many previous SXSW events, noted that many conversations begun at the show lead to projects and efforts between participants who otherwise may never have met.

“The venue creates this deliberate chaos and you often make connections that you weren’t expecting, because you have to talk to people just to find out where anything is,” he said.

It’s also no accident that you can find panels about gender identity and the impact of SOPA on the web among the conspicuous parties thrown by magazines, tech firms and giant brands. The folks behind the show made a concerted effort to bring in people who care deeply about using tech to make the world better, or who just want to make tech better.

If what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, then the exact opposite is true for South by Southwest Interactive, what happens here in Austin during those five days should carry the debate or ideas out to a wider population. Maybe it’s an interview with someone about creating new standards for 3-D and virtual reality, which Jay Iorio of the IEEE is attempting to do, or it’s a look at how our private lives are under threat because of big data. Discussion will happen here that have the potential to launch a new standard or a new social movement.

Jay Iorio, an IEEE technologist, who is trying to develop standards for 3-D and virtual worlds.

The folks at SXSW work hard to bring in new faces of tech and foster discussions that range from the founder of the X Prize hoping to fix education to the way your interact with your mobile phoneand how that affects your humanity.

So yes, you should go. Don’t go for the parties, to launch your startup or with an eye on finding the next hot app. Go, so you can hang out with a like-minded community of folks who believe technology can help make the world a better place and who are actively trying to do so. Go, to learn about an entirely new area of technology! Sure, you can avoid all that, but that’s what SXSW is about, even if you have to dig a little harder to find it, or bypass the temptation of the easy app story or the next alcohol-fueled blowout featuring JayZ.

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In a panel on how women present themselves in the digital age, Huffington Post editor Margaret Wheeler Johnson asked, “Are you the same person online as you are in real life?” The question speaks to the bigger concern: When there are so many social media avenues to present yourself, how do you maintain authenticity and manage your identity (to borrow a current buzzword)? Some would argue that upkeep is unnecessary.

Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook has famously said,

You have one identity. The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly … Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.

But while much of the discussion around Zuckerberg’s comment has had to do with the “lack of integrity” bit, the feminist bloggers on the panel “Sex, dating and privacy online” responded instead to the idea of a single identity, stating that in this culture, multiple online identities (and a separation of public and private) are still necessary for most.

For an example of how fraught this area is for women or those who might have social reasons for staying anonymous, just consider the times. The rights of gay men and women to get married are leading to vitriol from the right, and top-rated radio hosts get away with calling a grown woman who takes birth control a slut. So while Zuck may have been accusing folks of lying if they maintain separate identities, the issue is far more subtle when seen from the fringe (or rather, the perceived fringe).

And because of handy features like single sign-on and integrations across social networks, it is increasingly hard to control data about yourself, as the EFF points out. One solution, from writer and panelist Rachel Kramer Bussel’s perpective? Reveal everything.

By blogging, tweeting, Instagramming and otherwise frankly being as public as possible, there is no longer anything to hide. It’s kind of like preemptively telling your boyfriend that embarrassing childhood story before your parents spill the beans. And of course, we have plenty of tools at our disposal to do this: Already, there are 600 tweets posted every second.

Blogger Twanna Hines pointed out, though, that this method is a privilege. For those with professional jobs who might not want their personal lives (in her context, sexual lives) broadcasted or who are concerned with safety, the online world can be a place of paranoia and fear.

The other choice? Reveal nothing. On a different panel, artist Zach Blas brought us back to the idea that identity is located in the face. His new project “Fag Face” disrupts the concept of biometrics by creating a mask that is an amalgamation of faces to protect your individual face and, therefore, your identity. His art piece could be considered a literal interpretation of a recent movement Blas talked about in the session, where people Like and Friend everyone, so that it is impossible to tell what they actually like or who they are friends with, thus maintaining anonymity.

That hits the heart of the discussion: In a world where companies are pushing people to expose everything, do we have to make a choice between authenticity and anonymity?

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Corinne Day

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In an interview at South by Southwest, Path CEO Dave Morin told me that the mobile social network doesn’t ever want to use algorithms to change the stories that appear in your feed. Instead, the app is all about telling a story of what’s happening with your friends in a chronological order. That said, Morin expects that there will soon be an explosion in the amount of personal information that users share.

It’s not just things that users self-select to share, like photos — which now make up about 30 percent of all messages shared through the app — or the music that they’re listening to at any given time. Path launched an API with the version 2.1 of its app, with Nike as the first partner to take advantage of it. Through the API, the Nike Fuel Band will share users’ information with the app, keeping track of movement in real-time and even allowing your friends to cheer you on as you run.

In our discussion, Morin hinted that more quantified self-type applications may come to Path, in turn bringing more personal data online. The key to ensuring the signal is high, Morin believes, is to limit the number of friends someone can actually have on the service.

Unlike Facebook, which lets you friend what feels like a near-infinite number of people, Path is purposely limiting how many people you can connect to. When Path first launched, that meant you were limited to 50 friends on the service. Now, that limit has been increased to 150, which is a value associated roughly with the maximum number of people we can maintain stable social relationships with at any given time, according to British anthropologist Robin Dunbar.

“We want to connect you to the right 150 people,” Morin told me. Once you sign up, it uses information from your existing social graph to attempt to highlight those people with whom you’re most likely to want to share that personal data with. It also means not letting you friend people willy-nilly. Once you’ve reached your limit, you have to delete someone before adding someone else.

Importantly, Morin acknowledges that it won’t be the same 150 people that you choose to share with throughout the lifetime of the app. Like real life, some friends might fall out of favor, while new ones will enter your social sphere.

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A group of folks concerned about sustainable foods have built the seeds of an open food database hosted on Heroku, with the code pertaining to it located at Github. The group, which gave an awesome panel at South by Southwest in Austin, consisted of a restaurateur chef, someone from an urban gardening movement, someone from Code for America and someone who rates sustainable restaurants.

So far, they have created a database of 1,000 foods and hope to have 7,000 that folks can access via an API. “It’s absurd that everyone has to build a whole new list of foods to build an app,” said Anthony Nicalo, CEO of Foodtree, and a chef.

I was excited about the effort since I wrote about the idea last April, and again in July, inspired by recipe site Gojee. After playing with that and other apps such as Food on the Table, I realized I needed a single way to identify food from one app to another. This is a challenging task for a variety of reasons, with one being that the makers of many of the processed foods that Americans eat, or even prepared foods served in restaurants, are composed of a multitude of ingredients (some are food and some are not).

However, the Open Food folks have sidestepped the issue of processed foods by only including whole foods in their database. But to make such a database useful for a wide variety of people and purposes, I think things like Coke or Twinkies will have to be included. For example, the power of Open Food data extends beyond food apps to calorie-counting apps or even budgeting apps.

Even those that might be threatened by such a service recognize the utility of an open food database. Alex Rosenfeld, the CEO and founder of Tasted Menu, an app that shows restaurant diners what the best foods are on a given menu, thinks the idea is a good one. He is an example of an entrepreneur who has built his food company first by hiring a bunch of Culinary Institute of America chefs to build a taxonomy for 6,000 foods and their associated tags.

He texted me after the panel to say that his primary concern was that the effort be cautious about how it tries to attribute things to restaurants. For example, while he might gain value from starting from such a database, his real value is the taxonomy his team has created around dishes. So, if one checks out catfish po’ boys on Tasted Menu, his app could use the Open Food data for the catfish or the breading, but his app will also note that the food is Cajun or Creole, fried, a sandwich and other things that will help real users figure out where they want to go and what they want to eat.

But establishing a basic nomenclature for the web is a great way to turn the heat up on food apps.

Image courtesy of Flickr user gabriel amadeus.

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Worldwide expansion continues

Uber is rolling out to between 15 and 20 cities worldwide this year — that we already knew. And just last week Uber officially took the wraps off its Los Angeles service, which had soft-launched about a month before.

So which cities are next?

Uber Toronto is set to go live later this week — a fact that was actually leaked to some Uber users when an email meant for launch partners went astray and was sent to regular members. The Uber Toronto service begins this Wednesday, March 14, also about a month after the startup first began testing in that market. The next city after that will probably be Miami, according to Kalanick, but no plans have been finalized yet.

Using big data to choose cities, and to prepare for launch

In part, Uber decides which cities to launch in based on the number of people who have downloaded the app and check for cars before the company has a presence. It counts those as a vote each time it happens, Kalanick said, telling the company which cities have the most demand.

Not only that, but when people check for cars, it also tells Uber a lot about where it should pre-position vehicles before it ever actually starts operations in a city. For its New York launch, Kalanick said he first assumed that Brooklyn would be where cars would be most needed, due to the dearth of taxis that go there. But heat map analysis showed that there was a lot more demand in downtown Manhattan then elsewhere in the city.

The Los Angeles launch also provided a huge logistical issue: How do you cover a city that is 600 square miles with the promise of a five-minute car pickup? It turns out that most requests happen in certain pockets of Los Angeles — from Santa Monica and Venice to Beverly Hills and Hollywood — which form more or less a U-shaped curve around the city. Knowing where to expect activity allows Uber to focus on busy areas, while leaving most of the city uncovered most of the time.

What kind of car do you want?

One of the more interesting changes to the Uber experience could be the ability to choose what kind of car you want to be picked up in. Most Uber drivers are currently either using standard Lincoln Town Cars or Escalade-type luxury SUVs. But Uber users currently have no idea what kind of car is going to show up when they use the app. That means that sometimes you get more car than you need and sometimes not enough.

Uber is trying to figure out how it can deal with this by enabling users to select the size of car they will need, whether it be a mid-sized sedan, a Town Car or an SUV. Kalanick said he could also see a different pricing structure, based on which car a user elects to use. But the problem in doing so is two-fold: How do you segment up inventory of vehicles? And how do you maintain the simplicity of the Uber user interface?

Launching that type of feature could operationally be a challenge. After all, what happens when there aren’t enough of one type of vehicle to meet demand? For the smaller vehicles, Uber could send an SUV instead, but still charge the user at the rate they selected. But too much demand for SUVs could become an issue if that’s what users ask for.

The bigger problem could be in changing the user interface to accomodate that type of feature. Today, the Uber app is incredibly simplistic: Users need only press one button and a car comes their way. A shift away from that one-click approach could potentially lead to consumer confusion, and giving users too much choice could actually work against it.

What else is in store?

Uber’s South by Southwest on-demand BBQ promotion — in which it has pedicabs navigating through downtown Austin, delivering barbecue sandwiches — shows the potential Uber has beyond just disrupting the transportation industry. That’s something that Kalanick is thinking about when he looks to the future, for sure.

“FedEx delivers packages in a day, but Uber delivers a Town Car in five minutes,” Kalanick told me. “And once you can deliver a Town Car, you can deliver pretty much anything.”

It’s all part of what he calls building an “urban logistics fabric” — charting the way things flow throughout a city and using that data to create efficiencies. That doesn’t necessarily mean Uber is going to get into the delivery business, but it leaves a lot of interesting possibilities for the company.

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So far, Tiny Review has only been available on the iPhone, and it’s pretty much a free-for-all — users have gone beyond the basic review functionality to use the app as an all-purpose meme generator. But what if Tiny Review were open to all through an HTML5-based web app? And what if it targeted the South by Southwest crowd specifically?

To answer these questions, the tiny startup team behind Tiny Review has ported the app’s functionality to the web, with a meme generator called TinySX focused solely on the intricacies of SXSW, or what they call “Geek Spring Break.” The idea, according to cofounder Melissa Miranda, is to “take a real event with real people, and see what memes emerge.”

It’s a lot of fun, and early entries have been pretty interesting. So grab a photo and play with it yourself.

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1: The social aspect is big

Many participants, and they varied from undergrads to folks in their 40s and 50s, came to see what others are up to, and to network.

Marsh Sutherland, CEO and co-founder of Referral Bonus, loves hackathons because, he said, they make his “brain tingle and adrenaline pump,” and he bonds with new friends. And, he said, “I help create something I’m proud of.”

Andres Douglas, a Boston-based developer who has participated in Facebook hackathons, Music Hack Day and TechCrunch Disrupt events, agreed that it’s all about the people. “It’s great getting to work with new people. It’s kind of like dating. We came with two [team members] and added two here,” he said.

Aaron Roth, a senior at the University of Pennsylvania, said he loves the enforced focus of the event.  ”You’re working with a team to create something new and great, in a short period of time, and work continuously through the night,” he said.

2: Don’t underestimate the thrill of adventure

There is huge appeal in trying out new things.  ”If you’re a developer, this may mean learning a new language, using a new set of APIs or building a product that’s different from your ‘day-job,’” said Jeffrey Peden, founder and CEO of CraveLabs, a Cambridge,Mass.-based maker of social network marketing tools. The same motivation holds with marketers and sales people, he said. They all want to try something new.

Cheryl Tom, whose day job is as a Montreal-based director of front-end development for CrowdTwist.com, said she welcomes the opportunity to hone her skillset and add new expertise. This weekend she learned Facebook and Twilio APIs.

3: They’re great talent pools

Several attendees that are already in established businesses use hackathons to check out prospective programmers and developers. Said Peden: “There is no better way to evaluate folks than to see how they go through a 30-hour, start-to-finish marathon of trying to build something — and it’s not something you can just show up at the end to discover.”

Several attendees said they’d received feelers from prospective employers.

4: They’re addictive

Nearly every AngelHack attendee seemed to be a hackathon veteran.  Sutherland has participated in several Boston Startup Weekends and is helping to build a similar event in Spokane, Wash.

Patrick Leahy, a business student at Penn’s Wharton School, may be an extreme example. On January 13, he was in the 48-hour PennApps 2012 hackathon. On February 27 it was the 72-hour paid hackathon for Wharton MBAs. This weekend was AngelHack. And Tuesday he’ll be aboard the StartupBus Boston for a 73-hour traveling hackathon to South by Southwest.

5: People like prizes

For all the talk of camaraderie and collaboration, free pizza, Red Bull and beer — there are also prizes. Teams get cash money for the best use of APIs from sponsors — Microsoft Bing, Box, Viximo, Twilio — and others.  There’s a free Geeks on a Plane trip. And tickets to the upcoming GigaOM Structure:Data conference.

Asked if the prizes mattered, Penn’s Roth said: “Oh, yeah. Big time.”

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