Category: Computers

Business Week online has an interesting article about over-hyped WiFi:

A year ago, Sean Marzola was the CEO of one of Silicon Valley’s hottest Wi-Fi startups. Embedded Wireless Devices in Pleasanton, Calif., had set out to design chips for Wi-Fi (wireless fidelity) access points — “hot spots” — that permit wireless Internet access within a radius of 300 feet. But about 18 weeks before EWD’s first product could start being manufactured, investors pulled the plug. Last August, EWD quietly closed its doors, leaving Marzola an entrepreneur without a home.

Note to venture capitalists: If you’re funding WiFi chips, you’ve been had. Intel, Broadcom, TI, Intersil, and Samsung will own this market, not foundry-less startups. You’ve been warned.

This is the piece in The Register that got Tim Oren so upset he slammed it without linking recently:

Japanese VC and tech socialite Joi Ito [Hates reading books – Lunch – Lunch – Segway – Lunch – Lunch – Fawning Parody – World Blogging Forum!]) has spent months hyping the couple who started the Movable Type weblogging software Ben and Mena [buys banjo]Trott.

The cute, but strangely synthetic twosome were showered with advanced publicity in the form of flights and lunches and “party games” (the latter is filed under “Humor / Leadership and Entrepreneurship” ), before Ito’s company invested in Movable Type last week.

Will we be able to trust Ito’s ongoing research analysis about his investment?

We shall see.

It seems to me that extra-cozy relationships between Venture Capitalists, Investment Bankers, and analysts are central to Spitzer’s investigation, but you’ll have to read both articles to see why that’s worth saying.

UPDATE: Tim Oren responds (in comments) with this:

My point is that said clueless journo segued straight from a screed about Elliot Spitzer and Wall Street analysts into carping about Joi’s investment. A public market analyst who presents some facade of impartiality has an obligation to act in accordance, which some number of them obviously blew off, no quarrrel there. Venture capital is a different function. Our fudiciary duty is to our investors. There is no public market in our holdings or funds, and you couldn’t trade on a plug from me or Joi if you wanted. A bit of free PR to the buying market (or other VCs) is one of the values we can provide to both portfolio companies and investors, and there is no violation of public trust in doing so. If there was any risk, it wasn’t to the public, it was to Joi’s fund itself since there might be some plausible circumstances it which his postings would draw competitive investment bids, a fact which he pointed out.

Come the lucky and wished for day when one of our investments goes public, we will have the same quiet period obligations as officers and other shareholders. Until then, we’re not violating any obligations by waxing enthusiastic about either markets or companies, though I do believe that being explicit about what we’re doing is both honorable and reasonable (the main point of the post you linked).

Trying to jump from bent analysts and i-banks, to an investment by a first round fund (Iocated in JAPAN, for pity’s sake), is such a distortion that is has to be willful. Said journo either doesn’t understand the industry, or doesn’t give a damn about accuracy. I smell an ox being gored or an agenda being pursued. As I said, that doesn’t exactly impart credibility to his other writings.

Fair enough on the facts. Thing is, anyone reading Oren’s “Due Diligence” blog has no doubt that Tim’s a VC and not a journalist, analyst, or industry pundit, but it’s much less clear to readers of the Ito blog what Joi’s business is. Ito writes about lunches with journalists, hosts “happenings” in support of “Emergent Democracy”, and issues garden-variety leftist attacks on capitalist influence on Japanese government, so it’s not entirely unfair to hold Ito to journalistic standards; he may not be one, but he plays one on the web. That being said, his praising of Six Apart followed by his investment in the firm doesn’t offend me on “conflict of interest” grounds. It looks to me more like a case of buttering up the principles by promising to make them into stars before walking off with a huge chunk of equity for a song, but that’s simply speculation on my part as I don’t have the facts to back it up.

One thing that is clear, or should be, is that Ito’s a smarmy character with a history of association with questionable, bubble-icious ventures such as Infoseek and PSI. Why a maker of personal blogging software needs venture capital at all is an open question in my book as well.

The Register takes perpetually angry law professor Lawrence Lessig to task for bemoaning the imminent death of the Internet:

What’s dying here isn’t The Internet – it remains as open as ever to new software and new ideas. Remarkably, the consensus that upholds the technical infrastructure survives, in the form of the IETF, despite self-interested parties trying to overturn it. What’s dying is the idea that the Internet would be a tool of universal liberation, and the argument that “freedom” in itself is a justification for this information pollution. It’s probably reached a tipping point: the signal to noise ratio is now too low.

I have to go with the Register on this one, even though the Professor claims to be misunderstood, and mumbles something about an “End-to-end Internet”, which apparently affirms a belief that the Searls/Weinberger World of Ends paper was somehow credible. But it didn’t actually represent a proper understanding the Internet in the past, present, or future for reasons I’ve already beaten to death.

Bill Thompson’s article on the O’Reilly Etech hive mind is killer, and a must-read for anyone who’s interested in the intersection of politics and technology. Here’s a teaser:

It seems that the A-list may soon have their first real-world political success, with their campaign to deregulate radio spectrum in the US – a move that uses a poor technological argument to push forward an assertion about the most efficient ways to allocate resources that would be remarkably familiar to any Reagan-style voodoo economists left over from the 1980s (7).

“Voodoo technology” is a completely apt description of David Weinberger’s recent work, which is generally echoed uncritically by the fellow tech-topians who headlined Etech.

The evil Bush-hater Lisa Rein has video and audio files from the alleged Warblogging panel at the O’Reilly Etech conference on her blog, but I can’t recommend them to anybody who knows what a warblog actually is. The discussion is moderated by spiky-haired peroxide punker Xeni Jardin, who was dedicated to keeping the discussion mired in personal trivia such as whether consumers want to know more about the personal lives of journalists. The star attraction, Stuart Hughes, is a BBC producer who lost a foot in Northern Iraq and talked at great length about his semi-conscious decision to share the details of his physical therapy on his blog. Hughes confesses that he didn’t know what a warblog was until after his personal journal had been linked by some blogs.

Seldom do you get deep insight from a panel at a computer show talking about social issues, but this was lame even by the most generous standard. Had the panel been more inclusive – open, that is, to actual warbloggers – it might have been different, but O’Reilly wants to keep geeks in the dark about these things.

The Register reports some very good news:

Howard Carmack – the Buffalo Spammer – has been arrested and charged in New York for four felony (i.e. criminal) and two misdemeanour counts relating to his alleged fraudulence in obtaining Internet access accounts to send more than 825 million spam emails.

That’s one down, several million to go.

David A. Sylvester of the Mercury News notes a quiet stock market rally may signal the recovery’s underway:

Since the beginning of the year, the tech-dominated Nasdaq composite index has risen 13.8 percent, better than the 6.1 percent of the broad Standard & Poor’s 500 Index and 3.2 percent for the Dow Jones industrial average. Friday, the Nasdaq rose a solid 2 percent to end the week with a gain.

More important, individual stocks are on a rampage. The stocks of 24 of the 150 largest companies in Silicon Valley have risen more than 50 percent since the beginning of the year, including five that have doubled.

Will this last? Or could the rally fizzle into another bear-market bust?

Another indicator is a relative dearth of venture capital, noted by George Avalos in the Contra Costa Times

The Bay Area’s market to finance fledgling companies plummeted to fresh lows during the first three months of 2003. The grim trends emerge from data supplied by the authors of the MoneyTree Survey. The MoneyTree is a quarterly review of venture capital financing in regions such as the Bay Area.

Privately held companies in the Bay Area raised nearly $1.3 billion during the first quarter of 2003. That was down 38 percent from the nearly $2.1 billion that private firms raised in the region in the January-March period of 2002.

The two trends aren’t contradictory, because a glut of VC-backed startups, all doing the same thing, ensures that nobody makes money. Remember Cerent and all the me-too optical networking companies? Something similar has already taken place with 802.11 chipset companies, the corpses of whom will soon litter the Valley. When customers start buying PCs and networking gear again, it will be from established companies, not from startups. So this is a different kind of recovery, after all.

This is cute.

Atheros has added higher speeds and hardware-based compression to their WiFi chipset:

NETWORLD INTEROP, LAS VEGAS, April 29, 2003 –Atheros Communications, the leading developer of advanced wireless LAN (WLAN) technology, today announced the availability of Super G” and “Super A/G” capabilities that deliver 90Mbps TCP/IP throughput for 802.11a/g and 802.11g Wireless LANs. These capabilities include a new 108Mbps data rate design for 11g and 11a, real-time hardware data compression, standards-compliant bursting support, and dynamic transmit and modulation optimizations. Super G and Super A/G are fully backward compatible with conventional 11b, 11g, and 11a products and are activated by a simple software driver upgrade for products already on the market.

This is impressive, if the range is anything useful.

Unstrung reports that Airgo Networks has raised $20M in a third round, bringing the total to something like $52M. They say Airgo uses multiple antennas to extend range and “increase capacity” of wireless networks, and speculate that the founders’ experience might be a plus:

One thing Airgo might have going for it is experience — as CEO Greg Raleigh has already created and sold a wireless technology company.

But they don’t delve very deeply into the question of how relevent this experience might be to what Airgo’s building, since Airgo won’t really say. I used to work there and I know what they’re building, but I of course can’t talk about it due to all the NDAs I had to sign and all the meetings I had to go to before I was able to figure out what they’re building and why. But I can say that I don’t expect their investors to make out on this deal, for reasons I will gladly explain when they make more product details public.

All in all, I think the Vivato product is more technically impressive, Vivato’s execs have much more in the way of relevent experience, they haven’t had massive layoffs, and their product actually works.