Georg Pagenstedt blogs about Martin Versavsky’s talk at the Medienwoche Berlin Brandenburg. Lots of interesting stuff in there especially that fon is now burning through 500k EURs a month and are looking at having 500.000 Hotspots in 2008 to break even. I am so happy to be part of the community and am already running two routers here in Cologne. And hey, I beat Georg in my Linus-Fonero number. He’s in the 20s and I am in the 10s, 13095 to be exact. The post has a picture of Martin holding up the Fonera, their own router coming out soon, by the way.
Update: Another bit from this Spiegel Interview. Martin expects each FON Hotspot to earn them 1 EUR a month on average. Very sound numbers I think. All in all it is nice to see an experience entrepreneur talk about numbers a little bit, finding out how he convinced people of his idea at least partly.
Technorati Tags: Bill, FON, Fonera, Linus
Monthly Archives: August 2006
A bit more about FON
The future of cars
This is what I would call this article. It’s about a company that has refitted a BMW Mini resulting in the following (in short):
- Maximum Range of 1500km
- Top Speed of 150mph
- 0-60mph in 4.5 seconds
- 4 160 horsepower electric motors, one in each wheel
Just read the article and check out there site here for more information. The wheels have full time ABS by the way, be it accelerating or braking, which the motors do all the time, recharging the batteries when braking. 
If you sell the car like this, please tell me.
Technorati Tags: Automobile, BMW Mini, Hybrid, Mini, PML
The Power of dabbledb
I already knew about dabbledb and it’s an interesting concept but a little hard to get an idea of what is possible with the application. Now they have a demo out there called Digg into Dabble and it’s amazing. It really shows the ease and power of the system. I really have to look closer into this.
Technorati Tags: Dabble, Dabbledb, Data Analysis, Data sources, Digg, Digg Power, Top Users
Here it Goes Again
Great video. Nice song actually. Check it out.
Technorati Tags: Music, Video
Amazon Elastic Compute Could aka EC2
I wrote some time ago about my first AWS Billing Statement, already commented by Marshall from TechCrunch. As they now wrote themselves Amazon EC2 is currently being trialed by a small number of long-time Amazon Web Services customers.
Thankfully, my last post about their S3 service seems to have put me in that camp and I am now free to play with the new EC2. Actually, I think it might be a good decision on their part, because I might really be using this for Ormigo some time in the future, dependent on how different services pan out.
The idea to easily deploy a new server without worrying about it too much is a good one and having a scalable infrastructure is too. The biggest problem really is that it’s still a bit expensive. With Host Europe i can get a 2.8 GhZ Xeon, with 2GB of Ram and 2 73 GB SCSI drives with Raid, including 5TB of traffic for 199 EUR, or I could go with Hetzner and take an Athlon 64 3700+, with good setup and unlimited bandwidth (throttled at 10MBit/s after 1TB but can be increased again in 250GB increments for free).
The question is how easy the servers can be managed, how easily DNS can be handled with possibly changing IPs or crashes, how fast the boot and what the network speeds are from Germany. But all in all, in the corporate space, this sounds very interesting.
Technorati Tags: Amazon, Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Bandwidth, Hetzner, Host Europe, Ormigo, Servers
OpenBC hires new Designer
Ok, not really true as such, but if you check out Christian Jung’s Blog where he blogs about his design ideas for OpenBC, then I’d say that Lars should really get a move on and get him onboard. With the recent design contest that OpenBC is running, a lot of people are submitting more of the same. Christian seems to be thinking about their business model and making the site something that reflects the business model and the way people use the platform. A dream come true for an entrepreneur. But it does seem that OpenBC already noticed.
Technorati Tags: Design, OpenBC
Collaborative Investments
TechCrunch writes about socialPicks, a web service that is a community of investors that work together to find the best picks. This is actually something I think all the companies that have user portfolios like OnVista need to get into. Remember that these web sites have huge amounts of portfolios of their users and could easily find the best performing ones. Building a special investment fund based on that seems to me to be easy enough. You could analyze best performance of those people that are trading on at least 1 share a month (only active accounts) over a given period just to start with. If you then take into account social interactions, ratings of companies, ratings of portfolios, best-of lists, discussions, digg like features, you are really getting into a new kind of portfolio that people might even want to mirror.
Technorati Tags: OnVista, Stocks, Stocktrading
Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle by Gartner
Some days ago Gartner has released their 2006 Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle and there is some interesting stuff in there.
As a side note, I had the same graph placed in front of me for coding languages in an argument by consultants to change a web platform from PHP to Java in my last job. Thankfully I, with the help of the team, wasn’t easily convinced and we stuck with PHP back then. I am still sticking with PHP now, even though I could go Ruby, but for now I am happy with the decision.
Anyway, back to the Gartner report. To start with, here is the hype cycle:
The general idea is that at the top of the curve, the hype around something is amazingly high and it needs to go through a valley of disillusion to be really adaptable by a large enterprise. All in all, this is not necessarily incorrect, but obviously depends on how far out there the company is and how far it sees technology as something of its core capabilities.
So one big part of all of this is Web 2.0. Social Network Analysis is obviously one thing and I have to agree that with reasonably big sets of data, this can get really interesting. Ajax is the second item on their list and they also see a lot of potential there, but I like this part:
High levels of impact and business value can only be achieved when the development process encompasses innovations in usability and reliance on complementary server-side processing (as is done in Google Maps).
One thing that is also important here is that with the current hype around frameworks and splitting code in a Model-View-Controller fashion again, the general way of working with JavaScript is a real problem. A lot of controller parts are suddenly back in the view and you don’t want that. Having been able to get some very good developers on board at Ormigo, I am happy to say that we seem to have found a good solution though. Timo has already posted about it on Cake Bakery. What Timo and Dirk developed is a model-view-controller system for Ajax, with the help of things like JSON and jQuery. Our templates are now fully free of JavaScript and the entire Ajax Framework is being tested via Unit Tests. Of course there are still some rough edges but things are moving along nicely and we are thinking about putting the entire system on Google Code or something similar in the not too distant future.
Management Tip: Buy your coders all the books they want to read because there are some interesting things bound to happen, especially if you have people that have a thirst for knowledge.
Collective Intelligence is another big term that Gartner throws around and boy do I believe it to be true. While we often think about speed to delivery, which might make a command control system more worthwhile, many people forget that software is more like art. There is not one way to do something, but a million and diversity of opinion might slow you down in the short term, but make you more agile in the long term. Additionally, switching costs on the net are close to zero (in the absence of interlinking users for example and allowing for internal networks to build) and that means that the small things make a difference. These small things mean that you need collective intelligence to find them. You need to rely on your users and be able to adapt fast. Uncertainty is a big thing that management will have to deal with in the future. I’d like to quote somebody here:
People are not afraid of change. They fear the unknown. – Dick Brown, chairman CEO of EDS
With no clear view of what will happen next, the known will have to become that things are unclear. Change needs to become part of the development system. For that, you need the right people.
If you don’t like change, you’re going to like irrelevance even less. – General Eric Shinseki, Chief of Staff, U.S. Army
Mashups are also mentioned but I believe their importance to be rated as moderate only because the idea of the mashup is so diverse. I sure as hell can host my static files on Amazon S3, get Maps via Google, Geocode via a third party, score data via somebody else and … . You get the idea. That’s a mashup if you want.
All in all, the future is continuing to be interesting, but I am repeating myself.
Technorati Tags: Ajax, Change, Collective Intelligence, Gartner, Mashups, Uncertainty, Web 2.0
Private Surfing
Tired of governments knowing what you do online? Try <a xhref=”http://www.relakks.com/?lang=eng” mce_href=”http://www.relakks.com/?lang=eng”>Relakks</a>, or rather wait a bit to try Relakks.
The idea is that they offer a special VPN Server over which all your network traffic will be handled, encrypted. The interest in the last few days has been so big though that they had to close registration to get more VPN Servers and handle payment a little bit more efficiently it seems. Congratulations to them!
Technorati Tags: Privacy, Relakks, VPN
