TechFlash, a Seattle blog which covers tech startups, held an event which featured Mike Arrington
This lively panel discussion featured Bill Bryant from Draper Fisher, Hillel Cooperman from Jackson Fish Market, Serena Glover of Twango, Andy Sack of Founder’s Co-Op and the founding director of TechStars Seattle,
In this 3-minute video interview we get the story on Web 2.0 startup GoMiles from co-founder Michael Komarnitsky.
GoMiles was formed seven month ago, and is an applicant to the new “Seattle TechStars“ program for early-stage startups. GoMiles has a slick, automated solution to ease the pain of tracking those pesky, vexing travel mileage program accounts.
There are a number of nifty, surprise benefits which flow from using this “Mint.com” like site for tracking travel reward mileage accounts.
Startup Trek TV had the opportunity to interview the co-founder & CEO of Digital Music analytics startup “Next Big Sound” at their headquarters in downtown Boulder, Colorado.
This startup came together in Chicago during the spring and summer 2008, and moved to the Boulder area after entering and winning a spot in the competitive and selective “TechStars” program, which attracted 600 companies to the competition for ten slots (we’ll report TechStars shortly).
Alex’s story of how he went from being a College Student to a Venture Capital funded, post-grad entrepreneur is quite the informative story. He gave up a lucrative
Yesterday afternoon Startup Trek ventured to Sausalito, CA to visit with senior Keiretsu Forum member Mr. Max Shapiro. Max is a Keiretsu Forum enthusiast, and CEO of innovative human resources firm PeopleConnect.com
Business School Seniors in the School of Business at California Polytechnic University (San Luis Obispo CA; “Cal Poly”) enrolled in “Business 454″ are tackling the pre-launch planning for a new digital media production firm which will launch in January 2010 as “StartupTrek.TV”
The 36 business school seniors in the Orfalea School of business will gain hands-on experience working in a tech startup company, as it plans a high-profile launch on the web, in advance of developing cable and broadcast television content relationships.
I am attending Henry Blodget ‘s “Startup 09″ conference in lower Manhattan today. Business Insider has done a great job of orchestrating the debut of a first-rate, high level technology industry business conference.
Thanks to Henry Blodget (CEO of Business Insider, Julie Hansen (COO) and the rest of the team at Alley Insider for inviting me to this debut tech event.
In this Networld+Interop trade show interview I visit with Ryan Woodings, founder and ‘Chief Geek’ at MetaGeek of Boise, Idaho. MetaGeek is an impressively bootstrapped wireless instrumentation startup founded by former Cypress Semiconductor employees in Boise Idaho. They have created a product line of innovative, impressive, low-cost, portable “micro spectrum analyzers” for use on the Wi-Fi and cellular ISM (Instrumentation, Scientific, and Medical) bands at 900MHz, 2.5 and 5GHz unlicensed Microwave spectrum.
A new era of mobility seems to be arriving, with the success of CradlePoint’s versatile family of “WiPipe” (TM) 3G-uplinked Wi-Fi routers. The photo at right shows me using a CradlePoint CTR-500 3G+Wi-Fi router in my car.
To make a long story short, I was driving into San Francisco on a beautiful, sunny Saturday morning when suddenly traffic snarled and backed up on the freeway — as tens of thousands of SF Giant fans streamed into SF for the third game against the New York Mets.
So… I took the nearest exit in defiance of my Garmin GPS’s directives, knowing that it’s powered up my onboard pair of 120VAC onboard power inverters.
The CradlePoint doesn’t require AC power, since it is shipped with a cigar-lighter style (12V automotive style) 3G-uplinked CradlePoint Wi-Fi router, and proceeded to work online for an hour or two, until well after the traffic cleared. Remeber that old saying: “Whereever you go, there you are”? Well, that day is ARRIVING, with 3G. If Clearwire + Sprint’s “CLEAR” WiMax service, or maybe Verizon + AT&T’s LTE 4G services arrive to improve things — great. But in the meantime, that day is HERE.
I have also been using CradlePoint devices to connect to my Vidtel video phone (it has a hard-wired Ethernet port) to make Video phone (Video-enabled SIP/H.264) calls from the car. In it’s standard configuration, the Vidtel picture is pre-configured with an exchange, number, and area code; registered on the server, and defaulted to stream H.264 (MPEG4 audio+video) at about 300kbps compressed (200kbps video + 100kbps audio). The video can be backed off to about 70kbps.
For my 3G uplink, I’m paying $30 extra to go from 5GB capped to unlimited ($100 vs $70) 3G plan from Sprint, the only carrier to offer an “all you can eat” 3G data plan (thanks, Dan Hesse!). The problem is (e.g.) using a Vidtel videophone for only 10 minutes a day could put you up against all three carrier’s 5GB limit.
I’m definitely rooting for Dan Hesse and Craig McGaw to have a $100B IPO to fund “the new Clearwire”, and build out the first nationwide 4G application. That could happen, if the market holds up, as IPO’s have started to “slowly” happen again. Clearwire and Sprint are rolling out WiMax in Boise, Portland, Las Vegas, Baltimore, etc – so it’s starting to happen.
I can see that the future technology roadmap for the USA, once we have both Metro and Rural areas area bathed not only in 3G Wireless Broadband, but in WiMax Microwaves providing last-mile access to a new era of faster broadband, for applications like this one, and much better – per Dan Hesse and Craig McGaw. But politics, money, lobbying, and sheer momentum is preventing the USA from modernizing it’s broadand infrastructure. Technology will in the end, prevail – but it may take many more years than it should have. And in this sort of thing, timing is everything.
As John McQuillan once said (~1997) at his NGN (next generation networks) onference, the internet represents, potentially, the “death of distance”. And here, in 2007, is one very good example of that profound phenomena.