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Thursday, September 12, 2002 |
Based on the 'Beyond the Browser' posting from yesterday Kevin Werbach asks 'Where are the applications?'.
Great question! We're starting to see tons of exciting stuff happening out there. Of course, for those who have been following the kinds of content and applications that have been built on Flash and Shockwave over the past few years, you've seen a glimpse of what we expect to be a much more common experience.
On the consumer side, here are a few interesting examples:
On the corporate side, we're just at the beginnings of seeing MX used for traditional business applications, but this will almost certainly be out and visible in the coming months and year. For developers out there, tell us about your apps?!
10:25:37 PM 
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This article is timely. For a variety of reasons, the FCC is allowing a couple of large telco's to bail out of their 3G spectrum licenses. Verizon and T-Mobile are able to back away from what was a $16 billion obligation. While the purported reason is to give some relief to the debt and revenue-poor telco sector, it underscores the fact that 3G is unlikely to be how we get our wireless broadband internet.
Let's take the cash and put it in WiFi broadband everywhere!
10:00:52 PM
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On the WiFi (802.11b) theme, I continue to ask myself if we're nearing a real mainstream inflection point for WiFi. The rapid growth in WiFi hotspots nationwide reminds me of 1993 or 1994 when a wide range of small, mostly regional commercial Internet Service Providers emerged. Large online services (AOL, CompuServe, Prodigy, etc.) were sniffing around but hadn't really moved into the ISP business; most of the telco's were marching around talking about iTV and 500 channels, and missing the boat. Skeptics said the commercial ISP world would take years to emerge, but within a couple of years it exploded into ubiquitous, affordable ($19.95/mo) dial-up access.
It feels similar. The grassroots excitement and momentum is clearly there. The availability of integrated 802.11b hardware is there. And now big telco players and emerging regional and national startups are starting to invest heavily in a build-out.
Will we see ubiquitous, affordable WiFi Broadband everywhere in two years?
9:53:37 PM
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Boston Globe on Boston hot spots: Solid reporting on the business and practice of Wi-Fi hot spots in Boston. Nice to know that Boston has Michael Oh, kind of the east coast Rick Ehrlinspiel. Rick showed up at Starbucks/T-Mobile's rollout announcement to hand out cards to the press and set up a Surf and Sip hot spot next door; Michael Oh used a portable Wi-Fi system set up in a car to offer free access across the street from a Starbucks on Labor Day. [80211b News]
It's been fun to watch this emerge. Over the past 6 weeks I've been a Boston WiFi Nomad, experimenting with different locations. It continues to blow my mind how quickly this is emerging. While lots of folks like to downplay T-Mobile and the Starbucks deployment, it strikes me as transformative --- for the first time, in an extremely popular and mainstream venue, we're seeing significant marketing and branding (look on the door of any Starbucks) for WiFi Internet.
9:43:22 PM
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It was funny to see Nick Bradbury pick-up and link to my blog. For the uninformed, Nick single-handedly created HomeSite, the worlds most popular HTML text-editor.
Nick is surprised it took so long for me to blog. I think that it gets confusing for people in companies who also have public faces; questions naturally arise about what can and can't be said, etc. Believe me, I have PR monkeys on my back all the time. Interestingly, though, it looks to me that the blogspace creates a much richer form of dialog than traditional journalism and public relations ever could.
9:08:11 PM
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© Copyright 2004 Jeremy Allaire.
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