CEDX

Long Island Business News Podcast - At C Level

Shortly after Labor Day this month, I was interviewed by David Reich-Hale of LIBN for their podcast series featuring Long Island CEOs.  This was right around the time of the Muni about face by the big players, and left a bunch of juicy questions to answer, vis-a-vis the prospects for Long Island Wi-Fi.  It's about a 10 minute listen, and the first time I've been able to hear myself on a professionally produced podcast. Does everybody else hate the way they sound to themselves? 

New wifi hotspots in the Garden State

UrbanHotspots is pleased to announce our new partnership with City Beans Coffee and Hudson City Caterers, providing complimentary wi-fi at their Harborside and Gateway Center cafes.  With a purchase, customers get one hour of access, using a complimentary card  given out by the cafe staff.  UrbanHotspots customers can use their existing accounts, or prepaid cards.   The Harborside location is convenient to the Bergen-Hudson Light Rail Line, and the Gateway Center location is on the third floor.

Helping Community Wireless

I installed this antenna at Robert Wagner Park, waaay downtown in Manhattan, in Battery Park City.  NYCwireless is establishing a new hotspot for the park, and the BPC Parks Conservancy wanted an antenna that was somewhat harmonious with the architecture of the building, so I took an 8 dBi omni and gave it a little character, trying to make it somewhat compatible with the lightning rod that preceded it on the roof.

I guess we have a fight on our hands

For folks that want to increase the availability of broadband, this is a true call to arms.  It's one thing for a company to compete on the basis of price and performance, it's just beyond the pale to try to snuff out competition in this manner.  The way this plays out will be a real test of whether our government has been purchased, lock, stock, and barrel by the big lobbies.

More innovations from Pulver TV

I was pleased to be in the studio audience today for the first ever live tv show to be seen on Facebook.  Jeff and his guest Kathryn Jones discussed the prospects for live internet TV and used the occasion to test out the new Tricaster, which certainly raised the production values, and adds a whole new set of tools available to folks that want to do their own high end content.  I had a blast hearing all about the background of JerusalemROCKS, and Kathryn's project, Synchronis.tv  Jeff never ceases to amaze me with his perpetual motion.  I'm seeing that sleep is overrated in this web 2.0+ world.

Surprisingly, Eater doesn't have a clue about wi-fi in coffee shops

In a really snotty post about the opening of CooperBricolage, Eater shows its pretentiousness and cluelessness full bore.  Instead of examining the concept of opening a co-working space where people are encouraged to take up residence at tables and work together, and providing an open environment to do so, they ragged on the place and suggested that people that wanted coffee and wi-fi head over to a coffee truck that has an ev-do to wi-fi router or a starbucks.  Part of the problem that cafe owners have with wi-fi is that people who want to work in a cafe type environment and use wi-fi take up too many tables for too long, and they wind up losing revenue or having to rush customers out or turn off the wi-fi.  CooperBricolage provides a community space for these people, a super-low rent incubator.  The Cafe Fuego space is unused during normal working hours, so it's a win for the Fuego people, because they get to bring in some more revenue during a time that they would not otherwise.  The rates that CooperBricolage charges are pretty reasonable, especially in light of the comparison that Eater makes. 

If one of these co-working types were to setup shop at a normal cafe, the cafe owner would lose more than the daily rate that CooperBricolage charges, because they would lose many table turns during the time the co-working type was there, especially if a flock of them descended.   CooperBricolage is not in the cafe business, it's in the incubator business, and reliable wi-fi is a necessity there, the cafe environment is an amenity, just as wi-fi is an amenity in a cafe.  It represents an excellent alternative to being chased out of a cafe for taking up too much space for too long.   It seems that Eater has a good eye for the front of the house, but no clue about what goes on in the back, the business end of the business.

I tried to post the following comment on Gotham Gal's blog entry announcing her Angel Investment in Curbed, of which Eater is a part, but comments are closed on that blog entry.

Joanne, you might want to use your position to educate some of the folks at Eater about the concept of co-working spaces, the kinds of places that may help Fred find some new portfolio companies.  They were pretty clueless about the concept when they wrote this post. It would have been good for them to illustrate the  difference between a co-working space and a cafe with wi-fi.  The post crossed the line from hip to snob, and an uninformed snob, at that.  Be an Angel and take some of the Devil out of Eater.

Open Source Hardware - Bug Labs Solution Providers

In Brad Burnham's post on USV's portfolio company Bug Labs, he talks about the kind of device he'd like to build out of a bug and modules.  It's a very sophisticated tool that would be more likely a system created for a military application, but it sounds feasible to build with the initial platform.  The result might look like Louis Tully's helmet in Ghostbusters, and I'm not really buying the line that individuals will be the ones creating products built on the bug platform, but if they can ship what they've described, it will open up a whole new marketplace for small systems integrators to serve their clients with custom hardware and software solutions that would have been too prohibitive for their customers to build previously.

I didn't say no, I said that e-Path can be successful if they make some changes

In Glenn's write up of this story in the Long Island Business News where Alison Snyder interviews me about the prospects for e-Path's success in building a Wi-Fi network on Long Island, I never said that they couldn't do it, I just outlined some of the pitfalls and challenges that await them, and made some suggestions on what they should do in my opinion to raise their chances of success.  They're going to have an uphill battle for sure, there's no disagreement about that.   I don't think that metro wi-fi blankets work, and that to be a successful wireless ISP, you have to have a mix of service offerings, over and above wi-fi access, which is what I wrote in the comments to Glenn's post.  At the end of the story, where Alison says I discredit the claims of e-Path's partnership with Cisco and Keyspan, I was questioning the proposition that Keyspan Communications and Cisco will be clients or anchor tenants of the network.  From the outside, it looks like Keyspan Communications and Cisco will be suppliers to e-Path of fiber backhaul and equipment, respectively.  I don't see how e-Path will get revenue from Keyspan Communications and Cisco.  LIPA, the electric utility, may be both a customer and supplier to e-Path, because they can use the network connectivity for telemetry from their substations, and they will collect rents from e-Path from the poles that e-Path has to mount it's equipment on.  If Keyspan Communications was a bit more forward thinking, they would already be customers of the existing WISPs on Long Island, using existing POPs to expand their footprint, but they don't do that.
I also think that the selection of e-Path was the correct one for the counties, because it puts no public funds at risk, and if they flop, they flop, no harm done.  My firms did not bid because we didn't see the ability to have a successful business case without anchor tenancy, and at the time, the big boys with the big pockets were pursuing the job, and we figured that it wasn't even worth the time to work on a bid because one of the big guys would be picked.  e-Path turns out to be the smart ones, because they were one of the last ones standing at the end of the bid  process, and now they have valuable leases to county property, gratis.  Delivering wi-fi with them will probably not be profitable enough for sustainability, but they can be used as a starting point for additional offerings, and that's where they can be a success.

Getting mentioned in the press is a great thing, because you get your name out there, but you don't have control over the ultimate end product.  Blogging is a terrific communications tool, because you get noticed and googled when you're in the paper, and you can use your blog to amplify and clarify your message. PR, Marketing, and Viral Marketing are different things from each other, and David Hornik of August Capital explains this well, and hilariously,  in one of the podcasts from VentureVoice's Entrepreneurial workshop.

Long Island Wi-Fi prospect update article

Alison Snyder of Long Island Business news interviewed me for her update article on the Long Island Wi-Fi project's prospects in light of the recent changes in the muni wi-fi market.  This project is a no-lose proposition for the counties, because they make no investment in the system, only allowing access to county property and having no commitment to buy services. The recent turmoil in the muni wi-fi market benefits e-Path because expectations have been so severely lowered, that whatever modest success e-Path is able to achieve will be viewed highly.  I think that in order to succeed, e-Path needs to roll out more offerings than outdoor wi-fi access, but it remains to be seen whether they can raise enough money to even build out their test networks.

LIMBA - Plug in Hybrid Vehicle Systems from Odyne

Dana DeMeo, Director of Engineering for Odyne came to speak at LIMBA this morning.  Odyne is a Long Island based company, recently gone public,  that develops and manufactures hybrid propulsion systems for vehicles in classes 6, 7, and 8, which are trucks of over 20,000 pounds.  It was great to see a passionate speaker from a company on an exciting path.  Dana explained the manufacturing process for how trucks like garbage trucks, bucket trucks, and  buses get built.  A garbage truck gets built by ordering a chassis from a manufacturer such as Navistar, putting an engine and transmission in, and then going to what's called an upfitter, such as Nassau-Suffolk truck to put the ultimate body on the truck, whether it is a garbage truck, bucket truck, or delivery truck.  Odyne offers truck builders an alternative drivetrain that works with standard assembly procedures.  It gives highway mileage performance to trucks that have local routes with lots of starts and stops.  The most efficient state for any system is called homeostasis, where all inputs and outputs are in balance.  They've developed a system that gets these types of vehicles close to those operating characteristics.  The estimated ROI for building a truck with an Odyne system is 3 to 9 years based on the cost of oil four years ago.  The vehicles charge overnight, and draw power down from the battery banks during their route.  There is an auxiliary engine on the vehicle, but it exists to charge the batteries, and kicks in when the discharging profile of the battery makes it necessary to start putting energy back into them so the vehicle can finish its route.  Even though it is more expensive to use an Odyne system, there are big direct cost savings in operational characteristics, especially in fuel and maintenance costs.  For garbage trucks, the regenerative braking system, reduces wear dramatically, and makes the trucks tremendously quieter.  The pollution profiles of Odyne equipped vehicles are also super low.  The engine that charges the batteries can be a traditional gas engine, or it can be a CNG or other alternative fuel burning motor.  The engine only exists to provide electrical power.  Another friday morning well spent at LIMBA, with a dynamic speaker from a young Long Island based manufacturing company, remarkable.