Jambo

This company is starting one. (Or at least fuelling one.) They make a little green box that has a pc-card slot and a wifi antenna. You stick your EVDO or EDGE PC card into it and now you have an ultra-portable high-speed WiFi hotspot that works anywhere you have cell coverage. (Some people have even hacked solar-powered versions.)

Carriers don’t like this very much. :)

“The premise is one person buys an air card and one person uses the service, not an entire neighborhood,” said Jeffrey Nelson, executive director for corporate communications at Verizon Wireless.

I think the VP at Junxion says it best: “We believe we’re creating an opportunity for the carriers. It may not be entirely comfortable for them right now, but we hope we can get to a point where we can collaborate with them.”

Instead of thinking in terms of 3G *versus* WiFi, Junxion is seeing the opportunity to bridge 3G *with* WiFi. WiFi has the massive install base and low cost, and 3G has the wide-area coverage. Too cool.

This may very well be my next cell phone. What’s missing? Notably, a GSM, or CDMA module. There is no way to reach a traditional wireless carrier on this device. Its a smartphone, without the phone (otherwise known as a PDA, albeit a fancy one). It has WiFi and Bluetooth. Combined with a bluetooth headset + Skype-In/Out/Voicemail, it becomes a very capable telephone.

A new carrier, Skype is in town. And it’s a whole lot cheaper than the Verizon’s/Cingular’s/Sprint’s of the world. (Try 2 cents-per-minute to China. And 2-cents per-minute while you’re in China for that matter - no roaming fees). Plus free in-network calling - really free, as in $0.00, not as in “free Verizon-to-Verizon if you give us $60/month”. Your whole phone bill could drop by an order of magnitude, even if you throw in an all-you-can-eat hotspot plan.

Charles is experiencing life without a GSM connection right now, and he’s actually not missing much. His phone died while traveling, but even so, he’s been very reachable. He can call me, I can call him. Granted, WiFi doesn’t have the coverage of GSM, but 95% of the places that I make calls, I’m sitting under a hot-spot of some sort (either at home, work, airport, etc). I’d be fine with those other 5% going to Voicemail.

Why not?

(I’m half-kidding, half-serious about this being my next cellphone. Of course, I realize there are tradeoffs in convenience if I were to really ditch GSM, but isn’t it interesting that its POSSIBLE? right now!)

Its true, VoIP changes everything. And maybe not just for the obvious reasons. Sure, its cool to make voice calls over Skype, and “Voice is just another data-stream” and “packets are packets, whether email or voice” and all of that cool stuff, but let’s dig deeper.

Let’s look at the handset vs. the carrier. What’s going on here? Its been a convenient marriage until now - handset manufacturers supply handsets to the carriers and they both win. But there is a tension emerging between carrier and handset. Opportunity is opening up on the handset to do TONS of cool new stuff - massive attention being given to wireless mobile devices. Convergence devices. Things like smartphones, wireless entertainment devices, lifedrives (maybe even wireless ipods).

Carriers are terrified of this stuff.

They are terrified of user control and off-network connectivity like wifi and bluetooth. These technologies empower the user, not the carrier. They just want to keep selling ring tones (and other content).

Verizon’s 1000’s of customers had to petition Verizon to offer a Treo smartphone. Many carriers cripple the bluetooth functionality on their phones so that you have to send files through THEIR network, not the local bluetooth network. Carriers have veto’ed the itunes phone - scared of too much local connectivity not passing through their network. Any app that you try to bundle with a carrier-based handset must go through a very long approval process. Red tape. Slow. Telecom-time.

Meanwhile the rest of us live on Internet-time. Rapid development, rapid deployment. There is a massive growing backlog of mobile apps - apps that cannot be deployed without carrier approval. These apps are looking for a platform that affords much quicker time-to-market. A platform that can move on Internet time. What happens when you don’t need a carrier in order to make a voice call? What happens when you can dial as easily as you can play a PSP game with your friend over WiFi? VoIP is the catalyst for a new breed of mobile apps that will spread on Internet-time instead of Telecom-time. Its coming, brace for it.

Is a laptop more than just a portable desktop computer?

Take a look at this post. Peter raises some interesting points. From a cultural standpoint, the laptop has evolved well past just being a portable desktop replacement.

“Now that laptops outsell desktops, it’s worth treating them as interesting and distinct entities that warrant special consideration as a mobile device. What, say, are the tools for the working-at-coffeehouse types? For the airplane commuters, the road warriors, the college students, etc.? What makes sense for a laptop to have that would have never made sense in a desktop? Why don’t we have location-awareness built into laptops?”

From Jambo’s perspective the laptop is, of course, a mobile device. We are creating a tool for these new mobile users which adds a social dimension to laptop usage and to public hotspots.

Charles’ discussion below, about the parellels between web content and mobile content is interesting. The Internet’s ability to deliver compelling content was grossly overestimated and it’s ability to connect people to each other was equally underestimated. Are we doomed to repeat that lesson with wireless??

Even WiFi is currently being thought of simply as a means of delivering content. Yes, it is a great way to access the content of the Internet, but that is a short-sighted view of the technology. Its short-range wireless capability to connect to other users nearby, gives it the possibility of creating something far greater than just a means to access content: Community on a much needed local level.

If you’re 6′4″, laptops don’t work well in coach (esp a middle seat). I finally have a decent way of getting some good work done on a plane - this. Combined with my bluetooth-enabled pocketPC, its the perfect companion for an airline tray - just the right size. Charles and I flew out to CA this afternoon, and since we weren’t able to sit together, we Jambo-ed the whole flight (seat 31E to 18F)! I actually double-violated the “no-wireless” rule by not only using a Jambo ad hoc WiFi connection to message with him in-flight, but I also used bluetooth so I could chat using a full-size keyboard with my pocketPC. Even though the airlines tell you not to, the FCC says its ok, so, hopefully I’m not going to jail.

Before we flew, I had lunch with my dad. He was telling me about a flight he took to Europe back in 1991 and he brought his PowerBook 100 out, and used it during the flight. The captain heard that someone was using a computer in-flight and came back from the cockpit to see it! Things have definitely come a long way for in-flight computing.

“When the world is flat, you can innovate without having to emigrate”.

I went to hear Tom Friedman speak the other day, about his new book The World is Flat. First of all, I strongly reccommend this book and I’m only 10 pages into it. The premise is that in the last four years, the international playing field has been leveled (flattened). He states, “It is now possible for more people than ever to collaborate and compete in real time with more people on more different kinds of work from more different corners of the planet and on a more equal footing than at any previous time in the history of the world.”

I realized just how flat the world is, when I turned my cell phone on in a remote fishing village in Brazil and it worked identically to the way it does in the US. I could make and receive local US calls, exchange SMS messages, connect my laptop to the Internet wirelessly (Bluetooth -> GPRS) and generally behave as though I were home in Texas. Brazil was flat. The world is flat.

72% of business travelers surveyed by Broadreach said that they would be more likely to ride trains instead of cars or planes if trains had onboard WiFi. 78% of them said that they would use WiFi on trains if it was available. The longer the ride, the more interested they were in using WiFi, since most business travelers are already doing work on the train. Broadreach is currently working with a number of firms that run trains in the UK to have WiFi installed in over 700 trains within the next four years. This would be a great idea for the US market as well, particularly for the Amtrak trains in the Northeast Corridor and the commuter trains into New York City, both of which get a lot of business travelers/commuters.

http://wifinetnews.com/archives/003358.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3729583.stm

Market Research firm Ipsos-Insight estimates that 134 million people worldwide have tried some form of wireless technology, which is roughly 40% of all people with Internet access.

http://wifi.weblogsinc.com/entry/3464826503758126/

With the increased number of WiFi hotspots, and the ability to make phone calls through the Internet (VoIP), expect to see more and more phones with WiFi included. Imagine being able to make calls for free or close to it anytime you are in a hotspot, where it is at home, at a hotel, in the airport, or at a Starbucks. Motorola, IDT Corp, Vonage, SpectraLink Corp, and Vocera Communications, all have or plan to release WiFi enabled phones by the end of the year.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/ap/20040510/ap_on_hi_te/wi_fi_phones