Marcelo Toledo

Businesses should hold off on investing in WiMAX until the technology is more widely deployed across the United States and until vendors produce more dual-mode cellular/WiMAX handsets, says a new report from Gartner Research.

Overall, Gartner projects that while WiMAX networks in the United States will start operating commercially over the next two years, WiMAX itself will remain a “niche technology” that will best serve emerging or rural markets that don’t already have access to broadband services. One of the big factors that WiMAX has going against it, says Gartner, is that WiMAX networks won’t be able to provide nationwide coverage for quite some time, as Sprint and its Clearwire partners will only begin launching commercial WiMAX services for the first time this September. Thus, says Gartner analyst Phillip Redman, businesses will have to wait until coverage extends to many more cities than the ones that will be covered by the end of the year.

Additionally, Redman says that enterprises that want both WiMAX data and cellular voice capabilities will have to wait at least a couple of years until more dual-mode handsets are produced. Since WiMAX is starting out as a data-only service, Redman says that unless businesses want to rely on VoIP for their mobile voice needs, they should look elsewhere until WiMAX devices are upgraded to include cellular coverage.

“In competitive markets, WiMAX is going to have a very tough row since it’s starting from scratch,” he says. “But WiMAX still has great opportunities in different markets. I think it makes sense in developing markets and developing economies that don’t have broadband comp from wireline carriers.”

Sprint currently plans to offer its first commercial WiMAX services in September in Baltimore, with launches in Washington, D.C., and Chicago scheduled for later in the fourth quarter. The company says other major metropolitan areas shouldn’t expect WiMAX to come to their cities until at least next year.

From: http://www.networkworld.com/news/2008/071808-wimax.html?fsrc=rss-wireless

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“Jaiku is now a part of Google. For more details about Jaiku and Google, see the Q&A about the acquisition.

Jaiku’s main goal is to bring people closer together by enabling them to share their activity streams. An activity stream is a log of everyday things as they happen: your status messages, recommendations, events you’re attending, photos you’ve taken - anything you post directly to Jaiku or add using Web feeds. We offer a way to connect with the people you care about by sharing your activities with them on the Web, IM, and SMS - as well as through a slew of cool third-party applications built by other developers using our API.”

Anyways, it’s a micro blogging tool I’ve been trying lately, it’s still closed and I have a few invites, if anyone is interested, mail me.

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I remember the first time I wanted to install Linux, 15 years ago, I had a Compaq laptop where Linux would never work, but I didn’t know that, so I tried over and over again, I knew so much the slackware installer steps that I could do it without looking at the screen.

One day I got tired and changed the approach, sold my laptop and built my desktop computer with the pieces I knew would work, it was the fastest computer I ever saw with Linux working like a charm. After this day, I never stopped using Linux.

And that’s how the market share for Linux started growing. Prior this I used windows and it was funny how people made fun of it, everybody used, but looked like everybody hated, something was wrong.

We all hoped with the time Microsoft fixed all those problems and worked on making our life easier and not boring, but for some reason it simply didn’t, they committed serious mistakes year after year, and this ain’t new, read this email sent by Bill Gates, what they did after 2003?

Now Apple is being recognized for it’s operating system and graphical interface that just works, makes our life much easier then anything available in the market, any person that try it, will be happier.

Being in the market committing mistakes after mistakes without a competitor to take advantage of it was easy, now we’ll see some action!

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Computex is one huge event, all over Taipei you can see signs of it, everyone knows about it and looks everyone is going to it. We went there all days, we passed for every single booth, I gave so many business cards that I had to make more. If you or your company needs electronic equipment’s this is definitely a good way to start.

The event is divided in five sections:

• Communications products
• Peripherals
• Mega trends
• Media
• Display and Digital Entertainment

I believe that most of the opportunities are for OEM, companies that know how to build very well, but don’t know or don’t want to sell directly to the end user. One famous company that passed through this is Asus, they have part of the company selling OEM for big companies, but they also have their brand Asus, which is getting so big and so strong that is making front with companies like HP, Dell, Samsung, …, so what they did? Spin off the company, because of course you can’t compete with your own client.

Taipei is a very interesting city, it’s very hot, but very cloudy, rain almost everyday, people are warm, they are always very friendly and when they understand English they are so kind trying to help you everywhere.

Food is singular, the first time we chose a restaurant we made a mistake, asking for the set, I’ve never seen so many weird things in my life, unfortunately I am not used to it and I couldn’t eat most of it, so I am more cautious with food now. 

Tomorrow heading to Amsterdam, I’ll definitely miss Taipei, Zàijiàn!

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So much to say, so little time to write. It’s sad, but you have to arrive 2 hours before any international flight, plus, in my city to get in the airport secure, you need at least 2 hours, this sums 4 hours, plus 10 hours of flight to Amsterdam, then 8 hours to stretch a little bit, little walk in red light street, eat something, shower and 10 more hours to Bankgok, 1 more hour waiting, then the final 3 hours to Taipei, and when you arrive you are 12 hours ahead… Computex already started and it’s a boom, I am saving every picture and text to post here soon, stay tuned.

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Tomorrow I’ll be going to Taipei, only a day of traveling and 12 hours ahead, I’ll be in the Computex talking with our hardware suppliers and possible new suppliers. We have big plans for the next years and there is definitely the best place for buying well.

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You have no internet and you need to find out what is the closest hotspot. What do you do? Imagine an offline hotspot locator, a simple application that will provide fields for searching and a grid to display the results. No matter where you are, if you need to know where is the closest hotspot, just open the application, filter a little bit and voila!

If you think deeper about this, you’ll see that it can be used in many situations, so making it a rock would be a waste of time, latest couple hours I’ve been writing the initial spec of this project, which must be flexible enough to be useful for anyone interested in providing up to date offline content to the user.

Resources:

• Multi-platform (Windows XP/Vista, Mac, Linux, Phones, PDAs, …)
• Display/Search fields customizable
• Everything is remotely updatable, information never gets old
• Easy to whitelabel and release for your business
• Free Software

If you have comments, please email me.

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Opening in great style, like usual, the day before the event was the fourth Quiconnect’s dinner, where everyone from the market has chance to meet, I had the pleasure to meet and chat with great people.

Day after, the event, divided in two parts, speeches in the Mobile Broadband Congress and the exposition in The Wireless Event, both being used for only one reason, meeting people, nobody really cares about the speeches much, they just want to sit somewhere, make meetings and close deals.

It was very common to see people sitting all day long doing meetings and not even getting to see the speeches or the exposition, for me, that’s what really worked, where I could meet people/companies to explore new opportunities.

I would think about changing it completely, the level of interest for the speeches are decreasing, mainly because it’s not chosen with focus in interest, it’s all about money, if you pay, you talk, which is a terrible model, normally events are either about scale or quality, and if you want to make money from the speakers you are dead, good speakers charge, not the opposite.

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Martin said… “Revenues at Fon last month were slightly over 100K euros. Gross margins are over 70%. Cash burn which was over a million euros during December was down to 480K euros in April and is going down to 350K euros in June. This puts us on target to be profitable in the last quarter of 2009. Number of registered Foneros is at 830,000. Number of registered hotspots is 332,000 and of active hotspots at anytime has gone up to 212,000 around the world up from 145,000 in December. Last week we added 6000 hotspots and we are on target to have 300K hotspots by year end. Headcount is 61 employees around the world which is remarkable for a company that is managing the largest and fastest growing WiFi network in the world. Our top countries are UK, France, Japan, Germany, USA, Taiwan, Spain and Italy.”

I doubt it, not even with a miracle Fon will be profitable in last quarter of 2009, I won’t even bother to show you the math, it’s so obvious, the fact is that by that date, the money will be almost gone… hurry up Fon!

Read my last article about this subject: FON Raises $9.5 Million - To buy their grave?

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According to PC World:

EarthLink next month will shut down its Philadelphia Wi-Fi network, the flagship of its now-dashed municipal wireless initiative, and then remove it from the city’s street lights.

It’s sad to hear this, means that yet, Muni Wi-Fi, is just a dream and no one found a model that works. What I want to know is, WiMax is trying this same model, what’s gonna be different? Why is it going to work?

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