Bits : Frontline, Silicon Valleyâs Wireless Startup, Folds
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Frontline Communications has gone out of business. A payment of $128 million to proceed with its bidding in government spectrum auctions was due last week.
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Mobile ESPN, a start-up cellphone  company backed by Walt Disney Co., will announce as soon as  Thursday that it is closing down operations, The Wall Street  Journal reported on Thursday.
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(InfoWorld) - Backers of a massive wireless network for California's Silicon Valley have yet to build promised test networks or complete a model agreement for local governments, but at least one executive expects those to be finished by year's end. The project has slid past its original scheduleÂ and still faces negotiations with about 40 municipalities spread across a 1,500-square-mile region, even as municipal wireless runs into tough times in neighboring San Francisco and elsewhere around the U.S. But despite gloomy media reports, organizers are promising results soon. A model agreement should be completed in the fourth quarter, said Anne-Marie Fowler, a principal at SeaKay Inc., part of the Silicon Valley Metro Connect vendor consortium that will build the project. That deal will be the template for customized contracts with each city. Proof-of-concept networks in Palo Alto and San Carlos should be completed around the same time, she said. The 1-square-mile test networks will first be open to city governments thinking about participating in the plan and then be available to the public for 60 to 90 days, she said. It's a brave forecast for a project that at one time was expected to start rolling out in January or February of this year and is still on paper. Participants blame ever-changing technology and the complexity of hammering out a deal covering multiple technologies and as many as seven different services. But in a shaky market for municipal wireless, any delay can cause jitters. A report in the San Jose Mercury News earlier this week said the initiative was in danger of collapse. It quoted Russ Hancock, chief executive of Joint Venture: Silicon Valley Network, the nonprofit group organizing the initiative, saying the group was ready to scrap the project. Not so, according to Seth Fearey, vice president and chief operating officer at Joint Venture, though he added that the group is always looking at how it can move the project forward and thinking about alternatives. Hancock was misquoted, he said. The group is still in talks with Metro Connect over the basic agreement they will bring to individual cities, and there are only a few things left to be resolved, he said. "It's up to the Metro Connect team to make this thing happen," Fearey said. "We're pushing them as hard as we can." Once the model agreement is drawn up, Metro Connect will take it to local governments and customize it for their needs. Cities would grant rights to facilities such as light poles for mounting radios, after which Metro Connect will be able to offer residents a subscription service. ButÂ the network is envisioned as more than just Wi-Fi.Â Metro Connect is considering pre-WiMax wide-area wireless, special networks for public safety and transit, and environmental sensor networks. Cisco Systems Inc. and IBM Corp., along with network builder and operator Azulstar Inc., make up the rest of Metro Connect. The Silicon Valley plan is different from failed deals such as San Francisco's, executives said. Metro Connect won't just build a network and count on advertisers or residential subscribers to support it, Fowler said. "We don't ask one revenue source to carry the whole day," she said. Many cities have expressed interest in paying to use the network for communications in the field and specialized functions such as meter reading, she said. The consortium is approaching schools and corporations about buying services, too. There will be a free ad-based service, but if ads don't support it, the service can still survive, she said. Some critics have said the plan, estimated to cost $100 million or more, is too ambitious. Craig Settles, an independent municipal network consultant who has worked with some cities in the area, has said the organizers should have started out with fewer technologies for a few targeted applications to build interest, then expanded later. But Metro Connect's Fowler says the complexity and scale, though they have caused delays, will generate enthusiasm. "We realized we had something bigger than what we thought," she said. "I would, of course, like to have started earlier, but ... I would not have wanted to start with a smaller vision." Â
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More than a thousand people who phoned in for assistance too often -- at least in the company's eyes -- find themselves suddenly cut off from wireless service.
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A plan to blanket San Francisco with Wi-Fi fell apart last year, but now a startup named Meraki says it plans to deliver free, ad-supported Wi-Fi access in in the city.
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A few big brains in Palo Alto want to ease the corporate stranglehold on mobile communication. By Robert Strohmeyer from Wired magazine.
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A Silicon Valley startup aiming to catapult wikis into the mainstream and transform the editable Web sites into an application development platform has attracted a flood of interest for its product beta.
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Avi Shechter, co-founder and CEO of Fringland Ltd. (Fring), could be on to something big with the launch of a cheap Internet-based phone service that runs over mobile networks. But the Israeli entrepreneur could also be in for the fight of his life with mobile phone network operators determined to protect their cash-cow voice business from virtual service providers.
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With EarthLink no longer pushing into the municipal Wi-Fi business, the wireless network it previously wanted to build in San Francisco likely won't happen.
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Circuit City is phasing out the sale of T-Mobile wireless service as it prepares to focus on launch of Verizon Wireless stores within its own walls.
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ZDNet&#39;s survey of IT professionals in August kept Wired &amp; Wireless on top for the 18th month in a row. Airespace, a Silicon Valley start-up that sells telecommunications gear, has won a partnership with IBM
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After the FCC dismissed applications to use a bandwidth segment as a nationwide wireless network, the future of the band is uncertain.
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A local startup is selling technology to enable the average person to set up and manage their own WiFi wireless network. BeeTelecom Inc.
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An ambitious plan to turn  millions of desktop computers into hubs of wireless Internet  access has been shelved after PC makers balked at the price of  the feature, Intel Corp. INTC.O said on Monday.
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By Cox, John  Cisco, IBM and two partners have been awarded the contract to build a public 802.11-based wireless mesh that is intended to blanket most of the Silicon Valley peninsula of California, some 1,500 square miles.
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eEye Digital Security founder Marc Maiffret has left the company and plans to launch a new venture, developing next-generation mobile phone software for the corporate world.A noted hacker, Maiffret co-founded eEye in the late 1990s with Firas Bushnaq and had served as the company&#39;s CTO, overseeing a staff of about 30 engineers. Bushnaq stepped down as CEO in 2006, and Maiffret said that he&#39;d started thinking about leaving to pursue other startup ideas earlier this year. &quot;I&#39;d been doing it a long time,&quot; he said Wednesday. &quot;I started the company when I was 17 and had been doing it the last 10 years.&quot;The 70-person company, based in Aliso Viejo, California, has been going through some bumpy times lately.&#160;Bushnaq&#39;s replacement, Ross Brown, was fired earlier this year, and eEye also recently shut down its Orange County sales offices.Maiffret said that this had nothing to do with his departure and that he&#39;s leaving eEye in good shape, however. &quot;Today, it&#39;s pretty much an engine that&#39;s been running itself,&quot; he said. He stopped working for eEye in September but didn&#39;t announce his departure until this week. eEye representatives could not be reached immediately for comment, but Maiffret said that the company has not yet found a replacement CTO.He will be doing some consulting work and developing the new software for Windows- and Blackberry-powered mobile phones, which he expects to unveil in the first quarter of next year. &quot;Everybody has these miniature computers in their pockets, but nobody is doing anything interesting with them,&quot; he said.Although the new product will not be security-related, Maiffret said he expects to remain involved in the security research community, where he also plans to do consulting work as a self-described &quot;CTO for hire.&quot;&quot;I&#39;ll probably be more involved in [security research] now,&quot; he said, &quot;because being CTO of eEye didn&#39;t leave me with a lot of personal time to do hands-on research.&quot;
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IT officials from three California cities detailed their experiences Monday with trying to set up municipal wireless networks, efforts that have yielded varying degrees of success.Speaking during the MuniWireless conference in Santa Clara, Calif., IT executives from Anaheim, San Francisco, and Los Angeles noted development plans for these networks, both for public services and to bridge the digital divide between those with Internet access and those without."Really, it?s been the applications that have been the driving force," said Robb McIntosh, information services manager for Anaheim.The city is in the process of building wireless links for public safety, public works, and other services. EDS runs the city's IT, McIntosh said. Meanwhile, Anaheim's citizen Wi-Fi network, intended for resident access to wireless capabilities, is 70 percent developed, McIntosh said.San Francisco's now-stalled efforts to build citywide wireless links were inspired by the digital divide, said Chris Vein, San Francisco CIO."[Bridging this divide] remains the driving force for us today," Vein said.Plans had called for a mesh network to cover all 49 square miles of the city. EarthLink was supposed to provide the system but that plan did not come to fruition. "Now, we're kind of stepping back, taking a big breath and looking at what we have to do next," Vein said.Anaheim's choice for paying for its citizen wireless network involves selling subscriptions. In San Francisco, payment options such as subscriptions or simply using taxpayer funds are still on the table."We're taking a look at everything," said Vein. "We haven't ruled anything out."Los Angeles also cited digital inclusion as its reason for seeking a wireless network, said Mark Wolf, assistant general manager for the city's Information Technology Agency.Wolf stressed the hurdles in having to provide wireless coverage to a city spanning 464 square miles and extending from the ocean to the mountains. Los Angeles has been doing Wi-Fi on a small basis and has been learning from cities such as Philadelphia and San Francisco. The plan is at a crossroads, Wolf said."It?s a good thing that it's at a crossroads and not cross hairs, in the sites of a gun," said Wolf.?Aside from the altruistic goal of digital inclusion, Los Angeles also is equipping its police force with sophisticated wireless equipment from Motorola. Video capabilities allow police to see a scene before arriving; other features include license plate-scanning, mobile digital cameras, and facial recognition systems.In other talks during Monday's general session at the conference, Padmarsee Warrior, CTO of Motorola, stressed that multiple wireless standards such as Wi-Fi and the newly approved WiMax standard will continue to coexist. While Wi-Fi is limited to covering hot spots, WiMax is good for covering large areas."The right kind of debate for the industry to have is what combination of these technologies provides true value to public safety, to governments, to municipalities, to consumers, to enterprise, to corporations, etc., as the world becomes mobile. And the world is becoming mobile," Warrior said.Speaker Esme Vos, co-founder of MuniWireless.com, emphasized applications for wireless. These included making wireless capabilities available on public transit so people can get their work done while commuting, traffic management, and energy management. Cities such as Riverside, Calif., Tuscon, Ariz., and Milpitas, Calif., are utilizing wireless to provide city services, she said.With cities doubling in size every five years but without the ability to double the number of municipal employees, cities are looking to leverage wireless, Vos said.