Friday, February 11, 2005

Internet TV viewer iTube adds QT integration, more. East Bay Technologies on Thursday released iTube 1.3, the latest version of its software that enables you to watch more than 1,500 channels of Internet-based TV programs, Webcams and music video channels. This upgrade features integration with QuickTime, resulting in the addition of over 100,000 QuickTime files to iTube's Internet Video Search function. It also includes the ability to switch into full-screen mode as well as several bug fixes. This is a free update for registered users; the full software is US$24. Mac OS X v10.2 and Safari are required. [MacCentral News] 12:44:40 AM

WS-Security in the Enterprise, Part 1: Problem Introduction. WS-Security doesn't exist in a vacuum--in an enterprise, it must work with many other systems, which means dealing with other access control systems and potential incompatibilities. Denis Pilupchuk begins his series on integrating WS-Security and enterprise systems by spelling out where the problem lies and what pieces need to be created to resolve it. [O'Reilly Network Articles] 12:43:14 AM

Stewart Butterfield on Flickr. Not even a year old and still in beta, Flickr is a revolutionary photo storage, sharing, and organization application boasting roughly 270,000 members. Richard Koman catches Flickr CEO Stewart Butterfield for a few words on what has made Flickr so revolutionary and where it may be headed. [O'Reilly Network Articles] 12:41:56 AM

Wi-Fi Blackberry. Hey, don't get excited--this new Blackberry doesn't have cell access: The Blackberry 7270 has Wi-Fi built in as well as a VoIP client, but there's no cellular radio inside, reports Techworld. Instead, it's designed as a campus-wide enterprise tool that combines voice and messaging. Campus-wide pager systems have been widespread and there's a growing use of VoIP over Wi-Fi; this is a neat combination of both. But it means some executives will now have to carry two Blackberrys.... [Wi-Fi Networking News] 12:41:14 AM

Point and Counterpoint on Municipal Broadband. Mobile Pipeline runs two politely contrasting views on municipal broadband: Now this is the kind of civil discourse that acknowledges facts on both sides of an opinion that I've been hoping for. Mobile Pipeline contrasts the "municipal broadband is costly and inappropriate" opinion of Dave Molta with the starry-eyed idealism--wait, that's hard-bitten realism--of David Haskin who argues that municipalities are stepping in where incumbents aren't willing to tread. (Disclosure: Haskin writes me checks in his capacity of editor of publications that I write for at CMP.) Both authors point out that the NMRC report has a funding/disclosure bias, but both also tackle the issues within. Molta argues that the report was being attacked for its authors' connections; I'd take the opposite point that the report would have been better received with less furor had a picture been painted instead of I and other journalists having to track down the connections. Molta notes, "But beyond the cries of conspiracy lies some wisdom about technology, market competition and politics." I agree: I wrote a long post analyzing the best-founded aspects of the report. Molta writes, "Building out metro-area Wi-Fi networks that deliver per-user throughput in excess of one megabit per second would likely require the deployment of thousands or tens of thousands of access points." That's fortunately incorrect. He hasn't studied the Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi-like metro-scale systems that are in actual use in many cities already. There are definitely scaling issues, but we're not talking about building clouds of Wi-Fi access with ubiquitous rates within the cloud for roaming users. Rather, this is much more like the WiMax point-to-multi-point standard. Talk to Tropos, PacketHop, Belair, and SkyPilot, and then we can revisit this statement. (I've talked to two of the four and will be writing more about them all in the future.) Talk to San Mateo, Oklahoma City, Chaska (Minn.), Buffalo (Minn.), and Corpus Christi, and then get back to me. Molta ignores the issue of service and availability. Incumbents work best with competition. A lack of competition causes them to focus infrastructure building into other areas. When I spoke with Tacoma Power about their fiber-optic/coax network, they said they were dragged kicking and screaming into offering broadband services because they couldn't convince the incumbents to provide the services their communities were demanding. This is a statement made by virtually all municipalities considering or who have built fiber, coax, and wireless... [Wi-Fi Networking News] 12:40:16 AM

Best VC Blogs. A number of my readers alerted me to the fact that Fast Company has a survey on the best VC blogs. Considering that VCs can be quite competitive and my cohorts Brad and Jeff are already stuffing the ballot box,... [BeyondVC] 12:38:47 AM