Innovation Toronto » internet

Global Dreams for a Wireless Web

innovation2 — Wed, 28 May 2008 02:22:48 +0000

SITTING on the porch at Finca Torrenova, his 800-acre retreat on this Mediterranean island, Martin Varsavsky ticks off the credentials of the group of Internet entrepreneurs finishing lunch at a nearby table.

“He has 40 million uniques, he has 50 million, and he has 8 million,” Mr. Varsavsky says, referring to the number of visitors to Web sites owned by his guests — many of whom are also business associates and have joined him for several days of brainstorming about the digital future.

These days, commercial victory on the Internet is all about scale, and Mr. Varsavsky, a 48-year-old from Argentina, can be forgiven for speaking longingly and in detail about his peers’ achievements. No stranger to success — he has had a tidy crop of new media and telecommunications hits since the 1990s — he is still struggling to bring his newest Internet venture to fruition.

Three years ago, aiming to create a global wireless network, he founded FON, a company based in Madrid that wants to unlock the potential power of the social Internet. FON’s gamble is that Internet users will share a portion of their wireless connection with strangers in exchange for access to wireless hotspots controlled by others.

Why Is The Internet Sometimes So Slow? Internet ‘Black Holes’ May Be To Blame

innovation2 — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 21:25:56 +0000

photo credit: palmettoart

You’re trying to log on to a Web site and it’s not working. You try again and again. But persistence doesn’t pay off. The site you want is inexplicably, frustratingly, out of reach.

The other computer might just be turned off, but the causes could be more mysterious. At any given moment, a proportion of computer traffic ends up being routed into information black holes. These are situations where a path between two computers does exist, but messages — a request to visit a Web site, an outgoing e-mail — get lost along the way.

A University of Washington system named Hubble looks for these black holes and maps them on a Web site, providing an ever-changing constellation of the Internet’s weak points.

The Hubble map lets visitors see a map of problems worldwide or type in a specific Web page or network address to check its status. The work is being presented in San Francisco at the Usenix Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation.

What Do Venture Capitalists Know?

ron — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 16:07:09 +0000

The National Venture Capital Association surveyed 170 of its members, and this is their collective wisdom for 2008:

The sectors VCs are most bullish about are Clean Tech, Media, Biotech, and the Internet, in that order:

A Third Industrial Revolution

ron — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 18:21:10 +0000

The pivotal economic changes in world history occur when new energy regimes converge with new communication regimes. Today, the technology that made possible the IT and internet revolutions is coming together with renewable energy and hydrogen and fuel cell storage technology to create the foundation for a third industrial revolution and a post-carbon, post-nuclear era. In 25 years, businesses and homeowners will produce much of their own power with locally available renewable energy, and store it in the form of hydrogen. Surplus energy will be shared with others via an intelligent “intergrid” just as we now produce our own information and share it with others via the internet. This revolution will help usher in a near zero-emission energy era.
Jeremy Rifkin is an adviser on climate changet to the EU commission

From the Guardian - read more . . .

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