wgc blog

A pic of the WGC pod at this years CES.

To see Wireless Grids in action, come check us out at CES in Vegas this coming week! We're located right up near the front of the Sands expo hall in the "Mobile Internet & WiMAX" TechZone (Pod 72404 B). Keep your eyes and ears open! We have some interesting announcements in the pipeline...

Our very own Norman Lewis gave a speech at this year’s Mobile Internet World in Boston two weeks ago. Here is an interview after his speech.

We’ve had some press recently and figured we should bring it all together for our fans.

In Business Week

In the Syracuse Post-Standard

...but the pictures only show up on the Syracuse blog

Mentioned in Andy Abramson’s Blog

Hey, let us know if you see WGC mentioned anywhere else. ;)

This is the second part of my series on scaling a startup with minimal resources. Last time, I talked about monitoring your services using pingdom. Today, I’ll be talking about email.

Email is still a killer app. We use it all the time. Nobody in the office noticed that the the blog and website were down for the weekend. (Thanks guys!) If our email had gone down for the weekend, people would definitely have been banging on my door and calling my phone to tell me that we have a problem. It’s Just That Important(tm). Do you know anybody with a CrackBerry BlackBerry? Why do you think they call it that?

When we first got started, we just used whatever email addresses we already had set up. That lasted for about a month or so, then we decided that this was just bad branding. We needed to look a little more organized. So, the next step was setting up a mail server for us. I just used Courier IMAP and Postfix to get us a good setup. The problem was that I was now responsible for keeping the mail up and running…not exactly my cup of tea. I also had to start worrying about things like open relays, spam and virus filtering, helping people configure mail clients, even the security policies of the Syracuse University network (where our main office is located). Arggg! I just want to write code. So, I started looking for a way to offload this responsibility.

I found two viable solutions, Google Apps or Webmail.us, either of which could offer us the two things that I thought we needed – email and a good web interface. In the end, it was Google. It’s free, I can set up a CNAME so that mail.wgrids.com points to the webmail, it integrates with Google documents, and (MOST IMPORTANTLY!!) people were already familiar with how to use it because we all already had Gmail accounts. Perfect!

Of course, GMail has gone down a couple of times. It’s a major operation, I would expect it to do that once in a while. The difference is, when our email goes down these days, I just write code and eventually it comes back online.

Summary

• Total cost for Google hosted email: $0
• Total worry about email: 0
• Total code written since the switch: thousands of lines

Working at a startup, there is so much to take care of when it comes to technology. I’m the guy that people look to (i.e. yell and throw things at) when email doesn’t work, when the website is down, or when demos crash and burn. It can be a lot sometimes.

So, I’m embracing the whole DRY agile methodology thing and automating as much as possible with specific tasks watching the whole company for a specific aspect. Today, I signed up for an account with pingdom to monitor some of the more important websites that we have. Pingdom is a simple service that will check a website once a minute and send you an SMS if it is down. They have servers on 6 continents pinging away at my site. Oh, and here is a nice little tip, if you sign up for a trial account they will offer you an upgrade at 70% off the regular price. That means you can sign up for a full year at about $36.

So far, I’m happy with the interface and the functionality. It looks like they struck the right balance in terms of the features they offer. I have it keeping an eye on this site, the main wgrids site and our development server (which is not even running a website, so they just try to ping it.)

I’m thinking this could be a good thread of posts for me, about how to grow and automate the entire infrastructure for a small company. Next week, perhaps, I’ll talk about email.

The challenges of valorizing what we have termed personal infrastructure (the ability to create mashups between your home content/hardware/software and web services out on the Internet) are manifold. This goes well beyond what is conventionally understood to be ‘home networking’. At WGC we are attempting to enable the end-user to create new uses for the devices, software and hardware and personal content they already have in the home (and what they may add to it in the future) with two main goals:

First, for users to be able to access their resources from anywhere in thew world; and, Secondly, for them to be able to combine these resources with other capabilities they can ‘find’ around them at any given time to fulfill personal goals.

The big question (besides the technologies we are building to enable all of this) is how do you begin to valorise this personal infrastructure?

SYSTEM DYNAMIC MODELING

One starting assumption is that the value of this personal infrastructure is a function of one person and the aggregate utility of the content and functionality residing on all the devices owned by that person (and of every other person granted access to his/her infrastructure). The next step is creating the foundation for a dynamic model that can adjust and adapt to the fluid entry and exit of new devices, new or old created content, and new value resulting from innovative mashups of the existing personal infrastructure.

This raises a number of complex questions. To model this dynamically changing environment a distinction needs to be made between tangible and intangible value – the difference between the monetary value of a device and the content that is generated from it during its lifetime. While it is reasonable to accept the assumption that the physical value of the device will depreciate over time, the value of the content may appreciate over time, peaking at a certain point, or declining at others. To be less abstract. Take the example of photos of your children stored on a PC. As the PC depreciates over time, the value of the photos appreciates reaching a peak as the kids grow up. But what happens when your parents have their fiftieth wedding anniversary and you want to create a photo album/display recording their lives and that of their grandchildren? The photos will appreciate even more for that brief period. Being able to combine these pictures with sound and play it on any screen and sound system in your parents house, makes this even more valuable. Putting a monetary value on this is extremely difficult – but necessary, because the real value of the personal infrastructure lies in precisely fulfilling human needs or wants which are necessarily subjective, transitory and fragile. Hence the need for a system dynamic model.

PARTS vs THE WHOLE AND DISRUPTIONS TO THE EXISTING VALUE CHAIN

This is what we are currently modeling as the business opportunity underlying WGC’s personal infrastructure. We have some way to go to model this dynamic and complex relationship. But it is clear that there is a counter-intuitive dynamic at play here that promises a huge business opportunity for all concerned.

A rudimentary exercise begins to show this potential. If you add the dollar value of each device in a personal grid and subtract from each one its depreciation value over time, and then add to this the appreciation value of the content (and functionality depending upon how such a grid is configured) two curves are generated in opposite directions: depreciation value goes down while content value rises (exactly how high remains part of what needs to be determined by the system dynamic model we are developing). However, personal infrastructure is not just a static mix of devices and content. It is a dynamic environment where resources on devices can be reconfigured to create new valuable assets. For example, you could mesh together the microphones from all your old and obsolete cell phones to create a surround-sound recording capability that could be linked to a video taken of your child’s sixth birthday party. The devices may be obsolete and would have been gathering dust in a study drawer in the house. But now, new value is created by taking advantage of the functionality embedded in yesterday’s devices. Meshed together in this way means they retain some value, indeed, they create even more. The new whole is now far more valuable than the sum of the parts.

This has immense implications for the future: it highlights that existing valuation modeling will have to change. The lifetime of devices can be extended, indeed enhanced. While this may frighten OEM and mobile device manufacturers, this is an opportunity for them. Think about the brand value of bringing out innovative new devices that embed this kind of functionality and thus enable customers to extend the lifetime value of their devices. This would signal the end of designed obsolescence and make users more open to embracing new technologies. Lifetime devices can create lifetime customers. Does anyone know how to place a monetary value on such a goal?

This also means that the existing value chain around home networking will also be fundamentally challenged. But the clear implication of the above is that the total value of a personal infrastructured-future will increase over time. The pie will get bigger, not smaller, although how that is divide up will change. This is an immense opportunity not a threat. This is what we at WGC are aiming to make a reality.

I have to say it. I don’t use all these social/web 2.0 apps to be social. Really. I mostly use them to share my info with myself. It’s a secondary effect that I can share my stuff with you. Take flickr. I can share my pictures with you, and at the same time I can (a) backup my pictures across all of my machines and (b) make them available with a consistent user interface to all machines that I currently own as well as those I may own in the future. That’s gold to me. It’s one more thing I can cross off my list of “Things I would be happy to never have to worry about again”(tm)

Hot water is at the top of my list. If I never had to worry about having hot water at my house again I would be ever so happy. I’ve done a lot of work on my house in the last two years. One of the things I really want to do is install a tankless (i.e. on-demand) hot water heater. This would mean that I would never have to worry about when I could take a shower based on things like (a) is there laundry running, (b) is the dishwasher running, (c) did one of my housemates just take a really long shower and use up all the hot water? Those thoughts would never again cross my mind. The concept of running out of hot water would be like running out of cold water, which if it does ever happen signifies some bigger problems.

Einstein allegedly had 7 suits, one for each day of the week. This way he didn’t have to waste time thinking about what to wear today. I’m no Einstein, but I am into making life easier. He made his life easier by taking a choice out of it. That choice, made daily adds up over your life to a good amount of time and energy…time and energy that is better spent somewhere else.

Okay, so what do I have on my technology oriented Never-Again-Worry List:

• I would be happy to never have to personalize a computer and install all of my software. I usually spend about 2 days customizing a new machine when I get it. I’ve been really thinking about using Virtual PC’s to help solve this. If it was easier to migrate to a new machine, I’d probably buy more of them. I’m a complete sucker for newer/faster/multi-core processors, more RAM, USB 3.0, and 802.11 zeta. Make it easy for me to transition and I’ll fork out more money you crazy vendors you.

• Remembering or even dealing with a phone number. This is almost there, but if I lose my phone I’m hosed for a while. I often have to edit the numbers in my phone when I travel abroad to add or remove country codes. Context is one of the keys to solving this problem…and companies like Tellme seems to be well on the way to giving it a shot.

• Managing my music. I really need flickr (in the way I use it) for my music. Or a last.fm that actually stores all my content. I have over 50 gig’s of sound on various machines of mine. I would have a lot more if I didn’t lose 2 hard drives on an old machine. (Boo!) Will somebody write a music manager that just sits on top of amazon s3 and caches my high volume songs to cut down on bandwidth costs. Please. Someone. Please.

What do you want to never have to worry about again?

One of the biggest problems inherent in working in a new field is that it often becomes very difficult to communicate concepts and ideas because the vocabulary around the domain has yet to evolve.

This has also caused several head scratching moments on the development side too, especially as we come to design user interfacing constructs. Up until now we have been largely able to side step these issues, as when building the proof of concept applications we always have the excuse that we are 'testing' the interfacing concepts as much as the technology.

As we move from prototype engineering into developing our first deployable product however, we need to really get to grips with the problem. Or do we? Maybe this is thinking about the problem in the wrong way.
The overriding philosophy of WGC is to simplify technology to the point that the end user doesn't have to acquire new skills or develop an understanding of the workings. This notion too should extend to the language around our user interfacing. So instead of trying to develop a vocabulary around the technical processes we have, for now at least, decided to base the interfacing around the end user's mental model of what they are doing and the everyday language around that. So 'authorization' becomes 'sharing with', 'remote resource orchestration' becomes some thing task specific such as 'record' etc.
In all likelihood we will find that our predicted mental models don't match exactly with the reality of useage, but this is what is so exciting about the beta testing process.

Now this may all sound pretty obvious, and indeed had we emerged from the lab a little earlier we may be somewhat further down the road, but in fact it is a lot more complex than that.
The flexible, extensible, evolving landscape of the ad-hoc grid means that the hard coding of these interfacing constructs become very difficult the moment we orient around a usage pattern which is context and not process related. Simplifying for the user means more complexity for us! In effect we have had to abstract the interfacing a further notional level from that of a traditional architecture - the interface is a living, evolving entity - not an ever changing sub set of some pre-ordained system parameter matrix. And, we finally have a grasp on it!

Most interfaces 'ask' users what they want to do by presenting various options to them through icons, buttons, menu items etc. This doesn't really work in our domain, instead we have to get to a situation where the user can tell us in their own way what they want to do with the collection of resources currently available to them, and that collection of resources is something we can not know about at build time.
The realization of this approach will be somewhat limited in our first product of course, but we are thinking long term here.

It's the interest in problems like this that keeps the team together through all the stresses of living in a startup.