Are you ready to share your broadband?
The Karma mobile hotspot is $79, plus pay-as-you-go bandwidth.
“WiFi is a resource that can be collaboratively consumed.”
That’s the oracular wisdom that Robert Gaal, co-founder of Karma, dropped on me halfway into our interview. Let’s have it sink in for a bit before we continue.
Ready? Karma is the wireless hotspot — like a MiFi — that comes with social sharing as part of the offering. It also has a more sensible pricing structure than competitors. Bandwidth is pay-as-you-go, $14 a gigabyte, and your credits don’t expire. That is a refreshing change from telco access points that lock you in to contracts. Even the month-to-month data plans (like you get on iPads) seem onerous in comparison. So props to Karma for rationalizing the hotspot space.
The social and collaborative part of the product is the connection sharing scheme. Every Karma hotspot is part yours, and part the community’s. “Your” hotspot provides 100MB of data to any and all visitors for free, after which they can sign up to pay for the service just like you. And for every 100MB of data that visitors use, you get 100MB of bandwidth added to your account.
So it pays to leave your hotspot on so others can use it. And it gets even more communal. While Karma won’t let a hotspot owner see traffic from guest users, it does tell you who is using your device and bandwidth. Owners get guests’ names and links to their Facebook profiles. Gaal says that often, when owners see they have a guest, they will try to find that person and be helpful. “It’s all to get guests engaged in the community.”
Visitors to “your” hotspot can get 100MB of bandwidth for free.
Karma is, to a point, a refinement on some other community bandwidth products. It can be compared to Fon, which distributes fixed, ethernet-to-WiFi routers. The model is similar: Owners get priority access, and guests from the network (other Fon users) can use a portion of the bandwidth when they’re not at their own home. Fon is having some success working with carriers, for whom it can help create a better consumer experience. Karma’s Gaal, likewise, thinks that his product can make a carrier’s bandwidth more pervasive and affordable.
I love these communal resource plays.
I’m also closely tracking Open Garden, which turns your Android (or OS X or Windows) device into a community hotspot on its shared WiFi network. In other words, everyone in range of an Open Garden-equipped device can share bandwidth. (And sharing can happen over Bluetooth, so endpoint users can save on battery life.) it is an awesome solution for people with both an Android phone and a tablet. It would be good for iPhone + iPad users too, except getting low-level networking stuff like this into iOS isn’t doable.
And then there’s Space Monkey, which does a communal bandwidth thing with storage: It puts the file storage “cloud” into homes of users. Those who have a Space Monkey storage appliance in their home get half of the storage for themselves, and the other half is encrypted and shared by other Space Monkey users. It’s a mesh of storage nodes, essentially, and it’s elegant and robust.
The challenge with all of these ideas is getting the owned/shared ratio right. Too much sharing will turn off individual device owners, who do pay to run their slice of the community network, either in bandwidth fees or diminished battery life. Too little sharing and the economics don’t work for the provider company. So everyone in this space goes a step beyond feel-good community sharing to give the owners something extra: Free bandwidth (Karma), an extended network (Fon; OpenGarden); or increased reliability (Space Monkey).
And then there’s the danger of running afoul of the network owners. That’s why the companies that aggressively partner with telcos have the best chances of success, even if doing those deals can really slow down roll-outs.
But the real challenge is that all these community plays, while technically beautiful, are fighting macro trends. The costs of bandwidth and storage are dropping; the pervasiveness of wireless is increasing. The economics that may work now will not work forever. Anyone doing a community resource sharing play has to carefully surf very choppy waves, and companies that fall off their boards may have a hard time getting back up.
-Rafe
See also
I interview the Open Garden CEO (CNET)
Space Monkey puts the cloud in your house (CNET)
Audio version of this column
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Good WiFi fences make good neighbors
Wifis.org acts as a communication proxy between you and people in range of your WiFi access point.
When WiFi was first becoming a thing, it was kind of beautiful. It was communal. In densely-packed cities, it was implicitly shared. Personally, I had an unreliable DSL connection, and when it dropped out, I’d just hop on to the neighbor’s WiFi until it was fixed. It was the “can I borrow a cup of sugar?” moment in the virtual world. But without the delightful/messy step of actually meeting the neighbors.
Today, the WiFi density at my San Francisco house is ten times greater, but it’s a desert of neighborliness, since all the networks are locked down with passwords, and I don’t know which network belongs to whom. Thank goodness my cable carrier ISP is so reliable.
The weird project, Wifis.org, by Mathias Nitzsche in Berlin, brings neighborliness, and the concept of a backyard fence you can yell over, to WiFi. The idea is that you rename your access point to a Wifis.org URL, like Wifis.org/RafesHouse. Anyone in range of your network sees that as the identifier. When a visitor goes to that URL, they get a contact form.
A note entered on the form (like, “Can I get access to your WiFi? There’s a six-pack in it for you.”) is forwarded to you, and the sender doesn’t get your email or physical address. Once you, the WiFi owner, has the information, it’s up to you to make contact.
Sure, there may be ISP terms of service that forbid sharing (as especially re-selling) of bandwidth, and yes, if your WiFi is used to hatch a terrorist plot or download illegal or protected content, you’re on the hook for it. But as this service puts actual people together, I’d like to think that those are edge cases — like the very uncommon AirBnB user whose house gets trashed.
In a sanitized, rich neighborhood, a product like this might not go far. But in an apartment block or a location where people know, in their guts if not in the fronts of their minds, that they are all sharing in the adventure of making life work, it makes sense. Nitzsche says that it’s in developing economies where the product is, in fact, more widely used. Not everyone can get a network line dropped into their home with a phone call.
For those of us in tech havens like the Bay Area, Wifis.org brings the opportunity for physical neighborliness to an otherwise entirely walled-off, digital world.
Mostly I’m covering this idea as a reminder that WiFi, still being a fairly new thing, is highly unoptimized. That can be rectified. Connectify, which I recently covered, links networks together to improve bandwidth. This little project links people together in sort of the same way. And I just think that’s cool.
-Rafe
See also:
Fon
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The Layer On Top: Mover.io
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“Box loves us,” says Eric Warnke, CEO of Mover. His company makes a tool that lets people quickly move mass amounts of data directly between cloud-based file storage systems.
Warnke wants Mover to sit on top of all those online storage products. He wants developers to stop worrying about writing files to different file systems (like Box, Dropbox, Sugarsync, Skydrive, etc). He wants to build the one universal online storage API, to free developers from worrying about storage.
Mover has an app using its API: Backup Box. It transfers files between online storage systems. It can be used, for example, by a business that wants to import its old FTP archives, or employees’ “rogue” Dropbox accounts, into an approved corporate Box account. That’s why Box loves it, Warnke says: It makes getting started with Box easy.
What’s not easy: Building a consistent layer on top of dozens of businesses that are actually trying to differentiate from each other. Mover is walking a tightrope, trying to remove differentiation between products for developers, while still hoping these products continue to differentiate and compete with each other on features, service, and prices. It’s only when data moves between services that Mover works.
It is not a zero-sum game, Warnke says. The easier it is to move data between systems, the better the big storage industry does. This thinking is reasonable and solid when an industry is growing. But we’ll see how people feel when (or if) the storage segment goes stagnant, or contracts.
- Rafe
See also:
Otixo
Primadesk
Filepicker
Audio of this column:
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Infrastructure Reversal
The QBotix Tracking System is a robot on rails that adjusts solar panels to keep them aligned with the sun.
Credit: QBotix
Solar panels don’t work efficiently if they’re not pointed at the sun. So most solar farms have panels mounted on pivots, and motor-driven mechanisms that keep them oriented correctly. It’s the obvious solution.
Except that motors break, are expensive, and are hard to install. So the startup Qbotix has designed a system where motors are instead inside on a robot on a monorail. The robot’s track takes it by each panel every ten minutes, where it mechanically connects its motor drive to gears on the mounts, and re-points the panels. The ten-minute interval is frequent enough for standard photovoltaic cells.
It may sound backwards to send a robotic riddler out to your solar farm to keep things adjusted, instead of doing things the sensible way. But according to CEO Wasiq Bokhari, using a robot means you can put a more reliable motor in the system and share it. You also greatly lower the cost of the panel mounts, which means you can use more, smaller panels instead of fewer, bigger ones. That saves money in installation and maintenance.
There are other examples of this infrastructure reversal. Kiva Systems‘ robots move entire shelves in warehouses to where products are needed. Google and Waze replace the need for traffic road sensors with the mobile phones that ride in cars.
Upending traditional systems requires not just technology but chutzpah. Because the initial reaction to such a concept is generally disbelief. That’s a good thing, if you think of it as competitive head start.
- Rafe
See also:
CNET video of Qbotix in action
A Robot to Tilt Solar Panels (MIT Tech Review)
Audio version of this column:
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