roundtable

Unbreakable: Mesh networks are in your smartphone's future

It's not that we're running out of mobile bandwidth. It's just that it's poorly distributed.

If you're in your home next to a Wi-Fi router, you might have a clean signal and access to a 12-megabit connection. Meanwhile, someone outside your door could have a smartphone that's struggling to hold onto a slow connection to a cellular tower a mile away. But mesh networking might make things better for everyone.

Mesh networks let devices share their connections with other users. If one user has a clean network connection and another nearby user does not, the second user can piggyback on the first's, automatically. If there's a collection of many people, their machines can all cooperate to make connections -- to each other and to the global Internet. In advanced mesh networks, connections and data can hop among devices, creating ad hoc bucket-brigade paths for communication.

The concept of mesh networking is not new. Many military systems rely on mesh networking, since forces in the field cannot rely on communications infrastructures. Utilities also use mesh networks for collecting data from equipment, like smart meters.

On this Reporters' Roundtable, I interview two innovators in mesh networking. They're both trying to bring this liberating (they say) and bandwidth-saving (ditto) technology to the masses.

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Next on Roundtable: Unjammable networks and aerial drones

I'm preparing for two very cool Reporters' Roundtable shows that I'll be recording this week. First up, we're doing a show on one of my favorite technology topics, mesh networks. Then, it's attack of the drones.

Mesh networking Mesh networking is when wireless devices pool together to share bandwidth and connections. Mesh networks can also be made more resistant to jamming and censorship than traditional point-to-point wireless. The tech is hard to implement, but the the military has been using mesh technologies to great effect for years, and commercial and consumer implementations of mesh networking pop … Read more

Google I/O dissected on Reporters' Roundtable

We're recording this Roundtable on the final day of the Google developers conference, Google I/O. From my perspective as a jaded and grumpy tech journalist, it has been a pretty cool conference. Google launched its own 7-inch Android tablet, a new living room entertainment streaming appliance called the Q, Chrome for Apple's iOS, a competitor to Evite called Google+ Events... and that's just the shipping products. We also saw wing-suit skydivers wearing Google glasses jump out of an airship hovering over Mosone Center and glide to a landing on the convention center roof.

So there's a lot to talk about, and I've got two great guests to run down the important topics that came out of the Google I/O conference:

In the studio: Stephen Shankland, CNET News senior writer and alpha geek. Via Skype: Esther Dyson. Dyson is an investor in Internet startups in the U.S. and elsewhere, on the board of Airship Ventures (the company that took the Google wing-suit jumpers up), and former chair of the Electronic Fronteir Foundation and of ICANN.

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Should you buy Facebook stock? Roundtable panelists discuss

As Facebook was trading as a public company for the first time today, we assembled a group of tech and finance experts to talk about the new stock. Is it worth buying? What will it do for technology overall? Can Facebook compete on mobile? Our panelists to debate these and related topics:

Jill Schlesinger from  CBS MoneyWatch.com. Jill can help us sort out the pros and cons for investors interested in buying into this mega IPO.  Andy Rachleff, CEO of  Wealthfront, an Internet-era investment advice service. Andy's a venture capitalist at Benchmark Capital. He also teaches entrepreneurship at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He wrote about Facebook's IPO on CNET News in February. Tom Merritt, host of  Tech News Today on the TWiT network. Tom takes the pulse of the tech world every day on his show. Paul Sloan, the main guy covering the Facebook IPO at CNET News.

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Live: Reporters' Roundtable on Facebook IPO

It's happened. Facebook is a public company. Should you invest in this massive offering? Join us live at 9:30 a.m. Pacific/12:30 p.m. Eastern to talk about the IPO and what it means for you. And also how it might change the economics of technology forever.

We have great people to talk about this IPO:

Jill Schlesinger from  CBS MoneyWatch.com. Jill can help us sort out the pros and cons for investors interested in buying into this mega IPO.  Andy Rachleff, CEO of  Wealthfront, an Internet-era investment advice service. Andy'… Read more

It's Facebook IPO on Reporters' Roundtable, live on Friday

Tomorrow at 9:30 a.m. Pacific (12:30 p.m. Eastern), I'll be hosting a special live episode of Reporters' Roundtable with three great guests, to discuss and debate the Facebook IPO.

Joining me tomorrow are:

Jill Schlesinger from  CBS MoneyWatch.com. Jill can help us sort out the pros and cons for investors interested in buying into this mega IPO.  Andy Rachleff, CEO of  Wealthfront, an Internet-era investment advice service. Andy's a venture capitalist at Benchmark Capital. He also teaches entrepreneurship at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He wrote about Facebook's IPO … Read more

Evernote CEO Phil Libin talks valuations and bubbles

I'll disclose this off the top: I'm a big fan of Evernote. I like the app and use it all the time. I even pay for it. I also enjoy talking with Evernote CEO Phil Libin, who I have found to be uncommonly deliberate and transparent for a startup CEO.

With the news around Evernote lately -- the company's recent $70 million funding round and its acquisition of Penultimate -- I thought it'd be good to bring Libin back to the Reporters' Roundtable to discuss the current state of the software economy, and what Silicon Valley looks like from the startup's perspective today.

In this discussion we also talk a little about Libin's "100-year startup" talking point. We don't get too much into the company's global ambitions, though, and I do want to point out that as popular as Evernote is here in the U.S., it's also apparently very big in Japan, and, Libin hopes, will also soon be big in China (subscription to The Wall Street Journal required).

Libin is probably going to become CEO of a public company within a few years. Do you think he'll be able to keep Evernote innovating, figure out how to turn its revenue stream into a flood, and keep investors happy? Watch the video below.

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Wrapp: Giving you free stuff to 'gift' to your Facebook friends

Wrapp rolled out in the U.S. today. It's a mobile/Facebook gifting platform, kind of like Karma, which I covered recently and liked quite a lot. I don't think Wrapp is as slick or as fun as Karma, but it's got a devilishly clever business model, and I'm having a hard time seeing how it can go wrong.

See my Reporters' Roundtable interview with Wrapp CEO Hjalmar Winbladh, below, for more. His perspective on the business of gift-giving is interesting, and it might help you come up with ways you can think around the edges of your business.

What Wrapp does that's so clever: It combines gift-giving with targeted marketing with social metrics. The idea is that if you want to gift someone (I guess that's a verb now), Wrapp will look at the person you're thinking of, figure out where they are and how valuable they are to the Wrapp partners, and display for you a number of potential gift card option. For example, if you're looking at getting something for your fashionable girlfriend, you might see a $10 gift card from H&M you can give her -- at no cost to you.

You can add on to the gift card value (and you'd better, you lout), to give her $100 (at a $90 cost). Or you can just cheap out and go for the freebie.

Either way, H&M gets a good potential customer into the store, and for a very reasonable (to H&M) expense of only $10.

Wrapp, of course, takes a fee when the "card," which resides on the recipient's smartphone, is redeemed. The company also helps brands collect data on who's connecting with whom. If the companies working with Wrapp are smart, they're also correlating big data about who's buying what based on their social profiles.

Personally, I'd rather pay for a box of chocolates with cash and give that as a gift; I don't like the thought of an honest gesture being exploited as a datapoint on some product marketing wonk's Powerpoint. But that's because I'm a romantic. Wrapp is a smart business and it really could help more people connect through gifts and gift-like gestures.

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How Wavii understands news (Reporters' Roundtable)

The startup Wavii fascinates me. I've spend a career honing my writing and analysis skills, and here comes a punk startup that can read what I write and summarize it in a clear headline that's often better than my own.

How does it do it? Is my job threatened? I sat down with the CEO of Wavii, Adrian Aoun, and we talked about how the product works, why he built it, and how it traces its lineage back to the famous linguist Noam Chomsky.

For more on Wavii, read my review, Wavii groks the news so you don't have to.

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