I’ve been waiting for this for over 7 years. Anyone living/working in Palo Alto especially on Sand Hill Road knows exactly what I’m talking about. (Ironic that the center of the information revolution - Palo Alto, and more specifically Sand Hill, has had spotty coverage for years.)

Here is the WSJ article.

All this for around $600 bucks (the cost of a high end handset)

Now I wonder if I can get Cingular or Sprint to pay me for third party traffic I route to their network (that would only be fair for their crappy service). . . kinda like distributed power generation. . .

BTW, I wonder which VC would be the first to get one (or already has one!)

Blogspotting has posted a conversation Heather Green had with Scott Gatz. In it she writes that

And Gatz imagines amping that up so that you can get these alerts delivered to you when and where you want, whether it’s on your cell phone or even in your living room over a settop box. So, say, if a Soho apartment in the right range comes up for sale and you’re in Central Park uptown, an alert would be sent automatically to your phone, allowing you to scoot downtown and take a gander.

Ok so that sounds fine and pretty cool to me but I’m getting a little confused . . .

Then comes this line. . .

Still, Gatz doesn’t think that centralized services go away completely.

Ok now I’m confused. In fact for the above scenerio to happen a centralized service will almost HAVE to exist. If I’m not mistaken, RSS is a pull architecture. It would be almost improbably inefficient for a cellphone app to ping the RSS feed every 10 sec to get updates on SOHO housing prices. Furthermore, the RSS feed will have no way of uniquely identifying the feed request and thus serving up a personalized listings. What needs to happen is for the RSS feed service to ping ONE centralized server that new content has been added/updated, the server will comeback and grab ALL the new content, then it will selectively push that content (using a proprietary protocol) to subscribers who wants a portion of that content (such as houses in a certain price range).

Maybe Scott is planning to implement proprietary RSS feeds or proprietary applications to create some sort of barrier to entry for Yahoo! (which is the central server scenerio I described). OR he is assuming that a authentication & push implementation of RSS is going to be part of RSS 3.0. In that case, I am eargerly waiting for the future - free and open.

I tend to get stuck on one train of thought and it takes me a while to get off it. . so more open souce ideas today . . . (I promise to get off this open source thing over the weekend)

I think the world needs an open source hosting platform. Before I get into what it is exactly, here is why. . .

1. Software as a service - aka hosted model, aka ASP, aka on-demand (thanks to salesforce.com for adding to a list of confusing acronym) is finally becoming a reality after over 5 years of hype (anyone remember Corio?). SMB and even some larger enterprises have begun to adopt the model.

2. Open Source software is moving beyond infrastruture to applications (both enterprise and personal/group utility)

3. Some Open Source applications will need some sort of hosting to be delivered to the end user to offer end-to-end solution, increase adoption, and compete with commercial hosted software.

4. Hosting costs money

5. Open Source contributors contribute brains but not money (asking for contribution doesnt quite work)

6. Open source infratructure stack is becoming more and more standardized - LAMP+Jboss?

7. Open Source contributors & users do have some limited bandwidth and CPU cycle on their machine

So why doesnt someone create a program that aggregates the LAMP stack and add virtualization layer to the stack so that users of open source software as well as contributors can “tie” their computers together to create a free virtual p2p hosting platform? Be a great way for users to give back and contribute to the programs they are using. Can definitely let hosting resource contributors set limits as far as bandwidth/cpu cycles. And perhaps only people with broadband speed of over XXX Mbps can join the network. Also integration with eclipse and sourceforge would be nice to let project admins push code to the platform seemlessly.

Obviously lots of people will still want to modify the open source code and host the software themselves. But for lots of applications that would not make a lot of sense. Think of all the personal or group utility/ware thats being produced ( all the open source wiki’s for one) that could be hosted on the platform. BTW, this could be used for open source webservices too which would need a hosting service even more critically.

If whoever is creating this really really wants to make money he can also embed an option for the source owner to charge for usage. By building a billing platform for source owners (like content owners in Brightcove’s biz model), the company can take a cut of the transaction.

I’m sure there is a lot of lantency issues that still need to be solved. But it might not be such a far-fetched idea in the near future.