July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Verizon is the king of fast cellular networks in America, or so it says. And it’s hard to argue with the company’s numbers.

Verizon reported its fourth-quarter 2012 earnings today, revealing that 63 percent of its smartphone sales were Apple iPhones. But chief financial officer Fran Shammo made a special point of stressing the carrier’s fast 4G LTE network.

“Customer adoption of 4G LTE is really gaining momentum,” Shammo said on the company’s earnings call. “Our total 4G LTE devices sales reached 7.3 million [units] … up 60 percent from last quarter.”

Almost all of the Android phones Verizon sold were 4G LTE capable, and 65 percent of the entire 9.8 million smartphones sold were 4G LTE. (The non-Android numbers are down slight due to sales of Apple’s older iPhone models, which do not support LTE.)

Source: Verizon

Verizon devices/4G LTE coverage

But it’s not just the devices, of course. It’s the network that matters.

“Almost half of our data traffic is on the 4G LTE network,” Shammo said, adding that Verizon believes its 4G network is five times more efficient than 3G. “We are by far the market leader, with 476 markets covering 89% of the US population.”

The company will no long be adding any capacity to its 3G network; instead it is continuing to expand 4G coverage. Verizon expects to have full coverage of the U.S. by mid-year 2013.

Chief competitor AT&T’s LTE ambitions had a slow start and have generally not compared favorably with Verizon. However, late last year AT&T did manage to acquire some additional spectrum that should help it expand LTE more rapidly.

photo credit: Robert Scoble via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Doug Renert is a co-founding partner of Silicon Valley’s Tandem Capital.

Canada has many reasons to be proud.

For starters, the country has mostly dodged the economic crisis that continues to rattle the rest of North America. Canadian businesses enjoy lower corporate tax rates, plus plenty of government subsidy programs. Not to mention the fact that the populace enjoys universal healthcare coverage and the ability to travel without being labeled “loud Americans.”

However, when it comes to mobile apps, Canadians may not be so lucky.

The nation’s app store can be likened to the state of Nevada in 1951, when nuclear weapons testing sprouted a continuous stream of mushroom clouds throughout the flatland.

Canada’s role as the “guinea pig for mobile apps” was first brought to my attention when Peter Relan, CEO of Crowdstar, told me they always launched their apps in Canada first to work out the kinks and bugs before releasing in the U.S. and elsewhere. This approach makes perfect sense since Canadians resemble their southern neighbors so closely, though on average the “Canucks” may like beer and hockey a lot more and guns and frozen yogurt much less.

Doug Renert

With 10 percent of America’s population, Canada provides a risk-free test market.  Competitors and the media likely won’t get wind of failed launches or top performers in the mobile app stores of the Great (but relatively quiet) White North. And developers and marketers can tune apps to their hearts’ content until everything is primed for a successful launch in the “Promised Land” of red, white and blue.

This was the case for Bash Gaming (formerly BitRhymes), one of our portfolio companies that soft-launched its hit mobile social casino game Bingo Bash in the Canadian Apple App Store before hitting the U.S. They launched the game on each platform within Canada first, and only after several weeks of optimization for that market did they launch in the U.S. — where it eventually became a No. 1 grossing game.

That being said, this same strategy backfired on the Android side.

Bingo Bash had become such a hit on iOS that when the studio launched its Android version just a couple of months ago, word spread like wildfire. American Android users quickly caught wind of the leaked Canadian version — and cried foul! So Bash Gaming immediately made the Android launch effective worldwide.

Larger companies have been pursuing this tactic, as well. Nintendo recently launched its new Wii Mini on December 7 – for Canadians only. Perhaps it’s only a matter of time before all this activity results in a rash of protests across Canada; a generation of activists shined a spotlight on Nevada decades ago and successfully won a ban on nuclear testing. Who will be the crusaders when it comes to Canada’s role as the world’s mobile guinea pig?

Or perhaps Canadians are darn proud of their role in the mobile app ecosystem as they involuntarily test-drive their way through buggy, early versions of every app imaginable. I, for one, am envious of this not-so-glorified breed of users who get first dibs on the fun games and cool apps that go on to become the top hits in the rest of the world.

Doug Renert is a co-founding partner of Tandem Capital, Silicon Valley’s first and largest mobile accelerator fund, currently at $32M. Tandem backs 12 early stage mobile startups each year with its brand of “muscle capital,” a powerful combination of funding and hands-on support. Some of Tandem’s biggest successes include PlayHaven and Bash Gaming, formerly known as BitRhymes. Prior to Tandem, Doug built businesses as an operating executive at Oracle and as CEO of telecommunications startup Tello.

photo credit: BFLV via photopin cc

In his new book The Fine Print, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist David Cay Johnston tell us, among other things, what’s wrong with the Internet in America. The answer is fairly depressing: It’s too slow, too expensive, and … too controlled by a duopoly of AT&T and Verizon.

Japan has fiberoptic Internet available to many homes with speeds of 100 or 200 megabits per second, and, believe it or not, an available 1 gigabit per second service. (At least one place in the U.S, Chattanooga, Tenn., can get an equivalent speed.) South Korea is still the king of Internet speeds, however, with an average 17.5 megabits per second to all homes.

Average speed in the U.S., meanwhile is a measly 5.8 megabits per second — actually a decrease from U.S speeds of 2011, according to Royal Pingdom. It’s the barely visible blue line in the chart below:

Source: Royal Pingdom

Average global internet connection speeds.

That slower speed comes, unfortunately, at a higher cost than many other countries.

Hong Kong gets 500 megabits per second for $37 a month. Other major international cities, such as Paris and Berlin, get 100 megabits per second for $40. But the same speed in Washington, DC, comes at $105, courtesy of Comcast, and Verizon’s 150 megabits per second service sets New Yorkers back $159.95.

Typically, service providers point to the vast distances of North America as the reason why speeds are slower here. VentureBeat contacted both Verizon and AT&T for comment, but neither have responded (yet).

The question remains for cities as densely packed as New York: Why such high cost for such comparably slow service?

Johnston’s answer is that Americans were better off with Ma Bell’s monopoly. Adjusting for inflation, he says, phone service is 230 percent more expensive than in 1984.

That’s a future even Orwell didn’t anticipate.

photo credit: Maryam (one bored chica) via photopin cc

“Entrepreneurship is how America became great,” Case said. “The good news is that we’re still the most entrepreneurial nation in the world. The bad news is that all the other countries are trying to catch us.”

Case was speaking in Detroit at Techonomy on Entrepreneurship and American Relevance.

There are two types of founders, Case said: those who create an interesting product or service but have modest ambitions … and those who are trying to change the world, who are swinging for the fences.

Steve Case at Techonomy Detroit

Those who are swinging for the fences are continuing the grand American tradition of entrepreneurship, he suggested, continuing the legacy of legendary Detroit founders and leaders such as Henry Ford.

Case sees what’s happening now as the next revolution in technology. After the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, and the initial stages of the digital revolution, we’re now seeing perhaps the most important part of the digital revolution: the impact of digital technology on all aspects of the economy.

Even heroes, of course, need loyal sidekicks.

That’s why Case accepted the role of chairman of the Startup America Partnership, which is focused on building up all the regions of the U.S. Not just social media companies — not just Facebooks and Instagrams — but also companies that use technology intelligently in transportation, in manufacturing, in all aspects of the economy.

“In some ways, every company is now a technology company,” Case said.

The most important thing for entrepreneurial heroes, according to Case?

“They really have to have passion.”

Image credits: Blastr, John Koetsier

Sept. 9 - 10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

The latest WikiLeaks release has shone a spotlight on an alleged domestic and foreign surveillance program run with cloud-based software provided by Virginia company TrapWire, many of whose top leaders and employees are former members of three-letter American intelligence agencies.

WikiLeaks tweeted about it today, and the story quickly became a trending topic on Twitter:

WikiLeaks reveal secret, widespread #TrapWire surveillance system | RT rt.com/usa/news/strat… #WikiLeaks #gifiles

—
WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) August 10, 2012

TrapWire produces software that is currently in use by Homeland Security, the military, U.S. intelligence agencies, and local police forces including the LAPD and the Metropolitan Police Department in Washington, DC (whose chief recently praised the software). Private sector clients include major corporations in the energy, chemical, and financial industries.

TrapWire does three things: protect critical infrastructure by analyzing CCTV footage with face and pattern recognition algorithms to detect pre-attack patterns, provide online reporting systems for citizens to report suspicious behavior, and gather and analyze many sources of information to allow law enforcement to make sense of the masses of collected data.

If TrapWire does what it is intended to, it’s potentially a critical innovation that can help protect the U.S. from terrorism. Tying together disparate facts from multiple sources across geographies might have prevented 9-11. On the other hand, the secrecy, the integration with government, and the thought that a private corporation could have access to huge amounts of private citizens’ data is concerning to say the least.

The data WikiLeaks released was taken from more than five million emails allegedly stolen from a company with close ties and inside information about TrapWire, security information company Stratfor. Stratfor had a contract with TrapWire in which each company agreed to promote the other company’s products, and Stratfor agreed to feed its intelligence reports into the TrapWire system.

Then Stratfor was hacked by Anonymous in 2011, and Anonymous provided the emails to WikiLeaks.

In those emails, Stratfor says that TrapWire is in use in “Scotland Yard, #10 Downing, the White House, and many [multinational corporations].” One email talks about the Nigerian government being interested in TrapWire, and others imply that organizations as diverse and powerful as the Secret Service, MI5, and the Canadian RCMP are all clients.

And yet another leaked email from Fred Burton, Stratfor’s VP of Intelligence, says “God Bless America. Now they have EVERY major [high-value target] in [the continental U.S.], the UK, Canada, Vegas, Los Angeles, NYC as clients.”

TrapWire was not always so secretive about its software. Company founder Richard Hollis spoke about the software in 2005, say that it:

 … can collect information about people and vehicles that is more accurate than facial recognition, draw patterns, and do threat assessments of areas that may be under observation from terrorists. The application can do things like “type” individuals so if people say “medium build,” you know exactly what that means from that observer.

And in 2007, the company elaborated on how TrapWire works:

 … the TrapWire rules engine analyzes each aspect of [reported security incidents] and compares it to all previously-collected reporting across the entire TrapWire network. Any patters detected — links among individuals, vehicles, or activities — will be reported back to each affected facility. This information can also be shared with law enforcement organizations …

The question becomes: Where does national security start and the public’s right (or need) to know end? And, to what extent should private companies be embedded in public surveillance?

Even tougher: does our security depend, at least in part, on our ignorance? Because if we learn about anti-terrorism methodologies, you can bet the bad guys do too.

There is as yet no statement from Stratfor, TrapWire Inc., or any of the named public security agencies.

Image credit: ShutterStock/Steven Finn