July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Cisco Systems announced on its blog today that it will acquire Denver-based BroadHop for an undisclosed sum. The technology will be used to shape mobile data traffic and will be folded into Cisco’s service provider networking group.

According to Cisco’s VP of Corporate Business Development, Hilton Romanski, global IP traffic is projected to increase threefold in the next five years. For this reason, the networking giant had its eye on BroadHop, a policy control and service management technology for carrier networks that has been around since 2003. BroadHop is deployed by more than 70 wireline and mobile carriers around the world.

BroadHop has an open policy platform, which is designed to make it easier for service providers to control and monetize any service, regardless of whether the network has new or legacy components. In a nutshell, the technology allows a carrier to develop service tiers based on bandwidth or application.

According to Romanski, the technology will benefit Cisco’s service providers, as users will be incentivized to purchase ”customized premium service packages,” such as on-demand streaming.

The BroadHop team will report to Shailesh Shukla, vice president and general manager of Cisco’s software and applications group.

The networking giant acquired three companies last month — most recently, Cariden for $141 million in cash. In an interview with VentureBeat, Cisco’s cloud computing CTO Lew Tucker stressed that the company is always on the look-out for potential acquisition opportunities to bring innovation to its suite of products.

However, GigaOm’s Kevin Fitchard pointed out, Cisco is not the first to jump on board the policy bandwagon. Aging giant Citrix whisked away Bytemobile earlier this year.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Hoping to push more 4G smartphones this holiday season, Verizon Wireless will offer double the monthly amount of 4G data to its subscribers.

The limited-time offer will begin Tuesday and is meant to coincide with the launch of the Droid Razr smartphone on November 11, CNet reports.

Since the deal’s not going to last forever, Verizon will likely convince many prospective phone buyers to pick up one of its new 4G devices. Along with the Droid Razr, there’s also the new HTC Rezound on the horizon, as well as Samsung’s Galaxy Nexus, the next flagship Android phone for Google’s Nexus line.

The deal is fairly straightforward: Verizon’s data plans will be doubled for new and existing 4G smartphone owners, so now you’ll get 4 gigabytes of data instead of 2GB for the $30 a month plan, 10GB on the $50 plan, and 20GB on the $80 monthly plan. Existing Verizon customers will have to request the upgraded plans via the company’s customer service line, or online through their My Verizon account.

While I commend Verizon for offering such a sweet deal, there’s really no excuse for not automatically upgrading all existing 4G subscribers. Not doing so will likely save the company some bandwidth down the line, and I can only imagine the outrage a Verizon 4G customer will feel if they miss out on this offer.

The top four largest Internet services in North America account for 64.4 percent of all network traffic, according to the report. They are Netflix, HTTP, YouTube and BitTorrent, according to the report’s executive summary.

The video-streaming component of Netflix is responsible for nearly 28 percent of all bandwidth usage nationally. Real-time entertainment services are the primary drivers of traffic, with especially heavy bandwidth consumption for music and video content.

The report also highlighted the rapid shift of Internet traffic away from desktop devices such as PCs, to all other forms of net-connected devices, such as set-top boxes, game consoles like the Xbox 360, the Playstation 3, smart phones and tablet devices. Only 45 percent of Internet traffic on fixed networks now goes to laptops or desktop computers, according to the report.

“The fact that more video traffic is going to devices other than a PC should be a wake-up call that counting bytes is no longer sufficient for network planning” said Dave Caputo chief executive officer of Sandvine. “Communications Service Providers need to have detailed business intelligence on not only the devices being used but also the quality and length of the videos being watched so they can engineer for a high subscriber quality of experience and not simply adding capacity through continuous capital investment.”

In spite of its prodigious consumption of North America’s broadband Internet resources, things have not been rose for the company with delightful red envelope. Netflix lost 800,000 customers during the 3rd Quarter, and Bloomberg reported today that the company has laid off 15 of its staff, mostly in human resources.

[Image Credit: EDHAR/ShutterStock]

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

With consumers watching more and more video content over the web via tablets and smartphones, carriers and ISPs are going to need help preparing their networks for the onslaught of traffic.

Enter Qwilt, a new startup emerging from stealth mode today aiming to offload the stress of providing popular video content to consumers. The company also announced today that it has raised $24 million across two rounds of funding from Accel Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Crescent Point Group and others.

With video now taking up 40 percent of consumer traffic on the web, carriers will have to scale their networks by ten times to keep up with the demand expected in five years — that is, unless they take advantage of Qwilt’s solution. The company offers a product that can be seamlessly integrated into network providers’ existing infrastructure, and which intelligently determines popular video content and pushes it to subscribers.

That means less stress for networks, since videos can be accessed more locally instead of constantly being downloaded from the web. And despite that change, users won’t notice any difference in how the video reaches them.

Qwilt’s network will also offer carriers a way to monetize the video that goes through their networks, similar to the services currently provided by content delivery networks like Akamai.

“The recent rise of bandwidth-usage caps shows how difficult and costly it is for carriers to deliver sophisticated video services today,” said Qwilt CEO Alan Maor in a statement today. “Their networks are simply not architected for it. Qwilt offers a win-win-win solution for carriers, content providers and, most important, users.”

Silicon Valley-based Qwilt was founded in 2010 by Maor, VP of marketing Dan Sahar, chairman Yuval Shahar, and serial entrepreneur Giora Yaron.

Image via drianita on MetaTube

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Beginning Thursday, Verizon will no longer offer new customers an unlimited data plan for smartphones, the company confirmed to FierceWireless.

Verizon is making its newest customers pick from four data plans capped at between 75 megabytes and 10 gigabytes of data. The monthly data fees range from $10 for the 75-megabyte plan to $80 for the 10-gigabyte plan. Tethering the phone to another device to enable Internet access on any plan will cost an extra $20.

The company is currently rolling out its latest fourth-generation wireless network, which is supposed to be much faster than its existing network. Verizon has released 4G-enabled smartphones and USB dongles that give notebooks and computers access to the 4G network. The iPhone, which launched on Verizon in January, still runs on the company’s 3G wireless network.

Verizon will also charge customers using 4G-enabled phones as wireless hotspots an extra $30 per month to continue using the wireless hotspot feature.

(The latest generation of wireless networks, including LTE and other 4G networks, will be a big part of our MobileBeat 2011 conference next week in San Francisco.)

Verizon said in October that it would hold onto its unlimited data plan. At that time, it offered the plan for $30 a month. The company introduced a smaller data-limited plan for $15 a month. But those plans were put in place before Verizon finally added the iPhone to its array of smartphones.

AT&T killed its unlimited data plan last year amid complaints about its wireless network’s performance in large cities like New York and San Francisco. AT&T’s iPhone woes led to some speculation that Verizon would close the curtain on its all-you-can-eat data plan whenever it began selling the iPhone.

Here’s a breakdown of each plan:

75MB: $10, amounts to around seven minutes of standard definition YouTube videos or browsing 150 websites. AT&T’s smallest data plan is 200MB for $15 per month.

2GB: $30, amounts to around 200 minutes of standard definition YouTube videos or uploading 500 photos to Facebook. AT&T’s 2GB data plan costs $25 per month.

5GB: $50, amounts to around 25,000 one-page email messages or 1,250 photo uploads to Facebook. AT&T has a 4GB data plan for $45 per month.

10GB: $80, amounts to around 1,000 minutes of standard definition YouTube videos or loading 20,000 typical web pages. AT&T does not have a data plan that offers more than 4GB of data.

We’ll be exploring the most disruptive mobile trends at our fourth annual MobileBeat 2011 conference, on July 12-13 at the Palace Hotel in San Francisco. It will focus on the rise of 4G and how it delivers the promise of true mobile computing. We’re also accepting entries for our mobile startup competition at the show. MobileBeat is co-located with our GamesBeat 2011 conference this year. To register, click on this link. Sponsors can message us at sponsors@venturebeat.com.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Early Bird Tickets on Sale

Verizon is preparing for an expected onslaught of mobile data usage from new iPhone customers by throttling data for the top 5 percent of users — the so-called “data hogs.” It’s also compressing data files transmitted over its wireless network, according to a Verizon memo (PDF) revealed by the mobile site Boy Genius Report.

Clearly, Verizon is trying its best to avoid appearing like AT&T, which saw its network take significant hits in performance after the introduction of the iPhone. Verizon is also home to powerful Android phones like the Droid series, and it’s preparing 4G devices to launch in a few months, so the new policies should help the carrier manage data hogs across all platforms.

According to the memo:

If you use an extraordinary amount of data and fall within the top 5% of Verizon Wireless data users we may reduce your data throughput speeds periodically for the remainder of your then current and immediately following billing cycle to ensure high quality network performance for other users at locations and times of peak demand.

Penalizing data hogs for two months seems excessive, especially since it’s unclear what the dividing line is between the top 5 percent of data users and everyone else.

As for the file optimization, Verizon’s memo reads:

We are implementing optimization and transcoding technologies in our network to transmit data files in a more efficient manner to allow available network capacity to benefit the greatest number of users. These techniques include caching less data, using less capacity, and sizing the video more appropriately for the device. The optimization process is agnostic to the content itself and to the website that provides it.

The memo goes on to say that the company will do its best to make sure the optimization doesn’t impact the appearance of content on your mobile device, it may end up having a minimal quality hit.

Assuming Verizon doesn’t go overboard with its compression settings, optimizing files could actually be a great method for dealing with wireless network strain. Most users aren’t aware of the sizes of files that they’re playing, which leads them to access files that aren’t really optimized for mobile devices. By re-encoding those files into something more efficient for its network, Verizon can surreptitiously make its service appear faster and more reliable without the need for costly upgrades. It’s a technique I suspect other mobile carriers will soon adopt as well.

The Milpitas, Calif., company provides optimization tools for wide-area networks (WANs), helping reduce bandwidth usage and mitigate latency issues that plague some large companies that need to transmit large amounts of data around the world by optimizing the files that are transferred. Aryaka Networks uses a number of methods. One of them, called deduplication, transmits only changes in a file rather than sending the complete file a second or third time.

The 75-person company is headed by Ajit Gupta (pictured left), whose previous company, content delivery network Speedera, was acquired by Akamai networks for more than $500 million. Aryaka’s funding to date comes from Trinity Ventures, Mohr Davidow Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners and Stanford University.

Aryaka Networks provides a browser-based interface that requires no client-side setup and maintenance, while other providers of WAN optimization offer appliances that require a “do-it-yourself” setup to handle the optimization. A portion of the data transmitted by a company passes through a number of quick-fire optimization processes at Aryaka Networks’ global offices in the U.S., Europe and Asia where and is then sent to its destination.

“Everything has been planned and you can just sit back and relax and get your work done,” said Ajit Gupta (pictured left), the company’s president and CEO.

Gupta expects his company’s cloud-based model to put other WAN optimization providers that offer their services in the form of a client-side “box” out of business. The market for providing WAN optimization isn’t very saturated, with only about 300,000 of a potential 8 million businesses getting on board, he said. Estimates from Gartner also peg the WAN optimization market as reaching $4.27 billion globally by 2014, according to Aryaka Networks.

“We discovered in our research that people were getting fed up with the cost and complexity and management aspects of it,” Gupta said. “So after about six months we cracked the code for it — which was tough, because it was something that hadn’t been attempted before — and approached our VCs with the idea and they liked it.”

Aryaka Networks was founded in November 2008 and secured its first round of funding in May 2009 but is now launching after successfully testing the product with 10 customers.

As the cloud has exploded, it is shaking up the tech industry and providing new opportunities in once-established sectors like storage. StorSimple is hoping to grasp the oft-misunderstood concept of pushing computing resources online and provide a way to cheaply and efficiently harness the power of the cloud for enterprise.

StorSimple provides enterprise users with an appliance that houses on-board storage and a network connection to various cloud storage providers like Amazon Web Services and Iron Mountain. The most critical, recent information is stored on-hand for quick access, and the rest is shipped off to cloud storage.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company also announced today that it picked up Ian Howells (pictured above), formerly of Alfresco and SeeBeyond before its acquisition by Sun Microsystems, to be its chief marketing officer. Howells will get to spend some of Mayfield’s money, since the funding round is pegged for marketing and growing the business “organically,” according to StorSimple founder and CEO Ursheet Parikh. (Organic growth, a term for growth through the natural expansion of a business, is often a euphemism for saying a company doesn’t plan to make acquisitions.)

The appeal of cloud storage is pretty straightforward: 10 cents per gigabyte of storage in a pay-as-you-go model, versus a much higher price for physical storage solutions, said Navin Chaddha, a general partner at Mayfield. The recent bidding war over cloud storage hardware provider 3Par, which led to a nice profit for Mayfield and other investors, is even more evidence that the cloud is no longer just a buzzword.

One differentiating factor is StorSimple’s use of “deduplication,” which cuts down on bandwidth usage by uploading only changes to a file, like a single word updated in a text document, instead of copying the whole file all over again to the cloud storage provider. The goal is to cut down on the massive bandwidth costs that some companies face when uploading data to cloud servers — and reduce costs by up to 90 percent.

StorSimple had earlier raised $8 million in a first round of funding from Index Ventures and Redpoint Ventures. Ignition Partners joined the most recent round of fundraising. Despite the sizable investment, Parikh said he doesn’t see an exit in the immediate future — he believes that a company that provides cloud solutions can grow quickly for 7 to 10 years, and StorSimple has only been around since 2009.