Being based in Barcelona means I get to visit the Mobile World Congress without having to manage a logistics nightmare. Some visitors are staying at hotels over 100 miles away, and commuting every day to the event and back, it is really that busy. Everyone who means anything in the mobile world will be here, so if you’re in town and want to get together for a coffee or a beer (well, a beer and a diet coke, I don’t drink) and talk about wireless technology and how nice the weather is over here, drop me a line in the comments. Oh, and look for something weird around the entrance…there will be a little surprise from Whisher!
Moobicent — DSL Geschwindigkeit ohne DSL gibt’s nicht?
Moobicent — DSL Geschwindigkeit ohne DSL gibt’s nicht?
Schnell ins Internet? Geht mit DSL und nur mit DSL und sonst mit gar nichts! Noch immer ist das in einer ganzen Reihe von Köpfen fest verankert. Dabei ist DSL nur eine mehrerer Möglichkeiten. Da gäbe es dann noch beispielsweise Kabel Internet über die Fernsehkabel oder aber mobiles Internet, etwa über UMTS Netze. Witzigerweise werden auch diese Varianten bisweilen DSL genannt: Kabel DSL oder mobiles DSL — irgendwie scheint der Begriff Breitbandverbindung ins Internet fest mit dem Begriff DSL verschmolzen zu sein. Das Unternehmen Moobicent würde das liebend gerne ändern.
Mächtigster Partner von Moobicent ist Vodafone, denn Vodafone schafft für Moobicent die technischen Voraussetzungen für mobiles Internet. Mobiles Internet bedeutet: Sie können im Zug, im Park, in der Eisdiele sitzen und etwa mithilfe des Anbieters Moobicent mit Ihrem Laptop ins Internet. Mobiles Internet braucht dafür Funknetze, von denen es verschiedene gibt. Am bekanntesten: das UMTS Netz. Aber Moobicent ist längst einen Schritt weiter und setzt verstärkt auf ein neues Funknetz, das HSDPA Netz. Für den Moobicent Kunden liegt der Vorteil in der Geschwindigkeit, mit der er Daten aus dem Internet laden kann. Sie erreicht erstmalig DSL Geschwindigkeit und könnte damit zur ernsthaften Konkurrenz für einen stationären DSL Anschluss werden. Während man sich bei einem UMTS Netz mit einer maximalen Downloadgeschwindigkeit von 384kbit/sec zufrieden geben musste, bietet Moobicent einen Booster durch Internetverbindungen über das HSDPA Netz. Hier ist ein maximaler Download von bis zu 7,2 Mbit/sec möglich. Das wird nur durch die schnellste gängige Variante beim DSL Anschluss getoppt, die 16 Mbit/sec anbietet.
Mit dem Ausbau des HSDPA Netzes schafft Moobicent eine echte Alternative zum stationären DSL Anschluss auf dem deutschen Markt für Breitbandverbindungen. Moobicent bietet natürlich auch eine Flatrate an. Man zahlt einmal monatlich und kann fortan ohne weitere Kosten mobil ins Internet. Mit HSDPA könnte Moobicent das mobile Internet mittelfristig deshalb aus einem Schattendasein führen. Noch ist der DSL Anschluss mit riesigem Abstand die Breitbandverbindung der Wahl in Deutschland. Laut dem Bericht zum Breitbandatlas 2006 des Bundesministeriums für Wirtschaft und Technologie dominiert DSL die Breitbandtechniken mit 97% Marktanteil. Aber wer sagt denn, dass das so bleibt? Einst gab es auch mehr Kutschen als Autos!
A great banning plugin for WordPress
Today, while looking at the last tirade by the anonymous German commentator on the Whisher blog, I went out searching for a plugin that would prevent someone from even posting comments based on their IP address (yes, WordPress has this in the preferences, but it will only mark posts as spam, it will not block access completely).
Stumbled upon Bannage, a very nifty but simple plugin that compares the IP address of the visitor to a set of ranges (you can use wildcards too to ban whole classes!) and changes the HTTP response to a 403 Forbidden, thus preventing him from even viewing the blog. If you get a lot of spam from you-know-which countries, this plugin is very well worth considering.
Deluded blog trolls
Over at the Whisher blog, we have some individual from Germany that is posting anonymous comments basically bashing us and saying some other WiFi startup is ever so much better. His last comment (we obviously will not approve senseless crap like this) now threatens to post screenshots of our censorship all over the internet, whatever that means. These are the comments we have received so far, feel free to judge for yourself if not approving them equals censorship, or that they are the work of a deluded troll just wanting to provoke.
my whishes | whishes@no.go
[someotherstartup].com succeded whisher did not. purely sad. they seem incompetent, very!!
gameover | gameover@test.it
whisher seems to be totally out. they cannot overcome the vista wifi problem – [someotherstartup].com could!
antiferran | antiferran@email.it
we dont like censorship. we told here that [someotherstartup].com has overcome these probs. whisher doesn´t !!
anti | anti@anti.it
we will blog your censorship everywhere in the net… use google, you will find!!
antimike | antikime@nomail.ol
no way for censorship! be aware, that screendumps of ALL your censorship can be find soon on the net, everywhere. NO WAY!
All these have been posted from IP addresses originating in Germany, so I think I have a pretty good idea of who is behind this, however, if I am right, he’s no longer promoting his usual startup, but another. In any case, please, give up.
As for the Vista issues in Whisher, it is true that we have had a very long and tedius integration process, but this is due to Vista having broken all previous behavior with something called Native WiFi, which is an extra layer in the onion (and a very thick one!), to make matters worse, hardly documented in the beginnings. The reason other WiFi tools work in Vista (the one this guy refers to doesn’t work that well at all as he claims) is that they don’t dig as deep as we do into the driver, basically using the garden-variety APIs for connecting and disconnecting from networks.
I upgraded my laptop so I could use my Seesmic invite
Just kidding – the content right now is not what I would call high grade material…but watching a friends 2.8GHz, 4GB of RAM laptop grind to a halt while watching some videos there, and playing with the rounded softy animated interface was an eye-opener. 50% of CPU and 80MB of RAM just to run this thing in the browser! Honestly, can’t we go back to sensitive, lightweight, well-designed and engineered websites? (OK, not just sites, “applications” too…). Ted was right when he wrote about Zoho. In a world where greentech is the new buzz, we are generating tons and tons of emissions just because an entrepreneur and a few engineers thought it would be cool to animate a tab change in their web-based UI, when a simple transition, or even a page reload, would be just as effective, and I’m pretty sure nobody would mind. Is it time to start thinking about green web development? Loic, any thoughts?
Uncov – startup critic to launch…startup
It was fun while it lasted. It seems that Ted Dziuba, the hand behind Uncov, the extremely harsh startup review site, has given up, curiously, at the same time he attended the Crunchies, and is launching his own Web two-dot-oh startup, Persai.
Always extremely critic of other startups in the new ’social internet’, he was often cited as the anti-Techcrunch, providing alternative not-so-shiny reviews of the same companies featured there. The professional blogosphere is very closed and competitive medium, and so, you can find yourself in a position where you get effectively blackballed from being mentioned in most top blogs, either for making fun of them (like Ted did) or by being strongly criticized in one. In the latter case, it will be the rest of bloggers who will not want to step on the first one’s toes, and write good reviews or posts, for fear that their friendship could suffer.
So, I guess Ted finally woke up and saw the reality, and realized that he has to play ball in order to get his own startup promoted around the blogs and forums. It would be interesting to know what kind of reception he got at the Crunchies, I bet it wasn’t warm, and this made him see what happens to those who stray from the politically correct path. In any case, good luck with Persai Ted, you made us laugh a few times.