August 2007

Recently, Comcast has been at the center of a debate over whether or not it is shaping traffic in order to restrict use of the BitTorrent protocol. According to many, but not all, Comcast users, their ability to seed (upload) torrents has been crippled. Unsurprisingly, Comcast denies this accusation.

Whether or not Comcast is shaping BitTorrent traffic is really part of a larger problem - net neutrality. The big question behind this issue is whether or not ISPs should be allowed to arbitrarily limit or enhance a users experience on the internet based on some sort of pay scale or by charging content providers a premium in order to provide their content at a higher priority than non-paid traffic.

As a content provider, our stance is that all information on the internet should be freely and equally accessible to any user from any provider. However, for many ISPs, deciding to offer a higher tier for both providers and users is becoming more and more tempting.

Imagine, your ISP, Acme, decides that traffic from the iTunes Music Store is using too much of its bandwidth. Acme then goes to Apple and proposes that Apple will pay some large sum of money in order for Acme to continue serving iTunes traffic. Acme then turns to the users and starts charging a $5 per month surcharge for any account that accesses the iTunes Music Store. Keeping in mind that music downloads on iTunes are perfectly legal and legitimate - we’re not even discussing P2P networks here. Doesn’t that just make you feel bad all over?

While this is simply a hypothetical situation, if ISPs start continue to shape their traffic, this situation, or a situation like this, might not be so far off. We’re teetering on a slippery slope here, so hopefully ISPs will decide to make decisions with the user in mind.

It’s been a busy week here, and that’s to say the least.

Our biggest news is the launch of our redesigned site (here). I really think that this new design shows the very best of our work and potential. For anyone who’s bookmarked this blog, those links will still work, but you might want to reference the new address in the future.

I’ve also had the great opportunity to meet a couple of really cool people in the last few days. Last week was Brad Feld, local VC and business guru, then this week Dave Jilk of Jilk Systems and Brian Kellner of Newgator - all very interesting and extremely bright individuals.

We’ve got some more news and articles coming down the pipe, so check back soon.

Today is the Investor Day for the TechStars teams. I wish all of them the best of luck.

As I noted in a previous post, each of the 10 teams will present to a group of nearly 100 Angel Investors and VCs to try and gain some more substantial funding. The work I’ve gotten to see from these teams is outstanding - I really can’t imagine they’ll have much of a problem winning over these investors. Even so, this day will surely be an anxious one for everyone participating in the program.

Kimbal Musk of Me.dium and Todd Vernon of Lijit are already doing some preliminary critique of the presentations today. The feedback seems generally pretty positive, especially for some of my personal favorites: Socialthing, J-Squared Media, Intense Debate, MadKast and EventVue.

Good luck TechStars!

Our new site is closer than ever to launch. Within the next week you should see a brand new NPL Solutions making waves slip silently onto the web. This redesign has taken a painfully long time, but I think it’s been absolutely worth it.

Right now we’re working out the last of the browser compatibility bugs, and I’d like to personally invite everyone to come take a look and let us know what you think. We’re currently hiding out at http://beta.nplsolutions.com/.

I attended the Boulder Denver New Technology Meetup monthly meeting tonight. I was very impressed.

I’ve mentioned TechStars a few times before, and six of their teams presented their projects for a group of about 80 people at CU this evening. Each team is going to present for a group of almost 100 VCs and angel investors next Thursday to try and get some more substantial funding (even though a few of the teams are already profitable - nice). Tonight gave this group of six a great practice run for next week. The teams which presented tonight were:

• SocialThing
• MadKast
• EventVue
• J-Squared Media
• Intense Debate
• BrightKite

My favorite presenter tonight was SocialThing. Because they’re in a closed beta right now, I’ve only had a pretty basic understanding of their project, but after their 10 minute presentation, I see that they have real potential. Chris Stock pointed out that the key to their success is offering enough functionality to not only draw users, but also to maintain a reasonable user base. It seems like their big draw right now is that they can synchronize your contacts across many different social platforms - a really incredible feature, but not quite a complete service (I know they have other features, that’s just one they really pushed tonight).

I’ve also been following MadKast and J-Squared pretty closely, so it was really nice to be able to see the people behind these ideas and their presentations definately held their own. I’m looking forward to seeing what J-Squared will serve up next for the Facebook community.

Another big highlight of the night was the live comment screen powered by BrightKite. David Cohen was a particularly avid user of this feature tonight. I didn’t get in on it this time, but looking back I can’t help but wish that I would have.

Perhaps the most prominent theme this evening was advertising. It seems (unsurprisingly) that just about every team is using some sort of advertising as their main revenue model. It’s worked so far for J-Squared so I don’t blame these other teams for following a similar route. Really though, even outside of TechStars this is becoming a more and more popular trend - as long as the developers can make some reasonable revenue, I see it as a win-win situation.

For anyone that did not get to attend tonight, I saw a video camera in the front of the room. My guess is that these presentations will be on TechStars TV in the next day or two.

Once again, another new addition to the blog today. At the bottom of the sidebar, you’ll notice the Me.dium widget. But what is Me.dium? Me.dium is a social browsing service which allows you to see and interact with people whose browsing patterns are similar to your own. In other words:

Me.dium’s vision is to reveal the hidden world of people and activity behind your browser. For the first time, you can see your friends and others as they surf around you on the web.
- Brad Feld

That’s just the tip of the iceberg though. Along with the release of this new embeddable widget, Me.dium also released an IE7 browser extension which opens up their user base tremendously. (Me.dium previously only supported the Firefox browser.) For a more information on Me.dium’s recent direction, Peter Buttler, part of the CNet community, has posted a terrific overview of what Me.dium is and where its going.

Want to get in on the action? It’s easy - get started here.

One of my dreams has always been to have all my documents, all my applications, all my everything available to me wherever I am. While this traditionally meant to me that I could start a beefed-up VNC session on my iPhone to connect to my home PC and check my email, listen to music, even watch hi-definition video, all by streaming the data, this would involve a major leap in the bandwidth of not only home broadband connections, but also the coverage and bandwidth of cellular data networks. A pretty large order if I do say so myself. Then I got to thinking.

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