The Next Net

Glide Mobile Lets You Check Out PowerPoint Slide Shows on Your iPhone

While Google (GOOG) is still supposedly fooling with the finishing touches to its Web-based version of PowerPoint, one startup already has it working on a mobile phone.   Transmedia out of New York City is finally bringing PowerPoint presentations to the iPhone and other mobile devices with it's Glide Mobile service. 

One of the sorely missed features of the Apple iPhone is full compatibility with Microsoft Office.  Out of the box, you can read Word documents on it, but you can’t edit them.  And don’t even think about running a PowerPoint slide show. 

But starting later today, Transmedia CEO Donald Leka tells me, Glide members will be able to go over to glidemobile.com on their iPhones (or Blackberries or Treos or Nokias) and show people slide shows that they’ve uploaded to Glide.  They can even edit them or create new ones from their iPhone (assuming they have a lot of time on their hands).  They can also type away on Word documents to their hearts content—a feature that was implemented a few days after the iPhone hit stores.

If a small startup in New York City can make Word docs and PowerPoint slides work on the iPhone, why can’t Apple (AAPL) or Microsoft (MSFT)? 

Disruptors Video: Inkless Printing (Zink)

In this week's Disruptors episode, I visit Zink in Waltham, Mass.  Zink is a spin-off from Polaroid that has developed an inkless printing technology.  The ink is in the paper in the form of special dye crystals that turn different colors when heated. By getting rid of the ink cartridges and associated printer heads, this will allow for the creation of compact, mobile printers that can be embedded into digital cameras, laptops, and even cell phones.  Watch the video.

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Apple Takes Its Bite of iPhone Mobile Service Fees

  iPod 
  Originally uploaded by stublog

In the competition to carry the iPhone in Europe, it looks like Vodafone (VOD) is balking at Apple's demands;  The Guardian reports:

Apple is understood to be demanding that its European mobile phone partners hand over a significant proportion of revenues generated by the iPhone and restrict the content that users can access.

The portion of network revenues demanded by Apple is believed to have been behind Vodafone's decision not to sign up as the exclusive partner for the iPhone in the UK. ... The iPhone is expected to launch in November in the UK through O2, in France with Orange and in Germany with T-Mobile.

So not only does Apple (AAPL) keep all the revenues from the $500 iPhones, but it gets a cut of the monthly service fees as well.  I guess even (most) hard-nosed telecom execs have a hard time saying "No" to Steve Jobs.  But if this report is true, good for Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin for sticking to his guns.

Update: Another tidbit about the economics of the relationship between Apple and the mobile carriers.  Citigroup analyst Richard Gardner models iPhone revenues for Apple to include the entire $500 average selling price plus a $100 bounty from AT&T.  (This is from a June 28 note of his).  Gardner does not model in any cut of the monthly subscription revenues, however.  (The $100 bounty would be more like a typical subsidy).  So if Apple is also getting part of AT&T's monthly fees, not to mention that of the European carriers, that would significantly increase its profits from the iPhone.

Why I am Going To Wait to Buy an iPhone

While many people are saying "TGiPhone" today, I'm not so sure that I really must have the must-have device of the moment.  Maybe it's just iPhone fatigue, with the non-stop media barrage masterfully orchestrated by Steve Jobs. (Disclosure: I too will be priming that pump as a guest on ABCNews Now today to comment on the madness as the phones finally go on sale).

Maybe it's the gnawing feeling I get that no matter how cool the iPhone may seem right now, it will soon seem as quaint and clunky as the very first iPod.  You remember, the one with only 5 gigabytes of memory, a black-and-white screen, and those protruding buttons around the scroll-wheel. 

Maybe it's the fact that the iPhone right now is a tease, hinting at what a broadband mobile computing device should be, but hampered by AT&T's worse-than-dial-up data network.  (Okay, it's a bit better than dial-up, but not much, since AT&T "boosted" its network speeds over the past few weeks).   Steve Jobs says he opted not to go with AT&T's faster, next-generation, 3G network because such phones would be too battery-hungry right now.  Fair enough.  That's just another reason to wait.

And don't tell me that the WiFi crutch is a good substitute for now.  WiFi is not everywhere, and even where there are networks, they are not always open or free.  And connecting to them can be a real bitch.  In the real world, WiFi phones still have a long way to go (see my recent experience with T-Mobile's Why Phone).  These networks are not controlled by Apple (AAPL) or by AT&T (T), so there is only so much they can do to try to make those connections work.

What good is a broadband phone if you can't get a broadband connection?  All the Web-surfing and video-streaming capabilities of the iPhone will be intermittent pleasures at best.

There are a litany of other deficiencies as well, including the inability to buy iTunes songs over the air, a camera that cannot record video, Word or Excel files that can be read but not edited, the inability to download contacts from your current phone, poor search functions, no support for instant messaging clients, and no GPS, to name a few.  I'm confident that many of these features will be added, improved, or corrected over time.  I can wait.

Then there's the price: $500 to $600, plus $60 to $100 a month for the wireless service.  If you go all out and get the best phone with the best plan, that will knock you back $1,800 in the first year alone.  You know what?  I'd rather get a pimped-out MacBook and still save $300.

Update: Glad I waited.  My boss just returned his.

Video: Watch James Dyson Dry His Hands

No, I'm not joking.  James Dyson, the one-man brand who brought us the vacuum cleaner that "doesn't lose suction," decided that automatic hand dryers need a rethink.  He gave me a private demo of his new "Airblade" hand dryer Tuesday afternoon at a theater in Times Square.  I brought my camera along to capture the magic.  Here's the video.

Click To Play

The basic idea behind his new hand dryer is that instead of using heat to evaporate the water on your hands, it uses a "blade" of air pushed through two eyelash-thin slits to, in effect, wipe your hands dry.  What makes it work is a new electric motor Dyson invented that rotates at nearly 100,000 RPMs, and has done away with the brushes and coiled wires of conventional electric motors.  It's hard to explain, just watch the video.

Can Private Equity Save Palm?

  Palm Foleo 
  Originally uploaded by KlausNahr

Private equity firm Elevation Partners agreed to buy a 25 percent stake in Palm (PALM), the struggling handheld computer company behind the Treo.  The price: $325 million.  Palm was earlier rumored to be looking for a buyer for the whole company, but apparently could not find any takers.  Elevation Partners' Roger McNamee and Fred Anderson will join Palm's board.  As will Jon Rubinstein.  Both Anderson and Rubinstein are former Apple executives—Rubinstein ran hardware and introduced the iPod under Steve Jobs; Anderson was CFO, until he left amidst the stock options scandal.

How Elevation hopes to turn around Palm is unclear, especially when  it  will soon be facing competition from Apple itself when the iPhone hits stores at the end of June.  Palm's announcement just last week of a new Treo companion ultramobile laptop called the Foleo garnered a ho-hum response.

It's going to have to do better than that, and fast.

Meraki Introduces Solar-Powered WiFi

WiFi mesh networks are now going solar.  Meraki Networks, a startup funded by Google and Sequoia Capital, today announced a $99 solar-powered wireless router/repeater that can create a mesh network with other similar routers.  (The $99 is only for the weatherproof router. The solar panel has not yet been priced.  Both should be available by August).

You can think of mesh networks as the next step after WiFi.  Today, there are tens of thousands of WiFi hotspots around the world.  But each one extends broadband Internet access no more than a few hundred feet.  A mesh network ties these WiFi routers to each other to create a bigger network that can cover a neighborhood or even an entire city.  I met up with CEO Sanjit Biswas when he was in New York a couple weeks ago.  He told me:

Meraki is a service, like municipal WiFi.  The economics of access changes when you create a big network.

One Meraki-powered mesh network in Slovakia, where DSl lines cost $100 a month, supports 350 people.  Another in San Diego, the So Cal Free Net, is serves 600 low-income residents with only three business-class DSL lines.   And Meraki itself is bringing a free WiFi mesh network to parts of San Francisco (this is separate from Google's project to cover the entire city with free WiFi hotspots). 

Currently there are 1,000 Meraki mesh netwoks worldwide with about 40,000 users.  Normally, each of these routers would have to be plugged into an electrcial outlet.  But now they can be solar-powered, which should help Meraki with it's stated goal of trying to bring "Internet acces to the next billion people."  Meraki's mesh technology is also being incorporated into each One Laptop Per Child computer (as students, Meraki's founders had previously created MIT Roofnet in Boston).

Once a wireless mesh network is set up, it can either be free to consumers and supported by ads—which might make sense in dense cities, although Biswas says there is too little local ad inventory to support that business model at this point—or whoever sets up the network can charge access fees ($10 a month is typical).   Meraki's software takes care of managing the network traffic as well as billing, whether by credit card or prepaid card.  Operators can choose to charge whatever they want or offer it for free and put up ads.  Meraki takes a 20 percent cut.  Says Biswas:

You probably have a better idea of what you should charge in Zimbabwe than I do.

Meraki's biggest weakness is that it fails to link, or at least give the option to link, the separate networks being built out on its technology. Contrast that approach to that of Fon or other WiFi communities where if you are a member you can log on anywhere in the world there happens to be a network.  With Meraki's mesh networks, people are building 1,000 standalone islands.

What would really be disruptive would be to connect them all together.

Is Apple TV Zune-like?

Fortune's Brent Schlender on the Apple TV:

It's about as uninspired as another prominent dud, the Zune, the MP3 player Microsoft launched last year. In fact, the Apple TV is so Zune-like, you'd think Jobs was so busy with the iPhone that he outsourced the Apple TV project to the folks up in Redmond.  To wit:

—Apple TV's most highly touted feature is its weakest one: It requires an HDTV, but the video you download is so low-res that it looks as fuzzy as plain old broadcast TV.

—There's no way to order a movie directly from the iTunes store via your TV, even though Apple TV has its own connection to the Internet. Instead, you have to download it to your computer first.

—Apple TV lets you show photos only from a single computer, even though photos are the one source of HD content everyone has, and are easy and legal to share over a network.

Move over, Mac Cube.

Microsoft Introduces Surface Computing

Microsoft unveiled a new tabletop computing interface it is dubbing "surface computing."  In the works for five years in Microsoft Research as a project called Milan, the idea is to transform a surface as big as tabletop into a touchscreen in order to be able to manipulate images, paint with brushes, or move digital objects around with your fingers.  (Check out the Popular Mechanics video embedded above). 

Microsoft did not invent this concept.  I've seen it before in high-end custom-hardware mapping applications, and Apple's upcoming iPhone shares some of the "multi-touch" interface techniques (such as being able to make a picture bigger by pulling apart opposite corners with two fingers).  But this may signal that the technology is finally ready to leave the research labs and venture into the real world.

Still, I wonder if this technology is getting ahead of itself, or are we truly on our way to a more immersive, Minority Report-like era of computing?  We are still many years from this going mainstream.  These Microsoft Surface computers will cost $10,000 to start, and are being sold to enterprises such as T-Mobile and Starwood to liven up their retail stores and hotels.  I still want one though.

Sony Invents Flexible Color Screen

The cool factor of tiny screens just got a boost.  Sony just announced a new technoloy that allows them to put a color screen on flexible plastic.  Digital wallpaper anyone?

(Picture via Pink Tentacle).