The
Wi-Fi Alliance, the global, non-profit industry association, has selected
Matthew Gast, a Trapeze executive, to chair two new, very important task groups. Gast will chair the Wireless Network
Management Marketing and Security Technical task groups.
[more]
Dräger Medical Certifies Trapeze Networks Products Interoperable
PLEASANTON, Calif., August 4, 2008 – Dräger Medical, an international leader in the fields of medical and safety, has certified interoperability between Dräger’s line of Infinity patient monitoring equipment and Trapeze Networks’ line of NonStop Wireless networking.
In Dräger’s notice of certification, Lars Roth of Dräger’s Monitoring Systems and IT group, wrote, “Due to the critical nature of medical devices, Dräger Medical tests and verifies network hardware components used for communication between medical system devices. These tests include proper IP Multicast handling, wireless roaming, wireless encryption and load testing. In addition, tests with competing traffic are run in order to understand and detect the proper Quality of Service settings. These are the key parameters that will ensure that in a shared Infinity OneNet installation, the data flow of the Dräger patient monitors is being prioritized over non-patient monitor data.”
“People kick around the words ‘mission-critical’ until the expression is meaningless,” said Ahmet Tuncay, executive vice president of product management and business development at Trapeze Networks. “For Dräger, mission-critical means monitoring patients in the ER, ICU, OR, and everywhere in between. Dräger has pioneered mobile patient monitoring and is turning to the leader in NonStop Wireless, Trapeze Networks, for wireless infrastructure. --That’s mission critical.”
[more]
This story ended up with some very interesting competitive spins to it. Some hard work and some great relationships brought everything together quite nicely. Very pleased with the story.
By Rivka Gewirtz Little, Senior News Writer
Last week cabling company Belden Inc. completed its acquisition of Trapeze Networks for $133 million, and executives say the wireless LAN company's 200-plus partner channel will remain intact and supported.
"Our partners are pretty excited about this," said Jim Vogt, president of Trapeze, adding that the company will function independently, continue to use its own name and look to further expand the channel.
Because it is so difficult for an independent company to survive in the hotly competitive wireless LAN market, Trapeze partners appear to believe that the acquisition by Belden, a publicly traded company, will strengthen Trapeze's position and give it global reach. A string of small wireless LAN companies have been acquired in recent years.
"This is going to solidify Trapeze and give them the financial backing to continue on in the future," said Dick Stayner, major accounts manager at Valcom, a Trapeze partner in Salt Lake City.
Trapeze can't promise that there won't be channel conflict, since at least a portion of Belden's channel, which dwarfs Trapeze's, will eventually be able to sell the wireless product.
Initially, though, Trapeze partners are likely to see new opportunities, because many Belden partners are not yet trained in wireless technology and can't sell the wireless product until they are. In those situations Trapeze partners will be brought in on Belden deals, Vogt said.
"Now we can put our sales force behind them and go after larger accounts," Vogt said. Belden partners often serve large businesses that could have both wired and wireless networks, or have wireless systems that need extensive behind-the-scenes cabling.
However, it is unclear how Belden partners will take to bringing in Trapeze partners.
"Everybody will want to sell Trapeze and they'll wonder why we're bringing in [our own channel]," Vogt said. "So there will be some conflict there." But he added that there will be "some reward" for taking Trapeze partners into accounts.
A formal award or incentive system hasn't been finalized yet, and the companies are banging out the rules of engagement. Those guidelines must emerge quickly since eventually Belden partners will be trained and may try to cut out Trapeze partners, resulting in channel conflict.
"What the Belden guys are doing now is sorting out where the interest is in the Belden channel, figuring out who would like to step up and extend their business with this offering and whether they have the propensity to do it. Then we are going to have to map our channel list and say, 'Here are my channels by region, and here are yours," Vogt said. He added that it will be like putting the "decoder ring together."
Beyond concerns about channel conflict, partners also hope the Belden acquisition won't change Trapeze's partner-friendly attitude.
Cliff Arellano, president of Trapeze partner Communications Products Inc. (CPI) in Indianapolis, said his company used to work with wireless LAN company Airespace, which was later acquired by Cisco Systems Inc. CPI started working with Cisco but didn't find the super-vendor to be "really partner-friendly," so it switched to Trapeze. CPI has a rosier outlook on the Belden deal since it is already a Belden partner too. Nevertheless, Arellano said he hopes Belden sticks to its word that it will be friendly toward Trapeze partners.
"Belden seems to get the picture, whereas Cisco didn't appear to care," Arellano said.
In the meantime, CPI is testing products from Ruckus Wireless and may eventually incorporate some Ruckus technology into its offering.
Ruckus launched an incentive program to poach unhappy Trapeze partners once the Belden deal was announced. Ruckus marketing vice president David Callisch said the incentive program has drawn new partners, and he gave two examples. CPI was the only Trapeze partner contacted by press time that showed any interest in Ruckus, and Arellano stressed that CPI is moving very slowly with Ruckus and is fully committed to Trapeze.
Arellano said the company "had been stuck once before" with small vendors like Ruckus that were later acquired and weren't the same for partners. Now that Trapeze has been purchased by Belden, he said, it is definitely stable.
Music. Doesn't everyone? I've survivied the roller coaster rides of different formats and has been fairly successful getting what I really want into a digital format that's almost convenient. There have been hard disk failures, some dead end streets, and etc., but, overall, I'm doing ok.
What I've come to praise today is a service that does what it's promises and promises something that you might want.
MP3Tunes makes a simple proposition and does a lot of heavy lifting in the background. Install a little app next to your 
music files and open an account. The app will automatically copy all of your music up to MP3Tuness server for safe keeping. But, while your files are there, would you like them cleaned and washed, retagged, re-collated into the correct album play order, re-titlte with the right title, etc. Very nice feature. Then, of course, all those fixes become synched to your local files.
Perhaps your in your office and you don'thave your iPod or the particular album you have a yen to hear isn't synched to your iPod. No problem. Log on to MP3Tunes and open up it's player (which is a dead ringer for iTunes), find your tracks and rock on.
Maybe you want to have your music files at work as well as at home. No problem. Install the little app leave it on over the weekend and , voila. All your music is there on Monday morning.
I'm very happy with the service and highly recommend it.
PLEASANTON, Calif., June 26, 2008 – Today, Trapeze Networks introduces SmartPass™ 7.0, the access management platform for Trapeze NonStop Wireless™ networking products. SmartPass 7.0 gives network managers precise control over every dimension of the who, what, where, when, why and how of access management. With SmartPass 7.0, network managers have more control over wireless network access than they typically have for the wired network. Network managers can easily control access based on location, traffic, and time-of-day policies.
“SmartPass 7.0 marks an important advancement in access control and how it must be integrated with business applications,” said Ahmet Tuncay, vice president of product management and marketing. “SmartPass is now a standards-based platform combining user authentication, device integrity checking, and dynamic access control with open interfaces for third-party development, a first of its kind in the wireless LAN industry.”
Today, SmartPass can accept the following plug-ins:
- Advanced Access Control
- Location-Based Authentication
- RADIUS-based Monitoring and Reporting
- Guest Access
Trapeze Networks has published the application programming interfaces for SmartPass so an enterprise can write its own plug-in and control its wireless network with precision.
Advanced Access Control
SmartPass installs quickly and immediately begins to protect the
integrity of the production network. With the Advanced Access Control
plug-in, the network administrator using SmartPass can set access based
on location, time of day, identity of user, SSID, VLAN, and / or
accounting data. It is based on the RFC 3576 standard and has the ability to change authorization attributes during active sessions.
One example application of Advanced Access Control is in an education
setting where for any given student, after 10 MB of downloads one
session, the user is moved down from full access to the lowest priority
queue, perhaps 100 Kbps maximum. This way, every student has a chance
to benefit from high-speed access.
Location, Location, Location
SmartPass 7.0, with the Location-based Authentication / Access Control plug-in, works with the Trapeze Networks Location Appliance
to provide location-based services and add location information to
accounting data. Network managers can set rules to permit or restrict
access, allocate bandwidth and allow resources all based on location.
This is a feature unique to Trapeze Networks.
In a school, for instance, a professor is giving a test from 2:00p to
3:00p in Classroom 230. She has the ability to change wireless access
for students instantly to deny access to the internet during that time
and at that location. If the professor chooses, students can still have
access to relevant classroom materials on the local area network.
Plays Well With Others
SmartPass works hand-in-glove with Trapeze Networks’ LA-200 Location
Appliance. SmartPass also works seamlessly with Trapeze Networks’ RingMaster,
the company’s wireless network management suite, its access points and
wireless controllers. All these components come together to deliver NonStop Wireless for the Always-on Enterprise.
No man is an island and no network application should be forced to work independently of all the others. That’s why when Trapeze Networks engineered SmartPass, it made the platform plug and play with Cisco’s NAC (Network Admission Control), Microsoft’s NAP (Network Access Protection), and the TCG (Trusted Computing Group).
SmartPass maintains per user statistics, lifetime session counts, traffic details, and total traffic passed for a user session or specific device. All together, this means that SmartPass 7.0 cooperates and complements existing network tools by giving managers unique views and reports on all aspects of wireless usage and traffic patterns relating to time of day and location. This information can be used to make decisions about adjusting the capacity of the network by adding more access points to relieve congested areas.
Be Our Guest
Today, it’s expected to allow guests to have wireless access, but too
many enterprises give too much away to too many. And the new generation
of wireless-enabled sub-notebooks, iPhones, gaming and music devices
makes a bad situation worse.
With SmartPass, the guest access operator is completely shielded from the WLAN controllers and network management tools so mistakes can’t be made. When guest accounts are created, they are automatically purged after a pre-determined time, such as the end of a work day, and can be changed in mid-session. SmartPass can be used to handle a couple of guests in a conference room or 1,000 people in a convention center. Either way, every guest can do their own work and only their own work.
Easy to Use, Easy to Buy
Through September 30, 2008, Trapeze Networks customers can upgrade to a
SmartPass 7.0 base license for $295, a $300 savings. For more
information on this promotion, see the Trapeze website
(www.trapezenetworks.com) or one of its many channel partners.
About Trapeze Networks
Trapeze Networks is a leading provider of enterprise wireless LAN
equipment and management software. Trapeze was the first company to
introduce NonStop Wireless – delivering unmatched reliability to the
enterprise wireless LAN. Its solutions are optimized for companies
requiring mobility and high bandwidth such as healthcare, education,
and hospitality. Trapeze delivers Smart Mobile™—
providing scalable wireless LANs for applications such as Voice over
Wi-Fi, location services, and indoor/outdoor connectivity.
# # #
I grew up in the Carnegie Library in Fort Smith. Now, it's the Fort Smith Library.
Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins. I regarded the Green Eggs and Ham, The Cat in the Hat, and its successors as the author lowering his sights and playing to the crowd. My library card was pale blue with rounded corners and there was a metal tag affixed to it. I can remember exactly how the library smelled. Books also give off special smells. According to a recent survey of French students, 43 percent consider smell to be one of the most important qualities of printed books—so important that they resist buying odorless electronic books. CaféScribe, a French on-line publisher, is trying to counteract that reaction by giving its customers a sticker that will give off a fusty, bookish smell when it is attached to their computers.
From The Lbrary in the New Age, The New York Review of Books, Volume 55, Number 10, June 12, 2008
The Carnegie Library in Fort Smith was one of four libraries endowed by Carnegie in Arkansas. The four Carnegie Libraries in Arkansas pale in comparison to the the 165 Carnegie Libraries in Indiana.
And in 1919, when the last grant was given, more than half (1,689) libraries in the U.S. were Carnegie Libraries. In all, Carnegie endowed 2,509 libraries around the world.
Carnegie Libraries advanced the innovation of open stacks, shelved books open to the public, something we all take for granted now. Imagine.
Andrew Carnegie was a wicked man in many respects, but I can't help but second the person who called him the patron saint of the library. I would not be me, if it weren't for the Carnegie Library and the Fort Smith Public Library. It's impossible for me to calculate how many hours, days I spent there. For my mother, it was a combination of childcare and a priceless gift that created ... me.
In New York, the first place I lived was the Harvard Club which is, basically, a library. It was all leather and cozy and that summer tasted like Tom Collins. The New York Public Librar
y had a system whereby the copy machines worked when a special token was inserted in it, a token the library sold. I discovered, by accident, that the token was identical to a subway token in every respect except for it's price which was fifteen cents less and I arbitraged that spread to pay for my newspapers and magazines and coffee.
Now, in my wallet I only keep three cards: My Amex, bank card, insurance card and my Library card and I keep the library card so that its covers the others and it is the first thing someone sees when I open my wallet.
In San Francisco, the metropolitan center I live next to, it took me some years before I discovered The Mechanic's Institute Library, a private library I joined about four years ago. Professionally, I was in need of something like a
office pied-a-terre, someplace quiet where I could cool my heels, perhaps do some work, and maybe even use for meetings. Hotel lobbies are sometimes good for this and I've used many fine hotel lobbies in my time, but there's something about San Francisco hotel lobbies that don't especially strike me as welcoming or conducive to day-long sitdowns the way many NYC hotel lobbies are. Coffee shops are far to noisy, and the rent on a chair measured in vente lattes is neither healthy for my physical or financial self. I was familiar with the idea of private libraries and was 
glad of heart when I discovered The Mechanic's Institute Library as it is Very Affordable, centrally located, chock-ful of character, has requisite technological conveniences and is quite lovely to lounge around in. I've taken the family there for some of the events hosted there and almost joined the Proust Society that meets there every month (but declined as I had finished my marathon and, frankly, needed to put that obsession behind me for a while). The oldest chess club is affiliated with the library and meets in rooms that are consecutive from the library and the players there add even more color to the library. I keep my library card to Mechanic's Institute Library in my back-up wallet in my bag. Everyone reading this who lives in or near San Francisco should subscribe to and support the library.
Finally (and I almost forgot this), I've embarked on a project for my synagogue's library. As the library is without a set of Talmud, and as Talmud is almost essential to the deep study of Torah, I've launched a fundraiser to acquire a set of the "Oral Torah" and perhaps even contract with student librarian to help our library along a bit.
And this is all true.
This looks to me like a marriage made in heaven, or at least as
close as one can get to thatdelightful, if theoretical, concept.
Belden has a huge following, name recognition, a channel, and great
wired products. Trapeze has a very competitive wireless LAN system. I
think that this acquisition is very clear evidence of the importance of
wireless LANs, unified networking, and the very significant growth
prospects ahead for both.
[more]
Charmed.
My instruments alerted me to a story that will appear in this coming Sunday's New York Times Magazine entitled Exposed. (I can remember how, when I worked in the halls of book publisher, we would receive parts of the Sunday paper mid-week, all fresh smelling and glistening with the dew that the cognoscente would discuss over afternoon cocktails in cool, dark lounges.)
Bethatasitmay, I received the alert that the New York Sunday Times magazine will feature a story by one Ms. Emily Gould. Ms Gould's reputation precedes her and then there was this rather ... humid ... photo illustration.
So I arrived at the article prepared to cringe at yet another amazed and naive account of Life On The Internet Thing As Understood By The New York Times, that would set back the Our Cause by another year. (Internet? Hmpf. People with tattoos and STDs chattering about absolutely any random thing that occurs to them. Hmpf. You can't be serious.) I heard myself saying, "I've invested twenty years into this internet thing and we're right back to Big Brother and MySpace and internet = wasteland. Damn.
But then I read the article and was absolutely charmed. This is the first time that I can remember that The New York Times has run a story where the internet is a part of the story but not the novelty of the story or the morale of the story or the glittering brand-new toy of the story. Here are some parts I liked:
Emily writes ...
When, at age 24, she decided to move to New York, she had two career options: Columbia Journalism School or Gawker. She chose Gawker. Two years later, every magazine editor in town knew her name, and she was hired as the online editor of Vanity Fair. Maybe the days were over when young comers were slowly mentored as they prepared to assume their bosses’ titles, covering community-board meetings or fetching coffee.
Indeed. Don't forget the cream and extra sugar. Emily does an excellent job of capturing the climate and choices of New York media, the juxtaposition of cardboard coffee cups and sitting next to Anna Wintour.
Then, Emily describes what it's like to be an online celebrity. For me the sub head captures it whole: "Famous for 15 People." This is something I've observed with great interest during the past couple of decades: How celebrity manifests itself in the online world. There, we can find almost affinity groups circling around almost anything or anybody. I have watched, in rapt fascination, the rise and fall of many people on Live Journal, and antecedents like the Well and elsewhere who are famous because... and that's the most fascinating part of all.
They are famous because they are maestros of the medium and it is this specific talent that propels them.
I can cite two very different examples and experiences. On Live Journal, I am a "friend" of someone who I've never met in real life. I read her journal , listen to her telephone posts, and follow her through her life step-by-step because she pretty much chronicles her life in that much detail.
So, at first, I'm self-conscious about this as it made me feel like some sort of voyeur. Afterall, what is my real connection with this person? And then I noticed that she made me think about things in a new way and that I would take things from her and use them in my own life. And feel good about it. I am informed, entertained and educated. So what is this experience?
I had a very different experience involving someone who wasn't there. Again, on Live Journal, I began to observe someone who was presented with Great Challenges in her life. Her story unspooled over more than a year. There were spiritual, mental and physical setbacks that culminated in what appeared to be an attempted suicide. And I had a moment, like that we might have experienced in reading fiction, when one becomes aware that there is a story-teller telling a story about the story-teller. Such like: And then the whale rammed our ship and we all died. I realized that I had become enmeshed in a work of fiction that, in technique, was no different from Bram Stoker's famous work.
3 May. Bistritz. __Left Munich at 8:35 P. M, on 1st May, arriving at Vienna early next morning; should have arrived at 6:46, but train was an hour late. Buda-Pesth seems a wonderful place, from the glimpse which I got of it from the train and the little I could walk through the streets. I feared to go very far from the station, as we had arrived late and would start as near the correct time as possible.
We will read this text and become involved in it and then at some point we might become self-conscious of the fact that the author of this diary ... wait, it isn't really a diary, it's a work of fiction akin to the epistolatory novels of, say, Samual Richardson (see Clarissa: Or the History of a Young Lady
Basically, what I'm reaching for here is that Ms. Gould tarries exactly on the cusp of our life / our fiction and the porosity of the boundary between them. And she accurately captures the results of actually becoming the protagonist of your own life.
Kudos, Ms. Gould, and thanks for oversharing.
• Customers with greenfield opportunities should consider Trapeze when selecting a wireless vendor, especially if there is a need to scale the WLAN to a very large number of APs. In addition, customers in this situation should consider using 802.11n at the onset, rather than older ABG technologies.
• Existing Trapeze customers should consider the new controller and software in this announcement when planning upgrades to their WLAN environment. Trapeze has significantly changed the capabilities in its offerings, especially when it comes to scaling the WLAN environment. Customers should consider the new capabilities when planning for the next year.
• Customers of other WLAN vendors should consider Trapeze when looking to upgrade the existing WLAN. Trapeze has made significant improvements that may outstrip the current WLAN vendor.
[more]
When University of Minnesota students return for classes this fall, they’ll discover a whole new meaning for the term “academic freedom.” That’s because for the firstrt time, they’ll have a chance to connect to
the school’s new campuswide wireless network, which, thanks to its adherence to the latest 802.11 Wi-Fi standard, will allow them access to electronic resources via ultra-high-speed, seamless and reliable connections from just about anywhere on the Twin Cities campus.
When it’s fully implemented in the next few years, the new 802.11n wireless network will be the world’s largest, with approximately 9,500 access points deployed over 300 buildings and large communal areas on the school’s 1,204-acre campus in St. Paul and along the east and west banks of the Mississippi River in Minneapolis.
The network, which will take five years and an estimated $15 million to build out across the entire campus, relies on state-of-the-art products from Trapeze Networks.
This is very, very interesting and gives me hope about what we can do with this internet.
Don't get me wrong. I love the career I've chosen. It's just sometimes I find that my colleagues are doing our profession a disservice. Take for example this week's issue of PR Week (yes, I'm a subscriber). The April 11 issue features a roundtable in San Francisco / Silicon Valley and around the table sit some of the leading lights hereabouts.
One question posed to this august group was, "So, what about the recession?" Everyone at the table, save one voice, replied, "What recession? There's a recession? I don't see a recession." The lone dissenter was Mr. Paul Bergevin, formerly of IBM and Cunningham and currently enriching the public image @ Intel. Mr. Bergevin noticed that the last time the economy went through a mild recession, there were heavy casualties in technology media.
Okay. If I were the president or MD at an agency, or the VP of Corp Comm at a company with a market cap larger than most countries in South America, I might not want to let on that the heavy rains of the economy were puddling in my front yard. Nevertheless, ... please. How credible is it for these folks who do more revolutions per minute than a carousel at Coney Island to turn away from what is blindingly obvious to most of us, even President Bush, for crying out loud.
I don't usually get worked up about what my peers say or think, but it just so happens that I know more than a couple of the people around that table and I know they are smarter, better still, wiser than this. It hurts all of our credibility when a group of very bright people don't admit there's an elephant in the room.
It's been Some Time, since I arrived on the Left Coast, having relented (or succumbed) to irresistible gravinomic forces, that maelstrom known as Silicon Valley. Nevertheless, I think I'll forever see the world through the grey glasses given to my by the New York Times.
Being here, is rather like becoming the eccentric uncle who is kind of fun every now and then but we never quite figure out what he really does for a living. Here, in the eye of the storm, we charming company but whey do they insist on being so different. Yes. So, our aunt visited and was shocked by what she saw. Another cup? Shhhhhh. It's the fog.
Quoth the Times: Beneath the huge modified hammer and sickle painted on the wall behind the counter, body piercings are outnumbered only by the laptops open throughout the room. As latte sippers pore over the latest draft of a business plan, bang out a little code or post to a blog, it is not hard to overhear snippets of dialogue with a decidedly capitalist bent: “We could make money off that,” and “Have you talked to them about a deal?”
For the Web 2.0 crowd creating businesses, as well as the post-Web 2.0 crowd looking for businesses to build, Ritual is the place to be. While it has not yet risen to the mythic proportions of Buck’s, the hangout in Woodside, Calif., for entrepreneurs and venture capitalists, it is becoming the place to generate ideas, find staff members and troll for companies to finance.
[more]
My favorite bit is the final paragraph of the article. Sweet.
Wi-Fi network maker Trapeze Networks has launched a pre-configured
appliance that can manage up to 5000 wireless access points or 1000
wireless switches - and won a giant contract for 802.11n Wi-Fi. The RingMaster-200 is a hardware version of Trapeze's RingMaster
network management software, and is pre-tuned to manage wireless LANs.
“Today, it’s common for enterprise Wi-Fi networks to include thousands
of access points cover hundreds of acres and span multiple sites," said
Ahmet Tuncay, Trapeze's marketing vice president.
Before this product, Trapeze's largest hardware device managed around
200 access points, while rival Aruba was ahead with its MMC-6000 which
can manage 2048 APs. Both companies use software to manage larger
installations, which has normally run on general purpose servers.
Aruba's recently purchased AirWave management platform uses software to
go up to 50,000 APs. Trapeze's appliance will make the process of
design and management simpler, says Trapeze, saving hundreds of IT
hours.
Ringmaster was central to Trapeze's recent success in winning what it
calls "the world’s largest deployment" of the new 802.11n standard, a
$15 million, five-year upgrade to the wireless LANs at the University
of Minnesota. The upgrade will include $3 million on access points
alone, swapping out existing APs from D-Link, Cisco and other vendors
for around 9,500 of Trapeze's 802.11n access points. Ringmaster
"…allowed us to quickly import our own CAD drawings and immediately
begin Wi-Fi planning for 300 buildings, including 1,300-plus floors,"
according to Steve Cawley, the university’s vice president of IT.
RingMaster has been a big part of Trapeze's WLAN strategy from the
beginning, for dealing with Wi-Fi propagation issues, and managing the
lifecycle of WLANs. The appliance can make a "virtual" site survey
based on architectural drawings, and configure access points for
specific locations before they are installed.
The appliance is based on a Linux OS, and has two redundant 250GB hard
drives to gather monitoring and performance data. The basic unit costs
$19,000 (£9,515) including a licence to support 250 APs, which can be
extended in steps of ten to 1000, up to 5000, if users buy software
keys.
Trapeze's claims - like most claims in the ever-competitive Wi-Fi
world - have already been disputed. Aruba told us that it already has
an appliance that manages 5000 APs, called the MM-200. We have been
unable to find this product on Aruba's site, however.
In today's NYTimes, I noticed the cover story of the business section on the saga of Jimmy Wales. The jump landed me at a picture of Rachel Marsden selling one of Mr. Wales' t-shirts. Then, on the next page was a story about Rush Limbaugh's Mac support issues and how he used his radio program to get his computers fixed.
And I thought, how quaint. These are two stories that have been kicking around the internet for a couple of weeks. And that made me think about why the NYTimes decided to run these stories now or, at all. It isn't as if either of the stories in the NYTimes added anything to the reporting that has already been done elsewhere. --I could have written the stories (re-writing what's already on the 'net.) So, what's the point? I hope the NYTimes doesn't decide it's OK just to rehash what's on ValleyWag.
Of course, I scarcely care about Jimmy Wales love life and really, really don't care at all about what type of computer Rush Limbaugh uses much less how he bullies the manufacturer into a level of support no one else receives.
I just hope that this particular Monday was a bit slow and the editors were grabbing whatever copy they could find.
University Of Minnesota Plans Wi-Fi Network For 80,000
The installation will cover 1,204 acres across the university's two campuses and supercede a current network of scattered Wi-Fi access points.
By W. David Gardner
InformationWeek
March 10, 2008 04:21 PM
The University of Minnesota is preparing to roll out what it calls the "world's largest 802.11n deployment" at the Big Ten university's two campuses. The deployment, to get under way in May, eventually will serve 80,000 students and staff.
[more]
By Jeff Goldman
In a disaster recovery scenario, Wi-Fi can offer the perfect mix of flexibility and interoperability.
<snip>
Similarly, Trapeze Networks is using Wi-Fi for disaster response in schools—company director of product marketing David Cohen says an educational environment is perfect for that kind of deployment, since the same network that’s being used for student and faculty Internet access can support everything from video monitoring to emergency communications.
“To enable all the administrators, firemen, police captains, all those people, to communicate with each other on a wireless network, that is a tremendous resource,” he says.
To that end, Cohen says, it’s the interoperability that really makes Wi-Fi ideal in an emergency situation: any first responder with a Wi-Fi device can instantly access the network as needed.
“Wi-Fi uniquely offers one system with guaranteed interoperability,” Cohen says. “Everything just works together.”
Trapeze System Replaces Older Wi-Fi from Various Vendors
By Matt Hamblen
March 7, 2008 (Computerworld) Wi-Fi has become commonplace on
college campuses, but the University of Minnesota is embarking on a five-year
project to upgrade its Wi-Fi network to the much faster 802.11n standard. The
$15 million upgrade would provide about 9,500 access points, one of the largest
deployments to date.
The first phase of the project, to begin in May, involves
replacing 2,200 access points that have been in place for as long as nine
years. The access points from Cisco Systems Inc., D-Link Corp. and others will
be replaced with 802.11n APs from Trapeze Networks at a cost of about $3
million, said Louis Hammond, assistant director of networking and telecom at
the university, in an interview today.
Trapeze beat
23 other bids in a rigorous RFP process, and won because of cost and Trapeze's
ability to manage the overall Wi-Fi infrastructure centrally and in a secure
manner, Hammond said. A key factor was that Trapeze has a planning tool called
Ringmaster that allows the university to use computer-aided design drawings of
buildings to immediately begin planning where to locate the APs for maximum
coverage in 300 buildings with 1,300 floors, and serving 80,000 students,
faculty and staff.
"We're
trying to build a safer and more secure system, and the current Wi-Fi system is
open, so this one from Trapeze will lock it down," Hammond said.
Even though
802.11n is still in draft form, many vendors are selling products to the
existing draft specification. Hammond said the university was concerned about
deploying a draft N product, but decided to go with it because the hardware in
the standard is finalized and only the software might be changed. "If
there are changes, they will be in software," which would reduce the cost
and complexity of a change, Hammond said.
The
university has two campuses, in Minneapolis and St. Paul, covering 1,204 acres.
Faster 802.11n, with its longer range, could be useful in eventually supporting
real-time video and voice traffic, but will also help as the school prepares to
scan bar codes on tickets to football games in a new stadium opening in the
fall of 2009.
Hammond said
the more robust Wi-Fi system could be integrated in the future with WiMax
network applications, although he said it is unclear what those applications
might be. Trapeze said it could integrate with WiMax technology when it becomes
available, meeting one of the conditions of the RFP, Hammond said. "There
are still a lot of questions about WiMax," he said.
Hi. Along the way from there to here, I've become quite enamored of some radio stations. So has beloved spouse Abby. We are radio people. Our union was blessed by the radio and we've chronicled the different chapters of our lives using the radio stations we were listening to at the time.
KISR
KMOX
KBAI
KOPN
WBGO
WMBR
WHRB
WNYC
WBGO
WBAI
WSHU
KXJZ
KCSM
KXJZ
KFJC
KQED
These call letters trace a route from the middle to the East to the West, the route I've taken from there to here.
The internet has un-moored radio, as it has so many other things that were once time / space dependent. Beloved Abby and I miss many of our old friends, but through the magic of internet, we've been reunited. We've tried many different ways to listen to internet radio but we are Very Impressed with our recently acquired Roku, so impressed we're buying two more.
Roku is exactly what it says it is, a SoundBridge between the computer and the way we listen to our music. When my computerized music server is on, Roku seamlessly connects to my library of digitized tunes. And when the computer is off, it will still connect us to our favorite radio stations.
Drop dead simple to install. Never opened the documentation. Very well designed. Performs beyond my expectations. Highly recommended.
I am delighted to report that I will now be helping out Trapeze Networks on a full-time basis.
Trapeze is one of the leading companies in WiFi networking and you will be finding out a lot more about the company and what it has to offer because I'm now managing the company's public relations.
Okay?
A 300 bed hospital will spend up to $300,000 on a Trapeze system, which is also sold by OEMs like Nortel and 3Com, or the competing Cisco gear. But this lets them give all clinicians these cool Vocera phones.
read more | digg story
I've always been a radio person.
When I was growing up in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and my parents put me to bed, they would turn on a small radio by my head. During the season, the station joined the St. Louis Cardinal's baseball network, at one time the largest radio network in the U.S. Stan Musial and Bob Gibson played then and no one else was more important in the entire world. Off season, the station played bingo as sponsored by the local Piggly Wiggly and I fell to sleep hypnotized by the announcer saying, "B-2 ... B-2. Remember folks, Piggly Wiggly has a special this week on pork loin and you shouldn't miss out. B-2. ..."
As an undergraduate, I was finally exposed to NPR and a Pacific station and if you don't know what Pacifica is you should look it up because it's something special. Susan Stamberg was the smartest, nicest person you could ever want to meet and Bob Edwards helped start a show called Morning Edition. My dear friend Stu Hackel had a program on KOPN, the Pacific station, and it was called The Fox's Minstral show and on hot summer nights I would hang out with him and we'd open the windows and Stu would play any song he wanted to.
In New York City, there was both a Pacifica and NPR affiliate, of course, and the most beautiful girl in Brooklyn introduced me to WOR, and WEVD. (And if you can tell me which presidential candidate's initials created the call letters for WEVD I'll buy you a cup of coffee.) We listened to Lynn Samuels, Paul Gorman, Simon Loekle, David Garland, Delphine Blue, Amy Goodman, Bob Fass, Citizen Kafka, Larry Josephson, David Rothenberg, Peter Bochan, Steve Post, Jonathan Schwartz, John Schaefer and many, many more. We also listened to WBGO, especially Michael Bourne.
In San Francisco, we listen to KCSM, KQED and we're lucky enough to just pull in KXPR and KXJZ out of Sacramento.
And that was a very long introduction to the topic at hand.
Today, Google's blog posted an entry from This is about more than simply a financial transaction, one company
taking over another. It's about preserving the underlying principles of
the Internet: openness and innovation.
Okay, so I believe this is probably true, but it probably shouldn't be the first go-to argument. Last time I checked Goldman Sachs or for that matter any other investment bank is not a corporate sponsor of the Electronic Frontiers Foundation. (I am and encourage you to join too.)
Any argument beyond, "It's a bad business idea," is a bit too sentimental for the business world to care about. I think the following are probably better arguments to put forward:
1. Yahoo is injured and it could be fatal. It hasn't delivered an innovation in a few years and many of its leading applications (mail, photography) have been acquisitions, not inventions. I'm not sure that they have any innovations in it any more.
2. Yahoo's installed base of "users" can, at any moment, run for the doors. Nothing locks them in and they might well flee under new management.
3. The bid is far too high. Yahoo is probably over valued right now and investors are catching on.
4. Yahoo's search engine? I don't think so. Can anyone make an argument that it stands a chance against Google? To tell you the truth, my back-up search engine of choice is A2, not that I get to it much after trying Google.
My view is that Google is best served to stay the heck out of the public spotlight on this one and work private channels instead. By speaking up, particularly when it uses arguments about the public good, might make Google appeared to be frightened about the prospect of Microsoft acquiring Yahoo. If it were me, and I had to put out a soundbyte, I might go with something along the lines of, "Well, to tell you the truth, we're pleased about Microsoft taking on Yahoo. This way, Yahoo will be out of the competitive picture and Microsoft will be too busy trying to digest the acquisition to be an effective competitor for at least five years."
First, Amazon reports this in their most recent financial statement:
Adoption of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) continues to grow. As an indicator of adoption, bandwidth utilized by these services in fourth quarter 2007 was even greater than bandwidth utilized in the same period by all of Amazon.com’s global websites combined.
Wow. You've got to believe that's a lot of bandwidth whatever it works out to be.
Then, comes the news today that Amazon has acquired Audible. While Audible hasn't rocked my world for a while, it is deeply connected to iTunes. I'm quite happy that whatever assets Audible has left will now be tended to by Amazon because I think Amazon will actually do something with the property / brand / content.
Of course we can throw Kindle on the pile and notice that Amazon is still an important center of gravity / ideas / power. While I haven't yet bought a Kindle, I'm watching it very close as I think it's the first device that meets most of our requirements for an electronic book.
I've "permissioned" my Tivo to my Amazon account and am looking forward to buying video content from the company and I'm very impressed impressed with Amazonmp3.
Perhaps the most interesting angle on all of this is Amazon's position on digital rights mangement. Unlike some companies we all know all too well, Amazon has been very cool about drm. The music we download from Amazon has no drm. I haven't devled into the video that I can buy from them but my guess is that it doesn't have drm (eventhough Tivo is a bit uptight about drm).
Very interesting, Amazon. Please continue to impress me.
The following is from Darryl Pinckney's essay in the Valentine's Day edition of the New York Review of Books. This is what it means to read. He quotes Ms. Hardwick in her class at Barnard:
"The only way to learn to write is to read." She brought in Boris Pasternak's Safe Conduct, translated by Beatrice Scott. She said she hated to do something so "pre-Gutenberg," and then began to read to us in a voice that was surprisingly high, loud, and suddenly very Southern:
The beginning of April surprised Moscow in the white stupor of returning winter. On the seventh it began to thaw for the second time, and on the fourteenth when Mayakovsky shot himself, not everyone had yet become accustomed to the novelty of spring.
When she got to the line about the black velvet of the talent in
himself, she stopped and threw herself back in her chair, curls
trembling. Either we got it or we didn't, but it was clear from the way
she struck her breastbone that to get it was, for her, the gift of life.
[more]
Wow. The New York Review of Books discovers that writing for a blog is different from writing for almost anything else. Hmmm. There might be something to all this blog stuff afterall.
Finally, I think I get the superhero fixation. It's the flying. It's the suspension of punctuation and good manners and even identity. Bloggers at their computers are Supermen in flight. They break the rules. They go into their virtual phone booths, put on their costumes, bring down their personal villains, and save the world. Anonymous or not, they inhabit that source of power and hope. Then they come back to their jobs, their dogs, and their lives, and it's like, "Dude, the ball."
Blog writing is id writing—grandiose, dreamy, private, free-associative, infantile, sexy, petty, dirty. Whether bloggers tell the truth or really are who they claim to be is another matter, but WTF. They are what they write. And you can't fake that. ;-)
[more]
I've been posting to LiveJournal for Very Long Time. One of t he charming things about LiveJournal is its mascot, the goat. Annually, LiveJournal publishes, the State of the Goat. Last year was eventful for LiveJournal. Six Apart sold it to a Russian company and there was a huge kerfuffle regarding the censorship of some journals. This is how that contretemps was descirbed in this year's State of the Goat:
In our attempt to implement a zero tolerance policy towards content that
supports child abuse, pedophilia, or sexual violence, we suspended about
500 journals in May of 2007 that should not have been taken down. We wish
it hadn't happened at all, and we cannot say we're sorry enough. However,
we did immediately realize our mistake, and all of the journals that did
not break our TOS were restored as quickly as possible. We really screwed
up, and when that happens, we've learned the best thing to do is just admit
it and try to fix the problem to the best of our abilities.
While I didn't appreciate the kerfuffle as it sent a very large community into paroxysms and floods of ill will, I do very much appreciate the directness and simplicity the incident was described in the State of the Goat. And this is probably a good lesson for others to notice and learn from.
... who knows way more than you do about a topic you're interested in and you decide not to study the topic anymore because you can just ask your friend what to do?
When I was a much younger man, I thought I would study wine and it might make for a good hobby. Then, I met my future father-in-law and realized I didn't have to know anything about wine. I could just ask him and draft behind him as it bought -- and sampled -- very good wines. Indeed.
I have a good friend who knows way more about home / entertainment, audio, video than I do and if I ever have a question or I'm facing a buying decision, I just ask him and do whatever he says. So, I rather fancied the iPod Touch (iPhone minus the phone) and he had just bought one and was taking it with him on his annual diving holiday in the Caribbean and when he came back, I asked him what he thought.
This is what I learned:
By the way, my friend also know a lot about wine.
I don't turn to McKinsey for bleeding edge insight. Rather, I use the consultancy as a pulsepoint on Mainstream American Business Thinking. I have tremendous respect for the firm and what it has accomplished, especially as it pertains to the sheen of its reputation.
Anyway, I'm a devotee of lists, always have been, always will be. (I'm still pondering last week's NYTimes' list of Ideas.) So, the McKinsey Quarterly has published an article entitled, Eight Business Technology Trends to Watch. Do tell. Spill.
I'll distill it for you here but
