Go to sleep, wake up; another person claims to have invented Facebook.
Step right up, Aaron Greenberg. So let’s hear your claim, young man. So you started a service called houseSYSTEM at Harvard four months before the precocious Mark Zuckerberg started The Facebook. Other than liking your idea and starting his own social networking thing, Mr. Greenberg, what else did Zuckerberg do to support your claim? They did teach you about competition at Harvard, and how it’s okay to start rival business down the street focused on the same market.
Not to belittle Greenberg’s claim but it does demonstrate how difficult it can be to invent something.
Who really invented the airplane? Was it Clement Ader, Samuel Langley, Albert Santos-Dumont, or the Wright brothers? Who invented the telephone? Alexander Graham Bell, Philip Reis or Antonio Meucci? Truth be told, Bell Co. successfully battled 13 lawsuits over whether it invented the telephone, including five that went to the Supreme Court.
In all, the Bell Company fought out thirteen lawsuits that were of national interest, and five that were carried to the Supreme Court in Washington. It fought out five hundred and eighty-seven other lawsuits of various natures; and with the exception of two trivial contract suits, IT NEVER LOST A CASE.”
Often, invention is simply taking a nugget of a good idea, making it better through changes and improvements, and finding a market for it. A classic example is what Bill Gates did with BASIC software.
My hunch is that Greenberg’s claim has more to do with envy than IP, and that any legal efforts will fail. The people behind UConnect, which also made a claim to have invented Facebook, may stand a better chance given Zuckerberg did some programming for them while at Harvard.
(Note: I do give Greenberg credit for something getting the NYT to write up his tale of entrepreneurial woe but that may say more about the fascination with all things Facebook than anything else.)
Of course, we all know really invented Facebook: Pete Cashmore.
Update: Dana Jasper of Sonic.Net left a comment saying that this is their own initiative and the equipment is coming from Meraki.
We’re doing this independently, using equipment from Meraki. Meraki and Google have an ad partnership, and any revenues that flow from that will be split with our customers.
Dana says that if the program works well in SF, then it would be expanded to other Bay Area regions where the ISP currently offers the service. (Original post below the fold.)
Despite the best efforts of Earthlink (ENLK), Google (GOOG) and Mayor Gavin Newsom, San Francisco MuniFi project is still stuck in neutral and going nowhere fast. For San Francisco residents, a new option has emerged: a tag team of Sonic.net, a Santa Rosa, CA-based independent ISP and that is using gear from Meraki Networks, a wireless hardware company based in Mountain View, Calif., and is trying to promote an ad-supported MuniFi model. (Its actually more like community wifi, and you can call it ComMuniFi.)
Sonic.net today notified its customers via email that they can get a Meraki wireless mesh router at a subsidized cost, which will allow them to connect it to their DSL line. The wireless router will share up to 500 kilobits per second of the bandwidth available on the DSL line.
Network users will see a Google ad bar at the top of the browser. In the future the ad revenues generated by this ad bar will be split between those who choose to opt and place a wireless router on their connection, and will be credited against their broadband bill.
It could be a rather small credit, so don’t get your hopes too high at this stage; this is still experimental and we are still working out many of the details.
This is a good model for Google to imitate in other regions as well. Google’s had to have known all along that their San Francisco grand plan was going to run ran into political trouble. The big question is why didn’t they roll out A similar service with Earthlink, a much larger ISP with many more broadband customers, would have been a better option for all concerned. I have become a fan of this community-based WiFi plan, which doesn’t need a lot of government dollars, and instead bets on citizen’s desire to share. Independent ISPs such as Sonic.Net are more likely to embrace this model.
Meraki backed by Google and Sequoia Capital, is one of the companies which has been championing a more community approach to free wifi. It recently announced plans to expand their experimental Meraki network to all across San Francisco.
Meraki has been selling its wireless 802.11b/g access point and mesh repeater, the Meraki Mini, for $49 and claims its products are already being used by 2,000 networks in 40 countries. The company also lists an outdoor ruggedized version of its Meraki Mini for $99. Meraki’s business is being built off hardware and software based on MIT’s Roofnet project. The Roofnet Project was previously funded by MIT’s Project Oxygen and NTT DoCoMo.
We’ve gotten hold of an internal email showing that Roper is planning to undo some of the expansion moves initiated by Sclavos and instead focus the company on profitability and growth. Sclavos’ regime had been all about growing revenues; to that end VeriSign diversified into many different areas — including mobile gaming, via their acquisition of Jamster.
On August 7, we submitted our 2008 Business Strategy to the Board of Directors for review, and it was approved. This strategy, the development of which began earlier this year as part of Project ONE, will among other things enable us to focus on our core strengths in DNS and SSL, as well as three select areas of growth opportunity: VeriSign Identity Protection (VIP), Messaging, and our Content Delivery Network (CDN). As I’ve said before, focus requires that we concentrate on doing a few things exceptionally well — and that’s exactly what we intend to do.
After talking to some well-placed sources, we have learned that the DNS and SSL businesses are cash cows that don’t need much of a sales team effort and continue to be highly profitable. They provide a stable foundation for VeriSign, which is why the company continues to keep them around.
In addition, VeriSign is experiencing rapid growth in its SMS-based services — it’s the SMS polling infrastructure provider, for some of the hit reality shows.
Roper Jr. has been telling Wall Street lately that he’s ready to get rid of VeriSign’s telecom operations, especially the businesses related to billing and payment. The company’s also exiting the managed security service business and its RFID-related operations. And it’s shedding businesses including Moreover Technologies and Weblogs.com, both of which it acquired in 2005. It is not clear who the buyers will be, but they are up for grabs our sources say.
The new episode of The GigaOM Show is up. In addition to our hitlines, we talk with executives from web analytics companies, Quantcast and Hitwise, and try to understand the complexities of web analytics and why it is hard to get a handle on who is the top site. We discuss, how the new distributed web impacts the web measurement business.
In what has to be the worst PR moves of all time, General Atlantic, a New York-based hedge fund, announced that it was backing a new buyout fund started by Jon Miller, former CEO of AOL and Ross Levinsohn, former President of Fox Interactive.
No details on the size of the fund were offered. TechCrunch says that some reporters might have been sniffing around the story and GA decided to rush the release in order to control the message.
Reporters from Wall Street Journal perhaps? The Journal says the new company is called Velocity Investment Group and will be looking to roll up at consumer Internet and media companies, including advertising networks. WSJ says that they already have signed up letter of intent with some companies.
How long before we see more of these roll-up vehicles show up and start buying up high-traffic properties, a strategy that was pioneered by IAC’s Barry “Get Me A Bargain” Diller?
A company called Jaxtr announced Tuesday that it's raised $10 million. The company, which hopes to emulate the success of eBay's Skype, actually attracted some of the same investors as Skype. Draper ...
Apple declined to pay more than double the wholesale price for each NBC TV episode, which would have resulted in the retail price to consumers increasing to $4.99 per episode from the current $1.99. Apple’s agreement with NBC ends in December. Since NBC would withdraw their shows in the middle of the television season, Apple has decided to not offer NBC TV shows for the upcoming television season beginning in September. NBC supplied iTunes with three of its 10 best selling TV shows last season, accounting for 30 percent of iTunes TV show sales.
