Even though 2014 has almost two weeks to go, it feels like 2015 is here as multiple conferences return in full force the first full week in January with International CES, and its associated conferences associated with CES, including NTCA’s Wireless Symposium & WiExpo, Team Lightbulb’s Broadband event and Parks Associates’ CONNECTIONS™ Summit at CES. ViodiTV will be at CES looking for new technologies and products that can help independent providers enhance their offerings and expand their businesses.
The 2015 ViodiTV Heartland Tour – Beyond Fiber
“We are the Mount Everest of South Florida,” said Jeff Leslie, president and CEO of ITS Fiber. This lighthearted comment speaks to one of ITS Fibers’ competitive strengths and points to the focus of Leslie and his team as they have transformed from a telco with a limited market potential to a data center-centric provider that serves a larger market area with many new services. It is an honor to announce that Viodi is teaming with ITS Fiber to produce a day-plus long event to explore how they made this transition.
Click here to pre-register for this event, which will be right after NTCA’s TEF event on February 10th and 11th in sunny and warm Florida.
Thanks to Calix and Metaswitch for their support of this event!
Looking Back to Get a Sneak Peek at Next Year
An always memorable event for yours truly is the ACA Summit. It provides a concentrated look at the topics of interest to independent MVPDs, while providing a variety of viewpoints from the beltway and beyond. It also provides great opportunities for networking. It was a privilege to work with the outstanding staff at ACA to put together this video that summarizes the viewpoints of executives from ACA member companies on why this conference continues to be an important one. Make your travel plans now, as, in 2015, this conference moves up a month from its normal time slot to March 3-5.
Click here to view.
Star Valley – Data Center Ready
Thayne, Wyoming has multiple assets that put it in a competitive position as a home to data centers, including the right kind of climate, low-cost electricity and now, thanks to Silver Star Communications, availability of a gigabit network that connects to multiple major peering points. In this interview, filmed at Silver Star Communications’ gigabit launch event, current mayor and Lincoln County Commissioner-elect Bob King talks about his community’s assets and the excitement around bringing a data center to his town of 364 people.
Following its announcement of its Gigabiz service in Wyoming, Silver Star announced this week the launch of its first Gigabiz customers in Idaho; Gigabit service is now available to business customers in the cities of Amman and Idaho Falls. Stay tuned over the next couple weeks for an exclusive video interview with Silver Star talking about the particulars of this deployment. In the meantime,
click here to see why one Mayor is excited to have gigabit in his community.
Impact of a Gigabit Network
What is the impact on the mid-mile when an operator turns up a gigabit network in the last mile? That’s a question that Vince Tyson, COO of Plateau in New Mexico, and his colleagues pondered and answered with an experiment. The result of that experiment was the rollout of a gigabit offering in the rural town of Clovis, New Mexico. In our video interview, Tyson provides insights from their rollout.
Click here to read more and view.
Highlights of Open Server Summit by Alan Weissberger
The big box buzz today is “Software Defined Everything” – from compute servers to networks, storage, and data centers. That’s according to the speakers at the 2014 Open Server Summit held last month in Santa Clara, CA. The implication is that a lot of existing hardware based functionality will be implemented as software which runs on compute servers and on network switch/routers built using commodity hardware.
If indeed that’s the case, the big losers will be the server vendors.
Click here to read more.
Overview of the Silicon Valley History Archives at Stanford
Leslie Berlin and Henry Lowood discuss Stanford’s Silicon Valley Archives in a series of short videos filmed at an early December IEEE Silicon Valley History committee meeting. Moderator Alan Weissberger also provides background information on the IEEE Silicon Valley History committee. Two quotes from Leslie Berlin’s book on Bob Noyce sets the stage for revealing the technology history of Silicon Valley.
Click here to view.
Some Tweets and Short Thoughts
- It looks like HP will commercialize Silicon Photonics or some variation in 2016 with The Machine. With power consumption of less than 1/5 of what an equivalent performance computer would require, it promises to disrupt the current data center model. The driver for this is the explosion of data that HP projects will need to be processed, stored and manipulated as the Internet of Things becomes everything.
- Broadband to the Lobster – Telco Americana digs up another example of importance of local management and ownership in understanding and being able to serve the needs of a given region – Maine Telco Develops Digital Lobster-Logging Tool
- “Storing value in a service increases its worth the more users engage with it, making it better with use.” Interesting article on what makes an app or online service something that becomes almost inseparable from a person’s being.
- Rural broadband providers’ technical expertise should be an advantage based on this excellent article on the nuances of data center real estate.
- Can’t go an issue of the Viodi View without one mention of the Mobile Internet of Things – autonomous vehicles – an article highlighting how close mainstream suppliers are to making them a reality.
- Congratulations to Nsight & Cellcom’s Rob Riordan who is retiring at the end of the month. I have appreciated his support through the years and have always enjoyed his insight in our many ViodiTV interviews. He will still be on the Nsight board of directors, so, hopefully, we will still see him on occasion at industry events.
The Korner – Keyboard in a Purse or Keypad on the Wall
The hand-computer interface is one of the most challenging, as often times keyboards are cramped (e.g. typing on a smart phone) or difficult to keep clean (my lap-top keyboard). CTX Technologies demonstrated several products at CES 2014 that solves this problem by allowing any flat surface to act as a keyboard or a keypad. The underlying magic to their products is LASER technology they developed that casts a virtual keyboard on the desired surface; the same LASER technology that CTX developed for micro-projectors. Its uses aren’t limited to the keyboard, however, as David Lithwick, CTO Technologies, demonstrates in this video filmed at CES 2014, as it could also create an unobtrusive, wall mounted keypad for a security system.
Follow Viodi on Twitter, LinkedIn or our video app (check out iLook.TV for how you can get an app like ours) for stories and videos to be published between now and the next issue of the Viodi View.
In the meantime, peace on earth, good will to all and best wishes to the Viodi View readers for 2015!
