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Why the vaunted spectrum auctions won't cut it

Editors' note: This is a guest column. See Morgan Reed's bio below.

In the Broadway musical "Oliver!," orphaned Oliver Twist famously holds out his empty bowl and asks, "Please sir, may I have some more?" For those of us who make mobile applications, we feel like Oliver, holding out our virtual bowl, begging for more spectrum to fill the hungry bellies of our customers.

App developers cheered when the divided Congress passed legislation providing for incentivized spectrum auctions while freeing up unlicensed spectrum. This is a step in the right direction, but it didn't … Read more

Startup Banjo looks to help you connect with folks in real world

Imagine this scenario: You're on a business trip in another city, where you just wrapped up your last meeting of the day in a coffee shop. Since you're a proper digital nomad, you fire off a tweet announcing that you're done for the day and ready to grab a drink.

Meanwhile, an old friend from college updates his Facebook status to say he's just arrived at a bar (a few blocks away) where he's meeting friends. Like your tweet, his status is embedded with a geographic tag (geotag), signaling the location of the message. If … Read more

Twilio bringing voice chatting to any iPhone or iPad app

Coming soon to an iPhone or iPad app near you: simple and easy person-to-person voice chatting. No carrier required.

While Apple has made iMessage a staple of iOS communications, it's not behind this new development. Rather, it's Twilio, a San Francisco startup that has become a major player in the cloud communication space by giving everyone from small app developers to large corporations an inexpensive and efficient way to integrate voice communications.

Now, with the release of its software development kit today, Twilio is giving iOS app developers the same voice over IP (VoIP) tools. And while those … Read more

Boku Accounts enables mobile payments anywhere, anytime

Mobile phone customers around the world may soon have a way to pay any merchant or any other person with their device.

Today, San Francisco-based Boku unveiled Boku Accounts, a white-label service that will allow wireless carriers to offer their customers a mobile payments system that could work throughout the world. Those mobile users, in turn, will be able to make payments at any credit card terminal either with their phones, or with a special debit card.

Though no carriers have yet formally adopted the new service, Boku says one U.K. operator is well into trials. The company, which … Read more

Little startup Infochimps has a platform for big data

Infochimps today announced a scalable platform for big data environments. The Infochimps latform is the first formal product for the company, which, to date, has served primarily as a big data marketplace.

The Austin-based Infochimps initially developed its data system behind the Infochimps Platform as the foundation for its big data marketplace. With the Infochimps Platform, customers will be able to leverage a proven big data system to construct big data projects for less money and optimize them more deftly.

A platform as a service (PaaS) model will heavily reduce costs by facilitating the creation of big data constructs while … Read more

Smart lights save energy without changing bulbs

The distributed sensor revolution is coming to office buildings, starting with overhead lights, according to startup Enlighted.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company today detailed the energy savings of some its first corporate customers who are using its computerized lighting controls. Enlighted said that customers, including Google, Turner Broadcasting, and Interface Global, have saved on average 60 percent on lighting energy. The return on investment, which depends on the price of electricity, is about two years, according to the company.

Rather than build a more efficient light source, Enlighted and a few other lighting startups are designing better controls. Automatically adjusting … Read more

NoshList: Free waitlist app for restaurants

Last month, I stumbled into Umami Burger, a restaurant here in San Francisco. It was lunchtime on a weekend and the restaurant was crowded, but the host asked for my mobile phone number and told me the restaurant would text me when a table was ready.

There's an app for that, it appears, since the host put my number into an iPad. And it worked: About 10 minutes later, while I was out for a walk, the message came in. The app in question: NoshList, which is leaving closed beta and should be appearing for free in the App … Read more

Why 'big data' is a magnet for startups

CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--Armies of entrepreneurs are trying to make money sifting through mountains of data from the Web and other sources, but one of the biggest challenges is simply getting control of the data in the first place

Entrepreneurs at an event here this week said that the trend of "big data," or collecting and analyzing reams of information from varied sources, threatens incumbent technology providers and enables applications once considered impossible. Startups are harnessing massive amounts of data to generate personalized entertainment ideas, predict how media coverage will affect company stock prices, or analyze genomes in the … Read more

A SecondMarket for small banks? Thank Facebook.

SecondMarket, which runs a market for trading stocks in private companies, is moving into regional and community banks.

That's quite a shift for the New York company, which since 2008 has created a booming business making a marketplace for people looking to unload private shares of hot tech startups such as Twitter, Yelp, and Facebook.

Surely the driving force behind this strategy is the resurgent tech IPO market. More specifically, Facebook, which is aiming to go public this Spring in what is expected to be the biggest Internet IPO in history. Facebook has been the most actively traded stock … Read more