News Blog

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom is doing his part to take away the stigma of being a geek.

In a fireside chat in the virtual world Second Life, Newsom responded to a question from Philip Rosedale, CEO of Second Life publisher Linden Lab, about virtual worlds not just attracting geeks.

The mayor laughed and offered a wonderful response: "Why are you so sensitive about geeks? It's all good," Newsom said. "We're all geeks."

PR wonk and buddy Joshua Weinberg sent me a rant that the driving time app and interactive map on the Bay Area's 511.org Web site is down, "due to a high volume of users." It's a pretty stormy day here in the Bay Area, but as Weinberg points out, it's during storms and emergencies, when public transit is a mess, that people will go to state-sponsored route-finding systems.

The error message's advice to use the text version is flawed: It, too, is overloaded. Google's traffic maps are working, though. Leave it to private industry to provide better emergency services than our tax-supported agencies.

That's ok, I'll use Google.

See yesterday's Dept. of Missing the Point on another navigation product.

Meraki, a start-up that hopes to bring cheap Wi-Fi to the emerging world, has raised $20 million in a second round of funding.

The company, which grew out of a Ph.D. thesis at MIT, has created inexpensive routers and a back-end networking service that balances available bandwidth between the routers and users. The end result is that the available bandwidth is used more efficiently, according to Sanjit Biswas, Meraki's CEO and co-founder.

"There are a small number of Internet connections, but they are repeated by a large number of radios" in networks based on the company's equipment, Biswas explained.

More than 1,000 networks using Meraki's routers have been set up and one of the company's big power users is Google. The company, however, will primarily aim its products and services at customers in India, Latin America, and Africa. The existing infrastructure in these places is fairly minimal, price is a key consideration, and demand is booming.

All these factors work in the company's favor, he said. The company makes routers for indoor and outdoor environments and has also come up with one that gets power from solar panels.

The goal is to provide users with 1-megabit-per-second service in places like Brazil.

To showcase its technology, Meraki will give away approximately 10,000 to 15,000 of its wireless repeaters that, in concert, will create a free wireless network covering San Francisco. San Francisco sports a lot of geographic challenges, and remains home to a lot of Internet power users. Like a lot of emerging nations, San Francisco also suffers from a mind-boggling array of political and bureaucratic problems. (I live here. I know). Earthlink and Google gave up plans to build a municipal Wi-Fi network for the city.

Meraki has an advantage in this department in that it doesn't rely on political approval. It gives or sells repeaters to people, and they erect and manage the network.

Meraki has already issued free repeaters to residents in the Mission, Lower Haight, and Upper Market neighborhoods. Overall, this covers about 2 square miles of the city, and 40,000 people have logged onto the network, said Biswas.

This being San Francisco, there is an inordinate number of iPhones tapping into it. Over 1,000 iPhones have logged on, he said. Users tell Meraki that the speeds are better than the cellular Internet service provided by AT&T.

The existing San Francisco network is served by only "tens of megabits" worth of bandwidth from the Internet, not much in the aggregate. "Not everyone uses it at the same time," said Biswas.

Investors in the second round included existing investors like Sequoia Capital, DAG Ventures, and Northgate Capital.

Citywide Wi-Fi is not dead in San Francisco.

At least that's what the city's chief information officer Chris Vein said Monday at a panel at the MuniWireless conference in Santa Clara, Calif.

Vein told attendees at the conference that the city is simply "taking a deep breath" while it figures out its next step.

"Nothing has changed in terms of our strategy," he said. "A lot has happened in the last three years, so we are at the stage now where we're listening and learning to figure out what our next move should be."

That said, Vein added that he fully expects the initiative to move forward and take shape in the Mayor Gavin Newsom's next term. Newsom, who in 2004 put forth the idea of offering free Wi-Fi access to all citizens, is expected to easily win his re-election campaign in November. And Vein said that the mayor expects to have an even more "audacious" term this time around.

In August it looked like San Francisco's Wi-Fi dreams were dead in the water. EarthLink, which had won the contract to build and operate the network, wriggled out of the deal as its new CEO and company restructured the company and basically laid off half of its staff. As part of the restructuring, the company greatly scaled back its Wi-Fi efforts.

Google, which was going to provide the advertising to support the free tier of service, is also out of the deal. Vein said he hasn't heard much from Google and is not in talks with the company or anyone else to kick-start the effort.

But the network will live on, he said. Citizens of San Francisco will vote on whether they want a citywide Wi-Fi network in November, when the issue is put up as a nonbinding ballot initiative. Despite many community based Wi-Fi efforts, many in San Francisco expect the ballot to pass easily.

But there are still many big questions that must be answered. For example, what will the San Francisco network look like? Who will own it and operate it? And what kinds of services will be available?

Mayor Newsom has gone on record several times saying that he believes a public/private partnership, like the one the city struck with EarthLink and Google is the answer. But some people on the Board of Supervisors would like to see the city take more ownership of the network to ensure control of the infrastructure.

San Francisco is one of many cities that have been forced to pull back on plans to build a citywide network. The main reason is finding a business model to support such networks. EarthLink clearly doesn't see the financial upside to a deal in which it bears most of the expense and risk to build the network.

San Francisco's main reason for building the Wi-Fi network is to bridge the digital divide and provide low-income citizens with affordable broadband access. Because the social merits of building and operating such a Wi-Fi network is a tough sell to many private partners, some cities are making public safety or improved government efficiency as their primary focus for building new networks. And they are promising to be anchor tenants, who guarantee service providers a set amount of business every year for using the network.

That's exactly what cities such as Minneapolis, Minn., and Providence, R.I. Minneapolis has committed to being an anchor tenant for 10 years. Its Wi-Fi network was put to the test this summer when it helped with recovery efforts during the aftermath of a major bridge collapse. And Providence uses a Wi-Fi network to help police better patrol city streets. Other cities are using Wi-Fi for remote surveillance, controlling traffic, lights and automatically reading parking and water meters.

Vein said that those kinds of applications are also being considered for San Francisco. In fact, he sees big potential in having city building inspectors use handheld Wi-Fi devices to access records and file reports remotely while they are in the field. He said that some of these applications will likely be addressed as part of the city's plans for the wireless network.

But he emphasized that bridging the digital divide through free or low-cost broadband access would continue to be the city's main focus in pushing the initiative forward. In part, providing free Wi-Fi access is an easier to sell politically in San Francisco, a city that has always kept the needs of poor and underprivileged citizens as a top priority. By contrast, pushing the project as a way to improve government efficiency could be viewed more suspiciously.

"In a city like San Francisco, there are some 200,000 people who are without broadband," he said. "And there are a lot of race and socioeconomic issues that come up as a part of this that politicians often need to address."

Whatever the final plan ends up being, Vein said that many of the issues and concerns that were brought up during the EarthLink negotiations will still be there and will need to be addressed.

"The same challenges of addressing privacy, health, and security concerns will still be there regardless of the business model and technology used," he said. "So we need to come together to address those concerns."

The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that brought forth wiki-based sites like Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Wikispecies, Wikiquote, Wikisource, the Wikimedia Commons, and of course the iconic Wikipedia, is packing up and moving.

The organization announced on Tuesday that at the end of January it will relocate from its longtime home of St. Petersburg, Fla., to the tech hub of San Francisco after choosing from six candidate cities in a search to find a headquarters close to major media, research universities and a thriving technology scene. "(San Francisco's) proximity to Asia in particular is expected to enable the Foundation to form closer ties with volunteers and potential partners in that part of the world," a release from the Wikimedia Foundation explained. "This is a key goal for the Foundation."

The Wikimedia Foundation has been based in St. Petersburg since it was founded by Jimmy Wales in 2003. While it currently only employs six people, the organization has said that new hiring will take place in anticipation of the move to San Francisco.

Wales' for-profit company, Wikia, has offices in San Mateo, Calif., and New York, as well as an overseas branch in Poland.

EarthLink said late Wednesday that it is bailing out of a contract to build San Francisco's free Wi-Fi service.

EarthLink backed out of the deal a day after the company announced it was laying off 900 employees--nearly half of its staff. EarthLink, which is trying to get its finances in order, announced earlier this summer that it would not invest in any new citywide Wi-Fi deployments until it came up with a better business model.

But it was assumed the company would fulfill obligations with cities where it had already signed contracts. Now it looks like EarthLink is trying to get out of any deal where it hasn't already begun construction, even if it has a signed contract.

Earlier on Wednesday, the city of Houston announced that EarthLink had agreed to pay a $5 million penalty to the city for not meeting its first deadline for building its wireless network. EarthLink has nine months to start construction or figure out a way to get out of the contract altogether.

And now, the company has also dissolved its contract with San Francisco, which was approved in January but was awaiting final approval from San Francisco's Board of Supervisors.

Under the contract signed in January, EarthLink would have paid the city $2 million for the right to build, install and run a free Wi-Fi network that would be supported through advertising from Google. EarthLink was also going to offer a paid service that offered higher-speed connections for $20 per month.

Earlier this summer the Board of Supervisors tried to tweak the contract, asking for changes in three areas. First, it wanted EarthLink to increase the speed of the free tier of service to 500 kilobits per second. It also asked EarthLink to reduce the length of the contract from 16 years to eight years. And finally, it asked EarthLink to extend privacy provisions it offered for its paid service to the free service.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom, who had stated publicly that he felt the current contract was sufficient, blamed the Board of Supervisors for dragging its feet and blowing the deal.

He told the San Francisco Chronicle, "I'm disappointed because we had a chance to get it done, and it didn't happen.The board delayed it, and now EarthLink could not be more pleased."

Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi said the mayor was completely wrong in his assignment of blame.

"The mayor wanted us to rush into a deal that was half-baked," he said. "And now he's trying to cover his tracks instead of looking at the real reason this deal fell through which is the fact that EarthLink is having a complete financial meltdown."

Mirkarimi said that it was EarthLink and not the Board of Supervisors that delayed the contract approval. He said that the supervisors were simply trying to get EarthLink to answer questions about the contract.

"They were dragging their feet all summer," he said. "I would expect a company that is trying to do business with the city of San Francisco to really be wooing us. So we knew there was something going on with the company. And it turns out our instincts were right."

EarthLink was expected to appear before the Board of Supervisors on September 12th. And a final vote was expected at that time.

EarthLink declined to comment further on the San Francisco deal. But earlier this week, EarthLink's new CEO, Rolla Huff, told CNET News.com that its citywide Wi-Fi business doesn't make sense for the company right now. He said the company needs to come up with a new business model before it spends anymore money to build these networks.

"We simply have not found a way in the old business model to make a return on our investment," Huff said in the interview. "We need to get our cost structure right, so we aren't burning so much cash that shareholders want to get out of the market altogether. We need to make it a valuable option. We have a real interest in ultimately making municipal Wi-Fi successful."

I am sitting in the San Francisco-Style Video Innovation panel at the Web Video Summit, listening to Justin Kan, who's been live-casting his life for 100 days now. As some of you may have heard, Justin turned off his video feed a few weeks into the experiment when things got hot and heavy during a date, and he received a decent amount of flack for his decision to stop rolling after pledging to stream his life 24-7. In today's presentation, Justin acknowledged that when promoting his site he, "tell[s] them it's 24-7, but I am lying." Not that I can blame the man; there are just times when you gotta have your privacy.

Next up is Schlomo Rabinowitz, who describes himself as "just another Jew in the media," and came into videoblogging after developing a career as a filmmaker. Schlomo's vlog has a very raw slice-of-life approach. He explained how this approach doesn't work for everything and demonstrated how the video work he does for CNET utilizes a more polished and professional approach.

... Read more

If you're lucky, as I have been in several cities, you might occasionally flag down a rare taxicab bedecked by its driver with disco balls, mood lighting, tinfoil hearts, or even a menagerie of stuffed animals. This week, San Franciscans got the option to hitch a ride in a novelty taxi of a different sort, as start-up Green Cab's single hybrid Honda Civic hit the road. Next month the fleet could total five gas-electric taxis painted in low-toxic green paint.

"It's not only environmentally friendly, it's good financially for the driver," said Green Cab co-founder Thomas George-Williams. Fuel for the hybrid Civic costs $8 per shift, a fraction of the $45 to quench a gas-guzzling Crown Victoria, he said.

Eight taxi drivers who wanted to improve their working environment while providing an ecofriendly service launched Green Cab, which provides them workers' compensation and will soon offer health insurance. Thirty drivers have joined the hiring wait list. George-Williams said he hopes to establish a model for other cities.

Green Cab is the latest sign of the growing greening of taxi, limousine, and rental-car services around the country. Some 180 hybrid and natural gas taxis currently roll the streets of San Francisco, where Mayor Gavin Newsom wants all cabs to have alternative fuel systems by 2010. Yellow Cab and Luxor Cab introduced hybrid Ford Escape SUVs to their fleets here in 2005. And since New York City taxi companies followed suit later that year, Treehugger.com has reported that hybrid riders tend to tip better.

But George-Williams isn't worried about competition from larger cab services. "They can't call themselves green because they're yellow," he joked.

For those who like to ride in style, ecofriendly chauffeur services are also on the rise. Bauer's corporate limo services are expanding nationally from their core green service, shuffling around Google employees in luxury electric and natural gas limousines. The Eco Limo operates in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, and Washington, D.C.; Vail, Colorado, visitors can sip organic beer and wine inside a posh, biodiesel Ford Excursion airport ride from Green Limousine.

Travelers looking to get behind the wheel while lessening their carbon footprint might pick a gas-electric Civic, Toyota Prius, or Highlander from EV Rental in six California cities and Phoenix, Arizona. Fox has hybrids in most of those cities as well as in Florida and Colorado. Tourists can zip around Maui or Los Angeles in a biodiesel Volkswagen rented from Bio-Beetle. The ever-expanding car-sharing companies Zipcar and Flexcar offer hybrid models that members can rent by the hour in more than a dozen cities.

Large car-rental corporations are slowly going green as well. Enterprise offered biodiesel options last year to customers in Portland, Oregon, and is introducing Saturn hybrids to three California cities. Avis and Hertz have focused on adding tens of thousands of vehicles that achieve at least 28mpg, about half the touted urban efficiency of a Prius.

And for when that rental car--green or not--breaks down, the Better World Club pitches itself as an ecofriendly foil to AAA and offers help for those stranded with an auto or a bicycle.

In what looks like a newfangled video racing game, Microsoft is previewing new technology in Windows Live Local that shows a street-level view from a driver's perspective and includes an interactive element that lets a user "drive" down the street using a keyboard's Up and Down arrows.

On the bottom half of the screen, a cartoon car navigates the city streets in a view that combines an aerial satellite map and a road map with street names. Users can change the border of the driver's window to "race car" or "sports car," or they can switch to a walking view. For now, a limited number of city streets are covered in downtown San Francisco and Seattle.

The street-level photos are reminiscent of Amazon's A9.com maps site, which shows photos of both sides of a street.