Former U.S. telecommunications company
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In this Episode, Taleen talks with Matt Drinkhan about priorities and a great mindset. Matt's career has been highlighted by his passion for his customers and people. His career sales totals exceed $130 Million. He's coached and given talks within organizations such as Equitable, Vector Marketing, Red Hat, CoreNet, EO (Entrepreneur's Organization), Oracle, Bank of America, Tarkett, Rheem, Google, and Front Row Dads. He has grown his reputation on the platforms of integrity for doing the right thing the right way and his highly energetic and enthusiastic personality. Matt lives in Charlotte, NC with his wife Julie and their 3 young daughters where he enjoys being a scratch golfer, avid sports fan, real estate investor, and a VERY active family man
In today's episode, THE MENTORS RADIO Host Dan Hesse talks with John Stanton, one of the creators of the wireless industry, the founder of multiple companies including T-Mobile USA, and now Chairman and CEO of the Seattle Mariners and Chairman of Trilogy Partnerships. He also serves on the Boards of Directors of Costco and Microsoft, which today is considered to be one of the world's most valuable companies. Learn the evolution of the wireless industry and why fans are driving changes to the most traditional of games—America's national pastime—baseball. John is truly a wireless pioneer, co-founding three of the top 10 wireless operators in the U.S. during the last 40 years. John helped found McCaw Cellular where he was Chief Operating Officer and Vice Chairman, which became the largest wireless operator in the U.S. and which was sold to AT&T to become AT&T Wireless. He then founded Western Wireless where he served as Chairman and CEO until it was acquired by Alltel, and he founded Voicestream, where he served as Chairman and CEO, selling it to Deutsche Telecom in 2001 for $50.7 billion. Deutsche Telecom renamed the company T-Mobile USA and it remains headquartered in Bellevue, Washington. John also served as Chairman of Clearwire until it was sold to Sprint in 2013. John is a member of the Wireless Hall of Fame. Listen to episode below, or on ANY PODCAST PLATFORM here. BE SURE TO LEAVE US A GREAT REVIEW on Apple Podcasts or Spotify and share with friends and colleagues! SHOW NOTES: JOHN STANTON: BIO: BIO: John W. Stanton BOOK: Wireless Nation: The Frenzied Launch of the Cellular Revolution, by James B. Murray, Jr. ARTICLES: New Mariners CEO John Stanton is baseball-loving billionaire with World Series goal, The Seattle Times In His Own Words: John Stanton
How can baseball embrace technology and new traditions while honoring its legacy and listening to its fans? Those were the questions at the heart of the Seattle Mariners CEO's conversation this week with Taylor Soper, at the GeekWire Rooftop BBQ and Mariners Day at the First Mode headquarters in Seattle. Stanton brings his experience as a longtime business and tech leader to his role with the Mariners. He also chairs Major League Baseball's competition committee, the group leading some of the biggest changes in the history of the sport, including the pitch clock that has dramatically shortened game times this year. He spoke with Taylor in the midst of a Mariners' winning streak that has since been extended to eight games with a 9-2 victory over the Baltimore Orioles on Friday. An early McCaw Cellular executive and founding partner at Bellevue, Wash.-based venture firm Trilogy Equity Partners, Stanton was CEO of Western Wireless and VoiceStream, the predecessor to T-Mobile USA, and also served as chairman of broadcast communications provider Clearwire. Listen for highlights from Stanton's remarks in the second segment, and read an extended writeup with more of his comments on GeekWire. In the first segment, GeekWire co-founders John Cook and Todd Bishop revisit a recent conversation with Brinc CEO Blake Resnick based on John's sighting of the company's technology during an armed standoff in his neighborhood this week. In the final segment, John and Todd offer their thoughts on Stanton's remarks, Todd rants about an annoying tradition carried on by Seattle Mariners fans in the stands during a pivotal moment in a game this week, and they discuss Todd's idea to use technology to help fans keep more engaged with the action on the field. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Hope Cochran is currently a Managing Director at Madrona Venture Group. Previously, she served as the CFO of King Digital, the creators of Candy Crush. At King, she not only led the company through an IPO and acquisition to Activision but also became a rockstar Candy Crush player. Prior to that she was the CFO of Clearwire through its sale to Sprint in 2013 and was the founder of her own company, SkillsVillage which she went on to sell to PeopleSoft. In 2013 Fortune named her to the top 10 Most Powerful Women in Gaming and in 2018 Women's Inc named her Most Influential Corporate Director. She is also on the boards of three public companies, Hasbro, MongoDB, and New Relic. Hope has a passion for the arts and holds a B.A. in Economics and a B.A. in Music/Opera from Stanford University.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
In this episode of the Thoughtful Entrepreneur, your host Josh Elledge speaks to the Business Coach & Strategist of ProAdvisor Coach, Matt Drinkhahn.Connecting with Matt can provide invaluable insights into sales, leadership, and high-performance coaching, given his successful track record and extensive experience across various industries. His approach is unique. Having overcome significant personal adversity, he offers a perspective that intertwines resilience, optimism, and business acumen. Matt has a reputation for integrity and enthusiasm, with a proven ability to generate substantial sales and develop effective teams. As a part of ProAdvisorCoach, he can provide personalized coaching, blending psychological understanding with strategic planning. About Matt Drinkhahn: Matt is a seasoned entrepreneur and sales specialist, has generated over $130 million in career sales, coaching and speaking for organizations like Google, Oracle, and Bank of America. Based in Charlotte, NC, he's also a real estate investor and enthusiastic family man. Enduring a life-changing zipline accident in 2015, Matt transformed adversity into growth, resulting in his most successful business year to date. A Wofford College graduate, Matt's journey includes recruiting 2000 sales representatives for Vector Marketing, attempting a professional golf career, and leading successful sales teams for Clearwire and Time Warner Cable. Currently, he offers high-performance coaching through ProAdvisorCoach, particularly in financial services, real estate, banking, technology, and retail sectors.About ProAdvisor Coach: ProAdvisor Coach merges the benefits of coaching and consulting to foster enduring transformation and sustained accelerated outcomes. Unlike standard consultants or coaching providers, ProAdvisor Coach integrates knowledge of foundational psychology, typically tied solely to coaching, with best-practice planning generally linked exclusively to consulting. This union offers a comprehensive solution that leverages both worlds. They focus on maximizing human potential, nurturing innovation, and optimizing systems, underpinning their approach with a deep understanding of human psychology and strategic planning. The result is an enhanced coaching and consulting experience designed to deliver superior, long-lasting results.Apply to be a Guest on The Thoughtful Entrepreneur: https://go.upmyinfluence.com/podcast-guestLinks Mentioned in this Episode:Want to learn more? Check out ProAdvisor Coach website at https://proadvisorcoach.com/Check out ProAdvisor Coach on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/company/proadvisor-coach/Check out Matt Drinkhahn on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattdrinkhahn/Check out Matt Drinkhahn on Twitter at https://twitter.com/MDrinkhahnCheck out Matt Drinkhahn on Instagram at https://www.instagram.com/eternaloptimistpodcast/Check out Matt Drinkhahn on Facebook at
You never know when the next person you connect with could change the course of your life. Matt Drinkhahn is an explorer, a business coach, and strategist to growth-minded leaders and a proud FrontRowDad. You have to be innovative as an entrepreneur, father, husband and coach… In order to improve and stay fresh today's guest journals and gets feedback! Today we talk about what makes a good coach, a good dad, a trustworthy husband, psychedelics, and doing things on our own terms! Better Call Daddy: The Safe Space For Controversy. Matt collects chicken soup books, holds family board meetings, and is an eternal optimist even through many surgeries! “My Mission is to push people to be the best they can be and to OWN that we were all made with limitless potential.” Matt's career has been highlighted by his passion for his customers and people. His career sales totals exceed $130Million. He's coached and given talks within organizations such as Equitable, Vector Marketing, Red Hat, CoreNet, EO(Entrepreneur's Organization), Oracle, Bank of America, Tarkett, Rheem, Google, and Front Row Dads. He has grown his reputation on the platforms of integrity for doing the right thing the right way and his highly energetic and enthusiastic personality. Matt lives in Charlotte, NC with his wife Julie and their 3 young daughters where he enjoys being a scratch golfer, avid sports fan, real estate investor, and a VERY active family man
About BrianBrian is an accomplished dealmaker with experience ranging from developer platforms to mobile services. Before InfluxData, Brian led business development at Twilio. Joining at just thirty-five employees, he built over 150 partnerships globally from the company's infancy through its IPO in 2016. He led the company's international expansion, hiring its first teams in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Prior to Twilio Brian was VP of Business Development at Clearwire and held management roles at Amp'd Mobile, Kivera, and PlaceWare.Links Referenced:InfluxData: https://www.influxdata.com/ TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is bought to you in part by our friends at Veeam. Do you care about backups? Of course you don't. Nobody cares about backups. Stop lying to yourselves! You care about restores, usually right after you didn't care enough about backups. If you're tired of the vulnerabilities, costs and slow recoveries when using snapshots to restore your data, assuming you even have them at all living in AWS-land, there is an alternative for you. Check out Veeam, thats V-E-E-A-M for secure, zero-fuss AWS backup that won't leave you high and dry when it's time to restore. Stop taking chances with your data. Talk to Veeam. My thanks to them for sponsoring this ridiculous podcast.Corey: This episode is brought to us by our friends at Pinecone. They believe that all anyone really wants is to be understood, and that includes your users. AI models combined with the Pinecone vector database let your applications understand and act on what your users want… without making them spell it out.Make your search application find results by meaning instead of just keywords, your personalization system make picks based on relevance instead of just tags, and your security applications match threats by resemblance instead of just regular expressions. Pinecone provides the cloud infrastructure that makes this easy, fast, and scalable. Thanks to my friends at Pinecone for sponsoring this episode. Visit Pinecone.io to understand more.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. It's been a year, which means it's once again time to have a promoted guest episode brought to us by our friends at InfluxData. Joining me for a second time is Brian Mullen, CMO over at InfluxData. Brian, thank you for agreeing to do this a second time. You're braver than most.Brian: Thanks, Corey. I'm happy to be here. Second time is the charm.Corey: So, it's been an interesting year to put it mildly and I tend to have the attention span of a goldfish of most days, so for those who are similarly flighty, let's start at the very top. What is an InfluxDB slash InfluxData slash Influx—when you're not sure which one to use, just shorten it and call it good—and why might someone need it?Brian: Sure. So, InfluxDB is what most people understand our product as, a pretty popular open-source product, been out for quite a while. And then our company, InfluxData is the company behind InfluxDB. And InfluxDB is where developers build IoT real-time analytics and cloud applications, typically all based on time series. It's a time-series data platform specifically built to handle time-series data, which we think about is any type of data that is stamped in time in some way.It could be metrics, like, taken every one second, every two seconds, every three seconds, or some kind of event that occurs and is stamped in time in some way. So, our product and platform is really specialized to handle that technical problem.Corey: When last we spoke, I contextualized that in the realm of an IoT sensor that winds up reporting its device ID and its temperature at a given timestamp. That is sort of baseline stuff that I think aligns with what we're talking about. But over the past year, I started to see it in a bit of a different light, specifically viewing logs as time-series data, which hadn't occurred to me until relatively recently. And it makes perfect sense, on some level. It's weird to contextualize what Influx does as being a logging database, but there's absolutely no reason it couldn't be.Brian: Yeah, it certainly could. So typically, we see the world of time-series data in kind of two big realms. One is, as you mentioned the, you know, think of it as the hardware or, you know, physical realm: devices and sensors, these are things that are going to show up in a connected car, in a factory deployment, in renewable energy, you know, wind farm. And those are real devices and pieces of hardware that are out in the physical world, collecting data and emitting, you know, time-series every one second, or five seconds, or ten minutes, or whatever it might be.But it also, as you mentioned, applies to, call it the virtual world, which is really all of the software and infrastructure that is being stood up to run applications and services. And so, in that world, it could be the same—it's just a different type of source, but is really kind of the same technical problem. It's still time-series data being stamped, you know, data being stamped every, you know, one second, every five seconds, in some cases, every millisecond, but it is coming from a source that is actually in the infrastructure. Could be, you know, virtual machines, it could be containers, it could be microservices running within those containers. And so, all of those things together, both in the physical world and this infrastructure world are all emitting time-series data.Corey: When you take a look at the broader ecosystem, what is it that you see that has been the most misunderstood about time-series data as a whole? For example, when I saw AWS talking about a lot of things that they did in the realm of for your data lake, I talked to clients of mine about this and their response is, “Well, that'd be great genius, if we had a data lake.” It's, “What do you think those petabytes of nonsense in S3 are?” “Oh, those are the logs and the assets and a bunch of other nonsense.” “Yeah, that's what other people are calling a data lake.” “Oh.” Do you see similar lights-go-on moment when you talk to clients and prospective clients about what it is that they're doing that they just hadn't considered to be time-series data previously?Brian: Yeah. In fact, that's exactly what we see with many of our customers is they didn't realize that all of a sudden, they are now handling a pretty sizable time-series workload. And if you kind of take a step back and look at a couple of pretty obvious but sometimes unrecognized trends in technology, the first is cloud applications in general are expanding, they're both—horizontally and vertically. So, that means, like, the workloads that are being run in the Netflix's of the world, or all the different infrastructure that's being spun up in the cloud to run these various, you know, applications and services, those workloads are getting bigger and bigger, those companies and their subscriber bases, and the amount of data they're generating is getting bigger and bigger. They're also expanding horizontally by region and geography.So Netflix, for example, running not just in the US, but in every continent and probably every cloud region around the world. So, that's happening in the cloud world, and then also, in the IoT world, there's this massive growth of connected devices, both net-new devices that are being developed kind of, you know, the next Peloton or the next climate control unit that goes in an apartment or house, and also these longtime legacy devices that are been on the factory floor for a couple of decades, but now are being kind of modernized and coming online. So, if you look at all of that growth of the data sources now being built up in the cloud and you look at all that growth of these connected devices, both new and existing, that are kind of coming online, there's a huge now exponential growth in the sources of data. And all of these sources are emitting time-series data. You can just think about a connected car—not even a self-driving car, just a connected car, your everyday, kind of, 2022 model, and nearly every element of the car is emitting time-series data: its engine components, you know, your tires, like, what the climate inside of the car is, statuses of the engine itself, and it's all doing that in real-time, so every one second, every five seconds, whatever.So, I think in general, people just don't realize they're already dealing with a substantial workload of time series. And in most cases, unless they're using something like Influx, they're probably not, you know, especially tuned to handle it from a technology perspective.Corey: So, it's been a year. What has changed over on your side of the world since the last time we spoke? It seems that well, things continue and they're up and to the right. Well, sure, generally speaking, you're clearly still in business. Good job, always appreciative of your custom, as well as the fact that oh, good, even in a world where it seems like there's a macro recession in progress, that there are still companies out there that continue to persist and in some cases, dare I say, even thrive? What have you folks been up to?Brian: Yeah, it's been a big year. So first, we've seen quite a bit of expansion across the use cases. So, we've seen even further expansion in IoT, kind of expanding into consumer, industrial, and now sustainability and clean energy, and that pairs with what we've seen on FinTech and cryptocurrency, gaming and entertainment applications, network telemetry, including some of the biggest names in telecom, and then a little bit more on the cloud side with cloud services, infrastructure, and dev tools and APIs. So, quite a bit more broad set of use cases we're now seeing across the platform. And the second thing is—you might have seen it in the last month or so—is a pretty big announcement we had of our new storage engine.So, this was just announced earlier this month in November and was previously introduced to our community as what we call an IOx, which is how it was known in the open-source. And think of this really as a rebuilt and reimagined storage engine which is built on that open-source project, InfluxDB IOx that allows us to deliver faster queries, and now—pretty exciting for the first time—unlimited time-series, or cardinality as it's known in the space. And then also we introduced SQL for writing queries and BI tool support. And this is, for the first time we're introducing SQL, which is world's most popular data programming language to our platform, enabling developers to query via the API our language Flux, and InfluxQL in addition.Corey: A long time ago, it really seems that the cloud took a vote, for lack of a better term, and decided that when it comes to storage, object store is the way forward. It was a bit of a reimagining from how we all considered using storage previously, but the economics are at minimum of ten to one in favor of objects store, the latency is far better, the durability is off the charts better, you don't have to deal—at least in AWS-land—with the concept of availability zones and the rest, just from an economic and performance perspective, provided the use case embraces it, there's really no substitute.Brian: Yeah, I mean, the way we think about storage is, you know, obviously, it varies quite a bit from customer to customer with our use cases. Especially in IoT, we see some use cases where customers want to have data around for months and in some cases, years. So, it's a pretty substantial data set you're often looking at. And sometimes those customers want to downsample those, they don't necessarily need every single piece of minutia that they may need in real-time, but not in summary, looking backward. So, you really—we're in this kind of world where we're dealing with both hive fidelity—usually in the moment—data and lower fidelity, when people can downsample and have a little bit more of a summarized view of what happened.So, pretty unique for us and we have to kind of design the product in a way that is able to balance both of those because that's what, you know, the customer use cases demand. It's a super hard problem to solve. One of the reasons that you have a product like InfluxDB, which is specialized to handle this kind of thing, is so that you can actually manage that balance in your application service and setting your retention policy, et cetera.Corey: That's always been something that seemed a little on the odd side to me when I'm looking at a variety of different observability tools, where it seems that one of the key dimensions that they all tend to, I guess, operate on and price on is retention period. And I get it; you might not necessarily want to have your load balancer logs from 2012 readily available and paying for the privilege, but it does seem that given the dramatic fall of archival storage pricing, on some level, people do want to be able to retain that data just on the off chance that will be useful. Maybe that's my internal digital packrat chiming in at this point, but I do believe strongly that there is a correlation between how recent the data is and how useful it is, for a variety of different use cases. But that's also not a global truth. How do you view the divide? And what do you actually see people saying they want versus what they're actually using?Brian: It's a really good question and not a simple problem to solve. So, first of all, I would say it probably really depends on the use case and the extent to which that use case is touching real world applications and services. So, in a pure observability setting where you're looking at, perhaps more of a, kind of, operational view of infrastructure monitoring, you want to understand kind of what happened and when those tend to be a little bit more focused on real-time and recent. So, for example, you of course, want to know exactly what's happening in the moment, zero in on whatever anomaly and kind of surrounding data there is, perhaps that means you're digging into something that happened in you know, fairly recent time. So, those do tend to be, not all of them, but they do tend to be a little bit more real-time and recent-oriented.I think it's a little bit different when we look at IoT. Those generally tend to be longer timeframes that people are dealing with. Their physical out-in-the-field devices, you know, many times those devices are kind of coming online and offline, depending on the connectivity, depending on the environment, you can imagine a connected smart agriculture setup, I mean, those are a pretty wide array of devices out and in, you know, who knows what kind of climate and environment, so they tend to be a little bit longer in retention policy, kind of, being able to dig into the data, what's happening. The time frame that people are dealing with is just, in general, much longer in some of those situations.Corey: One story that I've heard a fair bit about observability data and event data is that they inevitably compose down into metrics rather than events or traces or logs, and I have a hard time getting there because I can definitely see a bunch of log entries showing the web servers return codes, okay, here's the number of 500 errors and number of different types of successes that we wind up seeing in the app. Yeah, all right, how many per minute, per second, per hour, whatever it is that makes sense that you can look at aberrations there. But in the development process at least, I find that having detailed log messages tell me about things I didn't see and need to understand or to continue building the dumb thing that I'm in the process of putting out. It feels like once something is productionalized and running, that its behavior is a lot more well understood, and at that point, metrics really seem to take over. How do you see it, given that you fundamentally live at that intersection where one can become the other?Brian: Yeah, we are right at that intersection and our answer probably would be both. Metrics are super important to understand and have that regular cadence and be kind of measuring that state over time, but you can miss things depending on how frequent those metrics are coming in. And increasingly, when you have the amount of data that you're dealing with coming from these various sources, the measurement is getting smaller and smaller. So, unless you have, you know, perfect metrics coming in every half-second, or you know, in some sub-partition of that, in milliseconds, you're likely to miss something. And so, events are really key to understand those things that pop up and then maybe come back down and in a pure metric setting, in your regular interval, you would have just completely missed. So, we see most of our use cases that are showing a balance of the two is kind of the most effective. And from a product perspective, that's how we think about solving the problem, addressing both.Corey: One of the things that I struggled with is it seems that—again, my approach to this is relatively outmoded. I was a systems administrator back when that title was not considered disparaging by a good portion of the technical community the way that it is today. Even though the job is the same, we call them something different now. Great. Okay, whatever smile, nod, and accept the larger paycheck.But my way of thinking about things are okay, you have the logs, they live on the server itself. And maybe if you want to be fancy, you wind up putting them to a centralized rsyslog cluster or whatnot. Yes, you might send them as well to some other processing system for visibility or a third-party monitoring system, but the canonical truth slash source of logs tends to live locally. That said, I got out of running production infrastructure before this idea of ephemeral containers or serverless functions really became a thing. Do you find that these days you are the source of truth slash custodian of record for these log entries, or do you find that you are more of a secondary source for better visibility and analysis, but not what they're going to bust out when the auditor comes calling in three years?Brian: I think, again, it—[laugh] I feel like I'm answering the same way [crosstalk 00:15:53]Corey: Yeah, oh, and of course, let's be clear, use cases are going to vary wildly. This is not advice on anyone's approach to compliance and the rest [laugh]. I don't want to get myself in trouble here.Brian: Exactly. Well, you know, we kind of think about it in terms of profiles. And we see a couple of different profiles of customers using InfluxDB. So, the first is, and this was kind of what we saw most often early on, still see quite a bit of them is kind of more of that operator profile. And these are folks who are going to—they're building some sort of monitor, kind of, source of truth for—that's internally facing to monitor applications or services, perhaps that other teams within their company built.And so that's, kind of like, a little bit more of your kind of pure operator. Yes, they're building up in the stack themselves, but it's to pay attention to essentially something that another team built. And then what we've seen more recently, especially as we've moved more prominently into the cloud and offered a usage-based service with a, you know, APIs and endpoint people can hit, as we see more people come into it from a builder's perspective. And similar in some ways, except that they're still building kind of a, you know, a source of truth for handling this kind of data. But they're also building the applications and services themselves are taken out to market that are in the hands of customers.And so, it's a little bit different mindset. Typically, there's, you know, a little bit more comfort with using one of many services to kind of, you know, be part of the thing that they're building. And so, we've seen a little bit more comfort from that type of profile, using our service running in the cloud, using the API, and not worrying too much about the kind of, you know, underlying setup of the implementation.Corey: Love how serverless helps you scale big and ship fast, but hate debugging your serverless apps? With Lumigo's serverless observability, it's fast and easy (and maybe a little fun, too). End-to-end distributed tracing gives developers full clarity into their most complex serverless and containerized applications, connecting every service from AWS Lambda and Amazon ECS to DynamoDB, API Gateways, Step Functions and more. Try Lumigo free and debug 3x faster, reduce error rate and speed up development. Visit snark.cloud/lumigo That's snark.cloud/L-U-M-I-G-OCorey: So, I've been on record a lot saying that the best database is TXT records stuffed into Route 53, which works super well as a gag, let's be clear, don't actually build something on top of this, that's a disaster waiting to happen. I don't want to destroy anyone's career as I do this. But you do have a much more viable competitive threat on the landscape. And that is quite simply using the open-source version of InfluxDB. What is the tipping point where, “Huh, I can run this myself,” turns into, “But I shouldn't. I should instead give money to other people to run it for me.”Because having been an engineer, where I believe I'm the world's greatest everything, when it comes to my environment—a fact provably untrue, but that hubris never quite goes away entirely—at what point am I basically being negligent not to start dealing with you in a more formalized business context?Brian: First of all, let me say that we have many customers, many developers out there who are running open-source and it works perfectly for them. The workload is just right, the deployment makes sense. And so, there are many production workloads we're using open-source. But typically, the kind of big turning point for people is on scale, scale, and overall performance related to that. And so, that's typically when they come and look at one of the two commercial offers.So, to start, open-source is a great place to, you know, kind of begin the journey, check it out, do that level of experimentation and kind of proof of concept. We also have 60,000-plus developers using our introductory cloud service, which is a free service. You simply sign up and can begin immediately putting data into the platform and building queries, and you don't have to worry about any of the setup and running servers to deploy software. So, both of those, the open-source and our cloud product are excellent ways to get started. And then when it comes time to really think about building in production and moving up in scale, we have our two commercial offers.And the first of those is InfluxDB Cloud, which is our cloud-native fully managed by InfluxData offering. We run this not only in AWS but also in Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. It's a usage-based service, which means you pay exactly for what you use, and the three components that people pay for our data in, number of queries, and the amount of data you store in storage. We also for those who are interested in actually managing it themselves, we have InfluxDB Enterprise, which is a software subscription-base model, and it is self-managed by the customer in their environment. Now, that environment could be their own private cloud, it also could be on-premises in their own data center.And so, lots of fun people who are a little bit more oriented to kind of manage software themselves rather than using a service gear toward that. But both those commercial offers InfluxDB Cloud and InfluxDB Enterprise are really designed for, you know, massive scale. In the case of Cloud, I mentioned earlier with the new storage engine, you can hit unlimited cardinality, which means you have no limit on the number of time series you can put into the platform, which is a pretty big game-changing concept. And so, that means however many time-series sources you have and however many series they're emitting, you can run that without a problem without any sort of upper limit in our cloud product. Over on the enterprise side with our self-managed product, that means you can deploy a cluster of whatever size you want. It could be a two-by-four, it could be a four-by-eight, or something even larger. And so, it gives people that are managing in their own private cloud or in a data center environment, really their own options to kind of construct exactly what they need for their particular use case.Corey: Does your object storage layer make it easier to dynamically change clusters on the fly? I mean, historically, running things in a pre-provisioned cluster with EBS volumes or local disk was, “Oh, great. You want to resize something? Well, we're going to be either taking an outage or we're going to be building up something, migrating data live, and there's going to be a knife-switch cutover at some point that makes things relatively unfortunate.” It seems that once you abstract the storage layer away from anything resembling an instance that you would be able to get away from some of those architectural constraints.Brian: Yeah, that's really the promise, and what is delivered in our cloud product is that you no longer, as a developer, have to think about that if you're using that product. You don't have to think about how big the cluster is going to be, you don't have to think about these kind of disaster scenarios. It is all kind of pre-architected in the service. And so, the things that we really want to deliver to people, in addition to the elimination of that concern for what the underlying infrastructure looks like and how its operating. And so, with infrastructure concerns kind of out of the way, what we want to deliver on are kind of the things that people care most about: real-time query speed.So, now with this new storage engine, you can query data across any time series within milliseconds, 100 times faster queries against high cardinality data that was previously impossible. And we also have unlimited time-series volume. Again, any total number of time series you have, which is known as cardinality, is now able to run without a problem in the platform. And then we also have kind of opening up, we're opening up the aperture a bit for developers with SQL language support. And so, this is just a whole new world of flexibility for developers to begin building on the platform. And again, this is all in the way that people are using the product without having to worry about the underlying infrastructure.Corey: For most companies—and this does not apply to you—their core competency is not running time-series databases and the infrastructure attendant thereof, so it seems like it is absolutely a great candidate for, “You know, we really could make this someone else's problem and let us instead focus on the differentiated thing that we are doing or building or complaining about.”Brian: Yeah, that's a true statement. Typically what happens with time-series data is that people first of all, don't realize they have it, and then when they realize they have time-series data, you know, the first thing they'll do is look around and say, “Well, what do I have here?” You know, I have this relational database over here or this document database over here, maybe even this, kind of, search database over here, maybe that thing can handle time series. And in a light manner, it probably does the job. But like I said, the sources of data and just the volume of time series is expanding, really across all these different use cases, exponentially.And so, pretty quickly, people realize that thing that may be able to handle time series in some minor manner, is quickly no longer able to do it. They're just not purpose-built for it. And so, that's where really they come to a product like Influx to really handle this specific problem. We're built specifically for this purpose and so as the time-series workload expands when it kind of hits that tipping point, you really need a specialized tool.Corey: Last question, before I turn you loose to prepare for re:Invent, of course—well, I guess we'll ask you a little bit about that afterwards, but first, we can talk a lot theoretically about what your product could or might theoretically do. What are you actually seeing? What are the use cases that other than the stereotypical ones we've talked about, what have you seen people using it for that surprised you?Brian: Yeah, some of it is—it's just really interesting how it connects to, you know, things you see every day and/or use every day. I mean, chances are, many people listening have probably use InfluxDB and, you know, perhaps didn't know it. You know, if anyone has been to a home that has Tesla Powerwalls—Tesla is a customer of ours—then they've seen InfluxDB in action. Tesla's pulling time-series data from these connected Powerwalls that are in solar-powered homes, and they monitor things like health and availability and performance of those solar panels and the battery setup, et cetera. And they're collecting this at the edge and then sending that back into the hub where InfluxDB is running on their back end.So, if you've ever seen this deployed like that's InfluxDB running behind the scenes. Same goes, I'm sure many people have a Nest thermostat in their house. Nest monitors the infrastructure, actually the powers that collection of IoT data collection. So, you think of this as InfluxDB running behind the scenes to monitor what infrastructure is standing up that back-end Nest service. And this includes their use of Kubernetes and other software infrastructure that's run in their platform for collection, managing, transforming, and analyzing all of this aggregate device data that's out there.Another one, especially for those of us that streamed our minds out during the pandemic, Disney+ entertainment, streaming, and delivery of that to applications and to devices in the home. And so, you know, this hugely popular Disney+ streaming service is essentially a global content delivery network for distributing all these, you know, movies and video series to all the users worldwide. And they monitor the movement and performance of that video content through this global CDN using InfluxDB. So, those are a few where you probably walk by something like this multiple times a week, or in our case of Disney+ probably watching it once a day. And it's great to see InfluxDB kind of working behind the scenes there.Corey: It's one of those things where it's, I guess we'll call it plumbing, for lack of a better term. It's not the sort of thing that people are going to put front-and-center into any product or service that they wind up providing, you know, except for you folks. Instead, it's the thing that empowers a capability behind that product or service that is often taken for granted, just because until you understand the dizzying complexity, particularly at scale, of what these things have to do under the hood, it just—well yeah, of course, it works that way. Why shouldn't it? That's an expectation I have of the product because it's always had that. Yeah, but this is how it gets there.Brian: Our thesis really is that data is best understood through the lens of time. And as this data is expanding exponentially, time becomes increasingly the, kind of, common element, the common component that you're using to kind of view what happened. That could be what's running through a telecom network, what's happening with the devices that are connected that network, the movement of data through that network, and when, what's happening with subscribers and content pushing through a CDN on a streaming service, what's happening with climate and home data in hundreds of thousands, if not millions of homes through common device like a Nest thermostat. All of these things they attach to some real-world collection of data, and as long as that's happening, there's going to be a place for time-series data and tools that are optimized to handle it.Corey: So, my last question—for real this time—we are recording this the week before re:Invent 2022. What do you hope to see, what do you expect to see, what do you fear to see?Brian: No fears. Even though it's Vegas, no fears.Corey: I do have the super-spreader event fear, but that's a separate—Brian: [laugh].Corey: That's a separate issue. Neither one of us are deep into the epidemiology weeds, to my understanding. But yeah, let's just bound this to tech, let's be clear.Brian: Yeah, so first of all, we're really excited to go there. We'll have a pretty big presence. We have a few different locations where you can meet us. We'll have a booth on the main show floor, we'll be in the marketplace pavilion, as I mentioned, InfluxDB Cloud is offered across the marketplaces of each of the clouds, AWS, obviously in this case, but also in Azure and Google. But we'll be there in the AWS Marketplace pavilion, showcasing the new engine and a lot of the pretty exciting new use cases that we've been seeing.And we'll have our full team there, so if you're looking to kind of learn more about InfluxDB, or you've checked it out recently and want to understand kind of what the new capability is, we'll have many folks from our technical teams there, from our development team, some our field folks like the SEs and some of the product managers will be there as well. So, we'll have a pretty great collection of experts on InfluxDB to answer any questions and walk people through, you know, demonstrations and use cases.Corey: I look forward to it. I will be doing my traditional Wednesday afternoon tour through the expo halls and nature walk, so if you're listening to this and it's before Wednesday afternoon, come and find me. I am kicking off and ending at the [unintelligible 00:29:15] booth, but I will make it a point to come by the Influx booth and give you folks a hard time because that's what I do.Brian: We love it. Please. You know, being on the tour is—on the walking tour is excellent. We'll be mentally prepared. We'll have some comebacks ready for you.Corey: Therapists are standing by on both sides.Brian: Yes, exactly. Anyway, we're really looking forward to it. This will be my third year on your walking tour. So, the nature walk is one of my favorite parts of AWS re:Invent.Corey: Well, I appreciate that. Thank you. And thank you for your time today. I will let you get back to your no doubt frenzied preparations. At least they are on my side.Brian: We will. Thanks so much for having me and really excited to do it.Corey: Brian Mullen, CMO at InfluxData, I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with an insulting comment that you naively believe will be stored as a TXT record in a DNS server somewhere rather than what is almost certainly a time-series database.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.
Analysts Don Kellogg and Roger Entner welcome Mike Dano to the show. Mike is Light Reading's Editorial Director, 5G & Mobile Strategies and has covered the wireless industry as a journalist for almost two decades. 0:47: Mike shares a bit about his recent article titled “Inside the Messy World of T-Mobile's Midband 5G Spectrum Licenses.” 2:21: What spectrum does T-Mobile own? 4:04: What happened when one of the organizations that actually owns some of T-Mobile's spectrum wanted to sell it. 6:09: The situation with Cox Communications and T-Mobile. 7:21: The insights from the AT&T Study that Mike found interesting - reliability versus speed. 12:14: How does the Oculus affect usage and the future? 15:30: Who's rumored to be developing some AR/VR tech? Mike's Article mentioned in this episode: https://www.lightreading.com/5g/inside-the-messy-world-of-t-mobiles-midband-5g-spectrum-licenses/d/d-id/774745 (https://www.lightreading.com/5g/inside-the-messy-world-of-t-mobiles-midband-5g-spectrum-licenses/d/d-id/774745) Keep up with Mike Dano's work at Light Reading here: https://www.lightreading.com/about-us/d/d-id/1 (https://www.lightreading.com/about-us/d/d-id/1) Tags: telecom, telecommunications, business, wireless, cellular phone, cellular service, Don Kellogg, Roger Entner, media, Recon Analytics, T-Mobile, spectrum, spectrum licenses, Clearwire, Nextel, Sprint, 2.5 Spectrum Auction, FCC, WCO, Cox Communications, Verizon, AT&T, AR/VR, Oculus,
Hope Cochran, managing director at venture capital firm Madrona Venture Group in Seattle, was previously the chief financial officer of King Digital, the maker of Candy Crush and other hit mobile games. She led King through its initial public offering in 2014, and its $5.9 billion acquisition in early 2016 by Activision Blizzard. That gives her a unique perspective on Microsoft's deal this week to acquire video-game giant Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion. We also talk about Cochran's career, including her past role as the chief financial officer of Clearwire leading up to its $15 billion acquisition by Sprint; and her current role at Madrona investing in fintech and gaming companies, including Seattle-based VR gaming company Rec Room, where she's a board member. We also discuss her leadership role in the Onboarding Women group created by Madrona and several other Seattle-area businesses to increase the percentage of women on public company boards. Cochran herself is on the boards of public companies Hasbro MongoDB and NewRelic. Cochran majored in economics and music at Stanford, and she gave a fun and inspiring answer when asked to name the song that best represents her as an investor. Listen to the end of the show for that. More: Hope Cochran on The Room podcast and Madrona's Founded and Funded podcast. Editing and production by Curt Milton; Theme music by Daniel L.K. Caldwell. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
About BrianBrian is an accomplished dealmaker with experience ranging from developer platforms to mobile services. Before InfluxData, Brian led business development at Twilio. Joining at just thirty-five employees, he built over 150 partnerships globally from the company's infancy through its IPO in 2016. He led the company's international expansion, hiring its first teams in Europe, Asia, and Latin America. Prior to Twilio Brian was VP of Business Development at Clearwire and held management roles at Amp'd Mobile, Kivera, and PlaceWare.Links:InfluxData: https://www.influxdata.com TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by my friends at ThinkstCanary. Most companies find out way too late that they've been breached. ThinksCanary changes this and I love how they do it. Deploy canaries and canary tokens in minutes and then forget about them. What's great is the attackers tip their hand by touching them, giving you one alert, when it matters. I use it myself and I only remember this when I get the weekly update with a “we're still here, so you're aware” from them. It's glorious! There is zero admin overhead to this, there are effectively no false positives unless I do something foolish. Canaries are deployed and loved on all seven continents. You can check out what people are saying at canary.love. And, their Kub config canary token is new and completely free as well. You can do an awful lot without paying them a dime, which is one of the things I love about them. It is useful stuff and not an, “ohh, I wish I had money.” It is speculator! Take a look; that's canary.love because it's genuinely rare to find a security product that people talk about in terms of love. It really is a unique thing to see. Canary.love. Thank you to ThinkstCanary for their support of my ridiculous, ridiculous nonsense. Corey: Writing ad copy to fit into a 30 second slot is hard, but if anyone can do it the folks at Quali can. Just like their Torque infrastructure automation platform can deliver complex application environments anytime, anywhere, in just seconds instead of hours, days or weeks. Visit Qtorque.io today and learn how you can spin up application environments in about the same amount of time it took you to listen to this ad.Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. This promoted guest episode is brought to us by our friends at InfluxData. And my guest is titled as the Chief Marketing Officer at InfluxData, and I don't even care because his bio has something absolutely fascinating that I want to address instead. Brian Mullen is an accomplished dealmaker is how the bio starts. And so many of us spend time negotiating deals, but so few people describe ourselves in that way. First, Brian, thank you for joining us. And secondly, what's up with that?Brian: [laugh]. Well, thanks, Corey, very excited to be here. And yes, dealmaker; I guess that would be apropos. How did I get into marketing? Well, a lot of my career is spent in business development, and so I think that's where the dealmaker part comes from.Several different roles, including my first role at Influx—when I joined Influx—was in business development and partnerships. And so, prior to coming to Influx, I spent many years building out the business development team at Twilio, growing that up, and we did a lot of deals with carriers, with Cloud partners, with all kinds of different partners; you name it, we worked with them. And then moving into Influx, joined in an BD capacity here and had a couple different roles that eventually evolved to Chief Marketing Officer. But that's where the dealmaker comes from. I like to do deals, it's always nice to have one on the side in whatever capacity you're working in, it's nice to have a deal or two working on the side. It kind of keeps you fresh.Corey: It's fun because people think, “Oh, a deal. You're thinking of mergers and acquisitions, and how hard could that be? You just show up with a bag of money and give it to people and then you have a deal closed.” And oh, if only it were that simple. Every client engagement we have on the consulting side has been a negotiation back and forth, and the idea is to ideally get everyone to the point where they're happy, but honestly, if everyone's slightly unhappy but can live with the result, we'll take that too.And as people go through their own careers it's, you're always trying to make a deal in some form: when you try to get a project approved, or you're trying to get resources thrown at something—by which I generally mean money, not people, though people, too—it's something that isn't necessarily clearly understood or discussed very often, despite the fact that half of what I do is negotiating with AWS on behalf of clients for better contractual terms. The thing that I think takes people by surprise the most is that dealmaking is almost never about pounding the table, being angry, and walking out, like you read the world's worst guide to buying a car or something. It's about finding the win for everyone. At least that's the way I've always approached it.Brian: That's a good point. And actually that wording that you described of finding a win for everybody, that's how I always thought about it. I think about it as first of all, you're trying to understand what the other party—and it could be an individual, it could be a company, it could be a group of companies, sometimes—you're trying to understand what their goals are, what their agenda is and see how that matches with your own; sometimes they're opposing, sometimes they're overlapping. And then everyone has to have some perceived win in a deal. And it's not competitively; it's more like you just have to have value, that is kind of what the win is – having value in that deal.And so that's the way I always approached it. And doing deals, whether you're in BD or sales, or if you're working with vendors and you're in a different functional role, sometimes it's not even commercial, it's just about aligning resources, perhaps. Our deal might be that you and I are both going to put a collective effort into building something or taking something to market. In another scenario might be like, I'm going to pay for this service that you're delivering, or vice versa. Or we're going to go and bring two revenue-generating products together and take them to market. Whatever it might be, it doesn't matter so much what the mechanics are of the deal, but it's usually about aligning those agendas and in having someone get utility, get value on the other side.Corey: I think that people lose sight of the fact as well, that when you're talking about a service provider—and let's be clear, InfluxData has launched a cloud platform that we'll talk about in a minute—this is not the one-off transactional relationship; once the deal is signed, you've got to work with these people. When they host parts of your production infrastructure, whether you want to admit it or not they're your partner more so than they are your vendor. It has to be an ongoing relationship that people are, if they at least aren't thrilled with it, can at least be happy enough to live with, otherwise it just winds up with this growing sense of resentment and it just sort of leads nowhere.Brian: Yeah, there really is no deal moment. Yes, people sign agreements with companies, but that's just the very beginning. Your relationship evolves from there. We're delivering a product, we're delivering this platform that handles time-series data to our customers, and we're asking them to trust us with their product that they're taking out to market. They're asking us to handle their data and to deliver service to them that they're turning into their production applications. And so it's a big responsibility. And so we care about the relationship with our customers to continue that.Corey: So, I first really became aware of time-series data a few years back during a re:Invent keynote when they pre-announced Timestream, which took entirely too long to come to market. Okay, great. So, you're talking about time-series data. Can you explain what that means in simple terms? And I learned over the next eight minutes that they were talking about it, that no, no, they couldn't. I wound up more confused by the end of the announcement than I was at the beginning.So, assuming that I have the same respect for databases as you would expect for someone whose favorite data store is Route 53—because you can misuse it as a beautiful database—what is time-series data and why does it matter in 2021?Brian: Sure, it's a good question. And I was there in that audience as well that day. So, we think of time-series data as really any type of data that's stamped in time, in some way. It could be every hour, every minute, every second, every half second, whatever. But more specifically, it's any type of data that is generated by some source—and that could be a sensor sources within systems or an actual application—and these things change over time, and then therefore, stamped in time in some way.They can come at different frequencies, like I said, from nanoseconds to seconds, or minutes and hours, but the most important thing is that they usually trigger a workflow, trigger some sort of action. And so that's really what our platform is about. It allows people to handle this type of data and then work with it from there in their applications, trigger new workflows, et cetera. Because the historical context of what happens is super important.And when we talk about sources, it could be really many things. It could be in physical spaces, and we have a lot of IoT types of customers and use cases. And those are things like devices and sensors on the factory floor, out in the field, it's on a vehicle. It's even in space, believe it or not. There are customers that are using us on satellites.And then it can also be sources from within software, applications, and infrastructure, things like VMs, and containers, and microservices, all emitting time-series data. And it could be applications like crypto, or financial, or stock market, agricultural type of applications that are themselves as applications emitting data. So, you think about all these sources that are out there from the physical world to the virtual world, and they're all generating time-series data, and our platform is really specially designed to handle that kind of data. And we can get into some details of what exactly that means, but that's really why we're here. That's what time-series is all about.Corey: And this is the inherent challenge I think we're seeing across the entire industry slash ecosystem. I mean, this is airing during re:Invent week, but at the time we are recording this, we have not yet seen the Tuesday keynote that Adam Selipsky will take to the stage, and no doubt, render the stat I'm about to throw at you completely obsolete. But depending on how you count them, there's somewhere between 13 and 15 managed database or database-like services today that AWS offers. And they never turn things off and they're always releasing new things, supposedly on behalf of customers; in practice because someone somewhere wants to get promoted by launching a new service; good for them. Godspeed.If we look into the uncertain future, at some point, someone's job is going to be disambiguating between the 40 different managed database services that AWS offers and picking the one that works. What differentiates time-series from—let's just start with an easy one—something like MySQL or Postgres—or ‘Postgres-squeal' is how I insist on pronouncing that one. Let's stay away from things like Neptune because no one knows what a social graph database is and I assure you, you almost certainly don't need one. Where does something like Influx work in a way that, “Huh. Running this on MySQL is really starting to suck.”Brian: When and why is it time to consider a specialized tool. And in fact, that's actually what we see a lot with our customers is coming to us around that time when a time-series is a problem to solve for them is reaching the point where they really need a specialized tool that's kind of built for that. And so one way to look at that is really just to think about time-series in general as a type of data. It's rapidly rising. It's the fastest growing data category out there right now.And the reason for that is it's being driven by two big macro trends. One is the explosion of all these applications and services running in the cloud. They're expanding horizontally, they're running in more regions, they're in many cases running on multiple clouds, and so it's just getting big—the workloads are getting bigger and bigger. And those are emitting time-series data. And then simultaneously, you have this growth of all these devices and sensors that are coming online out in the real world: batteries, and temperature gauges, and all kinds of stuff, both new and old, that is coming online, and those sources are generating a lot of time-series data.So typically, we're in a moment now, where a lot of developers are faced with this massive growth of time-series data. And if you think about some data set that you have, that you're putting into some kind of traditional database, now add the component of time as a multiplier by all the data you have. Instead of that one data, that one metric, you're now looking at doing that every one second in perpetuity. And so it's just an order of magnitude more data that you're dealing with. And then you also have this notion of—when you have that magnitude of data, you have fidelity, you're taking a lot of it in at the same time, I mean, very quickly, so you have batch or stream data coming in at super high volume, and you may need that for a few minutes or a few hours or days, but maybe you don't need it for months and years.And so you'd maybe dropped down to kind of a lower fidelity for the longer-term. But you really have this toggling back and forth of the high fidelity and low fidelity, all coming at you at pretty high volume. And so typically what happens is, is when the workloads get big enough, the legacy tools, they're just not equipped to do it. And a developer—if they have a small set of time-series they're dealing with, what is the first thing they're going to do? They're going to look around and be like, “Hey, what do I have here? Oh, I've got Mongo over here. I've got Splunk, or I've got this old relational database, I can put it in.”And that's typically what they'll do, and that works fine until it doesn't. And then that's when they come around looking for a specialized tool. So, we really sit in Influx and, frankly, other time-series products really do sit at that point where people are considering a specialized tool just because the workload has gotten such that it requires that.Corey: Yeah. Taking a look at most of the offerings in the space; anything that winds up charging anything more than a very tiny fraction of a penny—from what you're describing—is going to quickly become non-economical, where it's, “Oh, we're going to charge you”—like using S3: every, I think, 1000 writes cost a penny—“Oh, we're just going to use S3 for this.” Well, at some of these data volumes, that means that your request charge on S3 is very quickly going to become the largest single line item in your bill, which is nothing short of impressive in a lot of cases, but it also probably means that you've taken a very specific tool—like an iPad—and tried to use it as something else—like a hammer—and no one's particularly happy with that outcome.Brian: Yeah. First of all, having usage-based pricing is really important. We think about it as allowing people to have the full version of the product without a major commitment, and be using it in test scenarios and then later in the very early production scenarios. But as a principle, it's important for people that just signed up two hours ago using your product are basically using the same full product that the biggest customers that you have are using that are paying many, many thousands or tens of thousands per month. And so the way to do that is to offer usage-based pricing and not force people to commit to something before they're ready to do it.And so there's ways to unlock lower pricing, and we, like a lot of companies, offer annual pricing and we have a sales team that worked with folks to basically draw down their unit costs on the use of the platform once they kind of get comfortable with their workload. So, there's definitely avenues to get lower price, and we're believers in that. And we also want to, from a product development perspective, try to make the product more efficient. And so we basically are trying to drive down the costs through efficiencies in the product: make it run faster, make queries take less time, and also ship products on top of it that require developers to write less code themselves, kind of, do more of the work for them.Corey: One of the things I find particularly compelling about what you've done is it is an open-source project. If I want to go ahead and run some time-series experiments myself, I can spin it up anywhere I want and run it however I see fit. Now, at some point, if I'm doing this for anything more than, “Oh, let's see how I can misuse this today,” I probably want to at least consider letting someone who's better at running these things than I am take it over. And as I'm looking through your customer list, the thing that strikes me is how none of these things are quite like the other. We're talking about companies like Hulu is probably not using it the same way as Capital One is, at least I certainly hope not. You have Texas Instruments; you also have Adobe. And it sort of runs an entire gamut of none of these companies quite look alike; I have to imagine their use cases are also somewhat varied, too.Brian: Yeah, that's right. And we really do see as a platform, and with time-series being the common problem that people are looking to solve, we see this pretty broad set of use cases and customer types. And we have some more traditional customers like the Cisco's and the IBM's of the world, and then some relatively new folks like Tesla and Hulu and others that are a little bit more recent. But they're all trying to solve the same fundamental problem with time-series, which is “How can I handle it in an efficient way and make use of it meaningfully in my applications and services?”And we were talking earlier about having some sources of time-series data being in, kind of a virtual space, like in infrastructure and software, and then some being in physical space, like in devices and sensors out in the real world. So, we have breadth in that way, too. We have folks who are building big software observability infrastructure solutions on us, and we also have people that are pulling data off of the devices on a solar panel that's sitting on a house in the emerging world, right? So, you have basically these two far ends of the spectrum, but all using this specialized tool to handle the time-series data that they're generating.Corey: It seems to me that for most of these use cases and the way you describe it, it's more about the overall shape of the data when we're talking about time-series more so than it is any particular data point in isolation. Is that accurate, or are there cases where that is very much not the case?Brian: I think that's accurate. What people are mostly trying to understand is context for what's happening. And so it's not necessarily—to your point—not searching for one specific data point or moment, but it's really understanding context for some general state that has changed or some trend that has emerged, whatever that might be, and then making sense of that, and then taking action on that. And taking an action could mean a couple of different things, too. It could be in an observability sense, where somebody in an operator type of mode where they're looking at dashboards and paying attention to infrastructure that's running and then need to take some sort of action based on that. It also, in many cases, is automated in some way: it's either some series of automated responses to some state that is reached that is visible in the data, or is actually kicking off some new series of tasks or actions inside of an application based on what is occurring and shown by the time-series data.Corey: You know what doesn't add to your AWS bill? Free developer security from Snyk. Snyk is a frictionless security platform that meets developers where they are, finding and fixing vulnerabilities right from the CLI, IDEs, repos, and pipelines. And Snyk integrates seamlessly with AWS offerings like CodePipeline, EKS, ECR, and oh so much more.Secure with Snyk and save some loot. Learn more at snyk.io/scream. That's S-N-Y-K-dot-I-O/screamCorey: So, we've talked about, you have an open-source product, which is the sort of thing that most people listening to this should have a vague idea of, “Oh, that means I can go on GitHub and download it and start using it, if it's not already in my package manager.” Great. You also have the enterprise offering, which is more or less, I presume, a supported distribution of this—for lack of a better term—that you then wind up providing blessed configurations thereof and helping run support for that—for companies that want to run it on-prem. Is that directionally accurate, or am I grossly mischaracterizing [laugh] what your enterprise offering is?Brian: Directionally accurate, of course. You could have a great job in marketing. I really think you could.Corey: Oh, you know, I would argue, on some level, I probably do. The challenge I have is that I keep conflating marketing with spectacle and that leads down to really unfortunate, weird places. But one additional area, which is relatively recent since the last time I spoke with Paul—one of the cofounders of your company—on this show is InfluxDB Cloud, which is one of those, “Oh, let me see if I look—if I'm right.” And sure enough, yeah, you wind up managing the infrastructure for us and it becomes a pay-per consumption model the way that most cloud service providers do, without the really obnoxious hidden 15 levels of billing dimensions.Brian: Yes, we are trying to bring the transparency back. But yes, you're correct. We have open-source and we have—it's very popular—we have over 500,000-plus instances of that deployed globally today in the community. And that's typically very common for developers to get started using the open-source, easily recognizable, it's been out for a long time, and so many people start the journey there.And then we have InfluxDB Enterprise, which it's actually a clustered version of InfluxDB open-source. So, it allows you to basically handle in an environment that you want to manage yourself, you manage a cluster and scale it out and handle ever-increasing workloads and have things like redundancy and replication, et cetera. But that's really specifically for people who want to deploy and operate the software themselves, which is a good set of people; we have a lot of folks who have done that. But one of the areas that's a little bit more recent is InfluxDB Cloud, which is really, for folks who don't want to have anything to do with the management; they really just want to use it as a service, send their data in—Corey: Yeah, give me an API endpoint, and I want you to worry about the care, and the feeding, and the waking up at two in the morning when a disk starts filling up. Yeah, that is the best kind of problem from my perspective: someone else's.Brian: Exactly. That's our job. And increasingly, we've seen folks gravitate to that. We've got a lot of folks have signed up on this product since it launched in 2019, and it's really increasingly where they begin their journey, maybe not even going to the open-source just going directly to this because it's relatively simple to get started.It's priced based on usage. People pay for three vectors: they have the amount of data in; they have number of queries made against the platform; and then storage, how much data you have and for how long. And depending on the use case, some people keep it around for relatively short time, like a few days or a couple of weeks. Other folks have it for many, many months and potentially years in some places. So, you really have that option.But I would say the three products are really about how you want to run it. Do you care about running the, kind of, underlying infrastructure and managing it or do you just want to hit an endpoint, as you said.Corey: You launched this, I want to say in 2019, which feels about directionally right. And I know it was after Timestream was announced, so I just want to say first, how kind and selfless it was of you to validate AWS's market, which is, you know how they always like to clarify and define what they're doing when they decide to enter every single market anywhere to compete with everyone. It turns out, I don't get the sense that they like it quite [laugh] as much being on the other side of that particular divide, but that's the best kind of problem, too: again, someone else's.Brian: Yeah, I think that's really true.Corey: The challenge that I have is that it seems like a weird direction to go in as a company, though it is clearly based upon a number of press releases you have made about the success and market traction that you found, it feels, on some level, like it is falling into an older version of an open-source trap of assuming that, “Well, we wrote the software therefore we are the best people you could pick to run it.” That was what a lot of companies did; it turns out that AWS has this operational excellence, as they call it, and what the rest of us call burning through people and making them wake up in the middle of the night to fix things before it becomes customer-visible. But from the outside, there's no difference. It seems, however, that you have built something that is clearly resonating, and in a big way, in a way that—I've got to be direct with you—the AWS time-series service that they are offering has not been finding success.Brian: Thank you for saying that, and we feel pretty excited about the success we've had even being in the same market as Amazon. And Amazon does a phenomenal job at running products at scale, and the breadth that they have in their product lineup is pretty impressive, especially when they roll out new stuff at AWS re:Invent every year. But we've been able to find some pretty good success with our approach, and it's based on a couple of things. So, one is being the company that actually develops and still deploys the open-source is really important. People gravitate to that.Our roots as a company are open-source, we've been a part of and fostered this community over many, many years, and there's a certain trust in the direction that we're taking the company. And Paul, our founder who you mentioned, he's been front and center with that community, pretty deeply engaged for many, many years. I think that carries a lot of weight. At least that's the way we think about it. But then as far as commercial products go, we really think about it as going to where our customers are, going to where developers are. And that could mean the language that they prefer, the language of preference for them. And that could [crosstalk 00:22:25]—Corey: Oh, and it's very clear; it seems that most database companies that I talk to—again, without naming names—tend to focus on the top-down sale, but I've never worked in an environment where the database that will be used was dictated by anyone other than the application developers who are the closest to the technical requirements for the workload. I've never understood this model of, “Oh, we're going to talk to the C suite because we believe that they're going to pick a database vendor based upon who has box seats this season.” I've never gotten that and that probably means I'm a terrible enterprise marketer, on some level. But unlike almost every other player in the database space, I've never struggled to understand what the hell your messaging has meant, other than the technical bits that I just don't have quite enough neurons to bang together to create sparks to fully understand. It is very clearly targeted at a builder rather than someone who's more or less spending their entire life in meetings. Which, oh, God, that's me.Brian: [laugh]. Yes, it's very much the case. We are focused on the developer. And that developer is a builder of an application or service that is seeing the light of day, it's going out and being used by their own end-users and end-customers.And so we care about going to where those developers are, and that could mean going and making your product easily used in the language and tool that customer cares about. So, if you're a Python developer, it's important for us to have tools and make it easy for Python developers. We have client libraries for Python, for example. It also means going to the cloud where your customers are. And this is something that differentiates us as well, when you start looking at what the other cloud providers are offering, in that data—like it or not—has gravity. And so somebody that has built their whole stack on AWS and sure they care about using a service that is going to receive their data, and that also being in AWS, but—Corey: It has to live where the customers are, especially with data egress charges being what they are, too.Brian: Exactly.Corey: And data gravity is real. The cloud provider people pick is the one where their data lives because of that particular inflection in the market.Brian: Absolutely true. And so that's great if you're only going after people who are on AWS, but what about Google Cloud and what about Microsoft Azure? There are a lot of developers that are building on those platforms as well, and that's one of the reasons we want to go there as well. So, InfluxDB Cloud is a multi-cloud offering, and it's equal experience and capability and pricing on each of the three major clouds. You can buy directly from us; you can put it on any of your cloud bills in one of those marketplaces, and to us that's like a really, really fundamental point is to bring your product and make it as easy to use on those platforms and in those languages, and in those realms and use cases where people are already working.Corey: I'm a big believer in multi-cloud for the use case you just defined. Because I know I'm going to get letters if I don't say this based upon my public multi-cloud is a dumb default worst practice for most folks—because it is, on a workload-by-workload basis—but you're building a service that has to be close to where your customers are and for that specific thing, yeah, it makes an awful lot of sense for you to have a presence across all the different providers. Now, here's the $64,000 question for you: is the experience as an InfluxDB Cloud customer meaningfully different between different providers?Brian: It's not. We actually pride ourselves on it being the same. Using InfluxDB, you sign up for InfluxDB Cloud, you come in, you set up your account, create your organization, and then you choose which underlying cloud provider you want your account to be provisioned in. And so it actually comes as a secondary choice; it's not something that is gated in the beginning, and that allows us to deliver a uniform experience across the board. And you may in a future use case, maybe somebody wants to have part of what they're building data living in AWS and maybe part of it living in Azure, I mean, that could be a scenario as well.However, typically what we've seen—and you've probably seen this as well—is most developers are—and organizations—are building mostly on one cloud. I don't see a lot of multi-cloud in that organization. But we ourselves need to be multi-cloud in order to go to where those people are working. And so that's the distinction. It's for us as a company that delivers product to those people, it's important for us to go where they are, whereas they themselves are not necessarily running on all three cloud products; they're probably running on one platform.Corey: Yeah. On a workload-by-workload basis, that's what generally makes sense. Anytime you have someone who has a particular workload that needs to be in multiple providers, okay, great, you're going to put that out there, but their backend systems, their billing, their marketing, all the rest, is not going to go down that path for a variety of excellent reasons, mostly that it is a colossal pain, and a bunch of, more or less, solving the same problems over and over, rather than the whole point of cloud being to make it someone else's. I want to thank you for taking so much time to speak to me about how you're viewing the evolution of the market, how you're seeing your move into cloud, and how you're effectively targeting folks who can actually care about the implementation details of a database rather than, honestly, suits. If people want to learn more, where can they find you?Brian: They can go to our website; it's the easiest place to go. So, influxdata.com. You can read all about InfluxDB, it's a pretty easy sign up to get underway. So, I recommend that people get their hands dirty with the product. That's the easiest way to understand what it's all about.Corey: And if you do end up doing that, please tell them I sent you because the involuntary flinch whenever people mention my name to vendors is one of my favorite parts of being me. Brian, thank you so much for being so generous with your time. I appreciate it.Brian: Thanks so much for having us on. It was great.Corey: Brian Mullen, Chief Marketing Officer—and dealmaker—at InfluxData. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn, and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice along with a long, angry comment telling me that you work on the Timestream service team, and your product is the best. It's found huge success, but I've just never met any of your customers and I can't because they all live in Canada.Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.
0:26: The 3.45 Auction is heating up. How the Spectrum Screen works and how it is supposed to work. 3:35: T-Mobile managed to lock out the bigger players in the 600 mhz auction and got everything they wanted. 4:50: How much spectrum each carrier has - do they have competitive parity? 6:26: Why the Sprint and T-Mobile Merger wasn't the time to bring up competitive advantages and disadvantages. 7:30: Will a ruling come out before the 3.45 Auction? 10:27: Verizon has placed their bets on C-Band which isn't active just yet. 12:34: The FCC is politically deadlocked - what could happen? Tags: telecom, telecommunications, business, wireless, cellular phone, cellular service, Don Kellogg, Roger Entner, Recon Analytics, 3.45 spectrum, FCC, Clearwire, Sprint, Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, PC Magazine,
Ben Wolff, CEO of Sarcos, talks to Boardroom Alpha's David Drapkin about robots, SPACs, and why investors should be looking at Sarcos as an opportunity to invest.Discussion TopicsIntro to SarcosWhy is now the time to go publicWhy a SPAC? Why Rotor?Who are your direct competitors?Sarcos' Valuation Shareholders + PIPE investors SPAC redemptionsSarcos revenue model Path to revenue projections Potential CustomersImpacts of COVIDPublic company experienceFinal word from BenAbout Ben WolffBen Wolff serves as the Chairman and CEO of leading global robotics company, Sarcos Robotics. In this role, he oversees the strategic direction of the company and engages with the company's partners, customers and investors.Prior to joining Sarcos, Wolff served as Chief Executive Officer, President and Chairman at Pendrell Corporation from 2009 to 2014. In 2003, Wolff co-founded Clearwire Corporation, where he served as President, CEO and Co-Chairman. Clearwire was sold to Sprint in 2013 for more than $14 billion. Wolff has also served as President of Eagle River Investments, an investment fund focused on telecom and technology investments.Wolff previously served on the board of the Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association (CTIA), and is currently a member of the Board of Visitors of Northwestern School of Law at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon.Wolff earned his law degree from Northwestern School of Law, Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Oregon in 1994, and his Bachelor of Science degree from California Polytechnic State University in 1991.
Evan and Dave chat with John Saw, the CTO of T-Mobile. John Saw is the EVP of Advanced and Emerging Technologies at T-Mobile, and is responsible for constantly evaluating ways to disrupt wireless communications. John was previously the CTO at Sprint and came to T-Mobile as a result of the companies merging. John was also the CTO at Clearwire before the company was acquired by Sprint in 2013. John earned a Doctorate, Master’s, and Bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from McMaster University, Canada, and has six U.S. patents in wireless technologies. In 2017, the FCC chairman appointed him to the Broadband Deployment Advisory Committee. He also serves on the board of directors for Spectrum Effect, a pioneer in RF spectrum analytics, and he is on the advisory boards of the 5G Open Innovation Lab and Global TDD Initiative (GTI).When John’s not working on network innovation, he enjoys golfing, skiing around pesky snowboarders, and hiking with his wife.You can subscribe to TalkingHeadz on most podcast apps.
“I think one of the things about the creative professions in general is built into them inherently is problem solving. If you want to become, say a biologist, really what you're doing as a biologist is you're discovering things that already exist. As a creative you're inventing things that don't exist.” Creative director and entrepreneur Jonathan Deiss has had a very unique career. After being accepted to Ivy League schools to study architecture, eventually graduating with a Master’s Degree from UCLA, Jonathan headed down the path to deign buildings. However, it was what become known as Web 1.0/2.0 that attracted him more, to work in burgeoning world of websites and digital design. Jonathan realized, “Education isn't just about what you're learning. It's also about learning to learn.” Over the years Jonathan rose up the ranks of advertising agencies like Tribal DDB, Dailey & Associates, Trailer Park, TBWA Chiat Day, The Ant Farm, mOcean, Real Pie, Mojo, Publicis, Leo Burnett and Sapient. He has overseen accounts for Activision, Clearwire, Wells Fargo, Epson, ESPN, Warner Brothers, Disney, Kia, Mutual of Omaha, Disney, Paramount, Fox, and Sony to name a few. He’s done a lot of TV, film and video game marketing as well as traditional marketing. He then went “client side” and helmed creative for Beachbody globally and was responsible for all creative department business including, not only all design direction, but also department budgeting and administration, talent acquisition and retention, and product development. When talking about all of the projects he has worked on and projects he has overseen, Jonathan points out, “You have to learn the discipline of learning in order to succeed in life. One of the ways that I've succeeded is by having a hunger for figuring things out. And the only way you get hungry about figuring things out is if you train yourself over the course of your life from childhood, to have an interest in discovery to have curiosity, to be interested in new things, new ideas, new information.” That curiosity led to Jonathan creating two new ventures, two projects that could not be more different from each other. TheThrillStudio.com is the home 3D printed orcs, dragons and wizards. Micowilderness.com is the home to spiders that are as large as your hand. When we talked it was hard not to chuckle at the idea of spiders but Jonathan said something very wise, “Whether or not you're going to be a great professional in whatever industry you choose is going to be more based on your work ethic, your, your intelligence, your ability to problem solve and your attitude.” And he is right. So, enjoy this episode of Creative Mind. To contact Jonathan Deiss head over to his website - http://jonathandeiss.com For the latest in 3D printed collectibles – http://thethrillstudio.com For all the creepy crawlies – https://www.microwilderness.com
This week on The Room, we interview Hope Cochran, managing director at Madrona Venture Group. It's probably easier to ask, what hasn't Hope done? Music and economics at Stanford. Founder and CFO of SkillsVillage, bought by Peoplesoft in 2001. CFO of Clearwire and King Digital. Board member of three public companies, Hasboro, Mongo DB, and New Relic. Today we explore colorful stories of her time in C-suites and boardrooms discussing insights and themes such as advocating for yourself at work, what makes a good board, and the little moments that matter.
Doug Smith is the President and Chief Executive Officer of Ligado Networks and is responsible for directing the vision of the company and managing every aspect of its day to day operations. With more than 25 years of domestic and international telecom and wireless industry experience, Doug has engineered, built and launched nationwide networks for GTE, Nextel, Sprint Nextel and Clearwire. Valerie Green is Executive Vice President and Chief Legal Officer of Ligado Networks and is responsible for the company's legal public affairs and regulatory activities. Prior to joining Ligado, Valerie served in the Obama Administration as Assistant to the President and Director of Presidential Personnel. She also served in the White House as Deputy Special Counsel to the President and Special Assistant to the President and she started her career as a litigator with several prominent law firms.
Josh King is Chief Legal Officer at Avvo. He is responsible for the company’s legal affairs and business operations. He is also a frequent writer and speaker on interactive media and professional ethics issues. Prior to joining Avvo in 2007, Josh spent over a decade in the wireless industry, in a mix of legal and non-legal roles: Vice President, Corporate Development at AT&T Wireless, Director of Business Development for Clearwire, and General Counsel for Cellular One of San Francisco. Josh started his legal career as a litigator in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Beth Taska is the EVP of Human Resources for 24 Hour Fitness, which was founded in 1979 and has over 400+ locations and over 23,000 employees serving 4 million club members. She has held the CHRO (Chief HR Officer) title and Senior HR positions for corporations such as Clearwire, Gap and Sears. Beth’s career path was not of the norm, she holds an undergraduate degree in Political Science and a graduate degree in Public Administration and worked for several municipalities around the Chicago area before beginning her career in the HR world. The CHRO role at 24 Hour Fitness includes onboarding over 17,000 people each year from the very inception when someone begins with 24 Hour Fitness and training these people. There is a duality with recruitment here because there is a large part of the 24 Hour Fitness workforce that uses their position as a stepping stone and part of the workforce includes people that want a longer tenure with the company. 24 Hour Fitness practices relationship based leadership and practices positivity and making a difference in some fashion with their members and their employees. In this episode Beth will discuss the differences that relationship based leadership can make within an organization and how that affects employees. What true leadership is and where it comes from, some of the simplest behaviors can make the largest impacts on an individual which in turn can make large impacts for an organization. How doing a 5 minute “Gratitude Circle” first thing each morning with everyone sets the positive tone for the work day ahead. What 24 Hour Fitness strives for each of their members with relationship based selling and how they turn that into a positive for their bottom line. How they deal with having mostly female members versus male employees. Beth discusses all of these things and explains the impact that being vulnerable makes for everyone within an organization and how to be vulnerable. What you will learn in this episode: Beth’s story What is Relationship Based Leadership? What is Relationship Based Selling? Four traits that leaders should have. How to work with employees want a long tenure and employees that want a short tenure. How to bring vulnerability to the workplace Are work families a good thing or not what, exactly what is a work family. Why it’s important for leadership to be viewed as human versus mechanical Links from the episode: Beth Taska On LinkedIn BethTaska.club (Music by Ronald Jenkees)
Testing LTE speeds across the country, more drama between Sprint, Dish and Clearwire and Facebook brings video to Instagram. How to Contact us: How to Listen:
It's basically a comedy of errors this week.Headlines:Apple to NSA: HA HA!!Yahoo had 13000 requests for user dataApple had 5000Facebook's was 18,000 and Microsoft's was 31,000FBI says, "Look up and say 'Cheese!'."Huawei looking to buy NokiaMicrosoft cleans house and kills off botnet.Microsoft reverses DRM decision. Are we sure we won?Newest PS3 update bricks your console just in time to buy a PS4!Dish tries to buy Sprint but fails, goes to buy Clearwire instead. Does sprint sue Dish?Lasers are the future of fruit!At least he knows his terminology!Zuke’s Favorite: The start of The Last Summer on EarthZohner’s Favorite: Periodic Table of AwesomeSchmidty’s Favorite: Yo Daddy BattleStark’s Favorite: Jedi’s don’t use elevators See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Clearwire postpones its shareholder vote on the proposed Sprint acquisition, a white Nexus 4, and multiple comments about Straight Talk. How to Contact us: How to Listen:
This week, a cease fire backfires, the Clearwire saga comes to a close and the end was nigh and we survived.
Surprise, Sprint looks to pick up Clearwire, Republic Wireless officially launches and Google Maps for iPhone.
The Cell Phone Junkie Show #334 49:37Show NotesSprint takes a controlling interest in Clearwire, Apple and Google announce upcoming events and Microsoft announces Xbox Music.
This week, T-Mobile's doing well, Nintendo's doing poorly and Clearwire's doing worse.
This week, Sony's livin' la vida Vita, Clearwire's losing money at Light speed and Nintendo's catching up to the big kids.
This week, Xbox LIVE goes Metro, OnLive goes mobile and Clearwire goes modern.
The Cell Phone Junkie Show #288 1:16:49Show NotesCarrier IQ finds itself squarely in the spotlight, Verizon making spectrum moves and Sprint announces a new agreement with Clearwire.
The two discuss Intel’s investment in wireless company Clearwire and the PeopleSupport sale to India’s Essar Group See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
CONTAINS EXPLETIVES: Mr Rajaratnam’s brother, Rengan, called Mr Rajaratnam to alert him to a Wall Street Journal news article that discussed the potential combination of Clearwire and an investment from Intel, among other companies. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
The two discuss Intel’s investment in wireless company Clearwire and the PeopleSupport sale to India’s Essar Group See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
Clearwire WiMax broadband service is currently available in 62 U.S. markets and reaches over 41 million people. By the end of 2010, 120 million people in the U.S. will have access to its wireless mobile service in New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Denver, Minneapolis, the San Francisco Bay Area, Miami, Cincinnati, Cleveland and Pittsburgh. David Maquera, […]
The wireless broadband pieces appear to be falling in place: Sprint Nextel says its next-generation high-speed network will be launched in a few markets by the end of 2007. Intel plans to embed so-called ”WiMAX” enabled semiconductors in laptops by the end of 2008 and startups like Craig McCaw's Clearwire hope to blanket much of the nation with WiMAX service. Other companies are supporting hybrid wireless networks so that devices can hop between technologies. Where is all this heading and what does it mean for the ”Anywhere Consumer”? See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.
WiMax - Why Not? Craig McCaw is a visionary, who has had an uncanny ability to predict the future of technology. WiMAX has the potential to do for broadband access what cell phones have done for telephony - replacing cable and DSL services, providing universal Internet access just about anywhere - especially for suburban and rural blackout areas. Just like in the early 1980's Clearwire's Craig O. McCaw has been buying up licensed radio spectrum. You may not have heard of Craig but in the early 80's he recognized local cell permits being sold by the the FCC were greatly undervalued and he started bidding cellular phone licenses. He did his buying under the radar screen of the telcos and, by the time they recognized what he was doing it was basically too late � Craig had already purchased and owned licenses in most of the major markets. Of course he had the money - in 1986 Craig and his brothers sold a cable television business their father had left them for $755 million and concentrated on building a national cellular phone network. The story continues - MCI Communications sold its cellular and paging operations to Craig in 1986 for $122 million and their company went public with the brothers holding around 40% of the company. His last big acquisition in the cell market was the $3.5 billion deal for LIN Broadcasting where he outbid Bell South. With the LIN acquisition Craig and his brothers had almost complete control of the 1989 U. S. cell market. McCaw brothers sold the company to AT&T in 1994 for $11.5 billion and a lot of people figured they would just ride off into the sunset � not the case! Fast forward to today - Clearwire, under Craig's direction, has quietly purchased enough licensed radio spectrum to build a national WiMAX network. What is WiMax?Let's begin by putting WiMax in context. You and I both have cable modems. This is Broadband access - for residential access either a DSL or cable modem and at the office either a T1 or a T3 line - pretty expensive and not available in all areasWe also have WiFi access - at home, at work or on the road WiFi routers or wireless access points provide mobility with connectivity - hot spots are very small, so coverage is sparsenot that many years ago, we both used dial-up access - many (71%) use dial-up either because broadband is not available or too expensive - painfully slowThat's where WiMax comes in to the picture. WiMAX or Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access is the name given to the IEEE 802.16 wireless standard, which provides: speed of comparable to broadband service wireless access (significantly cheaper than cable or DSL and much easier to extend to suburban and rural areas) broad coverage - much more like a cellular network rather than small isolated WiFi hotspots WiMAX works much like WiFi but supports higher speeds, greater distances and a greater number of users. What's needed for WiMax?WiMAX components include: A WiMAX tower, not unlike a cell-phone tower, but able to cover a much larger area - up to 3000 square miles for a single tower versus 10 sqr miles for cell [Rhole Island is 1045 sqr miles; Bermuda 22 sqr miles; and Delaware 2489 sqr miles] The second component is a WiMAX receiver (a small box or PCMCIA card, or integrated into a laptop - like WiFi in Centrino/Pentium M) A WiMAX tower can connect directly to the Internet using a wired connection (e.g. a T3 line) or connect to another WiMAX tower using a line-of-sight, microwave link. Can you give us some specs for WiMaxWiMAX can provide two forms of wireless service:non-line-of-sight, WiFi sort of service, a small antenna on your computer connects to the tower uses a lower frequency range -- 2 GHz to 11 GHz (similar to WiFi) lower-wavelength transmissions provide greater immunity to physical obstructions limited to a 4-to-6 mile radius (~25 square miles of coverage; similar in range to a cell tower) line-of-sight service, fixed dish antenna points to the WiMAX tower from a rooftop or pole stronger and more stable, so it's able to send a lot of data with fewer errors use higher frequencies (up to 66 GHz) at higher frequencies - less interference; more bandwidth. Currently, the fastest WiFi connection is up to 54 megabits per second under optimal conditions. WiMAX is predicted to handle up to 70 megabits per second - providing the equivalent of cable modem speeds even when shared by several dozen businesses or a few hundred home users. Distance is where WiMax really outshines WiFi - while WiFi has a range of about 300 feet, WiMAX will provide wireless access for a radius of 30 miles. The increased range is due to the frequencies used and the power of the transmitter. Of course, at that distance, terrain, weather and large buildings will act to reduce the maximum range in some circumstances, but the potential is there to cover large geographic areas. What would happen if I got WiMAX An Internet service provider sets up a WiMAX base station 10 miles from your home. You'll need a WiMAX-enabled computer or upgrade your old computer to add WiMAX capability. You would receive a special encryption code that would give you access to the base station. Potentially, the cost could be much lower than current high-speed Internet fees because the provider never had to run cables. For your home network, things wouldn't change much. A WiMAX base station would send data to a WiMAX-enabled router, which would then send the data to the different computers on your network. You could even combine WiFi with WiMAX by having the router send the data to the computers via WiFi. Craig has also attracted some major investors with Motorola and Intel giving him close to $900 million in July. Rumor has it that, with Clearwire's potential network, within 3 years the company will be able to offer nationwide WiMAX service for around $25 per month which is significantly less that people are currently paying for other providers nationwide lower bandwidth data services. Clearwire is not without competition. According to WiMAXTrends.com: On August 8 Sprint Nextel President and CEO Gary Forsee announced that Sprint will adopt WiMAX as it technology choice for its next generation "4G" network. Mr. Forsee announced that its current EV-DO network will complement a mobile WiMAX network. The mobile WiMAX network will be utilized with a full range of WiMAX-embedded devices. The products are coming and the providers are committed to build the network. This makes me think seriously about the Muni WiFi initiatives we are seeing springing up in most U.S. cities. Will they survive? If I'm a business person on the road do I take my chances on Muni WiFi or do I just pay Clearwire $25 per month for guranteed access? References: A Wake Up Call from Craig McCaw, Business Week Magazine, July 24, 2006 The Wizard of Wireless: http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/mcc0bio-1 SPRINT NEXTEL ANNOUNCES THAT WIMAX IS TECHNOLOGY CHOICE FOR ITS NEXT GENERATION "4G" NETWORK: http://WiMAXTrends.com