I'd like to pretend that a week in Sardinia was deeply culturally enriching. What is clear, however, is that a week of all-you-can-eat Italian buffets and bistros enriches the waistline rather considerably.
I'm sure you'll appreciate the irony in being a telecom consultant, travelling with a 21 month old daughter, and my first action when entering a hotel room is to disconnect the phone from the wall. Little madam likes to pick up the handset, dial a few buttons, and blurt out some orders. "Want apple! Want biscuit!". Best not to disturb the receptionist in these circumstances.
I also had to explain to her that the reason she can't use the cell phone to call Nana and Grandad is that it's gone bad and can't make Skype calls. She seemed to accept that in preference to a discussion on roaming rates and her personal spending allowance.
In the whirlwind before going away I didn't get a chance to comment on the Peripheral Visionaries conference in Washington DC where I was on a panel. It was a good show, and got an unusual blend of people together in the same room. That said, I winced a few times as I could hear the technologists and lawyers talking mutually incomprehensible dialects. For example, Mark Spencer of Digium (purveyors of the open-source Asterisk PBX and pushers of Dundi rendezvous technology) needed a translator. On the other hand, many of the traditional regulatorium representatives seemed unperturbed by Skype, BitTorrent et al. When the namespace comes from another continent, or the technology from another country, petitioning your congressperson doesn't make sense any more.
One of the questions on my panel was to name a company you would invest in if you had to only own one stock in your portfolio, and had to keep it. I have to admit that a blog name like Telepocalypse doesn't exactly lend itself to a bullish industry outlook. I picked Quova, a mid-size privately-held company.
I probably didn't make a great job of explaining why in the panel -- there just isn't space -- so I'll try to make a better go of it now.
What Quova does is compiles databases mapping IP addresses to positions on the physical surface of the earth. I don't know much about how they do it -- whether it's via semi-public databases of IP address blocks like RIPE and ARIN, or pinging nodes and triangulating based on the speed of light, I don't care. The data is used by a number of industries to tailor their output to the user, or for fraud detection.
Why do I like them? Firstly, I appreciate the "make the best of what you have" approach. The "telco way" would be to have a massive standards committee, tons of use cases, partners who have their own agendas, and massive delay. The result would be horribly expensive, over-engineered, under-deployed, and unlikely to be much actual use. Instead, Quova did the "revolution from the edge" approach. They don't control the networks, but they suck in what information they can and assemble the best picture possible with the data they have.
I like the way they link the physical and virtual worlds. These sorts of business models tend to have legs. Pure virtual businesses were tried in the .com boom and largely found lacking. IP address to lat/long is as clear a crossover as you can hope for.
They're also pretty atomic. Do one small thing unbelievably well. I think they'll build up expertise that is hard for others to reproduce. (Disclaimer: I'm not an expert in geolocation, and don't know how well the competition stacks up, or if there is any.) They fit very nicely into a web services world. Even with the rise of technologies like IPv6 where the address space is given a good shaking up and becomes harder to map, they will be the distribution network of choice for what geolocation data exists.
And best of all is that being a private company they don't have a stock ticker you can use to disprove my hypotheses! The perfect pundit punt.
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