The Ruckus Room

Starting a Startup

Perhaps you saw this story featuring our founders in this month's ENTREPRENEUR magazine. 

Truth be known, these guys didn't start thinking about Smart Wi-Fi first. They just got pissed off because they couldn't get it to work right with what they were TRYING to invent.

Sequoia Capital (Garuv Garg really) had introduced Bill Kish (the guy sitting on the cube) and Victor Shtrom and put them up as "entrepreneurs in residence" (Sequoia, one of the larger VC firms, is actually quite supportive and aggressive in this regard). This basically means they put these guys in a room, gave them some money and every so often would peek their head in to see what they are doing. 

At first Bill (a rocket science software guy) and Victor (an RF antenna engineer), prompted by Garuv (x-Redback guy), wanted to make an A/V god box with every input and output imaginable. The idea was to shunt all traffic (digital and analog) through this box, transcoding and encapsulating, etc. then spitting the traffic out to other devices - like TVs, speakers and such, throughout the home. 

But they found building such a box was waaaaay too expensive.  More to the point, they really wanted to use Wi-Fi as way to move this stuff around - but they couldn't get the network to behave. Voila!  An idea - let's try and make Wi-Fi as good as a wire in the air.  Now there's a technical challenge.

Most startups happen this way.   

At Alteon WebSystems, the founders (now ridiculously rich) built an ASIC with processors it in. We wanted to use these embedded processors to offload TCP processing chores from servers in order to make them run faster now that people were using gigabit Ethernet.

But when we looked at the network interface card (NIC) business, we quickly found that there was better use for the technology. Why not gang up these processors in a box and put the box in front of a bunch of Web servers being used for e-commerce?  "Web Switching" was born.  We ended up going public then selling the company to Nortel for $7.8 billion.  Good times.

Selina Lo (our CEO at Ruckus) and Dominic Orr (our Chairman at Ruckus) were the executives at Alteon who made those decisions. They also saw the value of Bill and Victor's work and its application in the triple play market.  But it's still early days.....who knows.  You just need to be nimble.  Say what you want, but making Wi-Fi more reliable and predictable is a good thing.  Period. 

Ultimately good, sound technology is fundamental. But often what's more important is applying that technology in a different way in order to add value to a bigger problem - swallowing your pride, and have the willingness to do so.

2007 CESsta

CES was anything but a siesta. Three words best describe it this year: guys, gadgets and girls. 

During the daytime, there seemed to be three main areas of hotness:

1. Mobile Media Services
2. Over-the-top Applications
3. In-Home Multimedia Distribution

On the mobile media front one of the hottest developments was mobile TV.  The best example of this is a small new company called MobiTV.  MobiTV offers a service with popular channels and TV content formatted for phones, PDAs and other Windows CE devices. They've struck some big deals with content and service providers to let consumers quickly and easily pull up CNN and other various content wherever.  It simply rocks.

Over-the-Top (OTT) applications (best described by Shelly Palmer, a leading pundit in the rapid evolution of "networked television") refers to a television set (usually a flat-panel) that is connected to the public Internet as well as a private content distribution network (CDN) like a cable, satellite or telephone company. It's called OTT because the "data" part of the "video, voice & data" triple play is considered an application that rides "on top" of the existing infrastructure. For example, Sony introduced a new BRAVIA Internet Video Link Box - need an extra Ethernet wire to your TV set. Woo-hoo!

Finally 802.11n garnered huge interest by carriers and consumer electronics companies. 

Our own demo featured multiple MPEG-2 HD (20 Mbps data rate) streams with headroom for TCP data running over some non-channelized 2.4 Ghz spectrum. Even with our 802.11g demo and 10 Bluetooth phones entering the suite every five minutes, the thing ran and ran pretty well (given it was a proto system that had never been publicly shown before).

We showed it with a special spatial multiplexing antenna array that helps avoid interference and extend range. Carriers really liked what they saw but still remain skeptical. 

What they aren't skeptical about is running MPEG-4 HD streams over 802.11a/g NOW (we showed this too). They see this as a way to solve the hard to reach TV where wires aren't an option. Many carriers will go this way first while they test and try 802.11n.

But ultimately they'll need an industrial strength N solution to spew content from a media center system to end points littered throughout the home. For now it looks like broadband providers will still lead with wires (HPNA over coax) for now (at least the North American carriers). But this will change radically in 2007.

That was CES in a shot glass, or two.

Some 2007 Predictions

Some not-so profound, very silly, but all completely 100% guaranteed predictions for the company year.  What are yours?

	Cisco Systems purchases Calix for $1.2 billion
	Brittany Spears becomes spokespersons for Hanes and their new line of women's "briefs"
	Aruba Networks, the ultra edgy mobile networking company, goes public with a first day valuation of $2.3 billion
	Motorola buys Extreme Networks in fire sale deal
	Barak Obama announces he'll make a run for the democratic nominee for president, invites Hillary to be his running mate
	AT&T buys DirecTV, Liberty brokers the deal
	Dan Jones of Unstrung appears on Oprah Winfrey publicizing his new book entitled "Democracy without Wires"
	SlingMedia is purchased by SONY Corporation for $575 million
	Apple Computer introduces new line of dual-mode (Wi-Fi/GSM) iPhones that play iTunes and run OSX lite
	Match.com and eHarmony.com enter nasty "love-suit" over "post-texting" a new technique to steal customers by pretending to be someone else after they've already met you