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According to Dow Jones , some colleges have banned the iPad from their networks. Princeton and Cornell, for example, are seeing major networking and connectivity issues that mirror the problems many users are seeing with their iPads at home. Princeton also decided to share details about the issues it is seeing on its network in a detailed statement that could help Apple diagnose and fix the connectivity issues that have plagued the iPad since launch. Sponsor As we reported earlier this month, quite a few iPad owners have experienced WiFi connectivity issues with their devices. There seems to be a wide variety of issues, ranging from bad WiFi reception to regular drops on the WiFi connection because of what looks to be a bug in how the iPad connects to some routers. The iPad’s Problem According to Princetion: DHCP According to the report from Princeton, at least one of these connectivity problems can be traced back to how the iPad handles DHCP leases. DHCP, which stands for Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol , is responsible for assigning IP addresses to computers on a local network. Normally, these IP addresses are renewed at regular intervals. If the device doesn’t request a renewal of the address, the DHCP server can hand this address out to another device. The Princeton team found that, under certain circumstances, iPads renew their lease of a given IP address once but then allow the lease to expire. Once the lease has expired, however, these devices still try to use the same address without asking for a new lease, which is bound to fail, as the router doesn’t remember the device anymore and has probably assigned the IP address to another device already. You can find more details about Princeton’s diagnosis – as well as a step-by-step guide for reproducing this issue here . Is This Good News for iPad Owners? If this is indeed the source of most iPad connectivity issues, then this is good news for Apple and iPad owners who are currently experiencing these issues, as a straightforward software update can probably remedy this problem. Discuss
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More Details Emerge About the iPad’s Connectivity Issues
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Most of the initial buzz surrounding Apple’s announcement on Thursday of its new operating system, iPhone OS 4, centered on the support for multitasking . While this feature has been long anticipated by users and developers alike, another important but less discussed aspect of the update involves Apple’s Game Center – a social gaming network to be launched for iPhone and iPod Touch later this summer. Similar to the networks already prevalent in console gaming, Apple’s Game Center will allow friend invitations and multiplayer game-play and will include matchmaking and high-score tracking. Sponsor The Game Center may be Apple’s attempt to compete with Facebook’s dominance over the hugely popular and incredibly lucrative area of social gaming . A report released this week suggested that the gaming company Zynga , maker of six of the seven most popular social games, is worth over $5 billion. Unlike Facebook, Apple does not currently have a social network upon which to automatically connect players and friends, although implementation of the Game Center may well bring this about. Details about the Game Center were not explicit in Thursday’s announcement, although the beta release of the operating system will include a developer preview of Game Center and contain a set of APIs so that mobile game developers can build apps that take advantage of the social gaming network capabilities. Echoing the popularity of gaming on the iPhone, initial analytics since the iPad release point to the continued domination of the App Store by gaming and entertainment applications. The updates to the iPhone OS could provide an opportunity for mobile and social game developers and for entrepreneurs in the gaming industry. Discuss
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Apple’s Game Center: More Opportunities for Social Games Developers
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The semantic web is one of the leading trends we track here at ReadWriteWeb, so it was big news to us earlier this month when Evri announced it was acquiring Twine creators Radar Networks . Following the announcement, Twine CEO Nova Spivack wrote an inspiring and lengthy farewell blog post detailing the acquisition, and the story behind the development and growth of Twine. Towards the end of the post, Spivack outlined some lessons for budding entrepreneurs based on what he learned through his startup experience. Sponsor The number one piece of advice he suggests is to raise as little funding as possible from venture capitalists, and to stick with revenue funds, bootstrapping or angel funding to get by. Based on Spivack’s experiences with raising VC funding, he believes the conditions and strings that are attached to it aren’t worth it if the company can get by without raising any funding, especially in the current economic situation. “It is no easy task to get a startup funded and launched in this economy,” he writes. “The odds are not in your favor — so play defense, not offense, until conditions improve (years from now).” Part of playing defense, he says, is to curtail spending as much as possible – a suggestion that goes hand-in-hand with the modesty of raising as little venture capital as necessary. Spivack urges startups to avoid quickly spending and expanding upon bloating their bank account with investor dollars; instead, he argues for responsible saving and planning for unexpected downturns and crashes. “Assume the market will crash — downturns are more frequent and last longer than they used to. Expect that. Plan on it,” writes Spivack. “And make sure you keep enough capital in reserve to spend 9 to 12 months raising your next round, because that is how long it takes in this economy to get a round done.” One of the things we hear VCs look for in potential investments is traction, but Spivack, interestingly enough, says traction is not always a sure-fire bet for funding and success. He says VCs are more concerned with finding a company that is producing revenues preferably at a break-even level – something he attributes to an evolving VC landscape. “Venture capital investing has changed dramatically — early stage and late stage deals are the only deals that are getting real funding,” writes Spivack. “Mid-stage companies are simply left to die, unless they are profitable or will soon be profitable.” Spivack provides a number of other lessons he learned from his time with Twine, and be sure to read his entire post for a touching story behind his company. For now, note his most important lessons regarding modest spending and modest fund raising. A lot of startups enter the scene looking to become as flush with cash as possible, but in some cases, with some entrepreneurs, having too much money can be a bad thing. Discuss
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Twine CEO to Startups: Be Modest With Your Money
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Tips,
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In our poll last week, we asked: “Does it Really Matter How Cloud Computing Is Defined? ” This week, we want to know: “Is Oracle a cloud company?” The questions have some relationship as how we defien cloud computing has some impact on the way we view a company and its overall vision. As for the overall debate, most of our respondents to last week’s question agreed with the RedMonk team on this one. The number one response : “It’s simple. Just think of cloud computing as servers, middleware and apps.” The interest in this topic is shifting. About 100 or so people responded to the poll, compared to past polls that have had more than 1,000 votes. Maybe the more legitimate question should be: ” Does it NOT matter at all how cloud computing is defined?” Sponsor
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Weekly Poll: Is Oracle a Cloud company?
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Two companies outside Silicon Valley say they are the first implementors of a new open source protocol called Salmon , which allows comments to be sent over the walls of one social network to communicate with users of another. Imagine being able to post a message on Facebook to “@janedoe@twitter” and then seeing Jane receive the message in real time on Twitter. It’s a vision comparable to being able to call any telephone number, whether it’s part of your phone provider’s network or not. Facebook isn’t implementing Salmon, but that’s what Canadian open source business microblogging service Status.net and Florida-based stream service Cliqset announced they have implemented between their networks this morning. Think of this as a technical foil for monopoly beginning to unfold. Sponsor Because Salmon is an open standard, any service can implement it without formal business relationships, and Google Buzz is expected to enter the Salmon ecosystem next. If a substantial portion of the technical community implements Salmon, Facebook could be under a lot of pressure to do so as well. (As it was with OpenID, for example.) If you could still message your friends inside and outside Facebook, it would be a lot easier for innovative new alternative networks to lure you away from the one big site that 400 million people use today. The Players Evan Prodromou of Status.net says his service has 1.2 million users, hosts 12,000 sites on its cloud and is adding 800 sites per week. It’s a hot little startup that’s fast implementing new technical protocols and making high profile hires. Status.net began rolling out Salmon support earlier this month but today announced that it was working with Cliqset on displaying the cross-network communication. “We’ve got disparate implementations communicating well using this open standard for cross-network conversations,” Prodromou said today, “It’s the first time!” Cliqset is better at trailblazing innovation than user acquisition but is a very respected member of the technical community working to create social network interoperability. Google Buzz appears to have seen a lukewarm public reaction to its launch but is most disruptive because of its support for open data standards . Salmon is still listed in the “coming soon” stage of the Buzz roadmap . Today’s news isn’t just about those players, it’s about the Salmon protocol that would allow any social network to participate. Salmon was developed primarily by Google employee John Panzer. If you’ve seen the way that the Echo commenting system displays Tweets, trackbacks and other social media mentions below blog posts, that’s the kind of model that Salmon aims to make open source. Interoperability as Foundation for Choice, Innovation, User Control Facebook’s near monopoly on mainstream social networking means that users have limited options in how they experience social networking and they have to play by Facebook’s rules. Not everyone likes how Facebook changes its rules, especially its privacy policy. Likewise, though Facebook is incredibly quick to innovate, it’s generally assumed that a market with more than one competitor gives all companies in question more incentive to try to win the hearts of users. Simply put, if you could leave Facebook and still communicate with people using Facebook (you can’t today) then leaving Facebook would be a lot easier and more social networks would have reason to invest in building a compelling service for you to use. If there was more than one meaningful option, those services would compete to build the best social network they possibly could. And Facebook would have more reason to be careful when considering dramatic changes in things like its Privacy Policy. Today, where else are you going to go without losing touch with all your friends? That’s why interoperability is important and that’s why it’s a big deal that two small social networks used by early adopters have pushed Salmon-based interoperability out into the wild. Discuss
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Cracking Facebook’s Dominance: New Cross-Network Commenting Protocol Could Be a Game Changer
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