Roland Tanglao's Weblog

I think Jon is onto something. Mesh sounded great (could people blog more podcasts and videoblogs of the conference please? That's it, my goal will be to make sure that Northern Voice 2007 is 100% podcasted and videoblogged at decent quality, sorry Tim but not everybody can do awesome HD video for everything) but we are missing the common Web 2.0 thread that "meshes" everything together which I think lies somewhere in open source, ubiquitous inexpensive broadband (fixed today and mobile tomorrow), RSS, people (not just white male Californians, but women, Canadians, Indians, Filipinos :-) , etc.) and "Silicon Valley everywhere" (including Vancouver in my biased opinion with great startups like sxip, Dabble DB, eqo, etc.)

FROM Jon Arnold's Blog: Mesh Conference - Final Thoughts:

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There was lots of good content and obviously some great energy. I'm sure the successes of the show were a happy mix of good planning and putting everyone together to share and feed off each other. I definitely learned a lot, but for someone who is on a steady diet of VoIP and telecom conferences like VON, Internet Telephony and Globalcomm, this is a different world in many ways. Didn't hear much talk about VoIP or podcasting or SIP - stuff like that. But that's ok - Web 2.0 is about so many things.

And that's where the challenge lies for me. A lot of great perspectives were put forward at Mesh - both from the speakers and the attendees. However, there wasn't a lot of connecting the dots - maybe by design - but I'm left with the feeling that for as much as I learned, I still don't have a sense how these things fit together.

This actually brings me back again to the Mesh logo. You can't help but be drawn into that image and the energy it seems to radiate - which is exactly what happened at the show - so, kudos for the logo designers. The energy was there alright, but like the logo, I didn't really feel that all the strands - yellow, blue, green, etc. - connected. They're oscillating around each other, and bumping into each other a lot, but never really intersecting or truly meshing into a unified form. At the end of the day, much like Earth at Creation, I'd like to see this humming mass of energy and chaos sort itself out and unravel nicely like a ball of yarn.

My conclusion is that this did not happen, and I'm concerned that for some, the conference was just a blur, like this....

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Yup, real broadband to the home (and mobile too) is what's really needed to really make the net take off. And by real I mean 10 Mb/s bidirectional and up. Unfortunately I doubt we'll get it from the cableco and telco oligopoly here in Canada. More likely ths kind of bandwidth will come from something out of left field like Spanish upstart Fon.

From Paul Kedrosky's Infectious Greed: The Broadband Bandwidth Boondoggle.:

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Paul's Rule of New Technology: Unless you offer a ten-fold improvement in performance along some meaningful dimension, most users of your technology won't notice the performance increase. Rolling up from 1.5Mbps to 6Mbps fails that test, even if it does offer broadband providers an opportunity to charge you more.

Real world-changing differences in broadband will require (mostly) two things:

1. A 10x increase in bandwidth. In other words, jump me to 15 Mbps or 30Mbps from 1.5Mbps; don't take me to 6Mbps.
2. A symmetric pipe. Most of what's interesting, at least to me, requires far more than the current throttled-to-death outbound pipe. The idea that in some near broadband future I'm getting, say, 15Mbps in, but still dawdling along with 640kbps out, does diddly for me.

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