Plugged In - Next big tech ideas may be small ones
By Eric Auchard
SAN FRANCISCO, April 1 (Reuters) - Five years after the tech boom went bust, there's a dearth of million dollar or billion dollar ideas, or so some fret.
But it doesn't mean that there is no smart new technology to wow consumers. It's just that people are finding more efficient ways to do it.
Maybe that's because it has never been easier to create potent technology hybrids that mix-and-match hardware components, use a bit of borrowed software code, and require only a few thousand dollars of investment.
From simple Web sites that allow users to share photos or become their own radio broadcasters to do-it-yourself interactive televisions that are being put together to play any sort of TV, photos or Web content for a few hundred dollars, the new breed of inventors aren't counting on a big IPO.
By taking advantage of low-cost computers, freely shared software and high-speed Web connections, the next wave of innovations may not come from any venture-capital funded skunkworks or big business research lab.
"Now people with a good idea are willing to take the risk with $10,000 instead of $10 million. If the idea doesn't pan out they move on," said Justin Chapweske, 26, founder and CEO, of Onion Networks of Lauderdale, Minnesota. "The cost of failure today is just a lot lower."
Onion provides a technology to speed up video over office networks. It allows users to skip ahead without downloading an entire video. While his own business requires heavy investments in a network of computers to speed video delivery, Chapweske sees himself as an enabler of low-cost innovations.
"On today's Web you no longer need to build all the components of your system," trend watcher Tim O'Reilly, publisher of a line of popular computer manuals and do-it-yourself guides. His company recently introduced a new magazine called Make, a kind of home hobbyists guide for hackers that offers detailed instructions on how to do aerial photography with kites and digital cameras, for example.
Tim Halle and friend Jeremy Roberts recently assembled what he humbly calls "a simple platform for interactive television" using widely available parts and software code.
The resulting system, which should sell less than $600 allows not just TV to be stored and replayed, like a Tivo, but can be easily programmed to go out on the Web and searches for any type of video, digital photo or Web site content.
"Once you can surf by it, all your content kind of turns into television," says Halle, who once worked on interactive TV projects for a Public Broadcasting System station in Boston but became frustrated by the high cost of available gear.
The Project for Open Source Media (POSM), as Halle calls it, is designed for the era when anyone with a $200 camcorder or a video cameraphone can become a broadcaster. The interactive TV box costs $500 plus a $100 TV turner card.
Halle relies on openly developed software that he can use for free -- a Firefox browser, QuickTime for Linux, an mPlayer plug-in for other types of video to assemble a system that can works like a Tivo at first glance.
This new generation of tinkers aren't holding out to get rich. They start out making technology to please themselves and their friends. If a million people end up using it, so be it. Maybe they'll quit their day jobs.
Evan Williams, who helped create Blogger software and later sold it to Google, is working with a small group of developers in San Francisco, to build Odeo, a highly anticipated new application due out in the next few weeks. Odeo relies on a freely available set of simple yet powerful database programming tools known as Ruby on Rails.
Odeo will turn individuals with a music recorder and a microphone into radio broadcasters who can edit and share digital recordings of all sorts -- music, personally narrated museum tours or perhaps 30-second "weird sounds of the day," Williams says. Listeners can download audio programming to their iPod or other music player and listen when they want, a concept known as "podcasting," and a kind of Tivo for radio.
"We are standing on the shoulders of giants," Halle said of how he and others are remixing existing technologies to create new devices and services.
Mark Spencer, of Huntsville, Alabama, was 21 when he decided to build a telephone system for himself using Linux with with $4,000 of his own, and his parents, money. The system, called Asterisk, evolved from a pet project into a full-scale replacement for a telephone switchboard, able to manage Internet phone calls, e-mails, even videophone traffic.
Spencer gives away his basic phone system -- built entirely in software -- for free. Asterisk is being put to use everywhere from a financial services company in Boston for 40,000 office workers he won't name to Brazil and Africa.
Now 27, Spencer is looking to make money by producing a fully tested version with all the functions offices require at far lower cost than traditional PBXs from Nortel (NT.TO: Quote, Profile, Research) or Lucent (LU.N: Quote, Profile, Research) , let alone newer Internet voice over Internet systems from Cisco (CSCO.O: Quote, Profile, Research) or Avaya (AV.N: Quote, Profile, Research) .
"I can't think of any features that are very popular that we don't have," Spencer says.
Companies such as Aspect Communications (ASPT.O: Quote, Profile, Research) , a supplier of customer contact center software, have begun using Asterisk software to fill gaps in their own product lines so they can better compete with other incumbent players, says Jeff Pulver, a pioneer of the Voice over Internet Phone market who sees Asterisk as a growing challenge to entrenched players.
© Reuters 2005. All Rights Reserved.
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