Yesterday, the City of Brotherly Love announced plans to turn all of its 135 square miles into the world's largest wireless Internet hot spot.  The ambitious project, announced yesterday by the city's CIO (Dianah Neff), has been pegged at around $10 million and calls for placing APs (Access Points) around the city on rooftops and lampposts.  Once operational, the network would enable users to access the Internet anywhere radio waves can travel.

The yearly OPEX for this undertaking was estimated by Neff to be around $1.5 million annually, geared towards supporting and maintaining the infrastructure.  In order for these costs to be offset, the city will probably need to charge a fee for the service, unless it can secure some advertising revenues, in which case the service would be free of charge.  Either way, Neff assures that a fee would cost significantly less than what is currently charged for DSL or cable broadband.

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The CNET article mentioned about similar initiatives in Amsterdam (where a startup called HotSpot Amsterdam launched a wireless network earlier this week), New York and Cerritos, CA. I am aware of other such efforts being pursued in Cleveland (where the service is being offered for free) and Los Angeles (which put an RFP out in July).   more »

Om Malik asks a question that surely is on every techie and Microsoft investor's mind: how is Microsoft (Nasdaq:MSFT) spending its colossal $7 billion R&D budget?  He was able to find a few hints on a recent Bill Gates speech at the Microsoft Research Faculty Summit, held in early August.  While I enjoyed reading the speech, I must confess that downloading the slides did not give me too much info, other than a few universities with which Microsoft is cooperating, including MIT, Harvard, Cornell, Carnegie Mellon and Illinois.  For good measure, Robert Scoble dropped in and left a few hints, including the Channel 9 video tour of Microsoft Research or the Windows Embedded Lab Tour.

That said, the home page for the event itself (the Research Faculty Summit) was also packed with links to various research initiatives including the Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL), DateLens (an information visualization project) and Piccolo.NET (a toolkit to help build 2D graphics that users can interact with).

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Brad Feld's blog (Feld Thoughts) is a great source to learn quite a bit about the VC world.  In a recent posting, Brad talked about the re-emergence of the PP (Participating Preference) feature in term sheets.  In short, it is the right of an investor to get his money back before anyone else (as long he holds preferred stock) and then participate as if he owned common stock in the business.  Apparently, this "double dip" clause used to appear mostly in East Coast in the early-to-mid nineties.  After that, it disappeared, before making its way back (to both coasts this time) in 2001.  Read all about it - it's excellent material. (Hat tip: @argumente).

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