Just a reminder: Unwired Loop goes read-only tonight

Published on April 30, 2012 in Guides. Closed Tags: .

We talked about the future of Unwired Loop and our strategy to change the focus of Unwired Loop last week, this post is just a follow up to that reminding you that the site will become read-only tonight and will be moving to a new location within the domain (which you’ll see after midnight, we’ll make an announcement).

Just to recap for those of you who don’t want to read up on it, we provided an excerpt of our discussion below.

There’s been a lot of uncertainty around the Unwired Networks offices about Unwired Loop’s future as a news front, and how we want to approach it in the future.

Today won’t be the day that we announce the plan to close Loop, nor will it be in the future. Our focus has been and always will be to provide content that is relevant for our viewers, readers and followers.

Reading: “Unwired Loop: Where we go from here”

Unwired Loop: Where we go from here

Published on April 24, 2012 in Guides. Closed Tags: , .

There’s been a lot of uncertainty around the Unwired Networks offices about Unwired Loop’s future as a news front, and how we want to approach it in the future.

Today won’t be the day that we announce the plan to close Loop, nor will it be in the future. Our focus has been and always will be to provide content that is relevant for our viewers, readers and followers.

First things first, I’d like to note, and this comes from the team, Unwired Loop, as it is right now will no longer exist after April 30th. We have decided that continuing to provide tech news in the fashion that we have been in the past year or so.

The good news is that all is not lost, we will continue to provide an archived version of the old Loop for those of you who wish to read some of the content we wrote.

Secondly, some more good news, starting this summer we’ll be launching our new Loop site that is geared towards digital media, that we’ll discuss in the upcoming months.

I’m glad that you guys have been a part of the community, and we hope that you will continue to support our endeavors in the months to come.

Scalable Internet, an idea for the masses

Published on February 1, 2012 in Ideas. Closed

We often talk about how we want to improve our vision of creating good content, and how we want to be the next big thing for people to read, share and experience, but something we’ve been looking into doing is becoming the next big pipeline for data.

While I can’t say this is something a lot of companies try to do, one of the biggest problems today is that cable/satellite providers is provide both pipelines for data and content, and not either or.

For example, Cox Communications, one of our local communications company provides services for both residential and business customers, providing cable television, internet, wireless and telephony services, but is an all around communications company, and not just one.

Our vision, or one that we’d like to achieve is providing scalable bandwidth for those that don’t need all that “fluff” (no offense to those that do provide such solutions).

The question lies, how can you do that in an age where bandwidth costs are high, and the demand for digital media is also high? The answer, scaling based on need.

For example, one customer uses his or her device (be it a smartphone, tablet or computer) to surf the web, but they don’t need all that much bandwidth to do it. You, or the business would set a relatively small cap. But what happens when they go over that cap? Most companies have a 3-strikes rule (or less) and you lose your service.

The solution: Ditch the cap, charge based on what they use. Much like how pay-as-you-go companies charge for the usage of services. But instead of charging a fixed rate, charge only for what is used, and not for what isn’t.

Now how would you scale in a larger market? The answer to that question is simple, like any carrier/communications co, you take the ratio of people on that particular pipeline, and distribute it evenly, much like how QoS (or Quality of Service) works in home networks, and Load Balancing in Small, Medium and Large scale networks.

The question to you, the masses, is would you like to see such a service? We’re tossing around ideas and markets we’d like to introduce in, and maybe, if this idea takes off, that we could build cheap, reliable, and scalable internet for all, or for those that don’t have the need for nothing more then data consumption.

Post-“Clarity”: Looking Ahead

Published on January 29, 2012 in Fundamentals. Closed

Yesterday marked Unwired Loop’s (and arguably the entire organizations) first year of business, bringing a huge milestone, and a big release we’ve been discussing for some time, dubbed “Clarity” which was the major redesign for both Loop and other sites.

Clarity started off as a minor release, but during the development, it was clear that the design changes would be more then just a minor update, but a major upgrade, changing the fundamentals of how you look at Unwired Networks.

So what’s next?

Looking ahead, onto our next planned release, which has yet to begin development, the logical step is to improve upon the things we didn’t get to with “Clarity”, such as Social Network Integration, Featured Stories, Tag and Category based navigation, and many others.

Our next logical approach is to make the design more Site Friendly, not Blog Centric, something we wanted to do, but never got to. While we can’t confirm, nor deny that it will make it in the next release, we will say that it is something on the top of our list of things to do.

So I have a suggestion, where do I submit it?

We’re always taking suggestions, you can send in your comments through our Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ accounts, or just comment here on this post, either way we’ll get it.

Unwired Labs Guide – The Basics

Published on December 6, 2011 in Guides. Closed

This post is a multi-tier post, half-way through writing, we realized that there’s a lot of things we need to cover, so please bear with us while we work on this. This document, and associated documents are of dynamic nature, and will be updated as needed. 

Let’s face the facts, we’re here to test and break things that eventually make their way into production.

Okay, so that’s a little sarcastic, and probably a turn-off. Unwired Labs is here to let all new projects run their course, whether they make it out alive is up to the community (and ultimately us).

Now you’re probably asking, why have a /labs section when we could just have a /beta section on our site? Well, there’s a short and long answer to that question, for the sake of time, and the sake of your sanity, we’ll keep it (somewhat) short.

Before we begin, there are going to be some terms that you should be familiar with, they’re listed below.

Terminology 101, your guide to understanding this post

  • Idea – Used to establish a group of thoughts, or features. An idea, unlike a product or service, is one feature, or a subset of a feature.
  • Product – Used to express a site/product, for example Unwired Loop.
  • Service – Self explanatory
  • Experiment – A term used to reference a feature, product or service that hasn’t quite hit a subset of production use, an “experiment” is a subset of an idea that will form into something bigger (or not, depending on the nature of the work done)

The Idea of Unwired Labs is to host, test, develop and extend products (and services?) of The Unwired Group (our parent company). We develop projects based on ideas, and things we think might work in various areas of the site. While we know coming out some will not see the day of light, they could make their way into other products/services as a new feature, or service.

Understand that because this site is a “sandbox” and meant for testing, that not everything will work correctly, in fact, we don’t expect it to.

Next, how we plan to actively develop, extend and release ideas, experiments, products and services.