Open Garden -- as you can tell from the name -- breaks down walled gardens intentionally and creates more Internet connection for all the apps and gadgets of Silicon Valley to be used on the lines provided by the older, crippled telecom companies.
At a bare-bones but geek-intensive demo at TechCrunch Disrupt, Open Garden catalyzer and co-founder Micha Benoliel spread his arms wide on stage and announced that his product is bringing "Internet Everrrrryywherre," rolling his Rs with a French accent.
It's created by the same guys who have been working on Bittorrent and Utorrent all these years, and have now created the Napster of Internet Connections by enabling you to utilize but not literally tap into wireless connections even when you haven't paid for them.
The cover story is that the app will enable you to network all your gadgets that currently don't talk to each other -- so it's like tethering with your i-phone but now you can put a laptop, desktop, i-phones, tablets all together on a kind of instant LAN with no configuration botheration. And bring along your family and friends.
But that's just the cover story. At TechCrunch Disrupt, Open Garden already had a cult following, with a million sign-ups -- because it's like Napster for finding not songs, but wireless connections you can jack into. It doesn't intercept or replace wifi -- it's on Bluetooth -- but it choses the fastest path. Asked on stage at TCD by Google VP Marissa Mayer, one of the judges, if this system would end up flooding all the devices, Open Garden c0-founder Stanislav Shalunov said future iterations of the software, still in beta, will have channel bundling with multiple paths, and will load balance over all of them.
He quickly skipped over the "all your devices" use case (which he usually uses to justify content-copying) and asked about another: what if he were at the airport on one paid wireless account, could he bring his entire family, wife and three kids, on to that line, even if they don't have paid accounts? "Yes," said the devs.
"It won't be necessary for them to pay an additional fee," said Shalunov. "Awesome!" said Fred.
Lawyer-turned-tech-blogger Michael Arrington then piped up, "Won't you be litigated out of existence or just blocked?"
"Unquestionably the technology is very disruptive," Stanislav (who goes by the name "Stas") deadpanned.
Stas elaborated with his theory of how his tool isn't really stealing-- it's just sort of borrowing, in order to "help" telecoms in fact get more business. Riiight.
"When VOIP appeared, the big players said 'no way," Stas recounted by way of analogy.
Then the big carriers came around, and adapted to "reality". "Now, Skype will come presold working over 4G" on an i-phone, he explained. He believes Open Gardeners will help offload congestion of 4g and 3g networks to wifi, increasing performance.
"Thus they can extend life of their infrastructure," he reasoned. I wonder if the telecoms could be the judge of that, not the torrent kiddies?!
Stas is very persuasive, however. Imagine a black-clad futuristic warrior fighting giant robots in a science fiction movie. He just stands his ground and tries to use dead-cold logic as his weapon. That it's essentially "insect logic" suiting his interests (and of course Google's) for lower costs on the utilities where they sell their products and services just doesn't matter -- it's "science."
Meanwhile, the use case isn't Fred's family and their many gadgets or even Fred's daughter and her college friends, the use cases are political and social revolutions here and abroad.
If the San Francisco BART shuts off the wireless in a limited location, as it did with a flashmob recently, someone in the crowd of Anonymous rabble-rousers at the periphery outside the block might be able to keep the whole crowd wired. If the authorities of Egypt or Russia or Oakland, CA shut off the wireless in a public square filled with demonstrators, or shut off a mobile company, somebody with a DSL line nearby can still keep the demonstrators wired if they are all on Open Garden. This is the Wired State's greatest boon yet -- unless, of course it can't work with DSL/wireless, but that may be coming in a future iteration.
When the Sequoia Capital investor asked how these guys planned to make money, they answered that the service was free.I went up to the stage after the show and caught sight of Micha donning a black Pirate Party t-shirt apparently for a photo opp -- he wasn't wearing one while he was giving the demo.
As Stas seemed to be available for his fans at the edge of the stage and none of them had come up yet, I asked in English if he were a member of the Pirate Party.
"I can neither confirm or deny that I am a member," he said slowly and carefully.
I tried again in Russian to see if I could detect anything more. In Russian, he replied slowly and carefully, "Ne mogu ne potverzhdat' ni otritsat'."
I asked if Open Garden currently had any lawsuits pending or lawyers' C&D letters.
He asked me to repeat the question, and said "Nyet." I asked if he anticipated any lawsuits, and he gave the same answer about how this would be good for all companies.
Open Garden won a separate prize for "most disruptive" technology from GetAround, last year's technocommunist TechCrunch Disrupt winners, who had collectivized your car.
Asked on his blog about why he was supporting this heist of telecom services, Fred fumed that he had already explained this to me 20 times and it was getting old. But his explanations have never been convincing and now Fred has gone beyond just tacitly endorsing the copying of content among devices; he wants all the telecoms to be subsumed to the endless appetite of him and his friends for content *and* broadband on the Internet for free. Who pays?
The Pirate Party, which is sort of like the expropriating Bolshevik Party only with better beer and gadgets, has already won seats in the German parliament where it is busy instituting something appropriately called "liquid democracy" with no "no" vote.
Crypto-pirate Stas stands his ground.
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