Tellus Venture Associates

The road goes on forever and the party never ends

12 September 2022 by Steve Blum
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Robert Earl Keen

That didn’t turn out like I planned. A couple trips around the sun ago, I stopped daily blogging, intending to go deeper into selected topics on this Humble Blog and turbocharge this website, making it a more complete resource for local broadband development. Instead, my business took a different turn, towards ventures of my own. So there have been no new blog posts and little updating since then.

Going forward, this blog and website will continue.… More

Thankful for one more trip around the sun

27 November 2020 by Steve Blum
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Martina mcbride

Happy Thanksgiving, Gentle Reader. I’m most thankful that you’re interested enough to be reading this on a holiday weekend. Next to that, I’m thankful there’s only a month left in 2020. As Jimmy Buffett and Martina McBride sang, this year gone by ain’t been a piece of cake.

If you’re still reading, I’ll assume you have some particular interest in this Humble Blog, and might want to know what I have planned for it. I began it twelve years ago, and went to daily blogging eight years ago this coming Tuesday.… More

East Bay Broadband Report Card published by Tellus Venture Associates confirms benefits of competition


Download the full report.

I’ve published the final report on regional broadband resources, prepared for the East Bay Broadband Consortium. The East Bay Broadband Report Card gives a community-by-community assessment of core broadband infrastructure in Alameda, Contra Costa and Solano Counties, on the eastern side of San Francisco Bay.

The top line conclusions are…

The best consumer-grade broadband service is in central Contra Costa County, in the City of Concord (A-). It was the only one of the forty cities studied that rated an “A” level grade.

… More

Five Geek ways to celebrate Boxing Day

25 December 2012 by Steve Blum
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Like a calm, sunny morning after a hurricane, Boxing Day is a time to wallow in the luxury of nothing so urgent to do as yesterday and dream of the future without worrying about tomorrow.

Some don’t look at it that way, preferring instead to run frantically around the beach tidying up. Let them be.

The day after Christmas is a day off work in much of the erstwhile British Empire, originally an occasion to give gifts to people who work for you: a Christmas box of hand-me-down clothes and left over food bestowed on grateful servants by the lord of the manor.… More

Nothing wrong with competition – CASF update

I filed reply comments today regarding the California Public Utilities Commission’s (CPUC) review of eligibility requirements for construction subsidies from the California Advanced Services Fund (CASF). The first round of comments were reasonably evenly split between the ayes and the nays. My comments put me in the yes camp too.


To baldly go.

In particular, I took issue with the cable television lobby, the California Cable and Telecommunications Association (CCTA). What they want is to allow existing telecoms companies to be able to get funding for any eligible area under normal rules, but put ridiculous restrictions on local governments, independent ISPs and other non-traditional broadband providers.… More

Eye contact is next teeping opportunity

Telepresence is to teleconferencing as dining is to eating. One is a mechanical process, the other transforms the simple act into a complete social experience. Or so the hope goes.

Also known as teeping, the idea is to create a completely immersive environment where you forget that the person you’re talking with is not physically present. Cisco is pushing this technology hard, but hasn’t crossed the line from teleconference to telepresence.


Teeping opportunity

I spent some time in a Cisco telepresence demo room this week, during a small business symposium co-hosted by the TIA and Cisco.… More

Confronting the killing ground

Start up companies looking for traditional “A” round financing in the $4 to $8 million dollar range will be left to die over the next 18 months. In fact, the financial killing ground will stretch from the $1 million level up to, and perhaps past, the $10 million range.

That was my take away from yesterday’s small business symposium sponsored by Cisco and the Telecommunications Industry Association. One of the highlights (from an information perspective, anyway) was a panel discussion with three venture capitalists (Ajay Chopra, Trinity Ventures, Michel Wendell, Nexit Ventures, Eric Zimits, Granite Ventures), and moderated by Dean Takahashi of VentureBeat.… More