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The move to 4G will not be cheap. Carriers must consider network upgrade costs and a refresh of their handsets, not to mention the issue of backhaul. Will they attempt wireless backhaul? Wait for fiber? One way or another, by 2013 carriers worldwide will invest some $163.5 billion in capital expenditures, with much of that going to 4G data services, according to data out today from ABI Research.

In the meantime, carriers in developing countries will be spending about $131 billion on 2G and 3G upgrades this year, while carriers in mature markets will start throwing their money at 4G in 2009. By 2013, carriers will spend about 28 percent for voice, 67 percent for data, and 5 percent for mobile TV.

Israeli chip startup DesignArt hopes to cut those costs with a line of base station chips for carriers that, when used in a clustered network, can essentially create their own backhaul. The other innovative aspect of the firm???s chip design is the fact that everything from radios to backhaul is on one chip. That system-on-a-chip design can cut both costs and the form factor of a base station, enabling equipment makers to use the chip in pico cells to base stations. It does this using 3 watts of power.

The company is currently sampling a WiMAX version of its chip, which will go into production next month; it plans to offer an LTE version later on. Motorola is checking out the chip and is also an investor.

Two things struck me about DesigArt’s chip: The first is that the time it will take them to bring it from idea to production is a mere 18 months, incredibly fast for the chip industry, where that time frame can run two years or more. The second is that, with so many functions on it, this single chip could prove a challenge to many of its competitors.

Joachim Hallwachs, VP of marketing for DesignArt, said the use of ARM cores, Tenscilica-embedded processors and its own customized RISC-based core all contributed to shorten the time needed for both design and integration. As for the competition, the firm will take on Intel, Texas Instruments, Freescale, Sequans, picoChip and Wintegra with its various components. The spending on 4G is just beginning, but if equipment makers buy into DesignArts’ semiconductors, the company may end up displacing a lot of chip makers.

Our growing ability to use the Internet as a giant database, apply that information in a creative way to build interesting mash-up applications, and then apply them to markets — stock, real estate or fantasy — is an area that holds a lot of fascination for me. But while a few efforts have produced rudimentary, data-based mashups that are good, so far none have been truly game-changing.

We’ve already showcased two startups — Skygrid and Placebase — that have impressed us with their ability to offer pointers that can be translated into actions on the real-world stock and real estate markets. Trulia and Zillow fall in that category as well, though I think they’re both eons away from where they should be. And today we’re adding New York-based Sense Networks to the interesting and growing list of intelligent mashup companies.

By combining historical and real-time location data acquired through either GPS and Wi-Fi, along with other real-world information, the company has come up with a “social navigation and nightlife discovery application” called Citysense. The mobile app, which runs on Blackberry and the iPhone and is currently limited to San Francisco, shows nightlife hot spots on a map in real time. You can then drill down to find information on, say, local bars and restaurants. But Citysense itself is actually a small part of a bigger story.

It runs on Sense Networks’ platform, called Macrosense, which has the ability to take geo-location data sent out by phones and vehicles, such as taxis, and map it to historical data, such as old traffic patterns, local restaurants and other geographical information. I would describe Macrosense as a machine-to-machine platform that can mash up many inputs to create real-time “heat maps.”

This is where it gets interesting: The company doesn’t want to take any advertising or charge people for the application. Instead, it wants to take the trend information it’s gathering and sell it to investors who want to trade based on that information — which is understandable, given that the company has been seed-funded by money from a hedge fund. And I like this idea, even though I have some concerns about privacy. The company says their system is based on “anonymous, aggregate location data.”

“Citysense demonstrates the power of combining anonymous, aggregate location data for social navigation,” said Sandy Pentland, chief privacy officer, co-founder of Sense Networks, and director of human dynamics research at MIT. “The idea is similar to automobile GPS systems sharing and pooling current road speed conditions so that everyone can avoid congestion.”

I’m still not entirely convinced. But if we put privacy concerns aside for a minute, the possibilities of this are mind-boggling. Imagine mapping foot traffic to, say, Gap or Apple stores. While it would never tell you if people were shopping or not, it would be a great indication of how hot (or not) the store was, enabling you to trade on the information. Take it one step further and mash it with web-based data or Twitter feeds: You could build a highly complex and near real-time view into what’s happening on the innerwebs.

Which reminds me: It’s time to call my buddies Paul Kedrosky and Tim O’Reilly so I can pick their brains about these trading mashups.

Last week I ran into Troy Lane Williams, founder of PeoplePad, a stealthy Austin-based startup that’s creating some kind of front-end portal for the semantic web. I have no idea what the finished product will look like, but Williams’ previous startup experience has colored PeoplePad’s product and its formation.

Williams may be familiar to readers who recall his involvement in Questia, the pre-Google Books, subscription-based online library that launched in 2001 with $150 million in backing. Questia is still in business, but Williams left in May 2007.

Wisdom from Williams includes:

• Shut up. I had to push to get Williams to talk to me. After a big launch for Questia and watching other complicated technology companies receive media hype they couldn’t live up to, Williams says he’s not letting PeoplePad into the public eye until March 2009. He’ll do a limited beta this fall, though.
• When it comes to the web, free is where it’s at. The last decade has taught Williams that the mass market isn’t going to pay for online informational content, which means advertising is a must, as is getting cheap — but also high-quality — content. He cites Wikipedia as an example.
• The Internet isn’t for passive reading. Williams dealt with large blocks of text at Questia; he even criticizes Wikipedia for being too text-heavy. “We need to structure data around lists and data boxes instead of around snippets, so people can get to the key points,” Williams says. Data doesn’t have to be text and a site shouldn’t restrict itself to “spiderering around the web” for all of its information.
• What’s good for people is better for machines. If it’s easier for people to enter short amounts of data, it’s also easier for machines to read that data using properties of the semantic web.
• Use existing technology if you can. Williams says he’s not out to build new semantic databases or semantic programming languages; instead PeoplePad will use services from companies such as Metaweb or Radar Networks.
• Usability is key to the success of a consumer-oriented site. The semantic web is less powerful if grandmothers, dentists and other not necessarily tech-savvy can’t use it.

After hearing all this, I suggested to Williams that he was building a sort of Mahalo powered by the semantic web, but he says he’s not. Perhaps after Williams wanders down Sand Hill Road this summer looking for his first round of capital, more information will leak out. Readers, any guesses?

Today, telco gear maker Dilithium Networks launched a software product for carriers, content publishers and content delivery networks that can handle all of the transcoding necessary to take content formatted for one screen and move it to another in real time. The Dilithium Content Adapter is the first software product from the seven-year-old telecommunications gear maker. The company has focused on 3G video since its inception, and Dilithium says the product is already deployed with some operators and CDNs.

But Dilthium’s not alone in its focus on delivering faster video to mobile devices. In a few months, Limelight Networks will launch a mobile CDN product for its customers, and Dave Hatfield, an SVP of marketing sales at Limelight, says customers are testing such a product now. While it’s not a huge focus at Limelight right now, he says phones like the iPhone have changed the potential size of the market by making it easier for consumers to get mobile video — and that could spur market growth.

After the launch of of the iPhone, which opened the Internet to mobile users in ways that were previously cost prohibitive or downright impossible, mobile video may be inching closer to reality. I’m even inclined to shed my doubts about mobile video (although not mobile TV). As such, operators may have to worry about delivering everything from video ringtones to YouTube content on devices. And that could mean a new market for content delivery networks.

Delivering images and video over the Internet to a PC via a CDN is an established fact of doing business for content publishers, but adding mobile screens to the mix have a few gear and service providers seeing green. Such vendors are trying to capitalize on three opportunities in the mobile infrastructure to sell products.

First is some sort of transcoding service, through which content formatted for TVs or PCs is encoded and decoded in real time, or encoded in a variety of formats and stored for delivery to the appropriate device. The second is a sizing service that fits the content to the mobile screen on one of more than 5,000 different mobile devices out there. Finally, the third is any sort of tweak that can reduce the amount of space and time to deliver mobile video on a wireless network.

There are skeptics. Barrett Lyon, CTO of BitGravity, a P2P CDN, scoffs at the notion that any sort of specialized services need to be offered for delivering content to a mobile phone. He points out that CDNs are already delivering ringtones and other content to mobile devices. He may be right, which means Limelight may not find a huge market for its services.

However, I tend to believe that real-time transcoding and other ways of rendering content delivery across multiple devices seamlessly will propel sales of gear or software in the years ahead. Especially if mobile Interent devices take off like chip makers hope.

In filtering through the myriad of WiMax announcements at CTIA, I’m coming away with the feeling that the market for this technology isn’t going to be anywhere near as big as everyone had initially hoped. Sprint, for example, has delayed the launch of its Xohm WiMax service until later this year. Apparently it’s still committed to the launch, and may make it happen as soon as this summer, at least judging by the gossip among the attendees at CTIA.

Most carriers are endorsing LTE as the 4G standard of choice, and Arun Sarin, the CEO of Vodafone, said this morning that he thought WiMax should be subsumed into the LTE standard. It was the same message he pushed at the Mobile World Congress earlier this year. A move that drastic is unlikely, but most WiMax adoption is likely to occur in developing countries and among smaller carriers.

Other signs of WiMax’s lukewarm reception could be found within Cisco’s announcement that it would provide the network equipment for regional WiMax carrier Xanadoo. Cisco gained its WiMax network equipment through its purchase of Navini Networks in 2007. Xanadoo had been a customer of Navini for its previous generation of WiMax equipment, so choosing Cisco is good for Cisco, but not exactly unexpected or a new entrant in the pool of WiMax carriers.

With the potential market shrinking and facing a slower expansion, the plans unveiled by several of the WiMax chip startups at the show are puzzling. WiMax chip startup Beceem said it plans to produce its chips at 65 nanometers, as does and Sequans, another WiMax chip vendor, later this year. Pushing WiMax chips down the process node indicates these startups believe there will be a large demand for WiMax chips in the near future.

I’m not sure I buy it. Bill Krenik, the CTO of Texas Instrument’s wireless division, said his company still believes in WiMax, but thinks it won’t live up to the hype it generated a few years ago. As the technology hype meets reality, I think some of the chip startups might be getting too far ahead of the WiMax adoption curve.

As someone whose job involves understanding how certain people and things relate to one another, the idea of the semantic web is both compelling and scary. It could make my job that much easier, or it could make me as redundant as switchboard operators are today.

Coding information in a standard way so that machines can see how one person relates to another, or how a string of words could alternately be a movie or a book title, is a challenge. But plenty of companies are taking little bits and pieces of the problem and solving them. One such startup, Radar Networks, the maker of Twine, today received $13 million in funding from Velocity Capital, Vulcan Capital and DFJ. Other startups such as EVRI and Freebase have also benefited from VC interest in the semantic web.

Some of the companies are following the standards offered by the W3C, which is pushing RDF as a standard data structure to underlie the semantic web. But not all companies working on helping machines figure out the relationships and categories that most humans have learned use that standard.

Nor are all the companies interested in making the semantic web work startups. Yahoo uses RDF in some of its offerings and Google’s efforts with its social graph API initiative resembles the semantic web in its goals. Instead of using RDF, however, it’s using XFM and FOAF tags.

Reuters is another company that sees potential is getting machines to understand relationships. Earlier this month its CEO laid out a pretty compelling vision (at least to Tim O’Reilly) about how Reuters would rely less on delivering information and more on packaging its information in a way that could be used by analysts and computers to quickly delineate relationships.

Reuters would then be able to take its content, make it programmable and offer that data to users, who could then do with it what they will. Things like making relationship charts that currently can take a journalist and graphics department a couple of days to complete, and must then be monitored and changed manually, become easy.

The effort to render all of the data on the web into a semantic form will take a while. Nova Spivack, CEO of Radar Networks, believes that semantic web applications are currently in the early adopter phase. Twine will unveil its efforts in March through a private beta and another startup, AdaptiveBlue launched a semantic plug-in called Blue Organizer earlier this month. Spivack believes that in 2010 mass adoption will take place as people start to expect machines to make “intelligent” connections between people and things.

All of this is interesting, but putting a layer of semantic code over the existing web raises some concerns. One is the danger of inaccurate or at the very least less nuanced sense of relationships between people. Another is the everlasting nature of information on the web. How will coded tags be able to follow the intricacies of human relationships as fights ensue, jobs shift and even names change?

Another issue that we’ll have to deal with is confusion as people try to figure out what the semantic web really is. I’m thinking of it as code added to existing and new web content that helps determine and maybe track relationships between people and contexts for objects. I’m not married to the W3C standards, however, and others are doing this without using those particular programming tools.

There are also plenty of other definitions and hopes for the next phase of the web that may play out before we get an intelligent Internet. It’s already apparent that the web will continue to become more useful over time, but won’t ever replace the benefits of human interactions. If you doubt me, just recall your most fulfilling customer service call with a person compared with your most fulfilling experience with an automated agent. While both are helpful, sometimes you need a real, live human being.

Ethernet’s growing importance as part of the carrier networks, especially in newer telecom economies such as India and China, is one of the main reasons why Nokia Siemens Networks is acquiring privately held Atrica, a Santa Clara, Calif.-based equipment maker. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Atrica counts Orange Business Services, KVH and Optimum LightPath among its 40-odd customers. The deal set to close by the end of 2007 is part of my ongoing thesis that there is little or no room for mid tier-telecom equipment makers, even if they are part of a fast-growing sector such as carrier Ethernet.

Matisse Networks and Qosera are two new startups looking to capture the carrier Ethernet opportunity. Atrica had raised a total of $134 million in funding from Accel Partners, Benchmark Capital, BellSouth Corp., SBC Communications, 3Com Corporation, and Intel Capital among others.