Yesterday, this author, under color of expressed permission from Padraic McFreen, Founder and Chief Innovation Officer of MiVu®, made some pretty pretty huge claims concerning MiVu® and its foundational role in today’s nearly $11 Trillion Internet Industry.
Many of you requested that I include “verifiable facts” that can be “checked” for accuracy and as well as quoted.
As I enjoy my relationships with Wall St., today’s installment of “40 Days” as well as future installments, will include a fact checker’s dream. As my reader, you will agree, though Silicone Valley insiders have kept MiVu® — or its significance to the “Valley’s” overall worldwide technical dominance a “secret” — you too would appreciate facts that are not only relevant to your life and business today, but also details that are anchored by information that may be easily referenced.
Now that the general housekeeping is out of the way, Padraic McFreen will be so relieved. If you know him personally, then, you already know that he’s big on details, rules and procedures.
He sees every problem as an opportunity and designs solutions for them in mere minutes, when others may spend months if not years searching. Many Fortune 500 CEO’s call Padraic McFreen “my Genius.” You’ll learn why as we progress.
With your permission, I’ll continue “40 Days.”
The Internet Industry has not always existed the way you and I use it today. Today, the Internet is ubiquitous. Every publicly traded corporation in the world relies on the Internet and when asked, notes the Internet to be mission critical to business.
This hasn’t always been the case. In the late 1990’s through the early 2000’s, the Internet was literally an “eight letter dirty word” on Wall St. and Main Street as well. Nobody wanted anything to do with the Internet for commerce, let alone for anything “mission critical.” The Internet was a huge failure.
According to Ideas.ted.com, the Internet and the dot.com bubble ruined the lives of too many for it to ever be considered anything more than a dark chapter in American financial history.
“As early as November 2000…losses were pegged at $1.7 Trillion. But that would count only public companies. Beyond them, it’s estimated that 7,000 to 10,000 new online enterprises were launched in the late 1990s, and by mid-2003, around 4,800 of those had either been sold or gone under. Trillions of dollars in wealth vanished overnight.”
When you’re finished here for today, please head over to Ideas.ted.com and read the article. Quite the history lesson.
Padraic McFreen launched MiVu® on September 1, 2000, just two months before the monumental losses were reported in November of that year.
He launched MiVu® as a .net, rather than a .com startup. The decision to become a .net startup rather than a .com had more to do with the nature of his startup’s business, rather than the state of the market.
Padraic McFreen’s startup, MiVu®, wasn’t going to sell sock puppets, offer discount travel, hire Hollywood stars or ever want to advertise during the Super Bowl.
MiVu® was a network. MiVu® was the first of its kind Internet access network — a Multiservices internet Infrastructure Virtual Universe. MiVu®’s descriptive tagline, “The 21st Century Access Network”, got the attention of its telecom equipment supplier, Lucent Technologies.
As with all startups, ideas begin with “scribbles.” Founders in 2000 are no different than founders in 2021 — they all scribble on notepads, napkins and sticky pads. Padraic McFreen has given me permission to include one of his first attempts at changing his MiVu® from red and black to the logo still in use today.
You will see from his “artwork” that MiVu® was a network that broadcasted its network signal down to the cities within which it would ultimately serve. Quite interesting that the logo he ultimately settled on closely resembles his hand-drawn attempt.
Logos are huge. This author will spend time discussing the 2007 version of Apple’s logo which pays tribute to the MiVu® logo. Only insiders knew of this connection. Soon you will too.
Let’s get back to Lucent Technologies. Padraic McFreen, on a roll with his artistic abilities, went further and sketched out the towers he would need to build and deploy in order to bring MiVu® to its intended customers, the small Internet Service Providers.
When you drive by one of the microwave towers in your neighborhood or office park, you’ll now know where it all began, who’s idea it was, when it was first imagined and where.
Hand-drawn sketch of the MiVu® Microwave Tower Network 4Q/2000. Private Testing Lab, Roswell, NM (in original publication)
As this author noted yesterday, the experts at Bell Labs had a difficult time wrapping their minds around the MiVu® 21st Century Access Network. From Bell Lab’s perspective at the time, “what is an Internet network?” The engineers protested “loud and arrogantly.”
Padraic McFreen remembers one of the telco network gurus exclaiming during one of many conference calls, “we’re a telco network company not an information and entertainment Internet network company…we don’t even know what an Internet network is…customers dial into the Internet just fine.”
Imagine if you will, one of your key vendors’ team leads behaving in this manner. How would you have handled it? Padraic McFreen has qualities that are indeed rare. To see past the negativity from people you’re likely to be partnered with for years and focus only on the goal — bringing MiVu to its customers; breathe new life into the Internet; give the Internet a new purpose — is a very strong leadership quality.
This author realizes many of my readers here may not actually know Lucent Technologies or Bell Labs. The two are going strong today thanks to Padraic McFreen ignoring negativity and remaining focused on the big picture.
Lucent Technologies merged (reverse acquisition) with Alcatel, then, the two along with Bell Labs were acquired by Nokia recently.
Tomorrow we’ll continue sharing the “cool” factor of the Internet compliments of MiVu® and delve deep technically into what precisely was MiVu® then and what and where MiVu® is today.
In the meantime, Padraic McFreen has given me permission to include a few pages of his first rough executive summaries that were successfully presented to the very high profile senior leaders of Lucent Technologies.
Rather than requiring this author to go through each one of the following pages and describe in detail the contents, Padraic McFreen has requested that I simply point out that you will see terms, ideas, elements, methods and language that ultimately redefine the telecommunications industry, create an Internet Industry and set telcos on a path of marketing and advertising “choose our blue network,” “choose our red network,” “choose our yellow network,” “choose our pink network,” “no…choose our orange network” and more, but all are basically the same network, the MiVu® 21st Century Access Network. It is fully operational quietly providing services and offering products to billions of users worldwide.
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