Ever been stuck in a menial job, frustrated because you knew you were capable of so much more? Then you may have something in common with your Internet router — you know, that thing in the basement you have to reset when you can’t get online?
It’s a metaphor offered by Dale Willis, co-founder of Madison-based start-up Paradrop Labs, which seeks to elevate routers to a more lofty purpose — that of miniature, in-home servers.
Willis describes them in an email as “the central nervous system for all Internet traffic in the home,” which raises the question: Since we’re already communicating through them, why not communicate with them?
Paradrop Labs seeks to give routers the ability to perform functions that they’d otherwise outsource to the cloud. For instance, fetching a movie from Netflix for instant play or analyzing data from any of your smart-home devices (learning thermostats, security systems, smart locks and so on). Doing so, he reasons, could potentially increase speed and security.
Say you’re on vacation and want to peek at the video feed from your Dropcam, a popular in-home smart security camera. A lesser router would stream your video to servers in Iowa or Oklahoma (aka “the cloud”), making it a more attractive target for hackers. This is a problem, he says, because Dropcam’s customer data is centrally located, “so they have a giant target on their back.”
Using the Paradrop smart router, Willis explains, your private in-home videos would actually stay on your router rather than get pushed to the cloud.
“I’m not claiming that Paradrop is perfect from a security standpoint,” Willis says. “But if a hacker wanted to try to break into Dropcam’s customer base, they wouldn’t be able to target one location to do so; it would literally be distributed into everyone’s homes, which inherently makes it a more difficult problem.”
Paradrop also has the potential to process data faster than the cloud. Given more memory, the Paradrop router could collect data proactively from the Internet in a more efficient, intelligent way. Perhaps it would grab and cache the next Bob’s Burgers episodes in your Netflix queue so that when you’re ready to watch, there’s no buffering, no congestion. Bob, Linda and family are already stored locally on your router.
Willis says this works out pretty well for Netflix too, which “is finding it more and more difficult to push all of its content to meet customer demands.”
“To solve this, [Netfix] created Open Connect, which basically puts a mini-Netflix server in each major city, so when you request a video (hopefully), the local server will have it.”
Paradrop makes Open Connect obsolete, says Willis. “What we do is eliminate the need for any of that by saying that each individual could pick and choose what content they would want to watch, and Netflix could ‘lazily’ send this content to the home, which would drastically reduce the [traffic] burden that Netflix experiences,” Willis says. “If those same movies could be downloaded over the course of an entire day,” he adds, “there would be no burden at all.”
The Paradrop smart router will rely on developers creating apps for it in open-source software platform Ubuntu. “Our end goal would be to have an app store, just like Android or iOS for smart phones.”
Willis started Paradrop in 2013 with his former UW-Madison computer science professor Suman Banerjee. However, the pair have found more support for their innovation outside of Wisconsin.
In late July, Paradrop won the “People’s Choice Award” at DemoDay, the climax of GigTank, a summer accelerator program in Chattanooga, Tenn. This came on the heels of a $150,000 federal Small Business Innovation Research grant.
When asked if it’s easier to secure funding outside of Wisconsin, Willis replies, “Yes, I would absolutely say, 100%, more money is available in other states, but more importantly, it’s easier to get.”
“We have all heard of [local] success stories for sure,” he says, pointing to EatStreet as an example. But he finds venture capital firms in other parts of the country are more willing to “to bet or be risky.” There, a startup might not need “huge traction — tens of thousands of users, with huge percent growth indicators,” to seal the deal with investors.
That’s not to say that Madison, in particular the Wisconsin Entrepreneurial Bootcamp and the relationships he and Banerjee have forged through UW-Madison’s School of Business, hasn’t given Paradrop a strong start. Still, he says raising funds here can feel a little like “trying to kick water uphill.”
