Bruce Miller, a Boston based technologist and Angel investor talks about his criteria for making angel investments. He also discusses the problem of packet-loss with mobile communication, and the technology that is being developed to solve this problem.

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Today we’re joined by Bruce Miller who is an Angel investor and technologist based out of Boston, Massachusetts. Bruce is a smart guy. He’s got a couple patents to his name. And he wants to talk to us today about investing in Boston, a little company he’s got going out in South Dakota, and packet loss technology. So stay tuned and we’ll get to all of that. But first could you introduce yourself, and tell us a little bit about your background?

Sure, my name is Bruce Miller. Today I’m operating as a consultant and Angel investor. I’m a technologist by background. I have a set of degrees from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute back…probably embarrassingly way back, I graduated many years ago. And my background includes medical instrumentation, fault tolerant computing, artificial intelligence, and more recently data communications and telecommunications. I started with a little company called Wealthly back in the nineties, and that became a company called Bing Networks ultimately part of Nortel, probably companies that you recognize. I went off at that point and started a company called Astral Point Communications, and we developed some of the early optical technology that went into the networking infrastructure. We were ultimately bought by Alcatel. And I stayed on with Alcatel for about five years, operating as the lead strategist and technologist for the North American Optical Division. And after that I’ve got involved in data center technology. I was working with a company called Force Ten Networks out of California, which fairly recently got acquired by Dell. And now I’m back to my roots which is more small stuff, more individual level stuff. I’m very involved with my investments, and I have a reasonably busy consulting agenda.

So can you tell us about those Angel investments you’ve made recently? Because there’s some interesting companies there, and I’d love to talk about some of those.

Yes I’m probably more diversified than most of the angels that you’re used to dealing with. I’m a technology guy, and a lot of the angels you deal with to the comfort zone and stay there. I tend not to do that, part of the reason is, opportunities come in lots of forms. And also for me it’s more interesting to be involved in a variety of different areas. Right now I’m heavily involved with four companies and four areas. One of them is a social networking company called Pingup. It was originally called Gettable. And this is a company that operates out of what Massachusetts is calling the innovation district. We have a bit of a migration from the innovation area, which used to be in the shadow of MIT, to the waterfront. So it’s kind of interesting to see the waterfront becoming more of a dynamic environment. I have a second company that I’m invested in which is in MIT’s spinout. It was started by a group of MIT, University of Porto, and Cal Tech professors called Code-On Technologies. I have a third one which was started by a good friend of mine, I was sort of instrumental in helping get him going which called Q Factor Communications, and the fourth one, which is completely different, is called BBT Homes and we’re building residential housing up in North Dakota. And there’s a reason for that. We didn’t pick North Dakota because we threw a dart at a map or anything.

So what’s the reason for that? Shale exploration?

Yeah, it’s fracking. What’s going on up there is, housing is a rare commodity because of the infrastructure growth. So we chose that area because we knew there would be a demand. And it sort of fit our model for what we could build and what we thought we could make money.

That’s a scalable business, and there’s clearly a demand. There’s a lot of cash-rich people with nowhere to put the cash right now, and supplying them with a single-family home  makes a lot of sense. But this is a technology podcast, Bruce, so tell us about Q Factor.

So let’s go back to technology. You don’t want to hear about lumber and concrete.

Maybe in another podcast

So let’s go back to technology.

The have a multiplicity of patents. The formation of the company occurred initially by leasing intellectual property rights out of Code-On Technologies. And then subsequently augmented that with…the last time I talked to them, about a half dozen patents of their own.

Interesting, so can you tell us a little about the technology. And you don’t have to reveal anything proprietary, obviously. But  explain to the listener what Q Factor does in terms packet loss, why when they’re using their iPhone, it slows down, and why Q Factor thinks it has the technology to solve that problem.

Ok I mean what happens is, there’s a technology out of MIT based on randomized packet encoding. And this was a technology that’s been developed, as I said, by multiplicity of universities. What it does is it basically takes packet information and encodes it as coefficients and spreads this misinformation out over a communication stream. And what that does is it says that when you have sort of randomized errors – packet drops, there are certain cases where you can reconstruct that information, and the technique is very low overhead.

So if I could explain that in layman’s terms, you’re seeing a particular pattern and then you’re using an algorithm to predict what should be there. Because when there’s packet loss, there’s a loss of information. And this technology basically substitutes that lost information without actually having tho pull it over the Wi-Fi network. Am I correct in saying that?

Well that’s fairly close, and they use of multiplicity of techniques, so we’ll talk about several if there are interest. So, basically think about it as adding a small amount of information to a packet, which can encode the packet stream and spread out fashion, so if you lose one piece of information, the information that’s spread out can be recompiled to recreate that packet.

Ok, so that’s slightly different from what I said. That’s interesting. So it’s actually coming from the origin.

Correct! And they’re multiple techniques. One technique is called randomized network coding, in which you don’t need to have communication between the source and destination. The algorithms can operate independently, and the reconstruction can be independent. Or you can have deterministic where, if you will, there is information exchanged, and the two ends can figure it out in concert. So what they can do, if you look at things like Wi-Fi networks, and you look at things like cellular networks, one form of loss is based on sort-of randomized dropouts. And when you get a packet drop, algorithms like TCP are not very gracious. When TCP was designed…I don’t know if you guys know what TCP is, I don’t know my audience so maybe I should define by acronyms. TCP is the fundamental control protocol that handles data transfers across the internet. And it’s an algorithm that was designed to be opportunistic. So basically it tries to shove a lot of information through the communication infrastructure, and when it sees things slow down or there’s a drop, it reels it way back down again. It says, “Oops, I got to go down to something  little because I started losing throughput. And the problem with that is, in this day and age it can really screw up your communication in terms of the fidelity and efficiency of the network. So having any sort of packet drop in a communication network today is a really bad thing. Think of watching a movie, and you lose a key piece of information and your movie has to reconverge again. Right?

Right. this is stuff that is technically complicated, but it basically affects anyone with a smartphone or a tablet. It’s interesting technology because it’s looking to replace the IP protocol with something that is more designed for a wireless or a Wi-Fi connection.