User:Sigma0 1/og

_This is a draft, please do not quote_

Open Garden, Inc. is a software developing company based in San Francisco, California, United States. The company's main software product enables smartphones with mobile Internet, tablet computers and laptops to share their Internet connection with other wireless-capable devices on a peer-to-peer basis in order to connect to the Interent and transmit data faster and more efficiently. The application turns the nearby devices with Open Garden software into routers in an encrypted network mesh without a central access point. The available bandwidth is discovered and redistributed automatically between the devices without requiring users to manually sift through available networks to find the best one.

Open Garden supports and promotes opened wireless networks and is a member of the Open Wireless Coalition, which was founded by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

History
Open Garden, Inc. was co-founded in 2011 by businessman Micha Benoliel, Internet architect Stanislav Shalunov and software developer Greg Hazel in San Francisco, California. Benoliel, Shalunov and Hazel shared similar backgrounds in Internet infrastructure and peer-to-peer technology. Benoliel, originally from Nice, France, had worked at Skype where he negotiated the deals with European telcommunication companies that enabled users to make calls on computers to and from landlines and cell phones. Meanwhile, Shalunov had spent much of his career working on Internet infrastructure, first at Internet2, the US academic networking consortium, and later at the peer-to-peer filesharing service BitTorrent where he met Hazel, the lead developer of the popular BitTorrent client uTorrent, used by more than 200 million peer-to-peer users worldwide.

After raising $2 million seed money from a group of leading technology industry angel investors in 2012, the company was able to extend their initial application by additional features, such as roll out multi-hop connectivity and channel bonding that had been on the company’s roadmap since it was launched. The new funding team was led by Allan Green, an early investor in Phone.com and Mobileway, David Ulevitch, CEO of OpenDNS, Derek Parham, creator of Google Apps for Business, and Digital Garage, which also invested in Twitter and Path.

Currently, Open Garden is most popular in the United States, followed by India, Mexico, France, Brazil, United Kingdom, Italy, Spain and Germany. The increased bandwidth that results from sharing and more effient use of the existing infrastructure has a potential also for providing an Internet connection for the underconnected communities in Africa and emerging mobile markets where relatively few people have cell phones, incomes are low, and people are more likely to share their phone service.

Open Garden's offices are located on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay.

Products
Open Garden offers software solution of the same name, a proprietary internet community-based connection sharing software application  that shares an internet access with other devices using Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. If users have no direct Internet connection available within an Open Garden network, the application automatically connects to the Internet through links to other devices such as laptops or mobile phones. If the person whose Internet connection is being shared leaves the network, the application automatically detects and connects to the next best available connection by introducing a way to access the Internet simultanously over multiple channels. Such network is self-healing and self-forming in the sense that each of the nodes operates only with local knowledge and forms a network with other devices using a probabilistic distributed algorithm. Because Open Garden’s solution is built on software rather than on hardware, it requires no operational expenses and minimal capital expenses from mobile operators, compared to alternatives such as femtocells and microcells.

The Open Garden software is currently available for Windows, Mac and Android operating systems; the iOS version is under development.

Features

 * Seamless connectivity - This feature enables users to connect any supported device to the mesh and thus to the Internet without installation, configuration, or pairing. Open Garden uses different physical ways to connect to the net and devices learn about each other in various different ways, including Bluetooth discovery, through a cloud service and using local chatter.
 * Channel bonding - Nowadays, most users access the Internet through only one channel, wireless or mobile (3G or 4G). Open Garden introduced a way to access the Internet over multiple paths at once so that the channels are merged ("bonded"), thus improving speed and reliability.
 * Automatic path choice - Once connected, the devices find a path to the Internet also completely automatically. If a path fails, a new one will be chosen and, if necessary, new connections will be established with other devices.
 * Multi-hop - If no direct Internet connection is available, devices will access the Internet through chains of other devices. Again, if necessary, network chains will grow to reach the Internet connection.

Business model
As of November 18, 2012 Open Garden was available for download for free. In the future, Open Garden expects to obtain revenue by extending their current free service to the freemium business model and offer paid options such as faster downloads for consumers and VPN access for business users. Another possibility would be to become a virtual mobile operator and sell customers cheap wireless connection in those cases when Internet access through the Open Garden P2P mesh is not available. The company is also talking to phone carriers and hardware manufacturers about the possibility to have the Open Garden software pre-installed on their devices and in this way help the carriers to deliver better data coverage, relieve congestion on their networks by offloading 3G and 4G phone traffic to WiFi, and maximize speed.

Awards and recognition
Open Garden and its product were introduced on October 11, 2011 at the Android Open 2011, where they won Startup Showcase award. Next year, on May 26, 2012, Open Garden was a runner-up for the Top Startup award and a winner of the Most Innovative Startup award at the TechCrunch 2012 Disrupt Conference, proving to fulfil the main goal of the conference - disruption.

Competitors
Other platforms to offer free network sharing include the Spanish company FON (established in 2006), and Commotion Wireless, developed by the Open Technology Institute in Washington D.C. Free data sharing in the form of text, audio and video messages and free phone calls are offered by Cyprus-based Viber Media on through their Viber application, by Sidecar and by Skype.

Criticism
From the beginning, mobile carriers were afraid of losing revenue they obtain from mobile Internet users. AT&T spokesman Mark Siegel said that Open Garden violates company policies by enabling unauthorized tethering and mobile Web connection sharing. For that reason, Telco has asked Google to make Open Garden unavailable for download and usage for AT&T customers. Open Garden's founder and CEO, Micha Benoliel has denied that his company is involved in anything illegal.