Today a colleague of mine and I had a great day at BarCamp in Palo Alto. The spirit and the atmosphere were amazing - people brought food, drinks, cookies, and we had some very insightful and inspiring conversations with incredibly smart people. Kudos to Tara and everybody else who pitched in for organizing the event!
To finish the day off, we decided to grab some food at Madison & 5th on University Av. (try the Sauvignon Blanc they have on their wine menu, highly recommendable...), which is where I'm sitting right now while writing this post.
While we were discussing trends in the social media world, my colleague pointed out the website of MyFootballClub - a perfect example of reaching scale by pooling the masses. So while I was looking at the website and of course joining my colleague in joining MyFootballClub, we thought about how we could replicate the approach to acquire spectrum in the U.S.....
The question is: could we pool enough people and money to enter the 700 MHz auctions that are soon to be held, buy a slice of the spectrum, and make "open access" a reality? So let's just say we could raise the money (we're talking about ~$5B and more...), then what would it take in terms of legal requirements to participate in the auctions, and what would be the operating model, etc.? Thoughts?