One year after the start of the pilot project “Weimar DRIN” Cuculus has installed about 80 hotspots around the city of Weimar, thus making Germany’s largest public city hotspot network a great success. The offer of a wireless, free of charge internet access is used and appreciated by many of Weimar’s businessmen, inhabitants and tourists. Of course, the project has attracted great attention of other interested parties willing to install a similar system. Moreover, Cuculus is developing further features and services to meet the requests of the interested customers by increasing at the same time the value for the potential users. Currently, Cuculus is evaluating and planning the second phase of the network, which should increase the coverage and allows for new services. One decision of the company is to open up the network for new partners, introducing new services or technologies. The final decision how the second phase will look like in detail is expected latest for the early 2009.

http://www.weimar-ist-drin.de

HotSpotRuhr has the challenging aim of creating Europe’s largest hotspot network by linking the most important places of Europe’s third largest urban area, the Ruhrgebiet, via hotspots until 2010, when the city of Essen will be Europe’s Capital of Culture. For that reason, Cuculus has now presented its unique and simple solution to a large group of interested local partners. Potential partners are local Internet Service Providers (ISP), cities, companies with large customer bases like energy suppliers and organisations responsible for marketing public relation in this area. The participants’ immediate feedback was very positive and Cuculus is now looking forward to a good cooperation with HotSpotRuhr and the various interested parties.

http://www.hotspotruhr.de

ZONOS(TM) Petite is a pocket size wireless IEEE 802.11b/g router.
Each ZONOS(TM) Petite box can work both as a public hotspot and as a regular private WiFi access point, even in parallel on the same box. The configuration is self-explanatory and the setup can be done within 3 minutes. If the device is used as public hotspot only, no additional configuration is required and the pre-configured setup can be used.
A standard Ethernet port of a DSL router can be used to connect the ZONOS(TM) Petite box to the Internet. Also, another WiFi connection from a third-party WiFi network can be used as connection. Thus each ZONOS(TM) Petite can very easily help to increase the coverage of the WiFi network of DSL customers at home.
ZONOS(TM) Petites can be used to extend existing WISP networks, as add-on device for DSL-routers or as one part of a Virtual WiFi Operator business case. The devices and concepts address providers only.

In an interview with Marco Schreiber, Freies Wort, René Böringer speaks about the importance of being an entrepreneur when founding and managing one’s own company. Very often engineers face strong difficulties in learning the commercial skills of successful managers. However, René Böringer, having founded already two companies, is a confident entrepreneur meeting the challenges of marketing “his” product.

http://www.freies-wort.de

At this year’s CeBIT in Hannover, the department Integrated Hard- and Softwaresystems of the Technical University Ilmenau presents, among others, its research project concerning autonomous management techniques for large networks (hall 9, booth D04). As a university spin-off, Cuculus maintains a strong and very productive cooperation with different chairs at the university. The chair of Prof. Dr.-Ing. habli. Andreas Mitschele-Thiel operates a ZONOS Server-based platform for research purposes. Research topics are automatic and self-organizing management approaches as well as the investigation of Femtocell-based networks connected via “real-world” DSL infrastructure.

http://www.freies-wort.de

Following a phase of intensive development, Cuculus proudly provides the first Virtual WiFi Operator (VWO) solution. This solution is based on the ZONOS Server System and combines two main advantages making it a unique approach in the market. First, it offers the possibility to connect different access networks of already established WISPs, in a way that the end customers do not recognise any service interruption or different look and feels. Thus it’s much more than the classical WiFi aggregation, which just bases on exchange of account data and roaming agreements. Second, Cuculus developed interfaces, which allow connecting the whole system to mobile or DSL operator’s backends via Webservices. This enables a bundling of WiFi with other mobile data services, a unified user registration and login procedure, reuse and integration of services like SMS, premium SMS and even location-based services (LBS) based on the information of the WiFi network. By applying the virtual WiFi Operator solution a seamless WiFi offering for a whole country can be rolled out within 12 month by cooperating with and reuse of already existing WiFi networks without losing the ability to provide and develop own services.

Proudly we are looking back on the exiting year of Cuculus’ foundation. Being a young company we have reached a lot during our first year. Especially our project “Weimar DRIN” has been and still is a great success.
Of course, we would not have been able to move that far without the cooperation with and support of our partners, customers and users, which we herewith want to acknowledge gratefully.
As for the current year 2008, we plan to improve our products, to strengthen and expand our market position and to launch new projects. Also, we are looking forward to deepening the cooperation with our partners, customers and users and to establishing new contacts.

We wish all our partners, customers and users as well as interested persons and parties a happy and successful year 2008!