Today’s show features the CEO and co-founder of Paradrop.io, a solution for pushing computational power to your router. It’s an interesting approach to making the Internet function better and more efficiently for end users: making your router a software platform.
Paradrop is a platform that allows code to run on routers, which means there’s a whole host of new functions available plus some clever ways content can be pushed ever closer to the end user. As Dale Willis, the CEO of Paradrop points out, companies like Google are seeing the benefit of equipping home routers with more memory and processing power than ever before. Google’s new OnHub is just the beginning of a wave of smart routers which Paradrop hopes to see grow and become standard in homes. Its platform will rely on those hardware enhancements so developers can use the Paradrop platform to optimize their own applications and services.
As data networks grow to accommodate more traffic, platforms like Paradrop could help intelligently route that data more effectively. Also, software-defined networks will play nicely when a router is smarter about what it can do, so look for more services like this to appear as our hardware networks get smarter and ever more reliant on powerful software.