Today, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said that the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the body for New York City’s arteries of public transit, had completed the first phase of a citywide project to install Wi-Fi and voice-calling service in its subway stations.

Service is now expanded to 36 subway stations, including the six that were tested last year. Major stations, including Times Square and Rockefeller Center, are included in the expansion.

The project allows for voice calling, text messaging and Internet browsing from the station platforms — not on the trains themselves. And you’ll have to be a customer of participating wireless services to access voice and data.

Carriers AT&T and T-Mobile have already signed on to provide service for wireless voice and data for their customers. Executives from Verizon and Sprint were also in attendance at Gov. Cuomo’s press conference, as the two carriers say they plan to be a part of the network down under.

Wi-Fi is available through Boingo, and Transit Wireless is providing the infrastructure for the five-year project. Currently, the Wi-Fi is free through a sponsorship by HTC, which requires that the user watch an ad for the company’s new flagship smartphone before accessing the Wi-Fi.

The original plan to have the major stations wired by the end of 2012 was delayed in part by Hurricane Sandy.

New York City already offers free Wi-Fi service in 20 parks across five boroughs. And Google earlier this year brought free Wi-Fi to the Chelsea neighborhood (where the search giant has offices, marked by a giant sign), spanning a 13-block coverage zone.

So how does New York City stack up to other major metro areas? Surprisingly, it lags behind some in terms of underground Wi-Fi installation. Last year, London’s transportation authority introduced Wi-Fi service to 120 Tube stations, powered by Virgin Media, although it is mostly pay-as-you-go service and doesn’t include wireless calling.

In Asia, the JR East line in Tokyo is dotted with Wi-Fi hotspots, although, again, many require a prepaid pass; Hong Kong currently offers limited daily sessions of free Wi-Fi in 14 MTR stations. Indian Railways also just launched a pilot for free Wi-Fi Internet service on trains on the New Delhi-Howrah Rajdhani line.

But it’s often better to get it right than to get it first, as evidenced by the Wi-Fi service in San Francisco’s Bay Area Rapid Transit system. BART commuters were promised that Wi-Fi would be widely available three years ago, but service is still notoriously unreliable.

(Feature photo courtesy of Leone Fabre/Flickr Creative Commons. Photo of girl in subway station courtesy of Hernan Seoane/Flickr Creative Commons.)

The new wireless standard, called 802.11ac, can triple its predecessor’s typical speed, wireless experts say, and handle more than a billion bits of data per second in an ideal environment, fast enough to stream high-definition video with ease.

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“[In Latin America] the smartphone will be your whole connection to the Internet,” said Bloisi, in an onstage interview at the D: Dive Into Mobile conference in New York. “I think Wi-Fi is a big, big trend.”

The fast-growing Movile is trying to find better ways for consumers in its market to be able to connect to take advantage of rich media. “We believe the best of the mobile opportunity will be in the next four years,” said Bloisi, who noted that most users are on pre-paid phones in the important region.

More to the point, “We really need cheaper phones,” said Bloisi, especially since Latin American countries like Brazil are among the most expensive places to buy a device by a factor of 10 times or more.

Why is that so? “Taxes, taxes and the mystery of the Brazilian economy,” he joked, while pointing to efforts to produce phones in the region that would be less expensive.

Bloisi also thought that the focus away from HTML5 — a once-hot area of mobile development that has recently fallen out of favor — was wrong.

“It is not a religious discussion,” he said. “[But] on the long term, I am more HTML5.”

Apple paid around $20 million for the Silicon Valley-based company, according to a person familiar with the matter who said the deal closed recently.

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Last week, the fight between Apple and pugnacious hedge fund investor David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital went all flat when he withdrew a lawsuit after the company yanked a proxy proposal that would have allowed shareholders to vote on eliminating preferred stock from the company charter.

But the real issue at the core of the fight — the massive mountain of $137 billion in a cash hoard that Apple holds and that Einhorn wants it to distribute in some fashion to shareholders — still remains.

It’s not clear what Apple will do now, especially since a lot of it is overseas. But execs have indicated that they are evaluating what to do to best serve nervous investors, who have bidded the stock down 40 percent since the fall. While it’s not clear what that will be, it’s also pretty likely Apple will do something.

Until the company decides, though, I have some good ideas for CEO Tim Cook to consider:

* Apple could purchase 1,567,506 Tesla Model S Performance vehicles with 85 kWh battery and a carbon fiber spoiler at $87,400 each, which would effectively allow CEO Elon Musk to buy the New York Times (a bargain at $1.42 billion!) and use it as his own personal blog.

* It could buy 17.9 houses for each Yahoo employee located near its Sunnyvale, Calif., HQ, so they could be super-close to work, per CEO Marissa Mayer’s wishes. That breaks down to 206,015 overall homes for 11,500 workers, at a median sales price of $665,000 for the area.

* Apple could acquire a big chunk of the Internet all at once, including Groupon ($3.36 billion), Yahoo ($25.95 billion), Facebook ($61.7 billion), Twitter ($10 billion), LinkedIn ($18.32 billion), Yelp ($1.47 billion), AOL ($2.81 billion), Pandora ($2.09 billion), Zynga ($2.69 billion), OpenTable ($1.32 billion) and, finally, Pinterest ($2.5 billion). Phew.

* It could pay Andrew Mason’s $378.36 severance after getting jacked as CEO of Groupon 364,013,179 times over.

* Apple could pay for 97,857 parties for Yammer’s David Sacks’s 40th birthday (at $1.4 million each). Snoop Dogg included.

* It could foot the bill for the budget cuts to save the U.S. government $85 billion this year, so Americans could stop having to say “sequester.”

* Apple could buy $329 16 gigabyte Wi-Fi iPad minis for 416,413,374 people — everyone in the U.S. (315,429,318), plus France and Spain.

* Or it could just give the 7,069,909,686 people on the planet $19.38 each, and call it a day.

* Apple could use $1 bills to carpet an area of 560 square miles, which would more than cover Silicon Valley.

* Finally — and I think this would be a nice gesture to make up for calling his efforts a “silly sideshow” — Apple could give Einhorn 15.56 times the value of his $8.8 billion fund.

Or, of course, not.

This cataclysmic inevitability was brought to my attention over the holidays by my 6-year-old son. Far off though it may be, he believes our solar system’s imminent demise is cause for alarm sooner rather than later. (For him, that means sooner than getting a flu shot — but later than downloading the most recent service pack for Minecraft.)

Of course, I recognize my 6-year-old is thinking too far ahead. Too big.

But he did get me wondering, are the rest of us thinking big enough? Especially those of us who develop — and invest in — new innovations.

If not for being stuck on an antiquated United Airlines plane unequipped with Wi-Fi (is there any other type?), I may not have found the time to commit this thought to paper — I would likely have been overwhelmed by the next flurry of emails or meeting requests. It’s easy to lose sight of the big picture. In fact, as I survey the current startup landscape and consider the kinds of companies attracting VC dollars, it seems like the investing community isn’t thinking of the big picture at all.

Today, investors are less interested in transformative companies and more interested in trendy ones. Funding is flowing — and flowing fast — toward “quick-response startups.” These companies, more often than not, are launched during all-night hack-a-thons. They’re the wired brainchildren of eager coding buddies and Costco-like volumes of Red Bull.

Do many — or even any — of these startups, still in incubation, believe they can create a billion-dollar company on the heels of a market that’s already matured? No. And we don’t expect them to.

Because typically, companies like these aren’t founded to solve big problems — but rather immediate, narrow (and sometimes trivial) ones. For example, we now have dozens of VC-funded apps that help friends share photos, plan their weekend activities and order drinks more quickly in a bar. Yes, the first mobile photo-sharing app leveraged the social graph in unique ways and was — without a doubt — transformative. Three years later, however, startups continue to evolve the concept, but to what end?

Don’t get me wrong. I enjoy a cool app as much as the next guy. But we can’t continue funding the companies that produce them at the expense of companies that produce truly breakthrough technologies and experiences. It’s bad economics, and, to the extent that this mindset pushes out true long-term transformative thinking, bad for humanity as well.

Indeed, these quick-response startups reflect — and perhaps are causing — a new and worrying trend: As a recent article in the Economist — “Has the ideas machine broken down?” — points out, today’s inventions are producing far less “economic impact” than inventions of the past. Progress actually appears to have slowed since the early 1900s.

It seems, in short, that we have reached a plateau when it comes to the more recent megatrends that stimulated great innovation: Games, social, local and mobile. Now that these digital revolutions are maturing, we’re just tinkering around the edges. Making marginal improvements. Tweaking the charger ports on our iPhones.

This trend, by the way, is not all that different from what happened in the late 90s — when the spread of the Internet was followed by VC investment in every dot-com commerce play imaginable, including dozens of pet-related dot-com startups. (In retrospect, one may have been too many.) In some ways, the early aughts saw a dearth of fresh ideas, too — right after the Web 2.0 innovations hit the market.

Now, we seem to be trapped by the narrowness of our own thinking again. And we have to ask ourselves: What will it take to buck this worrying trend, to push past this period of creative stagnation?

The answer? The same thing it took in the 90s and the early aughts: more companies like eBay, Google and Facebook — startups that brought to life world-changing and enduring ideas.

These companies may have been founded by “hacks” like the ones portrayed in “The Social Network.” But they were hacks that created massive waves of innovation, as did the founders of Yahoo!, Amazon and Twitter. They pioneered at the front end of huge emerging trends, from Web to commerce, from social to mobile.

Today, there aren’t enough of these front-end innovators. Years after these companies created new markets and experiences, we still have startups paddling out into the surf, hoping to catch the big tsunami that long ago passed them by.

What we need, in other words, are more wave-makers. More pioneers. More Yangs, Bezoses, Zuckerbergs, Brins and Pages, not to mention more Jobses, Fords and Edisons.

And make no mistake, the investor community — especially the VC investor community — has a role to play in encouraging that level of genius. In many ways, we just have to return to our roots.

It used to be that venture capital was the most ambitious kind of capital there was. Investors like me would fund startups, and not expect to see the payoff until five to 10 years down the line. We did so because we chose companies of extraordinary promise that trafficked in big ideas — businesses that, with enough time and money, could create products that changed the way humans interact on a day-to-day basis. Microsoft, Google and Apple — these are companies built with long-term VC investment. And they gave rise to the Age of Information.

So, going forward, let’s be as ambitious and smart with our capital as we once were. Let’s take more risks and be more encouraging of big ideas and bold leaders. We can’t get trigger happy with our funding dollars and settle for a quick fix or a “me too” idea.

Let’s also remember that innovation can benefit those living in the developing world. After all, innovation brought automobiles to India that cost less than $2,000 — and stoves to Africa that also charge cellphones.

And, most importantly, before we invest, let’s ask ourselves some crucial questions:

• Will this startup change the world — not just my world? Is the problem it solves large enough and its appeal wide enough?
• Does this company meet a critical, unmet need — or does it just bring simplicity or efficiency to an already-tackled issue?
• How difficult is the problem I want to solve? And is my solution unique, based on strong intellectual capital or a patentable idea? Or is it a piece of Web functionality that could be easily and quickly cloned, copied and resold?

In the past, investors haven’t always asked these questions. But if we start now — and answer them honestly and correctly — then we can unleash a new era of greater creativity and better returns.

If my tenure at Foundation Capital has taught me anything, it’s that investing in truly meaningful companies pays off. There are startups with world-changing ideas out there. And discovering what they are — and bringing their ideas to life — will require each of us to slow down and devote some time to big thinking.

If my 6-year-old son can do it, so can we.

Charles Moldow is a general partner at Foundation Capital, focusing on consumer Internet companies. He was previously a founding executive at TellMe Networks and at @Home.

Those who want to auction every last hertz of spectrum overlook two basic economic facts about unlicensed spectrum:

First, if spectrum is as valuable as mobile carriers claim it is, reducing the amount of spectrum available for auction by dedicating some of it for unlicensed use should drive up the price of the remaining auctioned spectrum. So designating some unlicensed spectrum will not reduce proceeds delivered to the Treasury. Given the inelastic demand for spectrum, the price increase for the spectrum that is auctioned will result in no loss of revenue. Some of the spectrum that is likely to be useful if set aside for unlicensed use is not likely to fetch much of a price at auction (e.g. the “duplex gap”) because it is not suitable for high power 4G (LTE) wireless networks.

Second, unlicensed spectrum is the most valuable part of the wireless broadband product space by a wide margin. It supports half the traffic delivered to consumer smartphones and tablets and is the final link to the consumer for one quarter of all traffic flow delivered to users with fixed, wireline broadband. The massive amount of economic activity in the unlicensed space generates huge economic value, which in turn maximizes large tax revenues for the federal government.

Those who think that more unlicensed spectrum will lead to “free” Wi-Fi also overlook basic economic realities. Even though unlicensed spectrum is very good for consumers and the economy, it is important to recognize that not paying money at auction to gain access to unlicensed spectrum does not mean that it is free to put it to use. Quite the opposite is true. There are real costs involved in moving the exaflood of bits to and from an unlicensed hotspot. There are real costs in building and acquiring the equipment that will receive the data transmissions and to manage an unlicensed wireless network. If you talk about service for hundreds of millions of people in the U.S. and billions globally, one thing is certain — if the cost of building and operating an unlicensed network are not recovered from consumers, the network will not be built or operated.

A substantive debate on spectrum policy is a good thing. The clash of ideas will produce better decisions at the FCC. But let’s all take a deep breath and get our facts straight. A hundred years ago, public policy to allocate spectrum concluded that interference could only be controlled by giving a small number of broadcasters exclusive licenses to operate in specific frequencies. Twenty years ago, the FCC decided to try a radical new approach by allowing anyone to transmit signals into spectrum that had been considered garbage, as long as they adhered to simple technical rules. We now recognize that this radical decision led to modern-day Wi-Fi. The remarkable success of Wi-Fi demonstrates that hotspot operators and consumers will willingly pay hundreds of billions of dollars to build and use the Wi-Fi infrastructure even without the ability to exclude others granted by a license — and they are likely to do the same for the FCC’s more recent innovations related to unlicensed use between TV channels, and new unlicensed designations in the 600 MHz, 3.5 GHz and 5 GHz bands in the future.

Could new, unlicensed designations lead to new competition for cellular wireless broadband service? Maybe, but the important point is that it will be an important input to the wireless broadband space, particularly the Internet of Things that connects hundreds of billions of objects.

There are two extremely important lessons to learned from the remarkable success of unlicensed spectrum.

• Policy should expand possibilities, not foreclose them.
• Having dramatically different business models occupy a single product space spurs and maximizes innovation and efficiency.

It would be a huge mistake to try to pick winners and losers by favoring cellular licensed service to the exclusion of unlicensed spectrum.

Mark Cooper is the Director of Research at the Consumer Federation of America and a fellow at the Donald McGannon Center for Communications Research at Fordham University.