Convergence Conversation

In Today’s Issue: Vodafone after T-Mobile UK? Femtocells ready to launch; voiceprint ID at Vodafone Turkey; moving to the Smoke; HOWTO install unauthorised software to a Palm Pre; Intel-Nokia strategic alliance; Moto Karma launches on AT&T; AT&T femtocells coming; subscription navigation application; TV to go; Comcast, TimeWarner break with Hulu; Virgin Media to bother filesharers; ARCEP says yes to urban overbuild, divides France into three parts; NSN gets optical kit from Juniper, i.e. Ericsson; the long death of Nortel; new Ericsson CEO talks to the FT; Indians alarmed by exploding Chinese gadgets; GVoice hype and cold water; AdSense for mobile launches; native SDK out for Android; BREW’s future; iPhone 3GS costimates; EBay “bought Skype but not the code”; Genachowski’s in at the FCC; Entanet shoots back in the UK wholesale wars

Consolidation watch: More...

“to secure the UK’s position as one of the world’s leading digital knowledge economies”

We believe that the breadth of the scope of this ambition is the real problem of the report: too many intertwined companies are affected, especially when the government is pursuing a policy of Industrial Activism, which is longhand for intervention. Only time will tell whether benefits outweigh the costs of this intervention, but our initial impressions are not good. In this note, we examine three of the key findings which have the largest impact on telcos. More...

In the last 12 months the fundamental question related to the ‘2-sided’ telecoms market opportunity has changed from “what is it?” to “how do we do it?” A new report describes the key priority areas.

The 2-Sided telecoms business model theory has been now been articulated thoroughly (see “The 2-Sided Telecoms Market Opportunity” report), and the theoretical growth opportunity largely accepted by senior strategists, as evidenced by the vote at the November 2008 Telco 2.0TM Executive Brainstorm and again at the May 2009 event in Nice, South of France. More...

There is an ongoing debate about the size of the losses at YouTube and for how much longer the parent, Google, can afford to fund its errant child’s excessive lifestyle. Credit Suisse put a high price on it; Brough Turner criticised their analysis; RampRate decisively debunked it.

The debate has focused upon YouTube as a standalone service and little attention has been given to the spin-off benefits accruing to the parent. Google controls a significant, and growing, share of the means of production of the entire Internet Industry. We argue that ownership of YouTube is a crucial ingredient for Google’s control of the economic rent that Google extracts from the whole of the Internet value chain. More...

Telco 2.0 is delighted to announce that Nathan Richardson, Executive Producer for EVE Online at CCP Games, will be speaking at November’s EMEA Telco 2.0 event, to help us understand the ‘digital generation’.

EVE Online is one of the world’s biggest massively-multiplayer virtual worlds, a community which incorporates as many as 300,000 subscribers and 45,000 others on free trial accounts. Within its world, players organise themselves in alliances, guilds, and commercial corporations and compete to dominate the trade of the Universe, whilst of course looking out for space pirates, or perhaps dabbling in piracy themselves. More...

We mentioned that IBM Research is charting a Telco 2.0 agenda, concentrating on mobile enterprise applications, emerging-market mobility (especially applications for SMBs), and enterprise-to-end user applications. Here’s a video demonstration of their Seer augmented-reality application, which is being trialled at Wimbledon this week.

A couple of points come to mind. The first is that Anssi Vanjoki’s remarks at this spring’s Telco 2.0 event about the future of the Web being contextual, rather than semantic, and that this would be driven by the proliferation of new sensors (orientation, machine vision, location, etc) on mobile devices, are entirely right. More...

Ericsson is promoting its Java SDK on YouTube:

Well, it’s good to be reminded of the fundamental need for communication. Netscape legend Jamie Zawinski said something similar in a now-classic blog post about groupware, social networks, and contacts management:

But with a groupware product, nobody would ever work on it unless they were getting paid to, because it’s just fundamentally not interesting to individuals. So I said, narrow the focus. Your “use case” should be, there’s a 22 year old college student living in the dorms. How will this software get him laid? That got me a look like I had just sprouted a third head, but bear with me, because I think that it’s not only crude but insightful.

A new open-source technical toolkit (based on Linux, Asterisk, OpenSER and perhaps OpenSS7) is emerging for Voice 2.0 applications. In this note we will discuss the elements that go into it, the possibilities and problems involved, and the consequences of these developments for existing operators.

Two kinds of technical change: conservative…

Technological change is happening in several forms in the industry. One of these mainly affects how existing network designs and business models are executed. For example, switches that were once dedicated hardware systems running extremely specialised software are being replaced with softswitches which run on standard bladeservers or even PC-servers. More...

In Today’s Issue: Nortel - the final curtain; NSN vultures up CDMA, LTE assets; CSL CEO: Chinese vendors are our rightful masters - submit!; Iran: HOWTO strangle the Internet; actually, asking NSN seems to be the staff solution; MTN chafes at the bit; more censorship data; Uncle Sam’s monster e-mail database; Novarra: half the data traffic is from basic phones, and we know because we read it!; Indian 3G auction set for September; WiMAX to follow; the great British spectrum sale?; AT&T/Slingbox/Baseball neutrality row; cablecos can community on Canoe; AT&T gives away MMS; 80% of growth at RIM now consumer; IBM R&D to spend $100m on Telco 2.0-ish agenda; Intel wants to put your phone in a cloud; Free lobbies on, self-funds fibre rollout; Wind faces cash call; BT will deploy more fibre, one day, perhaps; the call centre that can’t; augmented reality, without pills, with Gphones; new Android gadgets at T-Mobile; More...

In Today’s Issue: Sprint sells iDEN assets; US mobile data price wars; value heads for the edge and for key infrastructure; T-Mobile denies Data Thieves of 2009 caper; epic net neutrality row in the UK as politicos play to the whistle on Digital Britain; C&W in fatcat punchup; Australian NBN news shows Telstra and Optus making nice; a hundred flowers blossom, a thousand schools of thought contend, and they all want a broadband stimulus cheque; universal GSM for the poor - the US poor; Telekom Austria looks at separation; Qwest - customers don’t care about speed but do want everything now; Sprint-L(3) tie up to buy up Qwest; Kenya’s submarine cable comes ashore; China Unicom “buys 125,000 Node-Bs”; Qualcomm sees recover; Dell claims to monetise Twitter; dismantle your Palm Pre; Palm hires Apple iPod chief; Nokia coming for Adobe and MS developers; two Nokia howtos; sue your way to popularity; HP mobile soc More...