Convergence Conversation Info 10th October 2008

The Weekly Roundup: Friday 10th October

Here’s this week’s roundup of the hot topics on Convergence Conversations.

Moving away from all the doom and gloom of the current economic crisis, this week’s blogs proved that news does exist aside from free falling stock prices. From Boris’s extravagant claims of free ‘blackberry type gizmos’ for the London Olympics audience, to the latest on music artists fight against illegal downloader’s, and on into the ongoing debates surrounding broadband issues. Convergence Conversations continues to cover the wide variations within convergence and the platforms on which it exists.

Read on to find the latest installment of the aptly named ‘Ring! Ring!’ blog series, broadband lobbying suggestions, and why you can lead a student to water…but you can’t make it think.

If music be the food of love...

by Sam Ingleby of Intellect

The music industry - under enormous external pressures - is undergoing huge structural change at the moment. Two articles in the press today capture the shift in shape and size of the industry. Firstly a pithy little graph from The Economist, adorned with a spotty youth listening to his (illegally) downloaded content on a handheld device. The analysis has a one ray of good news flashing through a generally gloomy grey sky for the record companies. Whilst sales of digital music are steadily growing (in 2007 digital downloads accounted for 15% of global music sales compared with almost nothing in 2003) the outlook for the music industry as a whole is worrying. More...

Ring! Ring! Hot News, 6th October 2008

by Simon Torrance of STL partners

In Today’s Issue: Sprint selling Nextel; personalisation is dead; new enterprise voice at Sprint; harassing your customers; Apple iPhone NDA dropped; new Nokia, HP iClones; bloggers drool over Gphone; no new Nokias before Noel; S60 5th Edition; Web apps vs mobile apps - synthesis achieved; Nokia music; T-Mobile phone-router; weird concept phones; BT outsourcing whole of Openreach?; C&W/Thus spaceship gaffe; T-Mobile in 17 megacustomer datafart; MTN buys small country in West Africa; transit costs the same in London and Bucharest; More...

You can lead a student to lectures…but you can’t make it think

by Colin Batten of Intellect

Oxbridge put lectures on iTunes

The news that Oxbridge will make lectures available on iTunes acts as further evidence that students are lazy creatures of habit. However it also illustrates a rather important point too…the need for business development managers to embrace technological and social change, in order meet consumers changing expectations and needs.

For those tech savvy students enrolling at University as we speak, it may come as a shock that lectures have not been available via iTunes for time immemorial. More...

A lobbying suggestion

by Dave Birch of Consult Hyperion

The modern economy depends on the innovative use of new technology. Innovation is a key source of comparative advantage. We cannot compete with the developing economies in manufacturing and even services are being outsourced, so we must innovate. These are the kind of statements you always hear from European politicians and the truth is that they are at least partly right. The European Commission has just released a paper identifying the following as the key challenges for the next stage of the Internet: More...