Strategy

MVNOs: operators as bit-pipes and outsourcing service creation

Posted on by charlie

I read the post below and it then occurred to me:

The operator is just a bit-pipe for these MVNOs. And, with MVNOs, the operator is effectively outsourcing service creation and customer acquisition. And the risk is heavily with the MVNO, which mean that they have to work hard to provide value and succeed.

Hmm, that sounds great for everyone. Bring it on!

Link: Mobile Slate: Six Of One, Half Dozen Of Another.

There are roughly 6 MVNOs (Mobile Virtual Network Operators) in the USA before 2006. I thought that would be enough, but in this ever changing landscape 6 more have popped on to the scene for 2006.

Innovation

Radio Handi, the party line for planet earth, is live!

Posted on by charlie

Click here to go to the Radio Handi website for more info.

Brian, I love the tagline – ‘The Party Line for Planet Earth’.

Link: Lifeblog: Phoning It In From ETel – Radio Handi Makes Its Debut.

Brian McConnell is at O’Reilly’s Emerging Telephony conference revealing his latest project – Radio Handi.

And a blurb from the site:

Welcome to RadioHandi, the party line for Planet Earth. This
breakthrough service, built from the ground up around open standards
telephony and instant messaging technology, will enable people around
the world to create voice communities about any subject, location or
peer group, all for the cost of a local phone call. With it, people can
post messages and engage in live group conversations with people
calling in from fixed, mobile and VoIP phones from around the world.

Strategy

MocoNews.net on: MySpace shooting for mobile

Posted on by charlie

Link (via The Kelsey Group): MocoNews.net: mobile content news.

Ross Levinsohn, president of Fox Interactive Media, is speaking to a good-size crowd at the Mandalay Convention Center. A lot of table setting to start — how News Corp. reinvigorated its interactive business, spent nearly $2 billion, built audience up to 62 million users, etc.
Some highlights:
— “This is the year MySpace is going to go mobile. You can see them interacting on their computer, now want to extend that to the phone. … We want to empower MySpace screen names to supplant mobile numbers.”

And thanks, Richard, for the original link.

Strategy

Engaget on: World Tracker turns anyone into a cellphone spy

Posted on by charlie

Link: World Tracker turns anyone into a cellphone spy – Engadget.

Forget those piddly wiretaps. The next frontier in warrant-free surveillance is upon us, and it’s open to everyone. A UK service called World Tracker apparently uses cell tower data (or GPS, when available) to track the location of just about any GSM cellphone. Just enter the number you want to track into the service’s handy Google Maps-based interface, and you’ll be able to zoom in on the device’s location, with accuracy somewhere between 50 and 500 meters.

Thanks, Kari, for the link.

Innovation

Phoning It In From ETel – Radio Handi Makes Its Debut

Posted on by charlie

Brian McConnell is at O’Reilly’s Emerging Telephony conference revealing his latest project – Radio Handi.

I’ve been watching Radio Handi come to life (Brian and I go way back*). It’s been exciting. I think it’s a really neat way to tie voice and Web.

One interesting thing is that such a system would be very expensive to set up just 5 years ago. Now, Radio Handi has local phone numbers in over 30 countries, you can call it via Gizmo (or probably any SIP device), and you can follow conversation via RSS.

I think big sites with big communities could benefit from this. If you are interested in talking with Brian, let me know. I can make an introduction.

Link: Phoning It In From ETel – Radio Handi Makes Its Debut – O’Reilly Emerging Telephony.

Radio Handi enables people to create voice communities around any subject, place of interest or peer group, and to telecast live audio from MP3 feeds or conference phones. You can create a message board and party line for your club, for people who share an interest, or for your friends. With it, you can create an open party line that people can dial into from all over the world (30  countries and 1 VoIP network to start with, much more to come). This is our first public demo of the platform.

*Please note: Many years ago, Brian recruited me to PhoneZone/Hello Direct, helping me make the transition from biomedicine to telecomms (and to be a full time writer!). Thanks, Brian. We then worked a bit together on his subsequent venture, TrekMail, which was sold last summer to Visto. We’ve been in touch over Radio Handi for some time now. I told Brian I’d help him, as I could, to make some connections, if it helps (never know where that might lead). In short, I am partial to Brian. Don’t be surprised if I pitch it to you out of the blue. 🙂

Statements

Disney to Acquire Pixar for $7.4B in Stock (press release)

Posted on by charlie

If it’s good enough for Jobs and Lassiter, it’s good enough for me.

This affects me personally. I am a junkie for animation and that’s what Pixar has been doing for the 20 or so years I have been following them. Some of my favorite animated films and shorts are from Pixar.

I’ll be watching this whole merger closely, since I am not too confident of the merging of disparate cultures. I see a great HBS case study coming out of this.

Link: Disney to Acquire Pixar for $7.4B in Stock: Financial News – Yahoo! Finance.

The Walt Disney Co.’s purchase of Pixar Animation Studios Inc. allows Disney to inject new creative life into its animation efforts, while Pixar can end its public run at the top of its game.

Innovation/Strategy

Multimedia Blogging and Social Media Enter a New Era With the Launch of JuiceCaster (press release)

Posted on by charlie

If you want to get an idea of what I have been thinking of, check out JuiceCaster. I haven’t played with it, but philosophically, it’s where I have been trying to get folks to move – take the media that folks create and be the ‘lubricant’ to have them easily share, create, and sell from anywhere.

These guys are not the first, nor the last, to do this (Rabble, comes to mind). And everyone has their take on it and own special challenges.

But, I think it’s hard to build your own community, with so many around.  Juice Wireless is a mobile marketing company. I think part of the play here is the standard ‘we build the reference and then sell heavily to operators and their community’ story. Yeah, that works, but such a play is much better with companies that already have large content creating communities (think, MySpace, Six Apart, Google, Yahoo, and so on). Communities don’t move and personal content causes it’s own lock-in.

To all you existing mega-communities: Mobilize and close the create-consume-connect cycle.

Link: Multimedia Blogging and Social Media Enter a New Era With the Launch of JuiceCaster — The World’s First Personal Broadcast Network: Financial News – Yahoo! Finance.

The JuiceCaster(tm) Network (http://www.juicecaster.com), the world’s first Personal Broadcast Network, is launched today by Juice Wireless, an award-winning creator of interactive mobile applications. JuiceCaster enables any consumer to quickly and easily create, distribute, and access original multi-media content called JuiceCasts, including text, pictures, audio and/or video, from virtually any digital device, from PCs to cell phones, iPods and more. The JuiceCaster Network integrates the JuiceCaster functionality on a large range of content driven web sites, so that any user on any web site in the network can easily find and experience any JuiceCast created by any other user on any other site in the JuiceCaster Network.

The Narrative

Golden Swamp hosting the Carnival of the Mobilists

Posted on by charlie

Link: Golden Swamp – Carnival of the Mobilists.

Welcome to the GoldenSwamp, which is proud to host the first Carnival of the Mobilists for 2006 — themed this week toward the mobile future. GoldenSwamp.com is my blog for posting terrific knowledge available as open content for learning on the Internet. This golden knowledge is the future of learning. In the masthead the Idea Frog will tell you the basics, tadpole tabs lead to more ideas, and if you put your cursor over the little boy he will start learning from his mobile phone. My new book about all of this is featured in the sidebar. My entry for the Carnival describes The Interactive Fly (don’t miss the gastrulation slides). On to the stellar entries below, and again welcome! Judy Breck, Swampkeeper

The Narrative

Leaving your laptop behind – adventures in mobile computing

Posted on by charlie

Andrew Carton is a great guy and has turned his love for the Treo into a great business (see Rodrigo put him on the spot here).

While browsing Andrew’s site, I saw this article on how Peter Arts, someone Andrew corresponds with, was able to leave his laptop behind by building a multi-part tool around the Treo 600. It seems Peter has been refining this tool for many years (as have I, see this quaint old article of mine from early 2000).

Link: Treo 600: How to leave your laptop behind.

What this kind of discussion of mobile computing always brings to mind is the push and pull between converged devices that have everything or multi-part solutions. Each have their plusses and minuses and I think there’s room for both.

Blindspot/Strategy/The Narrative

Blindspot: Mobile TV

Posted on by charlie

I have a list of items that I call ‘Blindspots’ – things that others seems to be excited about but I just don’t get (either I’m not excited, or I need to learn more). My fear is that I am missing something in the discussion or alternately, I get something that others do not. Either way, my eyes glaze over when folks start lathering at the mouth over one of my well developed blindspots.

The MobHappy guys took a hatchet to Mobile TV recently. And I totally concur with their sentiments. My take is also that TV, as in regular streaming broadcast TV, doesn’t make sense anymore on any platform, so it’s dead already when it hits the mobile device (disclaimer – my company makes DVBH devices, but I don’t, so this is my opinion*). And video itself is not really mobile. Portable, yes. Mobile, as in walking and using the mobile device, no.

On the other hand, something is up in the apparent success with the video iPod and I think that points to where portable video is going. Specific videos. Good size and format. Easy discovery and management.

So, my suggestion is to watch the iPod for where portable video is going, not these ridiculous mobile TV pilots.

Link: Please, Make The Mobile TV Hype Stop at MobHappy.

The results of two mobile TV trials in the UK have been released, with plenty of stories painting the service as The! Next! Big! Thing! But both of these trials raise as many questions as they answer. Russell mentioned yesterday how the results of the first trial showed people were more interested in — and spent more time — listening to the radio than watching TV on their handsets, but the spin is clearly turned on over at BT Movio, talking about “consumer thirst” for mobile TV.

More blindspots coming (eh, I’m not perfect). What’s your blindspot?

*My company also makes Series 60 devices and the 770 Internet Tablet, all of which could easily adopt a iPod like model in finding, packaging, and viewing videos in a portable way (kinda like the PSP, too).