Tuesday, May 27, 2003

Can mobile wireless drive the market up? I watch the local news in New Jersey every morning.  For the last 2 years the stock market report has always been gloomy.  No hope to be found in any of the reports. But something is changing.  I wonder this morning will it continue? I am starting to see and feel a glimmer of hope in the last week of reports.  Mostly driven by Verizon and its mobile phone offerings and the obvious downward slowdown in the market.  I am no market expert but could this be the beginning of the upward cycle? Will mobile wireless be the driver that moves the rest of the market up?  Time will tell.  Are others feeling and seeing this?  I remember the last time I felt like this, again admitting not being any expert in the market field.  It was around 1994.  I was watching the Internet grooving and the Web building a head of steam during the day at work.  Then I came home to watch the mainstream reports on how bad the market was.  Then one day is seems it all changed.  In reality I remember it taking the mainstream market reporters about 6 months to a year to slowly switch over from their doom and gloom reporting to the over positive reporting that helped blow up and drive the bubble. H.G. 7:17:04 AM  comment []       Practical Considerations in Tracing a Blogosphere Story Practical Considerations in Tracing a Blogosphere Story. Tracing the development of a blog story is difficult and poses problems that identifies the importance of the activity of blogging itself. Over the past week, Microdoc News has been focusing on blogging as a collective activity, which can be considered as collective journalism, that is, creating a collective story through the conversation taking place between blogs. Microdoc News began discussing blogging as collective journalism in "Dynamics of a Blogosphere Story" and provided further refinements in "Googlewashed Revisited: Shape of a Blogologue". Collectively, since Tuesday 20 May, 2003, bloggers have constructed a blogologue or collective blog-story starting from the Microdoc News stories. ... While it is interesting following the development of a blogosphere story being built through collective journalism, we think it is indeed difficult to isolate the story from the Internet. In mapping other stories we need also to indicate the way the story gets reported in other forms of online communication and the way those other forms of communication change the flow of the blogosphere stories. Blogging practiced collectively is an organizing influence on the Internet. It is not surprising that we cannot divorce a collective blogosphere story from the rest of the web. ++ [Elwyn Jenkins: MicrodocBlogger] 6:13:09 AM  comment []       More Wi-Fi hype More Wi-Fi hype. I thought this was a bit ranty for Mobitopia, but have been asked to post it anyway... More wi-fi rubbish. Taking it one point at a time: 4G??? 4G???? How far away is that from being a realistic, deployed, consumer thang? 10 years? We're a few years away from 3G being launched, to try and predict what 4G will bring without taking into account the lessons we'll learn from 2.5G and 3G seems just plain stupid. Alternatively, you can make any old prediction you like and stuff it full of meaningless buzzwords ("integrated wi-fi broadband" indeed!), praying that if you're wrong, no-one will remember. But Google is my elephant, and I shall not forget. "Today, broadband is email; but it enables voice"... err, what? You need broadband for voice communications? Tell that to the telcos who've been running mass-market, reliable voice comms over GSM for 12 years (or whatever it is). Tell it to folks like Real who've been streaming audio over plain old modem connections since 96/97 (or maybe earlier, I can't be bothered to check). Broadband is email? Yeah, like goats are cheese. Nokia are launching a WiFi phone? Great, now let's see applications for it, and a network to support it, and someone to pay for that network, and maintain it, and handle customer complaints, and run it alongside all the other 802.11 networks out there without degrading them. And who said Bluetooth was destined to be "a LAN access technology"? I mean, obviously we've had the wireless idiots who claimed that every step taken past starbucks would lead to an "m-voucher" being bleeped into our skulls, but who said Bluetooth was for anything other than connecting devices (where it sits very happily now, and works)? I like Wi-Fi, I really do - it's a fantastic piece of tech and has 1001 uses. But can people please SHUT UP about how it's going to kill everything else and rule the world? Until you can deliver QoS over it, work out a way of deploying it cheaper than you can a 3G network, and until Wi-Fi is a standard part of phone handsets, it won't go anywhere beyond where it lives now: a great last-50-yards wireless network tech. Posted by Tom Hume Add Comment [Mobitopia] I agree.  A bit ranty.  "it won't go anywhere beyond where it lives now: a great last-50-yards wireless network tech." is not a bad place to live for now.  Purely driven by the present market needs, demands and safe business positioning. True: It is not clear if the telcos will support QoS in their hotspot deployment today.  We don't expect them to right away.  They don't have to because the mass market is not ready for VoIP yet.  The present infrastructure is great for most data stuff we do today on Enterprise LANS. So the present WiFi generation offerings keeps the offering away from reliable wireless business voice apps like VoIP that would compete with their other cell offerings, their cash cow of the moment.  Perfect happy medium right now if you ask me. But I expect the WiFi evolution action, the future hot spot network drivers are in the enterprise hot spot space.  The place where the telco signals break down and the corporation must invest in their own wireless infrastructure.  Today that network is WiFi.  Here we will see QoS, mobile WiFi phone, VoIP and other mobile apps that will drive the next generation of public hot spots and public wireless in general.   I'm sure this is a space be watched carefully by all.  It's these apps that may drive and fragment the next generation of public wireless space.  As Tom says, many lessons yet to be learned before declaring victory.  Brace yourself for much hype from all wireless network infrastructure camps in the coming years.  H.G. 6:03:47 AM  comment []

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