Wednesday, April 10, 2002|
A la i-mode I-mode's popularity in Japan, where it is used by over 31m subscribers, owes much to local factors, such as the high cost of dial-up Internet access, a fondness for gadgets and a lack of enthusiasm for PCs. But two of the reasons for i-mode's success can be easily replicated in Europe. The first is its business model, which involves generous revenue-sharing with providers of content. Once approved by DoCoMo, each i-mode content provider can charge users up to ¥300 ($2.50) per month. DoCoMo collects these charges as part of the monthly bill, takes a 9% commission and passes the rest to the content provider. KPN has adopted a similar revenue-sharing model.
The second aspect of i-mode's success that European operators are starting to emulate is the notion of the operator-specific handset. In Japan, handset makers work closely with the country's three operators, each of which uses its own network technology. This means that a handset designed for use on one network will not work on another. But it has the advantage that operators can specify handset features in great detail, enabling them to differentiate themselves from their rivals, and ensuring tight integration between handset, services and content. Japan's smallest operator, J-Phone, has had great success with its camera-phones, which allow photos to be taken and e-mailed while on the move. KPN's European i-mode service requires a special handset made by NEC or Toshiba. |
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Enron's Kenneth Lay: The Last Road Not Taken On August 22, 2002, Enron vice president Sherron Watkins visited chief executive Kenneth Lay in his Houston headquarters and warned him that the company could "implode in a wave of accounting scandals." At that moment, says Michael Useem, director of Wharton's Center for Leadership and Change Management, Lay could have taken specific action that would have prevented bankruptcy and saved the jobs of thousands of Enron employees. Useem compares Lay[base ']s choices with those facing Salomon chief executive John Gutfreund a decade earlier. 7:06:10 PM  comment
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Telephone Call Centers: The Factory Floors of the 21st Century For most of the past century, factories offered a path upward for Americans short on education. But millions of [base "]good[per thou] manufacturing jobs have fallen victim to automation and global competition, leaving many low and semi-skilled workers to turn to a 21st century replacement: the telephone call center. What are the advantages of call centers, how can the technology best be used and what is the outlook for call-center employment in the next decade? 7:01:36 PM comment
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Making Wi-Fi pay Boingo and Joltage: pointing the way to Wi-Fi profitability The Wi-Fi landscape has flaws in both the top-down model, as well as the bottom-up model for spreading the technology to a mass market. However, the approach of Boingo and Joltage as possible solutions for tying a Wi-Fi network together, may be a viable one. This recent article from The Economist gives an excellent overview of the Wi-Fi market and provides some reasons why companies like Boingo may succeed. 6:10:05 PM comment
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Content is Not King "DoCoMo today admitted that it missed its own 3G subscriber goals. The carrier had planned to add 150,000 new subscribers for its 3G services by the end of March. DoCoMo managed to sign up only 89,000 new users as of March 31. The carrier expects its overall mobile growth to slow by 30 percent over the next three months." [source: FierceWireless]
Further support for Dr. Odlyzko's provocative thesis? You be the judge. For what it's worth, I'm in near complete agreement with him. |
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British Telecom re-enters wireless market with mobile enterprise Just five months after spinning off its mobile division, British Telecom Group today said it plans to re-enter the wireless market with a series of mobile enterprise services. BT will buy airtime from its wireless offspring mm02, and then re-package the time along with a suite of mobile voice and data offerings. As a part of its new strategy, the company also plans to build Britian's first public WLAN network, installing hot spots in airports and other locations throughout the country. BT plans to install 400 hot spots within a year and 4,000 within three years. The WLAN network will cost BT only $14.35 million a year and will serve to compliment the company's mobile data offerings. BT plans to earn $716 million in revenue from its new mobile enterprise services by 2007.
For more on BT's new mobile enterprise strategy read the rest of the article. |
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News.com Vinod Khosla on the real-time enterprise (there is a Yahoo group dedicated to this). He concludes that 1) composite apps are the way to go -- these are apps that leverage multiple packaged solutions via Web services to provide corporate specific solutions, 2) the structure of the Internet and the Web is increasingly going to be the structure of corporate IT systems, and that 3) end-users need control over real-time data to construct their own business processes. I concur on all of these points. K-Logs and the real-time enterprise technologies are two-sides of the same coin. K-Logs offer an elegant solution to getting what is in employees heads and on their desktops organized over time and into a shared repository, where it can be archived, searched, and browsed. It captures unstructured data and provides the context that makes it useful. Real-time enterprise technologies get important data into the hands of employees so they can make use of it. It breaks down walls between sources of information and enables new combinations to emerge that aid operations. The point of integration for both improvements (both K-Logging and composite apps that allow employees to consumer real-time data services), should and will be on the desktop. The interface will be in a Web browser. The desktop platform for these apps will be able to interconnect with Web Services. Again, the price of admission to this new world is $39.95. [John Robb's Radio Weblog] |
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Bots: The New Mobile Infantry. Who was that guy in camouflage running around with grad students and robots at Ground Zero in the days following the terrorist attacks? It was a former Army lieutenant colonel, using the new mechanical dogs of war. By Michael Behar of Wired magazine. [Wired News] 5:04:09 PM comment
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EE Times: Intel wants to turn PCs into wireless LAN access points. Intel is working on ways to repartition the software for an 802.11 access point so that part of the task runs on a PC host and part on an 802.11 client PC card in the system. That could reduce the price of a consumer access point from $250 to about $100... [Tomalak's Realm] 5:03:40 PM comment
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CTO Forum: IBM's Wladawsky-Berger talks grids [IDG InfoWorld] 5:03:23 PM comment
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RIM: Future More Grim Than Expected. Lowers guidance for future [allNetDevices Wireless News] 4:16:46 PM comment
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Will Microsoft go on a buying binge?. As the company's antitrust trial drags on, Microsoft is sitting on $38 billion in cash. Some analysts expect it to start buying, but others say acquisitions aren't the wisest move. [CNET News.com]
I think they should just buy a country and declare themselves a sovereign nation. Something specious like Anti-Trust laws wouldn't pose a problem anymore... |
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Tim O'Reilly: Inventing the Future.
The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed... |
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Analysis: Microsoft fires back in Web services war [IDG InfoWorld] 4:06:32 PM comment
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In-flight satellite Internet service coming soon [IDG InfoWorld] 3:48:37 PM comment
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Wireless Spending On This Rise? The latest Morgan Stanley survey of CIOs showed that wireless is rising on the list of IT spending priorities. Do you see this happening in your company? What are employees most interested in using? 12:57:31 PM comment
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BroadVision Makes Apps Available On Mobile Devices Voice interaction is one of the features enabled by the software, which will let users access e-commerce and portal Web applications from wireless PDAs and WAP devices, kiosks, ATMs and point-of-sale terminals. 12:56:20 PM comment
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Gartner: Handheld Market To Be Steady In 2002 Shipments of handheld computers are expected to grow this year at about the same rate as 2001, but smart phones should provide competition. 12:55:08 PM comment
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IT Plays Radio Tag Controlling product and parts inventory via bar codes is low-tech, labor-intensive and costly; radio-frequency tagging adds upfront expenses but can cut labor costs by automating and speeding up data acquisition and processing. 12:53:03 PM comment
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Last update: 9/11/05; 11:25:34 AM .
