Continuing its masterly replay of Microsoft's old kill-competitors-by-bundling-their-products-as-free-features-in-our-platform strategy, Google today begins giving away tools for analyzing the effectiveness of web advertising. The Google Analytics service is a repackaging of the Urchin software that Google acquired earlier this year. In addition to the competitive benefits - Google Analytics is a hammer blow to small specialist companies like Web Side Story, and it neutralizes analytics as a potential advantage for direct competitors like Yahoo and Microsoft - the free service will likely increase sales for Google's AdWords service. Analytical tools for ad performance are a complement to advertising itself. By giving the complement away, you'll tend to boost demand for the ads. (Joel Spolsky explains the economics of complements well.)

Of course, the service also means that Google will gain access to a ton of new data on ad performance that it can analyze itself. For one thing, Google Analytics can be applied to ad campaigns running outside the Google network, giving Google information on how its competitors' programs perform. For another, Google will gain greater insight into the decision making of its AdWords customers, information that could help it in optimizing its ad pricing (ie, maximizing its income at customers' expense). No need to worry, though. Google says we can all trust it to do the right thing. A Google executive told CNET: "We have very strict controls on the data. It is only used to provide reporting to customers and people using the analytics."

It's hard to complain about getting stuff for free that you used to have to pay for. This is, after all, how competition is supposed to work - the benefits fall to the customer. And that's great. Beyond the question about what happens to the data Google collects, though, there's another concern, which may or may not be purely theoretical. When Microsoft fought competitors by bundling new features into its operating system, it was frequently attacked for chilling innovation. When you give a product or service away, you take away the economic incentive for inventors and entrepreneurs to improve the product. Google right now is such a rabid innovator that it's hard to think of the company as being a force that impedes innovation. But even a cute 800-pound gorilla is still an 800-pound gorilla.

12:39:29 PM    comment   

Friendster's fading. Flickr's feeling tired. But MySpace is rocking, Facebook's booming and TagWorld's launching.

It's clear that community sites can have a lot of appeal, particularly to the young. MySpace, for instance, logged nearly 12 billion page views last month - that's more than eBay - according to Business Week. What's less clear is how long the appeal will last. Will those that flock to community sites when they're fashionable hang around indefinitely? Or will they stay only until a hipper joint opens up down the (virtual) street?

My guess is that online hot spots, like their real-world counterparts, will go in and out of fashion fairly quickly - and that those betting on their staying power will be disappointed. One reason is simply the fickleness of the young; as soon as a place gets too popular (and the bald-headed guys with backwards baseball caps start showing up), the trendsetters head for the exits, and the crowd soon follows.

But another, more subtle force may also be at work. On the surface, it would seem that the more you invest in a community site - designing a home page, uploading photos, tagging everything that moves - the harder it would be to leave. After all, if you go somewhere else, you'll have to start all over. But maybe it's just the opposite. Maybe what's really fun about these sites is the initial act of exploring them, putting your mark on them, checking out the marks made by others, spreading the word to friends, and so on. Once you've done that, maybe you start to get bored and begin looking around for a new diversion - a different place to explore and set up temporary quarters. Community sites may be like games: once they become familiar, they lose their appeal. You want to start fresh.

When it comes to Web 2.0 communities, in other words, familiarity may breed not loyalty but contempt. As we're seeing with beleaguered Friendster, their trajectories may follow the paths of bottle rockets: up fast, down fast.

If I were Rupert Murdoch, whose News Corp. bought MySpace a couple of months ago, I wouldn't just be investing in expanding the MySpace property. I'd be building (or buying) the site that's going to displace MySpace as the in-place. It's fine to pitch a business to a capricious clientele; just don't expect stability.

12:38:38 PM    comment   

Rafat got the word that The Facebook might be working on a mobile version of their psychotically popular social networking site on Amp’d’s new network. Wow. That’d be a killer combination, if you ask me, and it’d be a massive win for a new service like Amp’d.

I can’t say I’m a huge Mobile Social Networking fan. I think there are have been enough attempts so far at it, that if it hasn’t taken off yet, it probably won’t without some other magic ingredient. And I don’t think that ingredient is another feature like LBS, I’m talking about another solid reason to use the social network - like MySpace’s music stuff, or the FaceBook’s school focus. The Friendster lesson is simply that networking for networking’s sake gets you lots of users, but then if there’s no there there, they go away as quickly as they arrived.

Personally, I think that if mobile socialnetworking networking sites have a fault, it’s not that they’re missing a feature, it’s that they have too many. I think drastically simpler services like PartySync will in the end, end up drawing more users and use than all these complex friend of friend schemes out there.

Still, you can’t help but wonder at what will happen if/when Amp’d launches Facebook Mobile, and what sort of sound a bazillion horny/drunk students out there will make as they move simultaneously to their network. ;-)

-Russ

12:37:31 PM    comment   

Well this is pretty cool, a year and a week after I ask for a mobile version of Konfabulator, it turns out that Opera launches their new mobile AJAX Platform product, which is essentially that. Yeah!

From their site:

Creating advanced applications using open standards Web technologies is significantly easier and more-cost-efficient than using traditional technologies. Because Opera Platform[base ']Ñ¢ is based on Web technologies, any Web developer can quickly and affordably create new and advanced mobile applications with a remarkably short time-to-market. Existing Web applications can easily be adapted to fit the mobile phone. …

Very cool. There is also a new 8.5 version of the S60 Opera Browser as well, but this is a completely different product. The Opera Platform is an extended version of the browser, in three parts: The Application Player (the browser engine with extensions to access native functionality like contacts, messaging, etc.), Application Framework (UI elements) and the actual web-standards based Application (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc.).

The cool thing is they’ve synced their releases, so you can download their regular browser to do your widget development on your desktop (even on my Mac!). This is pretty damn neat if you ask me. I’m definitely going to mess with this thing and see what I can come up with.

-Russ

12:36:17 PM    comment   

Sunil Jain, in his latest article in Business Standard (via Rediff), writes that the latest actions of goverment indicate that it may be undermining the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India. Am highlighting some points from the article.

More so since, when it comes to Trai’s other powers, to insist that telecom firms allow others to interconnect with their subscribers on fair terms, these have been circumscribed by the telecom appellate tribunal, the TDSAT.

While it just takes a simple instruction from Maran to say interconnection disputes are part of Trai’s jurisdiction, the minister’s in no hurry to do anything of the sort – let Trai fight out the issue in the Supreme Court seems to be his view.

While formulating the USL in 2004, Trai’s argument for extending the protection was that long-distance telcos like Reliance, Bharti and the Tatas (VSNL) had invested good money and so needed some time to recoup this – an argument not used to give cellular firms more time during the WLL mobile days!

When Trai said, in line with the global practice, that BSNL would have to allow others access to its last-mile fibre going into consumers’ homes, the ministry simply ignored this recommendation. The short point is that while Maran has done the right thing by increasing competition in the long-distance business, there is a fundamental conflict of interest.

First, he’s responsible for BSNL’s profits. Second, as a politician, his interests cannot be the same as that of the industry. The ADC and VPN cases are examples of just this.

But what if the regulator hasn’t done a good job? After all, in the WLL mobile case and the long-distance cartel, Baijal’s decisions were one-sided. So how do you prevent a regulator from being arbitrary?

An arbitrary regulator, it is true, is a bad thing, but is any day preferable to an arbitrary politician.

12:34:07 PM    comment   

Celcom (Malaysia) Bhd will offer full coverage of its 3G services nationwide by March 2006, says its chief executive officer, Datuk Shazalli Ramly. Shazalli said that Celcom hoped its 3G subscribers would increase significantly once the platform of 3G services is available throughout the country.
Tag: | Posted in: Countries Specific 3G News AsiaPac Malaysia Country
Our 3G Support Service - [Daily 3G News]
12:31:07 PM    comment   

SFR has posted revenues of [base ']Ǩ6.48bn for the first nine months of 2005, up by 7.6% from 2004, on a comparable basis. Operating profits grew by 10.4% to [base ']Ǩ2.03bn, compared to the first nine months of 2004. For Q3 only, revenues reached [base ']Ǩ2.24bn, up by 6.7%, and profits rose by 7.5% to [base ']Ǩ692m. SFR also reported 515,000 3G subscribers as of end October 2005, ahead of its initial objective to reach 500,000 3G customers by the end of the year.
Tag: | Posted in: Countries Specific 3G News Europe France End Users
Our 3G Support Service - [Daily 3G News]
12:30:16 PM    comment   

"VODAFONE UK customers have accessed one million streams of mobile TV in 14 days. This follows the launch of Sky Mobile TV on the Vodafone 3G network but does include some viewing of Channel 4 too."
Tag: | Posted in: Specific 3G News Opinion
Our 3G Support Service - [Daily 3G News]
12:28:20 PM    comment   

Harish Bhat, TTSL president (Marketing), said, "Crossing the six million customer milestone has been a remarkable achievement by Tata Indicom. We have strived hard to achieve this magic figure in such a short time and it is the fastest growth posted by any CDMA service provider in the country."

12:26:12 PM    comment   

WorldSpace chairman and chief executive officer Noah Samara said, âo[ogonek]We have already invested $200 million in India. Further investments will be mainly for developing technology to enable implementation of services, content development and marketing.âo?

Related:
WorldSpace Plans To Invest $150 Million In India In Next Two Years
WorldSpace Is Rocking In India; 114% Growth In Subscriber Base In Q3 [ContentSutra]
12:25:13 PM    comment   

In India, 20% of respondents expressed an interest for mobile data applications. While the lowest proportion of all the markets surveyed, this would still represent an opportunity of about 27 million users. If these subscribers opt to spend the $1.44/month mentioned as the preferred spending level, mobile data has the potential of generating annual revenues of $466.5 Million. Given that BRIC countries are forecasted to add an estimated 645 million new subscribers over the next five years, the mobile data opportunity is substantial.

12:19:08 PM    comment   

According to Branson, Virgin would foray only if it could âo[ogonek]shake up the marketâo? and not just be a me-too case. Virgin Mobile is a major provider of mobile communications in the UK with over five million customers. Virgin Mobile launched its operations as a mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) in November 1999.

12:04:45 PM    comment   

Two of the best writers on information technology, Robert X. Cringely and Joel Spolsky, have just delivered thought-provoking new articles. Cringely speculates on how Google plans to deploy scores of portable data centers throughout the land, which combined with its reputed ownership of large amounts of installed fiber-optic cable will enable it to turn "the entire Internet into a giant processing and storage grid" under its control. "There will be the Internet, and then there will be the Google Internet, superimposed on top. We'll use it without even knowing. The Google Internet will be faster, safer, and cheaper ... And the final result is that Web 2.0 IS Google."

Spolsky offers an alternative, and persuasive, take on why record companies are trying to get Apple to charge different prices for songs at its iTunes Music Store. "What they really want," he argues, "is a system they can manipulate to send signals about what songs are worth, and thus what songs you should buy. I assure you that when really bad songs come out, as long as they're new and the recording industry wants to promote those songs, they'll charge the full $2.49 or whatever it is to send a fake signal that the songs are better than they really are." We usually assume that you increase sales by reducing prices, but as Spolsky shows it's not so simple. Consumers are anything but rational.

11:44:47 AM    comment   

John Battelle in an op-ed for The New York Times argues that we are not in a bubble, but instead we are building a better boom. Looking back over past few years, John argues that things have changed for the better. Open source software, commodity hardware and the ever falling prices of hardware have been game changers.

These emerging trends, were chronicled by me in pages of Business 2.0, first in The Rise of The Insta-Company, and then, The New Road To Riches and Escape from Silicon Valley. My colleague Michael Copeland and I had written two stories - The Fifth Wave and The Tech’s Big Comeback in recent months. What we point out that what were emerging trends are now a given.

John today, and Michael Parekh yesterday argue that the Web 2.0 is not in a bubble. I agree - so far it is not a bubble. But it can very quickly become one. Less than $200 million invested and some $100 million worth of exits. Not a bubble. Of course, those who have had successful - Flickr, OddPost and Weblogs Inc - most were built in the throes of what I call Internet depression. And raised minimal outside investments and bootstrapped. (Less is More!)

Looking forward, there are some signs that make you go… oh! oh!

The recent frenzy to fund say five to-do-lists, or five video hosting sites or whatever. What we have is “Babble 2.0.” We are talking about these new tiny-tots in breathless tones ( I am guilty as charged!) and talking a lot… all the time. We are not asking the “show me the money questions.” That is giving VC community some kind of a nervous tic, and an itch to invest …. as much as they can… now. I think the babble is leading to over investments, and hence the general sense of a bubble.

There is a chance of things getting out of control. Here is a scary statistic sent to me by the law firm of Foley & Lardner LLP. They surveyed top executives, advisors, outside consultants and investors in the emerging technology industry, and were told by 75% of the respondents that in these days of stagnant, post-bubble IPO M&A is the only exit. Wow… can there be so many M&A deals?

I think being nervous and cautious is a good thing. I love innovation, I love new ideas, and I love a happy, growing Silicon Valley. What I don’t like is what happened in 2000. No I don’t like entrepreneurs getting hurt, getting dispirited. Just because someone had to put too much money to work!

[ * ] Babble 2.0, first used by none other than Jason Fried. Copy right… Mr. Fried.

11:35:30 AM    comment   

Quite what the networks, and indeed us consumers will do with all that extra bandwidth remains to be seen. HSDPA PCMCIA cards for laptops are a cert though and maybe for the first time, we[base ']Äôll have really smooth video streaming. Don[base ']Äôt expect HSDPA speeds to stop at around 4Mbps either.
Tag:3g | Posted in: Specific 3G News Opinion
Our 3G Support Service - 3G Interim Management [Daily 3G News]
11:33:18 AM    comment   

The acquisition of one of the largest suppliers to the cable industry of set-top receivers allows Cisco even further entrance to home markets: The company bought Linksys a few years to get into the consumer play, and its purchase of WLAN switch maker Airespace was originally perceived as just an enterprise entry.

But the Airespace division was key in pushing out Cisco's mesh product line this week, which is aimed at municipal deployment. Witness BelAir's recent announcement of cable-plant compatible mesh Wi-Fi that eliminate the backhaul problem wherever there's a cable line, and Tropos's announced entry in Sept. into cable/mesh products with Scientific-Atlanta is, one might suspect, no longer on the table.

Cisco's current product portfolio could let them easily integrated voice, Wi-Fi, remote management, security for home networks, and end-point CPEs for municipal networks into a single black-box. Wherever there's cable, they can provide a cable-oriented box; where there's not, Wi-Fi-based CPEs with similar utility could come into play. The bandwidth for streaming video over municipal networks certainly isn't there, but Cisco isn't known for a one- or two-year horizon.

11:04:59 AM    comment   

JPMorgan, Merrill Lynch & Co. and Lehman Brothers are the underwriters...the stock will trade under the symbol "WTHN"...detailed coverage on our site MocoNews.net [PaidContent.org]
10:57:01 AM    comment   

Thank you Sony. It's about time somebody came out with movies made for your mobile. I mean, let's face it, with the Video iPod and multimedia phones popping up everywhere, it should definitely be easier to get content for these devices. So Sony Pictures has decided to start introducing movies on 128 MB MMC cards. If you have a cellphone that plays multimedia files and has a card slot, you're in. And I'm shocked, shocked I say, that the company is being so kind about not putting all this on Memory Sticks! This is truly a step forward. Way to play nice Sony! Movies slated for first release include Stuart Little, Ghostbusters, Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, and Spiderman 2. One caveat: Don't try to play these flicks on a larger screen because although they should look grand on your small cellphone display, the quality won't hold up on something larger. No word on pricing just yet and the DRM will probably infect every phone in the world and take out the entire Eastern Seaboard, but we can always dream of a world without hate. Anyway, thanks for taking the lead, Sony.

Movie for Mobiles - Sony gets its act together [Phoneyworld]

1:35:50 AM    comment   

I’m sure this is something that’s been raked over before, but I don’t see a common understanding of what ‘Net Neutrality’ actually is. Despite many of the Internetorati demanding it by law. Whatever.

There appear to be several different camps, which you could paint as “bottom of IP”, “middle” and “top”.

The bottomistas would see enforced Internet Protocol itself as a premature optimisation and violation of the end-to-end principle. Unhappy that you only get IPv4 or IPv6? Still grumpy that you only have IPv4 and not even IPv6? Really miserable that your VoIP packets are staggering under the poisonous load of IPv6 headers? You’re a bottomista.

I suspect there are some fundamentalist bottomistas who would object to your service providers not giving you a choice of Ethernet, ATM or roll-you-own-L2-protocol. We’ll pretend to be out and not answer the door when they knock.

The middlemen draw a distinction between “raw IP” (before the ISP gets ahold of it), and “retail IP”, which is what you and I get to experience. This kind of suggests that the OSI 7-layer model got it horribly wrong, because there’s a fundamental cleave right in the middle of layer 3, where IP sits. Fair comment, but sounds pretty radical to me. Although I’ve never really got layer 6, so maybe they’re onto something.

Then you might be a “top of IP” kind of girl. You can cope with the discrimination creeping higher up the stack to the next layer, where particular TCP and UDP ports and flags are screened off. But you only get queasy if particular commercial service providers or applications are targeted. Blocking off port 25 is OK to you, since it doesn’t discriminate against any particular email service provider.

Sadly, these are all hogwash and bunkum.

Net Neutrality is a dead end, because as Searls and Weinberger correctly noted, the Net isn’t a thing, it’s an interconnected set of agreements. These are bilateral and freely entered into. And since those agreements weren’t modelled off a viral template such as the GNU General Public License, they are all unique. There’s no contageous clause that insists the Internet becomes a “thing” by virtue of everyone having to agree to freely and neutrally pass packets in an ever growing pool of Neutraldom. So to impose neutrality you’re going to have to interpose yourself into a lot of contracts. (Another reason why “Internet Governance” is an oxymoron when referring to anything beyond IP address allocation and routing, which do require some central agreement and co-ordination.)

There’s no grand “first principle” from which you can derive network neutrality as an economic argument. No public choice, competition, game theory or otherwise construct that leads us there. Indeed, saying that the public would benefit if there was a transfer of wealth from providers to users isn’t good enough. You’re playing with matches in the oil refinery when you start messing with property rights. Yes, those networks are mostly funded by risk capital. The local loop copper of a fixed operator may still be hangovers from monopoly days, but generally those assets were brought into the private sector on clear rules, the stockholders took a punt, and some of the better informed ones who saw the long-term potential of DSL etc. got to reap a windfall. Of course in parallel the telcos have done a superlative job of lobbying for rules that keep competition out, but that’s a different issue.

But wait a moment, it gets worse.

What if I wanted to allow people in the street to access my WiFi? But I only want to offer web and email, so as to make P2P filesharing tricky. As a good public-spirited citizen I put up a splash page so they know exactly what’s going on. Am I allowed to? Or is Net Neutrality only for the mythical mystical “them”?

When in deploying my network do I need to “design-in” neutrality? Concept, build or operation? Should we be outlawing the deployment of PSTN-specific GSM networks because they’re “unfair” to non-PSTN voice applications like Skype? Am I allowed to deploy non-technological measures for neutrality, such as contract terms? Am I allowed to read the packets, but not block them, in order to enforce my contract (repeat - freely entered into by both partners)?

What level of jitter and congestion is perceived as “neutral”? What if I deploy technology like Qualcomm’s 1xRTT, which separately supports voice and data, with PSTN-only voice, but the data is a bit lousy for VoIP? Is that being unfair, or merely a realistic response to the limitations of technology?

Is neutrality a wholesale or a retail problem? What if the access infrastructure owner offers “neutral” IP connectivity, but no retail provider chooses to pass that on directly to the public without layering on some filtering and price discrimination?

Oh, and what’s so special about the Internet? Do other IP-based networks need neutrality principles? Do any networks? Should more network industries be forced to forego “winner takes all” rewards? Google looks awfully dominant at adverts, doesn’t it… I wonder if that ad network needs a bit of “neutrality”?

Incidentally, althoug I’m against blanket rules enforcing neutrality, I would reserve it as a tool for post hoc competition and antitrust law enforcement. And I think you can make a stand on Network Neutrality on political and free speech grounds, but that requires a very different policy approach (i.e. not one that confiscates the proceeds of private capital investment).

And if the users value a neutral connection so much, perhaps it’s time for them to self-organise a bit, build their own networks, or tender for connectivity together — rather than rolling over and accepting whatever the local telco can cableco provide by default. But that would burst the illusion that government is here to save us from ourselves and we’ve no need to take personal responsibility for our connectivity freedom.

The moment you try to define Network Neutrality, you have to choose a layer, a time, a market, the participants. You have to make non-neutral choices in order to define the boundary of your Neutrasphere. There is no ‘neutral’ space devoid of favouring the interests of particular market players. The contradiction is inherent. There is no way to finesse it away.

Everything’s bass-ackwards. Neutrality is a sign of healthy supply competition and sophisticated ways of demand expression. It’s an output, not an input. Beware demanding net neutrality as a blanket principle, rather than a scalpel to excise particular local anti-competitive acts. Khrushchev declared the corn harvest was great, too — but it didn’t create the incentives for more corn to be sown and for the system to succeed on future iterations. And net neutrality rules are also likely to have the exact opposite effect of that intended.

Net neutrality messes up freedom of contract, freedom of association, and property rights.

I don’t buy it.

1:15:43 AM    comment   

I think this short essay by Ben Hyde is unmissable. Nominally it’s about the pricing of health club memberships. But just do your “sed -e ‘s/health club/telecom/g’” search-and-replace and it magically becomes the snappiest description of the state and future of telecom, ever.

1:13:32 AM    comment   

Step 1: Note BBC article on Growth concerns rattle Vodafone:
“Vodafone has been struggling to reverse a drop in Japanese user numbers. Fears over slower growth at Vodafone in the coming year have driven shares in the mobile phone giant sharply lower.”

Step 2: Ask which product 90% of the revenue comes from.

Step 3: Ask how they’ve improved this product to distinguish it from the competition as a result of their tens of billions of network upgrade expenditure.

For the usual fee, I’ll run a workshop for them with steps 4, 5 and 6 :)

Isn’t it an amazing industry where the one product that hardly ever changes or improves is the one that pays the bills? We can make 8-megapixel camera phone, but we can’t seem to get into market one with better audio quality or that can handle voicemails offline.

1:10:04 AM    comment   

David Isenberg is worried that I’ve been turned by the telecom borg into a fan of telcothink. I can see why he’s concerned, but I’ll try to explain why I don’t think it’s a problem.

Network Neutrality entrenches the current status quo in the US. The conditions in the US are unique to that country; no other has a comparable market structure and regulatory environment.

Here in the UK I subscribe to Zen Internet. They block ports 135-139 on TCP and UDP to exclude Microsoft LAN file-sharing protocols from operating across the WAN.

And I don’t care.

Zen caters specifically to people like me who value a high-quality Internet connection and are willing to pay a small premium for unfettered access and quality customer service. If no ISP offers truly “unfiltered” neutral Internet connectivity in the UK, it’s because there’s no demand for it. Why campaign for something that the public by its actions has expressed no desire to have?

There are better remedies to failed telecom competition laws than Net Neutrality. The most obvious is to simply copy the rules from somewhere else that has cracked the problem. Plenty to choose from higher up the list! I suspect that this will be too hard a pill for my American friends to swallow, so they’ll just have to continue with their disease until he symptoms worsen and the bitter medicine tastes less foul.

Personally, I think it’s wonderful that SBC’s CEO falls asleep at night wondering how he can get Google to pay for his pipes. This is precisely the kind of creative business thinking we need! Yes, they are HIS PIPES — at least colloquially, as I’m sure the shareholders have an opinion on who actually owns the business. If he can find new ways of funding them, whoopee!

The problem is that he can possibly make such price increases stick because he’s established significant market power by ensuring the rules preclude real competition.

More radically, you could try to seed a new “open” Internet via a General Peering Agreement which, much like the GNU General Public License, would agglomerate an ever-bigger pool of openness. That said, it isn’t easy to see where you would start now to achieve this. It would have been a slam-dunk 15 years ago when most of the Net was the wiring between universities and a few early entrants like Sun Microsystems.

Another alternative would be a radical approach that would allow customers to “opt out” of Bell hegemony and reclaim ownership of their local loop at regulated rates. A more extreme form of unbundling — one which could even be done at the exchange level. Imagine receiving a ballot card which would allow all the users of an exchange to select one wholesale provider! Now that would generate some business on K Street.

Freer rules on unlicensed spectrum would help those who dream of a wireless mesh future bypassing access bottlenecks. And so on. In fact, pretty much anything apart from Network Neutrality, please!

Ultimately, if the customers really only wanted TV with a ‘buy’ button and that’s all the market was capable of delivering, then yes I’d be in favour. But as David notes, the “market” doesn’t really exist in the US. The problem is that blanket Net Neutrality rules will make things worse, not better. It’ll eliminate the bottom end of the ISP market by preventing price discrimination, and these people will be attracted to the more price-discrimination friendly IMS world. Not the outcome we desire.

Call me a Hayekian or Chicagoan, but I really believe that the price mechanism is important, and that it’s vital that monopoly rent price signals be allowed to be sent. How else do you ever expect to attract new capital to create competition?

The time to apply Network Neutrality rules is this: an incumbent with monopoly or duopoly power in the connectivity market also offers an application service like email, voice telephony or TV. Only then do you have cause to ensure that the application market remains open. (You’ll need some small print to deal with cases where it’s an affiliate who stands to gain and pass the money over through the back door; e.g. an SBC-Yahoo! deal which excluded rival portals.) All other forms of price discrimination are legit.

As mentioned before, there’s also the issue of truth in labelling when people buy “Internet access” or “broadband”. That needs to be dealth with separately too.

If you’ve got cancer, you’ve got to take the chemotherapy. The morphine is only there to relieve the pain, not to make you better. Sorry for the unpleasant diagnosis, but that’s the way it is.

1:01:27 AM    comment   

Hmmm.

This long tail thing.

Isn’t it interesting that so much of this microcontent is captured and hosted by dirty great big commercial Net enterprises? And that almost none of our photo sharing is direct P2P, for example?

It’s as if the head is eating the tail. I’ll have to go fetch one of my old topology textbooks to see what’s supposed to happen next.

12:54:19 AM    comment   

Article in DNA has a good analysis of growth trends in Indian telecom. It starts with the point that since India now has a large user base, the percentage of growth will be lower.

Year-on-year growth in the past four months was 52%, much lower than the comparable period growth rate of about 80%.

ARPUs are expected to fall as a large chunk of the growth is coming from the pre-paid segment, which generates lower revenues vis-s-vis the post-paid segment.

In fact, the growth in the pre-paid segment is largely being driven by the Rs 200 recharge coupon which industry majors had launched in the June quarter.
Revenue per user in this segment is less than half the average that companies like Bharti and Hutch enjoy currently.
Analysts say the growth kicker from the Rs 200 recharge coupon could wane by the end of this fiscal.

Players who are rolling out their networks aggressively are growing at rates faster than those who aren[base ']Äôt.

In fact, in the case of BSNL, circles like Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh (East) have seen double-digit month-on-month growth in subscriber numbers, thanks to fresh capacity.

So, on the one hand, revenue growth is expected to be lower than earlier periods, and, on the other, growth in cash flow may not keep pace with growth in revenues given the high level of capex by most major players.

It[base ']Äôs surprising, therefore, that Bharti trades at a forward price-earnings multiple (2006-07) of 19 times, not much lower than Infosys[base ']Äô valuation of about 22 times, when the latter[base ']Äôs free cash flows are expected to grow at faster rates.

12:50:22 AM    comment   

Though they've been bouncing the idea of a $100 laptop around for a while ($100 Laptop - No Child Left Behind), it looks like it's finally becoming a reality. The lime green laptop is about the size of a text book and with a hand crank to allow it to operate without electricity. Designed at the MIT Media Lab, the project mainly aimed at developing countries where a calculator and Internet access can mean the difference between starvation and a good year. The goal is to allow these kids and even adults to actually own the laptops, though governments or charities will pay for them.

Looks like Brazil, Thailand, Egypt and Nigeria are the choices for the first wave of laptops early next year and each is slated to buy at least a million of them. Though not in production yet, one unnamed company has offered to build them fro $110 each and four others are considering joining the effort. They operate at about half the speed of store-bought laptops and will run on an open-source OS. The screen is actually from a portable DVD player and can be viewed in either color or black and white.

Researchers unveil $100 laptop for schoolkids [Reuters]

12:22:15 AM    comment