Lunch break time. I liked this entry on social benefits of broadband over at the Technology Liberation Front (and I thought I had a good blog name…).

Money quote:

The New Milenium Research Council today released a study on the benefits of broadband, which finds almost $1 trillion in benefits related to elderly and disabled Americans alone.

Even if their counting is off by an order of magnitude, it’s a lot of money. I’ve often said that the future route to success in network operation is innovation in finance — i.e. pricing, ownership, funding. The above echoes what I heard over at Citynet. Why is the City of Amterdam taking a 1/3 stake in their muni fiber network? One reason is that you don’t need to keep grandma at home and out of the residential care for more than a few days to pay for your videolink.

Find the beneficiaries of the network, and tap them for the cash. Just don’t necessarily expect the beneficiaries to be the same as the users, and for heavens sake get away from the horrific marketing, billing and support costs of traditional network sales.

11:22:39 PM    comment   

When at Sprint, myself and David used to run around doing exec presentations on how the Sprint diamond logo (RIP) should be a trust mark, and that Sprint could add value as an intermediaryby making people’s (wireless) web browsing experience safer and more convenient. We even filed a patent, whereby the operator logo on the handset would light up when showing operator-provided interstitial advice pages.

Anyhow, we used to get a lot of blank stares, and telcoheads looking at us like we’d just come back from vacation on planet Zog.

I don’t think we’d get that reaction now. Just take a look at this:

This is the fire-up splash page from their new anti-phishing plug-in for Firefox. Google is the Web’s new trustmark. Can you imagine any telco positioning themselves in this way? Every intermediation of a telco is regarded with distrust and suspicion. Nobody sees a telco trademark and thinks (however naively): “these guys are on our side”. Google have to follow “don’t be evil”, not because they’re nice, but because the privacy effects of theis business give them no choice.

PS - Notice Amazon/Alexa’s new service where they are offering web crawling APIs (for a fee)? We argued that Sprint was in a good position to become the champion of commercial web services APIs, where people assembled applications from lots of component services, but where money was also due to flow between those parties. The idea was to leverage Sprint’s natural advantage in providing an in-house selection of web services (messaging, profile, identity, etc.) into a wider sphere. Needless to say, those ideas got killed, and Sprint remains a capital-bound midwestern telco, and not a cash-machine virtual enterprise like Google.

10:24:45 PM    comment