Friday, September 13, 2002

Yahoo Broadband InfoWorld reported today that Yahoo and SBC have finally delivered their anticipated DSL offer for Yahoo users. Several things are noteworthy about this: There finally appears to be a building critical mass of marketing energy emerging from the big three (Yahoo, AOL and MSN) around broadband. Each of them appear to be "getting the faith" that consumer broadband can not only create new subscription revenue fees, but more importantly provide the basis for creating more valuable online services (there's only so much you can do with 40kbs of HTML). It's great to see aggressive intro pricing. At $29.95/month this starts to look like it could break through the price elasticity that has kept so many consumers tied down to their dial-up services. It's noteworthy that in Japan the government has subsidized broadband pricing into the range of $15/month (wow!), under the theory that unleashing broadband will open up enough new economic valves that it's worth it. On that note, I'll wager that within 12 months that the $29.95/month fee becomes the magic number for consumer broadband, just like $19.95 did for dial-up. Most noteworthy is the almost total lack of compelling content, services and applications that is available. Content, media and communications providers just haven't been willing to build services with the assumption of broadband, putting the industry in a catch-22. Will we soon break through to the other side? 8:46:37 PM    comment []

More Cool Applications This was posted in the comments of the 'Where are the killer apps' item from yesterday. Really great application. It's worth creating a username and checking out their online floorplan and room design tools. Sweet. 3:19:46 PM    comment []

Real-Time Apps on PDAs This experiment with FlashCom shows what we will begin to see by next year. WiFi enabled PDAs with Flash Player 6, offering up real-time text, audio and video messaging applications. The example was found by MacroFun, and is built and running live on Flash Communication Server. 7:41:50 AM    comment []