Thursday, October 24, 2002

Enabling WiFi Service Providers ZDNet offers up this piece about the recent Agere and Ericsson announcement about an integrated software/hardware product that will enable ISPs to easily offer WiFi services, integrating with their existing billing and provisioning systems, and even enabling "roaming" between any ISP that supports the infrastructure.  Next year should be an interesting year for the WISPs. 12:52:07 PM    comment []

Forthcoming Supernova Conference I'm really excited about Kevin Werbach and Jeff Pulver's forthcoming Supernova conference.  My interests in the convergence of applications, media and communications double-converge with their conference, which promises to be an important event, with even more interesting speakers and attendees.    12:48:06 PM    comment []

Web Services a decade away? ZDNet reports that IDC and lots of CIOs think that the vision of software as a service is still a decade away.  I beg to differ.  Within a year, if you build an Internet application you are by default building a web service.  It's in the DNA of nearly every Internet application platform.  Macromedia is putting it into hundreds of millions of client runtimes.  So is Microsoft.  It's in every server.  Just like the web of HTML/HTTP, it happens on its own accord.  It may be a few years before we see the huge material successes, but certainly not a decade. 12:07:47 PM    comment []

It's interesting to see how the price wars on broadband service in the UK are really shaping up to drive the whole broadband industry into 'premium services', with bundled content and applications appropriate to broadband.  It appeals more to consumers, who need a reason to upgrade, and creates a potential profitable revenue streams beyond the low-margin access business. 10:25:26 AM    comment []