Thursday, May 08, 2003

Broadband Bounty British broadband brouhaha British Telecom is being criticized for lowering its wholesale broadband pricing to a point that leaves a £1 ($1.57) a month difference between its ISP fees and what it sells bandwith to rivals carriers. Talk about a thin margin. It only goes to show that the bits are the commodity and content is the value creator. Here's why AOL and MSN, as they face the transition from dial-up customers to broadband, are in such a fix -- they've been selling bits, that's what the marketing has been all about: "Get connected." Well, now folks are connected and the reason they'll pay for faster connections is more/different content and services. But, because of actions like British Telecom's, connectivity is too cheap to earn a significant margin and they are being forced back on content. The message in the BT move is that the content challenge is sweeping the globe. Yahoo can (and has) taken advantage of this by working with BT to sell broadband services directly to consumers in the United Kingdom and collecting a bounty for new customers, as it has with SBC in the United States. It's already built its business around aggregating content and as long as it doesn't charge for content will be able to take providers' money for bringing an audience, as well as collecting broadband bounties. [via RatcliffeBlog: Business, Technology & Investing] Good stuff from Mitch. 4:56:59 PM    comment []

Intel's wireless vision Intel's wireless vision The Register: "The endgame, says Intel, is 'reconfigurable, intelligent CMOS radios'." [via Werblog] This is what MillennialNet is doing. 4:28:05 PM    comment []

Wireless Standards in the Home Ubiquitous Wireless Broadband for home media The ultra-wideband community is looking to position UWB as the dominant technology for moving media streams between devices in the home by making it into "wireless Firewire" (Firewireless?). UWB has some characteristics (including high bandwidth and low power) that may make it better than WiFi variants for these uses. It's quite possible that four classes of unlicensed wireless technology will all thrive -- WiFi, UWB (aka WiMedia), Bluetooth, and WiMax (802.16) -- though Bluetooth may be the odd standard out. [via Werblog] Interesting take from Kevin.  In looking at opportunities for home media redistribution, several folks have argued with me as to the appropriateness or robustness of Wi-Fi for reliably moving high-bandwidths.  Today, they're right, but tommorow as 802.11g and improved antenna and access point technology come to the fore-front this may no longer be an issue.    Interestingly, at the same, another unlicensed spectrum standard is emerging around RFID tags, dubbed ZigBee.  ZigBee uses IEEE 802.15.4 RF as the physical network and provides a services layer on top of it.  One of our investments is in MillennialNet, an MIT-derived company building a software networking platform on top of RFID for sensor-connected devices.  They're also helping to drive ZigBee, along with Motorola and others.  Millennial's software+hardware reference designs can enable intelligent, networked devices that have 5-10 year battery lives.  Examples of ZigBee applications include: Wireless home security Remote thermostats for air conditioner Remote lighting, drape controller Call button for elderly and disabled Universal remote controller to TV and radio Wireless keyboard, mouse and game pads Wireless smoke, CO detectors Industrial and building automation and control (lighting, etc.) 4:27:00 PM    comment []

PingID ships open source Liberty SDK PingID has just shipped the 1.0 release of SourceID.Java, their open source SDK for Liberty-enabling any J2EE application.  They're also a few weeks away from a full .NET implementation of SourceID, which will mean J2EE and .NET applications will be able to federate authentication using the Liberty Alliance 1.0 specifications. Unlike Passport, Liberty specifications, and SourceID in particular, make it relatively straightforward to enable single sign-on across websites both inside an enterprise and across the public Internet without a central identity repository or service. This is a great step forward for identity management and should help to give Liberty more momentum. 4:14:36 PM    comment []