Cats and bags!

Ok, so the bag is hardly even opaque, still, it's sometimes a while before people notice the naked guy in the middle of the room...
Stowe Boyd throws away a few comments about what I think is going to really make a big difference.

I expect this to be one of the areas of future battle between MSN, Yahoo, Google, and AOL: who will develop the best integration of communication, collaboration, and coordination tools based on the "buddy list is the center of the universe" motif?

I'm not sure how much more I want to say about this right now, but here's a few additional thoughts:
- What if your email came in and was filtered to your buddies IM chat history?
- What if your browsing was guided by your community?
- What if your 'suppliers' were your buddies?
- Not all buddies are good buddies!
- Is the cat my buddy? What about my car?

All will be revealed, eventually... (or PM me and if you're my buddy - and you sign an NDA - I might tell you more!)

Selling the Wisdom of crowds

In a rather long post on his blog, Jeff Jarvis gets it just about spot on. I'd also have to agree, more or less with the comments of KirkH on the same piece.
I posted a related item to this a few days ago, where my point was not so much about crowd wisdom, as about the creation of consensus. People make a statement or a prediction, or they produce the 'Ultimate Chill out session' on iTunes or post some radical photography on Flickr and people buy into it (or not).

Public reinforcement through consumption, and rehashing or forwarding, can bring any content to the fore, viewed by millions.

The thing is that time is less of a factor here on the internet than before we were all online. I'm going to call this phenomenon the 'Long Truth', after the original concept of the Long Tail which is an often misinterpreted theory about how sales of particular items, over time, can outsell the current favourites, even if they were not popular when released.

Think about it. We are all expressing ourselves publicly on the internet by creating content and over time it may, or may not, be considered good, or valuable or just plain true!

All of my blog entries over the last 6 months may not have achieved a large audience and there is no consensus agreeing with the opinions I have voiced (except the ones I rehashed), but there is now a repository of content out there that could spring back to life at any moment, if the conditions in the internet are right.

I can comfort myself in the knowledge that I may be right; in the end.

There are no new ideas, just ideas that the US Patent Office are taken in by

It's amazing how quick the web-lethargy has evaporated and how quickly the market moves in a particular direction.
Om just blogged on 3 new Web 2.0 developments and following the leads, 2 of them sound a little too close for comfort to the ideas I'm currently working on! I had expected I had a bit more time to come up with the demo (on mobile of course!), perhaps a year at the outside, but it seems like you get about a 3 month window, if you're thinking way out there!
So, next time you wake up with that 'Eureka' feeling, put the coffee on, fire up the PC, quit your job and organise a staff meeting for later in the morning.
Then have a breakfast meeting with the VCs, run a couple of slides past them, call your buddies with the news that you got $5 million, and clear the lounge for development.
You should be at Alpha by lunchtime, with a few early adopters, sucked in by the hourly blog entries on your website. The afternoon is hard, outsource the main development around the world and then assemble the beta in time for tea, demo using the latest mobile and video podcast it around for analysts and bloggers.
Early in the evening Om posts it on his site and immediately the messages of interest are flooding in. Set up an autoresponder to arrange meetings for the following morning, then take the team out for lapdancing until the early hours.
Next morning, wake up and by lunchtime you should have flipped the company!
Shower and repeat!

SMSC and MVNO

Some MVNOs have access to IN capabilities, some more still have access to the SMSC. So here's a recipe to maybe cash in on the operators SMS revenue.
First, take a large spoonful of SMSC access for your subscribers
Ensure you have a good GPRS data cost negotiated with the operator,
Next, reroute all incoming SMS over an instant messenger provisioned to your customers phones. When your customer replies to the IM, route it back to the relevant operator network via the best interconnect route.
SMS within your own network can be near free, SMS to external networks can bypass your agreement with the host operator, allowing you to drive the prices down by negotiating your own interconnect deals.
Then again, with most operators offering hundreds of free SMS per month to get contracts, it might not be worth the trouble!

Top of the blogs this week

The funniest post I have seen in a while came from Richard Stastny on VOIP and ENUM.
It was a post which more or less just repeated the content of the IMS Insider blog, but they say comedy is about timing, and Richard comments dryly at the appropriate places to great effect.

Part of blogging is that you state your point and expect comment (providing anyone reads it!), good or bad. You have to be able to take a certain amount of criticism and I'm sure the guys at IMS Insider blog were expecting a lot of comments!

They can't possibly believe what they are writing!

Regulated Dementia

Dementia is becoming prevalent among many of the telco institutions as they struggle to grasp the political, social and commercial effects of the internet.
The last time around (Bubble 1.0) we did not have the critical mass to effect the social and economic changes that were promised by global connectivity; this time we do.
Telcos and governments are becoming disintermediated in large areas of their 'business'. VoIP, VPNs, proxies, personal servers etc.
Many of them are in denial.
They need to recognise it and implement the drastic changes in their organisations before it is too late.

The US FCC used to be the voice of reason and led many of the other regulators around the world, however, dementia seems to have set in and (mixing metaphors wildly) the lunatics have taken over the asylum.
CALEA applied to IP services doesn't make sense. The FCC must be made to see sense. Law Enforcement needs to realise that the days of tapping in to someone's communications are over. Any criminal with moderate intelligence can already conduct their business under encryption that will take months to crack (the UK police require 6 months to decode harddrives that they confiscate!).
Connectivity is becoming a political issue that is akin to free speech, as opposed to the right to bear arms. Either way, it is a fundemental right in the new world. Those without it are disenfranchised and disadvantaged.
But the internet is more than that. It does not respect international boundaries and therefore is not controllable by a single government or body, without the imposition of draconian measures
So, what's the answer?
Law Enforcement need to concentrate on other methods of determining wrongdoing. By all means, subscribe to the stream of bits coming out of someone's connection, but don't assume it's from a particular person, don't assume it will be open to interpretation within a meaningful timeframe, and don't expect that what you hear is necessarily the truth.
If the regulators demand the impractical, then they will create subversion of the regulations.
Perhaps a location database for all routers would help?

Cliche, but if you love something, set it free, it will come back to you. Give the internet the Power of Community, and it will begin to police itself. That, of course, has it's own dangers, as Nazi Germany showed, but availability of information, not control of it, alleviates that risk.

To pitch(fork) in a final metaphor; we need to make a whole lot of smaller haystacks, rather than create a method to find the needle in a great big one!

Rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated

I never did find out what happened to Kunjilal but I predict that I'll be back to more regular postings soon, though it's sometimes hard to separate out work from blog in a way that leaves both creating their own value.

I've been musing over a few things this past week:
Richard Stastny with his key comment 'So either [telcos] concentrate at the problem at hand they can solve and where they still can earn money: the access, or also this will be taken away from them by independant fiber providers.' In other words, forget triple plays and throw to first!

James Enck (among others, but he predicted it and has a great inside story to tell) reports on the acquisition of EasyNet by Sky TV (largely owned by NewsCorp). NewsCorp are certainly behaving strangely for a company that doesn't see a huge shift towards the internet for all content/media related industries. Personally, I think they are acquiring the right companies, so far, but time will tell if their management can keep them moving forward in their respective internet niches, or if some other small startup will overhaul them, once they get stuck in the NewsCorp machine.

Kevin Werbach peers into the crystal ball a little deeper than most and raises some warning flags about the freedom of the web and in particular the legal challenges that are being raised to Google print, and the evolution of VPNs to suck in all of a consumers internet use to a single network, where it can be controlled/monitored and monetized (think of Neilsen in the US TV ratings)

Even Meg Whitman was at it, predicting that all voice communication on the net will be free in 3-6 years. As Kevin Werbach said, the mobile companies probably have a few years beyond that, but it's the inevitable endpoint.

It also seems clear to me that DNS days are numbered, David Cameron will be the next Conservative leader and they still won't win, Hearts will win the Premier League in Scotland, England will not win the World Cup in 2006, Presence will be the entry point to the web, Handset manufacturers will demand that operators sell their branded devices rather than the other way round, NewsCorp will outsell Apple in content download and FON will become a primary network for delivery of mobile content.

Anyone care to give me odds??

IPTV or TV over IP... a question for the lawyers?

Apple's recent announcement that it has signed deals with ABC-Disney to distribute programs via iTunes, and the announcement of the video iPod makes me think that the whole regulation and licensing edifice is on the point of irrelevance in its current form.
I have posted several times about licensing in general and I am coming to the conclusion that we are already at the point where plugging the dyke in one place, just leads the water to flow in another direction.
There is currently some debate as to whether having broadband internet access in the UK would require someone to have a TV licence (assuming they didn't have a TV, just a PC). So what do the regulators do when content gets delivered over IPTV? Give out licences at 100s of thousands or millions to deliver it? What if an operator says they're not IPTV, they are just selling a program over the internet. Will the regulator require a license to sell content (DVD producers?). The whole thing quickly becomes unworkable.

The UK TV licence is just a tax, pure and simple. It is a secondary means of funding the arts through a top heavy, outdated organisation that includes the delivery of the content within it's remit.
Let's assume that delivery is 'free', paid for by individual access subscriptions or municipal access. If that is the case, then the BBC is just a collection of content producers funded by the taxpayer.

Shouldn't this be a far looser arrangement than it is currently? If the access part was separated off as a kind of municipal network it would be free to diversify into other areas than television, with the mission of providing ubiquitous basic access, particularly in disadvantaged areas, to government and community services and content.
The creation of the content can then be funded in the same way that arts grants and lottery revenue is distributed; to smaller producers without the need for the 'old boy network' (look at how many programs are produced by ex-BBC staff companies).

In today's global economy, giving a fixed amount of credit to your citizens on the 'iBBC' would be the best way to distribute publicly funded content, which could then be purchased by anyone interested. It would also do wonders for the accuracy of viewing statistics!

Exercise in Futility

Here's a little game for mobile operators to play at their next management bonding session.
'You are a startup mobile operator, in the GSM/3G space, and you are targetting 2 different areas, business and youth. Choose one of the segments and devise a set of products to blow the competition away, and make a healthy profit for the company.
Here are the groundrules:

• No revenue from voice
  
• No revenue from SMS/MMS
  
• Data is already priced by the competition at $20/all-you-can-eat
  

It would be interesting to see what kind of business model they came up with...

They might even notice where the real value in running a mobile network lies.

Short & Sweet...

Web 2.0

• Key Enablers
  
  • Broadband Access
    
  • Presence / State
    
  • Mobility
    
  
  
• Key Services
  
  • Storage / Retention (i.e. history)
    
  • Search / Retrieval
    
  • Identity / Location
    
  • Community / Collaboration
    
  • Security / Privacy
    

You could also say 'the Future of Communications' in place of Web 2.0.
But how many telcos have their strategy aligned with this?
How many web companies do (e.g. Google, Ebay, Yahoo)?