Wednesday 7 February 2007, 4:47 PM
Skype, meet Symantec. Symantec, Skype.
In other breaking news (boom boom), a boy tries to destroy a supposedly indestructible phone...
Wednesday 7 February 2007, 12:54 PM
MySpace Mobile: If you can't beat 'em...
It will be very interesting to see how companies like Yospace fare in the coming years, actually. Will the punters go for a mobile-centric service like theirs, or do they want to use their favourite web apps on their phones? Another example is search - do these gazillion upstart start-ups really think they can beat the mighty Google on handsets?
Some would say the smart money would be on the big web brands conquering the mobile empire. People know them already and - crucially to the whole user-generated content thingy - would quite like to have a "seamless" experience whatever system they're running the app on.
Hence, today's announcement of an exclusive partnership between Vodafone and - you guessed it - MySpace. According to the press release, "the partnership will enable millions of Vodafone customers to access MySpace Mobile, allowing them to edit their own MySpace profiles, find and add friends, post photos and blogs and send and
receive MySpace messages while on the move".
MySpace Mobile will even be pre-loaded on certain future Vodafone handsets, so this is a serious tie-in. And, in my humble estimation, a pretty smart move on the part of Vodafone. If there's one lesson to learn from the IP Revolution, it's that you can't tell the punters what they should use - you have to listen instead and take it from there.
Tuesday 6 February 2007, 9:52 AM
BT takes over Indian enterprise comms
The company was already the distributor of BT Infonet's managed network services and products nationwide in India but, according to BT Global Services CEO Andy Green, today's news makes BT "the biggest foreign global carrier operating in India [which is] a cornerstone in our global expansion plans".
Mwahaha!
Friday 2 February 2007, 4:42 PM
Reding on the warpath again (and again)
Judging from this Dow Jones piece, Reding is still adamant on creating a Eurotelco super-regulator, something she's been "suggesting" for a while now. Understandably, national regulators and the telecoms industry are less than ecstatic at the idea - pointing out the virtues of a local regulator for local people - but do they have a choice anymore?
Perhaps. Just to give a bit of background, the problem is that there's no real harmonisation of telecoms regulation across European member states. In the UK, Ofcom has liberalised the market by forcing BT to spin off Openreach, but some other countries' markets are still very much dominated by their incumbents. So, when a company like BT or Deutsche Telekom goes multinational, as is now the case, they find it awfully tricky to offer the same product across European countries.
So there's several options on the table - none of which will please everybody. The so-called "nuclear option" is a super-regulator, which, as we have established, is not wildly popular with anyone. Another option is for the EC itself to gain more powers in overriding national regulators' decisions if it disagrees with them - opinions are mixed on this one.
The third option (favoured, unsurprisingly, by the regulators themselves) is for the European Regulators Group (they must have fun parties, eh?) to "get more teeth" in levelling the playing field amongst its own members. Now, apparently this is what the regulators have put to Reding, and apparently the letter referred to in the Dow Jones piece was less a declaration of war than an invitation to the regulators to convince her of the virtues of the ERG option.
Let's see what happens. This sure as heck ain't over yet...
Thursday 1 February 2007, 2:47 PM


