Communication Breakdown

News just in from Skype: the VoIPsters' business customers can get a "special promotion" if they click through to a Skype/Symantec co-branded website via skype.com and download Norton Internet Security and other Symantec Norton products, which are now Skype certified! So there you go.

In other breaking news (boom boom), a boy tries to destroy a supposedly indestructible phone...

Yesterday I popped along to a briefing with O2, who have just launched their latest "50 to watch in mobile" list. Top of the pile is Yospace (not be confused with Mytube, I suppose), a mobile user-generated content company not a million miles away from the MySpace/YouTube concept (except users pay to download clips, and the uploader gets paid each time).

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.

Another week, another foreign acquisition for BT. Last time it was an IT consultancy in the States, but this week it's more standard telco stuff, specifically i2i Enterprise in Mumbai, an enterprise services company "specialising in internet protocol (IP) communications services for major Indian and global multinational companies".

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!

Not content with threatening operators over their admittedly usurious data/SMS roaming tariffs, Eurocomissar Viv Reding is now allegedly waving a pointed stick at national telecoms regulators for not "liberalising" fast enough.

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...

Here's one to whip out next time someone asks you if they should upgrade to V*sta...