Lee Dryburgh has been organising a great telecom conference called Ecomm for the last two years. It specifically excludes people pitching their products and only gives sponsors a speaking slot if they have something to say. http://ecomm.ec/
I was lucky enough to speak on the Amsterdam version. I had a 7.5 minute slot to tell my story on why all telecom marketing and product management is wrong and another slot on another day on why voip won't be free anytime soon. I thought the format worked great because of the short pitches of the idea, instead of the usual BS on market shares etc.
I'm the author of the piece. Most comments in my opinion make the mistake of saying: I want this or that to be my identifier. Or I don't want a universal identifier.
The reality is: there are two identifiers that are on most business cards. Phone numbers and e-mail adresses. Both could be used in a much more advanced way. No matter which way you look at it the telephone number won't go away. ENUM would enable you to use it in multiple ways.
Cellphone traffic data has to be stored for 6-24 months in the EU, exactly for this reason. It's useful for law enforcement. The Dutch Parliament yesterday accepted a law that requires this data to be stored for 12 months (who called who, where). Internet data (who used what IP-adress at what moment, who mailed who, but not what websites were visited, gmail, twitter etc.) will only need to be stored for 6 months.
Paul Budde an Australian Broadband honcho had the following experience with Telstra and the way they see broadband:
Telstra and Freedom of speech
Last week I was involved in an interesting but disheartening incident - one that further highlights the problems we are facing with Telstra in Australia.
Tomorrow I will be chairing Day One of the Broadband World conference, organised by terrapin. This event included a panel session entitled 'Can open access regulation truly work in Australia without retail separation?' in which Telstra had agreed to participate.
At the last moment, however, Telstra asked the conference organisers to withdraw two people from the panel, saying they wouldn't participate otherwise. It was also very interesting to see that they even came up with the names of the people they would like as replacements. more
900 gigabyte per month upload should be enough for everybody.
But in reality. Some weeks I go over 5-10Gigabyte per week (Netherlands) just doing VPN kind of stuff. Other weeks I don't even hit 100megabyte.
I would want to be able to send my parents the footage from my harddisk camcorder without any encoding etc, but the upload still sucks.
Just posted this on my blog: http://lunaticthought.blogspot.com/ (You can find more info here on the economics of submarine fibre and nice pictures of the Tyco Responder Cable laying vessel)
Gigaom is reporting on Google buying a share into the Unity submarine cable. Many people will read into this an attempt by Google to become a telco or do anything out of its current layer 7 service and application business. I don't belief it is, it's just simple economics. Google now buys wholesale capacity instead of retail. My reaction on Gigaom was:
One of the main drivers for wanting your own fibre on certain submarine routes is the pricing strategy of the owners of the submarine fiber. Traditionally these fibres have been owned by incumbent national monopolists. Their pricing was set at a fixed price per Mbit/s. If your banndwidth utilisation grew, their income grew too, though their costs didn't, leading to excess profits. On the Transatlantic route this problem has been solved by having an oversupply of commercial competitive fiber. The oversupply resulted in a situation I call mutually assured destruction, where everybody went bankrupt and whole networks were sold for pennies.
On the Pacific route it's mostly incumbent national monopolists owning fibre and they probably have learned from the Atlantic disaster. This means prices don't drop (or not as quickly as traffic growth) and that means that some parties see an increase in their traffic costs. Google now has solved this by joining a club of submarine fiber owners and not having to worry anymore about the cost of a megabit/s. Google just has to worry about when they will fill up their terabit chunk and when someone will slice through the fibre.
BTW I'm willing to bet Google will join another club on this route to add some much needed redundancy.
Dutch Company Cyclomedia recently finished a full overview of the Netherlands. You can see 360 degrees of every 20 metres or so. They even have tools that help you measure the sizes of things on the street and on houses. It's popular with municipalities and real estate agent. It's also featured at the major real estate site Funda.nl I hope it links through, but you can see a street view in front of the working palace of the Queen here.
I've always thought that one of the best ways for Google to do work on this is to do a large campaign (online, direct mail, magazines, I don't care), where they cross promote their services. So for signing up a company gets $10 that can be spend on Adwords. This way you help SME's into using adwords for their business. I noticed recently that when I searched for a store in my town that would have a specific thing, I would watch out much more for Adwords than if I search for grand ideas.
All in all I feel that Google could do way more to integrate their business lines and do cross promotion and selling. Google Analytics is great, but why is there no one stop shopping for the search words that people that visit my site use? "Oh they're looking for Google Adsense for Charity, yes that's me, let me buy a keyword with one click."
Quote from the NYT: Microsoft was joined today by AT&T, a company that traces its lineage to the Ma Bell monopoly that was broken up in the mid-1980s. "We think antitrust authorities should take a hard look at this deal and the implications," said Jim Cicconi, senior executive vice president for external affairs at AT&T. "If any one company gets a hammerlock on the online advertising space, as Google seems to be trying to do, that is worrisome."
Interesting that AT&T joined in. They are moving against Google to support their Net Neutrality position. But let us look at how much money there really is in this market and then see whether an almighty Google might actually be able to hurt AT&T. Google currently makes 10 billion a year from 281 million broadband users worldwide. That's is $35/broadband user/year or $2.90 a month. Just look at the price of AT&T's offering and you can see that Google's ARPU is no more than a few percent of AT&T's ARPU (Average Return per User). Google's ARPU is supporting various content offers through this businessmodel, more than 40% of the ARPU flows to the content owner. So at the moment AT&T can beat up Google for a maximum of $2 per month per customer.
So how big could Google's ARPU grow? In a country like The Netherlands 5.7 billion a year is spent on advertising to about 7 million households. This makes 67/household/month (and this number isn't growing too much) This is the total advertising expenditure on the national market and includes all major media: Newspapers, television, direct mail, cinema, magazines, billboards, internet etc etc etc. If Google can get part of that on a global scale, it amounts to a major amount of money. But now look at it from ARPU point of view. It would be hard for Google to get more then 10-15% of this market space ($6-$10/household/month) because they would have to replace all the existing ways of doing advertising and these are still powerful and sustain many content business models)
If a telco can his hands on google's revenues, they might be able to knock a few dollars of the price of a broadband connection. But $6-$10 isn't going to pay for the line and the costly upgrades. Just go and look up the financial information of telco's to see how big they are and how much money they spend on a yearly basis. Google is dwarfed by that. (Broadband reports said that telco's would spend $41 billion on network upgrades just this year, Google made only $10 billion last year) Odlyzko was right when he said: "Content isn't King" and we can add to that "Advertising will never be king".
So when AT&T says that Google is making money over their networks. We are talking about change compared to what AT&T is charging its customers.
Will Google get a dominant position? Only if they offer content providers the most money for showing a banner and advertisers the greatest amount of clickthroughs. That is why Microsoft and Yahoo are loosing out. The offer less adviews per day, that generate less clickthroughs per thousand adviews and pay less per click and offer advertisers less conversions. Why would you use them? Nobody in the equation is getting better by using Microsoft and Yahoo not the content provider and not the advertiser.
Now lets hope Google pays some attention to my pitch for Adsense for Charity. The idea is that anyone using Adsense can designate a percentage of their Adsense revenues for good causes or open source projects. Even if we are only talking about a very small percentage of Adsense users doing this, we still would be talking about millions of dollars per year) So please help out in spreading this idea, by linking to it or spreading it onwards.
I couldn't disagree more with the choice of BT as the leading company because of its 21CN network. As such it is in interesting choice of BT to go to Ethernet IP for its entire network. There are at least two other incumbents who are doing the same thing. KPN has a project called ALL-IP and and Telstra has a project called the Common Network.
In contrast BT will only do ADSL in its network, they will not reach speeds above 24 mbit and in response to a question on access networks he says, that it is very hard to understand what a user will want to do with more than 24mbit. (hereby forgetting that most of the UK will not be living close enough to a dslam to actually get this 24mbit). He doesn't see a reason for fiber to the home or any other kind of access networks. This was said by its Chairman Ben Verwaayen at a recent Ofcom Event on convergence. http://www.ofcom.org.uk/event/presentations/sessio n6 (minute 25 and onwards)
I call BS on this statement
on
Wikinomics
·
· Score: 1
Hi,
Just did a quick survey of new entries into the wikipedia. Found one that was up for speedy deletion and a couple that will probably remain, including ones on: = Chzech female serial killer - Hawaian football team - small lake somewhere in nowheresville, US - somewhere, smalltown USA
And ofcourse a gazillion edits to a gazillion pages, some big some minor, most probably leading to a better text. So yes you found the bad ones. But unfortunately you disqualified yourself right away by only listing the bad ones and not compairing it to the amount of good ones.
Fact is. The Wikipedia is a numbers game. It gambles on the fact that the majority of the world wants to do good. It improves this numbers game by making it easier for the good people to fix what the bad people have done bad than it is for the bad people to make bad what the good people have done good. (a couple of seconds edit to fix the bad, vs a couple of minutes to trash a page properly or to set up a spam page) It could make this even easier by tweaks to the User Interface, but hey those will come in the coming years.
The books are childrens's books. Don't forget that. They were aimed at british children age 10 and up. So the French words are not too known for them, but it does have something dark to it.
Its a childres fantasy world that grownups love to get lost in for a couple of hours.
The entire terror angle is complete crap. Chances of terrorism causing problems in the water supply are infinitely smaller than those that happen through other conscious and unconscious human action and the so-called Acts of God/Nature. Diesel spills are an environmental problem. Raw sewage in the water intake because of excessive rain are Acts of God/Nature etc etc. These things will be the majority of your problems. The great thing is that if you can detect these, you can detect terrorism.
I've been fiddling (my blog) with wiki's to see if they can work at work to tackle knowledge management problems that I'm experiencing in a large organisation. I came to the following points why wiki's can work there:
* They center work on a topic around a group of webpages
* They are easy to use. Socialtext is just a double click on a page
* They open up information to the entire organization through simple searches
* Information entered into them for the benefit of the project group is immediately also of benefit to others. So when doing my job, I unintended also help others
* They enable sending e-mail to and from pages, enabling e-mail repositories and lists of useful links on the relevant page.
* By sending an e-mail to the relevant project page, you add both metadata to the page and to the e-mail.
* They are free form, but can be structured
* If one co-worker doesn't update his page, because of time constraints or just being dead, others can.
* They can be about such highly critical information as: Best restaurants in Berlin, travel suggestions to Kiev, the latest law and its implications, biographies of important people, a list of insultants, the next project meeting or the office Christmas party, without requiring a central command and control structure.
* They don't assume where knowledge is in the organization.
For a review of Jotspot, Socialtext and Wetpaint see here
Guy I know used to have a well known server with free illegit porn. This server got to be quite well known around the world. One of the reasons he stopped was that a Yugoslav guy with some Yugo-mob connections came to his door to politely request the removal of content that the Yugo considered to be his copyrighted works.
Now the RIAA and MPAA have done some nefarious things to convince people to stop sharing music and movies, but getting the mob involved.. I haven't heard that one yet. Even when they get Uncle Sam involved, there is a chance of due course.
All this talk of supersonic passenger jets, great nice, but it will never be economically feasible, certainly not with the $100/barrel oil prices. What would be much more appreciated by the market and politicians is ultrasonic or anti-sonic jets. Anything that kills the noise of jets
Pah, the British have beaten the Americans by over a year with this trick and not in a small way too. These Americans can only show it in a lab. The Brits have been making water features for in a garden, where water flows uphill. Derek Philips, working for James Dyson (of the vacuum cleaner that never fails to suck), invented this and presumably they have patents.
Tivo still amazes me for not bringing their technology outside of the US. At first I thought it was because of the copyrights that exist on programguide information, but now that DVD/HD-recorders with program guides appear here in Europe, I can't imagine that to be the major hurdle. Tivo must be doing something really wrong if it can't bring its technology in other markets then North America and the UK.
What amazes me too is how Tivo doesn't seem to be able to license its technology to other players in the market in large quantities. You would expect that with such a great product several of the large consumergoods producers would love to integrate that into their product. But a quick Google doesn't show up alot of products that have "Tivo Inside" (TM).
My third gripe with Tivo is that they don't seem to grasp yet how to use broadband to supply people with programming they want to see. It seems that for the most part they are an all TV player that uses the internet only for a very small part of their business. Why not use it whole?
Oh well, I'm in Europe, what do we know. Just peeved that I read about Tivo for 5 years but still can't buy it in my country. Yes I'm jealous of the US.
I agree with you that it is alot more complicated then meets the eye. From personal experience I can say that law enforcement that cannot get an agency e-mail account, will get a public (web accessible) e-mail account elsewhere. People have a great need to communicate (by any means possible). So being overly protective with your agencies e-mail system, will lead to use of public e-mail systems.
So the real question is the choice between Microsoft's (nonstandard?) VoIP version and UMA.
Sorry mate, the question is, whether it will be SIP over 3G broadband mobile phones or just GSM over wifi (UMA). Now, my bet is on the first one, because it is simpler and judging past behaviours of mobile telco's... cheaper.
A major Dutch retail chain recently had to recall a whole lot of Gilette Mach 3 razorblades. It turned out they were fakes. The packaging looked real enough, but the razors were nowhere near the quality Gilette makes.
Trouble is that with globalization going on as it is, it is not unheard of for an import/export company to buy wholesale an X amount of razors, to sell most of it through their normal channels and to sell some excess surplus on the international market. Buyers would normally buy from the manufacturer, but it is hard to resist buying some of the wholesale surplus of others.
With globalization increasing, creating a bigger marketplace and smaller margins, I would expect to see more fakes for two reasons: - more superfluous relationships between supply and demand instead of the traditional 1 on 1 manufacturer, wholesaler, retailer relationships. Making it easier to slip something in and be unnoticed. - larger markets make it more profitable to inject fake goods into the economy, by creating larger demands for products, so that the margins combined with volume creates a large enough incentive for crime to seize the chance.
Slashdot Mirror
Lee Dryburgh has been organising a great telecom conference called Ecomm for the last two years. It specifically excludes people pitching their products and only gives sponsors a speaking slot if they have something to say. http://ecomm.ec/
I was lucky enough to speak on the Amsterdam version. I had a 7.5 minute slot to tell my story on why all telecom marketing and product management is wrong and another slot on another day on why voip won't be free anytime soon. I thought the format worked great because of the short pitches of the idea, instead of the usual BS on market shares etc.
I'm the author of the piece. Most comments in my opinion make the mistake of saying: I want this or that to be my identifier. Or I don't want a universal identifier.
The reality is: there are two identifiers that are on most business cards. Phone numbers and e-mail adresses. Both could be used in a much more advanced way. No matter which way you look at it the telephone number won't go away. ENUM would enable you to use it in multiple ways.
Cellphone traffic data has to be stored for 6-24 months in the EU, exactly for this reason. It's useful for law enforcement. The Dutch Parliament yesterday accepted a law that requires this data to be stored for 12 months (who called who, where). Internet data (who used what IP-adress at what moment, who mailed who, but not what websites were visited, gmail, twitter etc.) will only need to be stored for 6 months.
Shameless self promotion: This article at Ars Technica explains how peering and transit works. For some more info see my blog: Internet Thought.
Telstra and Freedom of speech Last week I was involved in an interesting but disheartening incident - one that further highlights the problems we are facing with Telstra in Australia.
Tomorrow I will be chairing Day One of the Broadband World conference, organised by terrapin. This event included a panel session entitled 'Can open access regulation truly work in Australia without retail separation?' in which Telstra had agreed to participate.
At the last moment, however, Telstra asked the conference organisers to withdraw two people from the panel, saying they wouldn't participate otherwise. It was also very interesting to see that they even came up with the names of the people they would like as replacements. more
enlighten us. And I didnt say it was socialist heaven, rather a well functioning market
Sent from nokia e51
900 gigabyte per month upload should be enough for everybody. But in reality. Some weeks I go over 5-10Gigabyte per week (Netherlands) just doing VPN kind of stuff. Other weeks I don't even hit 100megabyte. I would want to be able to send my parents the footage from my harddisk camcorder without any encoding etc, but the upload still sucks.
Just posted this on my blog: http://lunaticthought.blogspot.com/ (You can find more info here on the economics of submarine fibre and nice pictures of the Tyco Responder Cable laying vessel)
Gigaom is reporting on Google buying a share into the Unity submarine cable. Many people will read into this an attempt by Google to become a telco or do anything out of its current layer 7 service and application business. I don't belief it is, it's just simple economics. Google now buys wholesale capacity instead of retail. My reaction on Gigaom was:
One of the main drivers for wanting your own fibre on certain submarine routes is the pricing strategy of the owners of the submarine fiber. Traditionally these fibres have been owned by incumbent national monopolists. Their pricing was set at a fixed price per Mbit/s. If your banndwidth utilisation grew, their income grew too, though their costs didn't, leading to excess profits. On the Transatlantic route this problem has been solved by having an oversupply of commercial competitive fiber. The oversupply resulted in a situation I call mutually assured destruction, where everybody went bankrupt and whole networks were sold for pennies.
On the Pacific route it's mostly incumbent national monopolists owning fibre and they probably have learned from the Atlantic disaster. This means prices don't drop (or not as quickly as traffic growth) and that means that some parties see an increase in their traffic costs. Google now has solved this by joining a club of submarine fiber owners and not having to worry anymore about the cost of a megabit/s. Google just has to worry about when they will fill up their terabit chunk and when someone will slice through the fibre.
BTW I'm willing to bet Google will join another club on this route to add some much needed redundancy.
Dutch Company Cyclomedia recently finished a full overview of the Netherlands. You can see 360 degrees of every 20 metres or so. They even have tools that help you measure the sizes of things on the street and on houses. It's popular with municipalities and real estate agent. It's also featured at the major real estate site Funda.nl I hope it links through, but you can see a street view in front of the working palace of the Queen here.
I've always thought that one of the best ways for Google to do work on this is to do a large campaign (online, direct mail, magazines, I don't care), where they cross promote their services. So for signing up a company gets $10 that can be spend on Adwords. This way you help SME's into using adwords for their business. I noticed recently that when I searched for a store in my town that would have a specific thing, I would watch out much more for Adwords than if I search for grand ideas.
All in all I feel that Google could do way more to integrate their business lines and do cross promotion and selling. Google Analytics is great, but why is there no one stop shopping for the search words that people that visit my site use? "Oh they're looking for Google Adsense for Charity, yes that's me, let me buy a keyword with one click."
Quote from the NYT:
Microsoft was joined today by AT&T, a company that traces its lineage to the Ma Bell monopoly that was broken up in the mid-1980s. "We think antitrust authorities should take a hard look at this deal and the implications," said Jim Cicconi, senior executive vice president for external affairs at AT&T. "If any one company gets a hammerlock on the online advertising space, as Google seems to be trying to do, that is worrisome."
Interesting that AT&T joined in. They are moving against Google to support their Net Neutrality position. But let us look at how much money there really is in this market and then see whether an almighty Google might actually be able to hurt AT&T. Google currently makes 10 billion a year from 281 million broadband users worldwide. That's is $35/broadband user/year or $2.90 a month. Just look at the price of AT&T's offering and you can see that Google's ARPU is no more than a few percent of AT&T's ARPU (Average Return per User). Google's ARPU is supporting various content offers through this businessmodel, more than 40% of the ARPU flows to the content owner. So at the moment AT&T can beat up Google for a maximum of $2 per month per customer.
So how big could Google's ARPU grow? In a country like The Netherlands 5.7 billion a year is spent on advertising to about 7 million households. This makes 67/household/month (and this number isn't growing too much) This is the total advertising expenditure on the national market and includes all major media: Newspapers, television, direct mail, cinema, magazines, billboards, internet etc etc etc. If Google can get part of that on a global scale, it amounts to a major amount of money. But now look at it from ARPU point of view. It would be hard for Google to get more then 10-15% of this market space ($6-$10/household/month) because they would have to replace all the existing ways of doing advertising and these are still powerful and sustain many content business models)
If a telco can his hands on google's revenues, they might be able to knock a few dollars of the price of a broadband connection. But $6-$10 isn't going to pay for the line and the costly upgrades. Just go and look up the financial information of telco's to see how big they are and how much money they spend on a yearly basis. Google is dwarfed by that. (Broadband reports said that telco's would spend $41 billion on network upgrades just this year, Google made only $10 billion last year) Odlyzko was right when he said: "Content isn't King" and we can add to that "Advertising will never be king".
So when AT&T says that Google is making money over their networks. We are talking about change compared to what AT&T is charging its customers.
Will Google get a dominant position? Only if they offer content providers the most money for showing a banner and advertisers the greatest amount of clickthroughs. That is why Microsoft and Yahoo are loosing out. The offer less adviews per day, that generate less clickthroughs per thousand adviews and pay less per click and offer advertisers less conversions. Why would you use them? Nobody in the equation is getting better by using Microsoft and Yahoo not the content provider and not the advertiser.
Now lets hope Google pays some attention to my pitch for Adsense for Charity. The idea is that anyone using Adsense can designate a percentage of their Adsense revenues for good causes or open source projects. Even if we are only talking about a very small percentage of Adsense users doing this, we still would be talking about millions of dollars per year) So please help out in spreading this idea, by linking to it or spreading it onwards.
I couldn't disagree more with the choice of BT as the leading company because of its 21CN network. As such it is in interesting choice of BT to go to Ethernet IP for its entire network. There are at least two other incumbents who are doing the same thing. KPN has a project called ALL-IP and and Telstra has a project called the Common Network.
1 77-1212162_9475_1132326712652-Op_weg_naar_All-IP_1 81105.pdf9 419&print=true
o n6 (minute 25 and onwards)
However KPN is doing something more than just changing the backbone. KPN will roll-out VDSL2+ to the end-users as well. This will all be Ethernet/IP based for the backhaul and VDSL2+ for the last 450 meters, allowing 50/20mbit down/up. KPN will close 1350 swithch locations and roll out 28000 street cabinets to deliver the speeds to the end-user.
http://www.kpn.com/upload/1215076_9475_1132830598
http://www.lightreading.com/document.asp?doc_id=6
(the lightreading article forgets the vdsl2+ bit, see presentation for that)
In contrast BT will only do ADSL in its network, they will not reach speeds above 24 mbit and in response to a question on access networks he says, that it is very hard to understand what a user will want to do with more than 24mbit. (hereby forgetting that most of the UK will not be living close enough to a dslam to actually get this 24mbit). He doesn't see a reason for fiber to the home or any other kind of access networks. This was said by its Chairman Ben Verwaayen at a recent Ofcom Event on convergence. http://www.ofcom.org.uk/event/presentations/sessi
Hi,
Just did a quick survey of new entries into the wikipedia. Found one that was up for speedy deletion and a couple that will probably remain, including ones on:
= Chzech female serial killer
- Hawaian football team
- small lake somewhere in nowheresville, US
- somewhere, smalltown USA
And ofcourse a gazillion edits to a gazillion pages, some big some minor, most probably leading to a better text. So yes you found the bad ones. But unfortunately you disqualified yourself right away by only listing the bad ones and not compairing it to the amount of good ones.
Fact is. The Wikipedia is a numbers game. It gambles on the fact that the majority of the world wants to do good. It improves this numbers game by making it easier for the good people to fix what the bad people have done bad than it is for the bad people to make bad what the good people have done good. (a couple of seconds edit to fix the bad, vs a couple of minutes to trash a page properly or to set up a spam page) It could make this even easier by tweaks to the User Interface, but hey those will come in the coming years.
Just about the names.
The books are childrens's books. Don't forget that. They were aimed at british children age 10 and up. So the French words are not too known for them, but it does have something dark to it.
Its a childres fantasy world that grownups love to get lost in for a couple of hours.
The entire terror angle is complete crap. Chances of terrorism causing problems in the water supply are infinitely smaller than those that happen through other conscious and unconscious human action and the so-called Acts of God/Nature. Diesel spills are an environmental problem. Raw sewage in the water intake because of excessive rain are Acts of God/Nature etc etc. These things will be the majority of your problems. The great thing is that if you can detect these, you can detect terrorism.
I've been fiddling (my blog) with wiki's to see if they can work at work to tackle knowledge management problems that I'm experiencing in a large organisation. I came to the following points why wiki's can work there:
* They center work on a topic around a group of webpages
* They are easy to use. Socialtext is just a double click on a page
* They open up information to the entire organization through simple searches
* Information entered into them for the benefit of the project group is immediately also of benefit to others. So when doing my job, I unintended also help others
* They enable sending e-mail to and from pages, enabling e-mail repositories and lists of useful links on the relevant page.
* By sending an e-mail to the relevant project page, you add both metadata to the page and to the e-mail.
* They are free form, but can be structured
* If one co-worker doesn't update his page, because of time constraints or just being dead, others can.
* They can be about such highly critical information as: Best restaurants in Berlin, travel suggestions to Kiev, the latest law and its implications, biographies of important people, a list of insultants, the next project meeting or the office Christmas party, without requiring a central command and control structure.
* They don't assume where knowledge is in the organization.
For a review of Jotspot, Socialtext and Wetpaint see here
they referred to RIAA and MPAA
Guy I know used to have a well known server with free illegit porn. This server got to be quite well known around the world. One of the reasons he stopped was that a Yugoslav guy with some Yugo-mob connections came to his door to politely request the removal of content that the Yugo considered to be his copyrighted works.
Now the RIAA and MPAA have done some nefarious things to convince people to stop sharing music and movies, but getting the mob involved.. I haven't heard that one yet. Even when they get Uncle Sam involved, there is a chance of due course.
All this talk of supersonic passenger jets, great nice, but it will never be economically feasible, certainly not with the $100/barrel oil prices. What would be much more appreciated by the market and politicians is ultrasonic or anti-sonic jets. Anything that kills the noise of jets
Pah, the British have beaten the Americans by over a year with this trick and not in a small way too. These Americans can only show it in a lab. The Brits have been making water features for in a garden, where water flows uphill. Derek Philips, working for James Dyson (of the vacuum cleaner that never fails to suck), invented this and presumably they have patents.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/3046791.stm
Tivo still amazes me for not bringing their technology outside of the US. At first I thought it was because of the copyrights that exist on programguide information, but now that DVD/HD-recorders with program guides appear here in Europe, I can't imagine that to be the major hurdle. Tivo must be doing something really wrong if it can't bring its technology in other markets then North America and the UK.
What amazes me too is how Tivo doesn't seem to be able to license its technology to other players in the market in large quantities. You would expect that with such a great product several of the large consumergoods producers would love to integrate that into their product. But a quick Google doesn't show up alot of products that have "Tivo Inside" (TM).
My third gripe with Tivo is that they don't seem to grasp yet how to use broadband to supply people with programming they want to see. It seems that for the most part they are an all TV player that uses the internet only for a very small part of their business. Why not use it whole?
Oh well, I'm in Europe, what do we know. Just peeved that I read about Tivo for 5 years but still can't buy it in my country. Yes I'm jealous of the US.
I agree with you that it is alot more complicated then meets the eye. From personal experience I can say that law enforcement that cannot get an agency e-mail account, will get a public (web accessible) e-mail account elsewhere. People have a great need to communicate (by any means possible). So being overly protective with your agencies e-mail system, will lead to use of public e-mail systems.
Sorry mate, the question is, whether it will be SIP over 3G broadband mobile phones or just GSM over wifi (UMA). Now, my bet is on the first one, because it is simpler and judging past behaviours of mobile telco's... cheaper.
A major Dutch retail chain recently had to recall a whole lot of Gilette Mach 3 razorblades. It turned out they were fakes. The packaging looked real enough, but the razors were nowhere near the quality Gilette makes.
Trouble is that with globalization going on as it is, it is not unheard of for an import/export company to buy wholesale an X amount of razors, to sell most of it through their normal channels and to sell some excess surplus on the international market. Buyers would normally buy from the manufacturer, but it is hard to resist buying some of the wholesale surplus of others.
With globalization increasing, creating a bigger marketplace and smaller margins, I would expect to see more fakes for two reasons:
- more superfluous relationships between supply and demand instead of the traditional 1 on 1 manufacturer, wholesaler, retailer relationships. Making it easier to slip something in and be unnoticed.
- larger markets make it more profitable to inject fake goods into the economy, by creating larger demands for products, so that the margins combined with volume creates a large enough incentive for crime to seize the chance.