Time to get on record my long held belief about the future of proprietary cellular services. Transactions, that's it. Voice if totally essential, but otherwise transactions. Everything else that can, to non-proprietary meshes.

The GSMA initiative, shrouded in immigrants and the poor, will grow up the wealth curve and down the magnitude curve, all the way to micropayments probably.

DCMX is another step.

There are certainly differences between MSN Reporter and Digg, the most notable being the ability to vote stories down as well as up and the absence of substantial user profiles.  Digg has arguably gained a lot of steam from the top users whom until recently won bragging rights from an onsite list of their names and contributions.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/93099653/

Arguably? I'd argue otherwise.

The top ten Diggers only had value to the degree they led, chronologically, the second poster. After that, the impact was in the hands of the masses. Unless top Diggers had slavish followings who bumped their picks, and in that case, their departure should be beneficial to the diversity of news and cessation of gaming headlines to attract clicks. That latter action may have benefited Digg short-term, but I doubt I'm alone in getting tired of "Top 10" lists, "Amazing" and "Must See."

1. Mobile Phone To Send Money Home

The system will allow a person to put cash onto their mobile, and order it to be sent to a mobile phone number abroad, where the recipient receives a text message saying that money has arrived.

As a result, the costs of sending small amounts of cash could be reduced to just a few percent, from 24% currently
Less than one billion people have a bank account worldwide but close to three billion now have a mobile phone, according to the GSMA.

2. Viruses 'have hit most mobile operators'

Attacks on cellphones rose fivefold in 2006, with clients of 83 percent of mobile operators around the world having been hit, the joint study by security software firm McAfee and research company Informa said.
Even though the risk of a cellphone getting infected is still relatively small, thousands of phones have experienced this globally. Vicious viruses can render a phone useless or swell phone bills through pricey messages or calls to unwanted numbers.
"Version 3 (of the handset OS Symbian) is much safer. No malware written for this has been found," Hypponen said.

3. Sneakers Locate With Press of Button

The sneakers work when the wearer presses a button on the shoe to activate the GPS. A wireless alert detailing the location is sent to a 24-hour monitoring service that costs an additional $19.95 (euro15.34) a month.

In some emergencies _ such as lost child or Alzheimer's patient _ a parent, spouse or guardian can call the monitoring service, and operators can activate the GPS remotely and alert authorities if the caller can provide the correct password.

But the shoe is not meant for non-emergencies _ like to find out if a teen is really at the library or a spouse is really on a business trip. If authorities are called and it is not an emergency, the wearer will incur all law enforcement costs, Daniel said.

Once the button is pressed, the shoe will transmit information until the battery runs out.

$325 to $350 ($NZ475-515) adult shoes, childrens' sizes to come.

4. Myspace launches video filtering system

a system for scanning video clips and looking for signature vectors — such as a unique digital fingerprint — to compare with vectors stored in a database. Video can be blocked from appearing on MySpace when there is a match.

5 Site of the Week

http://www.dailylit.com/

Also mentioned:
Cory Doctorow
InternetNZ
Copyright (New Technologies and Performers' RIghts) Amendment Bill (Image PDF)
Copyright (New Technologies and Performers' RIghts) Amendment Bill (Text)

There's a huge buzz of excitement over at Telco 2.0 as they elaborate endlessly on how to turn a once peer to peer dumb network into a complex unicast "entertainment & advertising" platform.

The once peer to peer dumb network is the PSTN and our favourite comfortable incumbents, the telcos, operated it to great profit. No content in the PSTN, just users talking to each other. Exchanging information, bidirectionally, by common consent. The network was dumb, and neutral, it didn't carry English any better than any other languages, didn't perform any translation, didn't limit the rate at which you could speak, and censorship was performed only by receiver request, actioned external to the network by representatives of government, not some commercial entity.

Dumb, but not simple, just getting that clarity was a technological triumph in its time, and well rewarded. Now that its not so hard, this incumbent, like others whose jobs can be done as well or better by a child with an Internet connection seeks to sustain their margin.

Only scarcity generates margin, two ways, by limiting entry and allowing extortion (called "confusion" in Telco market speak, when scarcity doesn't really exist).

So Telco 2.0 is working on something hard and complex (for potential competitors) that will restore the uncontested sinecure revenue streams our PT&T successors are accustomed to. The candidate? Broadcasting, well, to be precise, something more surgical, unicasting, where you chose where and when to receive "Entertainment" and either pay or accept "Advertising."

The advertising industry is happy, the consultants are happy, the Telcos are happy, the survey shows this. Being a natural monopoly, even close, means never having to ask the customer.

The article features a diagramme demonstrating the required shift in operator cusomer relations, from a state called 1 sided to the new model, 2 sided.

1 sided? Well, yes, in the legacy PSTN we were all subscribers. Telco 2.0's 2-sided market is in fact a 2 tier market. Transmission, once symmetric/equal between peers now becomes in part, the good part, one way from the advertiser to the customer. Customer response, euphemism for buying, of course flows back to the advertiser.

The advertiser is now the more important customer and all the stresses that has created in commercial broadcasting are now thrown into the telco mix. If they were a hybrid before, they are certainly a mongrel now. Worsening the situation John Hagel describes (that Telco 2.0 pointed me at). In brief hagel
s point is that many organisations are clusters of disparate functions, often in conflict (see tension above) and difficult to balance. Where I advocate structural separation, Telco 2.0 is recommending a new tier of operations that extend this problem.

Where is the scarcity that justifies the grotesque pricing of data (e.g. TXT)? Apparently there is sufficient slack in the network that capacity can now be redirected to delivering what people don't want, to allow the delivery of what they do?

And will advertising become the price support of a call? How will the Telco with its negligible experience balance the way commercial television doesn't (what else drives Pay TV?) the mix of unwanted ads with desired content?

This brave new world is like the old brave new world of the interactive shopping Internet, where the half of your advertising spend that is wasted, can be identified. The resurrection of click-through in a proprietary environment.

"Entertainment" and "Advertising" are no longer earning what they were, even in the low cost open environment of the standards based terrestrial broadcasting and Internet environment, except en mass. In the small world gardens of the operators, where costs are high, customer expectations ditto, I don't see this being anything but a disaster.

There's a lot of optimism in the closed proprietary mind, this discussion overlooks the obvious and plumps for the conclusion:

Femtocells may look unlikely, but there's a possibility they may win out.

Yeah, right.

While I'm no longer naive enough to believe it will be one or the other, the idea that a femtocell, which is the tool of the operator, so you'll need one for each proprietary service operator (or change it when you change providers), which you probably therefore aren't willing to pay for, that will use your connectivity (and be prone to its weaknesses) is going to win a major portion of the market where the alternative gives you much greater freedom seems unlikely.

A Wi-Fi access point gives you infinitely greater choice of client devices, services, service providers, that could well outweigh the small performance advantage of limited handsets, limited services, single provider proprietary solutions. And remember, either solution uses the same backhaul.

I don't know the details, but there'd be a lovely irony if your femtocell used VoIP to backhaul the traffic to where you can be charged for it... If the argument that the cellular technology works more reliably from the handset to the femtocell, then why use it instead of DECT or any of the other cordless technologies that we know? There's already a Skype handset that does this.

Makes for a simpler phone? Perhaps, but sales figures for dual-mode handsets (Wi-Fi/Cellular) don't indicate there's any barrier to their uptake.

"Vodafone has no desire to subsidise a Wi-Fi handset"

What vodafone, and the rest of the comfortable incumbents will learn it's not what they desire, but what the customer wants, that occurs in non-monopoly environments. When you read the list of advantages of femtocells, note how many are advantages to the operator, rather than the customer.

The dead giveaway:

But there's an even more powerful business reason why mobile operators want to sell femtocells: they hate Wi-Fi, because users own it and can use it at will.

Not to disparage those operators who are going with UMA (AKA GAN) services like T-Mobile and Orange.

Even in duopolies and oligopolies, there tends to be one less powerful who will seize the chance to change the rules.

Most emperors have a few tailors turn up to sell them new clothes, few as transparently a bad idea as this one.

Yesterday was my second chance to actually handle an example of the latest iteration of the One Laptop Per Child. It was at the "Google & Open Source" presentation made by NZTE guest, Chris DiBona as part of the local Summer of Code. Chris was also a participant in the localised FOO Camp, AKA BarCamp. [localised versions, good or aping?]

The OLPC is a much solider proposition than its cheery Fischer-Price appearance would suggest, and while it was fun to wiggle its ears and get a feel for its keyboard, there wasn't time or opportunity to really see it in action.

That was the second time I'd seen it. On Tuesday, taking the short-cut via the James Cook Hotel, I spotted a figure as I left the lift that I recognised from the Baa Camp Flickr sets, and inquired "Chris? Chris DiBona?" The gentleman graciously acknowledged he was the same and after an explanation of how I knew and my interest in his visited he extended an invitation to join him and some WellyLUG folk at Leuven that evening.

The OLPC is a great solution to the provision of robust computing and connectivity, but I'm glad there's also the cellular handset route as an option and growing much much faster.

And I have a kosher copy of Vista. Mauricio Freitas is receiving a few complimentaries in his role as MVP and offered me one at the Summer of Code event. I'll try installing it on my dead XP box.

In the Sunday Star Times today, an article on executive reaction to Kim Hill's audience applauded mockery of the new positioning.

Careful not to appear a humourless suit Peter Cavanagh acknowledged he was amused, but found the action "unhelpful." It would "confuse" some listeners, thus his caring credentials were established. Not provoked by failure to get the joke himself, or the lack of compliance, it was for the listeners he had the "conversation."

Ironic when Radio New Zealand brags on the wit of its listeners to humble them with this patronising explanation, more or less as patronising as the new positioning, which is about politics and marketing more than public broadcasting.

In a recent interview I heard Peter talk of the freedom offered by the absence of the obligation to provide profit or return to shareholders his subsidised position allows. However, chasing audience is only one step removed from commercial broadcasting, and this goal compromises the impartiality and freedom of RNZ to make decisions for the public good. Public Good and public acceptance are not correlated, audience AKA mass appeal and profits for shareholders are.

Clearly RNZ can never escape the political bondage its funding imposes, but research around satisfaction would be better than counting earballs as a metric for such an institution. Charters are not a panacea, even TVNZ. has one.

And Baa Camp? Well, Mark Cubey (Kim Hill's producer), Paul Reynolds and Richard Hulse, all with RNZ affiliations are there, and peering is on the agenda.

Peering is the essence of P2P, which is the essence of democracy, which until now may have been the least worst form of Government, but with the emergence of participation at the level enabled by the reduced barriers of the Internet, may in addition to the bad, be good.

Other attendees gleaned from blogs include Juha Saarinen, Russell Brown, Mauricio Freitas, Ben Goodger, David Cunliffe, Rachel Cunliffe (possibly a distant relative), Lars Rasmussen, John Clegg and the aforelinked Rod Drury. Plus some unrecognised figures (Though I think that's Richard in the middle.)

Update: from Flickr it appears Colin Jackson, John Houlker, and Andy Linton were also there.

Thanks Nathan, probably one of the more effective talkfests NZ has hosted, ever.

There's nothing that compromises an argument quicker than hypocrisy. When you talk the talk but stumble on the walk, who can believe you? Admiring "How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything," and doing nothing in your own work to change anything is the conundrum for me over "Wikinomics," the book that describes "How," but doesn't "Do."

Which is irksome as I admire Don Tapscott's talk, shame the walk is crippled. The book says what I believe, but doesn't believe in it sufficiently to do.