April 2008 - Telco 2.0

Meet JIL ; that’s the Joint Innovation Lab, a project worked out between Vodafone and China Mobile that’s meant to establish standards for mobile widgetry. Apart from the obvious point that only telcos could come up with anything like a standards body for widgets, what’s the betting the standard turns out to be a lot like the Nokia Web Runtime? Perhaps more seriously, the head of Nokia R&D suggested there was an urgent need for a standard mobile platform, but it was more likely to be a de-facto...

Another common use of the word “platform” that sometimes confuses people is the way it’s used to describe the technology that goes around individual applications in a computer system. Like Microsoft Windows, Linux, Adobe Flash in the browser, Symbian S60 in a mobile phone, or what have you. IT people spend a lot of time arguing about them, which is probably less stupid than it sounds, because the history of IT has been the history of development platforms. This is down to the very nature of computing...

We’ve been delighted by the effort the speakers are putting in to their ‘stimulus presentations’ for the Telco 2.0 Executive Brainstorm this week in London. One or two have had their drafts sent back covered in red ink, but most have followed the detailed briefing, looking to bring new, fresh and relevant insights to help the brainstorm really hum. It’s now a mouth-watering line up and the event will be packed to the rafters. To supplement the formal content we have some interesting start-upweb/telecoms...

We’re putting together our Voice & Messaging 2.0 report , which includes a directory of all the interesting companies in the space we’ve come across. We’ll be presenting some of this at our event next week of course. But in the meantime, we’d like to tell you about one new company that’s extra-interesting. When we speak about Voice & Messaging 2.0, we’re usually thinking in terms of services, software, or devices that offer… voice or messaging! But it doesn’t have to be limited to this. Our...

For some unknown reason, I have this mental image of 1940s actress Hedy Lamarr, glamorous co-inventor of spread spectrum radio , doing her work in some swanky Manhattan hotel suite. A grand piano sits in the corner, and servants flutter by. Who wouldn’t want to be a fly on the wall as an eye-catching actress chalks up one of the foundation stones of modern communications? And all over afternoon tea and cake. Wait a few decades for the invention of the transistor, mix in some incomprehensible algebraic...