• BBC - Radio Labs - Podcasts on other mobile devices
  (tags: bbc podcast)

There’s a huge backlash against mobile spam going on in China right now. The General Manager on one of China’s biggest outdoor media companies, Focus Media, blithely revealed that the company was in possession of around 200 millions mobile phone numbers and had been sending out 100 million unsolicited messages every day. This is in a country with around 400 million mobile phones currently.

With a delicious sense of unintended irony, the interview tool place on World Consumer Rights Day - nice timing!

The impact of the interview has been immediate and dramatic. I doubt if the GM concerned would have heard of Gerald Ratner’s infamous Institute of Directors speech*, which ultimately cost him his job and control of his family jewellery business, but I’m sure it would resonate today with him. Focus has lost 25% of the value of its share price, been denied access to their message service port by China Mobile and rumours abound that it’ll lose it’s service provider status.

I have no sympathy. If you’re running a push based service, you must ask the recipient’s permission to engage with them and I don’t care if that’s via email, Bluetooth or Over the Air in a mobile context, or if you think you’re operating in an unregulated market or sector. You might be able to make hay for a while, but the twin grim reapers of consumer backlash and regulation will get you in the end and close you down.

* Ratner said that some of the earrings he sold were “cheaper than an M&S prawn sandwich but probably wouldn’t last as long.” This led to a hounding by the press and a boycott of his products by offended consumers. Ouch.

Today the voting opens for the MMA EMEA Board elections for the next year and I’m standing again for election. So, please vote for me if you’re eligible to, or lobby a colleague if your company can vote. Competition for an elected seat is tougher than ever and I need all the help I can get, especially vis a vis the big boys.

For the last year, I’ve been Vice-Chair and I think we got a lot done considering it was the start-up year as a Regional Board. But there’s lots still to do, especially in terms of driving new membership and really making the local side of things work. Many members want to join for the local country benefits around education and networking and we really need to start delivering these better in the next year.

I’m very bullish about the possibilities next year, especially with a new Executive Director of EMEA on board soon, and I’d love to be able to continue the work we started.

If you’re eligible to vote, you can see my full pitch here.

Thanks.

Russell

The license auction for the 700 MHz spectrum in the US ended earlier this week, and as widely expected, Verizon and AT&T won the most licenses. Google didn’t win any, but says it’s cool, and that American consumers are the winners here. It’s a little early to say that, methinks, but we can hope. The initial upshot of the auction is that AT&T and Verizon have consolidated their strong positions in wireless spectrum, leaving them well-placed to continue at the top of the US market.

It looks like, as I predicted back in November that Google bid up the price of the nationwide C block — the license with the limited open-access rules — up to the $4.6 billion reserve price, triggering the rules, then dropped out. Verizon eventually won the C block license, paying about $4.75 billion for it.

As far as my prediction that the auction would toss up an “interesting” winner. Echostar, which operates the Dish Network satellite TV service, won an unpaired block of spectrum covering much of the country for $711.8 million, leading to speculation that it will build a mobile TV service. Cable TV company Cox also grabbed a number of licenses.

But Qualcomm seems like the dark horse here. It grabbed 12 MHz of spectrum in a number of big markets, along with some unpaired E-block licenses. It also bid on the D-block, which was the spectrum intended for a public-safety network. It was the only bidder and didn’t did the reserve price, so the FCC is determining how to proceed (another auction seems likely). The obvious thinking on Qualcomm is that it wanted more spectrum for its MediaFLO mobile TV service, but Dean Bubley wonders if it has something more potentially disruptive — like building a network with its UMB technology — in mind.

My quick take on all of this is that the 700 MHz auction in and of itself probably won’t end up being as game-changing as many people seemed to think a few months ago. However, the FCC’s push for open-access rules — even if they didn’t go as far as Google and others wanted — did play a role in pushing Verizon, AT&T and others down their current “open” path, and that may be the auction’s biggest and most lasting effect.

• HTC Names Google Phone - Yahoo! News
  The mobile phone High Tech Computer (HTC) has been developing to run on the Android software from Google will be called “Dream,” have a large touchscreen and full QWERTY keypad, a person close to the situation said Thursday.
  (tags: google android htc)
• Sprint aims for unified architecture for networks - Yahoo! News
  (tags: sprint)

A month ago we organised a free download of the summary of the seminal Black Swan book, provided by getAbstract. We hope you enjoyed it!

Well, the nice people at getAbstract have decided that they’re happy to make this a monthly event and offer a free download every month.

We can certainly choose what titles we think you’ll enjoy. But, we’d love you to have an input too, so leave a comment below about which book you’d like to download the summary for, or drop us an email. We’ll do our best to include your choices, subject to getAbstract’s approval and their royalty arrangements with the various publishers and authors. Go visit their site and browse the current range of around 4,000 titles.

GigaOm reports that the speech-to-text company, SpinVox, has raised a whopping (technical VC term) $100m, on a valuation of $500 million.

That’s a very serious amount of money, especially for a Euro/British company, catapulting them into the Skype league. MobHappy sends our compliments, while smugly noting that we spotted this winner back in 2006.

If your company is a winner - write to us or leave a comment. We’ll be happy to write about it, if we believe.

“Dead Man’s Cell Phone” is a new off-Broadway play, that’s getting great reviews and which apparently raises a few interesting ideas about our relationship with mobiles.

The idea behind the play is that a guy drops dead (after musing “Where have all the phone booths gone?” - take note, Old Navy), after which his mobile starts to ring and ring. It’s answered by a young woman sitting nearby, who has a whole new set of experiences as a result.

One of the interesting themes to me is the idea that we can live on in a funny kind of way via voice mail. How spooky would it be to listen to a recording of a dead person asking you to leave a message? In fact, the dead man’s mother only really accepts that he is in fact dead, when his phone eventually gets cut off and stops working.

If that’s just too damn philosophical for a Thursday, I thought I’d tell you a little story about Marilyn Munroe, as I was reminded of it by another line in the play about how loud one of the actress’s hiccoughs are. Nothing to do with mobile, but I thought you’d be amused.

Playwright, Arthur Miller took his new bride-to-be, Marilyn Monroe to meet his mother in her tiny New York apartment. The walls were so thin that when Marilyn used the bathroom she was worried that everyone might hear her doing her business, so she turned on the taps to drown out the noise.

The next day, Miller rang to ask his mother what she thought.

‘She’s sweet,’ said Mrs Miller of her future daughter-in-law. ‘A wonderful girl. But she pisses like a horse!’

• Vodafone prepares for a new age - International Herald Tribune
  A decision by Vodafone to revamp its British work force to sell mobile broadband and other on-the-go data services more aggressively shows that the holy grail of the wireless industry is finally coming into reach.
  (tags: vodafone 3g mobile-broadband)

It’s still early in the year, but I think my prediction about “open” being the buzzword for 2008 is going to score me a point in our annual review. And, as I also predicted, a lot of it’s BS. First, you’ve got Sprint’s new transcoder, called “OpenWeb” (from OpenWave, natch). As Techype says, “A thoroughly open initiative all round, coincidentally utterly killing anyone apart from Sprint’s ability to host ringtones, wallpapers, Java games or anything else that requires device recognition”.

Then you’ve got Verizon announcing some details on its “open” Any App, Any Device program. Device developers will have to build their devices to some specs, then submit their products to the operator for testing and certification. These specs include not just adherence to CDMA standard, but additional “supplemental requirements” to “secure our network and our customers,” says the operator’s CTO.

So you could go to all this trouble, jump through Verizon’s hoops and pay to develop and create a device, then cross your fingers that they approve it and allow you to try and make a business.

Or, you could do what you’ve been able to do for quite some time, and just make a GSM/UMTS device, and pop a SIM in from one of Verizon’s US rivals like AT&T or T-Mobile — or any other GSM operator, for that matter. You won’t get an operator subsidy, but you won’t with your special Verizon CDMA device, either.

So just to keep track: for Sprint, “open” means viewing web pages only in the format they choose. For Verizon, “open” means only using devices they certify and approve. For me, neither of those really jive with my definition of open.