Grim Times

I have always had a philosophical problem with femtocells. Your carrier has awful coverage in your house, so they SELL you a box to plug into your home network. Maybe they charge you a monthly fee as well, maybe not. But of course the best for them is that while you are using your own bandwidth, you are not using their network. No matter.

If you use AT&T, while you are off-net and using your fixed line DSL or cable bandwidth via the femtocell, any data you consume counts – wait for it – toward your monthly data caps on AT&T. Truly this is one of the ballsiest moves by a carrier to charge you for something they didn’t give you. To be fair, I haven’t checked if Verizon does the same thing, but I wouldn’t be surprised.

More here -

As is often the case, John Stewart manages to neatly and bitingly summarize what’s wrong with things. In this case, it’s the quixotic effort to achieve US energy independence and the perennial push for renewable energy. Although there has been some recent progress on the renewable technology front, oil is here to stay, and efforts to wean ourselves off of it only seems to lead to a greater percentage of foreign-sourced consumption over time.

Between comments last week at CTIA and the 3GPP approval request to use their spectrum for TD-LTE, it is now only a matter of time before all of the mobile WiMax players hop on board the LTE train. Economies of scale are just too big to ignore.

So although there will still be fragmentation at the OS layer, we are finally, finally moving toward a common RAN platform. No more religious wars in wireless – could it be possible?

As pretty as that new EVO WiMax phone is, I wouldn’t buy one unless you plan to chuck it out in a year or so . . .

(D') Evo - Pretty, short shelf life

Poor Google – embattled on all fronts. In full-scale retreat on the China front, they now are facing a newly-invigorated post-Bush FTC, helped by no less than their old friends at Verizon Wireless!

So many people continue to think that Google wants to get into the carrier business – they were wrong when Google bid on 700MHz spectrum, they were wrong again when Google invested in Clearwire, wrong a 3rd time with Android, a 4th with the Nexus One, and at least a 5th with this ruckus.  Google does not want to be a MVNO (mobile virtual network operator), or a real one. At least as far as I can tell. Running a network is a hard, crappy business with ginormous capex and slimmer margins than software, search, and ads in general. Why buy the cow when you can just get the cream?

What Google does want, and has wanted with every strategic decision it has taken in wireless, is to dominate the third screen (mobile). Verizon’s greatest fear is not that they have to compete with Google, it’s that Google will use their networks in a way that completely marginalizes them. The carriers are like ISPs in the early 90s – despite being forced to open up to the internet, they still believe the best way to monetize their capex-heavy assets is to own and control the customer experience. Wrong – Google will help them to monetize those assets by turning them into dumb pipes.

At the risk of sounding like a broken record, let me repeat myself – Google will help carriers make money by turning them into dumb pipes. Dumb. Pipes. Is. Good.  Don’t fight it – embrace it.

Let them hollow you out – let them provide all the luscious, AdMob/Android-fueled, location-based goodness – leave them alone to do their magic. Your users will become voracious consumers of data in ways they couldn’t even imagine in front of their PCs.  And you will have data ARPU well north of $100 a month. It will happen.

Unless of course you help the FTC to hold Google back. But then Apple/Quattro and Microsoft/Bing will simply get more market share and the same thing will happen regardless.

So carriers, negate the hate – embrace the AdMob. You’ll feel all the better for it -

Ahh, finally. This week Bloom officially exits stealth mode, with a press conference on Wednesday and a great segment on 60 Minutes last night -

60 Minutes Video – The Bloom Box

It’s been hard to sit tight on this, but now the results will speak for themselves. This one is special.

We’ve all seen tough outcomes, but this one is especially unfortunate for shareholders and staff at Spinvox -

The BBC just reported that Spinvox, which had raised £100m and sold to Nuance for £64m ($102m),  was only able to return £600 to investors. This was after repayment of a £30m loan (about a third of the proceeds were in Nuance stock, which explains part of the difference). That measly 600 pounds was distributed pro-rata to holders of 1.9m Series A preferred shares, and 5.3m common shares were apparently worthless.  According to a letter sent to staff obtained by the BBC -

“Under the Transaction, a total of around £600 was paid for all the shares, with holders of A shares being paid in priority to ordinary shareholders. Ordinary shareholders received no payment for the transfer of their shares and therefore any of the options that you held under the above Plans were “underwater” immediately prior to the Transaction, that is, the exercise price of the options was higher than the value of the shares that you would acquire on exercise of the option. This means you would not have realised any financial value from your options at the time of the Transaction.”

Not sure if investors got checks or petty cash – can’t imagine the amounts were big enough to justify a wire transfer.

So Nuance managed to get 100 terabytes of audio and transcribed data, as well as some impressive global customers, for a fraction of the price they would have had to pay in happier times.

It will be interesting to see what happens with the new Nuance/Spinvox combo in 2010 . . .