Pajama Entrepreneur

The Wall Street Journal writes about the French telecom regulator forcing France Telecom and the other fiber operators (Neuf Cegetel and Iliad) to share fiber ducts leading to apartment buildings. The result is more competition in the market for broadband services in France. Indeed in Paris you can get 50 Mbps symmetrical broadband service for 30 EUR per month.

Quote from the WSJ article:

When France Télécom SA hooked up an apartment complex in eastern Paris to its new high-speed broadband network recently, it did something unusual: It left the door open for its competitors. In a small supply closet on the ground floor, France Télécom built a metal cabinet to store all the tiny fiber cables that eventually will connect to people’s apartments. On one side it installed its own fiber lines, but the other side it left empty for its competitors.

. . .

“It’s silly for each company to lay its own fiber and dig up the streets three times. They will exhaust themselves and run out of resources,” said Gabrielle Gauthey, a commissioner at Arcep.

Read the WSJ article to understand how the French regulator is making a lot of broadband customers very happy indeed.

I love simple applications that do one thing and do it well. Instapaper is one such application. Use it to bookmark online articles to read later. You can subscribe to your list via an RSS feed.

Here’s how you use it. Go to Instapaper and register. Add their “Read Later” button to your bookmark toolbar. When you stumble upon an article you want to read later or keep for reference, just click on the Read Later button and it is automatically added to your Instapaper list.

When you go to your Instapaper account, you will see your list of articles. You can click the RSS button on the right side to add the feed to an RSS newsreader like Netnewswire. So simple and convenient!

A study reveals that close to one third of iPhones sold by Apple in the US have been unlocked to work on other carriers’ networks. That’s one million iPhones! Apple will lose $500 million in 2008 in revenues because it gets no revenue share from these phones. One wonders how much money Apple would make by selling the iPhone unlocked to begin with. How many people did not want to buy the iPhone because of it is locked?

Last night, as I watched Steve Jobs announce movie rentals on iTunes and re-launch the Apple TV, it dawned on me that Apple has just driven a stake into the heart of the cable TV industry. The speed of cable TV’s demise will depend on how fast Apple can get films and TV shows from all over the world on iTunes. Here’s what Apple is offering:

• $2.99 per movie ($3.99 for high-definition films)
• you have 30 days to watch it and if you start a film, you have 24 hours to finish it
• you can watch it anywhere: on your iPod Touch, iPhone, laptop, desktop or TV (via Apple TV). If you download it to your Apple TV, you can move it to any of your devices including an iPod to finish watching
• Apple TV: little white box that looks like the Apple Airport Extreme wireless router but allows you to watch all iTunes content on your TV, no need for a computer. This is basically a set top box.
• All the major movie studios are on board.
• Movies available within 30 days after they are released on DVD.
• Available now in the US; in other countries within a few months.

Using the Apple TV box hooked up to your flat screen TV monitor, you can watch any content from movies to TV shows to YouTube videos, Flickr photos, video podcasts, your own video clips, anything you want.

So why should anyone continue to pay money every month to a cable company (and rent a set top box) to watch the same movies and TV shows that are on iTunes? It does not give you access to YouTube, video podcasts and other content on the Internet. You can’t watch your cable company’s offerings on your iPod or laptop while you are in an airplane.

Apple’s offerings also just killed the video rental industry. At $2.99 a pop, I would not even go down to the video rental store in the middle of a stormy winter day to rent a DVD. I can just rent it on iTunes and download it to my devices at home.

What gets me really excited is that iTunes could be the repository of films and TV shows that we never see on cable, in the cinema, or in our video rental stores: older films, movies made by independent film makers in different countries, TV shows in other parts of the world, and documentaries. Just look at the video and audio podcast offerings on iTunes. They even have iTunes University where you can view physics and English literature lectures given in top universities in the US.

When I watched Steve Jobs give a demo on how easy it is to rent and download a film, I’d say people-friendly video on demand is here. Not the clunky, horrible BBC iPlayer (which works only on Windows), but a way to find and watch video that doesn’t make you pull your hair out.

So why continue paying a lot of money for cable TV service? All you need now is a fast Internet connection at home!

Posted on Rose Cantine last month:

•  Jason Calacanis on Internet pollution and how to stop it
• Users revolt: blog network turns out to be owned by a marketing agency

Stats: iPhone has 0.09 percent of Web usage — yes, that’s a lot: In this post Valleywag points out that iPhone users tend to use the Web more than non-iPhone users. Excerpt:

Windows CE, which encompasses every Windows Mobile device shipped, holds a 0.06 percent share; Danger Research’s Sidekick product family holds a tiny 0.02 percent share; and the Symbian S60 smartphone platform, favored by Nokia, has 0.01 percent.

My take is that it has everything to do with the user interface and how easy it is to visit sites, check maps, look for information online. A lot of phones are clunky (terrible design) with the typical phone dialing pads or have ugly, impossibly small screens. Who would want to browse a website on that?

Cory Doctorow has written an excellent piece about how Facebook suffers from exactly the same dilemma suffered by earlier online social networks: when everyone’s on, it’s not cool anymore. And worse — you’ll need to “defriend” people. Oh how to do this without offending people? You can’t. Here’s an excerpt from Cory’s article:

You’d think that Facebook would be the perfect tool for handling all this. It’s not. For every long-lost chum who reaches out to me on Facebook, there’s a guy who beat me up on a weekly basis through the whole seventh grade but now wants to be my buddy; or the crazy person who was fun in college but is now kind of sad; or the creepy ex-co-worker who I’d cross the street to avoid but who now wants to know, “Am I your friend?” yes or no, this instant, please. It’s not just Facebook and it’s not just me. Every “social networking service” has had this problem and every user I’ve spoken to has been frustrated by it. I think that’s why these services are so volatile: why we’re so willing to flee from Friendster and into MySpace’s loving arms; from MySpace to Facebook. It’s socially awkward to refuse to add someone to your friends list — but removing someone from your friend-list is practically a declaration of war.

I left LinkedIn, a popular business networking site precisely because lots of people wanted to be my contact and began pestering me for endorsements even though I hardly knew them. It was a complete waste of time. If I need to contact someone, I don’t need to go through LinkedIn. I have a very good network already and my friends are more than willing to make introductions to other people.