Pajama Entrepreneur

Better enjoy the last remnant of civility left on airlines (i.e. no mobile phones) because Ofcom, the UK regulator, has just said they’re fine with mobile calls on UK-registered aircraft.

Read more on Rose Cantine.

In a Salon interview, Clay Shirky says that the ability to create ad hoc social groups on the Internet is changing society in profound ways:

The argument I’m making is that the Internet isn’t a decoration to contemporary society — it’s a challenge to it. It’s not just that there’s a lot of new things happening. It’s that the new things that are happening are breaking parts of society that had actually been incredibly stable over a period of in some cases hundreds of years. And that is really the mark of a revolution. It’s not just that some additional capabilities come into a society. It’s really that the capabilities of the new tool cannot be contained by society’s current institutions.

Shirky has just published a book called Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations.

Indeed, it is precisely these online tools that allow individuals to set up businesses and pursue their own livelihoods outside large organizations such as corporations. Thousands of pajama entrepreneurs around the world are able to trade goods and services, often across borders, at very low cost. What are these tools and which traditional businesses (middlemen) are these tools cutting out?

• Skype (and other VOIP services like Gizmo Project): telecom operators
• Paypal: banks (although unfortunately, Paypal did not create its own virtual currency that people can use to trade with one another, replacing traditional currency. You still need a bank account to use Paypal but that may change if people lose confidence in the major currencies)
• Blogs and wikis: large media and PR firms
• Online data storage services: physical offices

But it’s not just online tools that allow us to set up our own businesses. Inexpensive computer hardware, cheap storage in the form of DVDs and hard drives, mobile phones, broadband and Wi-Fi have all done their part in giving us tools to work independently. No need to rent office space, you can work at home or in a cafe, although in some cases, it’s fun to share an office. But the ability to  share an office (called co-working) exists precisely because there are all of these tools).

I am in Barcelona for 3GSM, the massive annual get-together of the mobile phone industry. Actually it’s now called something completely forgettable — Mobile World Congress — so everybody still calls it 3GSM.

I hear peals of laughter in the background. What? Pajama Entrepreneur at the cellular industry’s annual gathering? After posting more than my fair share of articles ridiculing and attacking cellular operators, you would never have expected me to come here. Actually I have been to 3GSM before (2004?), when it was still called 3GSM and held in Cannes, France. I think Barcelona is a much better location for the conference.

I will be posting articles on the latest gadgets and applications. This is an interesting year for the mobile phone industry. Unless the device manufacturers give us something better than the iPhone, they’re toast. And unless the mobile operators offer flat-rate affordable data plans and roaming rates, they’re toast. We shall see what they’ve come up with . . .

Walt Mossberg says that the amount of control that US cellular operators have over handsets and applications is terrible for innovation:

So it’s intolerable that the same country that produced all this has trapped its citizens in a backward, stifling system when it comes to the next great technology platform, the cellphone. A shortsighted and often just plain stupid federal government has allowed itself to be bullied and fooled by a handful of big wireless phone operators for decades now. And the result has been a mobile phone system that is the direct opposite of the PC model. It severely limits consumer choice, stifles innovation, crushes entrepreneurship, and has made the U.S. the laughingstock of the mobile-technology world, just as the cellphone is morphing into a powerful hand-held computer . . . That’s why I refer to the big cellphone carriers as the “Soviet ministries.” Like the old bureaucracies of communism, they sit athwart the market, breaking the link between the producers of goods and services and the people who use them. To some extent, they try to replace the market system, and, like the real Soviet ministries, they are a lousy substitute.

Read the rest of his post about “freeing the phone”.

I have not been posting much over the past couple of weeks because I was ill for several days and then very busy with projects. There are so many conferences this month, one of which is my own Muniwireless event in Silicon Valley.

Mobile 2.0 in San Francisco (Oct. 15) in San Francisco: new mobile apps and business models

Web 2.0 Summit (Oct 17-19) in San Francisco: but I will only be hanging out in the lobby. Here’s an article in the SF Chronicle about how to make deals and meet interesting people without actually going to the trouble of paying for the conference and seeing the sessions

Muniwireless Silicon Valley (Oct 21-23) conference in Santa Clara: all about citywide Wi-Fi networks

Law professor Tim Wu says there’s nothing illegal about an iPhone user unlocking his phone plus it’s so much fun:

The good news is that my iPhone works flawlessly. With my existing T-Mobile account, I get 1,300 more minutes of talk time than I would have received from AT&T for a comparably priced plan; I also now have a phone that I can take to Asia and Europe. I avoided a $200 termination fee, AT&T’s activation fee, and having to wait for AT&T to port my existing number. On the downside, I don’t have AT&T’s visual voicemail, and I have to stay away from Apple’s software upgrades, which might brick the phone. But it’s easy to download third-party apps, like iPong. Best of all, my geek friends are impressed.

Read the rest of Professor Wu’s article on Slate. In the meantime, Apple’s most recent attempt (version 1.1.1) to turn its customers’ iPhones into $500 paperweights has failed. Hackers have figured out a way to hack that as well, giving users, once again, the freedom to user their phones however they want to.

UPDATE: Dewayne Hendricks emailed me to say that hackers have read access to the filesystem on the iPhone, but not complete write access. They’re very close though. Click here to visit the iPhone hacker site.

The city of Paris has begun offering free Wi-Fi access in public parks and gardens, museums, libraries, and other public buildings. To find out which areas have Wi-Fi, go to wifi.paris.fr. Inspired by San Francisco, the mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoë, issued a public tender last year, seeking a provider to deploy the hotzones. SFR and Alcatel-Lucent won the bid. France Telecom, a sour grapes loser, is suing the city, saying it is unfairly competing with FT’s own paid hotspot access. France Telecom’s subsidiary, Orange, is reportedly Apple’s exclusive partner in France for the iPhone.

Ironically, San Francisco, the original model for this project, has no Wi-Fi. I guess depending too much on a private company to fund everything (in SF’s case, EarthLink) is a fantasy.

To read more about the Paris Wi-Fi project, click here. Another successful project recently launched by the city is Velib, free bicycles available at various points in the city, especially around metro stops. The city partnered with JC Decaux, the outdoor advertising company, to fund this project.

Paris Wi-Fi website: wifi.paris.fr