Pajama Entrepreneur

Viviane Reding, the European commissioner in charge of telecommunications will do everything she can to enforce functional (or structural) separation in the EU. According to this article in the NYT, the EU’s efforts to increase competition in the member states, by clamping down on the power of local telecom incumbents, has resulted in a dramatic rise in broadband penetration and in a few countries like France, lower prices and higher speeds. Here are a few excerpts from the article: 

“We have four countries that are world leaders — Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and Finland,” said Viviane Reding, the European telecommunications commissioner. “We have eight countries which have higher penetration rates than the U.S. and Japan. We are not doing badly at all.”    . . .  In an interview Tuesday, Ms. Reding vowed to press ahead with an effort to give regulators powers to force the so-called incumbent telecommunications companies to run their businesses in a way that would make it easier for new competitors to enter the market. In countries like Germany and France, former state monopolies have fought fiercely against such a move . . . Ms. Reding emphasized her determination to encourage greater competition in the market and to give regulators the power to force “functional separation” — obliging the owners of telecommunications networks to free the networks from their operating divisions . . . Asked about the recent increase in broadband penetration in Germany, Ms. Reding said it had occurred only under pressure from Brussels to encourage competition. “The German regulator was rather passive,” she said. “After I pushed him, he started to push his market.”    

Read the NYT article here.  My observation: Although the Netherlands is lumped in together with Finland, Sweden and Denmark as having the highest broadband penetration in the EU, I am not impressed at all with the rollout of FTTH in Amsterdam. In Paris, you can get 50 Mbps symmetrical service for 30 EUR. In Amsterdam, the FTTH project called Citynet has not even begun to announce when the center of the city will get FTTH service. I understand Reding’s frustration with local regulators, some of whom are friendlier to the local telco incumbent than others.  Viviane Reding’s recent victory in favor of consumers was forcing the mobile operators to lower voice roaming charges. She’s now trying to get them to lower data roaming charges, which are still outrageously high.  One of my friends got a bill for 10,000 EUR after she took video on her mobile phone and uploaded it to her blog . . . while she was outside the Netherlands! 

The European Commission has chosen the Nokia-backed DVB-H standard for mobile TV. Big loser: Qualcomm and its competing platform, MediaFLO. Qualcomm has been lobbying the Commission heavily in the past few months. What does this mean? By creating one standard for the entire EU, the Commission hopes to give a boost to European mobile TV services. Like they did with the GSM standard, the EU’s adoption of DVB-H will encourage operators and device manufacturers to launch these services within the next year.

Bill Gates: “We’re hopeful that that will be made available so that Wi-Fi can explode in terms of its usage, even out into some of these less dense areas (of the United States) where distance has been a big problem for Wi-Fi.”

Microsoft has been an advocate for unlicensed use of the television “white spaces” spectrum. Click here to read more.

From an article in the Guardian [Wave goodbye to the nine to five, and say hello to virtual enterprise]: A report on the nature of employment in 2018 predicts an exodus from the traditional workplace caused partly by environmental pressure to reduce the carbon footprint of commuting and partly by the demographic pressure of an ageing population, with fewer employees able to avoid looking after older relatives, leading to a blurring of boundaries between family and career.

I just returned from a trip to Japan. What amazed me was that I did not hear any mobile phones ringing in subway cars or trains. Neither did I hear (or see) people talking on their phones. I was so eerily quiet. But people are using their phones — texting, reading mini-novels, playing games, looking at video. Everyone’s staring into them, oblivious to the other passengers. Note that in Japan, nearly all the phones are the flip model (none of them from Nokia).

What accounts for the silence? On the shinkansen (high-speed train) people are requested to put their phones in silent mode. If you want to talk to someone, you have to do it in the area between the carriages. As a result, even though the subways and trains can be very crowded, it’s more civilized experience unlike in Europe or the US, where people chat loudly and talk about their personal problems within earshot of everyone. I also noticed that when two or more people are talking in a subway car, they do so in hushed voices.

I witnessed the same thing in a cafe at the train station in Kyoto where I was having coffee, waiting for the shinkansen to Tokyo. The guy sitting next to me suddenly rose and ran outside when his mobile phone rang. He did not take the call in the restaurant.

What amazes me though is that during the week and a half that I was in Japan, I did not see one person violate this “rule”. Not even the wildly dressed young guys with punky orange hair boarding the subway in Harajuku (a Tokyo district where a lot of young people hang out). Think of the thousands of people who use public transport in Japan.

What does this have to do with i-mode?

i-mode is a wireless service launched by NTT Docomo in Japan which provides access to mobile Internet sites. In other words, it delivers online content to mobile phones. It’s popular in Japan because on those long boring commutes and subway rides, people can simply stare at their phones and view the content. Since they don’t talk on their phones, it’s the one thing that occupies their time and allows them to not have to look at other passengers.

NTT Docomo entered into partnerships with European telecom operators a few years ago to launch i-mode in Europe. It was a flop everywhere. I know that in the Netherlands, KPN Mobile is giving it away and even then, most people I know who have it, rarely use it.

Why? People talk on their mobile phones in the Netherlands (which irritates other passengers but the chatting commuters don’t care). They don’t have such long commutes either. Many people bike or drive to work, too. Europeans and Americans are more “PC centric”, that is, when they think of online content, they like to look at it on a computer.

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 live in Amsterdam, everyone should know that by looking at my Facebook profile. Yet, Facebook has inserted this ad for Blockbuster in my news feed. Totally irrelevant to me. This is nothing more than SPAM. In a few months, my news feed will be clogged with utterly useless ads. How do I opt out of Facebook spam?