Pajama Entrepreneur

This is an amazing story of how three bloggers in Spain managed to create the most popular pro basketball site (Hoopshype) in the US. Never mind that one of them doesn’t even like the sport or that they’ve been blogging (and continue to blog) out of Madrid. Fantasy Sports Ventures bought Hoopshype from the founder, Jorge Sierra, for an amount in the low seven figures, according to the Wall Street Journal, and continues to blog with his colleagues.

I have also been running Muniwireless for several years out of Amsterdam and am often asked how I managed to become the authority on the US municipal wireless market. My answer: anyone can blog from anywhere and become an expert, if he or she is interested, writes well, has passion and . . . a good broadband connection. I can do my work from anywhere in the world as long as I have broadband. Indeed, if you make good money from ads on your site, why not live in a place that has good broadband but a lower cost of living? Why not Buenos Aires or Bangkok?

Geosign, a startup that raked in $160M in VC funding, blew up one year later after its business model — gaming the Google search engine — was effectively shut down via a change in Google’s algorithm. Read more here.

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.