Versatile Amphibian

France became the latest country in Europe to successfully allocate its 800MHz spectrum today, achieving a rather higher sum than they expected. Not much more to say on the subject, expect that Orange France came within a whisker of breaking the record for amount paid per-person, per MHz for the LTE spectrum. Only T-Mobile in Germany paid more - EUR0.73 vs EUR0.71, demonstrating that even the current economic malaise hasn't dented enthusiasm for next generation communications.

I’m firmly of the belief that participants in the TMT industry need to read widely in order to understand the present and future dynamics of the market. To that end, this post is a collection of the articles that have caught my eye this week. Digital media Worth a flick through, although interesting that the website is buggy if you’re not using Chrome. Sign of the times? http://www.googlezeitgeist.com/en# The arrogance of the music industry is astounding – why should Megaupload take down something that was legitimately produced and paid for? Do you think there might be a reason the labels and publishers are dying out? http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2011/12/judge-gives-umg-24-hours-to-explain-takedown-spree.ars Emerging markets Old news that I’ve just stumbled on again - I believe that these gateways hold the key for African telecoms networks as onshore cabling becomes more widespread. Malawi is land locked, but could still play a hub role in onshore connectivity. http://www.te...

This morning, O2 announced that it would offer a handset leasing proposition for UK mobile phone customers . Regular readers will recall that I've been thinking about this for a couple of years now and blogged about it in May 2010 (if only I'd talked to O2 about it). On the specific deal in question, I thought it was worth working out who benefits from this deal. The answer, to put no finer point on it, is O2. Financially, that is. The total price of 12 months of £55 a month contract is £660, but you have to take off 12*£20 = £240 for the airtime, so the handset cost equates to £440 for a £499 phone, which would be worth £325 in perfect condition after 12 months. If you stumped up the full amount for the handset then you’d have spent a net of £174 for the device. If you leased from O2 you’ve paid £440, so the effective cost is £266 for a new phone every 12 months. A great model for O2, as they’re effectively pocketing that £266 in addition to their profit on the service. c.20%...

A short list from me this week as I’ve been travelling and therefore reading on the iPhone! Breakthrough technology If Intel can pull this off then it will give them an advantage against ARM in the mobile processor space. Our ability to fab smaller, faster architectures makes it possible to create processors with more tailored computing units, increasing efficiency and therefore decreasing power consumption http://www.mobile-ent.biz//news/read/putting-ar-on-the-chipset I just like satellites – an amazing piece of technology http://holykaw.alltop.com/a-short-history-of-satellites-video The baseband processes radio signals and manages the wireless transmissions of a cell. Moving this processing into the cloud will be a trend in network builds in 2012 as operators seek to create more dense, but also more cost-efficient radio networks. http://www.rethink-wireless.com/2011/12/08/korea-telecom-plans-worlds-commercial-cloud-ran.htm Media business models I’m perplexed by this judgement too – t...

$907Mn of investment in African telecoms was announced in November, much of it related to deepening of mobile network capacity in markets where subscriber growth is ongoing. One of those may well be Nigeria, where regulatory action to enforce subscriber registration has led to a reduction in SIM numbers to about 93Mn. Interestingly, this action has co-incided with 5th operator Etisalat pledging to invest in an additional 1,000 basestations next year to take advantage of what now looks like substantial headroom for growth.

I’m firmly of the belief that participants in the TMT industry need to read widely in order to understand the present and future dynamics of the market. To that end, this post is a collection of the articles that have caught my eye this week. Technology evolution Tiny steps towards standardised communications in cars, but positive. The big, long term gambit must be to connect the cars themselves together to enhance safety and navigation, while reducing fuel consumption. http://www.reghardware.com/2011/11/28/bmw_and_fiat_join_connected_car_consortium/ More bad news for AMD. This time they’ve compounded the error of creating an architectural dud by alienating the fab that makes said dud (and used to be a part of AMD). The implications are potentially disastrous for AMD’s 2012 and 2013 line ups as switching fabs means redesigning the product. Bad times in Sunnyvale. http://www.extremetech.com/computing/106217-manufacturing-bombshell-amd-cancels-28nm-apus-starts-from-scratch-at-tsmc The ra...

On Tuesday, the UK Government released the Chancellor's Autumn Statement , an important statement of policy at a time when a double dip recession seems increasingly likely (if one believes the doom-laden rantings of the popular press, at least). In amongst the sensible stuff about public sector pay caps (about time, given the upcoming strike action by middle class, home owning unionists masquerading as "working class" activists) were two statements about the digital economy. Just when you thought the lessons of the risible Digital Britain/ Digital Economy policy failures had been learnt, here comes another misguided governmental attempt to interfere in a functioning commercial market. The concept is to assign £100Mn for two things: 1) Improving mobile coverage in the UK up to 99% of the population 2) Urban broadband fund to create up to 10 “super-connected cities” This is a laudable goal, but as usual there’s nothing in the document about how this will be implemented. The...

New technology With all the fuss about ARM vs Intel in the PC/ server/ mobile/ any other device market, it’s easy to forget the other alternatives from AMD. Sadly, “Bulldozer” seems to be representative of the speed of their new architecture, not its effect on the competition. Some commentators – like that linked – believe that multithreaded processes in servers will allow AMD to regain ground against Intel. They miss the point – this is a desktop chip and will compete against other desktop chips. Against these, and against server-specific products, it will get annihilated by the competition. http://www.informationweek.com/news/hardware/processors/231903448 Darknet activities such as this are a core part of the – accidental or deliberate – effort to segment and even weaponise aspects of the Internet. http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2011/11/the-darknet-plan-netroots-activists-dream-of-global-mesh-network.ars Breakthrough technology Given the criticism that so...

Business model evolution Apple’s new patent, if implemented in hardware, represents another nail in the coffin of mobile operators slightly pathetic attempts to monopolise the nascent NFC market. NFC in phones is a neat technology, but frankly offers limited additional customer benefit above conventional payment and access technologies. If payment in particular is such a draw, then the industry should ask itself how much consumers are willing to pay for chip and pin. The answer, in case you’re wondering, is “zero”. More sensible to make this a very minor part of the phone architecture. http://www.nfcworld.com/2011/11/09/311213/apple-patents-sim-within-secure-element-technology/ And just to ram home the point, news of this collaboration between Intel and Mastercard demonstrates how likely it is that the secure functions of NFC terminals will lie off the SIM card. http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/13/mastercard-and-intel-partner-to-secure-and-simplify-online-and-nfc-payments/ New technology ...

I’ve just returned from a week in Tokyo. Having just recovered from the jet lag, I thought I’d share some experiences and impressions about media and technology landscape. The first thing to say is that Tokyo is a beautiful city. It’s very clean and for the most part rather peaceful. This is helped by the nature of the traffic. Besides the ubiquitous Toyota Crown taxis, almost every other car was either a hybrid or a tiny Kei car – a glimpse into the future of European cities as fuel prices rise and taxes on gas guzzlers become ever more punitive. Beautiful or not, this year’s earthquake has had significant effects on life in the city. Since the well publicised issues with their generation capacity began, Japan has suffered with undersupply of electricity and this is manifest in the fact that none of the offices I went to were using their air conditioning. Something I hadn’t really appreciated is that modern office blocks are so well insulated that even the body heat of those inside cr...

Here's a few stories that I've found interesting this week from across the digital world. Digital media Mobile advertising is clearly a market with much growth in it, particularly in developed markets. I wonder, however at what point this will merge with traditional online and which set of business models will win out. http://www.rethink-wireless.com/2011/11/07/orange-venture-fund-mobile-digital-start-ups.htm The headline is slightly misleading, as the volumes required to access the best discounts continue to rise, but the analysis is typically cogent and demonstrates the very small size of the content delivery market worldwide, despite all the hype that surrounds online video. http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_business_of_online_vi/2011/11/cdn-pricing-stable-in-q4-down-about-20-for-the-year.html HTML 5 has really blossomed this year and Adobe’s announcement that Flash is to leave the mobile platform (albeit slowly) illustrates that fact. How long can Microsoft persist with Si...

I'm on a week-long trip to Japan to visit with some clients. Although not a reason for my trip, a subject that's come up several times is the alarming recent spike in cyber attacks on Japanese companies. One senior executive at a global electronics corporation told me that they were responding to at least one serious attempted breach every day; another - more worryingly a significant player in the defensive industry - reported similar issues. This goes to show that the recent London conference on cyber security was very topical as this is a global issue, at least for those companies that embrace and participate in market capitalism. There is clear danger of reaching for apocalyptic scenarios when discussing this topic, but I for one am concerned about the threat of cyber warfare perpetrated by China, Russia and others to the world's economic and political security. The regimes mentioned are not in any way wedded to the market economy - they and their puppet companies partic...

Investment in African telecoms picked up in October after a slow September, with $284Mn announced, principally in mobile, with the exception of Liberia and Sierra Leone receiving World Bank funding to connect themselves to the ACE subsea cable system. Biggest deal this month was the conclusion of France Telecom's protracted takeover of Congo Chine Telecoms. FT paid $125Mn for DRC's 3rd largest carrier and an additional $71Mn for 2MHz of 1800 and 10MHz of 2100 spectrum to boost capacity - necessary given DRC's 72Mn population, much of which remains unconnected. At $92.6 per subscriber, the deal looks like a good one for FT and further strengthens its grip on Francophone Africa.

Some thoughts on the Playbook 2.0 delay , since it's topical. I think the 2.0 upgrade issue is embarrassing for RIM and will be bad for their relations with the developer community, but it’s a small part of a wider dynamic in the tablet industry. If you look at the distribution of tablet sales so far, it almost exactly follows the distribution of wealth in the population, which suggests that early adopters are buying as a luxury and therefore buying on appearance, brand and reputation as much as they’re buying on the technical features of the platform. Software is definitely a major part of the tablet experience, but actually the Playbook (or Android equivalents) are not significantly more or less user friendly than the iPad in this respect. Where all of the competitors are currently falling down is that they’re taking the iPad on head-to-head with high concept products at the same price point, but without the great marketing and retail experience that Apple offer. So everyone is p...

Besides a slight naming problem , there were few surprises in the launch of the Lumia 800 at Nokia World today. I was a bit unimpressed by the stage show, which felt very forced, but the hardware looks good and, according to early benchmarks it offers very respectible performance. A few thoughts from me: I think Nokia should have been more aggressive in its pricing. I'm firmly of the belief that the mass market smartphone customer makes a simple choice. If they can afford an iPhone, then they buy one - its a trusted choice in a rather confusing world, not to mention its status symbol er... status. Those who can't afford iPhone then choose a monthly payment they can afford and go from there. By pricing the 800 at the same point as iPhone, I think NOK are in for an uphill battle. Rebuilding their brand requires shifting a lot of units and becoming the "next best option" after iPhone; not going head to head with Apple just yet. If it was me, I'd have accepted much l...

A slow month for announcements in September, perhaps a result of Ramadan and vacation season in much of the Western world. Only deal of significant note was Airtel's $30Mn purchase of a 3G licence in Rwanda and announcement of $70Mn of additional investment to build the network. Of the 39 stories on African telecoms, 29 related to mobile access networks, 6 backhaul and 3 to fixed line networks. Outside of basic access, number portability is generating a lot of buzz, with Ghana in particular having notable success in enabling customers to port.

I found this story remarkable. The Chinese authorities seem to be taking a more and more hardline approach to international businesses and markets, which flies in the face of the "common knowledge" that exposure to free market capitalism will inevitably soften the regime's economic and political control on the economy. Many of my clients are seeing toughening up of import restrictions, increasing requirements for technology transfer and great efforts being made to replicate or substitute technologies in the ICT space. TD-SCDMA is a great example of the latter, which has been pursued despite its obvious flaws, principally because its use avoids patent payments to foreign enterprises. I'm increasingly of the believe that technology companies should regard China as less of a market opportunity and more of a threat. I can't believe I've just written that, but I hear too many stories such as the above regarding market shaping and asymettric competition to ignore t...

August was a busier month than July for telecoms investments, with OneDotCom's announcement of $593Mn of investment in a B2B focussed ISP in South Africa trumped by MTN announcing a further billion dollars of network build in Nigeria. The latter market remains the Wild West from a legislative, regulatory and stability point of view, but an economy heavy with the potential of massive population and natural oil wealth continues to prove a draw. Also notable this month was American Tower's $140Mn tower upgrade programme in Ghana - a smaller market, but one that is made attractive day by being the polar opposite of Nigeria in terms of investment readiness.

I’m writing this post in the departure lounge at Nairobi airport, having spent most of this week in the city meeting various TMT companies. It’s been an eye opening few days, so I thought it’d be worth sharing a few experiences. The challenge that sub-Saharan Africa faces with infrastructure is apparent the moment you step out of Nairobi’s slightly ramshackle airport and into one of the ubiquitous vans, which almost instantaneously becomes another crawling, hooting part of Nairobi’s quite astounding “traffic”. Traffic is a word that comes up in pretty much every conversation. Kenya has only one major road, which links it to Uganda to the east and Tanzania in the south; teeming with well used trucks, tankers and vans it is as frequently gridlocked as the surface is pot-holed. “It breaks my Range Rover every time I drive on it” Bob Collymore, CEO of Safaricom told me, before going on to highlight the similar issues the country has with power supply and public transport. The almost...

It would be an understatement to say that we had an interesting night in London: buildings burnt out, 600 arrests (and counting) , probably to worst period of unrest in the UK since the 1980s. Without delving into the social context for this upheaval, what fascinated me last night was the way in which the power of the same social media that enabled the Arab Spring was demonstrated on the streets of a major European capital. Simple tools like BlackBerry Messenger and Twitter allowed an unconnected mass of hooligans to achieve an unprecedented form of self-organised co-ordination and thereby elude the (valiant) efforts of one of the world's best trained police forces . Whenever the police arrived, the mob simply moved on to an undefended area - classic guerilla tactics, but without the classic guerilla command structure. It is not hard to see why Middle Eastern police forces and particularly armies were unable to prevent small civil disturbances spiraling out of control. Th...

Over the last year I've been engaged on a number of projects in African technology and telecoms. As a result, I've started to compile a database of intra- and inter-continent investment into the networks that will enable the next phase of African growth. The map shows the location and size of the investments announced in July. As a disclaimer, in some cases (for example, network investment) I have estimated the scale of the investment based on my experiences operating in the territory and in the telecoms industry. The headline for July is that $790Mn of telecoms investments were announced in the Continent, with mobile ($499Mn) and ISP ($262Mn) the largest vertical markets for investment. Airtel's commitment of $400Mn for upgrades to its cell network in Nigeria was the largest single announcement, demonstrating the company's focus on enhancing the coverage and share of the Zain assets it acquired last year into Africa's largest mobile market.

Neilsen reported yesterday that in home streamers of content in the US under-index on total TV consumption. An interesting comparative data point for the UK comes from the BBC, which has been reporting steadily increasing use of the iPlayer for streaming live TV. In May, 115Mn on-demand streams were delivered by iPlayer, versus 17Mn live streams. The latter has increased 71% YoY, versus 16% for on-demand. If this trend is mirrored across the market, then perhaps the future is not as bright as anticipated for TV, viewership of which has been increasing steadily and currently stands at about 3.8hrs per person per day.

It surprises me that Nokia's latest set of poor results have been greeted with such happiness by the markets. A loss of $360Mn and further smartphone share to Apple seems like another nail in their coffin. This time last year I thought that Nokia's position as #1 handset maker was retrievable, but now I'm not so sure. I actually do buy the idea that Windows Phone can be a viable 3rd way against iPhone and Android (how the world has changed - I recall Operators being terrified of Microsoft 5 years ago, now they're willing them on...), however the strategy of announcing Symbian/ Meego's death a year in advance of it's launch seemed utterly crazy. Perhaps Stephen Elop decided it was best to focus them on one thing and halt the propensity to get distracted that had prevented Nokia succeeding in the preceding years. The trouble is that Nokia's travails are now front page news in the broadsheets, which means that 30-40% of the phone buying population are aware of...

A great article in Slate about the price of heavier cars in terms of road safety. As a long term driver of small, lightweight vehicles, it makes disturbing reading, even before one considers the environmental damage associated with 2T four wheel drives. I think that the idea the author proposes of increasing fuel duty to account for the additional health costs makes perfect sense. I fail to understand why in the UK we feel the need to pay for a vehicle licensing body like the DVLA (at the cost of 100's of millions of pounds) to ( ineffectively ) police road tax, when we could save a huge amount of money and gaurantee compliance by putting additional fees on fuel. Oh, and it would actually target those who pollute the most. Anyway, back on road safety, I remain really excited by the potential of self-driving in this area, even if it is only allowed on major trunk roads. British roads are quite safe but if one death can be avoided by mass adoption radar cruise control , brake assis...

A short post from me to day to flag that our new paper on success factors for mobile apps was published last week. Although it's quite a simple piece, the press coverage has been very favourable. Here's a few excerpts: Sunday Telegraph - Sunday Telegraph Silicon - Seven ways to stop your mobile app becoming a flop Guardian - Most branded apps are a flop says Deloitte. But why? New Media Age - Less than 1% of mobile apps hit 1m download mark Warc - Branded apps miss the mark Drum - Location information apps most downloaded, research finds Computer Weekly - Deloitte: the killer app could be killed off IT Pro – Smartphone users prefer Angry Birds to brands' application downloads. Tech eye - Branded apps are a mirage Inquirer - Nokia and Apple are leading European smartphone usage

Some great chat in the office today about the relative merits of the SIM card. I rather boldy claimed that in 3 years no new smartphone on sale would have a SIM card, the technology having been replaced by software SIMs. Needless to say, this view was not universally agreed with! Advocates of mobile operators and mobile banking providers decided that the former would never agree to ship such devices as they disintermediate them and that the latter would hate them for security reasons. I'm not so sure about either counter-argument, personally. The thing that hardware manufacturers really like about soft-SIM is that it makes it very easy to sell direct to the consumer - no messing about with holding stocks of SIMs, just choose the cheapest monthly deal, connect to iTunes or Android update and 20 seconds later the device is activated. Combined with 2 hour number portability , it really increases customer choice and disintermediates the service provider. The trouble for operators is th...

I can't help but think that the unveiling of HMV's new 'strategy' is the final nail in the coffin for music on the highstreet. Quite how they think that selling high end headphones (a product that couldn't be better suited to online merchants) and competing with the well established live performance players will save their business is beyond me. For me the future of such retail is in the creation of physical experiences that seamlessly and additively blend with online. For example, the use of augmented reality and near-field technology to enable consumers to sample on the highstreet (or even on the Metro ) and receive digitally on any device or promptly to their home. I've also written before about the role of HMV and equivalents in curating digital content for consumers faced with the unlimited choice of digital. Again, this is curiously missing as a positioning for HMV - imagine being able to walk into their store, sample some branded music, apps or games exp...

This Wednesday is an exciting day for anyone who uses mobile data services in the UK. Why? Because on Wednesday the first trials of the White Spaces Coalition's frequency agile fast broadband technology begin in Cambridge . Now that analogue TV is very nearly extinct in the UK we can finally start making use of the spectrum for some economic good, beyond re-runs and reality TV. To summarise the technology concept, the map of radio spectrum usage isn't a flat continium, but rather a comb with used bands separated by "guard bands" that prevent leakage from one channel into another. Furthermore, usage of the spectrum is inconsistent in different geographical areas, partly for the same technical reason (preventing leakage), partly because not all channels are broadcast nationally. The upshot is that large portions of the spectrum are unused, which is where the white space radio technology comes in. The radios they use (effectively a modified wi-fi router) use the free cha...

Just a short post from me - I've just spent the day at a client in Gurgaon , just outside New Delhi. Frankly I was amazed by the tangible sense of progress in the city, which resembles an Indian-flavoured Seoul (with the exception of the typically abysmal India road system). Big tech' names were everywhere, as was glass and steel, which completely dominate the skyline. Compared to the wide boulevards of colonially-styled New Delhi, this was a major shock. I was also very impressed by the ambition of the client in question - a palpable sense of energy and ambition permeated their (very large) corporate headquarters. Could it be that India is finally emerging from it's 20 year funk and becoming a genuine high tech challenger to China? Let's hope so...

Now, I've always had a soft spot for the Vauxhall/ Opel Senator - probably because they were the fearsome steed of the UK's traffic police when I was a lad. I'll also openly admit to being a lapsed/ recovered Trekker. Therefore, this is the coolest thing that I've ever seen. Quite why automobile manufacturers still seem incapable of making a decent in car electronics suite when one geek and a soldering iron can achieve this is rather beyond me...

So after 15 years in the making, the Duke returns ... and he's showing his age. I have to admit a feeling of regret at both the wait and the poor quality of the game: I spent many happy days in front of my Escom Pentium 100 (another long forgotten victim of the dotcom demise) blasting aliens and shooting gum. Perhaps I'll buy it anyway - one star for nostalgia...

I know this is old news and I know that it's geeky, but these videos of Google's robot car are awesome! How the mainstream auto industry can claim that we're 25 years from a commercial self-driving car is beyond me. The benefits in terms of road safety and fuel efficiency are too great to pass up for uninformed or pre-meditated concerns about handing over control of a fast moving lump of metal to a computer. After all, most new cars are "drive-by-wire" - a computer is already between you and the major controls, you're just not aware of it! Doubtless the cost of laser radar and the computer systems will be substantial, but I wonder whether they're much worse than the battery packs and charging gear of an electric car. Given the hideous compromises in environmental impact and convenience of the latter, perhaps governments should be promoting self-driving rather than "zero-emissions" as a way of reducing carbon emissions? Probably too far fetched - ...

For reference, the text of a speech I did for an internal meeting. 5 minutes on the effect of the Internet on business models: "From the 2011 vantage point it is clear that the Internet has had a profound effect on the fortunes of every business, government, NGO and individual in the developed world. And its reach is ever extending: to the deserts of the Sahara, to a billion consumers in China and a billion more in India, not to mention the further billion in the rest of developing Asia, Latin America and Africa. But it’s not that colossal expansion of scale of influence and the consequent opportunities and challenges for us and our clients that I think we should focus on today, but the even more profound expansion of scope that will accompany the next stage of the Internet’s evolution. When I think about the effect of the Internet on business models, I see three aspects: · Polarisation (of success and failure) · Acceleration (of decisions) · Diversification (of models) The reboun...