Versatile Amphibian

Last week was a bit of a busy one, but I still had chance for a bit of reading. Here’s a brief roundup of stories from the TMT industry that caught my eye. This week: Google vs Facebook in Internet Risk, goodbye  Google TV, cars drive themselves (but not in Canada), kids break Murdoch’s tabs Traditional business models FT says that its print product will henceforth derive from the digital. I’m not so sure that’s really practical. There’s a big difference between the fast twitch, unlimited word count world of the web and the more structured, quality-first print product. There’ll be two newsrooms for a long time yet. http://gigaom.com/2013/10/09/financial-times-our-print-product-will-derive-from-the-web-offering-not-vice-versa/ BT bows to the inevitable and goes back into mobile. I think they’ll do well, since BT Retail has seemingly figured out how to do product marketing. Bad signs for O2 though, who now have the poorest spectrum asset in the UK and seem to be goin...

I've been asked to contribute of a debate on 'green telecoms', specifically how the telecoms industry can enable other industries as they seek to reduce carbon emissions. A couple of thoughts I've had on the subject: First , should the telecoms industry contribute to the industrial commons by making certain data available to all, in the same way that GPS signals are open to anyone with a receiver? Tom Tom's HD Traffic service is one service that makes use of data on handset movement to route traffic. Could this data benefit everyone, reducing jams and hence emissions? Second , is there a benefit to a short range car-to-car communications system, a kind of automotive social networking that enables ECUs to communicate with each other? Besides the obvious benefits around collision avoidance, could such ad-hoc networking help manage traffic flow and even enable the sharing of services such as GPS routing and even in-car entertainment? Sounds interesting conceptually - ...