Wildfire

Hello, this Is Wildfire… how can I help you…

It was a bubble ago, when I was first introduced to Wildfire, a follow-me, find-me telephone service, that tracked me down by serial dialing all my phone numbers: office, home or mobile phone. Its simplicty is what made it more than memorable, and it is a damn shame it did not catch on with the masses. It was also an early window into the concept of presence, on wireless and wireline networks.

Om mentions Wildfire, I’d almost forgotten that Orange had wildfire service a few years back and it was great, and he’s right it just didn’t catch on and Orange canned it a while back. It had some un-documented features like you could ask Wildfire what noise to cows make and she’d ‘moo’ back at you. [via]

Come back wildfire please!!

Stelios Comment

My last post on the delcine of EasyMobile in Holland has courted a very acidic comment from a peter politakis or nicos manoudakis, but the the same comment has been posted on two other sites [here] and [here]. So obviouslt Peter or Nicos doesn’t like Stelios much. I must stress the comments are his (whoever he is) comments and not mine.

KPN is suing the Dutch state

KPN is suing the Dutch state, an 8% shareholder, for unequal treatment. KPN is regulated, whereas cablecos have no open access obligation and are allowed to cross-subsidize.

KPN is obviously not happy with the regulations that the Dutch state puts upon it. When I spoke to them recently they had been working hard outside of the netherlands and have an interesting Mobile proposition. [via]

Peter Cochrane’s Blog: Fat cat telcos are killing the net

In my view this is a pure money play by the dark side, who, if they succeed politically, will catapult us back to a time when they controlled connectivity and information flow. And if it happens in the US, which would be wonderfully ironic as that is the country that created the internet, we might see the EU network operators queuing up with their wallets open ready to skim off more money than they are actually due by exactly the same mechanisms. [via]

Peter adds to the growing debate on Net Neutrality.

Technorati Tags: Neutrality

Rolls-Royce engineers $20m VoIP deal

Under the managed services agreement, Nortel will become the preferred provider of enterprise telephony for the engine giant’s new global voice network, which will serve 26,500 users in Canada, France, Germany, Norway, the UK and the US. [via]

A nice win for Nortel as they’ve had a few problems recently. RR is owned by BMW, who signed a deal with Nortel earlier in the year. So Nortel will be pleased that they are expanding their scope within the BMW group.
Technorati Tags: BMW Nortel Rolls Royce

In with the New

The “new economy” isn’t so new anymore, but companies still struggle to adapt their business models to the Internet age.

Belgacom’s traditional cash cow has become an endangered species. “Clearly, the per-minute voice traffic revenue model will disappear over time,” the CFO says. Just as phone calls can be beamed as packets of data over the net, so can videos, making television “just another service that can travel over a broadband pipe into the home.” [via]

An interesting (four page) look at Belgacoms diversification into Television.

Technorati Tags: Belgacom Telecom

EasyMobile shuts Dutch service amid absent callers

EasyMobile, the discount mobile operator, said on Tuesday it would shut its Dutch operations on August 6 due to a disappointing number of subscribers since its launch in October 2005 [via]

I’ll allways thought Easy<blank> was most successful in the UK, Stellios is a household name in the UK, so I can see how maybe he’d struggle outside of his home market. TeleBusillis has a book on when the other EasyMobile operations will shut down.

I was at a Telco event were Stelios was the guest speaker and he had a go at everyone in the room and even the Hilton hotel too…I guess those guests are having the last laugh after ready this news.

Technorati Tags: easymobile TeleBusillis Stellios

Free WiFi spawns cafe backlash

Russ kindly reminded me of my recent squatting in Chester’s Starbucks following the lose of my broadband when he read this article.

I’ve just ordered a second ADSL connections so we’ll soon have two ADSL connections..not sure much more of a nerd that make me

Bebo Shuns $550 Million Acquisition Offer

San Francisco based social network Bebo, which recently raised $15 million from Benchmark Capital, rejected a £300 million ($552 million) acquisition offer from British Telecom Group “a few weeks ago”, according to an insider on the transaction [via]

Just picked this up via Techmeme, had seen this coming, but it follows on from Murdochs purchase of MySpace. So I guess BT don’t want to be left behind by News Corp as they move into the content game. I was listend to the DSC a few days back too and heard that Mr Curry and Podshow has also been talking to BT, which makes it a pretty clear strategy that BT is trying to build a credible online content armoury to move away from it’s reliance on the inteligent network for revenue.

Technorati Tags: Bebo, techmeme, BT, British, Telecom, Group, News, Corp

Nokia N70 misses the mark again

I’m off to Chicago next week, so I checked the flight times my assistant put in my calendar, so I flipped the city to chicago and checked the calendar and nothing, it was still showing UK times.

I just googled the problem and it looks like the calendar app doens’t flip the times over which is poor. So I’m going to use my SPV C600 phone for the trip.
Technorati Tags: Nokia, N70, Calendar, SPV, C600