This story about a rogue mobile phone constantly calling 911 is actually a little scary - sometimes a feature created to provide additional safety or security may end up compromising it. If a lot of cellphones unburdened by the cost and trackability of a carrier contract start dialing 911 in a particular area, they could quite easily create a denial of service for legitimate emergencies… however, in this case, surely they can triangulate the location based on other 911  services that have been set up that require the location of the call to be pinpointed?

Good post from Compete’s blog about the ubiquitous social network ads for Who has a crush / Swami Predicts and so on. They claim a pretty decent conversion rate. The danger in their model might be that it’s very susceptible to mobile phone chargebacks which can really kill a ringtone- or similar mobile content business. They must have a decent amount of volume for the carriers then…

Bob Tedeschi talks about Prosper in this Monday’s column in the NY Times. Pretty neat model like Zopa in the UK. I love this model — I always thought of something like this when I was thinking about changing money at the airport. The spreads are so ridiculously wide that travelers could very easily make a bunch of money in the airport if they could just organize themselves in the right way… (you heard it here first folks) and technology like this gives the opportunity to do this kind of organization. I have no doubt we’ll see wireless “real time bargaining systems” that let people do things like this before very long…

Maybe: trust is still the issue, but there are and will be technology-based ways of overcoming that too…

Dennis and the gang at Dodgeball are now part of the Googlesphere. Plenty of stories picking up on the email announcement that dball sent out. I posted a comment on Battelle’s blog here about them. Congratulations guys! I’m sure we’ll see plenty of innovation and great new ideas to come. Read all about it at teendrama.com

I’d written several times about WOZ, most recently this last April. There’s now plenty more detail about their product on their website. Now the recent story in eWeek discussing using the GPS location tags as an authentication token for a corporate laptop. Basically, if you’re in a certain range of places, you can get in and use your laptop for example. So you could set up zones where it should work like home or the office - and traveling I presume you would set up certain airports and places in advance. The latter would be a bit of a pain to do ahead of time, but overall I think this is a good idea. With security and access a major concern, it’s unfortunately inevitable that we will lose some of our previous freedoms in the corporate sphere and of course with that will come the loss of privacy (i.e. the firm will know where we are and if we’re working, all the time!).

Intel and Telkom are testing WiMax in Pretoria, South Africa.

The FCC has proposed lifting the ban on using wireless devices on planes. Naturally many people are complaining about the potential noise and annoyance of not only having the person next to you pepper you with smalltalk or wrestle you for the armrest but also now expose you to “hey, I’m on a plane on my way to XXX, what are you doing?” type of idiocy. I agree - it’s one of the best times I get to actually sit down and quietly read something.

I suggest that voice communications be only allowed in the last 20 minutes of the flight, so people can call and arrange things, and that during the rest of the flight only text communications should be allowed. If anything can get US users finally using text messaging the way they should (and requiring their carriers to provide actually useable text messaging products), something like this would be it!

I’m back at Dartmouth this weekend, and am currently sitting on the steps of the library outside as they are now closed (classes haven’t started yet for the undergraduates, thus it closes at 6pm on a Saturday). The only problem with wifi access everywhere is that most laptops mine included don’t work very well in the rain. Since it is New Hampshire, this must be the next project for the smarties at Dartmouth to work on!

Every few months a wireless wallet story reemerges, this one from Wired talks about near field technology. For the US market it will come down to a cheap and easy alternative - the credit card. It also fits in your wallet pretty handily….

I think wireless receipt capture is a potentially more interesting application…

I’m in the Oakland Airport right now, accessing via WayPort’s wireless system (I had a coupon which apparently had expired). On a recent visit to Minneapolis, I was surprised and delighted to find there was free wireless service everywhere in the airport. Very handy when you can’t get onto the earlier flight. I’d probably pay for it - and the $6.95 price point for “until midnight” access sure beats Starbucks’ $6-for-an-hour deal. I’m still waiting, however, for someone to do the definitive “extra coffee” or “free wireless if you spend $5″ study that I’m sure will somehow convince Starbucks to come to their senses and offer free wireless. Surely if the avg. register ring is $3.30 or whatever, a $5 spending thing makes all the sense in the world?

Anyway, I have to get into line for my Southwest flight…. gotta go.

This article from the Independent claims that some of the big drop offs in failed movie blockbusters is due to people texting each other about how much the movies suck, on the opening weekend (or at any rate much quicker than before). I would say it’s too early to make this call and would doubt there’s enough data to support this hypothesis… just yet.

BUT I love the idea of word-of-mouth on steroids, ultra-powered quick snippets of information that help people make quick decisions. This is going to be a recurring theme - the way communications technology makes context work better. It’s not about the best content, it’s about good-enough-content at the exact right time.

Qualcomm finished its 3rd annual BREWfest in san diego last week. Besides having a lot of the glitz and unnecessary expense associated with the heady days of the internet (Kool & the Gang was a headliner), Q also had some of the dot-com breathless excitement about their success and potential. In a world of over 1 billion cellphone users, 8 million BREW handsets shipped worldwide doesn’t get us to even 1% penetration. On the other hand, a handful of developers are actually getting $1m checks every month based on the popularity of games and some other apps that work well and are popular with the 3.3m Verizon BREW handset owners (4m are with KTF in Korea, no one else has meaningful numbers).
Development: $50-100k per app is the average development cost, with about $5k per handset to port to a new handset. The big problems for most developers seemd to be with the tools to track their success, and the lag in the payment cycles (often up to 6 months after the consumer has bought your app). Still, one gets the sense from meeting some of these developers and seeing the system work that maybe I should develop my own app…
Lots more to be discussed and more analysis of the figures in my upcoming report on BREW.

I ran across this article about how the Scottish police have “blamed mobile phone text messaging for a massive rise in the number of incidents involving threats and extortion”. The article is a wonderful example of how to misinterpret statistics and how the press can lead with figures that are (in the overall scope of the other stats) rather insignificant, and then not explain any of the nuances of why/how the technology angle is significant at all. Please add your comments to this blog entry if you come across any similar ridiculous mis-applications of “facts” and figures.

US Congressman Darrell Issa of San Diego is representing his constituency as best he can, insisting that Qualcomm, his district’s most important employer, has the technological magic dust to transform Iraq into an example for all Middle Eastern countries to follow. Just as installing a democratic government in Iraq will somehow convert the rest of the Middle East to see the error in their autocratic ways, so too will all the horrible GSM countries like Israel see the light and abandon evil franco-germanic GSM when they see how wonderful Iraq’s CDMA network is. The Register’s Andrew Orlowski has a great piece on this that gives a bit more thorough examination: http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/59/30058.html

Allow me to look into the future for Iraq, and the Middle Eastern wireless industry. Despite misstatements and bad PR from Congressman Issa, CDMA will in fact be the US government’s choice for Iraq’s new cellular network, and the lion’s share of the contracts will go to Lucent and/or Motorola (funded by fresh Iraqi oil sales managed by Texan oil companies). This will not, however presage a rush of CDMA into the Middle East, but will instead ensure that Iraq will be an anachronistic state that is not compatible organizationally or technologically with its neighbors. International roaming may be handy for some visiting US, Japanese and Korean business people (3 governments that did support this war). However, higher handset costs, no regional voice roaming, poor SMS interoperability, and a relatively data-averse Iraqi population will make CDMA a poor choice for Iraqi telecommunications.