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Twinloops blog

Jan's thoughts on tech

Things I’m going to be writing aboutAugust 14

I attended the Ericsson North American analyst event yesterday and came back with lots of ideas for pieces to write over the next couple of months. One or two of them may end up being blog posts here but the rest will likely be content published for Ovum’s paying customers (I’ll try to share some snippets here regardless). Here is a list of most of them:

• 5 things regulators can do to help telecoms to continue to grow in a sluggish economy. This was sparked by some comments from one of the speakers at the Ericsson event who talked about regulators screwing up markets - and it made me realise that much of Ovum’s regulatory content (which now sits within my practice) is pretty much after-the-fact commentary rather than prescriptive advice for regulators.
• The impact of a billion new middle class consumers on the global telecoms market. The 1 billion number is the estimate of a number of (non-telecom) analysts about the additional members of the ‘middle class’ (whatever that means on a global scale) who will come out of China, India and other emerging markets in the next few years.
• How real are economies of scale and scope in telecoms? We talk about this a lot as if it’s an obvious fact of life in telecoms, but I’m not sure much analysis has been done on how real the impact is compared with the price (specifically, acquisition and integration expenses and associated disruption) that is often paid to achieve them. Not yet sure how to m

Google’s pie in the sky ideas about broadbandJuly 25

I just re-read this recent post from the Google Public Policy Blog, and I still think it’s a lot of pie-in-the-sky nonsense. It really feels as though whoever wrote it either doesn’t know enough about the subject or has dumbed it down for readers to the extent that it makes no sense. Although the example cited is apparently real, the model described is far more complicated than it at first seems, and the chances of it being implemented on any large scale are virtually zero.

When I first saw the headline, “What if you could own your broadband connection?” I assumed that it was going to be about Google’s plans for wireless services - a little late perhaps given that they failed to secure any licences in the 700MHz auction, but it would have been interesting as an academic exercise. But no, it turns out they’re talking about fiber connections:

It may sound strange, and it’s certainly not what we’re used to. Today we have a “carrier-centered” model; phone and cable companies spend billions to build, operate, and own the “last-mile” connection — the copper, cable, or fiber wires that come into your house. Individual consumers then pay for particular services, like phone service or Internet access.

In turn, we tend to think about broadband deployment in carrier-centric ways. If we want to see super-fast fiber connections

FriendFeed needs to remain a niche serviceJuly 22

Mashable has a piece on FriendFeed and whether it’s destined to remain a niche service. The main reason for believing that it will be seems to be the poor interface design, but there appear to be others too.

But I tend to think that the key point here is that FriendFeed needs to remain something of a niche service in order to continue to function as it does today. As of right now most items on FriendFeed generate a manageable number of comments, and even mere mortals like me are able to contribute comments. We can engage in discussions with the illuminati of the blogosphere such as Robert Scoble, Dave Winer and so on and as such FriendFeed feels to me like the freshest and most accessible place on the web at the moment.

If it were to attract significantly more users I think the intimacy of the current FriendFeed would start to fade and that would be a great shame. I’m aware that sounds snobbish but it also gels nicely with another recent post - this one a guest post on LouisGray.com - about the accessibility of big hitters in the blogosphere.

Some have suggested that recent changes to Facebook create a FriendFeed like experience there. But the biggest difference is the closed user group that will participate in discussions on Facebook (defined by “friend” connections, ironically, wh

Glitches in iPhone appJuly 22

So I just posted from the iPhone app and although I now have a shiny new post on the site it’s clear that the app is a little glitchy (see screenshot). For some reason the app first posted an item with little title and text tags before posting my real post. In addition it seems the app doesn’t handle ampersands (&) very well. We’ll see if it does better when publishing…

(now posting from the keyboard - much easier)

It seems the ampersand didn’t cause a problem after all - just shows up funny in the categories list and in the “write” mode in the application. But the screenshot worked fine - not many options for how you incorporate an image like that - how you want text aligned, whether you want it linked to a larger version etc - but it’s probably best to keep things simple in a mobile app.

And no mystery tag post this time around, which means it was a one-off - I’ll have to test it on my other blogs to see if it happens every time you first use the app on a blog or if there was just an error somewhere this time around. At any rate, another useful application from the App Store - and best of all this one’s free,

WordPress app for iPhoneJuly 22

Hurrah! WordPress finally released their iPhone app today, which was heavily trailed by WP. This is a test post that I’m writing using the app. Thank goodness for the auto correct feature on the iPhone which is preventing this from being an utterly tedious experience. I can’t imagine writing a long post on here but it will be great for the occasional short post on the run. Here goes!