I'm too squeezed for time from the day job to blog much at the moment, but here's a gem I can't miss sharing.
Handsets get taken to the grave
More people than ever are asking to be buried or cremated with their mobile phones when they die, say researchers. ... Martin Raymond, director of international trend-spotting think-tank, The Future Laboratory said that this had started off "in the realm of the urban myth", but was fast becoming fact.
Now, what's strategically important about this? Well, the telcos are all desperate to finesse in some way the Paradox of the Best Network, which says that the stupidest dumb pipe is the best network for users, but the hardest one to make money from*.
Oh, and the asterisk?
"All other things being equal."
There's your get-out clause. Internet Protocol is just an abstraction that makes it easy for any networks to peer, and any device to attach to any network. But the abstraction doesn't necessarily match reality ("it fibs"), and it also doesn't cover all aspects of the real world ("it's incomplete"). This is fine, because the aim is to hide some of the complexity of real network topologies, varying pipe capacities, etc.
This "bury me with my phone" is an example of the latter category. IP has nothing to say about the user's affinity with their communications devices. So one way in which mobile carriers can search for new business opportunities is to hunt for more "personal affinity re-inforcement" businesses. In some ways the ringtone market is a shallow example of this.
By exploiting the mismatch between the abstraction and the real world, carriers can sneak between the chinks in the stupid network's armour to find new value sources that don't require price discrimination of every packet and network neutrality battles.
Full details for the usual immodest consulting fee ;)
Posted by Martin Geddes at 10:12 AMTrackBack URL for this entry:
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