Aloha's long goodbye, Standards Wars Episode 4G and the phantom menace

Here's AT&T's farewell gift for Aloha Partner, a phantom company full of spectrum, meant from the start* as an empty shell for sale : $2.5bn.

Here's the ITU's gift for WiMAX promoters : OFDMA / 802.16 joins FDMA, TDMA and CDMA in the IMT-2000 3G family just on time for the IMT-advanced kick-off. The 3GSM crew already knew this promising rival would be casted for Standards Wars Episode 4G, but this means intel & Co are here to stay beyond a phantom menace.

Here's 3's gift for Qualcomm : the Skypephone uses the Brew platform. San Diego joins Cupertino in the hype zone. Up North, Redmond is just starting to scratch the surface - a third Halo and a phantomatic 1.6% of Facebook**.


* see "Hiwire - Aloha Partners, Goodbye Stranger" (20060502)
** see "Microsoft outpervasived by Facebook and RIM" (20071025)

Microsoft outpervasived by Facebook and RIM

1.6%.

That's the best Microsoft could get from Facebook. In the news section, the integration of Facebook on Blackberry sounded much more disruptive. The king of pervasiveness is being "outpervasived".

The fact is it's getting more and more difficult to resist to FB's platform (I haven't been very faithful to LinkedIn lately).

Microsoft tried to avoid losing face but didn't win Facebook either.

FB got $240M from Redmond, WA. Without selling its soul to the Devil. Actually, the said Devil is not as scary as it used to be. Commoditized. Still dominant on his home turf but as clumsy in new environments as it used to be more than a decade ago with the internet.

Internet Explorer killed Netscape, but I don't think MSN will wolf that one down that easily.

While Microsoft is neither losing face, nor winning Facebook, Google and Murdoch try to explain why MySpace is not part of the virtual estate bubble.

Femtocell Hotel

To the question what kind of connectivity hotels will provide 5 years from now, I answered this :

- all best hotels will offer optic fiber connections to their hosts.

- but people will still need a wireless broadband connection of some kind (tuning in from your smartphone or smartPDA or smartwhatever is easier and can get quite addictive*). And something more secure and powerful than WiFi should definitely make it to handheld devices within 5 years. And some MNOs will get even better at this kind of service.

- I believe many smart users will always carry some sort of femtocell to tune to whatever broadband connection they get, even without a laptop.

* even for a Parisian : I'm routinely roaming from one free hotspot to another on my Velib'

Google Jaiku kentai ?

I don't care about the Gphone anymore than I did about the iPhone, but I do care about Google's vision about mobility and to me, dealing with Multiverse or purchasing Jaiku makes more sense than manufacturing devices.

Devices are about status, but you want to care about actual status : how are your friends doing, where on earth are they, what are they plotting, with whom...? Your personal network is much more important than your carrier's network, and portability will come some day for anything from a technical point of view, so value is to be made beyond the tools.

Besides, there are too many tools out there. Including in Google's portfolio. I hope they will take less time to boost Orkut and Google Maps / Google Earth with Jaiku than they did to implement basic Google tools in Blogger.

Yet, I'll stick to Big G for the blogging platforms. And I'll keep building Chinese walls with other e-mail services providers and interpersonal spaces like LinkedIn or Facebook.