Bouygues not for sale ? How about TF1 ?

France's new president makes no secret of his friendship with Martin Bouygues, Arnaud Lagardere, Serge Dassault or Vincent Bollore, major players in France's industrial and communications landscape.
As soon as Sarko got elected, L'Expansion revived rumors of a takeover of Areva and its nuclear gems by Bouygues, and the eventuality of the sale of Bouygues Telecom for EUR 8+ bns. Sarko loves Amerika but AT&T may have other fish to fry than a small spot in the middle of a saturated Europe. Deutsche Telecom just sold its ISP in France (Club Internet), but KPN (a fellow DoCoMo partner) confirmed its interest. And Telefonica has been expecting some reciprocity since Orange entered its home market. Even Vodafone could prefer 100% of France's #3 to 44% of #2 SFR....
Whatever. Bouygues doesn't seem as focused on communication as it used to. Lately, the group lost TPS to Canal+, the battle for TNT / DTV's best slots, part of its soccer rights to France Television, plus his Darth Vaderish leader Patrick Le Lay is about to be replaced by Nonce Paolini, a man who was deliberately sidelined during the elections nights, these key moments when medias meet with all politicians...
Beyond Bouygtel, the sale of TF1 would be a major hearthquake.
Vincent Bollore hates Bouygues and provided the private jet and yacht to Sarkozy for his Malta honeymoon with France. Silvio Berlusconi loves Nicolas Sarkozy and has unfinished business with France. He would be delighted to help Bouygues refocus on its core industrial activities. Bouygues Telecom could be sold once the question of the 4th 3G license is closed, opening a new era of partnerships at the wireless as well as the landline level (Free Iliad ?).

mAdSense and Google Phonies (Google Phones ?)

"Don't Be Evil" is embedded in Big G's DNA. They said we were the next Microsoft, they now say we are the next Apple. But we neither want to rule the hardware / OS entry point nor rule the hardware / DRM entry point. Do we ?
One thing is sure : if Google's plans remain evasive, their ambitions remain pervasive. And mobility a must have, whatever the path. Speculations, analysts and pundits keep fueling expectations (gPhone, WISP, M-VNO, VoIP, WiFi, WiMAX, mobile suites...), but Google shouldn't care about it.
... if it weren't for its shareholders... I don't want to spoil the party but $462 per share and $143 bn overall look like a lot of dough to me. Like that insane, neverending hike in the Vietnam stock exchange, not even dented by the Shanghai hiccup.
Come to think of it, the ultimate stage of mobile advertising by the king of online advertising will be called mAdSense.

What else ? The CeBIT is over. Which means it was open before. Talking about bomb news : cellcos are eventually realizing the golden years of mobile voice ARPU will soon be over and the bulk of mobile data is bound to go flat. At last.

What else ?
- BT and KPN are working on M-VNOs in Spain. Belgacom, Swisscom, Eircom declined to comment.
- Viviane Reding wants DVB-H to outperform Galileo and Airbus across and beyond Europe. China already decided to launch a competitor to Airbus and Boeing, another to 3GSM and cdma2000. Why not split from Europe over the GPS-killer / killee and why not launch a specific mobile.TV.cn ?
- The WiMAX Spectrum Owners Alliance (WiSOA) wants to promote both WiMAX roaming and the survival / resale of its exotic founders
- I'm still stuck with a broken foot and a broken club - I can't move and Paris Saint Germain keeps sinking towards second division. Mobility definitely sucks.

Mobile Real TV - LG and the H-free handset

Nokia are to duplicate in the Netherlands their Finnish Mobile TV experience, with KPN starring as Telia-Sonera and Nozema Services + Digitenne as Elisa. In this RealMobileTV* show, you don't care where the customers come from : whatever the casting, everybody ends up telling how great the experience was. Plus PR people can relieve themselves in public (in Dutch for Nozema or in English for Nok-Nok).
This time, the plot is about mixing broadcasting and mobile with as many users as possible and in a truly mobile environment (thus the coverage of railways and motorways). The Finns provide the already vintage DVB-H 7110 plus a IPDC solution (sounds like the heavy metal version of IP), the Dutch their bad taste for programming (remember where Endemol and Big Brother came from ?). Nozema already confessed an affair with the Wi-Fi - WiMAX - Mobile-Fi (802.20) family.
But guess which manufacturer could make mobile TV on handsets a true hit in Europe ? The inventors of DVB-H, Nokia ? Nah... LG decided to launch their 3G - T-DMB phone next year in Europe and China. LG-V9000 will be up for grabs Q1 2006, on time for the 2006 World Cup in Germany : LG happens to be a top sponsor and intends to become a top lobbyist for the Korean norm. Even if the Chinese team didn't make it through the qualifiers. Even if T-DMB competes more directly with DVB-T (already commercialized in many European countries) than with DVB-H. Even if no DMB network has been announced yet in Europe.
Well. LG are also into bigger TV screens, and you don't have to be a mobile operator to roll out DMB. Consumers shouldn't give a hyphen provided the service works. They might even dig the motto used to sell this rolla : "personal mobile (digital) TV".

* guess what : realmobiletv.com is available but mobilerealtv.com has already been locked by some guy living on Sunset Bvd. If he sells Palms, I gather they're not of the tree kind.

Brand new KPN - Brand new USA - Same old standards

KPN-Telfort are not the sexiest player around but they do have interesting cards to play. Of course, these days, the buzz is about Telfort's HSDPA trials with HUAWEI for an expected H2 2006 TTM. But the buzz should rather be on the Chinese manufacturer gaining shares in the European handset market soon : their Huawei U636 UMTS/GPRS/GSM won't help the mainland get mainstream that early but it could be the begining of something*.
KPN are the ideal partner for a big brand wanting to build a solid base in Europe. This medium-size incumbent is gaining - if not momentum - confidence. Enough to consider taking a bite of O2 in Germany after wolfing down Telfort in the Netherlands. Enough to launch VoIP and In-car TV at home. Enough to try such unfamiliar M-VNOs as Ay-Tildiz (for Turkish communities) or MTV (for the youth - not the main brand but local channels : TMF in the NL, VIVA in Germany). Enough to have KPN Mobile, Telfort, E-Plus and Base bring cash flow. Yet the group lacks scale, thus the discussions with Deutsche Telekom regarding O2 Germany. And neither O2 nor KPN have brands, whether DoCoMo likes it or not**. Anyway, KPN's board is screaming "f..k me I'm getting famous".

The other side of the Atlantic, I found interesting Verizon Wireless' cut in unlimited 3G EV-DO charges for existing PC card subs : $59.99 per month***, that's a little bit less than 50 euros but certainly not an offensive move. If Verizon aimed at bigger market shares or even substitution, they wouldn't focus on their high value customers. Even if they're moving closer to Cingular Wireless (47M subs vs 49), they are clearly fearing churn and a fiercer competition. As a matter of fact, voice and data are being discounted (the Google Talk - Yahoo ! Dialpad - MSN Teleo war certainly won't help) and concentration is speeding up : number 3 Sprint finished swallowing Nextel and starts pushing EV-DO, Alltel just became number 5 after absorbing Western Wireless, and number 4 T-Mobile is almost up for sale (Vodafone would love to split from CDMA Verizon but they already have to get out of their KK quagmire, plus T-Mobile US may need $10 bn for network improvement and 3G licenses - Cablecos are also cited as potential predators). The market will definitely be fun watching as auctions are nearing. Remember the time when US operators would invest massively in Europe ?

Now US players are more interested in US players. History will tell whether the 600 million bucks Qualcomm will lay for Flarion and their FLASH OFDM (Fast Low-latency Access - Seamless Hand-off Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplex - Now You May Breathe) techno helped ever the microsoftian Doc Jacobs rule 4G or, to the contrary, postpone to 5G the rise of a truly universal mobile standard****.


* Bad news for Nokia, still struggling with a 17% market share in 3G.
** As expected, i-mode proved a low end and limited brand : 12% of E-Plus' customer base (1.158 M i-moders in Germany mid-2005), 11% of KPN Mobile's (725 K i-moders in the Netherlands), a symbolic 1% of BASE's (25 K i-moders in Belgium). Often praised as a successful NTT DoCoMo sales representative, Bouygues Telecom launched the service on November the 15th, 2002 but converted only 16% of their base end July 2005 (1,230,000 i-moders in France).
*** newcomers remaining at $79 and V-Cast - VW's unlimited handset access - at $15, the same price as Verizon DSL's 768K offer with a one year contract.
**** (gee, I gotta stop foot-noting my damn blogs) GSM+ is winning the propaganda war : to confront CDG's end H1 figures (128 cdma2000 operators +22 committed to deploy next year), the GSA (Global Mobile Suppliers Association) announced 96 operational GSM/EDGE networks in 60 countries out of a total of 153 networks committed to EDGE in 85 countries.

License to bill

SK Telecom will enter the European market through GPS (their "i-Kids" service could sell with the help of Netherland's SF-Alert, starting with KPN) and implement RFID trials at home with the country's leading retailer (Shinsegae) and a producer with stamina (Korea Ginseng Corp, the king of insam / hongsam). Wireless service it is, no license needed.
At the other end of Eurasia, Alcatel and Nokia start working on cellular / Wi-Fi convergence trough UMA. Not the Thurman show, you know... remember Unlicensed Mobile Access ?
Elswhere, shareholders still rely on ye good ole business model where you pay for a license, you pay for the roll-out, and you pay for telling people to pay even more for your service.