After months of talking to smart people and taking notes, my latest notebook is filled. Usually what I do at this point is read back through the whole thing to see if there are any nuggets that I missed or forgot about.
Why not just dump it straight onto the Web? This is stuff that real people are saying in the real world. For your pleasure, here you go:
The bandwagon story of the day is Google looking into creating a "Facebook competitor" by talking with popular online gaming companies (Wall Street Journal). That's funny, I thought Facebook was a social networking site and not a gaming company. Shows you what I know.
That's also not to mention that Google has already tried to "do" social networking, but looks to be failing miserably with Buzz.
The spin in the Wall Street Journal is that by talking to social gaming companies like Zynga, Google is contemplating creating an alternative to Facebook, where many of the social gaming companies are growing like weeds (e.g. "Scott has acquired a semi-automatic weapon to blow you away in Mafia Wars!").
Can AT&T stop messing up? In this morning news, Gawker appears to have broken the scoop that 114,000 iPads have been victim of a security breach exposing email and iPad IDs.
The security breach has "exposed the most exclusive email list on the planet, a collection of early-adopter iPad 3G subscribers that includes thousands of A-listers in finance, politics and media, from New York Times Co. CEO Janet Robinson to Diane Sawyer of ABC News to film mogul Harvey Weinstein to Mayor Michael Bloomberg," writes Gawker.
AT&T confirmed the story this morning (Wall Street Journal). Just another black eye for AT&T, which is still trying to work out connection issues with the iPhone.
In other news:
- Why just focus on bad news from AT&T? They're rolling out 3D coverage of the World Cup with ESPN (Businessweek).
- AllThingsD reports that a Wall Street analyst says T-Mobile will be the next carrier to get the iPhone. InformationWeek's Eric Zeman says that's completely wrong.
- BP tries to reassure investors (New York Times). No, really, we're not a disaster! We know what we're doing! Really!
- Meanwhile, BP's bonds are starting to look like junk (Zero Hedge)
- Global markets rally (Bloomberg). Well, you can't go in the same direction all the time. That wouldn't be very interesting.
- Six strange iPad accessories (Newsweek).
- The HTC EVO is seriously flawed, says TechCrunch.
- Far out news of the day: Is the Obama administration looking at a plan to scrap social security? (Washington Post)
Don't you love the way that Apple dominates the news? Steve Jobs could put out a press release saying he's going to have his teeth cleaned and it would dominate the news flow on Financial TV. Oh really? Who's the dentist? Will this delay a product release?
Yesterday, of course was the release of the new iPhone 4, which had every tech pundit and their cousin covering every angle. For that reason, I'll keep this post short, giving you a few links to coverage and a few thoughts for what it means for Apple.
The main points of iPhone 4:
- It's slimmer, .37 inches vs. .45 inches for the prior iPhone (PC World review)
- It's got video calling (mirror.co.uk).
- It's got a sharper screen. And a Gyroscope (CNN)
- Actually, they are calling the screen a "retina display," because its density of 326 pixels per square inche allegedly rivals the human retina. Yeah, right Apple (Tom's Guide).
- IOS 4, which includes support for multitasking, iBooks, and other stuff (Mashable).
Okay, so what's it all mean? What's interesting to me is the statement that Apple has made with its last two releases: iPad and the iPhone 4. Have you noticed that Apple and Steve Jobs in particular claim to be "driving industries forward." For example, the message of the iPad as that it will enable the publishing industry to function in the digital world.
But rather than focus on whether or not the iPhone is driving some industries forward I can't help but think how it's driving the telecommunications industry backward. What do I mean by that? It is becoming more evident that the iFranchise is making the telecommunications provider increasingly commoditized and irrelevant.
What's AT&T's role in the iPhone franchise other than to connect the thing to a mobile network and then disappoint users. is AT&T adding any other value at all?
If all of the innovation is coming from Apple, what value are the service providers adding? What does this mean for the future of the mobile telecommunications industyr? Check out the videoconferencing component of iPhone which uses a WiFi connection and could certainly accelerate the trend of Internet communications platforms cannibalizing service provider networks.
Think about that, AT&T: Just look at what's happened to Apple's shareprice when compared to yours. Clearly they are the innovator and you are now the commoditized service provider.
Now, who has derived the most value out of the iPhone franchise?
Well, AT&T has eliminated the unlimited data plan, and Internet anarchists everywhere are having a cow. The funny thing is AT&T's headline on the announcement: "AT&T Announes New Lower-Priced Wireless Data Plans..."
First question: Are the plans really lower priced, as AT&T claims? Now that's funny. If you read the headline on this press release you would think it was some mundane, tiny pricing shift -- like AT&T thought it could slip one by millions of frothing-mouthed, blogging mobile data heads. Of course the digital-media addicted Internet anarchists note that by definition eliminating an all-you-can eat plan is raising prices. MobileCrunch calls this a "sad day in data land."
Looks like it's Steve Jobs Wednesday here in the tech media world. Lots of stuff coming out of the Wall Street Journal's D8 Conference, where Jobs spoke at length. There were some especially interesting comments on the iPhone, the iPad, and the service from AT&T.
Jobs downplayed his knowledge of "how telecom networks work," but he did answer a question that we all want to know the answer to: When will AT&T fix its iPhone service issues? Much of this involves around the challenges of high-speed mobile data, especially via the backhaul networks. This is the topic of our new report, "The Mobile Data Deluge."
