Year 2008 will be remembered for the financial crash but also as the year when iPhone 3G confirmed Apple’s revolution of mobile phones. RIM also strengthened their corporate position with new multimedia capable models and Android saw its first handset launched, the G1. Wireless broadband became a reality, with 3G/HSDPA/EVDO unlimited data plans widely available Netbooks [...]

Charlie Rose interviews Bill Gates a few weeks ago in Seattle. They talk about the remarkable life of a man who changed the World by putting a computer on everyone’s desk. And about someone who we all expect will make an impact with the foundation he runs with his wife. You may like or [...]

December 28th is the Spanish equivalent to April Fool’s day. That is why I had to read twice the news that iFart Mobile (see video) was the best selling application in App Store during the holidays (iTunes Link). Quoted from the iFart creator, Joel Comm’s blog: All I knew was that a lot of people would be [...]

Ten years ago the RIAA fought the decrease in sales of music CDs by different means, including: taking their customers to court, lobbying to have the ISPs stopping Internet Access to anyone who shared music files, and imposing taxes to any device able to store or play music, assuming everyone was in piracy. Ten years later, [...]

An interesting analysis from Telco 2.0 compares the business of YouTube versus Hulu in 2008. The table summarizes the key data used in the analysis: YouTube Hulu No of videos/day 1000+ million 3-4 million Average duration 2.75 min 27.5 min % clips with ads 3-4% 80% Average CPM $10 $15-20 2008 Revenues $118 m $52 m 2008 Loss $91 m $9 m According to Telco 2.0, YouTube would be generating revenues of [...]

The essence of Net Neutrality is “All Packets are created Equal“. No ISP should block or prioritize any traffic based on what the IP Packet carries. That is, no VoIP/Skype, YouTube video, music download or Bittorrent traffic should be processed differently based on its nature. All packets will be equally treated by the network infrastructure. This week [...]

Some facts about Online video: Online TV is growing. The number of people watching online video will grow from 563 million in 2007 to 941 million in 2013 according to ABI research, echoed by NewTeeVee. People watch far more hours of TV from the couch than on the PC. According to Nielsen (see table above found via [...]

Android announced this week that 14 new companies are joining the Open Handset Alliance. The new members are: AKM Semiconductor, ARM, ASUSTek Computer, Atheros Communications, Borqs, Ericsson, Garmin International, Huawei Technologies, Omron Software, Softbank Mobile Corporation, Sony Ericsson, Teleca AB, Toshiba Corporation and Vodafone. Some readings: Sony Ericsson sold their shares of Symbian to Nokia to [...]

As usual in bad times, the debate on whether progress creates or destroys value comes back, as questioned in Martin Varsavsky blog, this time referring to how RSS destroys affects to blogs reducing the amount of displayed advertisement. As Martin writes: I once debated Michael Porter at Davos on the overall value creation of the internet. [...]

Taiwanese vendor Asus brought the Netbooks to mainstream with their popular Eee PC, leading the way for other manufacturers to jump into a now crowded category. Following that success, Asus introduced a small-form-factor desktop, the Eee Box, creating a new NetTop category, that so far has failed to take off. But this could soon change with [...]

Mike Manos, Microsoft Data Center Chief, has unveiled in his blog the design of future “Generation 4″ Microsoft data centers. With the mission to provide massive easy-to-scale computing infrastructure to power the Cloud, Microsoft envisions pre-assembled containers equipped with a few thousands of servers each and its associated cabling and cooling system. Microsoft is already using [...]

Nokia has finally reacted and announces a device to compete with the iPhone. The N97 has a beautiful touchscreen and a sliding qwerty keyboard. From the video clip Nokia posted in YouTube you can notice that Nokia bets on widgets to make the interface even more touch-friendly. One surprising thing about the video is that [...]

These are the top hottest five topics that we have covered over the past twelve months with the biggest potential for a disruption in both the Communications Industry and in our habits. 1) Mobile Internet, the Internet way. The iPhone and Google’s Android have revolutionized Mobile Internet in the handset, making web browsing such a cool and [...]

One year has passed since we started this blog with Steve Job’s famous commencement address. Less than one moth later a post on LinuxMCE made it to the front page of Digg, and got 25.000 visits in one day! Since then, we have spoken about iPhone, Android, Mobile Internet, Mobile TV, IPTV, Internet TV, the economy of free, netbooks, WiMAX, clouds, pipes [...]

Any ambitious innovation must target to fix the problems of tomorrow considering the technology environment of tomorrow. Fail to consider the future environment and you might be pouring R&D dollars into the bin. Innovations that did bet on tomorrow: Remember when Gmail launched in 2004? It offered 1GB of storage when other webmails gave a few MBs. [...]

Speech Recognition technology is available for many years, still its impact has been quite low so far. Windows has speech recognition features that nobody use,  speech-to-dial is available in mobile phones since years. Few people configure it, and less of them ever use it. Only Interactive Voice Response (IVR) systems have been adopted in call [...]

Financial Crashes and Bubbles are opposite expressions of how absurd and irrational markets can behave. Markets over-react irrationally, driven by the irrational sentiments of fear and greed. Panic drives the Crashes and over-enthusiasm drives the Bubbles. As Martin Varsavsky said to Tim O-Reilly at the Web 2.0 Expo: “Markets are bipolar, and they over-emphasize good times and [...]

Tim O’Reilly interviews Martin Varsavsky during the Web 2.0 Expo Europe last month. Martin is a serial entrepreneur that successfully created Jazztel and Ya.com to compete with Telefonica in fixed telephony and Internet access in Spain in the late 90s. He later IPO’ed Jazztel and sold Ya.com to Deutche Telekom with huge profits. Martin is a [...]

Yesterday Google put an end to the advertisement agreement with Yahoo! that both companies announced in April. Google blamed the government regulators and some advertisers who had concerns on the deal. And who wouldn’t? The two major players in online advertisement were reaching an agreement to cooperate on search advertisement. Anyone smelling monopoly? Yahoo! and Google [...]

If Internet is a great tool for entrepreneurs to test business ideas. YouTube is becoming the natural place to disclose and test inventions. Leslie Berlin, a Silicon Valley historian, writes If no one sees, it is it an invention? for NY Times. Leslie explains that inventors have found in YouTube the right tool to make their [...]

Found via TechCrunch, Google keeps producing great stuff, and “organizing World’s information” for us. Google Earth for iPhone (and iPod Touch) puts literally the entire blue planet on your handset. Enriched by links to Panoramio and Wikipedia, and fully using the iPhone user experience, these apps will soon make GPS Navigators vendors like TomTom or [...]

Larry Page, co-founder of Google, just landed in Spain to receive the Principe de Asturias Prize, the Spanish version of the Nobel Prize. In his dialog with the press, Larry said that, working in Search, Google aims to be more and more intelligent, know more and more, gather more information and develop more intelligent computers. [...]

While Nokia posted a 30.5% drop in earnings in the quarter ending on 30 September, Steve Jobs proudly announced to analysts that 6.9 million 3G iPhone units were sold in the same quarter, outselling  even RIM’s Blackberry 6.1 million units. While Nokia blames price cutting for their profit decline, Apple says that their iPhone pushed net [...]

Al Ries and Jack Trout wrote it in many of their marketing best-sellers: “In the long run, every market becomes a  two horse race”. Jack Welch, legend ex-CEO of GE, made popular his rule of closing every business unit where GE was not number one or number two. Mobile handsets market is not different, and in [...]

Internet TV has definitively arrived and it is here to stay. YouTube crossed the chasm for video on the Internet, and Internet TV is now steadily going mainstream. Here is some piece of evidence:  Lean-forward TV gets traction. Mainstream users now feel comfortable watching videos on the PC. First it was the few minutes clips, but [...]