Posts Tagged ‘Telecoms’
Skype secrets stolen to help eBay sale, founders claim
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Technology on September 19th, 2009
The founders of Skype have alleged its trade secrets were stolen to help facilitate its sale by its current owner, eBay, in a move which could scupper the $2bn (£1.2bn) deal.
The legal action follows another filed earlier this week by Skype's founders, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, accusing eBay and a group of potential investors of technology theft.
The legal action targets Index Ventures and one of its partners, Michelangelo Volpi. Acrimony between Skype's founders and Volpi, a former high-flyer at Cisco Systems has been building for some time.
Volpi served on Skype's board and the pair of entrepreneurs recruited him to head another company they founded, the Web TV venture Joost.
The founders alleged in yesterday's lawsuit that Volpi misappropriated confidential information as he moved from Joost to Index Ventures, and helped to orchestrate its bid for Skype. "Volpi has maliciously and willfully breached his fiduciary duties," Zennstrom and Friis said in their complaint.
Volpi was not available for comment, while Index Ventures declined to comment.
The legal action is the latest development in the tortuous four-year relationship between Skype's founders and chiefs at eBay. The online auction company bought Skype in 2005 for more than $3.1bn, but two years later admitted that the purchase had been a bad strategic move and wrote down about $1.43bn of its investment in Skype. eBay had hoped to use Skype's technology to increase sales of its auction business by enabling buyers and sellers in its online marketplace to talk to one another. But this failed to materialise.
Equally as serious, eBay failed to buy the core technology for Skype when it purchased the company, licensing it from Joltid, the founders' company, instead. Last month eBay said a legal dispute over its use could see the phone service close.
The peer-to-peer technology that is used to deliver video and phone services over the internet is now at the heart of the legal war.
Joltid sued eBay and the investor consortium earlier this week, claiming that Skype was using this proprietary technology without authorisation. Joltid and Skype have also been in a legal battle in Britain over rights to the technology.
There are suggestions that Zennstrom and Friis had previously contacted several private equity firms to try to buy back Skype.
However, eBay agreed to sell a 65% stake in Skype to the consortium including Index, private equity firm Silver Lake, Netscape founder Marc Andreessen's Andreessen Horowitz and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board.
Yesterday's lawsuit said Volpi's knowledge of the confidential information had played a key role in the consortium's bid.
"Volpi and Index lacked the credibility and financial heft to lead a private equity investment consortium to acquire Skype unless and until they advertised their knowledge of the confidential information," it said.
Volpi was once regarded as a potential chief executive candidate at Cisco, and many in Silicon Valley had looked on with worry at his tenure at Joost since June 2007.
Although the company was a pioneer in bringing popular TV shows and movies to the internet, it struggled to tie key programming deals and find revenue.
He stepped down from his CEO role in late June, while the company cut jobs and scaled back its services.
He initially stayed on as chairman, but was removed from that role days ago and Joost had said it was investigating his actions.
Skype founders file suit against eBay
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Technology on September 16th, 2009
The founders of Skype have filed a lawsuit against its parent company eBay and the investment group attempting to buy the online telephony service, as the battle over its future continues to escalate.
According to documents filed with a court in California, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis - who founded Skype in 2003 before selling it to eBay two years later - are seeking an injunction against the service. They are also requesting millions of dollars in damages for what they claim is the unlicensed use of a networking technology they own.
The dispute could see Skype shut down, potentially derailing eBay's plan to sell off a majority stake in the internet phone business for $1.9bn to a group which includes venture firm Index Ventures and private equity firm Silver Lake.
The quarrel surrounds a piece of technology called 'Global Index', which belongs to Joltid, a separate, UK-based company started by Zennstrom and Friis in 2002. It provides some of the crucial peer-to-peer sharing systems that underpin Skype - but when eBay bought the internet telephone company in 2005 for $3.1bn, it decided not to purchase the system. Instead, it agreed to license Global Index from Joltid for the foreseeable future.
Zennstrom and Friis left Skype in 2007, and earlier this year Joltid revoked the license, leading to a series of court battles between the two companies over the details of their contractual agreement.
Although eBay is believed to be working on alternative technologies to replace Global Index, it admitted in a regulatory filing that the dispute could prevent Skype - which currently has almost 500m users worldwide - from operating as normal.
"If the matter is not resolved through negotiation," the company said, the "continued operation of Skype's business as currently conducted would likely not be possible".
The news also leaves the plan to sell off part of the company under a cloud. Earlier this month eBay announced that it had agreed to sell a 65% stake in the business to a consortium of investors that included Index Ventures - one of Skype's original backers - and a venture capital fund led by web pioneer Marc Andreessen.
At the time, the deal was welcomed by all parties and presumed to have the blessing of Zennstrom and Friis because of the close links between Joltid and Index.
An eBay spokesperson did return a request for comment.
Pre season nerves for Palm
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Technology on September 16th, 2009
With the Pilot, Palm changed the way we work – now it is back with the Pre, another rival to the iPhone. Is this make or break for the troubled company?
In the 12 months since the global economy went into meltdown, plenty of companies have struggled to succeed under difficult circumstances. Few, however, have experienced as many make-or-break moments in recent months as the troubled handset maker Palm. In January, the company went to the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas with its future at stake: in the end, it not only unveiled the innovative Pre handset, but also turned it into the surprise hit of the show – delivering a promise to revive the company's fortunes along the way.
Another crunch moment came in June, when the Pre went on sale in America. Some questioned the decision to join forces with the Sprint network – a distant third place in the US market – rather than its bigger rivals. Still, immediate reaction was good: more than 100,000 units were reportedly snapped up in the first week, meaning a match point had been saved.
A week later, its chairman, Jon Rubinstein – the former Apple star who forged Palm's new approach – was installed as chief executive. Could it be that the company still most famous for the Palm Pilot had turned itself around after several years in the doldrums?
Not quite. While green shoots may be on their way, the first hard evidence of Palm's potential comeson Thursday when the company announces its financial results for the past three months.
After the initial launch buzz wore out, things appeared to tail off. Failure to meet the initial demand left many shops without even a demonstration handset to woo customers, and industry observers suggest perhaps 400,000 more handsets have been sold since June.
That is a good launch, but not a great one – and with the Pre's European release due in the next few weeks, the stakes are as high as ever. The level of success of the US release determines how expensive the Pre will be in the UK and elsewhere, which then indicates how much more Palm can grow in the short term.
Palm reading
Deepak Sitaraman, an analyst with Credit Suisse who has followed the company's ups and downs closely, says international expansion could be key to Palm's long-term future. "What they need to do, obviously, is build out their distribution in the US as well as abroad and revitalise the brand – build it up outside the US, where it's not as well known," he says.
Although he expects the quarterly results to be fairly positive, he is not convinced that Palm can sell enough phones fast enough to lift itself out of trouble. As a result, he has recently downgraded his predictions for the company's shares and cut his estimate of how many handsets Palm would sell next year from 8.1m down to 6m.
It should be so much more straightforward. After all, the Pre is a neat little device that makes a worthy competitor to the iPhone. Reviewers have been impressed by the handset's touchscreen, keyboard and software – not to mention the innovative extras such as wireless charging. It's the sort of product that, if all things were equal, would put Palm back on track.
But things are not equal. The mobile phone market is increasingly competitive at the higher end – much more so than when Palm last made a serious foray into Europe. The company is now so short of funds that it cannot afford expensive mistakes like a failed European launch – with just $255m (£155m) cash in the bank and a burn of $190m in the past year, it appears that without a substantial boost from the Pre and the forthcoming Pixi, the company has only a few months of funds left.
Ian Fogg, a mobile industry analyst with Forrester Research, says that the situation is trickier because so many companies have now started producing their rivals to the iPhone. "It took a while for the product cycle to kick in and everything to come through … but we're seeing new Android phones from Samsung, Motorola, HTC and others," he says. "We're seeing the Palm Pre come to market, Nokia's Linux-powered handset, the Windows Phone range come out from Microsoft: we're seeing a lot of activity in this space. But Palm's challenge is that it is a much smaller company than virtually all of these others."
Indeed, while Palm can boast at being the third largest smartphone maker in America, its presence around the rest of the world is negligible.
From Sprint to a crawl
That situation has left the once-imperious company – and Sprint, the network it has partnered with – going back to basics in order to stimulate take-up.
A series of price drops has seen the price of the Pre slashed in half over just three months. From the initial launch, when it cost around $199 to sign up, it is now possible to buy a Pre for just $99 with a two-year contract. That has annoyed early adopters, while encouraging hesitant buyers to take a wait-and-see approach in case the price drops even further. And these efforts may not be enough to help the company recover the momentum it lost in recent years, particularly outside its home territory.
"Awareness has eroded simply because they haven't offered that many new products here," says Fogg. "That was true for a period in the mid 2000s – from 2004 to 2008… I think they lost a lot of awareness at that time."
This strikes at the heart of Palm's malaise: a history of hits and misses that the company has never quite shaken off.
Founded in 1992, an initial set of stumbles eventually led to the Palm Pilot PDA and a $54bn stock market launch in 2000 that created a blaze of excitement. Palm appeared to be on to a winner until – like the rest of the technology industry – it was rear-ended by the dotcom crash, an event that it followed up with a series of confusing strategic decisions.
A series of confusing events
It spun off its software division, bought a rival company, Handspring, to prop up its hardware offering and then switched to using Microsoft's Windows Mobile system. And then, when the rest of the world switched on to the iPhone and BlackBerry, it stayed still.
Sitaraman says that inaction is the root of many of Palm's problems. "Clearly the product transition that they had from the Centro to the Pre was probably too long of a gap when it comes to handsets, given that the industry does move fairly quickly," he says. "That was probably a lapse on their part – they were in the process of creating a whole new software platform, and faced some challenges in getting there. Clearly it hurt them in the past."
The turnaround started in 2007, when Elevation Partners – a Californian private equity firm – bought a quarter of the business for just $325m. They hired Rubinstein, a former Apple executive who, as part of Steve Jobs's inner circle, had helped propel the iPod to great things.
Once installed as chairman at Palm, Rubinstein scythed his way through the staff, crafted a new strategy and brought in scads of Apple employees.
"The company lost its way," Rubinstein admitted last weekend. "Our goal is to maintain that original spirit of innovation that is in the company's DNA. The most important thing now is execution ... We're up against a lot of tough competition."
That understates the scale of his task – which now looks increasingly like the most delicate of high-wire acts: after all, it appears that although he has constructed the right apparatus for success, Palm still faces being knocked off balance by the burden of history.
"What we have seen since the launch of the Pre is that they really have executed very well, with very few missteps – they've been incredibly sure-footed," says Fogg. "But the challenge is that they need to stay sure-footed, because they just haven't got a lot of wiggle room."
From Pilot to Pre: Palm's history
1992 Founded by tablet computing pioneer Jeff Hawkins, who joined forces with former Apple software sales boss Donna Dubinsky and Ed Colligan, head of marketing with Radius (another Apple spin-off)
1993 Produced in cooperation with Casio and Tandy, the company's first device, the Zoomer PDA, is a flop - but Palm keeps itself afloat by selling software to Hewlett Packard and Apple
1995 The company decides to take full control of hardware, software and sales, but struggles to find the cash required to make progress. Eventually, Palm is acquired by US Robotics for $47m
1996 First Palm Pilot is released. After a slow start, it turns into a success - shifting more than 1m units after 18 months
1997 US Robotics is in turn acquired by 3Com in a $6.6bn merger
1998 Unhappy at 3Com's refusal to spin off Palm as a separate company, the trio of founders quit to form a new PDA manufacturer called Handspring
2000 3Com spins off Palm as a separate company at the height of the dotcom boom, placing its value at around $54bn
2001 The dotcom crash wipes around 90% of Palm's value
2002 The company begins to spin off its software unit as PalmSource
2003 In a deal worth around $170m, Palm's hardware business merges with Handspring, the rival formed by its disgruntled founders back in 1998. PalmSource is spun off completely, and later acquired by software maker ACCESS for $324m
2006 Now a hardware-only business, Palm begins making handsets using Windows Mobile. By the end of the year, it buys back the rights to use PalmSource software from ACCESS for $44m
2007 Private equity investment group Elevation Partners buys a quarter of Palm for $325m. Former Apple executive Jon Rubinstein - who oversaw development of the iPod - is brought in as chairman
2008 Elevation invests a further $100m into the company, which then announces that it will stop making dedicated PDAs and focus only on mobile phones
2009 The company unveils the Pre in January, which then goes on sale in America in June and sells more than 100,000 units in the first week. Rubinstein is named chief executive, replacing Ed Colligan
Spinvox up for sale
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Technology on September 11th, 2009
The mobile voicemail-to-text company is in deeper waters than ever as Invesco says it is for sale - and cuts estimate of stake value
To add to the travails of Spinvox - the voicemail-to-text company whose technology has been very roundly called into question (and left some doubters unpersuaded) - is a further one: the company is up for sale, according to one of its venture capital investors.
According to the annual filing dated 31 May 2009 from Invesco, which had a 0.71% stake in Spinvox according to a July 8 filing (but now less after a £15m capital injection in during July/August),
More disappointingly amongst the unquoted investments, since the year end, the Company's holding in SpinVox, the voicemail to text messaging business, was written down in value after the Company chose not to invest in a further funding round, which was dilutive to non-participating investors. The business has been put up for sale, and it is possible that, should a good sales price be achieved, the new valuation may be exceeded.
According to the numbers, Invesco put in £759,000, which has now been written down to a value - estimated, of course - of just £75,000.
Does that mean game over for Spinvox? Not quite.
PaidContent says Spinvox is declining to comment on the Invesco report but has asked the company to withdraw it on the basis that it wasn't for Invesco to say so. (We think: tough. Better for financial statements to tell the truth than dissemble.)
PaidContent:
A sale could work out best for CEO Christina Domecq (who owns nearly 17 percent, according to the July filing), private investor Martin Hughes (17.9 percent), GLG (SEO: 066570) (15.72 percent) and CMO Daniel Doulton (8.8 percent). Share proportions may have changed following a recent emergency investment of over £15 million and the provision of a £30 million debenture loan.
Rory Cellan-Jones, the BBC's technology and business correspondent who really got the question of Spinvox's technology brought under the spotlight, noted in August that unaudited accounts seem to suggest it is losing money hand over fist, and that the £15m of money comes with strings that could see the company required to pay back £30m. That's the sort of thing that we'd tut over if it were loan sharks on doorsteps, of course, but companies in distress seem to have different rules applied.
The question now is whether anyone is going to want to buy Spinvox - or, indeed, its technology. Stay tuned.
Motorola banks on new Clix handset
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Technology on September 10th, 2009
US firm that created first mobile phone unveils handset using Google's Android software that will be known as Dext in Europe
The struggling American technology firm Motorola, which made the world's first mobile phone, has taken an important step in its attempt to regain its lost grandeur by unveiling its first handset that uses Google's Android software.
The Cliq – which will be called the Dext when it is launched in the UK next month – will compete with Apple's iPhone and the Pre, upon which rival American group Palm has pinned its own hopes of revival, in the key Christmas market.
The touchscreen Cliq has a slide-out keyboard, like the Pre; a better camera than both the Palm device and the iPhone, at 5 megapixels; and supports fast mobile broadband and wi-fi. But it is the way the phone integrates a host of social networking services – from Facebook and Twitter to the music-sharing service Last.fm – that shows how Motorola hopes to differentiate itself from the host of touchscreen phones available.
Motorola has taken Google's Android operating system – designed to compete with Palm's WebOS, Apple's iPhone OS, Windows Mobile and Nokia's Symbian platform – and built a new system it calls MotoBlur out of it. It allows users to synchronise their contacts, posts, feeds, messages, e-mails and photos from sources as diverse as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Gmail, corporate e-mail and even Last.fm and have them appear on the device's screen. As a result, the phone gives users an instant snapshot of all their communication services – unlike the iPhone, which relies on users downloading and flicking between a host of applications.
The Palm Pre has similar functionality for email and Facebook to the Cliq, while the low-cost INQ1 handset, from the Hutchison Whampoa-owned INQ, also allowed easy integration with the social networking site, email, internet telephone service Skype and numerous instant messaging services. But the Cliq is more integrated than any of its rivals.
The phone's home screen acts almost like a window on to the user's different applications. All conversation threads, friend updates, stories, links, photos and more are automatically delivered to live widgets on the home screen. Messages are relayed through a single message hub giving an instant snapshot of emails, texts and instant messages. Even news items can be amalgamated into one feed alongside friend's postings on Facebook.
The Cliq is the first of what will be many handsets from the American firm to include MotoBlur, which will become Motorola's smartphone platform of choice, though it will continue to make handsets using Windows Mobile aimed primarily at business users.
"Is this phone the make-or-break phone?" Motorola's chief executive Sanjay Jha asked the GigaOM conference in San Francisco. "No, but it is a very important starting point, it points the direction ... it is the first step in a long journey."
The Cliq is also an important step for Google's Android platform. There are already touchscreen phones in the market using Android, produced by Taiwan's HTC, but the Cliq is the first from a "big name" manufacturer. Samsung, LG and Sony Ericsson are all expected to produce Android phones in the coming months, leaving Nokia, the world's largest mobile phone manufacturer, as the only one of the top five handset makers not experimenting with the Google platform.
Two Drunks
Jha said coming together with the Android platform, which is run by Google's head of mobile Andy Rubin, was like "two drunks finding each other in a bar", which rather highlights the perilous state in which the company has found itself in recent years.
Motorola's fall from grace has been long and hard. Having made the DynaTAC 8000x in 1983, the first commercially available mobile phone (an unwieldy beige handset), it went on to dominate the market with Ericsson but the switch to digital phones in the 1990s found Motorola unprepared and its share started to slip as Nokia came to dominate the global market.
Motorola then started this decade as the second-largest mobile phone manufacturer in the world – accounting for one in four of all handsets sold – but still the market leader in the US. But it failed to follow-up the success of the ultra-slim Razr phone, initially launched six years ago, with another headline-grabbing product, preferring instead to try the same handset in a variety of different colours or with slight technical improvements.
By the time the iPhone appeared two years ago, Motorola was in freefall. In the three months to end June, Motorola sold just under 16m phones, giving it just 5.6% of the market, compared with 10% the previous year, and putting it firmly in fourth place behind Nokia, Samsung and LG.
Orange has grabbed the Cliq/Dext under an exclusive deal with Motorola for the UK. Pricing will be announced in the UK next week but the phone is expected to be free to anyone signing up to a long-term contract of between £25 and £30 a month, making it cheaper than the iPhone.
Ralf Gerbershagen, vice-president and general manager of Motorola Western Europe, told the Guardian: "This is a day we have been waiting for for quite a while.
"You have to have a great piece of hardware in the market and we believe that we have this with Dext, and you have to have a good brand and we believe Motorola is a very strong brand in the marketplace," he said. "Motorola is a global player and it is geared up to remain a global player".
MotoBlur is designed to cope with the bewildering array of web-based communication tools available, he added. "There are more social networking accounts around the world than email accounts and the reason is many people have a couple of them."
The Dext, he argued, would help consumers take charge. "In the end, technology is there to make your life simpler."
eBay sells 65% stake in Skype for $1.9bn
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Technology on September 1st, 2009
Online auction house eBay offloads majority stake in internet telephony group Skype to investment consortium
Online auction house eBay has sold a 65% stake in Skype to an investment consortium that includes the founder of Netscape, in a deal that values the internet telephony group at $2.75bn (£1.9bn).
Following a year-long review in which eBay considered the possibility of floating Skype, which it snapped up almost exactly four years ago, the company has decided to pocket $1.9bn in cash and retain a 35% stake in the business.
But the value placed on the deal is $350m less than eBay paid for Skype, and there are also doubts that the online auctioneer even owns the underlying technology that powers the service. The company is currently locked in a legal battle in the UK courts with Joltid, a company owned by Skype's original founders, which claims it actually has the rights to the technology.
Founded in 2003 by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, the entrepreneurs behind filesharing service Kazaa who then went on to launch online TV service Joost, Skype uses people's internet connections to make calls at greatly reduced cost. Only when people want to call "out" to existing phone numbers or mobile phones are significant costs incurred and these are paid for by its customers.
The company generated revenues of $551m in 2008, a 44% increase compared with 2007, with 405 million registered users, and eBay reckons it will make more than $1bn in 2011.
When eBay bought the business it had revenues of just $7m but the business has never sat easily with the company's investors, many of whom have criticised its lack of strategic fit with the rest of the company.
A full-scale review of eBay's future was launched after the retirement in March last year of the auction company's veteran boss, Meg Whitman.
The consortium buying the stake is made up of private investment group Silver Lake; UK firm Index Ventures, which was an early investor in Skype; Andreessen Horowitz, a recently launched venture capital firm led by Netscape founder Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz; and the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPPIB).
"We are extremely fortunate to have such a talented and seasoned group invest in our company," said the Skype chief executive, Josh Silverman. "This is a group of investors and industry veterans that have a strong track record of taking the technology companies they own to the next level. With their know-how helping to guide our vision, Skype is poised to enter the next phase of its growth and development."
"There is no doubt in my mind that the talented players that make up this investment group will enable strong growth of Skype in the years to come," added the eBay chief executive, John Donahoe. "This transaction allows us to unlock both immediate and long-term value while benefiting from talented partners to help Skype accelerate its growth momentum."
Shares in eBay rose more than 3% on news of the sale, but there are fears that Skype may not be the technological powerhouse that its new owners hope.
In March, eBay filed a claim against Joltid – founded by Zennström and Friis – in the English high court. Joltid, which owns the key technologies for Skype, then "purported to terminate the licence agreement". Without the licence, Skype may be worthless because it will be unable to run legally – or might have to pay hefty licence fees to Joltid to keep it going.
Joltid alleges that Skype "should not possess, use or modify certain software source code" and that eBay has disclosed some of that code in US patent cases following court orders. It is seeking to revoke Skype's licence on the basis of copyright infringement and misuse of confidential information.
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When will we get 4G mobile networks?
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Technology on August 26th, 2009
Scandinavia, parts of Europe and even the US could soon have next-generation mobiles. The UK, on the other hand …
The answer depends entirely on where you live. For those in Scandinavia and some other parts of Europe, it could be sooner than you might think.
A group of telecoms companies in Sweden and Norway recently announced that they plan to launch Europe's first commercial 4G services next year – offering mobile phone systems that can achieve speeds of 100 megabits per second, many times faster than the current maximums.
The advanced technologies – which largely revolve around something known as Long Term Evolution (LTE) – herald the next age for mobile phones, with new networks set to eventually replace a current 3G standard that is already being stretched to capacity as millions of us use the internet on our phones or via mobile broadband connections.
There are also some plans for 4G in Ireland and Spain – but the question of when it might reach Britain is still unanswered.
Although Lord Carter's Digital Britain report suggested that parts of the airwaves should be handed over, the actual allocation of the spectrum has been delayed.
The result is that while companies such as Motorola have already started testing faster services in Britain, nobody has yet announced plans to launch commercial 4G services.
While Europe traditionally outpaces the United States in terms of mobile technology, the dilly-dallying over 4G could give the American mobile phone networks a chance to leapfrog into the lead – with US companies like Verizon already planning to roll out LTE systems next year. Whatever happens, the world's mobile phone companies will be hoping that the 4G system lasts longer than its predecessor.
After all, it is only eight years since the world's first third-generation system went live (under the auspices of Japanese telecoms giant NTT DoCoMo) and just six since the first mainstream services went live in Britain, from 3.
And that development came at a very high price: in 2000, when the British government auctioned off its licenses for the 3G spectrum, the world was shocked when companies including Vodafone ended up paying more than £22bn for the right to run 3G networks.
With the mobile companies still trying to recoup the massive costs of those licences, it may be that our over-the-top excitement at the turn of the millennium is precisely what prevents us from getting access to the next generation of technology.
The truth about mobile banking in Africa
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Technology on August 14th, 2009
There has a lot written about mobile payments in Africa, particularly since the success of M-Pesa in Kenya (this BBC report has the basics).
Mobile banking is certainly a growth industry across many African countries: indeed, my esteemed colleague Rick Wray reports that UK-listed Monitise is hoping to extend the reach of services with a deal to run new systems across a number of African countries.
For Kenyans it is clearly an amazingly successful technology, and has generated all sorts of interesting opportunities for people who often live isolated rural lives or do not have access to the traditional banking structure.
However, despite the soaraway success of M-Pesa, mobile payments are still in their early days - and while Kenya has eagerly embraced the system, one swallow doesn't make a summer. As such, I thought I'd share a really great post I read from the CGap thinktank (it stands for the Consultative Group to Assist the Poor, but I think we'll stick with the abbreviation) on why M-Pesa hasn't necessarily hit the heights outside of Kenya.
The Web is full of stories singing the praises of Safaricom's M-PESA, a service that allows Kenyans to safely and cheaply send money to family and friends throughout the country using a mobile wallet. In neighboring Tanzania, M-PESA has been in the market for over a year. Yet it is not garnering the same level of media attention. Despite the close proximity of Tanzania and Kenya, the mobile banking landscape in each is quite different.
Among the differences they note are the communities they cover (Tanzania is bigger and less densely populated than its neighbour), a change in marketing strategy and a different pricing scheme.
While I'm not playing down the idea that mobile banking offers better living through technology, it's worth seeing that it is not simply the case that building the services will result in automatic success.
Spinvox steps up smear claims
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Technology on August 10th, 2009
The saga of Spinvox continues – this time with the company launching an investigation to uncover the truth behind what it calls a smear campaign against it.
Just days after the British startup tried to allay concerns about its speech-to-text voicemail technology by inviting journalists (including our own Kevin Anderson) to watch it in action, it seems things have become a little trickier.
If the concerns raised by that demo weren't enough, apparently a dossier of the company's alleged misdeeds has been circulated to shareholders, including Dragon's Den panellist Julie Meyer. The claims – which have been documented across a number of websites – include bad leadership, poor management and irresponsible financial behaviour, though it is far from clear what the truth is. In the past, company boss Christina Domecq has accused disgruntled former employees of a sustained attack.
With all that in play, the FT is now reporting that the company has put accountants and solicitors onto the case, as it attempts to plug the hole and buff up its image.
Will it be enough? Last week Spinvox confirmed a new round of fundraising - much of which will be eaten up by the company's debts. Executives apparently continue their brashly optimistic approach, however, just weeks after trying to get staff to take their pay in stock to save on costs.
While there's little that's transparent about the goings-on at Spinvox right now, it will be worth watching how far they take their smear claims: Phorm, the last company to try hitting back at its detractors, saw its own stroppy campaign backfire.
The red phone box still has a future
Posted by: Gadget Boy in Technology on August 26th, 2009
Giles Gilbert Scott's red telephone kiosk is one of the most beautiful pieces of street furniture ever devised. But what to do with it in the age of the mobile?
Some people have fairies at the end of their garden. We have a red telephone kiosk, one of the most beautiful examples of street architecture ever devised. Sadly, it is hardly ever used now – killed by the unstoppable march of the mobile phone. It is for this reason that thousands are being disposed of by BT. It is offering local communities the chance to take them over for £1 if they will maintain them or £300 a year plus VAT if they keep them as a working payphone. This provides a rare opportunity to either keep the kiosks as they are or turn them into a new form of public art. Or both. Designed by the architect Sir Giles Gilbert Scott in 1924, the red kiosks were first introduced two years later in London and other parts of the country. Since then, they have become a part of Britain's heritage, along with cream teas, warm beer and the Tower of London. But now they are in danger of becoming a mausoleum for the analogue age unless something creative is done.
Many kiosks have already been converted to alternative uses and there is no shortage of ideas, as I found when I asked around, including putting out an appeal on Twitter. Here are a few: a shower cubicle, a coffin, an emergency shelter for unpredictable weather, a Doctor Who artefact (though it would have to be bigger on the inside … ), a mini greenhouse, a sales point for newspapers or deliveries from the internet, a kennel for tall dogs, a PhoneBoo (suggested, would you believe it, by the founder of audioboo.fm), a coffee dispenser, an ATM cash machine (but it would be a magnet for robbers), an "island of tranquillity" piping soft music for stressed out people, a local tourist information point, or as one expat American said, just leave them as they are as "the most recognisable symbol to all foreign tourists". One wag suggested that as they were too often used by drunks urinating maybe they should be turned into chemical toilets. Another man has made a business out of restoring booths. Keep the ideas rolling.
One obvious use would be to have solar energy stored during the day to illuminate the kiosks at night as a sculpture or as a beacon for passers by. However, the people at the Centre for Alternative Technology in Machynlleth tell me their renewable energy powered telephone box was deemed uneconomic by BT. Last month, what is claimed to be the smallest art gallery in the world opened in a phone box in Settle, north Yorkshire. One tweeter, Lisa Devaney, suggested making some of them into a tribute to phones by filling them with discarded mobiles. Or the phones could be made into a sculpture of a person making a call as an ironic comment on the demise of a traditional communication. Or indeed made into any other sculpture.
This month BT has started a competition for alternative uses with a first prize of £5,000 and others of £1,000. It says there are 12,500 kiosks nationwide of which more than 6,700 are "potentially suitable for adoption", which sounds much nicer than saying they are in danger of closure.
A great suggestion came from Phil Slade. He urged that they should be turned into Skype stations or Fon points (or for that matter Truphone or any of the burgeoning internet telephony companies). This is a brilliant idea because it does several things at once. Technologically, it provides a magic bridge for the red kiosks to use their existing copper wires to move from the analogue into the digital age and, socially, it would provide free internet telephone calls for anyone, including the poor (as long as the person at the other end is hooked up to a web telephone). It could also be a base enabling the kiosk to expand into other digital areas – not least to become a base station to get broadband to remote parts of the country. Great idea. But it won't win a competition organised by BT, will it?
bt, Comment, Telecoms, The Guardian
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