T-Mobile Wi-Fi/Cell Phones: A “Threat” to Telcos, VoIP

The New York Times reports this morning that wireless carrier T-Mobile has launched a trial in Seattle of phones that use both cellular and wireless internet connections, which could improve reception in areas of weak cellular signals while enabling users to stretch their cellular minutes.

The first phones, which are available to consumers in Seattle on a trial basis, link to T-Mobile’s cellular network outdoors and to Wi-Fi routers at homes, in offices and in other locations like airports and hotels. This lets customers avoid using some of their cellular minutes and increases coverage in places where signals are typically weak, like basements and rooms without windows.

To gain access to the service, called T-Mobile HotSpot @Home, customers must buy a phone that works on both networks. T-Mobile is selling a choice of two handsets that cost $49.99 for customers who sign up for a two-year rate plan for at least $39.99 a month. Subscribers are charged $19.99 a month in addition to their regular cellular plan fees.

The dual-use phone service may appeal most to younger consumers who do not have a traditional phone line and rely solely on cellular phones and broadband lines.

“For the below-30 age segment, it’s a no-brainer,” said Roger Entner, a wireless industry analyst at Ovum, a consulting firm. “This is also a threat for other wireless carriers because it fixes the problem of poor coverage inside homes.”

When my two oldest children went away to college last year, cell phone reception in their dorm rooms was spotty, to put it charitably. Even though we had free in-network mobile-to-mobile minutes, we found ourselves needing to call their land line to get a clear connection.

Vonage’s advertising has been creative and memorable, particularly spot in which the circling dorsal fins near the beach lead the young lady to exclaim: “The dolphins! Let’s go play with the dolphins!” It’s also led to some creative spoofs:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2B4jjt6Tvk]

A phone that uses wi-fi wherever you find it (not just at home) and can use cellular signals when necessary looks even more like “a smart decision in a sea of stupid ones.” I can’t imagine how this trial won’t be popular and successful, particularly since it may reduce T-Mobile’s need to invest in more cellular towers.

Mobile VoIP is one more reason to get rid of the land line, as our family did last year. Some people will opt for DSL, while others will use cable. In the not-too-distant future, there will be no need for anyone to have both.

And with some communities going to city-wide Wi-Fi, it all comes down to lots more competition for the telcos. The Times says Sprint is working to develop a similar service. If this experiment works in Seattle, imagine how well it will go over in a Wi-Fi city like Philly.

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GTD Tip: Personal Blog as Ultimate General Reference File

Readers of David Allen’s Getting Things Done are familiar with his advice that general reference files are best stored in one A-Z file drawer (or rather one A-Z file system, using as many file drawers as your space allows.)

For e-mails that are not actionable but may have some future usefulness, storing on your local hard drive in a “Reference – Business” or “Reference – Personal” folder is a good option. You could make it one big reference folder, too. The point is your reference e-mails are in one location (and with a big enough hard drive, space isn’t an issue) where you can use indexed search functions to find that old message when you need it. More on e-mail implementation of GTD in a future post.

What about personal thoughts, notes, web site links, etc. you may want to access later? The proverbial “note to self” e-mail is an option, which you can then put in the reference e-mails archive on your regularly backed up 😉 hard drive. That’s perhaps the best option for sensitive or confidential information.

For everything else, a personal blog is an elegant solution that offers several benefits:

It is completely and easily searchable based on any word or text string you can recall about the contents. If, for example, I’m trying to remember the vitamin-related web site I heard about from my friend Morri last week, I could go to the search box in my right-hand navigation, type “Morri” and press enter, even if I couldn’t remember the name of his company or that his last name is Chowaiki, to find my post about dinner with him and several other ALI conference participants.

It allows you to add comments about and context for the resources you are gathering. Social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us (to be addressed in a future post) are great for adding one-word tags to a web site (and you can add brief comments), but to capture a train of thought relating to some information, a blog is unbeatable…and you don’t have to remember the exact tag you used. You can search on any tidbit relating to the post that you happen to recall.

Your thoughts and learnings are available to the world (unless you decide to make your personal blog a private blog that is password-protected for access.) Your post may lead to comments from someone else, which can help both of you, and others who may find your conversation.

For example, when I attended the ALI conference on blogging and podcasting in San Francisco last week, I posted on both of the pre-conference workshops and each of the general sessions. I included links to the speakers’ sites and to those they resources they mentioned during their presentations primarily so I would be able to go back and refer to them. This will be a valuable resource for me, much better than handwritten notes in a binder that will go on a shelf. And by including links to my posts, Shel Holtz made the information more easily accessible not only to those who attended the conference and knew I was blogging it, but also to his network of readers.

Finally, storage is unlimited, free, neat and orderly. You can dump the information into the blog, but if never clutters your desktop. If you take time to tag and categorize, it may be more easily accessible, particularly for others. But as long as you have a search function on your blog, it’s out of sight, out of mind, not cluttering your desktop (either physical or virtual)…but instantly accessible.

How cool is that?

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Three Strikes, and Starbucks’ Podcast is Out

Starbucks

Podonomics has a review of the news that Starbucks is discontinuing its podcast after only three episodes.

Among the problems cited: Boring topics delivered without energy, obvious reading from a script, distracting music and a infomercial flavor.

After outlining some specific suggestions for how the podcast could have been successful, the author concludes:

Overall, Starbucks’ focus was wrong. They failed because they focused on the coffee bean. They would’ve succeeded had they focused on their best asset – their customers and the stories they would happily tell about their experience with coffee.

Good principles to keep in mind for anyone considering a podcast. It can and should be much longer than what fits in commercial radio, but it’s got to have some life. It doesn’t need to reach even a 1 share, but it needs to have something about it that would be engaging for someone.

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Click-Fraud: Worse than TiVo?

The Post has another article about click fraud and how some internet advertisers are attempting to band together to fight back:

In the past year, industry analysts say, new forms of click fraud have emerged from the shadows of masked operations into plain view on the Internet. Dozens of Web sites offer to pay people to sit and click on ads, or to type certain words into search engines for hours at a time. Some sites have forums where people swap click-fraud tips.

Advertisers, who often pay for online ads only when someone clicks on them, have been crying foul and complaining to federal regulators. They’ve also sued the Internet’s largest ad networks, Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc., which earlier this year settled class-action lawsuits by advertisers.

A new lawsuit was filed last month in Pennsylvania seeking class-action status against Google. The FBI, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service are investigating click fraud.

On-line advertising is gaining phenomenally because the results supposedly have been better than those for the 30-second spot. I wonder how the problem of click fraud compares with the problem of people skipping the commercials when they use TiVo or another DVR.

TiVo

It’s a different kind of issue, but the same effect: paying for an audience that isn’t seeing the ad. Click fraud is malevolent and deceptive, more like a RICO activity. TiVoing is just an individual’s decision to fast-forward through the commercial.

With click fraud, the advertisers lose because they may be paying a dime for each click (although the price varies depending on the demand for the search term). The person doing the clicking loses too, because at half a penny a click, if they can click on 10 ads a minute (waiting for the sites to refresh so they can click again), that’s a nickel a minute or $3 an hour. Google and Yahoo (and the web sites that receive the fraudulent traffic, and whose owners must be behind the click-fraud rings) are the winners.

Still, I wonder which is the bigger economic problem for advertisers: skipping broadcast ads or fake clicks on web ads?

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