These weekly news roundups are a new Telco 2.0 service; they are meant to focus attention on news items that might not be Telco 2.0-related at first sight, or big enough to warrant a whole post to themselves, but do contain real insight. They are grouped under the categories used in the rest of Telco 2.0.
Digital Youth
When Search Attacks:
Participants in a fancy ID-business social network were horrified when a bot used to auto-populate their profiles libelled leading sci-fi author John Scalzi. He’d repeatedly written about disgraced congressman Mark Foley and used the word “paedophile”; guess what the bot decided to put in his “description” field?
Telco 2.0 Comment: Remember, automatic robots and highly personal information are a dangerous mix. If the AOL security breach was farce, this is tragedy, especially as Spock includes a function for users to vote on each other’s reputations.
T-Mobile Tees Up 3G:
First 3G device for T-Mobile USA leaked…but the real news is that even without UMTS,
data usage ex-SMS is booming.
Telco 2.0 Comment: T-Mobile is better known for its open-slather Web’n’Walk tariff in Europe, but how to explain its US data boom? Our theory is that its historic price leadership, going back to the days of Voicestream, captured a demographic that’s now adopting new gadgets and services rapidly. Note that AT&T just got FCC approval for the US’s first
HSUPA data card - 2Mbits/s uplink, 7.2 down.
Digital Cities
Wi-Fi…Why?
Cali-utopian geeks’ dream of free Wi-Fi everywhere doesn’t work. Maybe they could have a crack at the space elevator instead?
Telco 2.0 Comment: There’s a reason why mobile operators have lots of radio engineers, you know. And billing departments.
Paranoia in the palm of your hand:
New Sprint service lets you browse sex offenders’ register from your phone; so you can find a sex offender in a hurry? No, of course, it’s for your peace of mind..
Telco 2.0 Comment: “Checking for local offenders is free…after normal data charges” It’s one way to get those metered bits moving. In Telco 2.0 terms, this is somewhere between Digital Home and Digital Town. Notably, some other carriers offer various security-related services; MTN in South Africa streams your home CCTV camera feeds to your 3G device and texts you if the alarm goes off. At least you can do something about that other than “move house” or “collect angry mob”.
Digital Politics and Regulation
AT&T spotted wielding censor’s scissors!
Astonishingly, David “Stupid Network” Isenberg isn’t at all pleased that AT&T’s web music portal censored Pearl Jam being rude about President Bush. Perhaps it says more about AT&T that they’re hoping to make a profit streaming Pearl Jam over the web? Isenberg, again unsurprisingly, thinks this is an argument for network neutrality.
Telco 2.0 Comment: So that’s what they wanted all that
IMS gear for! More seriously, as John Waclawsky said, monitoring is the first step to control.
ESPN’s efforts to have fewer customers are a roaring success; the cable-TV sports channel may give up on a
scheme to restrict access to its website to customers of ISPs who pay it for the privilege.
Telco 2.0 Comment: The idea was that viewers who couldn’t get to see the videos would complain to their ISP; it could have perhaps been predicted that they would complain to ESPN’s website about not being able to see content
on their website. Further, the economics of this are a little strange; there is no pot of gold in the customer ISP world for content providers to get their hands on, quite the opposite with margins tanking all over the world.
Too many zeros;
Telekom Malaysia bills subscriber 17 times the GDP of the United States. Sorry, that should be “bills
deceased ex-subscriber”…
Telco 2.0 Comment: When you do something often enough, even 99.999% sometimes isn’t enough.
Digital Product Innovation
3UK to offer
cheap mobile data; 1GB/month=£10, 7GB/month=£25.
Telco 2.0 Comment: In the future, data transfer will be cheap. Cheaper and cheaper. How will 3 make money from this?
Nokia does identity and social networking:
sadly, they call it Mosh. In other awful branding news,
will Sprint-Nextel call its WiMAX service XOHM?
Telco 2.0 Comment: I, ah, hope you know what you’re doing with that ad budget.. Seriously, there’s so much interest in SNS these days it’s no surprise Nokia is interested, if only as a research project into user interfaces. It probably helps if your users can pronounce the service..Oh God, they’re actually going to
do it…
A plurality of Telco 2.0 attendees think the industry has made a good start with its 
Key Report findings:
