Be on the wave or under it™

• There is plenty of room to grow voice usage
• Think creatively about business models, especially pricing
• Use higher bandwidth to stimulate greater voice usage.
• Use higher bandwidth to segment the market and gain revenues by providing different quality levels (be less efficient with compression!).
• Provide toll-free wireless calling numbers to get revenue from businesses.
• Use content and other data services as inducements to greater voice usage (i.e., as the dessert, not the main meal)

Also, check out the article I wrote for the Taylor Harkins newsletter entitled, Do you hate your customers? It continues the theme from my earlier article, analyzing the media industry’s response to file sharing.

• Steganographic Mimic: Steganography doesn’t have anything to do with dinosaurs. Rather it’s the science of concealing messages in outwardly normal pictures or messages. Some overly paranoid government agencies have speculated that terrorists used steganography to conceal messages planning the September 11^th attacks. Frankly I don’t think they needed to go quite to that extreme, since coded or encrypted emails would suffice. Now there’s a new steganographic technique that avoids the suspicion that might accompany the sending or receipt of an encrypted file: Disguise the message as spam. The Spam Mimic Web site lets you sample the technique. First, go to this page, which contains a spam message I’ve encoded with a secret phrase. Then decode it at Spam Mimic. The technique makes use of the usually horrible spelling, grammar, and punctuation often found in spam emails.
   SpamMimic
  
  
• Pretty Good Text to Speech: Most text to speech converters sound robotic and idiotic, often trying to pronounce things that should be spelled out, and vice versa. Loquendo, on the other hand, sounds pretty doggone good. Check out the way their system speaks the paragraph you’re now reading. Not bad, eh?
  Loquendo
  
  
• Ends Justifying Means: At least three major record labels are spoofing popular music file sharing services like Morpheus, Kazaa and Grokster with thousands of decoy music files. The files look identical to a particular song, but are filled with minutes of silence or 30-second loops of a song's chorus. The labels are hoping that file sharing users will get so frustrated they’ll stop stealing the music and purchase the CDs instead. Good luck with all of that! One anonymous executive said, “We're not using any of this with any kind of promotion or marketing in mind. We're doing this simply because we believe people are stealing our stuff and we want to stymie the stealing.”
  
  According to one statistic, more than 18.7 million users downloaded illegal music in May. Spoofing won’t be the only tactic used to stop piracy. Labels are apparently looking at ways to scramble search queries or add file attachments to slow the download of a compressed music file that would typically download quickly. Particularly troublesome is a bill being prepared by Beverly Hills democratic Congressman Howard Berman that would legalize high-tech attacks against file swapping networks. One hopes that this legislation won’t enable the kind of attack envisioned by one record exec, who summarized the mindset of some of his peers as, “Hey, if you don't mind stealing my career and livelihood, I'm sure you don't mind if I destroy your hard drive.” Even Business Week is concerned.
  SiliconValley.com
  
  
• Net Traffic Exceeds Voice Traffic: In the US, Internet traffic has reached 100 petabytes per month, which is apparently double the volume of the nation’s long distance voice traffic. But the pace of growth in data is slackening, to a poky 100 percent per year, down from 130 percent in 2000 and 160 percent in 1999. Meanwhile, telecom revenues fell 17 percent and revenues-per-bit fell 45 percent in 2001.
  RHK
  
  
• Cyborg Teeth: The European branch of MIT Media Lab has designed a tooth implant that can silently transmit sound through the jaw and to your ears. The implant is designed to work with an external device such as a mobile telephone, which would transmit a local signal to the tooth receiver. Reception can be switched on and off at will with the aid of the external device. Multiple molars can be implanted for – wait for it – surround sound. Others have restrained themselves from offering this pun, but I’ve no shame: Is this the ultimate Bluetooth device?
  Wired News
  
  
• Failed BizPlan Archive: Alert SNS Reader Roger Hamm sends along a link to a research project that seeks to archive for posterity the business plans of failed dotcoms. The project is a joint effort between WebMergers, which tracked the dotcom revolution, and the Robert H. Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland. “If we do not act now to document the dot-com happenings of the past several years, many of the events and firms that helped define the period will be forgotten,” said David Kirsch, assistant professor of entrepreneurship and head of the research project. “We must create a meaningful digital archive of this historic era of entrepreneurship. The business plans of the 1990s are important cultural products that represent the creative efforts of our age.” Hmmmm. I’ve got a very creative business plan from a former employer that might be interesting . . .
  WebMergers
  
  

Just the Right Stuff™

If you subscribed to CTOMentor’s Just the Right Stuff™ newsletter, over the past few months, you’d have received news nuggets like the following, along with expanded analysis. Your personalized Information Needs Profile would determine which of these items you’d receive. For more information, check out CTOMentor.

• Military Scours Windows for Back Doors: The US Army and Navy are inspecting Microsoft’s Windows operating systems looking for unauthorized remote-control program. An undisclosed number of copies of the program, RemotelyAnywhere, were discovered on Department of Defense computer systems in March.
  ComputerUser
  
  
• Movie Pirates Despoil Precious Assets: Surveys say 350,000 films are being downloaded illegally every day, many of them while still playing in theaters. The Motion Picture Association of America filed suit March 5 against file-sharing services, including Morpheus, Grokster and Kazaa. An overwrought MPAA chief Jack Valenti said file-sharing “is file-stealing--it's an outrageous despoilment of precious assets.” Settle down. It’s only the end of the world as you know it.
  LA Times
  
  
• Palm Drives Bluetooth: Palm's drive to make Bluetooth wireless technology ubiquitous shifted into high gear in March with the announcement of a marketing partnership with Sony Ericsson and the release of a Bluetooth add-on card for users of its handheld devices.
  ZDNet
  
  
• Faster, Better, Cheaper Wireless LANs: Actiontec brings the price of high-speed wireless networking down to earth with its affordable ($149) 54Mbps wireless PC Card. Unfortunately, Actiontec skimps on security features, and its utility software offers only minimal network statistics.
  ZDNet
  
  
• Gartner Predicts Wireless and Mobile in 2002: Business planners have to accept that more than half of all the mobile applications deployed at the start of 2002 will be obsolete by the end of the year, and they have to put up with the lack of sufficiently useful and usable applications.
  Gartner
  
  
• Wireless Gaming Market to Grow to $2.8 Billion Worldwide by 2006: In-Stat/MDR believes wireless gaming offers an excellent opportunity for network providers to create additional revenue through increasing subscribers’ usage levels, reducing churn, and enhancing the overall user experience for their extremely fickle subscriber base. Cahners InStat

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