Convergence and the birth of a new AT&T

The proposed AT&T – Bellsouth merger signals the unfreezing of the US telecommunications industry and is likely to send seismic waves through the industry. If the merger goes through, the erstwhile baby bells will be reduced to three major players: AT&T, Verizon and Qwest. Further, there is some talk of Verizon making a move on Qwest and reducing the sector to a duopoly. The AT&T merger makes sense when you consider existing industry conditions.
Cable industries with their triple-play (TV, internet broadband, phone) offerings have stolen share from the traditional baby bells and consolidation might help AT&T cope with this convergence threat better. The new entity plans to apply the same brand across all its offerings and this should help reduce ad spend. The increased consumer base should also help when it comes to investment and roll-out  of new technologies such as IPTV. Scale should also help AT&T in dealing with its suppliers. The regulatory environment these days also seems to be favorable to such a move even though questions of how this merger would affect the net-neutrality issue persist. This merger might bring benefits to residential customers in the form of lower prices and increased choices but business consumers might suffer from a reduction in choices of service providers. It will be interesting to see how the cable companies and Verizon respond to this merger.

Cocomment is now ready for its close-up

Just a quick note; Cocomment is now out of beta and at your disposal. Enjoy!

Newsmap: Bringing news to life via Flash

Newsmap is a fantastic Flash based application that visualizes Google News based on coverage after breaking stories out by category and region. I came across this app on Coolhunting and it now occupies prime real estate on my start page. You can also track a related Slashdot conversation here.

MTV turns 25: Can it stay relevant?

BusinessWeek has a long but engrossing article on the measures that Judy McGrath, the new CEO of MTV, is taking to keep the channel cool and relevant. MTV’s target audience increasingly satiates its voracious appetite for media on the web and via cellphones in addition to TV sets. This proliferation of new distribution channels threatens MTV’s established business model of content delivery through cable; especially as it receives 60% of its revenues from advertisers.

McGrath is highly focused on understanding her customers and is referred to as ‘a 16 year old boy in an adults body’. She’s embracing new media and leading initiatives such as the on-demand streaming of videos to college campuses. MTV has also begun offering its content through iTunes, formed a partnership with Microsoft, and is launching a high-definition channel. MTV networks recent split-off from Viacom may also help it be more nimble and reactive to the market. There are many other businesses in the media and the technology sector that are facing challenges similar to the ones being faced by MTV and the lessons learned here could be applied widely. A lesson that’s readily apparent is of harnessing new technologies and cannibalizing your own business before someone else does. MKT 601, anyone?

The Real Estate industry unfreezes: Dell, Expedia…Zillow?

The Internet has played a major role in disintermediation in industries ranging from travel to personal computers; driving higher efficiencies and lower costs for consumers. All signs point to the real estate business being next in line for a similar seismic change. As things stand today, real estate agents affiliated with the National Association of Realtors (NAR) have exclusive access to the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) – the most comprehensive nationwide database of house listings. Real estate agents take full advantage of this information asymmetry and charge healthy margins especially in a buoyant market.

Two new online services that increase access to listing information and make the process of buying and selling houses on the web easier should serve a warning notice to real estate agents and provide an impetus to further differentiate their offerings. Zillow and Redfin are both based in Seattle (yay!) and promise to shake up the real estate industry. Zillow launched officially yesterday and its servers crashed from the surging traffic – an early measure of how eagerly consumers await such a service. Zillow still has some work to do in terms of the accuracy and the breadth of the information that it provides especially since it does not have access to the MLS. But, if the case that the Justice department has brought against the NAR runs its course and opens up access to this database, the real estate business may truly unfreeze from a disruptive technology. Viva web! More on this here, here, and here.

Newsmashing and a cool Greasemonkey script

I come across tons of interesting articles through the course of my day and often add links to many of these on del.icio.us. Often though in addition to bookmarking these articles, I also want to highlight and add annotations so I can remember specific portions, especially if I plan to blog about any of these articles. From an article on Slate, I discovered this phenomenon when conducted on the original article web page is called newsmashing. As you can imagine there are several technical and legal implications to this trend and I for one haven’t noticed it catching on in quite the fashion that the Slate article predicts. There is however an elegant bookmarklet and Greasemonkey script out there that allows you to see what other users on del.icio.us are saying about the article that you’re browsing. I’ve been using the greasemonkey script all day today and it’s pretty cool. You can find more details here.

Also, earlier today I got into the mag.nolia beta and I’m looking forward to playing around with it and posting a review over the next few weeks. I’ve also been using Cocomment some as you may have noticed from my sidebar and have a favorable first impression. Hats off!

Joining Co-Comment Beta

Waiting in my email inbox this afternoon was an invitation code for Co-comment. I posted about this yesterday and it seems like the Co-comment beta fairy was paying attention and granted my wish. I’ve added the Co-comment widget to the left sidebar and will be posting a review of this service in a week or two. Watch out fellow BIT742’ers, I’m about to become a commenting machine.

Blogs, comments and a new service

In class today, a cohort brought up the tedium of posting and then following comments on different sites. I was thinking about that when I came across this post on Robert Scoble’s blog about the new blog comments service Co-comment. Co-comment captures comments through a browser bookmarklet as you post them on individual blogs and then aggregates them to a portal. The service then lets you add comments that you’ve left on other blogs to your own blog and also provides an RSS feed for your to follow comments through a blog aggregator. Co-comment is in closed beta and I’m eagerly awaiting its open launch so I can play around with it. You can sign up for notification of its opening here.

Cellphones as a means of computing for the poor of the world

I like Microsoft’s idea of promoting cellphones over laptops as a computing medium in the developing world. Cellphones provide substantial advantages over conventional laptops in cost, internet connectivity, learning curve and availability. Also, as cell phone penetration in India has shown, infrastructure issues such as an intermittent power supply are not that big a drawback. In fact on my last visit to India, I saw cellphones being used by everyone from bhajiwalas (the neighborhood vegetable vendor) to cobblers. I haven’t read details about Microsoft’s plan but hope that they involve entrepreneurs in Asia and Africa. I’m not too enthused with the idea of governments. especially those in Africa, running this program. I’m now looking for some information on the web about what computing applications delivered through cellphones would be ideal for the developing world.

The MIT Technology Review also has more on this topic here.

Predicting the success of new movies and music

I’m taking a class on Advanced Competitive Analysis this semester and one of the business cases we discussed concerned the music giant BMG or as it is known today Sony BMG. Music labels such as BMG face considerable unpredicability when it comes to the launch of new artists and the same risk applies (with the capital investment being many orders of magnitude higher) for the movie studios as well. Roughly one out of ten releases ends up making money for the music labels and it is the ability to withstand this risk (along with access to and bargaining power with distribution channels among other things) that has created high barriers of entry to the music label business.

If the software discussed in this article from the Los Angeles Times or from this article in The Guardian catches on and reduces the unpredictability in movie and music launches, it could shift some of the power away from the labels/studios to the artists and further roil the content industry.  The latest issue of  The Economist deals with the challenges that technology (think complements) is posing for the content industry but since I haven’t had a chance to dig in yet – you’ll have to wait till later this week for my thoughts on that issue.

Also, here’s an explanation of Bayesian Classifiers and the underlying Bayes’ Theroem from Wikipedia.