Alec Saunders SquawkBox

James Seng takes apart a slide from Vesbridge Partners Roderick Randall in which Randall asserts "the stupid network is a stupid idea".  Caveat: I haven’t seen the whole presentation.  This slide, however, is frankly backward thinking.

If you’ve read this blog before, you know that The Stupid Network is a really good idea.  Standardizing the lower layers of the network and pushing the intelligence to the edge unlocks innovation in a way that just wasn’t possible with the so-called Intelligent Networks of the 1980’s. 

To add to James Seng’s comments, it’s more than just a marketing and pricing exercise to get value from the Stupid Network. There will be a wholesale shift of revenues away from transporting bits, and toward value-added services as the Stupid Network becomes the communications platform for the future.  Applications are the answer to the price erosion that will naturally chip away at incumbent’s revenue models.  To survive, the carriers must shift the basis of their competition away from price, toward value add. 

It’s true that some of the value add will be in bit-transport: speeds and feeds, plus QOS.  But the majority of the value add will come from new applications for those bits, not simply transporting bits faster.

This goes into the category of "officially geeky".  All morning I’ve been cruising to Toronto on a Via train, doing email, connecting to the internet, some IM, and so on.  I haven’t yet tried Skype.  How am I doing it?  Using my blackberry as a wireless modem. It’s slow, but it definitely works.

Jon Arnold sent me this interview with Skype founder Niklas Zennstrom on Skype’s business model.  It’s interesting stuff.  In recent months Skype has release an API which allows third party applications to control Skype, and allows handset devices to be interfaced with Skype.  The interviewer asks questions about Skype’s plans for corporate LANs, etc, which Zennstrom deflects.  Zennstrom speaks about Skype’s plans to be more like a mobile operator, but doesn’t speak to the issue of service creation on the Skype network.  Naturally, there are services being created — Skype-In/Skype-Out/Voicemail — but there doesn’t seem to be a way for third parties to do this.  It will be interesting to watch evolve.

Here is an amazing resource for entrepreneurs and marketers. The IT Facts blog grabs those endless stats that all the analysts publish, and collects them all under one banner. It even has an RSS feed. 

Two tools that I’ve come to rely heavily on are Google Desktop, and Lookout. Interesting enough, after months of reliable use, both decided to go insane on me in April. Google stopped indexing, and Lookout, while it could find items in the index, couldn’t display them.  New versions of both are out, which fixed the problems.