Alec Saunders SquawkBox

“Why would I give out my cell?” said Ms. McClain, 23. “I don’t need a guy I met at a bar one night calling me every day for the next two weeks begging me to go out. I want to filter out the people I don’t need to have contact with.”

Why indeed?  Cellular phones are the last bastion of privacy that most of us have.  But do most of us really want a disposable number, as the NY Times suggests, or just the ability to zap nuisance callers automagically to the bit bucket.  Most of us already have too many identities in our lives, and are looking for a little simplicity. Services like our own iotum, and to a lesser degree personal assistants like Grand Central and Webley / Communikate provide this service now.

A threat, however, is an increasing and dangerous trend to co-mingle your identity and your telephone number.  My recent experience trying to cancel Sunrocket is a perfect example.  Sunrocket CSR’s refused to cancel my account via email, rationalizing that email is insecure while the phone, apparently, is not.  The point that anyone can call claiming to be me, and that they have no way to verify that the caller is, in fact, me was completely lost on them.

It’s a dangerous trend.  Just as social security numbers are now the favorite means for identity thieves to impersonate you, phone numbers may be come the next.  What’s needed is a secure way to transmit credentials with the phone number.  This simple step would reduce credit card fraud, protect consumer privacy, and provide the peace of mind of knowing that the person on the other of the telephone is who they say they are… before making payment.

UPDATE:  Michael Urlocker has some nice additional insights, and gives a nod to iotum.  Thanks Michael!

The Ebayization of Skype is continuing.  Yesterday Skype Journal reported on the reorg, and today Om Malik has a whole lot more inside detail.  Henry Gomez is now running the show.  Most interesting was the way that the business development organization has been let go, and senior execs in multiple European markets.

Senior executives in Poland, France (Jerome Archambeaud, French Market Development Manager), UK (Alistair Shrimpton) and Italy have been let go, while Jonas Kjellberg, who headed up Skype’s Scandinavian operations has been redeployed in UK. Alberto Lorente, head of Skype in Spain and Portugal has been offered a position in London. In total about 14 people are leaving the company, many of them pre-merger employees. Many of them have till end of the year to finish their duties at the company.

That’s three reorgs in 12 months.  It must be hell to be on the ground there.  What’s that old saying?   “The firings will continue until morale improves!”

There’s been a torrent of criticism over the YouTube / Verizon deal announced yesterday.  Fred Wilson calls it lame, and Om Malik moans that the cellular providers walled garden will never come down. 

The deal with the devil, for those who don’t know yet, is simply this: for $15 per month, Verizon customers will be able to download selected YouTube videos to their cell phones.  Verizon and YouTube will maintain editorial control, deciding which videos are available and which not.

Critics fear that this will destroy the ethos of YouTube.  And never mind that $15 per month is a stupidly expensive price for the service.

Recently I’ve been experimenting with BBTV – a service provided by Rogers and RIM that lets you download summaries of the day’s news to your Blackberry.  For five dollars per month, it provides three (count ‘em, three!) video clips daily of approximately 60 to 90 seconds duration summarizing news, the world news, and sports.  It takes 3 to 5 minutes to download each clip, depending on the cellular connection.

It’s totally lame.  A complete and utter ripoff of the consumer, it may be the single most disappointing thing I have ever bought in my entire life.  Old news, managed by an editorial board that chooses what I get to see, and a carrier who overcharges me for the content.

Let’s be clear, though.  The YouTube / Verizon deal is just a co-marketing deal.  It’s a last gasp of idiotic old-skool telco thinking seeping into the internet, because YouTube doesn’t need Verizon to reach the customer on a handset. Every current model mobile phone I’ve got — from Blackberry to Nokia N-Series — can play video and connect to the net. You don’t need Verizon to download video off the net.   Moreover, Flash for mobile will shortly have the ability to play video, if it doesn’t already.  It’s just a matter of time before video sites like YouTube and Revver start to publish video optimized for the mobile handset.

A while back an asteroid called the Internet crashed into Planet Wireless.  It’s taking a while for the secondary weather effects to be felt, but the dinosaurs in control of those networks will eventually die.  Until then, legions of bright young MBAs toiling in obscurity in the bowels of marketing departments at these behemoths will be doing their best to keep resuscitating the lizards…

NY Times author Christopher Elliot writes about the frustration of finding no open power sockets when travelling.  I’ve written about this before.  The worst airport, by far, is O’Hare.  Check out the restaurants, because there are no power sockets in most parts of the concourse. 

A couple of resources to help:  Jeff Sandquist’s Airpower Wiki, and the Airport Power Wiki I set up in March of this year.

Microsoft employees, like those at many other companies I would imagine, have a tradition of posting a farewell email to friends and co-workers when they leave the company.  Usually it’s a “so long, and thanks for all the great memories” affair.  However, I remember distinctly when my buddy Brandon Watson (now CEO of startup imsafer) sent his mail out in 1999.  It was a pretty pointed indictment of company practices and attitudes surrounding innovation, addressed to senior management.  Then, of course, young Brandon mailed it to a select few of his pals, me included.  I remember shaking my head and thinking “man, he’s got stones!”, and wondering how it would be received. It was a pretty gutsy move from a young guy who just wanted to make things happen and didn’t have the patience to wait until he’d paid his dues.

Enjoy the mail.  You’ll see a lot of parallels with Brad Garlinghouse’s recent Peanut Butter Manifesto, and I imagine that (now that Windows Vista and Office 2007 have shipped) there are a lot of similar conversations going on at Microsoft today.