Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Carl Ford and I recorded a 10 minute segment for his weekly podcast earlier this week.  We talked about the iPhone, innovation, and of course, iotum’s new Talk-Now application.  As you may know, I have similar thoughts about the iPhone to the thoughts expressed in this Ars Technica post.

Anyway, I certainly enjoyed the chat with Carl, and I hope you do too.

AT&T’s Unity was the big news yesterday.  It’s a pricing plan that makes it possible to for AT&T Wireless customers to call AT&T Landline customers for free, without incurring any wireless minute charges. They can already call other AT&T Wireless customers for free.  Now the deal has been extended to landline, and you get a unified bill in the mail each month.  The gamble, of course, is that the AT&T customer base will buy their triple play bundle of services from AT&T, for one flat fee, and encourage everyone they know who isn’t an AT&T customer to become one. 

It’s not flat-rate to every line on every network.  Naturally, because AT&T has to terminate those calls on their competitors networks, they don’t want to incur the cost, nor fatten the other guys coffers.  In my opinion, this radically limits the appeal.  Customers would flock to a one-rate wireless / wireline plan, but will they change their behavior for “son of friends and family”?

Om Malik views Unity as a desparate move.  Equipped with graphs and charts that even Ross Perot would be proud to own, Om presents a looming disaster scenario as he notes that wireline minutes are down 40% since 2001.  More alarming for AT&T shareholders is that overall minutes (wireline and wireless) are down 15% as well.  Is it really possible that people are talking less?

In his op-ed³, Daniel Berninger pointed out that there has been a 40 percent decline in wireline minutes since 2001, according to FCC data. If you add all the wireless minutes to the total talk time, the total minutes are down 15 percent over past five years. “This means we either communicate less than five years ago or the Internet (e.g. email, IM, VoIP) is taking traffic away from the PSTN,” he points out.

Andy Abramson’s view is more optimistic.  For Andy, this is AT&T moving to reclaim market domination through better customer service. 

It is a move to reclaim market domination through customer billing and services simplification. In many ways this pre-empts the cable MSO’s moves and in other ways tells all the mobile players without an existing land line play that matters (T-Mobile, Sprint, numerous regional carriers) that now with Cingular and AT&T under one roof, taking customers back, or keeping them from leaving (reducing churn) is the highest priority for the merged company. By using the unified billing concept the combined entity will likely save millions off the bat, but also by saying they no longer have to bill you by the call says that they’re now one big network too. It also means that one grade of call quality will be assured, that you talk to one customer service person and that neither side can blame the other for issues any longer.

The cost savings of a unified bill may be real, but it’s not true that this entity won’t bill you by the call.  Not every telephone user in the US is an AT&T customer.  That means AT&T Unity customers will still be getting a sheaf of paper each month showing all the charges incurred to reach folks with other carriers.

This is a big cross-selling opportunity, and a big public relations exercise, but likely not a big deal.  For carriers, bundles have historically hit the bottom line hard without attracting new subscribers.  They’ve been an effective means to staunch the bleeding when cancellations are trending upward, but nothing more.  Expect management to try something new in a couple of quarters when the profits drop.

Seidio has begun shipping an extended life battery for the Blackberry Pearl.  Claims to increase talk time by 170%, has a cute little cutout to expose the speaker for better sound quality, and fits the Seidio rubberized holster.  Introductory price of $49.

While I’m in favour of extended battery life, I wonder how well this product will do.  After all, isn’t the point of the Blackberry Pearl its form-factor? 

Rick Segal has pumped out a series of excellent posts over the last couple days on the topics of NDAs, term sheets, and types of deals.  They’re well worth the read.

Term sheets, and liquidity preferences:

• The Liquidity Preference Question (references Suzi Dingwall-Williams piece Is a Liquidation Preference Acceptable)
• Annotated Term Sheet and the Secret Prize (includes a marked up term sheet from Craig Brown at Fasken Martineau)

NDAs and deal types:

• Shhhhh.  Promise not to tell.
• Execution Play vs. the Black Box.
• A Confidential Statistic — Strictly Private.

In particular, Execution Play vs. the Black Box is a very worthwhile read.  It’s worth knowing what kind of deal you’re presenting.