Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Suzanne Bowen has a couple of free passes to Interop / Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin on November 5 through 8.  If interested, she can be reached at +1 850 375 9276, by email at suzanne@supertec.com, and on Facebook as Suzanne Bowen.

My friend Jon Arnold dropped me a note yesterday about his new project, the IP Convergence TV portal.  Jon's the editor for this portal, which is a non-profit initiative that Comverse has put together. A group of charter sponsors including Intel, AudiCodes, Tilgin, BEA, Blueslice and others contribute in-kind by providing content about all the various aspects of IP convergence - IPTV, Triple Play, FMC, etc.

Check it out.  You'll see some familiar faces, including folks like Tom Howe. 

There's a fun dialog going on between Jeff Pulver, Moshe Maeir, and Shel Israel over Facebook adoption in Israel.  It's sprinting towards 100K users.  As Jeff notes, that's a little more than 1% of the total population.  Since October 14th, when Jeff spoke at VON Israel, it's grown from 70,000 to 97,000, which is remarkable since Israel is first and foremost a Hebrew speaking nation, not English.

Just for fun, I checked some other statistics from English speaking countries.

• The USA has 19,951,900 Facebook users, out of a total population of 301,139,947. 6.6% of Americans are Facebook users.   
• The UK has 6,407,580 Facebook users, out of a total population of 60,776,238. 10.5% of UK residents are Facebook users.
• Australia has 1,498,320 Facebook users, out of a total population of 20,434,176. 7.3% of Australians are Facebook users. 
• Canada has 7,361,720 Facebook users, out of a total population of 33,390,141. 22% of Canadians are Facebook users. 

Canadians are daffy for Facebook.

Alarm bells are being raised south of the 49th parallel over plans by Verizon to share subscribers' CPNI records with third parties.  CPNI, or customer proprietary network information, comprises users’ calling records and includes the numbers of incoming and outgoing calls and time spent on each call, among other data. CPNI is therefore the key to delivering targeted advertising to cellular phones.

Verizon Wireless in early October began sending letters notifying customers that they have 30 days to opt out of the program by calling an 800 number before their information would be shared.  Privacy advocates are circulating an open letter calling on the FCC to block this practice, arguing that the law prohibits Verizon from sharing these records.  The FCC, however, states that “Consent rules (have been) modified to require carriers to obtain explicit consent from a customer before disclosing a customer’s CPNI to a carrier’s joint venture partners or independent contractors for the purposes of marketing communications-related services to that customer.” 

Verizon spokesperson Jeffrey Nelson said “CPNI notices are nothing new; other telecom and wireless service providers have been using this as a means to open communications with their customers for years.  This is the first time Verizon Wireless has sent a CPNI notice to customers, and in accordance with FCC guidelines, we are providing the opt-out option for sharing information among our telecom affiliates."

FCC sez "you need to get the customers permission".  Verizon sez "Hey, we're gonna keep doing what we've been doing all along, but you can ask us not to."  They're not really the same, now, are they?

More from the Network Observations blog.

Within minutes of the announcement, I had RIM’s new Facebook application loaded on my Blackberry and was showing it off around the office.  As the CEO of a company with products on both Blackberry AND Facebook, this is terribly exciting.  Status updates, friends lists, friend adds, pokes, wall posts, and messages are all available over the RIM push architecture.  Nice.  It blows the tires off the Facebook’s old m.facebook.com mobile application.  MIA? The newsfeed, and third party applications.

My partner Howard, a Bell Mobility subscriber, had an entirely different experience.  He was presented with the following message when he tried to download the application onto his Blackberry.

Howard made a call to Bell Mobility support to ask why his access to Facebook was blocked.  The service rep, a lady by the name of Brenda Henry, explained that Bell doesn’t support this application, and therefore it’s not allowed.

Not allowed!

A very irate Howard then asked what right they had to block him from loading whatever software he wanted on the device.  Brenda stuck to the party line, saying that they didn’t support it, and therefore he couldn’t load it. "The only software we support is MSN", she said.  "What about Google, then?", asked Howard.  "I’ve got all kinds of Google applications on my Blackberry".  "I am sorry sir, but we only support MSN."

A call to the Bell Canada media relations department yielded nothing more than a commitment to call back.

Checking with friends at RIM, however, revealed that the message itself is a little misleading.  The wireless service provider isn’t the issue.  The application is only available for OS 4.2 and higher, which Bell hasn’t released on the 87xx series yet.

Too bad… there was a juicy blog posting in there about how the wireless "internet" and the real internet differ.  It will have to wait for another time.   Meanwhile, the gang in Waterloo should probably make their error message a little more clear or the team at Bell is going to be dealing with a whole lot more irate callers like Howard.  This is the sort of stunt Microsoft used to get dinged for twenty years ago.