Alec Saunders SquawkBox

I whistled out last week and ordered the N95-3 for myself from TigerDirect.  This is the North American edition of the N95, optimized for North American 3G networks.  And I have to say, I love it.  It sings, it dances, and boy oh boy is it fast.  I hooked it up to my PC as a modem, and got 1.5 Mb/s down, and 400 kb/s up.  A huge improvement over EDGE and GPRS.  I'm really looking forward to taking photos and videos and uploading them to the web over this super fast connection.

While I was at it, I ordered the 02700X7 carry case.  One of the things that's always concerned about the N95 is the lack of a holster.  The N95-3 has done away with the lens cover that the original N95 has, which makes it even more of a concern for me.  I should have looked more closely at this because … well, watch the video.

Two days ago Apple COO Tim Cook, speaking at the Goldman Sachs Investment Symposium, said that their relationships with carriers are marriages of convenience.  Cook noted that they wouldn't be bound to the single carrier model they've used to date, and said "we're not married to any business model.  What we're married to is shipping the best phones in the world."

Boom!  A warning shot to AT&T?  A negotiating stance to get a better rate from carriers they might be working with today?

And how about a really bad marriage?  Even though they proposed in a leap year, and got married the year after, it's been nothing but heartache for Sprint and Nextel.  They've now written down nearly $30 billion, which is pretty much the entire stock value of Nextel before the deal was announced.  Yesterday's they reported a net loss of $29.45 billion, which is more than the company's market capitalization.  They suspended their dividend, and wrote down an additional $29.7 billion related to the acquisition of Nextel.  They also drew down $2.5 billion on their credit line, stopped buying back stock, and may even need to raise capital.In the midst of that they announced the most aggressive unlimited plan yet — $99.99 for unlimited everything — voice, text, data, music, navigation, long distance included… Is it enough?  Can Sprint be the Phoenix that rises from the ashes, or is it time to scatter their ashes on the lawns of Overland Park and move on?

And what about a proposal that we haven't seen yet, which is the rumoured Nortel / Motorola merger.  Yesterday Nortel announced a $957 million loss for last year, cut another 2,100 jobs and moved another 1,000 offshore.  According to debt analysis firm Gimme Credit (I'm not making that name up, by the way), Nortel’s revenue and profit come almost entirely from sales of wireless software and equipment based on the CDMA standard. As most of us know, this technology is used in North America but isn’t used much in other parts of the world. GSM is the global standard, and Nortel is a relatively small supplier of this system.  And as the world migrates to UMTS, Nortel has abandoned its efforts in UMTS. So what does this have to do with Motorola?  Motorola isn't just a handset maker.  In fact, they have a line of GSM and UMTS equipment marketed under the Reach GMS brand. Could this be answer for both of them?  Or, as one of my VC friends noted once, is it a case of tying two rocks together and hoping they can float?

And finally, what about the much rumoured acquisition of Skype by Hutchison Wampoa?

Our distinguished panel discussed all these, and more.  Enjoy!

 

 Squawk Box Feb 29 [27:36m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Today is the 29th of February — the leap day, in a leap year.

And old English tradition was that women could propose marriage only on leap years. Supposedly, a 1288 law by Queen Margaret of Scotland, required that fines be levied if a marriage proposal was refused by the man.  Because men felt that put them at too great a risk, the tradition was in some places tightened to restricting women's proposals to the leap day - 29th of February.

In Greece, it was believed that getting married in a leap year is bad luck for the couple. Thus, mainly in the middle of the past century, couples avoided setting a marriage date in a leap year.So we're going to talk about marriages and alliances this morning.

• Apple and their carriers
• Sprint and Nextel's disasterous marriage
• Motorola and Nortel's rumoured marriage

See you at 11 AM EST

Inside Facebook reports on the recent changes made by Facebook in how developers can use "requests" and "notifications".  In principle, these are welcome changes designed to combat invitation spam, and when combined with the recent ban on forced invitations, they should make the experience of the Facebook platform better for everyone.

Requests are the ubiquitous invitations that every Facebook application sends.  They can be used for any kind of communication which demands a response from a user, and are commonly used by applications to invite friends to install the application.  Notifications, by comparison, demand no response from the user.  They simply appear in the users notifications list.

Previously, users of an application could send up to 20 requests and 40 notifications in a day.  Under the new rules, the allocation of requests and notifications is dependent upon the proportion which are ignored or answered.  An application which sends too many requests that aren't responded to will find the number of requests it can send reduced.

iotum's FREE Conference Call application can be thought of as an event coordination application where the event takes place on a conference bridge.  As such, we created the application to consciously mimic the Facebook Events application, because we wanted a familiar experience for users.  The Events application uses requests to invite users to events, and so do we.

There are some differences, however.  Facebook Events is an application which is installed by default in the users profile.  Our application isn't.  Therefore we also use requests to invite others to use the application. And that's where the problems start to become apparent with Facebook's new rules.  Requests in our application have to do double duty — inviting friends to use the application, and inviting users to participate in events.

Not all of our requests get answered, primarily because users prefer to answer those requests in many different ways.  We allow requests to be responded to via an iCal response (so the meeting is automatically inserted in the users calendar) or via email, as well as the RSVP that the request demands.  It's not uncommon for 80% of the requests we send to be ignored.

As a result, our request allocation, which was a problem when capped at 20, is now dramatically lower.  It has been varying between 5 and 8 allowed per day, which makes it exceedingly difficult to organize anything but a very small meeting.  Now, we've implemented various workarounds, such as "sharing" an invitation in email with groups and friends.  But honestly, these are oddball extensions and workarounds, and different from the experience that users expect.

By contrast, a Facebook event can invite as many people as the organizer wishes.  It's not uncommon for 80% of invitations to an event to be ignored, similar to what we experience with our application. But there is no penalty for ignored invitations to a Facebook event.   Facebook developed applications don't play on the same playing field as third-party applications.

This will remind astute readers of another platform player, Microsoft. Dogged by charges that it unfairly advantaged its own applications, the ill will created between Microsoft and its developer audience was so intense in the 1990's that the company ultimately ended up in court on anti-trust charges.  Whether true or not, tbe perception that the company treated itself differently from other developers was very harmful.  Facebook isn't Microsoft, obviously, but the value of having a good relationship with the developer community can't be understated. 

To be clear, I've no wish to see a return to the days of invite spam that this new measure was designed to combat. Those were bad days.  I'm simply asking that Facebook view future changes to the platform through this lens:

Could Facebook deliver their own applications using the APIs they give to developers, and within the rules they have imposed on developers?

If the answer is no, then perhaps there is a more developer friendly solution than the one being contemplated. 

Paypal is warning users to avoid Safari, and choose IE, Firefox or Opera instead.  Why?  Safari doesn't implement the modern anti-phishing systems that other browsers do.  It's good advice.  Over the past two years, with the emergence of strong anti-phishing technologies, fraud due to fishing is way down. 

Not many people use Safari any more, in any case.  In our own measurements, we've seen Safari use in the 1% range.  It seems that most Mac users prefer Firefox.  Moreover, Safari itself has trouble with web pages that IE and Firefox sail through.

The tragedy for users is that Safari is the browser on iPhone.  As iPhone gains popularity, expect more iPhone users to be caught in phishing scams if Apple doesn't choose to modernize the browser.