Orient Expression

Last night as events unfolded here in Bangkok the military coup targeted mobile phone, international gateway and TV operations in effort to keep some control. I was talking to a friend in the UK when the phone went dead. I thought nothing of it then around one hour later I got the sniff of tanks rolling down the streets of the city. Thai TV was on a loop of pictures of HM the King and the occasional message from the coup leaders. The military took control of at least one TV station that was repeatedly playing a message from the fallen leader and the telecoms gazilliionare's building (HQ of his mobile phone giant and TV station) were put under guard. I thought that the mobile networks had been locked down but then realised it was just another repeat performance of the years of under-investment in interconnection routes between the now overly busy operators. Next to go was the satellite feed, also owned by the now ex-Prime Minister. This lost me access to CNN and BBC World, howeve...

I was just catching up on some news and I came across this from the BBC. In summary the Royal Mail allow you to print a barcode that represents the stamp value and pay for it online. Think of it as prepaid franking.... They are targeting the work from home and eBayers to try and assist them and to try and reduce queues in the post office. Given that the letter business has been unraveled and that the distribution side of the Royal Mail, according to the BBC, made an annual profit of ~350M with the post office counters business losing 2M per week I would like to see more granularity behind the costs. The actual distribution costs don't change because of this model but the cost of sale for consumable does. I don't know how much they pay for paper, glue, ink etc. for the stamps but based on some analysis I have done here the printing and postage costs of today's large operations, say a telco, make up the bulk of the cost and it is fairly fixed. There's not a lot of...

I last wrote about the developing business cases for WiMax , on of the favourites in TV over WiMax. The bandwidth and transmission distances make this technology, in many peoples eyes, a good platform for IPTV. The UK is in the stages of going digital anyway so most people will have to get used to the idea of some form of set top box, might as well be some form of WLAN modem. The pressure that Cinema is facing, see the plea from Mark Cuban , to try and get some form of ROI in the film business is in large part down to the challenge that home entertainment lays down. The convenience factor of being in your home with your widescreen TV, DVD player and Home Theatre with full Dolby support means that the effort required to pull people out of their LazyBoys and head in to the cinema is large. As Mark mentions during a first weekend a typical distributor can end up paying $12 per head in advertising to get them to come and buy a $5 cinema ticket. One of the leaders in the home entertai...

The most hyped, most promising technology to really be tested gets another push from the Rupe. Rupert Murdoch is looking for life after (or during) satellite and he seems to think that TV over WiMax is it. It leads to an interesting discussion that is still ongoing, what is the business case for 802.16? Not surprisingly many people are still convinced that VoIP or VoWLAN will be the real use for the technology. This is because of the super-sized cell that potentially can be created, the super-hotspot could be a real challenger for GSM and CDMA due to the typical usage habits of the average subscriber. So with that said do we already have the killer application for WiMax. Skype was an early disruptor to voice reveune and it's portability across many platforms does it make the ideal choice for the VoIP application. Gizmo is also a strong candidate for me, it has already been trialled on GoogleNet in Mountain View by Team OM , and I like the fact that it does run on the Nokia 7...

It's been one year since I tried this blogging thing. I've had to learn a lot along the way and it's quite difficult to maintain the motivation to go out and find the supporting articles and links that I like to try and use. In the short time that I've been doing this I have noticed a shift in the way that the blogosphere pulses with stories and where the scoops come from. I know that not a lot of people read this but it's best not to know, there is a blogger who was getting a LOT of traffic but when she realised the volume of readers out there she stopped writing. The pressure of getting it right got to her. To get her going again she was given a very simple piece of advice "imagine you are writing for just one person" and this got her back in on track. So to the one person out there that reads this blog, I thank you.

In previous postings I have rambled about disruption in two popular media. Television - the concept of broadcasting will change to accommodate IPTV, VDO on demand and subscriber specific content Books - book readers will continue to grow in usage Well there is a long overdue overhaul for the newspaper. Forget the movies like Minority Report and their vision of a dynamically updating newspaper headline, news is already disrupted. Look over a colleagues shoulder and check out what they have on their RSS feeds. My habits have changed since being in Thailand where there is a limited supply of English language newspapers. The Nation and The Bangkok Post both do a good job but I need more. TV based news is Thai, unless you want to pay large amounts of money to the UBC monopoly, in which case you can get BBC World. So with these restrictions I went out and found a decent RSS reader and subscribe to varying forms of news inputs. For UK and International news I get a feed from t...