Nicolai Wadstrom on Tech & Entrepreneurship

Google speaks out about the the proposed wiretap legislation:

“Search engine giant Google has slammed Sweden’s proposed wiretapping legislation as illiberal and incompatible with Western democracy.”

More information here.

Fortunately the legislation was postponed, even though the former Swedish government’s major party (Social Democrates) are pro the wiretap proposal, the smaller parties in the parliament managed to post-pone the legislation of it for at least a year. Hopefully the opposition will gain some momentum by then. I wonder what RFA (Swedish NSA eq.) will use their new super computer for if the proposal is not passed to legislation.

There is a lot of talk about the gift economy, so even at Reboot that I went to end of last month.

I believe that the gift economy is driven by the human need to create and evolve and be appreciated. Humans need to be confirmed, some in obvious ways, some in the context of the appreciation of what they create or accomplish. Sometimes the appreciation is in the form of money and often it is not.

I think people are blinded by the fact that people are doing things for free that they do not really have to. For most people in the Western world today their of profession, education and jobs based mostly out of other factors than how much money they will make (even though it is an important factor of appreciation).

I think it simple comes down to different currencies, where money is one, appreciation of peers is another, the feeling of accomplishment is yet another and so on.

The interesting point is that the Internet allows for a free form of expression, where one using very few resources can express and test their ideas and contribute something with-out knowing that they will get paid or appreciated. It appeals to the Entrepreneur in me, because that is what Entrepreneurship is all about, taking an idea and going with it, and working hard to find an appreciation for what you do in what ever form that may be. To cite Guy Kawasaki, “follow your passion”!

I have been looking into getting a new laptop with a UMTS/HSDPA card built-in, and spoke with the Lenovo sales support today. Firstly they don’t know much about which cards go into which machines (so I won’t know which will work both in the US and Europe), secondly they do not give out unlock to make them work with-out Cingular or Verizon.
With the pricing of the machines (that is fine for the quality though), the provider do not even subsidize the machines, but still manage to create a lock-in, where Lenovo refuses to give out lock-codes.

So Lenovo basically sells Laptops to customer that pay for the hardware, get a locked WWAN card that they only can use with a certain provider.
The thing is there are lot’s of providers, outside of the US, and if you live there or just want to use your Thinkpad there you are out of luck, seems like either the Operators are going to put the laptop industry to a grinding halt for innovations (or their use) just as they have done for mobile phones.

Well, operators are just happy giving customers this experience, and Lenovo do not care to much about selling additional machines for European customers (or people roaming in Europe), they offer some options with Vodafone, but Vodafone is not even in all countries in Europe, and only offers the Thinkpad 3G locked-in solution in a few. So even though Lenovo was the first in the world to sell laptops with built-in 3G, in most countries in Europe it was first introduced from other manufacturers a year later. And still is not available in most European countries.

This is the pace of innovation in the world of GSM operators, so just as somebody said in their presentation on Von Spring Europe 2007 this week, “The biggest problem with GSM is the operators”.

From this years Von Europe 2007 in Stockholm it’s clear that the operators existing Business Models are dying, but they won’t go with-out a fight I think. The operators are so inclined to keep their revenue streams by moving into services areas, and charging for content or services, that they are more looking to reserve parts of the Internet for their own services, and thus creating “pockets of Internet”.

Part of the problem is regulation (either too much, or inappropriate), where existing Telecom operators are using the regulations to enforce their existing models, and the regulations are keeping new players at an noncompetitive position. For example some countries has legal requirements for a regulated operator to terminate International call in the country of origin (mostly due to requirements for military agencies to monitor traffic).
Another thing is IMS, that is based on being non-open for third-party services, is deployed to allow operators to apply traditional Telco business models to new services carried over IP, and keep control of services, end-to-end. The operators will close of any of competition’s services, if a cable/broad-band operator offers a pay-ed for Video service, they will block Joost, if they offer or own a paid for dating Community, they might block-out match.com and so on, or why not steer their users to use their own Internet Search service (where they are generated ad-revenue) and block of Google.

Now you might think that, no one would be a customer of a Internet service that blocks of Google today, and they won’t be blocking Google, but they will be blocking any future Google’s, YouTube’s, MySpaces or other upcoming services just as the Mobile Operators has done.

IMS (IP Multimedia System), developed with-in 3GPP, is a service delivery platform supplied by companies such as Ericsson, Nokia etc (traditional Telco solution suppliers), to integrate Voice, Video between phones, mobiles and computers using IP. It has been created basically so that the operators can build n-Play services that they control and effectivly control which services you can use from your Internet connection, just as on your mobile, where an operator can close the built-in VoIP client of certain mobiles so that you can not use that over your WiFi connection at home or at a hotspot.

Some links:

• http://computersweden.idg.se/2.2683/1.110807 (Computer Sweden, Swedish)

Blogging live from Von Europe Spring 2007, just heard about Quad Play and I can’t help thinking that is just another way of for the operators to create a another grip and lock-in on their customers,
I think so, what is essential is

1. Ubiquitous connectivity as Sheldon Renan (founder of Wibiki) spoke about with his concept of Netness.
2. Open standards and less regulation.
3. Lot’s of room for third party applications.

Simply put, we need less of the old telco-world of regulations, device lock-in, high-date rates, monstrous roaming charges, and is instead flat-rate IP-based connectivity at home, in mobiles and just about everywhere.

On that platform of a ubiquitous IP-infrastructure we can have triple-play, quad-play, penta-play or whatever, everything is just another service or application over IP, may it be Video, Voice etc. And we will see convergence between applications and new types of applications with Voice or Video applied.

This will create room for innovation, new types of services and application and true convergence. But also the lower barrier of entry works both ways, new services will have more competition and hard to create and maintain barriers of entry, so this create some new challenges to consider, most notably:

How to create business and make money in a world with-out scarcity?

Or perhaps with less scarcity, the ones that manage to-do this, will succeed in the long run. Or perhaps just find scarcity in other ways, such as having a better service, or a more innovative service etc.

According to IDG, the Swedish government have ordered one of the worlds fastest computer to be put to use by FRA (Swedish military surveillance section, Swedish version NSA), this news comes at the same time as the government propose new laws to allow FRA to monitor all Internet traffic int and out of Sweden.

The new supercomputer would yield a computing capacity of 180 TFlops (or 184 320 GFlops), powered by 17024 cores on 4256 processors. The officialy most powerful computer on the Top 500 list has a performance of 358 TFlops, the second 124 TFlops, so this new supercomputer would be the second most powerful supercomputer in the world. Admittedly many governments around the world do keep their military supercomputer installations secret. Sweden have never had a supercomputer of that capacity for civil use.
Such as supercomputer has a few usages, research, cracking encryption codes, or sipping through and indexing huge amounts of information (such as the search engines, Google, Ask.com etc), so if it’s not being used for research it’s very likely to be used for information espionage as the new laws will allow FRA to do.

Links

• IDG Article about FRA Supercomputer (in Swedish).
• IDG Article about the new Law (in Swedish).
• Legal professors upset about new proposals to monitor Internet traffic (in Swedish).

End of last month I attended Reboot 9.0, which was two days of inspiration. The most interesting input or output was not in the sessions, but rather the people I meet in-between the sessions. Had dinner Thursday night with The Starks (Erik and Peter), Simon Winter, Daniel Spikol, Charles Nouyrit, Juri Engström (founder of Jaiku) and Dave Winer a bit further down the table. Over the next month or so I will try to share some of the thoughts and ideas from this years Reboot.

All-in-all it was a good few days, and lot’s of fun and interesting people, will try to share some of of my inspiration over the next few months.