IBM's new standards participation policy

IBM has announced a new policy with regard to standards particiption. There are a couple of interesting things around this. Notably, this policy was developed by IBM employees using a Wiki. Quoting the policy:

The tenets of IBM's new policy are to:

• Begin or end participation in standards bodies based on the quality and openness of their processes, membership rules, and intellectual property policies.
• Encourage emerging and developed economies to both adopt open global standards and to participate in the creation of those standards.
• Advance governance rules within standards bodies that ensure technology decisions, votes, and dispute resolutions are made fairly by independent participants, protected from undue influence.
• Collaborate with standards bodies and developer communities to ensure that open software interoperability standards are freely available and implementable.
• Help drive the creation of clear, simple and consistent intellectual property policies for standards organizations, thereby enabling standards developers and implementers to make informed technical and business decisions.

To me, it will be interesting to see how quickly IBM moves to adhere to this policy. Suppose there was a consortium that did not meet one of the tenets (eg. the first one) that was in an area of vital business interest to IBM. I wonder how they would respond?

SMS vs. telephone calls

I found this item over at Nielsen, especially in light of this earlier item on this blog.

Given this data, is it any wonder that carriers would try to hike rates? After all, text volume seems remarkably inelastic given prior price increases. Economics suggests that they would raise prices in this case!

Is It the Dawn of the Reregulation Era?

I found this article over at BusinessWeek interesting (even if it didn't explicitly discuss telecom). I think this article supports R.B. Horwitz's contention that regulation is often introduced at the behest of the regulated industry to stabilize markets. Pure capitalism results in large uncertainties and almost demands periodic business failures as a form of market discipline. Regulation works to ease those pressures and, if done well, provides a predictable marketplace (which is generally supportive of investment).

So, if this article is correct, the recent market turmoil may usher in an era of increased regulation. Will telecom be included in this trend?

Spectrum trading

Spectrum trading is one of my areas of interest. So, it should come as no surprise that this article caught my attention. How is this different from the current broker-based approaches to "spectrum trading"?

State of the Internet according to Akamai

I found this report interesting (free registration required). It reports data as seen by Akamai, which serves many of the Internet's web sites. While the data are interesting, there are some notable countries missing ... Russia, for example ... so, while of interest, it may of limited value.