The Guardian has this juicy item about how Google is in "secret" talks with British entrepreneur Simon Fuller (whose golden touch has turned the Spice Girls, Pop Idol and American Idol each into multi-billion dollar franchises) to collaborate on some kind of Internet video venture that competes with traditional television. Sources close to Fuller say it "could revolutionise the way entertainment and music are distributed," on par with what Apple did to the music business.
Clearly Fuller's people are getting high on the possibilities of whatever it is. (Interactive online American Idol? Contestants vying for "Idol" status via user-generated videos? One big honking pop-music-social-media-video site that integrates every Web 2.0 gizmo available?)
But I agree with the always level-headed Mathew Ingram. Google may be talking to Fuller's people about distributing original content via YouTube or creating a video destination that houses the video catalog of Fuller's empire.
I don't think, however, that whatever is under discussion will revolutionize the way entertainment and music are distributed on the Internet. It's just that whenever Google comes calling these days, it's so exciting that the possibilities seem endless. That much wealth, power and rock-star status combined with what has to be the world's largest concentration of genius-level employees is enough to make any partner breathless.
Update: Oh yeah, another dishy rumor: Google is eyeing the acquisition of woebegone mobile carrier Sprint. Something tells me that Google is probably talking to lots of people about lots of things. But it makes much more sense to me that Google would play around with content production than it would buy into the grubby, demanding and, these days, highly competitive business of operating communications networks.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:16 AM | Print | Comments (0)The closed and limited nature of the U.S. mobile communications system is under great strain and the cracks are starting to show. The New York Times Laura Holson has this thumbsucker today that explains it all. Silicon Valley is battling the top U.S. mobile carriers, while the iPhone has given consumers a tantalizing peek into what kind of cool applications they could have but for the slow-moving AT&T and Verizon Wireless.
More intriguing to me is what T-Mobile has up its sleeve. The European-based carrier has a better intuitive sense of open mobile networks and has already stepped up to the plate. It will introduce an open standards-based phone based on Google's Android thingee (set of specs, platform, whatever you call it.) As the WSJ's Amol Sharma points out, T-Mobile has always been willing to break with industry orthodoxy in the U.S.
T-Mobile also has a secret weapon, barely mentioned when the company's plans are discussed: it owns $4.2 billion in advanced broadband wireless spectrum in the U.S., having emerged as the top bidder in the important AWS auctions in 2006. Despite its third-ranked status, T-Mobile has enough firepower to roll out next-gen services in markets with a combined population of 475 million.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:20 AM | Print | Comments (1)Despite the oppressive restrictions on free speech in China, which has resulted in high-profile imprisonment of journalists and online writers, government officials are increasingly at a loss to stop bloggers from disseminating unsanctioned information. As a consequence, Chinese bloggers are getting bolder, but not necessarily in the way you might expect.
According to this Reuters piece, some bloggers are starting to see bucks in their online posts, but extortion or blackmail, and not traditional advertising, seem to be the basis of the business model. Although many citizen journalists continue to toil without compensation to uncover unpleasant facts of life in China, some blogging opportunists are demanding hush money from government officials and local businesses in exchange for their silence.
In January, one writer for a Beijing-based newspaper was even reportedly beaten to death for seeking payoffs for not reporting problems at an unlicensed coal mine.
In a strange way it's kind of encouraging to see a nascent form of capitalist-like support for free speech in China, even if it's all backwards. The opportunistic bloggers are merely introducing an extreme and dark form of advertising support, going soft on newsworthy subjects in exchange for their money.
Without the deeply entrenched tradition of a "Chinese wall" (ed. note: couldn't help myself) that more or less separates money from editorial coverage in most Western publications, Chinese bloggers, or so it seems, are planting the early seeds of independent journalism in China.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 7:19 AM | Print | Comments (0)
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