Top Stories of the Week: Nov 26 to 30
I haven’t done much weekly wrap ups on this blog. However the past week was pretty interesting. That’s why I am thinking of introducing a weekly post where I cover some of the salient stories for the week.
Google Officially in the Race
Google, who has been dabbling with the idea of participating in the FCC’s 700 MHZ auction, finally confirmed their participation on Friday. This comes after various discussions on this topic during most of 2007. The news was first broken by WSJ.
Here is some of my previous coverage around Google’s wireless plans.
- Rise of The GoogNet
- Rise of the GoogNet — Part 2
- Rise of GoogNet — Part 3, Well Sort Of…
- More stories
Verizon is Now Open
This is was a very interesting move from Verizon last week. Over most of 2007 they have been resisting and fighting against Google to make the service open. They were lobbying heavily at FCC against including Google’s recommendations.
However in an unprecedented move they announced opening their network to any applications and any devices. This will offer much flexibility to 3rd party developers and subscribers.
I will have further analysis in a detailed post later. In the mean time, read my prior analysis of Verizon.
Pepsi follows Universal
This one is not that significant, however it is continuing the exodus of music providers from iTunes in search of greener pastures. The music landscape is changing significantly and everyone is in search of a newer / better business model.
Last week Pepsi announced that they will be leaving iTunes and moving to Amazon. Here is my previous analysis into the matter.
Tim Berners-Lee talks Graphs
The man who invented the web, recently talked about the social graph on his blog. His thoughts were pretty much at a high level and related to the Semantic Web (aka Web 3.0)
Check out some of my posts on the matter:
- Free the Social Graph
- OpenSocial Should Enable Social Network Interoperability
- Thoughts for Opening and Sharing the Distributed Graph
That wraps up the main items for the last week. I will be closely following these announcement and will have detailed posts.
Send me your comments and thoughts about this weekly feature.
The proof is in the pudding as they say. I wonder how many “open” devices will make it onto the Verizon network next year? Devices will still require “certification” and that could mean anything and still give Verizon the way to control who gets on their network and when.
Yeah it seems like a PR stunt at this point. Even if they truly open it they will have their own SDK / API combo, which again is an issue for developers.