Abhishek Tiwari

Tim O’Reilly of the Web 2.0 fame posted a great article on the NYT. He talks about the fact that mobile handsets are gradually becoming more and more like wireless PCs. This change along with the movement within the service provider community is forcing the”Open” mantra within the mobile landscape.

He reflects disappointment behind the fact that even though carriers are beginning to listen, they have not welcomed this with open arms (no pun intended). I am in complete agreement with his recommendation to the carriers to adopt the well established internet/PC business models.

I have mentioned this in a previous post. Carriers are inching towards the “Open” thought process versus taking the bull by the horns. Its simply a strategy where they are hedging their bets with a safe approach.

Yes I understand that they do have a lot of responsibility with the service. Even if they get past the thought that going “Open” won’t hurt their business, they are still worried about security and privacy. Carriers are concerned about the fact that Open models will lead to malicious content on the device, which results in a bad experience and increased customer support calls.

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I have been away for a week due to some server issues. Now that those are resolved I am back with the post on latest announcement from Amazon. As you know Amazon has been pushing the web-services agenda for quite some time now. By enabling S3 and EC2 among other services they have had significant success in this space. On Friday they added a powerful weapon in their armory.

SimpleDB, the latest entrant into the AWS portfolio is a web-services database for structured storage. Typical databases use SQL type query language to add, modify and delete data in a structured fashion. SimpleDB simplifies this by enabling a web-services interface on top of such a “cloud-based” database.

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1and1 my hosting provider is having some issues with the infrastructure where my blog is hosted. As a result the performance of the site is quite slow.

Hence, I am having troubles generating my usual posts. Hopefully this should be resolved in few days, after which I will post again.

Please stay tuned…

Update: The problem with my servers has gone away now. Seems like there was an issue with my Wordpress version and possibly the shared database at 1and1. Anyways things are better now and I will punch out some posts quickly.

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Most of you know about the infamous mobile Walled Garden, enforced by the big boys of wireless in the North American market. This approach to lock the wireless offering has led to significant frustrations for the service / application providers and subscribers alike.

The walled garden established by the carriers, allowed them to have complete / absolute control of the content and applications provided to the handset base. Application developers were at the mercy of the carrier, who essentially controlled most aspects of their business. Right from application functionality, marketing/promotions, discoverability and pricing were mandated by the carriers. Unless you as an app developer partnered with the carrier and deployed a native application (specific to their ecosystem), you had little or no chance of getting into the mobile ecosystem.

As expected this mode of operation has received lot of heat from the application developer community over time. Lately the pressure increased after Google decided to throw down the gauntlet for the upcoming 700 MHz auction. Google’s approach to open the ecosystem drew a fair bit of heat from the incumbents (obviously).

However one thing was certain, the mobile landscape was about to change. Participation from Google and other’s with the strong software background meant that carriers could no longer operate in a close environment. They would have to rethink their strategy.

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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

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