BT, Sony Partner for Calls from PSP

British Telecom is enabling calling from Sony PSP game players. Wwners will be able to call traditional lines, cell phones or PCs. There are more than eight million PSP devices in the European market. Initially, users will have to place their calls from home or from the two thousand BT wireless hotspots.

Eventually the service will be launched worldwide in around hundred countries. The four-year deal between BT and Sony will support messaging and video calling as well.

This Will be a Test

There are rumors Google Talk may finally offer the ability to connect with public network telephone numbers, where up to this point it has stuck to an instant messaging model for individuals and a "click to call" mode for commercial users of its maps feature, for example.

So the issue is the range of business models Google might consider. It is possible that Google will go with an ad-supported model, where callers listen to a brief ad before being allowed to make a call. Which will provide an interesting test of user behavior. This sort of thing has been talked about for decades but never has gotten any serious traction. Can Google make it work?

After all, there are lots of alternatives. Buddies who don't mind headsets can be reached for free. Domestic calls from landlines or mobiles don't typically impose any incremental cost. If you want to do video with a buddy or associate Skype's video feature is getting some pretty serious use. If you pick the right VoIP provider the global numbers you frequently call are no much of an issue. And there is always Jajah-style Web-enabled dial around/callback for the cases you haven't already thought of.

So the issue is how much "inconvenience" a user will put up with to place a call whose cost is zero to pretty minimal in some cases.

Gmail Attachments: 20 MB

Google's Gmail now allows sending of 20 megabytes worth of attachments. Of course, few mail providers will accept a such a big message, so it's safe to send messages bigger than 10 MB to other Gmail accounts, to Yahoo Mail Plus or to other premium accounts. And perhaps that's the idea: get people to use GMail because the large attachments are easier to handle.

Alltel Taken Private: That's Not the Issue

TPG Capital and Goldman Sachs' private equity unit are acquiring the fifth-largest U.S. wireless provider, Alltel Corp., for about $27.5 billion (chart by Chetan Sharma). The deal is the largest ever buyout in the telecom sector. One wonders just how far private equity firms can go before regulators become concerned. Wireless and cable companies are less likely to raise scrutiny.

But what if BCE, one of Canada's largest telephone companies, is taken private? At what point does the loss of public transparency become an issue for companies that, like it or not, are seen very much as having national interest implications. Not to mention social obligations not generally shared by cable or wireless providers. All the more reason to get a deal done now, fast, before such questions start getting asked, I suppose.

Google Steps Up Business Effort

Google and Salesforce.com are in talks about an alliance that conceivably could result in a new Web-based offering that integrates some of Google's online services such as email and instant-messaging with those of Salesforce.com, according to Wall Street Journal reporter Vauhini Vara.

Google also is launching a Google Apps Partner Edition, which will let other Internet companies build Google's online word-processing, spreadsheet and email services into their own products. Google Apps Partner Edition has both a free service and a package that includes phone support as well as additional branding and advertising options for a monthly fee.

The proposed alliance neatly illustrates a couple of overarching themes we see these days. Business information technology is changing because of robust consumer technologies built around the Web. As that happens in the enterprise market, value threatens to shift even further away from hardware, premises solutions or access and transport, and up into the "cloud."

And though it is a very odd thought for anybody who has been around enterprise IT or communications for a while, ad-supported services aimed at business users are coming. Premium and enhanced features will be sold for a fee. But lots of smaller businesses might find they can get along just fine with the ad-supported versions.

Over the top managed services providers will like that. Some infrastructure providers , ISPs, competitive local exchange carriers, resellers, cable companies, VARs or phone dealers won't like it so well.

"Classic" Isn't What it Used to Be...

Nokia is introducing what it calls a "classic" mobile phone, aimed at consumers and companies who appreciate simplicity and value for money."

"We recognize that a sizable number of people just want a mobile phone to stay in touch on their own terms," says John Barry, Nokia director. Apparently, "classic" isn't what it used to be.

The Nokia 3109 classic features email with attachments and synchronizes calendars and to-do lists with personal computers through its USB connection. The memory is expandable to 2 Gigabytes with a microSD memory card.

The Nokia 3109 classic is expected to be available in the second quarter of 2007 at an estimated retail price of EUR 140, excluding taxes and subsidies

The Nokia 3109 classic also features an integrated handsfree speaker, music player, UAB and Bluetooth connectivity plus an organizer with calendar, to-do list and notes.

"Staying in touch" now requires email, attachments, access to one's calendar, a music player and syncing with a PC, in addition to voice.

3G Shows Long Tail

In a way, global mobile experience shows the "long tail," Pareto principle or "80/20 rule" (80 percent of the results come from 20 percent of the services and features) already applies. Consider third generation (3G) networks. Every mobile operator has one, or is building one.

More than 74 percent of Japan's 97 million-plus subscribers were signed up for 3G services at the end of April, for example, so adoption of the platform isn't the issue.

But operators are still struggling to find the "killer app." Today's stock answer is "content." So far, however, no universally accepted "killer app" has emerged. Users are still mostly just using their phones to make voice calls and send text messages.

"As of now, it's difficult to pinpoint the killer service for 3G networks," said Lee Bang-hyung, Chief Operating Officer at SK Telecom Co Ltd. In fact, says Peter Erskine, the chief executive and chairman of Telefonica O2 Europe, agreed: "Text is the big standout."

That isn't to say a highly-used app won't be found. It is to point out that there will not be very many new applications nearly every user has to have. In the mass market, cable TV, mobile phones, videogame players, DVD players, iPods, TVs, PCs and phone lines are among the communications-related services and products that lie at the head of the usage curve. Almost everybody has them and uses them.

After these, usage begins to drop off pretty quickly. Fax machines and ATAs (or network interfaces) are lesser-used products that lie in the middle of the curve. PhoneGnome boxes, Jajah and mobile video today are things way out on the tail. If you randomly ask people on the street whether they use any of them, the expected answer would be "no."

In the mobile data services revenue bucket, service providers are eager to show rising average revenue per user in things other than short message service (text messaging). Those revenues are growing. From what we can tell, an awful lot of that revenue is coming from data cards and BlackBerry-driven data plans. So the growing, non-texting data revenues are for email and Web access, not content, music or other newer services.

What that tells us is that mobile email is emerging as a "head of the tail," popular service. Mobile broadband is shifting a bit closer to the middle of the curve. Some observers are hopeful that "watching TV on a mobile" will become a killer app. Perhaps. But we wouldn't be surprised if mobile email winds up being a bigger revenue driver. Or even mobile PC access, for that matter.

Our experience with 3G so far suggests the long tail operates in telecom as one would expect: Very few killer apps and lots and lots of things important to some people, some times. A few blockbusters, lots of niches, in other words.