“Conventional wisdom on the Sprint-Nextel merger is that this will make the market less competitive,” says Nick Wray, Vice President of Strategic Sourcing for Control Point Solutions. “I believe this merger will actually make the enterprise market more competitive. This consolidation, particularly of the technologies, will create a true competitor for giants of the wireless industry like Verizon and Cingular. The resulting company would combine Sprint’s large corporate customer base and network and Nextel’s extremely loyal customer base.”

“The near-term implications of the merger on Motorola’s handset business will be quite limited. Sprint and Nextel announced they would ask Motorola to develop dual mode handsets and, in addition, the operators are planning to keep the iDEN network fully operational at least until 2007, rendering Motorola’s iDEN handset business viable for at least another 3 years. In the long term Motorola’s handset division could lose 7-8c of its profits due to Nextel’s migration to a new technology, the impact on near term performance is quite limited. On the positive side, we note that while Sprint currently does not buy handsets from Motorola, the merger with Nextel and the development of dual mode handsets could open this market and create new opportunities.” iDEN sales account for approximately 20% of division revenues but 25% of profits, reflecting higher margins given Motorola’s sole-vendor status at Nextel.

• The New York Times
  
• The Daily Deal
• Gary Forsee, profile in The Kansas City Star
• Timothy M. Donahue profile in The Kansas City Star
• The San Jose Mercury News on tough integration challenges.
• Nextel Cup — but for how long? The New York Post

Now Bells think they can use the copper loops and fiber in combination to stream digital television down to your living room. The article, which appeared in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal (talk about being caught up in merger frenzy), compares Verizon’s all fiber strategy with the copper-hybrid strategies of SBC and BellSouth. I think in the long run, Verizon might have a better game plan, but SBC and BellSouth have a more budget option.

SBC figures 5,000 feet is sufficient to deliver next-generation services. Both a speedier rollout and keeping a lid on costs are obvious considerations here, but also the fact that rapid improvements in DSL are turning the copper “last mile” into a more valuable and useful asset than even the FCC seems to understand. Happily, the fine print in the commission’s ruling suggests to SBC that its investment will still be safe from confiscation by state regulators, who might otherwise use it to subsidize the company’s would-be competitors.

Jenkins has an interesting article, but he also makes some points, I wish he had gone into more details. And was not that reliant on a single company project - like SBC LightSpeed.

SBC is also betting on Microsoft to deliver a non-buggy software product (dubbed IPTV) on the first try. Don’t doubt that this is a big deal for Bill Gates too.

'-- There are so many ways in which Power5’s influence reaches beyond IBM’s primary base of well-heeled customers. Although IBM also sells Itanium 2, Opteron, and Xeon servers, the company seems clearly intent on putting Power5 systems in the hands of Linux and Windows administrators. --'

...John

Makes you wonder what they were doing with all this bandwidth before now? Oh.. I guess we know.

"Media RSS" is a new RSS module that supplements the enclosure capabilties of RSS 2.0. RSS enclosures are already being used to syndicate audio files and images. Media RSS extends enclosures to handle other media types, such as short films or TV, as well as provide additional metadata with the media. Media RSS enables content publishers and bloggers to syndicate multimedia content such as TV and video clips, movies, images, and audio.

We're in the process of identifying all the separate issues involved, coming up with some concise and effective recommendations, and then outlining our plan going forward. We're also going to be reaching out to the weblog community as a whole with information we've learned from both our experience with Movable Type and our background in running the TypePad service. There are a variety of ways to deal with spam, ranging from technical to legal to social methods, and we'll discuss them all.

There was been nary a whisper in the mainstream media? David Isenberg sums it up best when he writes, “You might not have noticed. USA Today put it on page 3B. The Washington Post ran it on 2E. The Financial Times gave it three paragraphs.” Makes you wonder doesn’t it.

The SEC commissioners rationalized that Winnick was non-executive chairman. But he was the founder, the spokesman, and the largest shareholder. Want to build an air castle, sucker investors and get rich? Green light is on at the SEC.

USA Today reports that

SEC’s two Republican appointees — Paul Atkins and Cynthia Glassman — disagreed with the case against Winnick. They argued that the company did meet the SEC’s minimum disclosure requirements. The two Democratic appointees — Harvey Goldschmid and Roel Campos — supported the enforcement division’s recommendations.In the end, SEC Chairman William Donaldson, who has often aligned himself with the Democrats on rulemaking issues, ultimately voted with his fellow Republicans, scuttling the deal. Donaldson’s reasoning, according to two people in the meeting, was that as non-executive chairman, Winnick wasn’t obligated to sign off on disclosure decisions.

Winnick is pretty thrilled I assume. Washington Post adds.

Winnick’s lawyer, Gary P. Naftalis, said his client was “gratified” by the agency’s decision. “We always believed that the evidence demonstrated that Gary Winnick acted lawfully and properly in connection with Global Crossing,” Naftalis said in a prepared statement.

I enjoyed reading this piece, and I am sure I will read it again and again, to more fully consider its argument. But I find myself disagreeing with the premise - why, in this world of the web, do we need to be bound by this winner takes all approach to the world? It works in a resource constrained world of homogenous PCs - once a consumer has purchased his Windows box, he's not going to easily purchase an emerging competitor - but somehow, it really doesnt' strike me as the right metaphor for a Web 2.0 world. I do agree that Google would be well served to make its service more of a platform, and that APIs are the way to go. But I'd really be interested in what Tim O'Reilly has to say about this piece, or Tim Bray, or any number of other folks. I'll keep my eye out...meanwhile, do read the piece. It's a worthy provocation.

Other POVs on this piece: TechDirt, Linden, SEW, Silicon Beat

I received an email from a Chinese wholesaler offering this USB powered Eye Massager.

To me this USB gadget looks more like a USB powered eye poker than a eye massager, but what do I know. We recently reported about the USB Massage Ball. Looks like USB gadget go big time in the health and wellness market.