Group items tagged

"Facebook is making strides towards becoming a multi-media communication juggernaut, its head of Messenger David Marcus announced today at TechCrunch Disrupt SF. Out of Messenger's one-billion users, 300 million people use its audio and video calling features each month. That's around the size of Skype's entire user base. Facebook is uniquely well-suited to disrupting traditional home and mobile phone voice calling and their successor, video calling. It has the most complete social graph of family, friends, and acquaintances - going beyond what's in most people's phone contacts. It has a one-billion user chat app where people are already spending tons of time. And it has the technology infrastructure to support high-bandwidth transmissions."

Pretty cool/plausible model for predicting disruption from wearables

My hypothesis is that the "digital broadcast" scramble to buy/merge everything is defensive move mostly by the traditional telcos & ISP's. They see the upcoming disruption from Wifi/mesh networks that will erode their primary source of revenue from cellular data.

"See the other two lists here"

Advertisements in Skype first appeared in March. Initial advertisers included Groupon, Universal Pictures and Visa. These ads appeared in the U.S., the U.K. and Germany. In a blog post at the time, Skype assured users its plan was to only show ads from just one brand per day in each market where advertising was sold. It also said the ads would not disrupt users' Skype experience with pop-ups or banners in the middle of calls.

The remote control must die; but what's next? One company at the apex of that question is Philips, which, unbeknownst to many onlookers, already makes remote controls for an array of TV makers, set-top box vendors and pay-TV operators like BSkyB. Philips now offers its own Wiimote-like gesture stick to screen makers like HP; (NYSE: HPQ) a motion-sensitive, qwerty-equipped uWand; candybars with integrated laptop trackpads and, yes, plain 'ol candybars for internet TV operators who still want them. All of this means the TV input segment is about to embark upon the same kind of innovative period of disruption and competing standards that the TV space is now wrestling with and which the internet itself before it first unleashed.

But at Tumblr, at least, there's something else very interesting going on: according to Karp, there are 9 curators for every creator on his site. Reblogging, on Tumblr, is so easy that the vast majority of Tumblr sites actually create little or no original content: they just republish content from other people. That's a wonderful thing, for two reasons. Firstly, it takes people who are shy about (or just not very good at) creating their own content, and gives them a great way to express themselves online. (As Arianna Huffington says, "self-expression is the new entertainment".) And secondly, it acts as a natural amplifier for the people who do create original content - the average post on Tumblr gets reblogged nine times, and therefore reaches vastly more people than if it just sat on its original site waiting to be discovered by people visiting it directly.

Is this as disruptive to all wireless carriers as I think it is?

If Google is successful with a "balloon network" will the traditional "tower & satellite" telcos be disrupted? NOTE: they do have the barricade of licensed spectrum...