Guy Kewney

CANNES, France—Youd think a man walking down the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival here, wearing his best tux, would have something more on his mind than Wi-Fi. Well, no. Its been only four months since I was whining about the lack of wireless LAN services in Cannes. Here I am, back again, moaning […]

By the time you read this, Pulver.com will have become something new—Pulvermedia—and Jeff Pulver himself will be hoping to avoid a lawsuit against The Dark Side. Pulver arrived in Stockholm, Sweden, last week to run VON Europe, and it was truly an attempt by the forces of repression to reclaim the night. By which I […]

The inertia of a few million users hooked on an obsolete software platform has meant that even when the software side of Palm was split off from the hardware side, the hardware side simply couldnt get moving. David Nagel pushed and pushed and pushed—and broke his back. Heres how it went wrong: Palm was too […]

When you see a pigeon fluffing out its neck feathers and trailing its tail feathers on the ground, you will recognize a male, trying to impress what it thinks is a female. When large telcos start inviting analysts to important meetings in exotic cities, and then have nothing much to say except some obviously inflated […]

Why are 3G handsets and data cards so awful? Answer: because the handset makers are deliberately making it impossible to show how bad they are, by making the tests meaningless. Its easy to understand why a 2-year-old toddler might throw mud onto the breakfast plate before trying to eat it. Its rather harder to understand […]

Have you ever seen a highway accident about to happen? Thats how I feel about e-mail on phones. Just about anyone will tell you that the killer app for mobile data is e-mail. What they dont tell you is who is going to die as a result. You want a list? I can give you […]

For those who didnt believe last weeks story in this column about the nightmare of IT staff in mobile data, heres an even less plausible tale… Ive found something which can genuinely drive mobile revenue up. The trick is simple: Find something which makes voice calls more expensive, but makes people want to pay for […]

“Billing on expectations” is the new buzzword. Heres how it works. Youre a phone network operator, and you want your customers to spend more on wireless data, so you get a bunch of songs, tunes, pop videos, wallpaper and teleshopping portals. Thats easy … isnt it? Well, it involves going to companies in Hollywood and […]

One has to ask whether the music business would know the butter side of a slice of toast from the crumb side. Watch the current dispute—a fierce one—that is just breaking out. The massed ranks of the GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) operators are lined up against the massed ranks of anti-copying software-patent holders. […]

Heres a mystery: why has Ericsson—which doesnt make phones—sued Sendo, which does, for using Ericssons GSM cell phone patents without payment? On the face of it, the mystery is no mystery. Sendo, a tiny phone maker from Britains second city, Birmingham, has been using Ericsson patents in its GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) phones. […]