Category Archives: Blog

Mobile companies are bad, Internet companies are good

Mobile companies are bad, Internet companies are good seems to be the flavour of the day but I think everyone is after the same thing. Profit! One of the most interesting points about Skype is that they are owned by eBay and also funded Fon ( www.fon.com ). Fon and Skype share a great deal of technology through their founders who started off with Kazaa. This technology fundamentally allows people to communicate directly via IP. Fon has develop one of the largest Wifi networks in the world through ADSL links in people’s homes. I have not been able to find out how many base stations they have but I know it’s more than 75,000. I guess Google started down this road as mobile operators put up walled gardens and didn’t want anything to do with the Internet. However this amount of wireless access provides a great deal of unused resources. What will they do with it? Google has a better chance of success as they implement a series of mobile/wireless applications (which I think will end as a toolkit for mobile advertisers and search engines) which sits on the device, providing the best possible user experience. Competition is good and therefore adding Google into the mobile pot will help drive additional services and business models into our world. However, I don’t see anyone saying “Google is the antichrist!”.