For all the outrage over the Chinese government spying on Skype users, when it comes to privacy, consumers value the talk rather than walk the walk. We often don’t want the inconvenience that security requires (sometimes even re-entering passwords is too much), which can be a difficult line to walk for entrepreneurs seeking to entice users to their online services.
If you’ve ever seen a Mafia movie, you know that playing nice with the mob is like having the tiger by the tail. It is no different for companies who do business in China, whether on their own or through partnerships. The latest one to experience the downside of this is eBay’s Skype, which has been taking some flack for privacy breaches in the region.
Citizen Lab, an Internet research group at the University of Toronto, released a report that shows text messages of Chinese Skype users were monitored and their messages blocked if they included political words such as the Chinese Communist Party, the Falun Gong, Tibet, and the great milk scandal. As a quick background, Skype and TOM teamed up in 2004 and in 2005 released a special software version, TOM-Skype. Since then Chinese users — some 69 million of them — have become a major part, roughly 20 percent, of Skype’s total install base of 338 million.
The report got so much attention that last evening Skype decided to respond. In a blog post, Josh Silverman (Check out my interview with Josh) tries to defend Skype and downplay its role in the China fracas. Here is my translation of the sanitized message he wrote: Continue Reading
The Wall Street Journal says today that Sprint may have found a few private equity buyers or a Latin American carrier to take its Nextel network off its hands. The paper names Cerebus Capital Management and NII Holdings, a carrier with operations in Argentina, Mexico, Brazil, Peru and Chile, as bidders for the Nextel iDEN network. NII also operates an iDEN network. The paper says other private equity firms have expressed interest as well. Continue Reading
Other than the availability of bigger boxes (or clear, plastic ones) it’s hard to point to big changes in the way we store our stuff. Shifts in data storage are similarly mundane. But like the physical storage industry, which has seen slight innovations in recent years, business-class data storage is quietly making its own incremental improvements — with support from venture capitalists. Continue Reading
There has been a rumor rustling around Silicon Valley for a number of months that Cisco Systems is on the verge of acquiring EMC. Such a move would make a lot of strategic sense for Cisco, but this rumored mega-merger of technology giants may have to wait for the U.S. economy to recover before becoming a reality.
If Cisco were to acquire EMC, it would have an enormous impact on the technology landscape and etch in granite the combined company’s role as the hub around which the rest of the enterprise data center industry revolves. It would also place the firm at the forefront of the ongoing synergy between storage and data networking, a trend observed back in July, when Brocade Communications Systems agreed to buy Foundry Networks for $3 billion dollars.
And it would give Cisco control over VMware, the leader in enterprise virtualization software, and help move it further up the technology stack from being a data networking vendor and into enterprise software. Last month at VMworld, Cisco announced the Nexus 1000V switch, an integration of their switching software with VMware ESX (this was not what I predicted, but it was a step toward my prediction).
Freescale Semiconductor said this afternoon that in an effort to focus its energies on high-growth segments such as automotive and networking chips, it will consider strategic options for its wireless chip business, including its possible sale. Anyone looking at the varied business units of the former in-house chip division of Motorola would have seen this coming. It has too many business lines, most of which didn’t have enough market share to be truly competitive, as we said back in May. Continue Reading
The worsening financial environment that has stymied the sale of Embarq, made short-term borrowing more expensive for AT&T, and generally made credit hard to come by, could also slow the deployment of the Clearwire nationwide network. The company and analysts say the joint venture that will link Sprint’s and Clearwire’s WiMAX spectrums should close before the end of the year, but building a nationwide network might take longer if debt stays expensive. Continue Reading
When it comes to WiMAX, towers might not be the only deployment option, according to Richard Keith, who leads Motorola’s wireless broadband and strategy. Keith expects that carrier-owned microcells and picocells placed on buildings will be part of WiMAX networks in addition to towers.
“With 4G, most of the networks are higher frequency, and that means more opportunity for holes, and less opportunity to penetrate buildings,” says Keith, whom I spoke with in conjunction with this week’s WiMAX World conference. “At the same time, the business model works because you have a product in a micro- or picocell that you can monetize over a few hundred people.” Continue Reading
