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Hutchison ‘looking for options’

With the merger of Orange UK and T-Mobile UK approved by the European Union, the current UK leaders, O2 and Vodafone, will be mulling their competitive responses. So far, Vodafone has mainly focused on revamping its software brands and its higher-value services, but it could also move to acquire the country’s smallest cellco, 3 UK, say analysts.…

Web threats: Why conventional protection doesn’t work

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(Source The Register)

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The European Commission has approved the merger, which will create the UK’s largest operator, after the parties allayed fears over spectrum and competition

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(Source ZDNet UK)

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BRUSSELS (Reuters) – T-Mobile, the British arm of Deutsche Telekom, and France Telecom’s Orange won EU regulatory approval on Monday for their plan to merge after they pledged to give up some radio spectrum.

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(Source Yahoo UK News)

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Only Apple and Google now tower over new merged beast

Independent application stores are usually overshadowed by the vendor-owned ones, but two of them have merged to create a mobile storefront that is larger than any of them, except the Apple App Store and Android Market.…

What is your recession sales strategy?

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(Source The Register)

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• European commission set to approve plan to create UK’s largest mobile phone company
• Proposed merger could still face a challenge from Vodafone and O2

The merger of Orange and T-Mobile looks set to get the go-ahead from the European commission after a last-minute deal was thrashed out over the weekend to secure the future of 3, the UK’s smallest mobile phone network.

The merged business would be the UK’s largest mobile phone company, with almost 30 million customers, and Orange and T-Mobile have agreed to hand back some of the mobile phone spectrum it would own in order to allow this to be used by rivals to run super-fast wireless broadband services.

The commission has yet to inform the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) about its decision, and the merger could still face a challenge from Vodafone and O₂, which are understood to be “lukewarm” about the concessions made over spectrum.

The commission’s decision is a blow to consumer groups that had been campaigning for authorities in the UK to investigate the deal.

This month the OFT formally requested jurisdiction to investigate the merger from the commission, which had until 1 March to give a decision. The OFT will tomorrow publish the reasons why it had asked to be allowed to run its own investigation, although the commission now believes it has dealt with any concerns. It was the OFT’s request that spurred Orange and T-Mobile into action.

Fears that the merger, announced last September, would become clogged up in the UK’s lengthy competition procedure led both companies to come up with a solution that met the concerns of the commission about the deal. The OFT and Ofcom, the telecoms regulator, were extensively consulted by the commission during the process.

The main concern was about the merger’s effect on the future of 3, which has driven price competition in recent years. However, over the weekend, 3, which is owned by the Hong Kong conglomerate Hutchison Whampoa, signed a new deal with T-Mobile and Orange, which will give it access to 3,000 more mast sites across the UK over the next few years, bringing the total to 16,000, the largest 3G network in the country.

Second, the UK authorities and Brussels were concerned about the level of control that the merged company would have over the scarce resource that is wireless spectrum. Specifically the merged group would have the vast majority of the spectrum granted in the 1990s, when Orange and One2One were launched, at 1800MHz. As reported by the Observer a week ago, T-Mobile and Orange have agreed to hand back a quarter of the spectrum the merged group would hold.

Neither 3, Orange, T-Mobile, Vodafone, O₂ nor the OFT would comment.

The OFT will tomorrow give its reasons for asking the commission whether it could have jurisdiction over the case, in a stock exchange announcement.

A copy of its reasoning, seen by the Guardian, makes it clear that the OFT’s main concern about any deal was also the future of 3. “The OFT considers that any weakening/elimination of Hutchison 3G would effectively result in a reduction of vertically integrated competitors from five to three and cause significant detriment to competition in mobile retail telephony,” the document reads.

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(Source The Guardian)

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FRANKFURT/LONDON (Reuters) – Britain’s consumer watchdog has asked for a say in the planned merger of the UK arms of France Telecom’s Orange and Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile, raising prospects of at least a delay to any deal.

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Which? campaigned for the Office of Fair Trading to scrutinise the proposed tie-up, rather than authorities in Brussels, because it was a deal that affected British consumers

Consumer groups today welcomed confirmation that UK competition authorities have asked Brussels for permission to investigate the proposed merger of Orange and T-Mobile.

A spokesman for Which? said this morning that it had campaigned for the Office of Fair Trading to scrutinise the proposed tie-up, rather than authorities in Brussels, because it was a deal that affected UK consumers.

“We have been very keen to have this looked at because T-Mobile and Orange have networks here. This merger affects British consumers and we think it should be looked at,” a Which? spokesman said.

If T-Mobile and Orange merge they would have a 37% market share of retail customers in the UK, or 40% including the virtual mobile network operators such as Virgin Mobile that use the two companies’ networks to run their services.

In December Consumer Focus and the Communications Consumer Panel wrote a joint letter to Neelie Kroes, the Brussels competition commissioner, urging a UK review of the deal, which is originally under the scope of Europe because two thirds of the turnover of the parent companies – France Télécom and Deutsche Telekom respectively – is generated outside the UK.

The OFT confirmed to the stock market this morning that it had made a request to the European commission to refer the UK aspects of the proposed joint venture between the two companies.

“The OFT’s initial view, following consultation, is that the joint venture threatens significantly to affect competition in mobile telecommunications in the UK,” the OFT said in a brief statement.

“If the request is granted, the OFT intends to examine the proposed joint venture with a view to deciding whether it should be referred to the Competition Commission for an in-depth investigation,” the OFT said.

If the OFT is handed the powers to investigate, it would delay the plans by the two mobile phone companies to consummate their deal, which was originally announced in September and slated for approval by the Brussels competition watchdogs as early as mid February. The OFT would conduct its own analysis of the situation before deciding whether to refer the tie-up to the Competition Commission for a detailed investigation that could last as long as six months.

The OFT said it had petitioned Brussels under Article 9 of the EU merger regulations.

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(Source The Guardian)

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• Orange and T-Mobile hoped to escape UK scrutiny
• Merger would create country’s biggest operator

The Office of Fair Trading is calling for the proposed merger of Orange and T-Mobile to be investigated by the regulatory authorities in Britain rather than merely subjected to scrutiny in Brussels.

The news, expected to be announced on Wednesday, will be warmly welcomed by consumer groups that have campaigned hard for OFT scrutiny of the deal. There are fears the merger, which will create the UK’s largest mobile phone network, could hamper competition and force up prices for consumers.

It is a blow for Orange and T-Mobile, currently the third and fourth placed networks in Britain, as it means a further delay to a deal originally announced in September. They had hoped scrutiny of the merger would be confined to regulators in Brussels, with clearance possibly granted as early as mid-February. Orange and T-Mobile have been lobbying the OFT, the telecoms watchdog, Ofcom, and Brussels regulators in recent weeks to try to assuage competition concerns.

But the OFT will inform the European commission that it remains worried about certain aspects of the merger and wants to subject it to further scrutiny, dragging out the process for weeks, possibly months. The OFT is understood to be particularly concerned about the effect on the UK’s smallest mobile phone network, 3, and the merged group possibly having a stranglehold on the country’s mobile phone spectrum.

The OFT’s decision raises the possibility the deal could be referred to the Competition Commission, whose investigations can run for six months or more. The OFT is not, however, believed to be planning to call for an immediate Competition Commission inquiry. Instead it hopes to use the threat of one to wrest a number of undertakings from Orange and T-Mobile.

The deal would give Orange and T-Mobile more than twice the mobile phone spectrum owned by market leader O2 or second-placed Vodafone, and more than five times the amount held by 3. The government is hoping to auction more wireless spectrum over the next few years, including the slice of the airwaves freed up by the switch to digital TV. But before it can start the sell-off, the regulator needs to deal with the capacity the companies already own. Vodafone, O2, Orange and T-Mobile all want to upgrade the spectrum they were given in the 1980s and 1990s to carry so-called 2G voice services, making it capable of running 3G mobile broadband. But they all own different parts of the spectrum and 3 has no legacy network capacity at all.

As part of the government’s Digital Britain process, its independent spectrum broker Kip Meek suggested a wholesale restructuring of the airwaves, capping the amount of spectrum any operator could hold in return for freeing up existing spectrum for 3G.

The Orange and T-Mobile merger was announced towards the end of his negotiations. He was able to take it into account but the whole deal has been thrown into confusion by objections from BT, which is threatening to take the government to court.

The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills extended the consultation deadline on the plan by a month in an effort to appease BT. But the new deadline, this Friday, might not leave time to enact the necessary secondary legislation before a general election. The OFT is concerned the T-Mobile and Orange deal might go ahead with no workable spectrum plan in place and it wants to ensure the merged group does not rule the airwaves.

The merger with Orange could also jeopardise T-Mobile’s network sharing deal with 3. The operator has helped cut mobile prices in the UK and chief executive Kevin Russell said yesterday its two-year-old network-sharing joint venture with T-Mobile – called MBNL – is an important part of its future. The OFT is concerned the introduction of Orange could unsettle the venture, hampering 3’s ability to compete.

“MBNL for us is a fundamental strategic platform,” Russell said yesterday in a presentation to analysts about his network. “It is a fundamental piece of our strategy, any exposure, however remote, to that not being supported by the merger of Orange and T-Mobile is a risk for us we believe needs to be closed off.”

Delays and trade-offs

The OFT has no power to force companies to change the way mergers or acquisitions are structured, but it can threaten to bring in the Competition Commission to run a full-scale inquiry. Many companies would rather reach a deal than go through that lengthy process. Last year the OFT struck a deal with the Co-op: the supermarket agreed to sell 133 stores across the country in return for having its merger with Somerfield passed without a competition inquiry. The stores were snapped up by rivals such as Morrisons and Sainsbury’s. In the spring, the OFT accepted undertakings from Global Radio that it would sell a clutch of radio station in the Midlands – including Beacon, Mercia and Wyvern – to avoid a Competition Commission inquiry into its £375m acquisition of GCap Media, after raising concerns that the deal could harm the region’s advertising market. More recently, the Co-op proposed selling some of its funeral parlours in the south west to gain clearance for its acquisition of Plymouth & South West Co-operative Society, an independent co-operative which as well as being a food retailer is also a provider of funeral services.

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(Source The Guardian)

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A change of heart has helped Tiscali customers left worse off after merger with TalkTalk. Miles Brignall reports

The home phone and broadband supplier TalkTalk has been forced into a U-turn after telling customers of the recently merged Tiscali that it would not be honouring contracts offered prior to the takeover.

As Guardian Money revealed shortly before Christmas, the merger of the broadband and phone giants, originally announced in May 2009, has resulted in a big price increase for some Tiscali customers pushed on to the higher TalkTalk tariffs. Some broadband-only customers face costs rising from £14.99 to £19.99 a month.

It was initially thought most of those affected were out of contract. However, in the past two weeks, TalkTalk has been telling customers who had recently signed new agreements it would not be honouring those struck with Tiscali salespeople – even if it was just a few weeks before the known-about merger. Some say they were told by TalkTalk staff that the fact they had signed an 18-month contract at an agreed price was “meaningless” as they were TalkTalk customers now.

One such customer is new mum Sarah­ Gladwin. The bank manager, who lives in Richmond, Surrey, was contemplating leaving Tiscali and finding a better deal after reading our original article.

Out of contract and free to take her business elsewhere, she called the Tiscali sales team in late December and was offered line rental, broadband, and free calls in the evenings and at weekends – its basic phone/internet package – for a very attractive £12 a month, with the first three months free.

She had to sign up for 18 months. “I was very happy with the deal. Confirmation came by email the same day and later by post. Both stated that my Tiscali package had been successfully upgraded, as per my order. We received a new wireless router in about three days. All great, or so I thought.”

A few days ago she received a letter welcoming her to TalkTalk and saying that, in future, she would be paying £18.50 a month. Other readers have contacted Money complaining about the same thing.

“Obviously, I didn’t want to pay nearly 50% more, so I phoned them to say ‘no thank you, we’ll continue with our agreed contract made last month’. But the call centre did not understand. It offered me three months free after speaking to a ’supervisor’.

“I explained I already had an 18-month contract with three months free, and a cheaper monthly fee, but all she kept saying was ‘we’re Talk Talk now’. After 45 minutes, I gave up,” says Gladwin. A second phone call elicited the same take or leave it response.

“How can you deal with a company that treats its customers in this way?” she says.

TalkTalk originally said it wanted to streamline its complicated range of tariffs down to one. “Our aim, at the end of this process, is to have one clearly understood set of prices. That will mean no one is paying more than the TalkTalk tariff and is fair to everyone,” it said in December, seemingly unaware its colleagues at Tiscali were offering different deals to retain customers.

Consumer law expert Dr Christian Twigg-Flesner at the University of Hull says telecoms companies and financial services providers rely on “unilateral variation clauses” to allow them to vary prices in this way.

“Most of the banks have these in their terms to allow them to change interest rates and the like. However, in this case, customers might be able to argue the company was misrepresenting its offer.

“But, as a consumer, you can’t force a company to honour a deal. Unfortunately, English law is reluctant to hold companies to contracts as long as they give the consumer the chance to opt out,” he says.

After Money raised the issue with TalkTalk the company had a change of heart, and says it will now honour the contracts with Tiscali – albeit with a rather complicated billing arrangement.

A spokesman says: “Customers who signed up with Tiscali or altered their package between September and December­ 2009 will be offered six months service at half price when they sign up to a new contract with TalkTalk. Those customers who want to stick with the original deal they signed, can do so. They will have to pay the TalkTalk tariff, but their account will be credited, up-front, with the difference, meaning they will pay nothing for the first few months.”

He explained the company’s recent downturn in customer service on the poor weather, during which just 25% of its staff were able to get to work at its Preston and Warrington centres.

“It caused us big problems in terms of answering calls and it came at the worst time, but we are now back to normal,” he says.

Meanwhile, the regulator Ofcom may have had a hand in the about- turn.

“Ofcom is aware of this issue; we are monitoring complaints and we are in touch with TalkTalk,” it says.

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(Source The Guardian)

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Following a difficult year, Spinvox’s operation providing translation of mobile calls to text messages has been purchased – but investors will lose out

Earlier reports by PaidContent had said that Nuance, a digital speech conversion company based in Burlington, Massachusetts, might buy troubled voicemail-to-text counterpart Spinvox before year’s end – and Nuance on Wednesday confirmed exactly that…

The price – $102.5 million – is less than half the more-than-$200 million in investment that Spinvox had raised before things started to go bad earlier this year, so there’s significant loss here for investors. It comes in $66 million in cash and $36.5 million in Nuance shares (2.3 million).

Nuance says it will be “integrating SpinVox’s carrier services with Nuance’s advanced speech recognition platform”, making it sound rather like the speech-to-text technology on which Spinvox, with its headquarters in Marlow, England, has prided itself will play second fiddle to Nuance’s own.

Nuance’s announcement repeats its clear statement that it’s its own, “sophisticated” speech technology which is “proven”: “This transaction marries innovative speech solutions and robust carrier-grade infrastructure to accelerate innovation.”

It means much-needed consolidation in a digital telephony market that may yet prove hot in 2010, with Google Voice and BT’s Ribbit ramping up to offer voice comms overlapped with web services.

Until recently a second-generation dot.com darling of English media, six-year-old Spinvox raised its second $100 million in March 2008 from Goldman Sachs, along with GLG Partners, Blue Mountain Capital Management and Toscafund Asset Management. Invesco Perpetual in September said it lost 90% of its own investment

But its finances began looking shaky this year, when paidContent:UK reported how staff had accepted an offer of stock instead of salary. Christina Domecq, the chief executive, said in a July interview with us that missed payments from its suppliers and the pressure of rolling out in Latin America had stressed company finances, and promised the company would turn cash-positive in 90 days.

But our story opened a can of worms. A BBC News story piled on, reminding readers that Spinvox’s voicemail-to-text process is not wholly automated. The company admitted the necessity to use human transcribers at call centers in new territories is very expensive…

Spinvox had never outright disguised its use of humans but, facing a perception problem in the summer season on top of financial difficulties, it was forced to raise over £15 million in emergency investment and take a £30 million bridging loan to stay afloat – all while defending against staff complaints about company spending…

It amounted to a perfect storm that was sure to mean investors calling for a full or partial sale. Three months ago, Invesco publicly confirmed sale chatter by saying in a filing the company was on the block. The company declined to tell us whether it met its 90-day cash target.

Nuance isn’t yet detailing which parts of Spinvox, which has been through a few layoff rounds in the last year, may be retained, but our guess is it won’t be the whole thing. In a final effort to be upfront about the product, however, Nuance’s announcement reminds us that the service offers both “full and partial speech automation”.

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(Source The Guardian)

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• Pledge for fast universal broadband access in peril
• Dispute over terms of sale of analogue TV spectrum

The government’s plans to bring broadband within the reach of every home by 2012 have been put in jeopardy by BT. The telecoms operator has warned that it will take legal action if the government presses ahead in the new year with plans to liberalise the nation’s mobile phone spectrum.

BT’s move could derail a key part of the government’s Digital Britain programme. The government’s pledge to introduce universal broadband access of at least 2Mb a second in time for the London Olympics was seen as one of the least contentious parts of the final Digital Britain report in June. But universal access requires changes to the way the airwaves are split between the UK’s five mobile phone networks, so they can run mobile broadband services in rural areas where fixed-line services are too slow. It also requires the sale of new space on the spectrum that will be freed-up when the analogue TV signal is switched off in 2012.

The government appointed the former regulator Kip Meek as an Independent Spectrum Broker to try to thrash out a deal with the networks. Part of his proposals included letting them run mobile broadband on the spectrum they were given in the 1980s and 1990s for voice and text services. In return, the five networks would have the 3G licences, which they snapped up for £22.5bn in the dotcom boom, extended indefinitely. Those licences are due to expire in 2021.

Meek also suggested tying the sale of the old analogue TV signal with the sale of a new part of the airwaves at 2.6Ghz, which is perfect for super-fast broadband in urban areas. He also proposed capping the amount of spectrum that any one operator could own.

BT, however, has sent a “letter before action” to the business secretary, Lord Mandelson, raising serious objections to Meek’s plans and threatening a judicial review if they are implemented. The company believes the mobile phone companies are being given an unjustifiable government subsidy by having their 3G licences extended.

It also wants the government to be more even-handed with new entrants when it comes to selling off new wireless spectrum. BT is believed to be interested in snapping up a sizeable chunk of the 2.6Ghz spectrum and using it for super-fast wireless broadband in towns and cities.

“BT has major reservations around the wireless spectrum proposals from the Independent Spectrum Broker,” said a BT spokesman, confirming that the company had written to the government. “The proposal to extend current 3G licenses indefinitely represents a gift of several billion pounds from the UK taxpayer to the mobile operators and is a barrier to competition and innovation in the mobile market,” he said.

“We would like spectrum to be auctioned in a way that is fair to all operators and stimulates competition in the market for both existing operators and new entrants,” he added. “We are discussing our concerns with BIS and are hopeful that these will be addressed.”

The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) has already extended the deadline for consultation on Meek’s plans by a further month in an effort to appease BT. But senior figures within the mobile phone industry have warned that the new deadline – of 5 February – could leave the government with no time to enact the necessary secondary legislation before a general election.

Mobile phone industry executives are also livid at BT’s opposition to changes to the spectrum regime, given that the company itself will benefit from the 50p-a-month telephone tax , which will be in next year’s finance bill. The tax is designed to raise upwards of £175m a year to help pay for the roll-out of the next generation of super-fast broadband networks in rural areas. BT is expected to be the main recipient of the cash.

Some senior mobile phone industry insiders have also pointed out that while BT objects to anything that helps out their industry, it is currently fighting for the right to be able to demand that the entire fixed-line telecoms industry helps pay its pensions bill. BT is locked in talks with the regulator Ofcom about trying to narrow its pension deficit by raising the price that its Openreach business charges everyone else for access to its residential phone lines.

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(Source The Guardian)

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Consumer groups appeal to Europe over fears that T-Mobile and Orange merger will affect competition in the British market

Consumer groups have urged Europe’s competition watchdog to allow a home-grown investigation of the proposed merger of T-Mobile and Orange amid fears that it will hinder competition in the British market.

The joint letter to Neelie Kroes, the Brussels commissioner for competition, by Consumer Focus and the Communications Consumer Panel will raise concerns over the Orange and T-Mobile deal, as both companies are hoping that Brussels will control the scrutiny of their proposed deal. They believe a European commission investigation will be far quicker than any review that is controlled by British regulators – the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) and Competition Commission.

Regulatory scrutiny of the deal will begin in Brussels because two-thirds of the turnover made by the parent companies of Orange and T-Mobile – France Télécom and Deutsche Telekom respectively – is generated outside Britain. In its investigation, the commission will liaise with the OFT, but it can also choose to “repatriate” the investigation to the British authorities. Such a move would lead to a much lengthier investigation.

The consumer groups argue that the OFT and the Competition Commission should run the process because the deal will affect “the particular characteristics of the UK mobile sector … We believe that this review would be best carried out at the national level, since the impact of the merger would be felt most strongly in the UK,” said the letter.

It comes after consumer organisation Which? recently warned that the merger makes a detailed assessment of the mobile market in Britain “a necessity”.

The merger of T-Mobile and Orange would create an operator with 37% of the British retail market – or 40% including the virtual mobile network operators such as Virgin Mobile that use the two companies’ networks to run their services, according to the letter. “We recognise that mergers can have price and service benefits for consumers through increased efficiency, economies of scale and greater investment opportunities; however, before taking a view in this case, our overarching concern is to ensure that the potential effect on competition is fully explored,” the letter goes on.

Consumer Focus and the Communications Consumer Panel have four main concerns with the deal. First, it could, in fact, hinder the expansion of 3G network coverage because there will be fewer networks from which to choose. Second, they fear it could lead to more small players such as 3 being swallowed up.

“Without small, independent mobile operators, the competitive innovation that has been a particular feature of the UK market may be lost,” the letter argues.

Third, the merged entity will have a stranglehold over a particular part of the airwaves – mobile phone spectrum at 1800 MHz – which could hamper the government’s plans to use wireless to help get broadband services to the entire population by 2012. Fourth, the consumer watchdogs are worried about the possible knock-on effect of the merger on Britain’s virtual network operators – companies such as Tesco Mobile, Lebara and Virgin Mobile – who lease capacity from the mobile phone companies to run their own services.

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(Source The Guardian)

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As the noughties come to a close, we take a look at the biggest technology stories of the decade – and how the Guardian reported them at the time

After a whirlwind 2006, you could be forgiven for thinking that 2007 would be a little quieter. Wrong: certainly in terms of technology, the year started with a bang and just kept going.

Behind the scenes at Guardian HQ, 2007 saw a few changes. We relaunched the technology website, moving from the classic Neville Brody design to one that brought the site and the newspaper closer together in feeling (and one that we’re still using, as of 2009).

We also started the Tech Weekly podcast in December – you can still listen to that first episode if you want.

Anyway, as we near the end of our look back over a decade of stories – and the way the Guardian reported them – we come across a series of major successes and dismal failures. There were plenty of stories we had to leave out, but here are five of the big ones.

2007

• Pretty much the first thing that happened was when Steve Jobs confirmed a swelter of speculation by announcing that it was planning to launch a mobile, the iPhone. The device had been hyped up in advance, with plenty of speculation that Apple was planning to do something in the phone market. But the handset itself looked like something we hadn’t seen before, and when it went on sale in the US people queued for days to get one. Not everybody thought it would be a hit, but by November, British customers could get their hands on it too – and O2 said it sold tens of thousands in a weekend.

• A few weeks after Microsoft finally made its latest operating system, Windows Vista, available worldwide. The first obstacle to overcome was the confusing array of packages, but after a series of driver problems that left people nonplussed, the impact was more damp squib than fireworks. By the summer, the rot had truly set in, and the computer industry pronounced its disappointment with the product.

• Cyberwar suddenly became a buzzword, with a number of incidents that appeared to up the ante global online warfare. After a political tussle involving a war memorial, the highly-wired state of Estonia was hit by cyberattack that left it reeling. That was followed, later in the year, by a string of strikes on western government targets that opened up a wide range of issues.

• One of the big stories of the year in British circles was the sale of music service Last.fm, which went for $280m to US media group CBS. We had a long history of following the company (literally right back to the very beginning) and had tipped in an article the previous year about whether UK entrepreneurs could produce a web success like YouTube. Maybe Last wasn’t the same scale deal, but it was a significant boost for the country’s startup stars.

• And after plenty of fits and starts, the BBC iPlayer suddenly got an injection of excitement in 2007. First off, a mildly depressing download service hit the scene in the summer – but then, after a rapid retooling, the streaming service that we’re all familiar with was pushed out in December. The rest, as they say…

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(Source The Guardian)

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As the naughties come to a close, we take a look at the biggest technology stories of the decade – and how the Guardian reported them at the time

Sitting here at the tail end of a vast, sweeping recession, it may feel grim out there. There’s a good reason for that: it is. But for the technology industry, few collapses cut deeper than the dotcom bust that really hit crisis point in 2001.

That year was a defining moment for so many reasons: the attacks on September 11th were not only horrifying to witness (as millions of us did) but they have also warped the world’s political outlook ever since. Not only that, but thousands of people lost their jobs as the economy plunged, struck by the double whammy of the bust and the general climate of fear.

Personally, it was a time of transition. I got my first national newspaper byline (I think it was this article about a cancer-stricken blogger who turned out to be fake). It was the kind of story that told me something fundamental about the web: that the evolution we were seeing online was one that mirrored human nature, even at its most avaricious… and that meant it was where real life was starting to happen.

So, continuing our look back at a decade of the Guardian’s technology coverage, it’s time to cast our eyes over the top stories of the second year of our round-up.

2001

• Barely a day went by without news of one dotcom company or another going bust. Literally: by the end of 2000, closures were happening at the rate of more than one every 24 hours.
The dotcom crash was documented not only in our pages, but also in magazines like the Industry Standard – which itself went under in 2001. One article in March described the climate as “widespread start-up slaughter”, while Duncan Campbell took to the streets of San Francisco to witness the phenomenon of the pink slip party.

• Apple which had been in the doldrums for some time, started finding its way out of the woods once it announced the launch of Mac OSX early in the year. And how the company needed it: US sales had already fallen by 40% and Steve Jobs was struggling to make profit with its iMac and Cube computers.

• Early in 2001, the knives were out for Microsoft in a big way. The judge who ordered the breakup of the company labelled Bill Gates “dinosaur” and “miscreant”, while. A long serialised profile of Gates by Ken Auletta described him as a ‘chilly messiah with a mission to blank out the competitive world’. And yet the Microsoft juggernaut continued: the relentless acquisitions continued (listed in an article with the eerily prescient title of “Vista expands for Bill’s window on the world”) and by the end of the year the company had stretched out into yet another field by launching the Xbox console.

The company ended up sticking together, thanks in part to Auletta’s reporting, and we scanned over the potential competition which appeared to exist in the form of Linux, RealNetworks, AOL and Netscape. My, that wasn’t how things turned out, was it?

• With internet access and mobile phones beginning their incessant rise in the public’s consciousness, a poll looking at the way British people were dealing with these new-found technological riches discovered that 41% of us were regular texters. A survey by Oftel later that year found that 40% of households were now online (dial-up access, of course).

• And while September 11 was responsible for a lot of horrific things, the enormous outpouring of grief and astonishment online was among the most stunning. A number of bloggers documented the strikes on the World Trade Center – and a brand of hawkish political tirade began to establish itself as a recognisable force in blogging. In the US, politicians pushed through a series of draconian monitoring and enforcement laws known as Patriot Act, while Britain began to realise the breadth of things that the recently-enacted Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act granted.

Tomorrow it’s time for 2002 – but if you’ve got any memories of the crash, or anything else you were doing in 2001, then leave them in the comments.

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(Source The Guardian)

Tags: 10, 12, 3, all, apple, blog, comments, compare, comparemobiles.com, deal, lg, line, merger, mobile, Mobile News, mobile phone, mobile phones, mobiles, networks, new, phone, phones, pink, sol, survey, uk, world

• Hard to move this weekend for chat about Google selling its own phone direct to customers. While nothing is confirmed yet, the independent reports all seem to point in the same direction: an HTC-built, Google-designed device that’s sold, unlocked, direct to customers through the Big G. Big whoop? Perhaps not, given that there are other Android HTC devices and there are plenty of unlocked phones in the market. But it could be a big signal that the internet giant doesn’t fancy playing nice with mobile networks forever.

• Talking of Google – and barely a day goes by when we don’t – the trial in Italy of four executives accused of invading the privacy of a 17-year-old boy with Down’s syndrome starts this week. The prosecutors argue that the company should have done more to prevent a video of the child being harassed from hitting its Google Video service. If found guilty, the quartet could face year-long prison (though they wouldn’t actually serve jail time if found guilty). The New York Times trails the event by interviewing one of the accused, privacy counsel Peter Fleischer.

• Just days after it parted ways with Time Warner, AOL could be ready to sell off instant messaging service ICQ. The purchaser? Well, the suggestion is that Russian investment group DST – yes, the same company
that took a $300m bite of Facebook. That’s a chin scratcher.

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Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)

Tags: 10, 12, 3, all, android, blog, compare, comparemobiles.com, google, HTC, latest, merger, mobile, Mobile News, mobile phone, mobile phones, mobiles, networks, new, phone, phones, sam, service, sol, test, twitter, uk

• The group has increased half-year profits to £75m, from £40m
• Demerger to create two separate stock exchange listed firms

Carphone Warehouse boss Charles Dunstone condemned as “crazy” government plans to combat online piracy by severing people’s broadband connections . The mobile phone retailer and owner of TalkTalk cheered investors by raising its profit forecast for the year.

TalkTalk, Britain’s second largest internet service provider behind BT, has threatened to take legal action if plans championed by Lord Mandelson to cut-off persistent unlawful online file sharers make it into law. An e-petition on the No 10 website against the law, which is part of the government’s Digital Economy Bill, has already garnered 26,000 signatories and the support of such technophiles as Stephen Fry.

“I do get the sense that the debate is moving in our direction,” Dunstone said yesterday. “People are coming to terms with the fact that what is being proposed subverts some of the basic principles of British justice. What’s being proposed is just crazy.”

His comments came as Carphone Warehouse said half year profits increased to £75m, from £40m last year as revenues rose 13% to £789m despite the gloomy economic climate. Accounting for the impact of writedowns, profits were £30m compared with a loss last year of £23m.

TalkTalk and the company’s retail business – named Best Buy Europe after its tie-up with American retailer Best Buy – did better than expected in the first half of the year and Dunstone predicted a strong Christmas quarter, meaning profits will exceed the City’s forecasts. Dunstone is hoping for strong sales of pre-pay mobile phones helped by cheap touchscreen handsets.

Carphone Warehouse, which bought Tiscali in May, is planning to demerge its retail business from its TalkTalk residential telephony and broadband operation by the end of the first quarter next year gave details about the demerger process today. There will be two separately listed businesses: TalkTalk Group PLC, which will have a primary listing on the London Stock Exchange, and Carphone Warehouse Group PLC, which will have a secondary listing. The latter will comprise Best Buy Europe – its 50/50 partnership with Best Buy of the US – plus its 48.5% stake in Virgin Mobile France and Carphone’s property assets.

TalkTalk has secured £650m banking facilities for the post-demerger period meaning TalkTalk and Carphone will be fully funded for their anticipated medium-term requirements. Carphone Warehouse Group will not pay dividends for at least two years after demerger, while TalkTalk is expected to pay dividends from the outset equivalent to that of the current group with a progressive policy thereafter.

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(Source The Guardian)

Tags: 10, 12, 3, best, blog, comments, compare, compared, comparemobiles.com, connections, government, largest, line, merger, mobile, Mobile News, mobile phone, mobile phones, mobiles, new, phone, phones, service, sol, Touch, uk, virgin

LONDON (Reuters) – Telecoms group Cable & Wireless (C&W) is to tap the bond market to fund its demerger by April next year, it said on Tuesday as it laid out plans to tie in senior management and for a pension agreement.

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(Source Yahoo UK News)

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LONDON (Reuters) – The FTSE 100 hit its highest close in three weeks on Thursday as British Airways soared with investors cheered as a merger with Iberia looked imminent, while gains were also powered by strength in banks.

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(Source Yahoo UK News)

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Very nearly on schedule, too

T-Mobile and Orange have signed their merger agreement, paving the way for the new operator to come into existence next year.…

Case Study: WhatsUp keeps Legoland turnstyles ringing

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(Source The Register)

Tags: 3, compare, comparemobiles.com, line, merger, mobile, Mobile News, mobiles, new, orange, sol, source the register, t-mobile, uk

• Orange to start selling the iPhone from 10 November
• ‘Added value’ plan dashed Christmas price war hopes

Orange will start selling the iPhone to British customers in just over two weeks, triggering a two-horse race for customers in the run-up to Christmas.

The mobile phone company announced last month that it had become the first UK network to prise open O2’s exclusive grasp on the device, which has helped the company maintain its place as the UK’s largest operator.

Orange is understood to be planning to launch the iPhone on 10 November, the day after O2’s two-year exclusive contract with Apple comes to an end. It will be sold through the company’s own shops and Phones4U .

Carphone Warehouse, which was the only independent retailer able to stock the iPhone when O2 had it to itself, is also expected to sell the phone on behalf of Orange. Orange refused to comment.

The date that Orange has picked to start selling the phone is the same day that Vodafone will announce its half year results. Management at the company has made no secret over the past few months that it wanted to get its hands on the iPhone. Although it has spawned a host of copycat devices, it is still seen as the best touchscreen phone in the market, winning a clutch of industry awards.

When Orange announced it had managed to sign a deal with Apple, Vodafone moved quickly to sign its own deal with the Californian company but will not get its hands on launch its the iPhone handset until the start of the new year. Instead it will rely on the new Blackberry Storm 2, But the merger timetable has been threatened by the government’s recent decision to ask the competition authorities to look at the impact of the deal on the UK’s airwaves. As a result, T-Mobile may have to go it alone with the iPhone for most of next year.

Kevin Russell, chief executive of the UK’s smallest network, 3, said last week he expects to be stocking the device sometime next year.

“I would expect the iPhone to be on the 3 network sometime during 2010,” he told a Westminster eForum event in London. “At the moment, we don’t have the iPhone. We don’t really have any smartphones but if we improve our range of smartphones and introduce the iPhone then our data traffic will grow massively.”

Certainly interest in the iPhone among UK consumers shows no signs of abating. Already Orange has had over 200,000 customers register their interest in getting the device, before the company has even said what it will charge for it.

There is hope that having more than one network offer the device will lead to a Christmas price war. But Orange UK boss Tom Alexander told the Guardian after signing the deal that the company is more likely to look at other ways of increasing “value”, such as including accessories and even pre-loading certain applications.

Read Original Story…
(Source The Guardian)

Tags: 10, 12, 3, all, apple, best, Blackberry, compare, comparemobiles.com, consumer, contract, deal, government, iphone, largest, merger, mobile, Mobile News, mobile phone, mobile phones, mobiles, months, new, o2, orange, phone, phones, phones4u, sam, sol, storm, t-mobile, Touch, uk, vodafone