Broadband / Network Services

DPI ad firm Phorm spent £50m last year account show. I'm no fan of such businesses because I don't think my ISP should earn money selling my browsing clicks and secondly, the opt-out mechanism is cookies which I frequently purge.

IBM to invest $100m in mobile services research: "mobile payment methods, security, privacy and user interfaces and, chiefly, to enhance the ability of corporations to use mobile devices to interact with customers and employees".

Digital Britain report: The Register

Nortel may be selling its wireless business, including the valuable CDMA unit, to Nokia-Siemens Mobile although there's time for other bidders to offer more.

Spam drops by 2/3rds after McColo is shutdown. Command & control for botnets, apparently. It won't last.

Comcast is making big IPv6 noises

Google Voice (was GrandCentral) is getting some good press and now they have reserved 1m phone numbers from L3.

WiMAX

Alvarion wins $100m, 17 state, 4G wireless contract

Tata broadband growth muted on WiMAX delay, sees WiMAX as essential part of plan to reach 10 million Internet users by 2014.

WiMAX set for major LatAm growth

RidgeWave: deploys with Kulaom in Jordan & Bahrain (80GHz backhaul)

Mobile / FMC / VoIP

Palm Pre: StevenF review. Open Source Portal is Open while the App Store is a (very) slow start partly because there's very little in it.

iPhone: AT&T get a lot of bashing but there's a couple of good news stories. V3.0 firmware supports auto-logon to WiFi hotspots and AT&T have enabled the feature for data plan users, they have eased upgrade pricing for some and said MMS will be free. Conversely, here's something AT&T won't want to hear, a quick and easy way to enable tethering or your can wait for AT&T's $55pm service plan although this price has been 'officially' denied by At&T via it's Facebook page (what next, manuals on MySpace?). Canadians will get free tethering until 2010. This guy is raving about the 3GS graphics.
Apple's Enterprise Deployment Guide (.PDF) for the iPhone. The V3 firmware jailbreak tools are ready. TUAW review. Various people have remarked on the much faster 3GS and AnandTech says it's 54% faster than the 3G and 11% faster than the Pre. We don't know the first weekend sales figures yet but Apple is warning of activation delays due to server over-loading (annoying but a high quality problem to have). The better hardware in the 3GS means some features are not available on previous hardware (obviously the compass is either there or not) but voice control requires lots of processing power and is available on the 3GS only so Vlingo makes it available on older h/w.