Wak Oentoenk

Material from Mobile Opportunity is being featured in two online forums, and I wanted to acknowledge them. The Carnival of the Mobilists is a group of mobile-related bloggers who take turns hosting a collection of the week's best mobile-related posts. They recently featured my commentary on CTIA. Wireless Watch, one of my favorite websites for Japanese mobile news, has just added a new community service in which it's consolidating the feeds from about 20 mobile-related weblogs around the world,...

In my other blog, I took the authors of a famous business book to task for making bad projections about future technological change. But it's not fair to single them out -- the same sort of problem happens to experts making projections inside technology companies. I've seen a lot of those projections over the years. The usual pattern is that technology predictions with a two year horizon are pretty good, because a technology has to be almost in prototype stage now in order to appear in high-volume...

There's a long and fascinating article from the New York Times describing Google's policy in China. As usual, the real story is more subtle and nuanced than what was first reported in the press. The article is great reading on several fronts – it talks about the cultural differences between the US and China, it discusses Chinese Internet usage patterns that are significantly different from other parts of the world, and it attempts to explore the thinking of the average Chinese Internet user. ...

A commentary on my other weblog, Stop Flying Blind. It's not mobile-related, but I wanted to mention it here in case you're interested in the subject....

Last week I walked the busy halls of CTIA, the main mobile phone trade show in the US. The show's very large. Not as big as CES, but the exhibits filled the main hall at the Las Vegas Convention Center, plus a big side hall. The aisles were filled with an overwhelming variety of everything phonelike, from phone holsters to RF components to those big fake plastic trees used to disguise cellphone towers. And of course there were mobile phones. Lots of mobile phones, from every major vendor and many...

I'm very happy to say that I've finally re-launched my second weblog, Stop Flying Blind. It's now hosted at a new location, using a different blogging tool, with a cool design. The design is by Michael Rohde, and the programming was done by Michael Ashby. They do great work, as you'll see if you check it out.Stop Flying Blind is a book I'm writing on how to plan corporate and product strategy, using market and technology information. It's the summation of what I've learned through almost 20 years...

Nobody really knows what Web 2.0 will do to the software industry. That's my quick summary of the Software 2006 conference, which I attended yesterday and today. That's not a mobile show, and so this isn't going to be a post on mobile technology. As part of my work with Rubicon Consulting, I'm trying to get back in touch with the tech world beyond the mobile space, and this was a step in the process. I wanted to share what I learned.I haven't been to this conference before. Attendees are a...

Like just about everyone else in the tech industry, I was caught off guard by Google's announcement late yesterday that it's acquiring Sprint. We all knew Google was interested in the wireless market, but I don't think anyone expected it to make a move this big, this quickly.In retrospect, though, I think the deal was kind of obvious.Google can compete with the wireline phone companies and the cable TV companies by offering municipal WiFi networks. It didn't have to acquire companies in those...