OK, so I’m back from Berlin and Munich, but still behind on post.

Right now, I’m in DC attending the Telecommunications Policy Research Conference… Should be interesting.

The threshold everyone in telecom was waiting for, looks like to have arrived, as mobile users overtake landline users. Mediamark Research Inc. announced the results of a study, finding that 84.5% of people surveyed have landlines in their homes, while 86.2% have at least one cellphone. Further, only 12.3% of the participants only had a landline, while the people who solely used mobile phones was 14.0%.

I don’t think that landlines will be going away time soon. Especially for businesses that require stable and high quality voice service. I can see home landlines usage to continue its decline. This move toward mobile-only usage raises interesting questions on how infrastructure in residential landlines will evolve, and the reactions by the telecoms and the FCC.

Quick tidbit from media bistro, via biz.yahoo.

Nielsen has started combining Hispanic station rating with the English-speaking ones. Spanish language channel Univision beat out all five networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX and CW) in its first week as combined. I’m not sure why they couldn’t have figured out before this week, that so many people were watching Univision. We know know, because they won every night, Monday through Friday. Also, they had nine of out of the top twenty shows. I’m interested in how this will affect the future mix media for marketers and advertising buyers. In any event, it appears that the list of television networks in the US is now six.

Image source: fcc.gov

I got a little behind writing here the last week, because my spare time writing was taken up by finishing my flow column on Kevin Martin, the chairperson of the FCC.

It’s up, so I thought I’d link to it.

What is the blog etiquette on cross-posting?
Good thing? Bad thing?
I’d be curious to hear your opinions.

Image soure: wikipedia

Americans love the underdog. Remember when seven years ago Google was a small startup, founded two smart guys from Standford? We has the same warm and fuzzy feelings about Microsoft in the 80s, when Bill Gates was everyone’s favorite geeky software boy wonder. It’s funny how, in typical American fashion, everyone roots for the underdog until it becomes the leader. At that point, the 90s era Microsoft and the current Google found themselves scratching their heads, thinking, “Where did our love go?”

We wouldn’t be so frustrated that Google is storing and analyzing all of our data, if they didn’t continually to offer or buy and integrate consistently superior products and services. Now that Google is the front runner, everyone has placed a bit target on the back of the company everyone seems to love and hate.

As a follower of innovation, I’m particularly interested in Joseph Schumpeter’s idea of Creative destruction, which embodies the notion that innovation, particularly from entrepreneurs, creates products or services that displace market leaders. Creative destruction is powerful idea and an amazing witness in real time. I’ll admit that it’s too often trotted out to defend monopolies, without mentioning that people often are getting screwed while they wait for some upstart to knock them down.

We know that with personalized search, the acquisition of youtube and Feedburner, gmail, and google docs, Google’s privately owned servers hold more of our digital lives each day. When it is too much? This week, while the Economist is asking “Who’s afraid of Google?” Techcruch is touting Cuill (pronounced ‘cool’) as the one to watch.

This startup was created by Anna Patterson and Russell Power, two ex-Google search experts and Tom Costello, who founded of the search engine Xift. Cuill is claiming that their search algorithms and methodology require only 10% of Google’s index costs. Of course, this could all be vaporware, but they have Google’s attention. TechCrunch reports that Google has offered to buy the company, even before the launching of their search engine.

Knowing when a company controls too much power is a very difficult thing to ascertain, until it’s too late. We haven’t been successful at finding the sweet spot where the creative destruction of innovation can occur and flourish without putting the general population at risk. This point occurs at the intersection of innovation, access, and regulation.

Cuill might be the Google search engine killer or it might just be a media darling that dies a quiet death or lingers as an also ran. (There was a time when people thought that Real Networks was posed to challenge Microsoft on the web.) As the speed of innovation increases, what are the criteria and guidelines to know when intervene and level the playing field. Is this something that is even possible to know? If not, what is should be the role of publically funded innovation, as it is getting increasingly rare, as the US government in particular is shifting the responsibility of research and design to the private sector.