Archives for March 2008

I can get stock information in real-time, and can monitor the scores and play-by-play of games with each passing instant. When a noteworthy person dies, the appropriate Wikipedia page is updated long before I get to it. I’ve been alerted to a number of natural disasters within moments through my growing Twitter community.

However, the mere fact that information comes at you quickly does not make it truly important. Real news with real impact typically happens slowly. Mount Everest rises up a few inches every year, because two massive tectonic plates are on a slow-motion collision course. (Impact being a function of both speed and mass, and we’re talking a lot of mass…)

Real Time vs. Real Life

As a communicator, and one that deals with crisis communications, time is usually of the essence. In crafting an appropriate response, one has to take into account who the message is for, and how and when it will likely be consumed. One notion I try to keep in the forefront is that the skills I use in assessment and execution have very little to do with matters of permanence. Emergency messages rarely matter beyond the news cycle. In fact, has anything you’ve ever shared in an email saved a life, or profoundly changed one?

Communicators are ramping up their skills and tools to deal with speed, but are doing so at the possible expense of context. We have all these wonderful strategies for dealing with problems and solutions and message gaps and negative perception — and are missing a very big piece of the picture: who owns the means of distribution? And what is my stake in that?

Selling Air

Mostly lost amid the hubbub over Obama’s speech, or his passport, or March Madness, or any of the other Breaking Headline Events of the Now, was this little piece of news:

Verizon Wireless Wins Large Chunk of 700MHz Spectrum

Verizon Wireless has won a nationwide block of spectrum that could be used to create a wireless data network, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission announced Thursday.

Verizon was the winning bidder in the 22MHz band of spectrum called the C block in the FCC’s 700MHz auction, which concluded Tuesday. The company bid $4.7 billion for the spectrum, which covers nearly all of the United States, while the high bids on the entire 700MHz auction totalled nearly $19.6 billion.

The FCC put so-called open-access provisions on the C block, meaning Verizon must allow outside devices such as mobile handsets from other carriers and must allow users to run outside applications on the network. Verizon originally filed a lawsuit against the FCC’s open-access rules, but dropped out while trade group the CTIA continued with the lawsuit.

Didn’t mean to geek out on everyone, but this is the sort of news that has a major impact on how we operate as communicators.

The Staredown and the Blink

This auction of wavelength was part of a long-running game between the cell carriers and Google. Google had announced a bid of $4.6-billion, and had enough cash to do it. The wireless companies started to get worried about the prospect that Google might get enough bandwidth to start opening up wireless across the country. Add in Google’s penchant for open standards on devices, and the business model was starting to look grim for the current carriers. After all, Google would basically give away handsets for free, lock you into your Google services (like GMail and search and Google Maps) and get money back through its online advertising arm.

Then Verizon stepped in, barely beating Google’s long-announced price. Google stared them down, and Verizon blinked. And Google essentially won the piece it wanted anyway — which was a covenant on the bandwidth that stops the winner from locking out others. You can’t dictate which equipment can work on the spectrum, and you can’t block third-party applications.

The Fallout

For me as a communicator, this is huge news. And I won’t even know exactly why for quite some time. But here are a few guesses:

1. It tells me that the trend toward mobile computing and communications is going to continue. My future strategies need to reflect that.
2. The notion of exclusive networks (walled gardens) may soon be a thing of the past. Open networks that are open to outside programs lead to innovation. That’s good and bad, because that wide-open innovation could lead to even greater splits and bifurcations in the ways in which I send my message.
3. Individual users will be empowered with more choice. Good for development, bad for adoption. The bulk of the people who aren’t on the mobile communications bandwagon aren’t tweakers and hackers. They want things that work. They don’t want things that require decisions, options, thinking, or debugging.

None of this changes what I will do for the rest of the day. Or the week. Or the year. But for those getting buried under the ever-present datalanche, it’s time to broaden out the perspective and look out at the horizon — before we find the continent has moved beneath our feet.

[tags]Ike Pigott, Occam’s RazR, communication, technology[/tags]