FCC knocks telcos' secret plan to divide and bill the web: "The story reveals that large phone companies have been threatening to charge the likes of Google and Vonage for "high-quality delivery of music, movies and the like over their telecommunications networks.""

Interesting. Are the economics of running a wireless network different enough from those of running a wired network to permit this sort of thing? And does this indicate a telecomms industry move towards, not away, from walled gardens?

Ignoring what might be best for Internet incumbents... what's best for customers here? This reminds me of John Strands thoughts at World Telemedia, that in order to present content to customers at a single, easily-understood price points (as opposed to separate transaction plus obscure traffic charges), content providers should be bulk-buying bandwidth at discounted rates and taking on the delivery charges - just as they do for SMS today.

Helen has a good post on participation TV as part of the mobile marketing mix: "And at last, this year, we’re beginning to see more interesting ways of interacting with consumers via mobile leveraging the popularity of key TV shows. "

Oh yes. I'm keeping fingers crossed that I'll be able to talk about something we're doing in this area soon. In many ways mobile makes a better tool for interacting with TV than the "red button":

• It's personal, not social - so many individuals can interact at the same time (and hey, for many TV is a social activity);
• There's a billing mechanism built in (as there is in some, but not all, iTV infrastructures);
• It's independent of the whole TV value chain; you don't need to butter up Sky, NTL, etc. to add an interactive element to your TV property if you do it via mobile;
• It lets viewers engage with a programme even when they're not in front of the TV;
• It lets players interact in many ways; sending text triggers, via "remote control" Java MIDlets, sending in photos, video... you name it;

Of course there are problems in enabling this kind of interactivity (how do you scale up web services to handle a massive volume of simultaneous users in a restricted timeframe?) but they aren't insurmountable.

But I *would* say all that, wouldn't I... ;)

2 dashboard widgets I can actually imagine myself using! This one for Brighton buses, and this one for train times...

Adverts 'increase youth drinking': "It said several studies had found an association between drinking and advertising but none had been able to establish whether there was a causal link."

So, formal studies aren't able to conclude whether advertising works or not?

Oops. It's "disagree with Ajit" week here at tomhume.org. When he posts that "Not a lot of people are actually browsing the mobile internet. Although WAP usage shows phenomenal growth, these figures include the use of WAP as a transport mechanism - typically for downloading content. In other words, every time you download a ringtone, you implicitly create a WAP page impression. I suspect the real figures used by consumers to actually browse the mobile internet are very low."

I'd like to see some evidence that figures for browsing the mobile internet are low. With the MDA noting an average daily total of 58.9m WAP page impressions in the UK then either everyone in the UK is downloading a ringtone every day, or something else is artifically inflating these figures.

(Nothing personal Ajit ;))