From Consumerist –

Sprint lost 148,000 customers after contract-subscriber defections more than offset prepaid gains. Sprint introduced new phones last year, including an exclusive deal to sell the Palm Pre, to keep more customers.

The company said it expects subscriber losses to slow this year. Chief Executive Officer Dan Hesse said he will roll out more fourth-generation devices this year, which give customers high-speed wireless Internet access.

Consumerist is even running a poll to figure out why. I’ll save them some trouble. Its the contract. Sprint’s contract has not kept up with the times. Tho they have MTM plans, their post paid contracts are probably the least consumer friendly of any of the major carriers.

I would also suspect that the network is part of the problem as well. Being in the DFW area, its one of Sprints oldest territories. Yet all these years later they still have dead spots around the DFW airport area as well as other areas of the metroplex.

If you are a Sprint customer, follow the link and take their poll.

Linky.

WalMart and BestBuy entered the used game market via supplier ePlay. Well ePlay ceased operations this week. So GameStop ends up being the only player in the field.

So what’s the problem? First I don’t think the market in used games was as large as people thought. My observation is most people keep their games and typically trade only when they switch console platforms offering the games as an inducement to buy the whole package. The other is presence. GameStop has mind share among the gamers so if you are going to do a trade do it with the store you frequent. Last game trade does not have the velocity of transactions that say a DVD movie does. You might watch a DVD you bought 2-3 times. If significant enough you might keep it. But most likely you will trade it within a month. A game on the other hand may take a month just to get thru all the levels. And those with online linkages will encourage holding onto that game even longer. It could be a good 6 months before someone considers trading it.

Chalk it up to a business paradigm that thought it was X but was not like X at all.

Linky.

… In Hungary? Yeah I know, Ole Tux is just an OS. That is what I thought too. Still do by the way. But in Hungary a political party — Jobbik — has sprung up.:

We are going to implement open standards in the public sector and will promote the spread of open source solutions among the general public and among businesses. Under these directives, government and public sector documents can be stored only, in open document formats, on systems running open standards applications.

We are going to develop open standard interfaces, in order to encourage municipalities, the tax department, the banking sector and public offices to use open source solutions.

We are going to supply government funded and developed applications for municipalities, nation wide, to eliminate parallel and wasteful developments.

When both proprietary and open source software will be available with the equal functionality to accomplish a particular task, we will make the use of open source solutions, mandatory.

We are going to implement open standards in the school system and will introduce open source computing as a subject in schools, under the discipline of computer sciences.

That ladies and gentlemen is the Jobbik party platform. Sound wild? Well I will just direct you to Sweden where the Pirate Party has a foothold in Parliment after raising petitions and funds on the Pirate Bay file sharing suit. They now have over a dozen affiliated Pirate parties in the world. So it would not be far fetched at all.

Linky.

FastCompany has the latest developments on BB’s effort to make itself relevant. Personally I think they miss the mark. –

Perhaps conceived as a one-up response to the unexpectedly popular RedBox movie kiosks, the SD-card rental stations are meant to address some of the age-old problems with DVD rentals–namely that they’re easily damaged, and must be returned. With an SD rental, the user keeps the SD card, though the content contains DRM which sets a date of expiration. (Above, the taxonomy of SD cards; below, a Blockbuster SD kiosk.)

Here be the problem. Do I need to go to a BB store to get the SD of the movie? If I do then that is not an improvement over DVD’s in the convenience factor. I still have to get in my car. The other is, deploy in retail sites? That’s fine but at the rate the RedBox is deploying, BB may not have any opportunities left by the time they get the program rolling. All in all a very slow response to a serious threat to their long term prospects.

My take? BB is toast. Pass the butter and jam.

Linky.

EDGEWATER, Colo. — A man who claimed he was attacked and stabbed in Edgewater Monday night has admitted he stabbed himself because he didn’t want to go to work.

Aaron Siebers, 29, reported the stabbing at about 6:30 p.m. when he walked to his job at Blockbuster Video, 1921 Sheridan Blvd.

Siebers was rushed to St. Anthony Hospital where he received stitches to close his wound.

Meanwhile, officers from Edgewater, Mountain View, Lakewood, Lakeside and Jefferson County began a search for the suspects, who had been described as three skinheads or Hispanic males dressed in black. He told police they tried to rob him and then stabbed him with a knife.

Investigators reviewed surveillance video taken at a nearby business. It failed to show an attack where Siebers claimed it had happened.

Now Retail can be stressful at times. Dealing with customers all day can be a demanding situation. But commit Seppuku so you don’t have to report to work? Wouldn’t quitting been easier??

Linky.

This blog has been saying that voice channels on mobile is a anachronism. With the largest chunk of CPE now being smart that supports both a voice and data channel, the reality is the voice channel is passe. Well it looks like AT&T saw the handwriting –

Bowing to openness pressure from the FCC, AT&T renounced on Tuesday its opposition to internet telephone calls that use the iPhone’s 3G data connection.

In short, Skype on the iPhone is now OK by AT&T, the company said in letters to Apple and the FCC.

AT&T’s change of heart comes just after the FCC controversially announced that it was planning to extend internet openness rules to mobile networks. The wireless carriers are fighting back, arguing that wireless networks are not robust enough to operate without intense network management.

AT&T made no mention of the FCC in its announcement, crediting the change instead to a routine examination of its policies.

Now the result we applaud. Though we are left with a bad after taste considering that AT&T was dragged there kicking and screaming. But that is not a panacea either. Consider that in certain markets like NYC the 3G bandwidth is overburdened and drops are a given with the average iPhone user. So having a Skype call dropped could be annoying. Especially since 1/3 of iPhone data calls are dropped daily.

We are 2 steps forward, one step back. We now have some open light on open access. But we are hindered by the lack of bandwidth coupled with a reduced revenue of the providers to fund the upgrades for more bandwidth.

Linky.

An interesting conjecture piece over at Yahoo finance on the long term survivability of certain firms in this downturned economy. –

Sprint Nextel

Sprint Nextel is bleeding customers, and could lose as many as 4.4 million net post-paid subscribers this year.

This is a huge problem when you have large amounts of maturing debt over the next few years.

A recent Deutsche Telekom acquisition rumor offered some hope, but that appears to have faded. Facing a difficult road ahead on its own, the company better keep its lawyers on speed-dial.

MC/EV=41%

What more can be said? They have had a customer retention problem practically since the day they opened their doors. Issues with billing that date back to the days when they were a long line company in the ’90’s. Customer service that has been spotty. Store designs that do anything but assist the customer.

A Sprint failure would not be too bad a situation from the consumer point of view in the short term. Long term prices will rise as its on less competitor in the fold. With only AT&T and Verizon in the mix the market would be at their mercy. Whither the FCC if that occurs?

CBS

Weak advertising and falling license fees have sent CBS’s earnings off a cliff in 2009.

If they remain depressed for too long, the company could have trouble refinancing $3.2 billion of debt coming due over the next five years.

It will really come down to whether or not CBS’s earnings collapse is merely cyclical, or the result of structural trend whereby traditional TV is dying.

As a business blog, we can’t help but feel partly guilty here.

MC/EV=55%

Interesting in two aspects. One, that CBS has taken such a long hard slog to the bottom when it did not have to. Two, that ABC must not be far behind though its revenues look better than CBS.

The failure of CBS (or NYT for that matter) would send shock waves thru the media industry. The followon action would be that investors will look harder at the debt structures of all media groups leading to a small rash of secondary defaults.

Advanced Micro Devices

When will AMD actually make money again? The question is becoming more important by the day since it carries over $5 billion in long-term debt.

After losing almost $3 billion from 2007 – 2008, analysts expect the company to lose more money in 2009 and 2010.

While the shares rallied from their February $2 low, they still appear stuck in a long-term down trend from $40 highs way back in 2006.

MC/EV=55%

It is apparent that the author does not know this company’s history very well. AMD has always been a up then down revenue producer. Right now they are in another funk cycle.

From a technical perspective anybody who is serious about 64bit computing is over half as likely to be using AMD even though Intel has 64bit chip designs. AMD got out there first and customer have stuck to them. The other aspect is AMD keeps Intel on their toes. There have been three cycles in the last 20 years where AMD has caught Intel napping on the technology front. It could happen again.

Couple of notes. This article is not intended as stock advise. Anyone doing so, does so at their own risk. Use of MC/EV scoring is a natty hammer for scoring defaults. Much better is the ‘Z’ score. But numbers for Z scoring are sometimes not public knowledge.

Linky

Well you don’t have to as long as you don’t mind paying a minimal fee for the privilege. The product is call 3jam and is very similar to GV in features —

Google Voice has been making a lot of headlines lately, but not for the reasons you’d hope. The service is already running into frustrating opposition from Apple and possibly AT&T (depending on who you believe). Today, it’s getting opposition of a different kind: 3jam, a company that until now has primarily offered services that revolve around SMS messaging, is expanding to offer telephony services that will be going head to head against Google Voice.

3jam offers many of the same core features offered by Google Voice, including the ability to have one phone number ring multiple phones, as well as an online interface for managing voicemail and text messages, though there are some more advanced features that it lacks (more on that later). But it does have a few features that Google Voice doesn’t, like the ability to receive calls on Skype, AOL, and Yahoo Messenger (why waste minutes when you’re sitting in front your your computer anyway?)

Considering the nature of the service I don’t think GV will remain free on certain aspects forever either. So if you have to have it NOW then consider this alternative.

Linky.

All I can say is just read the article. Realize that there are whole swaths of endeavor in this country in the same boat. Journalism as a content provider is the most vulnerable however. That is why Open Source Journalism will ultimately win out.

Britain that glimmering island that in many ways is the birthplace of both man’s political aspirations and freedom from want is also in many cases the test case for mobile digital. Britain is somewhere around 3-5 years ahead of the US. Not in technology, but in how to deploy, market it and have politicians screw it all up. –

But wait a minute - why would this be? Are telecoms companies salting away billions of pounds of profits in a great offshore lair, somewhere? Or are they merely reflecting the market’s demand for data? Plain vanilla 2G is enough to make a phone call, and that’s everywhere.

If the telcos are hiding anything, it’s the level of their debt. They’re broke, and running on empty (hence the nonstop rounds of refinancing), which explains their renewed focus on mature markets where they can squeeze higher revenues by diminishing competition. The UK is reckoned to be a full 10 per cent less profitable than other European countries, because retailers such as Carphone Warehouse are in the chain, and because of all this pesky competition. It’s true that the 3G auctions didn’t help, either, sucking £20bn into Brown’s piggy bank, and onto quangos like, well… Ofcom.

Which is in a sense reflected in the current apathy of the FCC, irrespective of pending ‘investigations’. But there is more —

What we now know, thanks to the 3G map, is just how expensive building out a broadband infrastructure will really be. What it shows us is that the definition of “rural” is much broader than we supposed. An analysis conducted for the Broadband Stakeholder Group last year put the cost of rolling out fibre to every home at almost £30 billion.

During the media orgy of coverage around Carter’s Digital Britain report two weeks ago, I only heard one journalist ask the obvious question: why tax all of us for something that 70 per cent of people don’t want. That was Jeremy Paxman on the BBC’s Newsnight, apparently waking up from a deep slumber.

But it was a lone voice, and I didn’t hear anyone - not a single one - go any deeper and follow this to its logical consequence. Which is that maybe people aren’t stupid, as the political and media classes suppose, and many find what’s on offer from the internet somewhat wanting. Maybe it’s not offering compelling services.

The US is ramping for a similar head long rush to round one of a universal service offering with $4Bn in taxes to be doled out. Its a known fact that even if available some 30% will just refused to sign up as broadband is NOT critical to their everyday life. What’s worse is that I have yet to hear any voice other than ourselves pose the question — “why tax all of us for something that 70 per cent of people don’t want?” Why indeed?

What Britain is experiencing is like a canary in a coal mine for the US. We face similar questions and much larger expanse of ‘white space’ in the 3G map than they. For the US it is more problematic. We have 10x their real estate and a carrier base loathe to leave the urban centers as they know that is where the profits are.

Chirp!

Read the whole article here.