Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

An article in the WSJ today, which they have chosen to make inaccessible to bloggers, reports that Google is talking to Verizon and Sprint about using the Google phone operating system. Money makes such strange bedfellows!

Do I care just because I am a Google fanboy? Not exactly, although that does amp up my excitement. With an open platform for development for mobiles, plus Google's conquest of Jaiku for its mobile/presence capabilities — I am a big fan of Jyri Engestrom, the founder of Jaiku, a smart and innovative person devoted to the Net's common good — this could be the disruption that turns mobile phones from annoying bricks of bad reception into a platform for apps that can assume constant presence and that know where we are and who our friends are. It could make FaceBook look like CompuServ.

Or, of course, the rumors could be wrong, the implementation could suck, the lawyers and lawmakers could screw it up, or it could fail in the market. But if ever a market was ripe for disruption — an archaic system bottling up the power of having everyone present in your pocket — it's the mobile market.