How France’s Free will reinvent mobile

I’m a huge fan of how France’s “Free” has been revolutionizing the french telecommunication market in the past decade. An article I wrote about them was published on Ynet back in 2006. Now they’re also getting into mobile.

Gigaom

Updated: Xavier Niel, the maverick founder of Iliad, the company behind Free.fr broadband service, is about to redefine the mobile landscape, perhaps as early as tomorrow, when he launches the much-talked about Free Mobile. In doing so, he will redefine what the idea of a carrier in the 21st century is, thanks to a radical new approach. Utilizing a blend of Wi-Fi, HSPA+ 3G, femtocells and its all-fiber backbone, Free will offer unlimited voice, texting and data over the mobile networks; just bring your own iPhone(s aapl). But before I get into the details of his new company, let me back up and tell you about Iliad and Free.fr.

Set it Free.fr

In Dec. 2007, while attending Le Web in Paris, I snuck out to visit Niel, the man behind Iliad, a Paris-based phone service that owned many entities including its most well-known offering: Free.fr, a broadband service…

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We Come to Expel the Darkness

We come to expel the darkness
In our hands is light and fire
Each one of us is a small light
Together we’re mighty bright

Away you darkness, Away the black
Run away from the light

This is the first verse of the israeli folk Hannuka song “באנו חושך לגרש”.

It’s also the name of the project my brother Kobi and singer songwriter Tamar Eisenman launched to try to raise a voice against obscurantism and women discrimination which recently surfaced in Israel, as women women were asked to move the back of a bus in Jerusalem, or forbidden to sing in official events in the army as to not upset religious soldiers.

Tamar and Kobi asked women to film themselves singing that first verse, and they’re collecting all those videos in a YouTube account.

Here are a few performances that I really liked:

Soluto’s Anti-Frustration Software is Brilliant

Soluto recently launched a private beta of their new web based PC “anti-frustration” software, and it’s brilliant.

The dashboard is simply gorgeous and filled with useful information and action items – here are a few screenshots:

General overview
Automatically update and or install new apps (from Ninite)
Security and Protecting Info
Hardware info – clicking on the little icons at the bottom reveal more details for the devices
Internet info
Optimize computer start-up and background running apps

After using it today to optimize my Mom’s laptop, I’m going to get the PC version installed in all my relatives computers. I wonder how useful the upcoming Mac version is going to be.

Enough with the non-existing digital frontiers: Louis CK experiment a tremendous success

“I have a profit around $200,000 (after taxes $75.58)”

https://buy.louisck.net/statement

Louis CK is selling a professionally produced show for $5 with no DRM or regional restrictions. Success.

I steal content when I’m not allowed to buy it legally. If I can, I make the effort to connect through a proxy to buy some music, or change the country setting of my phone to buy an app, but if it takes more than 5 minutes to work around some stupid rules, I’ll just get the torrent.

This experiment is yet another example of how “Piracy” is about convenience, not price or moral values or whatever media execs say it is.

Sell me you stuff, with no stupid rules. I’ll buy it.

How Do People Use Apple TV?

John Gruber:

Only 30 percent? That seems crazy to me. 70 percent of Apple TV owners don’t rent any movies or TV shows?

From How Do People Use Apple TV?.

Well, in most countries movies and TV shows aren’t even available in iTunes. We (I) just use the AppleTV to run XBMC, my 2nd favorite open source project.

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