Broadband Bits, Sunday Edition

I am still feeling quite under the weather, but here are some links I wanted to share with you.

• You know blogging is over when press releases are issued to announce the launch of a blog.
• 4g versus 4G: Yet another standards war in the making.
• 35 including T-Mobile and Verizon to bid for wireless spectrum as FCC gets the auction going on January 26.
• Future of Internet according to ….
• The Future Operating System
• PhoneGaim takes on Skype. Michael Robertson is at it again… pushing open standards!
• ZWave versus ZigBee: ZWave has been in the market for 3 years and has 100 OEMs and works on a proprietary platform that can gurantee interoperability and works on a different frequency than WLAN (Zigbee experiences significant packet loss with a WIFI network present). (Link Martin Tobias)
• IBiquity versus Satellite Radio… late the radio wars begin.
• Prisoners of Context: Software is dead some say. Not Venky who theorizes that “the new opportunity is exactly to sell and make software in a manner that has shorter sales cycles, very fast implementation time-lines, easy to upgrade and easy to maintain software, and a small amount of services.” 
• Comcast to boost speeds: Comcast is turning the heat on DSL by boosting its download speeds to about 4 megabits per second, up from 3 megabits per second at present. Upstream speeds are also going to increase by 128 kbps.
• James Enck: The best way to play telecom themes in 2005 may actually be through ancillary sectors, and Media may be a case in point.
• Newsweek has discovered VoIP and Jeff Pulver.
• Doc Searls: At CES I saw fear — of Apple — in the eyes of Microsoft “partners” signed up with PlayForSure. Hell, Microsoft’s looks open next to Apple’s iTunes/iPod system. And remember too that Apple designed, and will continue to redesign, the iPod as a hardware extension of the iTunes software/retail system. Please there is an effort to get an IPod killer off the ground.
• Nailed: Walter Piecyk drew attention as an analyst for making the rosiest tech stock prediction of all: a $1,000-per-share price target for Qualcomm. But that was not why he got into trouble with NASD. He shorted RF Micro Devices, and now is facing the music for it.