Playing with expectations can be a double edged sword for a new technology as WiMAX. An aggressive development plan encourages investors, but not fulfilling it can dishearten them and lead them to abandon many projects.

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It seems like Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft are condemned to compete against each forever. In the war to win over consumers by offering the best search engine in web pages, the best e-mail service or the most efficient  desktop search, a new battlefield must be added: an Internet video search engine.
Google has just launched its video search engine that so far is capable of tracking down content and images on eight US television channels, including ABC, NBC and Fox News. The beta version of this new search service is now available and indexes the broadcasts of those channels. The results show a frozen image of the broadcast with a caption. For now, the user cannot see the video clip but the company says “the next step is playing the video”.
Yahoo! has also been trying out a similar new tool that enables users to look for video clips on the Internet in the same way they would look for web pages and images. In fact, its beta version is already available as a bookmark on its main search page (so far it is not included in the Spanish version). Microsoft, not to be outdone, is planning to launch its own service at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) that will allow Media Center PC users to connect to the Internet through their PCs or interactive televisions to search for content-on-demand or video files available with broadband.
Actually, all the big Internet players were expected to take part in this business as audiovisual content is still something the Internet has to master. Thanks to the convergence of devices and the spread of broadband, the Internet is maturing as a televised entertainment platform. Moreover, the costs of creating, storing and distributing video have fallen considerable. Video search engines are opening a new market that everyone wants to corner, given that they will be the key to moving between all the audiovisual content that is to come, whether that be by broadband, cable or television.

Articles in The New York Times (Free Registry Required) and News.com
News in CNN and News.com

BSC could put an end to 120 years of independence at AT&T, the legendary North American operator founded by Alexander Graham Bell (the very person that invented the telephone). According to information that appeared in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, BSC may well offer between 15,000 and 16,000 million dollars to take over AT&T. The operation would mean, apart from the disappearance of a major telecommunications icon, the creation of the largest company in North America per revenue (although not per stock market value, where Verizon is still the leader).
For years, AT&T has been an international telecommunications reference and a model to follow for all the telephone operators. This is also true for its regional subsidiaries, called Baby Bells, which arose from the break-up of the monopoly in 1984. BSC is one such Baby Bell (BellSouth) that has grown and is now bidding for AT&T. This is something like the hunted becoming the hunter, except for the fact that AT&T is not what it used to be. Although it continues to control two key services, big corporations and the international network, its portfolio of clients has dwindled and the sale of its mobile business was not able to get it through hard times. Even though there is no hard evidence, the fact is that the markets have reacted by punishing BSC and revaluing AT&T’s shares.

News in News.com and PCWorld
Articles in Financial Times (Payment Service), New York Times (Free Registry Required) and BusinessWeek

The 2005 Davos Forum was centered on the fight against extreme poverty and was attended by some well known stars like Angelina Jolie, Richard Gere and Bono. However, although Bill Gates celebrated the fact that this year there was no session devoted to the role the new technologies can play in the transformation of the world, the World Economic Forum did not forget about technology altogether. Apart from the founder of Microsoft, other personalities of note in attendance were Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt and Hewlett-Packard’s President, Carly Fiorina.
But the greatest defender of the capacity of technology to improve the quality of life and eliminate the economic barriers of developing countries was the guru Nicholas Negroponte.
Negroponte displayed an economical portable computer that, at a cost of 100 dollars, will help to eradicate the present digital divide that exists between developing and industrialised countries. The aim of this MIT professor is to convince the Ministers of Education of countries like China to replace text books with portable computers.
Negroponte’s own experience of giving out portable computers to children in rural areas of Cambodia convinced him that low cost devices can make a fundamental difference when this action becomes widespread. “In Cambodia” explained the guru, “the first English word to be uttered by those children is Google”.

News in Red Herring
Articles in New York Times (Free Registry Required) and Business Week

By Tomás Crespo, e-business Center PwC&IESE collaborator
Although the blogs started out as a pastime, they are quickly becoming a business and indeed have given rise to the profession of blogger. Most big enterprises have webpages to collect messages, but is this a tool of the future?

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The EBCenter is organizing its fourth e-business event which will be held in Barcelona next April. The meeting will bring together recognized experts in the field and relevant company representatives here in Spain. If you wish to sponsor this event, please contact Gemma Golobardes.