Hedgehogging

Here’s what got the edit staff fired up this week:

• Did you see RCR Reporter Colin Gibbs’ story about Sprint Nextel selling ad space on its mobile Web service? Like it promised, Sprint Nextel is transforming itself from a wireless carrier and into a multimedia content company. But now we’re curious: Will Cingular be able to advertise on Sprint Nextel’s deck?
• Looks like Qwest outranked Sprint Nextel on the latest J.D. Powers network-quality survey, even though Qwest is using Sprint Nextel’s network to offer service. This makes us wonder how reliable these surveys really are. In related news, we just conducted a survey of ourselves about outsevles, and it turns out we’re awesome!
• News Corp. announced it is going to take a stake in VeriSign’s Jamba wireless business. Seems that News’ Mobizzo effort isn’t enough, and they need more help selling ringtones and graphics for “Family Guy.” Our only hope is that this agreement between News and VeriSign results in more “Simpsons” content, because if you haven’t guessed it already, our world view begins and ends with Homer. “Why you little?!”
• Paris Hilton, P. Diddy, Russell Simmons. The best entertainment at the CTIA I.T. show was actually the panel that followed Hilton’s lame effort. Sky Dayton, Trip Hawkins and Dan Schulman are visionaries?and pretty witty too. Let’s take a collective lesson from this and not hire any more “personalities” outside the industry. Unless, of course, someone like John Mayer comes in to sing. Get it? Sing. Not talk wireless. Not tell us he’s an MVNO like P. Diddy did (cuz he’s not). Sing.
• Looks like the chairman of Hewlett-Packard (who is a woman but is still called “chairman”) is going to step down because of the company’s phone-records scandal. The scandal involves HP tapping into journalists’ phone records to find out where HP’s leaks are coming from. We sure hope all you corporate types out there aren’t tapping into our phone records ? because there is absolutely nothing interesting in there.
• New York City, the greatest city in the world, is going to use IPWireless’ technology to build a $500 million network for police, firefighters and other public-safety agencies. Perhaps New York officials know something that Sprint Nextel does not, since Sprint Nextel chose WiMAX over IPWireless’ UMTS TD-CDMA for its 2.5 GHz network?
• Starwave Mobile has content-licensing deals with Sony BMG for singer Beyonce and with Universal Mobile Entertainment for the film “Scarface.” I wonder if Starwave will combine those two licenses into some kind of Beyonce/”Scarface” game. The possibilities are limitless.
• At CTIA I.T., Muscleman Arnold Schwarzenegger (who is also the most powerful elected official in California) talked about how cell phones today are similar to the high-tech gadgets his character used in the 1980s movie “Total Recall.” What’s also interesting is that Mr. Schwarzenegger just signed a bill that would ban driving and talking on a cell phone throughout the state of California. I wonder if it was also illegal to talk and drive on the Martian outpost in “Total Recall?”