3 & Wind merger + more things

2 minutes estimated reading time

Consolidation in Italy as Wind, 3 ink €21.8bn merger | TotalTelecom – I I hope that it won’t affect 3 UK roaming? I wouldn’t be surprised if 3 did similar deals in other mature European markets like the UK. Li Ka Shing is no one’s fool and wireless is mature and capital intensive. More wireless related posts here.

Fancy 10 Gbps home broadband? Broadcom’s built the guts of it | The Register – fibre dreams?

Less Money, Mo’ Music & Lots of Problems: A Look at the Music Biz | REDEF – interesting business analysis of the music industry

Apple denies plan to sell mobile services directly to consumers | Reuters – interesting that they went to the trouble of denying it. It might make sense for them to have a corporate MVNO for their staff

Nikkei report paints a disturbing picture of Konami | SiliconAngle – PR trainwreck

The Unemployable Programmer – a nice counterpoint to the ‘get everyone programming’ meme

Walt Disney Animation Studios | Hyperion technology – interesting write-up of their Hyperion render engine

Apple is testing a Siri voicemail transcription service – Business Insider – will it work any better than SpinVox?

brandchannel: Every Product Placement in ‘Mission: Impossible—Rogue Nation’ – love the early press release quoted and remember getting to site in college

FBI Struggling With Cybersecurity Because of Shit Pay and Drug Tests – both of which says a lot about the war on drugs and government getting tech

Official Google Blog: Everything in its right place – downsizing of Google+. The move to break it up is viewed by many as a defeat, it also makes sense when one thinks of app constellations, though I cannot help think of Brad Garlinghouse’s famous ‘peanut butter manifesto’ at Yahoo! nine years earlier. Though that was a blatant grab for political power, it resonates with some of what seems to be happening at Google in terms of retrenchment

Why the fear over ubiquitous data encryption is overblown – The Washington Post – interesting op ed by a former head of the NSA, a former secretary of homeland security and a former US defence secretary challenging the intelligence industrial complex demands for weaker encryption and more surveillance legislation