LATAM Telecom

From one of my favorite techie blogs at Salon.com , Farhad Manjoo today posted about Google working together with the city of San Francisco to provide free voice mail to to the city's homeless: "Bless Google for doing something amazing: The company is handing out phone numbers and voice-mail boxes to every homeless person in San Francisco. Folks can sign up for the numbers at shelters across the city. The numbers will be local and personal -- i.e., each person will get a unique 415-area code number that will never expire. The number will ring a voice-mail box that will play a personalized greeting; homeless people can check their messages by dialing in from any phone." Great initiative by Google and SF mayor Gavin Newsom, that others can and should emulate! This idea should be adopted by other cities, surely Verizon and others will be happy to participate in similar initiatives. In Latin America, this reminds me of an initiative by Carlos Slim's TELMEX, the fixed line...

The iPhone has shaken the industry in a way that only an outsider could do. Apple broke all the rules and moved swiftly into the handset business with the most successful device ever -or at least the most talked about; according to Google, the iPhone Was The Most-Searched Item In 2007. But it's not only the technology and the user interface that are extremely innovative in the iPhone. The terms of the agreement, in which Apple is getting revenue from iPhone sales, as well as a portion of the monthly fees from AT&T's iPhone data plans is a first in the industry. The iPhone has already landed in North America and Europe, and Asia is the next market on Steve Jobs' agenda. Apple has been reported to be in talks with China Mobile, the biggest operator on the market ( source ), and two Japanese companies: Softbank Corp (currently number 3 on the market) and NTT DoCoMo ( source from a Wall Street Journal report ). Recent reports indicate that Apple's revenue scheme has l...