WSJ writes:

Cellular companies have been hampered by their inexperience as middlemen between consumers and producers of music, videos and other content. Their high-speed networks can't yet guarantee constant connections. And equipment is expensive. Thus far, less than 1% of U.S. cellphone users have shelled out hundreds of dollars for phones fancy enough to access the most advanced entertainment.

What's more, the price of the content provided by cellular companies remains steep. Sprint charges $2.50 to deliver a song to a handset, and Verizon Wireless charges $1.99. Apple Computer Inc.'s iTunes Music Store charges only 99 cents, and its songs can be downloaded by computer to some Cingular Wireless cellphones, netting Cingular nothing. Sprint says customers are willing to pay more to be able to download songs anywhere.

The Economist writes about PCCW's trailblazing IPTV service in Hong Kong.

PCCW has, in the past couple of years, done something that fixed-line telecoms firms across the world hope to do in the near future. It launched a television service over broadband phone lines, called Now Broadband TV, that has been a huge commercial success. It could soon dethrone the local cable-TV firm as the dominant provider of pay-TV services. It is also the largest television-over-broadband deployment in the world. As they worry about the encroachment of new competitors on to their turf and search for new sources of revenue, telecoms operators the world over hope to follow Now's example.
...
Now also took the unusual step of developing its own set-top box, based on a stripped-down DVD player and produced very cheaply in China. This enabled it to begin its service without waiting for industry standards to emerge. It offered the box free of charge to broadband customers, 93% of whom now take the TV service as well. As its subscriber base grew—it exceeds 500,000, or more than 40% of the market—Now was able to poach valuable content, such as sports rights and film channels, from rival pay-TV operators. It recently launched a films-on-demand service, and on March 20th its own Chinese-language business channel.

The New York Times writes:

By 2007, networked robots that, say, relay messages to parents, teach children English and sing and dance for them when they are bored, are scheduled to enter mass production. Outside the home, they are expected to guide customers at post offices or patrol public areas, searching for intruders and transmitting images to monitoring centers.

If all goes according to plan, robots will be in every South Korean household between 2015 and 2020. That is the prediction, at least, of the Ministry of Information and Communication, which has grouped more than 30 companies, as well as 1,000 scientists from universities and research institutes, under its wing. Some want to move even faster.

Om Malik writes about a new virtual world:

Hive 7 is just the first example of the next generation web possibilities. It was nearly two years ago when I met the Linden Labs founder Philip Rosedale and understood his vision of the virtual spaces. For nearly half its life, Linden was kept going by angels, and before it got the money from professional investors.

I think, Hive7 is in the same place. It will be sometime before the world catches on to its true potential. Skibinsky says that his big breakthrough was in 2004, when he realized that “instead of building a closed online game it’s possible to do the reverse.” In other words, he had an epiphany that web is the ultimate API. He put together a virtual universe which has rooms where folks can meet, meet, chat, exchange resources and items. What got me excited about Hive7 was that it allows anyone to customize the whole experience. You can take the code, and tweak it.

Looking at what Hive7 has built, I have just realized that the web has now gone 3D. Virtual worlds have a new meaning, and collaboration just got easier.

Veer Bothra has put together a profile of the Bharti-Airtel creator, and offers the following quotes:

Mittal’s views on the new opportunties in India.

1. Software, ITES and Telecommunications is a ‘done deal’.
2. Hospitality, Healthcare and tourism will be the next big waves.
3. 630 million people in India are of working age, projected to go up to 837 million by 2010 making India a continent of consumers in six years.
4. India had a huge lead in the manufacturing sector but suddenly, in the last 20 years, China chipped in this area and we lost.
5. “I personally believe India’s time has come".

Mittal quotes Gandhiji: “those who try hard with lot of passion, eventually win".

The current search engines have a low relevance when it comes to searching for India-specific content because of their inability to identify “India-only” websites. Since most Indian sites tend to have a .com suffix, are in English and are typically hosted on US servers, none of the standard three parameters to identify India-centric content (domain, language and hosting location) work well. As such, there is an opportunity to build an India-centric search engine provided it can have the right basis set.

To build the basis set, one approach followed would be as follows: