Personally, I don’t get it – or use it, for that matter – but wireless pornography is expected to be a "hot" market over the next five years. Strategy Analytics now expects spending on pornography will rise to $5-billion by 2010 from $400 million in 2004. This is an upgrade from an earlier forecast of $1-billion as the research firm said adult entertainment businesses are activity developing services to meet consumer demand. Analyst Nitesh Patel said wireless porn will account for 5% of total spending on mobile content service within five years.
Let’s be honest, no one should be surprised by the pornography business. While I want to reiterate my innocence when it comes to the subject, the pornography industry has consistently been on the bleeding edge for using new technology. Its track record includes VCRs, e-commerce, CDs and the Web. It would be a big mistake to under-estimate how much consumers spend on pornography and how they are willing to get it.

NTP Inc.'s success in extracting US$450-million from Research in Motion has several interesting angles -- highlighted perhaps by how the three-year legal dispute fits into a larger trend involving the pro-active exploitation of patents and intellectual property.
While the focus on NTP has obviously been its wireless technology patents, there has been little attention paid to the company's ownership structure, which consists of 23 investors. This group, created in 1992 to license technology invented by Thomas Campana Jr., has been supporting/financing NTP's legal fight against RIM in the hope NTP would eventually prevail.
The big question is what NTP will ...   more »

A new survey by Ipsos-Insight, which seems to love doing studies on the Web, suggests the number of wireless Internet users climbed 29% in 2004. The biggest gains happened in the U.S. and Japan where 15 million and 11.6 million new wireless Internet users appeared. If the survey is accurate, it should be a huge boost to the Wi-fi and Wi-Max markets, which are still struggling to establish footholds. So far, the most "excitement" has been hot spots such as coffee shops but this isn't business as much as marketing - at least until prices become more reasonable. For the timing being, the most excitment in wireless Internet access may be happening within the house as people set up home networks. One person who should be pleased with the Ipsos survey is Craig McCaw, who plans to build a wireless broadband network in 100 U.S. cities. McCaw has raised more than US$300 million but he still needs billions of dollars to complete his latest project. In Canada, wireless broadband may be stalled until the ownership structure of Inukshuk Internet Inc., which now includes arch-rivals Rogers Communications Inc. and Bell Canada, is resolved.