Monday miscellany

Back in the saddle following two weeks of fascinating conferences - Telco 2.0 and MMF. Lots of messages to absorb and new people to follow up with. Still more to come, however, with OFCOM this week, TEN's NGA event next Tuesday (I'm the chairman for the day, including an interview with Francesco Caio), and Intellect's "Capitalising on Convergence" event (I'm on a panel with Cisco and Nortel) next Thursday [Update - the Intellect event has been cancelled due to market turbulence]. 

True to the "Winter of Our Discontent" zeitgeist, my inbox is full of complaints this Monday:

• An Irish Palladium Club founder member alerts me to the "Paddy Tax" controversy brewing around Vodafone Ireland. I don't have the time, but it would be interesting to see if this is a pattern in Vodafone's other "peripheral" markets in Europe, to pad margin and subsidize aggression in the core businesses.
• In Germany, my friends at fiber startup UnserNetz have grasped the key to assured funding - by declaring themselves a bank or auto company! It's a bittersweet piece of irony, because the sad truth is that the crisis is so dire, societies around the world will almost certainly forego forward-looking infrastructure investment in preference for bailing out failure, inefficiency and excess - just in the name of stability... again... Sad, because we know fiber can be profitable as well as a fulcrum to economic development.

Eirik Solheim from NRK, whom I had the pleasure of meeting at the MMF, has posted some very nice photos of the event, as well as a couple of highlights on video. Elsewhere, I see that YouTube is already well-populated with videos from the event also. 

I also see that Avinash Kaushik from Google has done an extensive post covering the content of his presentation at MMF, as well as much more. "Experiment or die" - a message not intended for telcos, but probably no less relevant.