Score-keeping in Boston's Fenway Park

Following a weekend when my baseball team eliminated itself from contention for the World Series (and here I prefer the active, responsibility-taking “eliminated itself” versus the passive, we-got-beaten mentality of “was eliminated”), I’m thinking about scoring.

What’s the score in the Anywhere Revolution — the transformation of our world into one that is ubiquitously connected? Here are some milestones I’ve noted in past weeks:

• Score +1 for more Anywhere Devices. I like to look for the appearance of connectivity in new types of consumer and enterprise devices. One I spotted in early holiday advertising this weekend: a Fisher-Price sit-on toy pony for toddlers that can interact wirelessly with the TV.  This is what we expect to see a lot more of: devices that incorporate connectivity not as some bolt-on gimmick, but as a natural way of threading together experiences across multiple devices and activities.
• Score +5 for the FCC’s new stance on expanding U.S. airwaves for wireless networks. The new FCC chairman’s keynote at a big wireless show in San Diego last week made it clear: the regulatory organization will add U.S. airwaves. “Spectrum is the oxygen for mobile broadband networks,” said Genachowski, and promised to accelerate the re-allocation of unused spectrum and free up more spectrum for use in unlicensed applications. I hope it means that startup M2Z Networks might be able to get its free, ad-supported mobile broadband network off the ground despite the lobbyist wrangling from incumbent wireless network operators.

But advances occur amid setbacks. Several I see:

• Economy delays western Europe in reaching the Anywhere Tipping Point. Yankee Group’s Anywhere Index tracks the rate at which the world’s broadband network is expanding. The Anywhere Tipping Point (ATP) for any region is when the number of broadband lines (wired or wireless) match that region’s population. This matters because  when enough people have access, Metcalfe’s Law takes over and exponential change atop the network accelerates. Our forecasts examine this index quarterly; our latest figures suggest that many European countries, well on their way to the ATP in 2008, took a delay of game in 2009 because of the economy. Stay tuned for an update in a few weeks on our latest outlook for Anywhere Economies in 2010.
• French socialism pulls France Telecom back from Anywhere Network transformation. I don’t call Anywhere a revolution for nothing; change of this magnitude is painful. As YG analyst Benoit Felten points out so thoughtfully in his post last week, suicides of FT workers have absorbed the media and the French government, leading to the resignation of an FT executive and the likely slowing of change within FT, as it wrestles with excessive manpower in a new age of networks that can and must be lean and mean to compete.

One week doesn’t make a season. On balance it’s clear the world’s networks continue to expand. With my baseball season over this year, I will concentrate my leftover energy on tracking this progress rather than that of the Boston Red Sox.