"m-commerce," R.I.P.

There's an entry at VentureBlog that looks at why the non-phenomenon formerly known as "m-commerce" was a total non-starter in the USA.
The author, Kevin Laws, theorizes that the US carriers were too short-sighted and control-crazed to see how they could make money by letting people buy stuff using mobile phones, and therefore strangled it.
We have a theory of our own, as indicated in our super high-profile buzzkiller column's take on that almost-burgeoning field in the former magazine known as [inside] back in '00: it's a stupid name for a bad idea put forth by a terrible industry (the US mobile phone industry, that is - the rest of the world seems to somehow have a much better grasp of how to do mobile-phone business).
The other possibility, of course, is that all those captains of industry were [inside] subscribers, saw our mockery of the whole m-commerce notion, and immediately decreed that all m-commerce initiatives be scuttled.

Hyphen, God of Mirage

DuCharmed, we're sure

From: "bob_at_snee.com"
Date: Mon Apr 5, 2004 1:04:18 PM US/Pacific
To: teeth_at_buzzkiller.net
Subject: world-class value-added hyphenation
Reply-To: bob_at_snee.com

See this press release:
http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/altavista/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_
view&newsId=20040329005792&newsLang=en

Whoever wrote it did some did world-class, high-quality, content-centric, enterprise-class, mission-critical, leading-edge, world-leading, value-added work.

I swear, every one of those is actually used in the press release--some more than once. (As a game, find which one is used more than once *in the same paragraph*.)

stay vigilant,
Bob DuCharme
www.snee.com/bob

[ed. note: we sense an up-welling of non-sense as the technology start-up scene begins to stir again with new money. We welcome it.]