RIM has made a number of failed attempts to reinvent itself and inject new energy into the company ��think: BlackBerry Torch, BlackBerry PlayBook, BlackBerry 7 OS � as it works to compete against the iPhone and Android handsets, to no avail. Still, says Reuters, “RIM’s board wants co-chief executives Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie to focus on trying to turn around the business through the launch of new phones, better use of assets such as BlackBerry Messaging and restructuring, two sources said.”

Lazaridis and Balsillie have resisted at least one request from an investor that requested the pair discontinue sharing the CEO position, a move Balsillie has said would be as meaningless as reprinting their business cards (CP: BlackBerry fallout: Does RIM really have a plan?).

Shareholder Jaguar Financial Corp has called for a sale of RIM, as a whole or parts, according to the report, and sources said there’s talk of RIM needing a “deeper bench” of executives and being distracted by listening to too many ideas from “investment bankers, strategic parties and private equity firms.”

Is the board really so sure Lazaridis and Balsillie can (for real this time!) turn things around, or are they nervous about the price it would fetch?

A Wall Street technology investment banking head told Reuters: “It is hard to find a value that makes sense with a falling knife.”

The company gives competitive carriers an alternative to using tandem voice service switches operated by the former Bell companies. In that role, it has competed against least-cost routers who no doubt are considerably less happy now that the FCC has cracked down on phantom traffic and other methods of avoiding the payment of access charges to terminating carriers�practices essential to some least-cost routers’ low costs.

�A lot of the low-cost router guys were accomplishing extremely low rates due to arbitrage,� said Neutral Tandem CEO Ed Evans on a conference call today with press and analysts.

With many arbitrage opportunities now outlawed, �we will be the least cost network based on the breadth of the network,� explained Surendra Saboo, chief operating officer for Neutral Tandem. The new rules �will be beneficial to us in competing for services in the least-cost route tables,� Saboo said.

Overall, Evans said, �there isn’t a significant downside� for Neutral Tandem as a result of the new rules�and in addition to winning more business with existing products, Evans said the company also sees an opportunity to get into new products and services.

Prior to the CAF order, there undoubtedly was a strong temptation for companies like Neutral Tandem to join competitors in what then were merely questionable tactics such as stripping certain information out of call detail records. Indeed some companies may have engaged in such tactics knowing full well that the business built around them might eventually come to an end, but that there would probably be no retroactive penalty for doing so. In other words to take the attitude that it was a lot of fun while it lasted.

Judging by the strong presence from the investment community on today’s call, there now seems to be a sort of shakedown occurring, with investors seeking to separate the companies that took the high ground from those that did not.

Motorola is one of the last Android-using holdouts to resist paying Microsoft royalties for the OS, which includes capabilities for which Microsoft apparently holds some of the patents. HTC pays Microsoft $5 for each Android phone it activates, and Samsung is believed to pay upward of that (CP: Samsung joins HTC in paying Microsoft for Android).

Motorola general counsel Scott Offer said in a statement that Motorola is “very pleased” with the announcement, and that the determination “may provide clarity on the definition of the Microsoft 566 patent for which a violation was found and will help us avoid infringement of this patent in the U.S. market.�

He added that Microsoft is currently infringing on Motorola’s patent portfolio (soon to become Google’s patent portfolio) and that the ITC is expected to rule on the case on April 20.

“Motorola Mobility remains confident in its position and will continue to move forward with its complaints,” said Offer.

The ITC yesterday also ruled in favor of Apple, in a suit against HTC, saying that a number of HTC’s Android-running smartphones violate one Apple patent, though not others for more core features (unfiltered: Apple the victor in ITC ruling, but the spoils may go to HTC, Android). By many accounts, HTC, like Motorola, came out the real winner.

The case is one in a tall pile of legal complaints filed by smartphone industry players. Apple has additionally sued HTC in a U.S. federal court ��along with other makers of Android smartphones, as Android is Apple’s real target � and HTC has its own suits pending against Apple in a federal court and with the ITC.

The patent is related to a feature set that lets users interact with data ��touching a phone number in an email to dial it, for example.

The ITC ruling, The New York Times reported, will prevent HTC from selling phones that infringe on the Apple patent in the United States after April 19. HTC has said it will make adjustments to the phones, saying the features in question were “small” additions anyway.

�It’s an important victory for Apple, but it’s just one of many battles,� Alexander Poltorak, chief executive of intellectual strategy firm General Patent Corporation told the Times.

Still, while the ITC ruled with Apple for the touch-related patent, it ruled against it for patents related to more core technologies. Since HTC and other Android manufacturers can now create a work-around for the highlighted patent and are then in clear, corks likely aren’t popping in Cupertino.

“If I’m HTC – and particularly if I’m Google – I’m feeling a lot better today than if I’m Apple,� Ron Cass, a former vice-chairman of the ITC told the Financial Times.

Cablevision had objected to Verizon’s assertion that Cablevision delivers at most 59% of its advertised speeds during peak hours and to other claims made in Verizon ads. Verizon said its claims were based on FCC data. But Cablevision said that data, published in August, was outdated (unfiltered: Verizon defends itself against Cablevision false advertising claims).

According to the Bloomberg report, neither party would disclose terms of the settlement. Verizon is no longer airing the ads, stating that the ads have run their course.

We suspect this is not the end of cable/ telco video ad wars, however. As an advertising lawyer quoted in the Bloomberg story noted, �It’s a little unusual to be quite that hard-hitting.�

But it’s not the first time Verizon has used hard-hitting claims in advertising against video rivals (unfiltered: Video services: Marketing matters more than ever). And with the OTT threat making the video market more competitive than ever, I doubt it will be the last. If Verizon keeps up these aggressive tactics, it would appear to be only a matter of time before competitors begin to retaliate with hard-hitting ads of their own.

The Times’ Nick Bilton was on to something, when he deduced that Apple has plans to bring Siri-like functionality to televisions (Unfiltered: Siri’s career plans include TV (and cars?)). The Journal reports that, in at least one meeting, Apple “described future television technology that would respond to users’ voices and movements.”

Other features could include wireless streaming technology to access shows and other content, and the ability for various Apple devices to communicate, enabling a viewer to pick up on one Apple device where it left off on a movie or program on another.

“Apple has worked on technologies for integrating DVR storage and iCloud, its online syncing and storage service, into the device, according to a person briefed on the matter,” the Journal continued. “Such technologies could allow users to watch shows they have saved or purchased on two different devices, like a TV and a computer, without having to buy or record the shows twice. ”

Apple already dabbles in the TV space, with its Apple TV set-top box. Moving beyond its professed hobby, Apple would find itself competing against a familiar cast of characters. Not just Samsung, but Google, with its Google TV software, and Microsoft (CP: Microsoft XBox 360 delivers voice-controlled TV and success from the start), which recently updated the software on its Xbox with Kinect features that enable users to control it by voice.

Some cable companies have helped reinforce this view by periodically ratcheting up the broadband speeds available at various service tiers without increasing the cost. Charter Communications, for example, has increased broadband performance at no additional cost four times over the past two to three years.

Not every HFC network operator is a cable company. SureWest, for example, operates an HFC network in Kansas City. And Friday it joined Charter and other cable companies in boosting bandwidth at no extra charge�at least for business customers. SureWest has done a DOCSIS 3.0 upgrade and along with it, a free speed upgrade to commercial accounts. Customers with packages up to 10 Mb/s, for example, now get up to 15 Mb/s.

Perhaps spurred by competition from advanced video offerings such as FiOS video, cable companies also have been making enhancements to their video services, including some at no charge. Today, for example, Time Warner Cable announced plans to support streaming on-demand video offerings HBO GO and MAX GO at no extra charge to customers who subscribe to HBO and/or Cinemax. Some other cable companies already offer the HBO GO and MAX GO services at no extra charge to HBO and/or Cinemax subscribers (CP: HBO mobile video app grows as ‘True Blood’ fans gorge).

Telcos that have developed their own video offerings have done a good job of continually adding value to their video offerings. But that’s a bigger challenge in cases where their video offering consists of reselling DirecTV or Dish Network. And if a telco’s broadband service relies on DSL, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to keep pace with the HFC network operators, who seem to be continually raising the bandwidth bar a bit higher.

Essentially, if we needed telling, competitive advantage will now come from what you can do with technology not the technology itself. As Mark Raskino, vice president and Gartner Fellow says of the first half, where technology itself was the driver, �great fortunes were made by companies like IBM and Microsoft.� Raskino argues that the winners of the second half will be companies that understand how to exploit the information that is now available. Leading the pack are companies that are not traditional makers of technology, and “it is already noticeable that the great fortunes of the second half of the age are being made by companies like Google and Facebook.�

The main skills to make the great fortunes of the next decades will be leadership and the ability of leaders to adapt the culture of a company to new environments. Information that is becoming available to companies and Governments will be the oil that drives the new world, and Gartner identifies several specific areas – location information; sustainability information – balancing sustainability against the ‘demands of massive consumerizing emerging markets’; social graph information – getting the most out of organizational and cultural design, and DNA information – providing information in the right way to healthcare and other industries.

Other, more esoteric advances are cited by Gartner, including brain response, inherent identity and more immediately the ‘internet of things’ which will become a major focus.

Although it is interesting to gaze into the future, we are still stuck in an age of operations, silos, politics and processes that are still battling to be competitive in the current market dominated by fiscal prudence. However, culture needs skill more than money to change.

This trend is inevitable, however fast it arrives. Already we are seeing shifts in roles and purchasing responsibilities. IT is now buying policy management solutions, CIOs are needing to retrain to manage distributed IT platforms and teams, as consumerization brings tablets and smartphones to work (CP: Gartner’s IT predictions – adapt or be swept aside). Business managers will have IT budgets, and IT departments will change to become suppliers to the business as well as coordinators of standards and platforms.

Telecom is not alone, nor is it the first to have to address the rapid commoditization of their core ‘product.’ When someone discovered that the coffee bean made a tasty, refreshing drink, it was not necessary to do more than say so. Competition to sell coffee beans meant price wars and mergers and regulation and ethical dilemmas. Now, no-one sells their coffee beans as ‘cheaper’ – it is not ‘sustainable’ to do so. Coffee beans are sold on whether a range of sweet, hot milky drinks can be enjoyed in a friendly environment, while working or relaxing. That experience is the battleground for the next decade for telcos (CP: Customer experience is the goal but what are the first steps?) and, as Gartner says, technology is only the weapon.

In response, Sen. Al Franken expressed his continued “concern” about the whole situation:

I appreciate the responses I received, but I’m still very troubled by what’s going on… People have a fundamental right to control their private information. After reading the companies’ responses, I’m still concerned that this right is not being respected. The average user of any device equipped with Carrier IQ software has no way of knowing that this software is running, what information it is getting, and who it is giving it to — and that’s a problem. It appears that Carrier IQ has been receiving the contents of a number of text messages — even though they had told the public that they did not. I’m also bothered by the software’s ability to capture the contents of our online searches-even when users wish to encrypt them. So there are still many questions to be answered here and things that need to be fixed.

How Carrier IQ and its partners handle this situation from here continues to be a huge story for the mobile industry, and will fundamentally impact how operators do business in the future. Without an ability to leverage data about networks and users — with appropriate privacy protections in place — mobile operators will lose a crucial piece of the value they can bring to the extended mobile ecosystem.

For now, the mobile industry continues to lose the PR war on a day by day basis. In the Gizmodo story we linked to above, for instance, the term “spyware” is used several times to describe the Carrier IQ software. As this story continues to play out, the industry is dying a death by a thousand pricks.

Clearly, the core idea behind Carrier IQ isn’t to spy on or invade the privacy of individual users. But the lack of an opt-in/opt-out strategy and the ham-handed handling of the initial “discovery” has the entire telecom industry scrambling to justify business practices that 1) aren’t at their core “evil”; 2) have been used in other industries in the past; and 3) are a critical enabler of how future mobile services are delivered and mobile business models defined.

For now, here’s the list so far of phones deploying Carrier IQ, courtesy of Gizmodo:

AT&T

AT&T claims about 900,000 users using phones with Carrier IQ. The software is active on eleven AT&T wireless consumer devices:

• Motorola Atrix 2
• Motorola Bravo
• Pantech Pursuit II
• Pantech Breeze 3
• Pantech P5000 (Link 2)
• Pantech Pocket
• Sierra Wireless Shockwave
• LG Thrill
• ZTE Avail
• ZTE Z331
• SEMC Xperia Play

It’s also installed but not active “due to the potential for the software agent to interfere with the performance” of the following phones:

• HTC Vivid
• LG Nitro
• Samsung Skyrocket

Carrier IQ is also packaged in the free AT&T Mark the Spot application, available for Android and RIM.

Sprint

26 million active Sprint devices have the Carrier IQ software installed, says Sprint. That’s almost half of all their subscribers, 53.4 million customers, so you can assume that they have it installed in all the Android phones of the manufacturers Sprint reported to the US senate:

• Audiovox
• Franklin
• HTC
• Huawei
• Kyocera
• LG
• Motorola
• Novatel
• Palmone
• Samsung
• Sanyo
• Sierra Wireless

Samsung

Samsung claims 25 million phones affected. It has directly installed Carrier IQ at the factory in the following models:

Sprint
• SPH-M800 (Samsung Instinct)
• SPH-M540 (Samsung Rant)
• SPH-M630 (Samsung Highnote)
• SPH-M810 (Samsung Instinct s30)
• SPH-M550 (Samsung Exclaim)
• SPH-M560 (Samsung Reclaim)
• SPH-M850 (Samsung Instinct HD)
• SPH-I350 (Samsung Intrepid)
• SPH-M900 (Samsung Moment)
• SPH-M350 (Samsung Seek)
• SPH-M570 (Samsung Restore)
• SPH-D700 (Samsung Epic 4G)
• SPH-M910 (Samsung Intercept)
• SPH-M920 (Samsung Transform)
• SPH-M260 (Samsung Factor)
• SPH-M380 (Samsung Trender)
• SPH-M820 (Samsung Galaxy Prevail)
• SPH-M580 (Samsung Replenish)
• SPH-D600 (Samsung Conquer 4G)
• SPH-M930 (Samsung Transform Ultra)
• SPH-D710 (Samsung Epic 4G Touch)
• SPH-M220
• SPH-M240
• SPH-M320
• SPH-M330
• SPH-M360
• SPH-P100
• SPH-Z400

T-Mobile
•T989 (Samsung Hercules)
•T679 (Samsung Galaxy W)

Cricket
• SCH-R500 (Samsung Hue)
• SCH-R631 (Samsung Messager Touch)
• SCH-R261 (Samsung Chrono)
• SCH-R380 (Samsung Freeform III)

AT&T
• SGH-i727 (Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket)

HTC

HTC preinstalled Carrier IQ spyware on about 6.3 million Android phones:

Sprint
• Snap
• Touch Pro 2
• Hero
• EVO 4G
• EVO Shift 4G
• EVO Design

T-Mobile
• Amaze 4G

AT&T
• Vivid

But none of this has stopped companies like Mohu and now WallTenna from seeking to use the TV broadcast spectrum for its current intended use�over-the-air TV broadcast. Mohu made the news recently when it said Time Warner Cable refused to air an ad telling viewers they don’t need cable (unfiltered: Mohu: Time Warner Cable said no to ‘OTT antenna’ ad). And WallTenna today announced a see-through antenna that’s shaped a bit like a folding picture frame. The product is designed for indoor use and its clear design enables it to be mounted on a window, where reception may be best.

For years the percentage of Americans who watch over-the-air has been in decline, now standing at about 15%. But don’t be surprised if the rise of over-the-top video, combined with free over-the-air HDTV and new antenna technology from companies like Mohu and WallTenna, begins to reverse that trend�at least a little bit.

That development wouldn’t have much impact on the white spaces opportunity, as the unused spectrum would still be unused. The more interesting question is whether over-the-air TV viewership would see enough of an increase to make broadcasters any less likely to auction off their spectrum.

The National Association of Broadcasters says members aren’t particularly excited about the possibility to begin with. And it’s all just speculation for now as the Senate has not approved the incentive auction concept�and we live in an era when almost no legislation ever passes both houses.