If Siemens is trying to unload its ailing mobile handset business, it will have to try doing this just a bit harder.  According to a report in yesterday's Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung German daily, just as Motorola execs were about to sign an agreement between both companies, they had a last minute change of heart and backed away from the deal.  This is a bit of a setback for Siemens, but I'd be willing to bet that there could be a potential suitor down the road (maybe an Asian player such as Samsung or LGE).

Business Week Online's blog (Blogspotting) has had quite a few interesting articles since its recent inception. One of them in particular struck a chord with yours truly, namely the one about the crunkie concept.  The idea is to post entries to a blog that can be pushed to cell phones of members of a buddy list whenever any of them are present in certain locations (for instance, a message saying that a certain product is now on sale whenever a friend walks through a shopping district).  It is one of the first attempts to connect presence and location to generate a new service - interestingly enough, this blog entry is called a Crunkie.  The product is the creation of Wavemarket - an app company funded by Qualcomm and early-stage VC firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson (which also has invested in companies such as Skype and SocialText).

After making a nice return on the MCI transaction, it looks like Carlos Slim Helu is ready to take on a next challenge.  And why not?  His astuteness already made him move up to #17 in the Forbes 2004 list of the world's wealthiest.  Although he has been successful in selling MCI for a tidy profit (he bought the shares at Filene's basement prices when MCI was emerging from bankruptcy and made close to $1.1 billion by selling his 13 percent stake to Verizon), the sale of his shares effectively leave him without a major foothold in the US market.  But the reality was that he made it quite clear that his position in MCI was strictly "a financial investment".

So where will he spend the proceeds from the sale?  Many felt that it would be in a region with which he is intimately familiar with (Latin America).  However today, at America Movil's investor day, management mentioned a few times that it is interested in entering the Spanish market (Mr. Slim owns America Movil and Telmex, among other holdings).  This foray into Spain can be achieved via a license purchase or via an MVNO play.  Recently, the Spanish telecom regulator (CMT) announced that it might auction 10 MHz of wireless spectrum under the same "beauty contest" rules of the March 2000 tender.  America Movil (NYSE:AMX) believes that the tariff levels in Spain are very high, and there is an opportunity for them to be a player.  With Telefonica getting more and more aggressive in Mexico (thanks to funds from its operations in Brazil and Spain), AMX currently has no means of striking back in enemy territory, despite its presence in Brazil.  So the move would make sense from a defensive or counter-striking perspective, however a full Brazilian-like offensive strike would not be productive.  This is an ongoing development that will get a lot of attention in the next few months.