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ESPN announced yesterday that it was shutting down its mobile virtual network, Mobile ESPN, at the end of 2006. See these articles in Forbes and Gearlog for details.

I was wondering if anyone was buying these phones or using this service. I’ve seen their advertisements on ESPN all year, but I’ve never ever seen anyone who used these phones.

The target market had to be 21 to 30 year old men, but most of them already have a cell phone.

One analyst noted that ESPN should have marketed the service for a few more months, at least until the end of the college and professional football seasons. Every additional month would bring ESPN more opportunities to promote the service, and provide more potential customers who were at or near the end of their mobile phone contracts.

Very few people want to pay for two cell phones, especially from two different carriers.

Granted, the target market I’ve identified includes a lot of gamblers. Gamblers will buy almost anything if they think it will provide them an edge. Mobile ESPN is an attractive service for these men, as the service delivered text and video content from ESPN’s television networks directly to the customer phone.

Keep in mind that ESPN didn’t operate the mobile phone network. It bought minutes and network management from Sprint, and resold the service to its customers.

Now ESPN plans to license its mobile applications to other carriers. Good luck! There are other mobile virtual network operators in the US such as Disney Mobile, Amp’d Mobile and Helio.

Helio is a joint venture between EarthLink and SK Telecom, led by EarthLink founder Sky Dayton, and partnered with MySpace as its core content source. It’s hard to argue with the man who built the second-largest ISP in the United States, or with the News Corp social networking juggernaut.

But Helio seems to be in trouble. I haven’t seen anyone who uses their phone or their service. Quite frankly, Helio’s teenaged target market has even less disposable income than the Mobile ESPN crowd. Helio does offer a tradeup program that lets customers sell their handset to Helio, but the rules are seem too complicated for most 16 to 25 year olds to follow.

Helio’s latest announcement is a combination EVDO-WiFi card, combining the fastest cellular data service in the US with 802.11 b/g access. Helio is also developing devices with built-in EVDO-WiFI access for release next year. The card is just a stopgap measure.

Imagine a Helio branded PDA or laptop that can access MySpace wherever there’s a decent cell phone signal.

I could imagine an ESPN branded device - but ESPN has thrown in the towel for now.

This just in from HowToWeb: a stunning 95 percent of all e-mail is unsolicited commercial e-mail.

This Washington Post article from May details an anti-spamming effort that went awry when spammers retaliated.

Spam counts have continued to rise as more e-mail administrators choose passive management approaches such as filtering. On my e-mail servers, the most obvious spam is scanned, identified and tagged by programs such as SpamAssassin. My servers then send the high-scoring spam directly to the trash without delivering these messages to an inbox. This process eliminates most of my incoming spam.

Because I have many international students, I don’t filter messages by top-level domain, language or code pages. But many companies do use these criteria as filters. A mainland company that has no Korean customers or suppliers can afford to dump any e-mail message from South Korea. That country has been a popular mailing point for spam messages, as it offers a high concentration of broadband subscribers.

I still agree with Joi Ito’s statement from three years ago - e-mail is broken.

Tech: Kids are becoming more adept with computers, but sometimes they turn into bullies. When I was a child, you had to insult someone to their face. Children who have grown up with technology may be more likely to launch craven and cowardly attacks through weblogs, IM and anonymous postings. They distribute pictures and videos of each other on P2P networks.

Beware the forward button, people. Once you send a message, you’ll never stop it.

Users sign and forward petitions though e-mail. Adults like “King” Peter Chung of the Carlyle Group and Trevor Luxton of Credit Lyonnais thought they could brag about anything and everything in an e-mail message. It all just makes me wonder sometimes.

Sports: Even NBC can’t ignore the fact that the stadiums are empty in Athens. I remember the Atlanta Olympics. Tickets got sold, and people showed up to watch. It’s not happening in Athens because the tickets are too expensive and Athens is hard to reach. Beijing has plenty of people to fill the stands in 2008, but the city is sinking. Buildings are crumbling, and the airport is threatened. So 2008 may be the first Olympics called off because of overdevelopment. Plus, there’s still the threat of an international boycott over China’s handling of human rights, Taiwan or North Korea. The problems in Athens and Beijing give Paris, London and New York City some real advantages for hosting the 2012 Olympics. Then again, what sane city really wants the Olympics these days?

USA: Yahoo! News - U.S. Moving Weapons Out of South Korea: It makes people in Hawaii a little nervous too, especially since the North Koreans have been playing with their rockets. Again. “‘This is a very intensive operation, involving a large amount of equipment,’ Johnson said. ‘The scale of this operation is about five times that of what we ordinarily do.’ ”