Archive for June, 2008
Need a Headset, Get a Ticket
Love this concept!! Get pulled over for using a mobile phone in the car, get a ticket (you have to be in the right state to be in the wrong — you know who you are!), send that ticket to Headsets.com and get a free headset. Yessir! That’s what I’m talking about. If you don’t believe me, then just click here for the full story from CNet. Related Entries TrackBack (0) | Comments (0) | Tag with del.icio.us | VoIP & Gadgets Blog Home | Permalink: Need ...
Top Selling Mobile Phones for June
According to Swedish case maker Krusell, the Top 10 selling mobile phones in June 2008 were:1. (8) Apple iPhone2. (5) HTC Diamond3. (3) Nokia E514. (2) Nokia 63005. (1) Nokia 31096. (9) LG KU9907. (6) Nokia N95 8 GB8. (4) Sony Ericsson K810i9. (-) Sony Ericsson K530i10. (10) Sony Ericsson W890i() = Last month’s position. At the moment, many companies in the Accessory industry are loading their warehouses with iPhone accessories just waiting for the European launch of the 3G version o...
Hey Hey Platform A, How Much Money Did You Lose Today?
My gut reaction to the news that AOL’s Platform A would offer a guaranteed CPM (cost per thousand) for applications developers building widgets for Facebook and Bebo was that it’s a subsidy and subsidies are an unnatural and bad thing for business. Then I found out the guaranteed payment was only 40 cents, which made me wonder how in the heck anyone could make real money off such a low CPM. That translates into $400 for every 1 million visitors. Even with multiple ads and millions ...
10 of the Biggest Platform Development Mistakes
Just like with golf, technology is as much about ensuring that your bad hits are recoverable as it is ensuring that you make great ones. We’re all going to have failures in our careers but avoiding the really big pitfalls will help you keep your company on the right growth path. Here are 10 common mistakes we at AKF Consulting see made during platform development — and the ones we believe are the most important to avoid. 1) Failing to design for rollback: If you’re developing...
JumpForward & IfByPhone in partnership
There is a great deal of value in allowing your users the ability to contact the right people, at the right time with the right information. One of the great benefits of social media is that it allows you to get in contact with people who you are interested in. I can go to facebook and keep up with the lives of former classmates, current friends and even business associates. I can go to Twitter and participate in conversations as disparate as SEO, fatherhood or the stunning sweep of the Cu...
Rogers Reveals Its New Service Plans for Blackberry and iPhone
Caveat: This post is mostly for the benefit of Canadians but then again if you’re outside Canada where unlimited data plans are the norm, count your blessings. These plans do have implications for mobile Skype usage costs, such as with iSkoot. Rogers takes major steps towards lower cost data plans for Canadians but they still don’t measure up to US and European benchmarks. To review the Canadian wireless data scene: Rogers is the only GSM carrier in Canada ...
Discover Yourself!
There are many people who go through life trying to be like somebody else only realizing years later they were never true to themselves. It took me a number of years to discover me. While it is great to have influences, you owe it to yourself to just be yourself. Discover who you are and let it show. Allow yourself to discover your independent own style and tastes. Be the person you see when you wake up and look in the mirror in the morning. Do whatever it takes to let the real you come o...
AT&T’s Suspicious Attempt at Humor
Get your satire meters cranked up: AT&T has come up with an advertising effort designed to shame you into paying your bills online (thanks, Consumerist). The telecommunications company that got into hot water with warrantless wiretapping is pushing its online bill payments with a series of characters who are members of the Online Liberation Movement. Cute theme, with one super ironic character — Ms. Suspicious, who is worried about online privacy. Well, AT&T says she shouldn’...
How Badly do Canadians Want an iPhone?
Now that the dust has settled on Rogers’ voice/data packages for the 3G iPhone, the question is how badly do Canadians really want the iPhone and how many of them are willing to pay for the privilege? Casting aside the entry-level $60 plan as a non-starter (150 voice minutes during the day is a joke), the iPhone will cost you at least $100 after taking into account network access charges, caller-ID, 911, 411 and taxes. If you want to use the iPhone as a Web browser to take advantage of 3G...
The Internet???s Next Killer App
Fred Wilson, blogging about the economic disruption caused by high oil prices, says: “And the web clearly has a role to play in all of this too. More on that later.” I look forward, as always, to seeing what Fred has to say but a smart reader Rajesh Raut jumped the gun in a comment on my post Passing the BTU: “Why do we need smart meters to use off peak electricity? “Take a space heater, connect the on/off switch to a small computer with Wi/Fi access. Have the comput...
Squawk Box conf call/podcast calls this week - please join us!
With Alec Saunders away on vacation, I agreed to step in to host our daily “Squawk Box” conference calls this week and next. I’m working on lining up some interesting guests and in the meantime we’ll also have our regular tech conversations that have always seemed to go well. (FYI, if you or someone you know would like to be a special guest either this week or next, please do let me know.) I’m particular excited about our show on Tuesday, July 1st, where we’ll...
Werner Vogels Explains Amazon Web Services’ Philosophy
One of the questions that I really wanted to get answered at Structure 08 was what the chances of survival are for the myriad of startups out there building their businesses around Amazon’s Web Services. Companies such as RightScale, Hyperic and Soasta depend on both the success of AWS and its shortcomings — the solutions to which they propose to offer. So I sat down with the online retailer’s CTO, Werner Vogels, to see how Amazon viewed this ecosystem. My takeaway? I think m...
Remember Your friends
There are times when it is YOUR duty to take care of YOUR friends…no matter what. Friends are just that…friends. They are there for you. No questions asked. Friends are part of your support system. They listen. They care. They offer advice. They love you. They can help you out of a jam and sometimes even put you in one their own. Remember their Birthday. Surprise a friend and send a video message. Send a text message. Just remember to reach out every once in a while and let your f...
Start the week
Talking Risatel Laughter Hotline has been a Skype Prime service since last fall. Call up and laugh with someone for twenty minutes. 2 € a call, first one free. Penn State student uses Skype to interview Spanish poets. Another Skype-in-Academe story. How to cope with a long-distance university relationship. Skype, phone, talking. The Independent. US politicos Skype vid into Personal Democracy Forum conference. Here’s the YouTube video. Meebo traffic growth is in embedded...
Destination Tel-Aviv: Some Work, Some Fun
Updated From Frankfurt: It has already been a long day! I got up at 3 a.m. to get ready and head to the San Francisco Airport in time to catch my early morning US Airways flight to Charlotte and then connect to Frankfurt and then to Tel-Aviv. US Airways doesn’t tell you that you that you’re flying through “some city” on your way to Europe, which was funny because I ended up at the International Airport and then had to head back to the domestic terminal. I am going there...
The Digerati’s Love Affair With Friendfeed
First, I’m not a regular Friendfeed user. In theory, I get the idea of having everything (RSS feeds, Twitter, blog posts, comments, etc.) aggregated in one, convenient place - something described as social media aggregation. It makes sense as the digital world becomes busier and more scattered. In practice, Friendfeed is just too busy and loud. There’s so much stuff being collected and presented that it’s somewhat overwhelming. As a result, I may check Friendfeed out every cou...
Blaming Airlines, AT&T Takes Flight
Yesterday, while I was returning from San Francisco to Austin, AT&T was letting folks know that it plans to move its headquarters to Dallas. A big part of the blame was laid on the lack of direct flights to other big cities, a fact I could appreciate after my indirect, 6-hour journey home. Ironically, as technology (powered in no small part by AT&T ) allows us to innovate anywhere, the financial woes of the airline industry that lead to fewer routes make it much more productive for thos...
The Myth of No Software
The debate around cloud computing and software-as-a-service (SaaS) has energized industry conversations on the future of software. But in fact what we are witnessing in the software industry today is not a revolution, but an evolution. Customers are most concerned with how to use software to sustain competitive advantage, align IT with the business and deliver the best experience for users without compromise — regardless of delivery option — whether that is SaaS, on-premise software or a co...
Invest in Yourself!
In my book, there is one sure thing when it comes to making an investment…the investments you make in yourself. Invest in Yourself is something I am a strong believer in. Whether you are starting a new business, taking a new course, studying for a test, getting yourself that something that makes you smile, there is no better investment in the world than the investments you make in YOU. Lead by example. Be the first person to invest in yourself and others will follow. Tags: Entrepreneurship...
Google Cloud At Work For NSF, Academia
Christophe Bisciglia, Senior Software Engineer at Google, talks to NewTeeVee’s Chris Albrecht at our Structure 08 conference and discusses how Google is bring cloud computing to academia including the National Science Foundation. Google gives academics and students at some of the largest universities around the planet access to massive resources for academic quest and experiments, Bisciglia says in this chat. In February 2008, Google announced that it was working with National Science Fou...
Chad Hurley Tells All: How They Built YouTube
Liz Gannes who edits our NewTeeVee site skipped the company dinner to attend an event where Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube was going to reveal the entire story of YouTube. She caught the entire event on tape, and has the full report, a must see NTV for anyone who loves start-ups. * If you can show growth such as a traffic hockey stick, your don’t need a PowerPoint to raise VC money. * However hard you may try, it is hard to predict the future and your future infrastructure needs. * Kn...
The Week That Was
After a short absence, my weekly review of the week that was is back. Here’s some of the news, views and other stuff that caught my attention: - Rogers unveils its data plans for the iPhone. The initial reaction is less than enthusiastic given the plans involve a three-year contract and there’s no unlimited, all-you-can-eat data packages. A poll on my blog suggests many people are going to stay away from buying an iPhone, which is a shame given its such a great device. Personally, I...
Our 5th Birthday
VoIP User celebrates being 5 years young. Read More… ...
Why No One Will Replace Bill & Steve
As noted author Nick Carr said in a video recorded for our Structure 08 conference, the retirement of Microsoft Co-founder Bill Gates marks the end of an era for a certain style of computing and the start of a new era of cloud-delivered services. To that I would add that it’s the end of an era of a certain kind of technology entrepreneur, one with the patience, guile and technology chops to survive multiple cycles, but also the business acumen to amass a vast fortune and carve out a monop...
A Clean, Well Lighted Path to Conversion
Mike Cooch outlines six basic essentials for a good website and delivers solid information on how to achieve it in this month’s Everon Technology Insider. Rule number six is: “Clear “conversion” path/instructions.” It’s a sad commentary that ten years after the Internet revolution many websites are their own worst enemies when it comes to conversion. Conversions go down when the number of steps goes up. Click-to-call cuts those steps — especially when there are...
DreamFactory: Cloud-opportunistic SaaS That Won’t Lock You In
What if there were a way to write and run enterprise applications that you could move from cloud to cloud? And what if that application automatically inherited the best things about that cloud without locking you in? DreamFactory may do just that. And as such, it may represent a new approach to application design: Cloud-opportunistic software. DreamFactory makes project, document and data collaboration software that runs in the cloud. Its DreamTeam Suite competes with Basecamp, Liquidplanner, ...
A Founder’s “Daily Flash” for Executing in the First 6 Months
Before he became a founder, Ian Shea spent eight years at DVR maker (and TiVo predecessor) ReplayTV. During that time, the company went through — among other things — a massive restructuring, layoffs, bankruptcy and a turnaround before finally being bought by DirectTV for an undisclosed amount in December 2007. “We went through it all,” Shea told me recently. And as soon as the DirectTV deal closed, Shea sought out an operating challenge he hadn’t yet faced: a sta...
Quon v. Arch: Curb Your Enthusiasm
The media got a little carried away with its praise of a recent federal court ruling that assigns certain privacy rights to text messages. The coverage, by and large, suggests that we’re on the verge of a revolution in workplace wireless communications that will see workers rise up and seize control of their electronic content. Sounds like fun. But it’s not gonna happen. Why not? Because the ruling in Quon v. Arch Wireless Operating Co. is significant for some employees but less so ...
The F|R Interview: VMware Co-Founder Mendel Rosenblum
During a break at GigaOM’s Structure 08 conference this week, Found|READ sat down with VMware co-founder and chief scientist, Dr. Mendel Rosenblum. Dr. Rosenblum developed VMware’s virtualization software while working on a supercomputer research project with his graduate students at Stanford University, where he remains an active professor of computer science. In 1998 he went on leave from Stanford to launch VMware with four business partners, including his spouse, Diane Greene, wh...
Enabled Comments from AOL/AIM, Yahoo, Movable Type, WordPress, LiveJournal, OpenID, or Vox users
Movable Type 4.0+ has several plugins that utilize Movable Type’s extensible Open ID Login framework to give a customized login experience for AOL/AIM, Yahoo, Movable Type, WordPress, LiveJournal, or Vox users on Movable Type blogs. The logon requirements for AOL/AIM, Yahoo, Movable Type, WordPress, LiveJournal, and Vox all support OpenID which makes this possible. On any blog entry you’ll see the following text near the Comments form: Sign in to comment using AOL/AIM, Yahoo, Mo...
Meet Tech Teentrepreneur Daniel Brusilovsky
Dropping out of college to launch your own company? Yawn. The real startup action is in the halls of your local high school. Case in point: Daniel Brusilovsky, the 15-year-old founder and CEO (yes, the CEO) of TeensinTech.com. Brusilovsky was easy to spot at our recent Structure 08 conference — he was the only one who needed his parents to pick him up from the event. But don’t let his age fool you; he’s got the executive lingo down pat. He’s raising his first round of f...
Microsoft to Acquire Powerset?
Microsoft has agreed to buy Silicon Valley-based semantic search engine Powerset for over $100 million, VentureBeat is reporting today, a move that will apparently be announced next month. Powerset’s search technology uses the open-source, cluster-based technology Hadoop, which provides fast answers to queries by using the resources of many computers. And of course, Microsoft has been very focused on shoring up its search offerings. For more, head over to OStatic. ...
Compaq Aero: What’s Your All-Time Favorite Gadget?
Thinking about all the gadgets I’ve owned over the years and the ones I really liked (easy to remember) and the ones I didn’ t like (those are much harder to remember). Quickly coming to mind was the Compaq Contura Aero, a snappy subnotebook that had its trackball at the right edge of the wrist rest — great for righties, but must have been impossible for lefties! This was a great notebook for word processing and commuting — which when I had it was exactly what I used it f...
Summer Camp & Gadgets: Let the Smuggling Begin
Can see why summer camps aren’t too big on allowing their campers to bring their personal gadgets along with them. But while they don’t allow them, seems like smuggling them into camp has become a new tradition. Wonder what the most popular contraband item will be — couple of years ago it was the iPod, but I think now it’’s the cell phone. ‘Course there could be some other ones, but I don’t think so … Related Entries TrackBack (0) | Com...
Sometimes you just gotta say: “What the f**k, make your move.”
Ever since I first heard the line, Sometimes you just gotta say, What the f**k, make your move in the movie Risky Business, I have used it to justify taking a chance and/or doing something outside my comfort zone. During our lifetime, we owe it to ourselves to try out new things, to challenge ourselves and to dare to be different. As a wise friend told me last summer: You should always do what you least want to do as long as it’s safe. (Its) How you learn.” And yes, s...
Can Today’s Hardware Handle the Cloud?
Load balancers are a cornerstone of any big computing application. By spraying traffic across lots of servers, they let companies turn many unreliable machines into one reliable service. But that service has a lot of moving parts, and sometimes they break. If it keeps happening, it may signal that a new class of networking device is needed for the demands of cloud computing. According to Amazon???s Web Services Developer Connection, a load balancer was deployed in its S3 storage service on June...
June 27: What’s Interesting Today
One of the toughest parts about hosting a conference is all the work that still needs to be done after the lights are turned off. We’re currently busy trying to finalize the video clips — and consolidate them for your viewing pleasure — while at the same time keep the site going. So posting might be a tad slow. In the meantime, here are some of the cool stories/bits I found that might be of interest today: Where Do You Want to Go Today? Forget the old Microsoft and instead use...
Be the Best You Can Be
Words from my Junior High School Graduation that still echo in my head: If you cant be a tree be a bush. If you cant be a bush be a blade of grass. But be the best damm blade of grass that ever was. These are words I learned to live by. Tags: Entrepreneurship, leadership, Entrepreneur, Jeff Pulver If you enjoyed this post, please consider leaving a comment or subscribing to the feed to receive future articles delivered to your feed reader. ...
Why Not Guitar Hero: Led Zeppelin or Somebody Else?
You know, we’ve had many long talks at home about what band we would have chosen for the first dedicated Guitar Hero offering. Now many out there are probably very satisfied with the choice that was made, I imagine many of your may have chosen a different band if it was up to you. Lots of votes at home for Led Zeppelin (Jimmy Page vs. Joe Perry — are you kidding???) or even Buckethead. And let’s not forget Jimi Hendrix; I could go on and on … Now wouldn’t it be coo...
Service Provider Views - Microsoft Telco 2.0, Part 2
The second installment of my look at Microsoft’s Telco 2.0 has been posted now on TMCnet. It’s part of my ongoing Service Provider Views column I write for them, and you can view the article here. In the first article, I looked at the drivers behind Telco 2.0, and in this piece I provide some examples of how telcos can bundle various Microsoft hosted services to address different audiences within their subscriber bases. As always, your comments are welcome, along with suggestions for...
Rogers Unveils iPhone Pricing
With the iPhone finally making its official appearance in Canada in two weeks, Rogers has unveiled its pricing packages - see the chart below. While Rogers proclaims its iPhone voice/data packages start at $60, a far more realistic package is either $75 or $100/month to make sure you have enough voice minutes to avoid hefty over-usage charges. All in all, it’s not bad given Rogers’ adoration of ARPU and its drive to generate more high-margin data revenue. (Note: You have to sign up f...
Jazinga Squawk Box Podcast
The other day, I posted about the Squawk Box I was hosting this week in Alec’s absence. My guest was Shidan Gouran, CTO and co-founder of Toronto-based Jazinga. They’re a promising startup with an easy-to-use, premises based SMB IP telephony solution. For small businesses looking for PBX-caliber telephony, and an alternative to a hosted offering, Jazinga is what they should be looking at. We had a strong turnout for yesterday’s segment - 22 participants - and lots of good quest...
Quote of Note: Chris Dodd on FISA
“Under the legislation before us, the district court would simply decide whether or not the telecommunication companies received documentation stating that the President authorized the program and that there had been some sort of determination that it was legal. “But, as the Intelligence Committee has already made clear, we already KNOW that this happened. “We already KNOW that the companies received some form of documentation, with some sort of legal determination. “But ...
.mark, anyone?
As much as the ongoing Yahoo-Microsoft soap opera and Microsoft’s apparent acquisition of Powerset are dominating the headlines, a particularly fascinating development is ICANN’s decision to radically liberalize the “top-level” domain structure. Since the Web emerged as a mainstream vehicle, there’s been a lot of back and forth about who controls the domain landscape, and which domain would rule the roost. While .com became the must-have domain, demand for alternati...
Heads in the Sand
"Please, don’t buy my product" is how fellow Vermonter Art Woolf, in a post on the Vermont Tiger site, characterized yesterday’s statement by all 21 of the state’s electric utilities. The utilities were warning consumers NOT to substitute electricity for fossil fuel as a heat source this winter even though we may be billed less for the electricity than we would have to pay for gasoline, propane, or kerosene. The coverage of that strange statement including a lea...
Gizmo5 moving to Jajah for call termination and billing
Gizmo5 going back to basic? Or a smart move to focus on it’s core activity e.g. their softphone client(s) Read More… ...
Iminlikewithyou Gets VC Cash For New Game
Iminlikewithyou, a New York-based dating game start-up has raised $1.5 million in Series B round of funding from Spark Capital, and a bunch of influential angels including Marc Andreessen. Baseline Ventures and Betaworks, also had previously invested in the company joined this round of capital. Bijan Sabet, who recently made news for investing in Twitter is joining the board of Iminlikewithyou. I wrote about Iminlikewithyou at the time of their launch and found their dating-gaming platform very...
What’s Wrong With Yahoo?
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a German writer, once noted that “if you get on the wrong train, running down the aisle in the opposite direction really doesn???t help.??? HBO series The Wire co-creator Edward Burns used that quote to describe the drug culture, bankruptcy of the political establishment and eventual fall of some of the great American cities in an interview with Reason magazine. You might as well use the same words to describe Yahoo! Over past few months, Yahoo???s destiny has become...
Don’t Leave Home Without a Personal Concierge
Venture Beat reports that American Express customers can now take Reardon Commerce’s personal concierge with them when they leave home. It illustrates the converging of several trends: context-centric application mash-ups, multiple ways of interacting — voice, SMS, email, Web. This could be taken to the next level with a smart interactive voice application at the end of the click-to-call to increase the efficiency at the other end — think about changing travel plans — an...
Citrix Can’t Stay Xen as Microsoft Launches Hyper-V
After today’s launch of Microsoft’s server virtualization hypervisor, Citrix, which bought virtualization company XenSource last year, may be asking itself some hard questions. Microsoft’s Hyper-V will compete directly with Citrix’s XenSource products for the data center as well as with products from VMware and startup Virtual Iron. But Citrix and Microsoft have close enough ties that the move by Redmond into data center virtualization may be akin to your sister stealing...
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News, opinions and announcements about fast changing communication tools and technologies, from various blogs and ezine.