Archive for July, 2008
Intel Friends Facebook to Make x86 Chips Sexy
I have to hand it to Intel. The company that brought us the brilliant marketing of Intel Inside (remember the stuffed guy in a bunny suit?) says Facebook has chosen its Xeon chips to power the social network. But because Intel is aware that server chips are commodities, the chip maker is also working directly with Facebook, tweaking settings to really make those dual- and quad-core chips roar in the hopes that they will continue to power the servers running Web 2.0 sites and compute clouds. Des...
NewTeeVee Startup Watch: Onecast, Zadby, Anvato, GoAnimate
NewTeeVee has been bursting with startup news this week, including news from a bunch of new companies that have barely been mentioned elsewhere, if at all. So for those GigaOM readers looking for a cheat sheet, I’ve pulled together one here: Onecast/1cast: Apparently this is something like RedLasso, but it’s been approved by TV networks instead of sued by them. Founded and funded by telco-turned-wireless guy Craig McCaw. The stealth company has nothing but a landing page for the mo...
Dynolicious for your Apple iPhone or iPod Touch - Coolest Apple App ever!
Dynolicious utilizes the accelerometer built in to your iPhone or iPod Touch to sense the motion of your vehicle to calculate performance statistics including 0-60 acceleration, 1/4 Mile Elapsed Time, Lateral G’s, and Horsepower. Is this not the coolest Apple App ever? I would have headed over to the Apple App Store to buy this app pronto, except I no longer drive a high-performance Dodge Viper - I now drive a pokey Volvo. Here’s a photo of my beloved 2001 Dodge Viper at a Cape Co...
13 Startups Working on Solar-Concentrating PV
We’re all familiar with standard photovoltaic solar panels, and many of us are starting to become acquainted with solar thermal tech that uses the sun’s heat to generate power as well. But there’s also a third option: Over a dozen startups are currently working on ways to use mirrors and lenses to concentrate sunlight hundreds of times onto tiny, highly efficient solar cells. Known as concentrating photovoltaic technology, the systems are meant to cut back on one of the most expensive pa...
Welcome to Bell Canada Lite
One of the most puzzling aspects of Bell Canada’s announcement earlier this week it was slashing 2,500 management jobs was that some analysts seemed surprised. In the wake of a leveraged buy-out that has left with more than $30-billion of debt, the company needs to be aggressive to boost cash flow. A key part will be lower operating costs, much of it through streamlining operations (aka wide-scale staff reductions). It’s the only way that Bell Canada can support its new financial st...
Alcatel-Lucent: Sign of an Industry-Wide Malaise
Earlier this morning Franco-American telecom giant, Alcatel-Lucent, gave CEO Pat Russo and Chairman Serge Tchuruk the proverbial boot after the company reported a disastrous quarter, missing its earnings and revenue targets. The company says they resigned – which is utter rubbish because in this day and age, no one gives up megamillion-euro pay packages just because they’re feeling pious. Much of the blame was put on macroeconomic factors and the wireless industry’s transition from CD...
Skype 4.0.0.155 Beta 1 for Windows
Skype just released a new beta of 4.0.called Skype 4.0.0.155 Beta 1 for Windows. Just remember there are some caveats to using Skype 4.0 beta. Read here for more. Here’s what’s new / fixes: 30.07.2008 Skype 4.0.0.155 Beta 1 for Windows change: Firefox Skype plugin updated to version 2.2.0.94 bugfix: Video mood and instant messages did not work when user had Flash Player 10 installed Localizations updated Also, here’s what was fixed in the prior version of the Skype beta: 09.0...
Level 3 & Packet8 major outage
BREAKING!A source is telling me that Level 3 Communications and Packet 8 are having a system-wide network outage for the last 30 minutes. Level 3 is a huge provider of VoIP termination and I believe Packet8 uses their network for termination. Other VoIP service providers will also be affected if indeed Level 3 is having an outage. I’m trying to confirm this as I type this. I’m currently on hold (5min so far) for Packet8’s technical support and sent my contacts at 8×8 an e...
SimpleSignal hosted VoIP lets Mobile Workers Listen to Emails and Manage Microsoft Outlook Calendar with Voice Commands
Today, SimpleSignal is announcing that it has successfully married Microsoft Exchange 2007 with its BroadSoft-based Hosted PBX offering to offer a new solution called SimplyMobile. SimplyMobile offers some really cool features, such as the ability to listen to emails from any phone — even a mobile device by leveraging TTS (text-to-speech). Also, it features the ability for users to use voice commands to call the people who emailed them. They espouse the ability to be driving and lis...
Save Titan!
From a NASA press release: NASA Confirms Liquid Lake on Saturn Moon “PASADENA, Calif. — NASA scientists have concluded that at least one of the large lakes observed on Saturn’s moon Titan contains liquid hydrocarbons, and have positively identified the presence of ethane… “”Detection of liquid ethane confirms a long-held idea that lakes and seas filled with methane and ethane exist on Titan,” said Larry Soderblom, a Cassini interdisciplinary scientist w...
3CX Free SIP Softphone
3CX has announced the release of a totally free new VoIP softphone called 3CX VoIP Phone that allows users to make and receive calls from their computer using SIP-based VoIP providers or SIP-based IP-PBXs. This free SIP softphone client isn’t the first “free” softphone on the market. That distinction belongs to Counterpath’s popular X-lite SIP softphone. However, I’m glad to see more free SIP softphones on the market. In fact, I’d like to see free SIP softph...
Google Eyeing A VC Arm?
The Wall Street Journal reports that Google may be trying to build out a corporate venture capital arm similar to other strategic venture groups at companies ranging from Intel to Motorola. The Journal reports that Google SVP David Drummond will be in charge, and that the search giant has hired 33-year-old former entrepreneur and investor William Maris to help. Since Google already invests in plenty of companies from Current Communications to 23&Me, the genetic information company run by S...
Who do YOU want to be today?
A friend of mine starts his days by asking the question: Who do I want to be today? And by doing so, he is able to reset his perspective on life on a regular basis. When you can empower yourself with the ability to see the world through the eyes of whomever you want to be, you can gain some pretty amazing insights and perspectives. And with such insights, you can also get a sense of enlightenment. So I ask, who do YOU want to be today? Tags: Entrepreneurship, leadership, Entrepreneur, Jef...
Yo FCC! Are You Doing Anything About Metered Broadband?
In an effort to burnish his public image, Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin has take up a populist and politically lucrative crusade against the evil cable company, Comcast and its nefarious efforts to block certain kinds of traffic. Given that we all love to hate our cable companies, especially the big ones, it is a calculated bet by Martin, who is rumored to be contemplating running for US House of Representatives after he leaves FCC. Now wonder, he has been campaigning ...
In Good Times and Bad, Direct Response Advertising Delivers the Goods
If you watched TV during the 1960s - or AMC’s hot new show about the 1960s advertising universe, Mad Men - “David Oglivy” is a name to be conjured with. A YouTube video of the Master at Gavin Heaton’s Servant Of Chaos blog is a Schweppervescent trip down memory lane. It’s also a timeless reminder for marketing folks that direct response - not general - advertising is the real gold standard. Why? Because direct response advertisers know “to the dollar...
Phweet - Ruthlessly Simplified Disintermediation
When I received this Twitter message earlier this afternoon: clicked on the embedded URL and immediately was listening in on a conversation involving not only Stuart Henshall but also David Beckemeyer of Televolution (producer of PhoneGnome - now known as the PhweetGeek), I found I was in for a most interesting conversation experience. Within minutes we had a multi-party call involving as many as eight participants from India, Italy, Ireland (actually, Pat was calling in while on va...
Android Co-Founder, Cisco CTO to Keynote at Mobilize
Every day the promise of the mobile web moves closer to being realized, and every day we move one step closer to Mobilize, our one-day conference dedicated to examining the implications — and identifying the opportunities — in this coming revolution. We are thrilled to report that we have confirmed two of the industry’s best and brightest as our keynote speakers: Rich Miner, co-founder of Google’s Android, and Padmasree Warrior, chief technology officer at Cisco Systems...
Phweet public alpha - from tweet to talk in one click
Mode shifting from twitter (great for metatalk: "can we phweet in 5 minutes?") to live, multi-party, p2p, in-browser, flash-only party lines. "A Phweet is a shortURL that makes conversations and conference calls possible between Twitter friends and across other social networks. Let your friends know you are talking. Invite them to join in. No numbers, no new profiles. Simple, just start Phweet talking!" - the Phweet blog Notes: A pilot project by Stuart Henshall (co-found...
Web Goes Retro With Firef.ly
For some of us old fogies who grew up using bulletin boards and forums on closed online services, online chat has always held a special allure. Remember, it was chatting that proved to be the killer application for AOL. Yet somehow the chat phenomenon didn’t quite translate as well on the open web, mostly because the implementations were kludgy and the software was too slow. Still, instant messaging and lately Twitter-styled short messages have only become more popular. At the other extre...
It’s about the Applications
Voice 2.0 Thought Leader Thomas Howe analyzed the applications available from the iPhone App Store today. At the end of the article he paid us a compliment: As a telephony developer, keep your eyes glued to ifbyphone - they are first out of the gate. We’re excited that people are using our iPhone application and are generally giving it good reviews. It has utility. It is useful. Tell your parents where you’re going to be tonight. Tell your fans about your next gig. Much ...
Ribbit sold, what’s going on with Lypp?
Already a couple of days old now is the news that Ribbit just sold for $105m with (£53m) in cash. A congratulations is in order for Ted Griggs and his crew! Due to this news Lypp is receiving a bit more attention and I have recently been asked by a few interested parties, “What are you going to do with Lypp?”. The short answer is “We are building a profitable company.” The long answer is, “We are building a profitable company.” Next week as we will be announ...
Frontier Sets Tiny Broadband Cap
Frontier Online, an incumbent carrier with service in 23 states, updated its acceptable use policy last week to reflect that it now has a 5 GB data cap for its DSL subscribers (hat tip to DSL Reports). Before we all cry foul, however, Frontier wants us to know that with that cap, we can each send half a million emails and download about 1,250 songs from iTunes. Of course, the picture’s less rosy if you’re like me and love Hulu, since then you’re looking at only 10-15 hours of ...
First Impressions; Tough Critics
For anyone involved in an online startup, the launch of Cuil earlier this week offered some good insight about the ins and outs of officially unveiling a new service. While lots of media and blog coverage is the ultimate goal to gain attention and users, a far more important issue is making a good first impression with a service that fills a need and performs well. Cuil got plenty of attention but it was hanmmered for not working and/or offering less than satisfactory search results. So, the que...
Dymo DiscPainter Review
Printing CD and DVD labels can be a chore. It often requires special labels and only certain printers can accept CD/DVD labels. Certainly burning CDs and DVDs has become more popular so users are looking for quick, easy, and fun ways to label and decorate their CD/DVD collections. I have an Epson printer at home that doesn’t print the size labels I need, so I resort to using a black Sharpie pen and hand scribbling on the CD or DVD. And when I had “scribbling” I mean scribbling...
Safety in the Slow Lane
Many people are driving slower to save gas, no doubt about it. I now drive the speed limit and I’m not alone in the slow lane. An optometrist Mary saw said he has gone from tailgater to tailgatee. Some people still speed; some semis are still barreling along at 80 whenever they’re reasonably sure there are no cops around. Worse, as the optometrist noticed, impatient would-be speeders including semis are tailgating us slow guys in their frustration to get going again. I’m not f...
Google Moves to Reinvent Transportation
On a sunny afternoon back in June of 2007, members of the media, academia and the tech industry gathered to watch Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin drive a white Prius around the parking lot of the search giant’s Mountain View, Calif., headquarters. It wasn’t just a slow news day — the Prius had been converted into a plug-in vehicle, and Page and Brin had gotten behind the wheel in order to announce the company’s RechargeIT initiative, which included, among o...
Comcast Earnings Prove Broadband Growth Slowing
As earnings season continues, it’s clear that some in the U.S. have had their fill of broadband. Within the past week AT&T and Verizon reported slowing broadband growth, and today Comcast saw its high-speed Internet access customers grow by 278,000 new subscribers, but added 18 percent fewer customers than it did during the second quarter of last year. It appears that messing with P2P traffic, the likely enforcement order from the FCC and worries over tiered broadband have done litt...
Are you where YOU want to be?
There are times when you need to stop what it is you are doing and ask yourself the question Are you where YOU want to be? Depending upon your answer, you owe it to yourself to make the first move and get yourself to the place where you really want to be. Sometimes we just dont know where we are going or how to get there. And sometimes we know where we want to be but dont make the effort to guide ourselves there. When you realize you have gone off course, make the effort and get yourse...
India Getting Ready For 3G Wireless Broadband
Coming soon in India - world’s fastest growing mobile market - 3G services by the dozen. And what that means is a looming free-for-all in a market where competition is already fierce, prices super low, profits even lower and consumer is the ultimate winner. <!–more–>Indian Department of Telecommunications (DOT) is getting all set to introduce about a dozen 3G licenses in some of the more densely populated regions including the South Indian states of Andhra Pradesh, Tami...
Vacation Time - Back August 7
Gotta take a break every so often, and it’s time now. We’re off on a driving trip for a few days through New York state, with the first stop being Cooperstown. It’s just part of the great American sports experience, and we’re looking forward to going back. We went there in 2007, and I did a full posting about that visit here. If you’re a baseball fan I think you’ll enjoy that. Having done the full treatment then, I don’t plan on doing another big post t...
Dell’s New Line Makes Like Apple
Finally it seems like somebody in the PC business besides Apple has grabbed the idea that style matters — the message is in the medium, so to speak … Dell’s smallest, most personalized and most environmentally responsible consumer PC, the Studio Hybrid, launched today; that’s it in the photo at left. Available immediately at www.dell.com/hybrid, the PC’s new unique shape and size can be personalized with six optional, external jewel-toned color or bamboo sleeves. D...
Early Termination Fees Going Bye-Bye?
Hey, hey, hey … Sprint Nextel was dealt a major blow in its early-termination-fee case when a California judge ruled it would have to pay $73 million. Bad news for Sprint … … but good news for us! The decision could bode poorly for the various trials that are taking place throughout the country, as well as the attempt by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to make wireless carriers exempt from these state court cases. “This ruling sounds the death knell for the in...
Wi-Fi Will Own the Home Network
Two studies came out today touting the conclusion that the multiple types of home networking technologies will not compete with one another, but will happily co-exist within the home. I, on the other hand, am beginning to think that Wi-Fi will take the lion’s share of the market and edge all others into one-trick pony status, à la Bluetooth for headsets. Cisco’s investment yesterday into WiFi-based wireless video transfer company Celeno Communications just drives this point home. ...
Welcome to the PS3 Data Center
Computerworld has done a nice job of encapsulating a corporate IT trend we’ve been writing about for the last couple of months with our focus on accelerator chips — among them graphics processors from Nvidia or AMD and Cell (which was designed originally for the PlayStation 3) from IBM — moving into the enterprise. To sum it up, the x86 processor, the workhorse of corporate computing, can do a lot, but accelerators such as Cell or GPUs can do some things better and faster, suc...
Catching Up: iSkoot Gets Third Party Recognition
Over the past few months there have been a few Skype Journal posts about iSkoot and how they provide mobile device access to Skype’s services. Of course, iSkoot also provides the software behind the Skypephone on the 3 network in nine countries. Recently iSkoot has been getting some accolades from third parties: Nokia named iSkoot for Skype as a featured Application of the Week earlier this month on both the Nokia site and the S60 site. iSkoot loads your Skype contact lis...
What a Difference a Cert Makes
Digital certificates are one way we know to trust someone online. Most of us use them without even realizing it; every time we visit a secure web site, our browser checks a certificate that’s been signed and dated by a trusted third party. Other servers, such as those used to send email, rely on certificates, too. But certificates, as they did for Google today, sometimes go stale. Given the number of people who use Gmail with their desktop mail application, this means desktop users were ...
VoSKY launches T1/E1 PBX-to-Skype Gateway
VoSKY today launched a high-density T1/E1 PBX-to-Skype Gateway. Who needs SIP trunks when you can have 23 or 30 simultaneous Skype trunks? Though I’d like to see a 100% software-based gateway solution for IP-PBXs, since like Skype, they run on the IP network already. Still for traditional PBXs with T1/E1 interfaces, getting a PBX-to-Skype gateway to migrate away from expensive per minute charges on the traditional PSTN makes a lot of sense. Often the biggest cost of migrating to a 100% V...
Navigata Shows Small Business Phone System Provider ‘Linksys One’ The Door
Word on the street is that Navigata (a subsidiary of Sasktel) is shutting down it’s Linksys One offer and is giving it’s customers until the end of October to get off their Linksys One network. Since Response Point provides some great features and offers the best of the VoIP and analog phone word, it is looking like it could be a good fit for some of those customers looking to get off the Linksys One platform. The good news is that the SIP trunks that we make available via SMBPhoneS...
Introducing The Ifbyphone Lead Distributor
Just a few days after launching the Ifbyphone Voice Broadcast app for the iPhone, today we are introducing the Ifbyphone Lead Distributor. Basically, the Ifbyphone Lead Distributor allows Ifbyphone customers to establish a virtual call center without any start-up expense. As an excerpt from our press release states, The Ifbyphone Lead Distributor offers a host of productivity benefits for small- and medium-sized businesses already taking advantage of Ifbyphone’s ability to integrate Web and te...
Front Page Of The Chicago Sun-Times Business Section
The Chicago Sun-Times, one of the two major newspapers in Chicago, featured us today on the front page of the business section. Click on the title below to read the article, or you can also find it in our press room. Skokie telecom hopes to create a buzz with phone solutions The Chicago Sun-Times also cited Jon Arnold’s comments about Ifbyphone in the article: Jon Arnold, principal of J Arnold & Associates, a Toronto-based telecommunications analyst, said Ifbyphone’s mashups of...
4b needs tweaking: Cimex Usability Study on Skype 4.0 Beta 1
How do you discover what people really do with your software? Our behavior often differs from what we think we do. The human-computer interaction research method eye tracking can reveal where a user’s attention goes when they use a product. Two days after Skype launched the Skype for Windows 4.0 Beta in June 2008, Cimex, a British firm with a usability and accessibility lab, spent a day watching people use Skype. Then wrote them up. I’m including the full text of their report...
IfByPhone’s iPhone Application: Updates
The launch of our Voice Broadcast application for the iPhone went very well. The application is rapidly climbing in popularity, and we’ve listened to the feed back from our users. To that end, we’re making some changes. Our iPhone accounts will now work forever (instead of the previous 6 months before signing up for a package). Users can use the 100 free minutes and not pay a thing. You can sign up here. We will be adding a way for you to enter your credit card information i...
Astricon, Win $100, and Party Hardy at ITEXPO
Came across DIDx (DIDXchange) CEO Suzanne Bowen’s blog today, where she mentions that DIDXchange is sponsoring the Code Zone Reception on Tues PM Sept 23 at Astricon and also “giving a lightning talk with some of you on DIDX and IAX2.” She includes a sign up link to http://www.didx.net/astricon2008/, but the link doesn’t work. Anyway, she’s offering an interesting survey with the chance to win a $100 gas card or $100 American Airlines voucher. “Whether you a...
Cleantech Investors Back Obama Over McCain
Presidential hopeful Barack Obama’s green energy platform has gained him fans among that industry’s most powerful players — its investors. According to a presidential campaign donation database, the investors backing cleantech companies are backing Obama as well, putting six times the amount of money into his coffers vs. those of John McCain. Read the full story on Earth2Tech.com ...
HP, Yahoo and Intel Create Compute Cloud
At long last Hewlett-Packard is stepping up with an answer to cloud computing by creating a partnership with two other big technology vendors and three universities to create a cloud computing testbed. Through its R&D unit, HP Labs, the computing giant had has teamed up with Intel, Yahoo, the Infocomm Development Authority of Singapore (IDA), the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany. The cloud...
The Stuff That Dreams Are Made of …
Buck Rogers and James Bond used jetpacks, and since the 1960s, several real jetpack designs have been built from metal, plastic and propellant. None has flown more than a minute. Now a New Zealand inventor, Glenn Martin, plans to unveil today what he calls “the world’s first practical jetpack” at the EAA AirVenture, the gigantic annual air show in Wisconsin. It’s personal flying taken to the very personal level. Martin, who has spent 27 years developing the device...
BT Buys Ribbit for $105 Million
BT (British Telecom) has acquired Silicon Valley-based Ribbit for roughly $105 million, according to various news outlets. Rumors of the deal first emerged on Venturebeat, though company officials vociferously denied any deal. Our sources say that the delays were mostly due to internal issues at Ribbit. Michael Boustridge, President, BT Americas said: “The Ribbit platform makes it simpler, cheaper and faster to build communications functionality into applications, enabling developers to intro...
Alcatel-Lucent CEO and Chairman Out
During its second quarter earnings call earlier this morning telco gear maker Alcatel-Lucent said its chairman Serge Tchuruk and its CEO Patricia Russo would step down. Both said they were stepping down because the consolidation after their 2006 merger was complete, and now the company needed someone to take it in a new direction. Russo will leave at the end of the year or sooner if the board finds a replacement and Tchuruk will leave Oct. 1. Russo especially had faced demands for her departure...
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xyz bla bla bla is this thing working? Technorati Tags: 2007, 911, Afghanistan, AlGore ...
Tangible vs. Digital
Even though Cottage Country is going digital with the sad but staedy penetration of high-speed Internet access and satellite TV, it is still pretty much an analog world. If you look around many cottages, you’ll see tangible, non-digital things such as books, magazines, newspapers, a TV that, if you’re lucky pulls in the CBC, and a radio. And if you’re wondering where VCRs and all those VCR tapes go to die, many of them will be found in Cottage Country. Without the Web and a 5...
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News, opinions and announcements about fast changing communication tools and technologies, from various blogs and ezine.