Archive for July 14th, 2008
1 Million iPhones and Counting …
Guess all of the problems haven’t stemmed the tide of iPhone sales since the 11th, with Apple announcing sales of 1 million units just a couple of days after launch (see the official press release here). How about this quote: ”iPhone 3G had a stunning opening weekend,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “It took 74 days to sell the first one million original iPhones, so the new iPhone 3G is clearly off to a great start around the world.” Seems that all of the ...
GigaOM Network Content to be Featured on BusinessWeek.com
Recently, our company entered its third year. It’s hard to believe that it was just a little over two years ago when Katie, Liz and myself would spend our days sitting in a Starbucks somewhere, trying to figure out what to blog about. It has been an amazing two years. We have grown as a company: We notched a few wins, survived a few scary moments, found time for some puppy love and had some fun, but most importantly, we’ve focused on the job at hand. My team’s focus — an...
Can Serendipity Make You Rich?
It could be my advancing years – I seriously doubt that – but every morning I dread turning on my MacBook Pro, fearful of the data deluge that it will bring and the day-long struggle to find the information I need to get things done that will ensue. And I’m not the only one caught in this quicksand-like avalanche of digital data. According to market research firm comScore, in May the total number of Internet searches conducted in the U.S. alone was about 10.7 billion — up nearl...
snom KlarVOICE Wideband VoIP Handset
Snom, the German VoIP handset manufacturer today announced that their wideband enabling technology called KlarVOICE is now available in the North American market. KlarVOICE, which can be adapted to all snom VoIP telephones, allows the capture of more than twice the spectrum of voice frequencies captured by standard phones for a high-fidelity VoIP experience. Key features of snom KlarVOICE powered handsets include full support for the G.722 codec and the doubling of the sample rate, providing an...
In Today’s News - the XBox 360 pwns the Sony PS3
According to Yahoo News, Microsoft Corp said today that its Xbox 360 console will sell better than the Sony PlayStation 3 over the lifetime of the machines. “Xbox 360 will sell more consoles worldwide this generation than PlayStation 3,” Don Mattrick, a senior vice president at Microsoft’s Xbox division, said at Microsoft’s news conference before the start of the E3 video game industry trade show. Microsoft said the Xbox 360 has outsold the PS3 in the United States by 5 m...
The Smart Grid Should Be Stupid
It is becoming conventional wisdom (uh-oh) that a large part of the strategy for reducing dependence on imported oil is to use electricity from sources like wind turbines, solar arrays and concentrators, and nuclear plants as a substitute for that oil. There is general recognition (uh-oh again) that getting that electricity from where it is produced to where it is used will require rebuilding our sadly obsolete electrical grid. Moreover, that new grid should be "smart" so that demand a...
Last million concurrent Skypers in 42 days; next million taking seven months
The beginning of the year began very promising concerning the concurrent Skype users online. In a speed record of 42 days we passed from 11 million to 12 million people online at peak time [18 January 2008 - 7 February 2008]. As my regular readers know, there are some fluctuations, resulting in less people online at: “GMT”-night Weekends National holidays of bigger Skype countries (USA, Brasil, UK, …) Christmas and New Year Period Northern Hemisphere Summer Period The graph below repre...
Sand 9 Gets $8M for Nano MEMs
Sand 9, a Boston University spinoff, has received $8 million in a Series A round from Flybridge Capital Partners and General Catalyst Partners. An early-stage investment in a fabless chip company is notable, simply because there are fewer of them than ever. While the firm isn’t making a true semiconductor, it is using the chip manufacturing process to make its nano-mechanical resonator, a component that can both filter and stabilize multiple frequencies on one piece of tiny machinery. Th...
Tesla Opening a Silicon Valley Store Next Week
Electric car startup Tesla Motors has raised more than $100 million in funding from Silicon Valley venture firms and has its roots in the Valley’s entrepreneurial culture. So it should come as no surprise that next week, on July 22, the company will open its second store in Menlo Park, Calif. At the location near Stanford University, Tesla will not only sell and service its vehicles, but also carry out the final assembly on them…Read more on Earth2Tech. ...
IT in Canada Portal - New UC Post
Toronto colleague Michael O’Neil has been honing his IT in Canada portal for a few months now, and it’s coming along nicely. The portal covers a lot of ground and there’s some very good content, focused primarily on IT-related issues. I’ve been recently added to the “Expert Ring” of contributors to the IT Forum Exchange, which is some nice local recognition. The Forum has several threads, which really are microsites covering a whole range of topics, and my mos...
Skype on "Law & Order: Criminal Intent" TV
Logan: What are you doing tonight? Wheeler: Skype session with my fiance. Logan: What? Wheeler: Video call. He’s still in London. Law & Order: Criminal Intent, "Reunion", episode 7.16 (#149), first aired 13 July 2008. "When the host of TV’s Rock ‘n’ Talk is bludgeoned to death by a champagne bottle, Logan and Wheeler’s investigation into the seamy music world involves Jordie Black, Wheeler’s favorite rock star from high school, whos...
Jeff Pulver - Driving Public Policy Support for VoIP
On Friday, Jeff Pulver had a very welcome post about some unifying efforts underway to create a national framework policy to support VoIP in the U.S. Jeff has long been active on the public policy front through the VON Coalition, which he founded in 1996. Given all the uncertainty around Pulvermedia these days, it’s not clear to me what role Jeff continues to play with the VON Coalition, which operates under its own steam as a non-profit, member supported organization. Regardless, Jeff is ...
Bezos Gets His Game On
With an undisclosed investment in Social Gaming Network by his personal fund, Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos is proving Om right. Back in May, when Bezos invested in Kongregate, another casual gaming site, Om thought it might be the first of many. May is also when SGN raised a $15 million round from Greylock Partners and the Founders Fund. SGN makes games for social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace, and has titles that include WarBook and Superlatives. Now that casual gaming has...
Toronto iPhone Launch Event: Elation and Disappointment
Last Friday morning, iPhone 3G launch day, I caught the earliest commuter train into Toronto and arrived at the Rogers "designated" iPhone launch store about 30 minutes before opening at 8 a.m. A lineup of about 150 people (awaiting what turned out to be 100 units with a cap of 2 per customer) who had endured a massive downpour about an hour earlier and been served a "breakfast" of a granola bar and orange juice. Ironically this store occupies the location of what was, at one...
Viacom Now After YouTube Employee Info?
The latest skirmish in the ongoing Viacom v. YouTube billion-dollar lawsuit battle is over how YouTube employees used their own site. It’s been a nutty couple of weeks for the high-profile case. First a federal judge ordered YouTube to hand over its user data to Viacom. Then Google asked to have user identifying information stripped out. Viacom denied it ever asked for that data (it did) and then said it didn’t want user information after all. Still with us? Now the news is that Vi...
FYI - I’ll be out at OSCON next week in Portland talking about voice mashups…
If any of you reading this will be out at O’Reilly’s OSCON Open Source Convention next week (July 21-25) in Portland, Oregon, I (Dan York) will be there giving a talk on Wednesday on “Mashing Up Voice and the Web Through Open Source and XML“. Here’s the abstract: With over 4.5 billion mobile and fixed phones out there as of November 2007, the phone represents the most ubiquitous user interface out there. As “mashups” on the Web let us quickly and easily acces...
Israel 2008: One Conference, a Few Friends, Many Startups & Some Observations
Just like that, it has been six months since I had my life-changing experience. And perhaps that’s why I was comfortable flying out to Tel-Aviv to attend Yaron Orenstein’s TWS 2008 conference, meeting with tons of startups and getting together with friends. The journey, not the visit to Israel, turned out to be quite arduous, mostly because of the modern air industry’s inability to observe punctuality and show any degree of respect for their customers. (Of course, if you follo...
RuneScape Moves to Come Out of the Shadows
RuneScape is one of online gaming’s biggest success stories, but unless you play it or know someone who does, you’ve probably never heard of it. Launched in 2001 by Jagex Software, an independent studio based in the UK, it’s a traditional fantasy role-playing game that boasts six million active monthly players, almost all of them in the English-speaking world — making RuneScape more popular in the West than World of Warcraft. (Over half of WoW’s 10 million player...
Where Am I Going?
Where Am I Going? is a good question to ask yourself from time to time. For all the times in our lives when we think we know the answer to the question Where Am I Going?, we can be secretly lost inside and not aware of it. These are times when we dont know where we are going, where we want to be, or who we really want to be. Unlike our cars and our phones, there is no optional GPS in our bodies that gives us absolute guidance. The only way we know where we are or where we are going i...
Warning: Carriers See 3G as Golden Goose
With everyone down with a bad case of iPhone fever (long line-ups on July 11 and proclamations it’s going to the “New Personal Computer”), one important consideration many people seem to be overlooking is the wireless carriers own the playground that everyone (hardware makers, consumers) want to play in. It’s the carriers who have been investing aggressively on 3G so they can offer a faster, service/application-friendly network to consumers. With those investments pretty ...
Gaia Gets More Cash as Money Pours Into Virtual Worlds
With Web 2.0 fever finally starting to wane, the investor community has been pumping some serious dollars into virtual worlds and MMOGs — about $345 million in 39 virtual worlds in the first six months of 2008. And the third quarter has started off with a bang, with veteran (it was started in 2003) virtual world/online community Gaia Online announcing that it has raised $11 million in Series C funding from Institutional Venture Partners. Gaia raised $12 million last year from DAG Ventures...
Small Business Internet Phone Services
U.S. competition appears to be heating up in the Small Business (SMB) Internet Phone Service market, but vendors are still wet behind the ears. Although it may seem like there is no shortage of choices for Business Internet Phone Services most of the service providers are still not delivering IP business phone lines in any way that the consumer can understand. There is also a misconception that Internet Phone Service and Business Phone Service delivered over the Internet are the same thing, they...
NOT Metcalfe???s Paradox ??? A Puzzle
Bob Metcalfe posed this puzzle at an unconference we were recently at. He says, however, he didn’t invent it. Most people, including me, get the answer wrong; in fact, I got the answer wrong twice ??? once by not listening and once by not thinking. Here’s the puzzle: You are a guest on a game show. There are three closed doors; behind one of them is a car you want to own; behind the other two are goats you don’t want despite the fact that they don’t burn gas. You have ...
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News, opinions and announcements about fast changing communication tools and technologies, from various blogs and ezine.