Archive for July 30th, 2008
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...
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News, opinions and announcements about fast changing communication tools and technologies, from various blogs and ezine.