Archive for August 26th, 2008
Suing Scrabulous: The Game Everyone Gets to Lose!
Well I guess it’s finally time to check out Wordscraper. Caving Responding to a formal complaint from Scrabble copyright holder Mattel, Facebook has blocked access to Scrabulous for pretty much everyone. I was hoping to at least play Scrabulous when I travel outside the States, but no longer, because Facebook has preemptively blocked it across the globe. (Except in India, where creators Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla hail from and where a court case is still pending.) Worse still, I’...
Woz: The Engineer Behind the Apple
At the 2008 Intel Developer Forum, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak (right in photo) took the main stage to talk about his love of engineering and science, the process behind developing the Apple II personal computer, and what it’s like to be “Employee No. 1″ at Apple. Wozniak also spoke of the impact Steve Jobs (left in photo) still has on Apple and its slew of successful products, from the iPod to the iPhone. If he had his wish, he would have remained an engineer f...
MeBeam: 16 person video chat, no download
Phweet demonstrates the power of talk without downloads. Phweet triggers voice conference calls through twitter. Now see MeBeam, multiparty video conferencing, all in-browser, triggered from Skype. Add mebeam to your Skype contacts list. skype:mebeam?add (you may have to do this manually in Skype 4b) "Send contacts" to mebeam. This invites them to the call. MeBeam Skypes you the link to a web page where you can all talk and see each other. A visual step-by-step here. Free...
Bell Canada: “Users will NEVER need more than 10Mbps to the home”
This piece in Canada’s Globe and Mail truly defies belief. Bell Canada is trying to offer some type of justification for why they are slowing down on rolling out fiber to the home. Well, I should say… they are trying to offer some justification other than the fact that they are now $30 billion in debt due to the recent buyout to take the company private. Anyway, along the way, they provide this gem: Mr. Crull said rivals cannot guarantee those high speeds and their service deterior...
Intel’s Third Tablet Ready for Back to School Ride
Intel has unveiled the third generation of its low-cost laptop for students, which branches out from the standard clamshell design with a tablet-style option and includes a touch screen. Introduced at the recent Intel Developer Forum 2008 in San Francisco, the new Classmate PC – slated for deployment by the end of this year — is aimed primarily at students worldwide in grades 3-8. “We spent a lot of time with ethnographers, building this Classmate with students in min...
Opentape Picks Up Where Muxtape Left Off
With web music fan favorite Muxtape currently out of commission due to “a problem with the RIAA,” an open source — if no more legal — alternative has appeared: Opentape. Opentape describes itself as “a free, open-source package that lets you make and host your own mixtapes on the web.” Or, in other words, a Muxtape clone that’s free and open source. The demo mixtape is basically a straight up clone of the Muxtape site. The software uses PHP 5, Apache, a...
Howard Wolinsky: What Skype means to me
On the occasion of Skype’s fifth birthday, Skype Journal will publish a series on "What Skype Means To Me." You are invited to email your essay or short thoughts to editor@SkypeJournal.com. Howard Wolinsky covered high tech and health care for 26 years from Chicagoland (Barack Obama is his Senator) before writing Skype’s U.S. blog. Back in late 1995, I was new on the tech beat at the Chicago Sun-Times. I asked to cover the Net because I was tired of the medical beat...
Battery Dead? Blame the Display — or the Weather
The more our cell phones come to resemble miniature computers, the harder it is to eke out decent battery life, leaving some of us with little more than fancy bricks at the end of a long day. In order to get a better sense of what exactly saps the juice from cell-phone batteries, I talked to a few people in both the chip and handset worlds. The biggest battery drain, according to my sources, comes from the display, which is one reason it’s going to be hard for iPhones and such to move muc...
Blackberry: The Smartphone for Wilderness Survival
Several years ago, while skiing at Whistler, a member of our party broke her leg in the most remote (but still in-bounds) glacier (Blackcomb Glacier) with only one route in and out. Having cell phone access resulted in having the ski patrol on the scene within about five minutes and timely removal from the mountain to the hospital. It was critical that the cell phone rf sensitivity in this somewhat remote location was sufficient to make a call. The past couple of weekends has found me in Ontario...
“Family Guy” Creator’s Web Show “Cavalcade” Launches Sept. 10
Love “Family Guy”? Get ready for “Cavalcade,” Seth MacFarlane’s new web series. Over at NewTeeVee we’ve got the scoop on the show’s release plans, and we also got our paws on the show’s trailer. It autoplays, so we embedded it after the jump. The multimillion-dollar-budgeted cartoon variety show is to be distributed through Google AdSense in a first-of-its-kind deal. ...
Aircell: On U.S. Planes, VoIP Will Be Muted
Ever since my troublemaker friend Andy Abramson figured out a way to make VoIP calls over GoGo, the in-flight broadband system from Aircell, there has been a flurry of activity leading to the banning of some of the services Andy used. Andy’s experiment came close on the heels of GoGo’s commercial launch on Aug. 20 on American Airlines. When I asked an Aircell spokeswoman if this was mostly an issue of limited bandwidth availability — after all Aircell system does rely on a cel...
Asterisk GUI 2.0 launches
Yesterday, afternoon I mentioned Asterisk GUI 2.0. Later that evening, Digium “officially” announced Asterisk GUI 2.0 and included some screenshots, which you can check out here: here’s a few screenshots to wet your whistle: Tags: Asterisk GUI 2.0, digium, GUI, VoIP Related Entries Digium AsteriskNOW News and more… - Aug 25, 2008 Leslie Conway Joins Digium - Jul 11, 2008 Digium Headquarters Tour - Aug 26, 2008 fring touchtone DTMF support - uh hello? - Aug 25, ...
Digium Headquarters Tour
During my tour of Digium’s headquarters in Huntsville, Alabama I snapped quite a few photos that I thought I’d share. I’ll just share a few here, but if you want to see them all, go check out the online photo album I created specifically for Digium: http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating/photos/digium/ Be sure to check my other photo albums as well: http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/tom-keating/photos/ The new Digium headquarters is very impressive. I couldn’t help but be...
Mobile VoIP - Update
Looks like I posted a touch too early on this topic yesterday. Olga’s Business Week article was posted right after midnight, and if I’d waited a bit longer I would have had all this in one post today. Anyhow, she covers the ground nicely and talks about a new one I hadn’t come across yet - Gorilla Mobile. My comments didn’t make their way into the article, but most of what’s there is familiar to what we talked about on Friday. If you’re interested in this topi...
Microsoft vs. Adobe: The Rivalry Heats Up
Want to watch a great boxing match? Just take a seat and watch the back-and-forth between Adobe Systems and Microsoft. I wrote about this fight-without-an-end last year, but now it seems the punches are being thrown with more intensity. No surprise: Like two aging gladiators, the two software companies have managed to outlive and beat most their peers. At face value, the fight is about Flash vs. Silverlight. Look deeper and the tussle is over not just online video but about cloud computing, ri...
HP Completes EDS Buy, Heads for the Clouds
HP said today it has closed its $13.9 billion acquisition of Plano, Texas-based IT services provider EDS, which was first announced in May. The success of the deal will depend on HP’s ability to integrate such a large buy into its already mammoth corporate structure. HP has tackled such a large integration before, via its $18.6 billion merger with Compaq in 2002, but many would argue that that deal was a blundering mess rather than a streamlined corporate integration success story. Now t...
VoIP Blocking Explained
Dan York, Director of Emerging Communication Technology at Voxeo, but also on the Board of the Voice over IP Security Alliance (VOIPSA) has written two excellent pieces in another of his blogs, Voice of VoIPSA, discussing the blocking of VoIP calls by Aircell. The first explains how they can block Skype calls, even though they are encrypted while the second goes on to explain why Andy Abramson could make a VoIP call using Phweet. 1. How Aircell is (probably) blocking VoIP phone calls on planes ...
Under The Sea, Google Expands Even More
Google is working with a consortium of carriers to become part of an intra-Asian submarine cable system, tentatively called the Southeast Asian Japan Cable (SJC). The cable would be Google’s second play in the sub-sea category. The new cable links various different cities to Guam, the landing site of a transpacific cable called Unity. Earlier this year, Google invested in this transpacific cable along with a bunch of other carriers. The Unity cable is expected to cost about $300 million. ...
Skype stops selling flat-rate all-Taiwan and all-Asia plans in Taiwan
Taiwan probably has the highest per-capita Skype adoption of any country. Politicians pose for Skype photo-ops. Their top portal drives Skype traffic. They invent the most stylish of USB and PC-free Skype phones. So I was surprised when Jan Geirnaert tipped me to Skype partner PChome backing off of some flat rate services as published in this DigiTimes story. Skype’s deal of a cheap flat rate to landlines in all of Taiwan and most of Asia was so good that some customers maxed...
Fons Tuinstra: What Skype means to me
On the occasion of Skype’s fifth birthday, Skype Journal will publish a series on "What Skype Means To Me". You are invited to email your essay or short thoughts to editor@SkypeJournal.com. Fons Tuinstra is a journalist, Internet entrepreneur, new media advisor and China-consultant in Brasschaat, Shanghai. Fons writes the China Herald and is a principal of the China Speakers Bureau, the leading speakers’ agency for Greater China. On my social networks: In the past mo...
3 and Skype to interchange minutes, unify calling experience
In Olga Kharif’s VoIP Goes Mobile in today’s BusinessWeek [emphasis mine]: Skype, the eBay (EBAY)-owned service used by more than 338 million people to make free PC-to-PC calls, later this year plans to release a new product called "Skype for your mobile" that will let customers use local wireless minutes to make international calls. And later in the story… Later this year, Skype will launch its Skype Out service, letting 3’s Skype customers make calls to home...
Dean McGuire Jr: What Skype means to me
On the occasion of Skype’s fifth birthday, Skype Journal will publish a series on "What Skype Means To Me". You are invited to email your essay or short thoughts to editor@SkypeJournal.com. Dean McGuire Jr. lives in Bangkok. It’s a true gift for me because I am an American who now lives in Thailand. I have four kids back in the U.S. It gives me a chance to talk and look at my kids every day and that is worth more to me than another program or email out there!! Thank...
Buzz About Data but Voice Still Rules
For all the talk about the iPhone, ringtones, the wireless Web and mobile e-mail, here’s the reality few people want to admit: the vast majority of wireless revenue comes from voice services because the vast majority of wireless subscribers mostly use their devices to talk. Talking on your cell phone is no where near as sexy as using an iPhone or Blackberry but that’s the reality once you get beyond the hard-core business crowd and the geeks. Carriers are reluctant to admit as much b...
Direct Response Delivers Just What it Promises - Immediate Feedback
The folks at Brand UK Blog don’t mince words. Here’s what they say about brand advertising in a recent post: ”For a small or medium size business it is a complete waste of money.” Got that? Now, direct response on the other hand, does just what it says — gives you immediate feedback on how well your campaign is working. And how effective is that? Let me tell you from personal experience. This year alone I’ve spent more money at the women’s clothing st...
OpenTape: An Open Source Muxtape
Muxtape, the online service that would allow you to create playlists and share tunes with your friend was recently shut down, much to the dismay of its fans. I found 8Tracks as a worthy follower. Now, OpenTape, an open source version of Muxtape has seen the light of the day. You can download the software and run it on your own server. I have no idea who is behind this project. You can check out the demo here. Download it from this link. RIAA will now have to try and spend more time shutting dow...
AOL Seeks Directions For A MapQuest Facelift
MapQuest isn’t the shiniest online mapping service. It isn’t the most accurate or the coolest. It is so old school … well you get the drift. Apparently, that hasn’t deterred over 47 million people who check out the service every month and make it one of the top 20 websites on the planet. Well, it is time for MapQuest to get a much-needed facelift. But the AOL subsidiary isn’t getting a makeover in the traditional redesign way: The service is entering a three-month ...
Mobile VoIP - Easier Said Than Done
Wanted to pick up on a few threads here that I think point to a topic we’re going to keep hearing about - why isn’t mobile VoIP happening? Of course the answer depends on who you talk to, but it’s certainly getting people’s attention and giving rise to some interesting questions. I’ve always been a fan of a mobile user’s best friend - such as Truphone, fring, Jajah, Mobivox, Rebtel, etc. Admittedly, since I don’t travel much, I don’t have much util...
Part I: Investing in Early Stage Startups - Its the Team that Matters
This week while I am in Israel I will be meeting with and will be pitched by a number of hi-tech startups with dreams. Many times during these meetings I feel like Im a technology scout looking for the next big thing. I look forward to attending these meetings as it is one of the ways I am able to keep track of the latest trends and fashions inside of the Israeli hi-tech startup space which I find particularly fertile for some reason. It is through the process of being pitched and pitching...
Treo 800w: Now Finally We Get Wi-Fi …
The first Treo device with built-in Wi-Fi connectivity is worth a look for companies running a Microsoft back-end infrastructure or for die-hard Treo users. Alas … Although the Treo 800w is likely the best Treo smart phone Palm has delivered to date, Palm’s late adoption of technology now standard on many competing mobile devices leaves the Treo 800w as a middle-of-the-road option for many casual buyers. At long last, Palm has added Wi-Fi connectivity to a Treo, as the 800w features...
Voxeo: A Textbook Case Study for Voice 2.0 and Telecom Partnering
When fellow blogger Dan York joined Voxeo Corporation last October, very few of us in the IP-based communications blogging space had heard of this rapidly growing service provider. Over the next few months, sometimes with Dan’s assistance, Voxeo has become a familiar name identified with a self-financed startup, a profitable business and a very large enterprise customer base focused on supporting voice applications through third party development activity. Revenue generation comes solely f...
Skype Video Not Dog Ready
This test of Skype’s Canine Compatibility shows a confusing user interface. Is a person really there if you can’t smell them (an odorama plugin?) or see them? Dogs have red/green blindness and see less detail. Cognitively, can dogs understand a computer monitor as a window to someplace else? Let’s watch: It’s been five years (35 years in dog or Internet years). Does Skype have a task force working to strengthen the bonds between pets and their families? Bark-to-speech tr...
2.9 Million Got Obama’s Text Message
Barack Obama’s text message is the big story here. Brian outlined the historical importance in an earlier post. Now we have more data about the text-message itself, thanks to Nielsen Mobile who describes it as “the single largest mobile marketing event in the U.S., to date.” They estimate that 2.9 million U.S. mobile subscribers received a text message from the Obama campaign over the course of Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Nielsen Mobile monitors shortcode marketing (the use ...
Apple’s Got a Few Blemishes of Late …
So much good news and now so much bad news. The Apple rumor mill is churning, but this week it’s about software fixes instead of new products. News reports are raising expectations of yet another iPhone software fix next month. Apparently software update 2.0.2 didn’t fix connection problems – in fact, it created new issues for some iPhone users even as others are wrestling with MobileMe foul-ups that make receiving e-mail on the handset sketchy. The software fix Apple was re...
Amazon To Re-Kindle Its Popular eBook Reader
Amazon will reportedly ship new versions of its Kindle e-book reader before year’s end. The original reader launched last November sold out in its first week and had Amazon scrambling to fill holiday orders. While sales have been brisk, estimates vary. A Seattle newspaper confirmed late last week that Amazon.com is in the late stages of rolling out two new versions of Kindle. Reports unconfirmed by Amazon indicate there will be at least two new devices — one with a new user interface...
Mobilize LaunchPad Contestants Announced
With less than three weeks to go, we are busy trying to finalize panels and speakers for our Mobilize conference, scheduled to be held on Sept. 18 in San Francisco at the Mission Bay Conference Center. (We have super-saver tickets on sale but not for long.) One of the highlights of the event is Mobilize LaunchPad. When we asked for submissions, we were simply deluged by the number of entrants, many of them tiny and pre-launch. The sheer number of applicants shows the robustness of the mobile ap...
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News, opinions and announcements about fast changing communication tools and technologies, from various blogs and ezine.