Archive for August 28th, 2008
Brough Turner: 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. Brough Turner is CTO of NMS Communications. In the 1990s, Brough was a leader in PC-based telephony and contributed to the emergence of VoIP technologies, products, and standards. Skype was a revelation – now love and disappointment. When I first tried Skype in early September 20...
Nokia Clarifies Its Future N-Series VoIP Plans
I recently wrote about Nokia backing away from VoIP on some of their N-Series phones, in particular noting that carriers had never viewed the addition of the functionality too kindly. Nokia is now responding on its blog, saying that no, it isn’t backing away from VoIP. The company also not only denies that it’s under carrier pressure, but goes so far as to say that I failed to “qualify” such a theory. In my defense, I have been covering the mobile industry for a long time, a...
Is Sony Ericsson Headed for Splitsville?
According to Reuters, Sony’s joint venture with cell phone maker Ericsson must do better. Asked whether Sony is planning to end its Sony Ericsson joint venture, Sony head honcho Howard Stringer said: “It’s certainly been a difficult year but buying out a partner is never an easy thing.” Sony lowered its group net profit forecast for the year to March by 17 percent, citing a slump at Sony Ericsson and weakening prospects for its electronics division amid tough price com...
Comcast Metered Broadband Official — Beware What You Download
Karl Bode over on DSL Reports reports that Comcast will institute a 250 GB cap on its broadband connections starting Oct. 1. Expect other carriers to follow suit and make tiered broadband a reality. Much as I would like to think otherwise, this is the end of the Internet as we know it. The caps are a move to ensure that the gouging scheme put in place by Comcast and other cable providers stays intact and they can continue to sell their video-on-demand services. It was a point I made when I wrot...
What’s Wrong with Second-Hand Video Game Sales?
Publishing giant Electronic Arts has said that it’s currently trying multiple new business models to help battle the critical problem of second-hand videogame sales. (No problem for me!) While retailers reap the benefits of selling the same product multiple times, publishers and developers don’t see any income once a title hits the second-hand market. But realizing it’s powerless to stop retail from selling second-hand goods, EA is looking to combat the problem by capturing...
Recent Skype Executive Interviews
A couple of recent interviews on other weblogs - one in English, one in French Jonathan Christensen, GM for Video and Audio, is slated to be a keynote speaker at IT Expo in two weeks. As a leadup Rich Tehrani, President and Editor-in-Chief at ITExpo organizer, TMCnet, interviewed Jonathan. Nothing earthshaking but includes some views on the overall communications market evolution, especially the role of mobile phones: RT: How do you see the communications market evolving?JC: Communications ...
What Do You Want in a Mac Netbook?
Rumors about small devices that run Mac OS X are a dime a dozen most days. Putting aside for a moment the question of what we might see from Cupertino, James Kendrick and Kevin Tofel converse on what they’d like to see out of an Apple netbook — in terms of pricing, size, weight and performance. For the full debate, head over to jkOnTheRun. ...
Bruce Wang: 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. Bruce Wang blogs from Shanghai, China, on content syndication, instant messaging, digital ID, and social media technologies. Skype is a daily tool I can’t live without. Skype is a perfect way to share ideas with a group of friends instantly, no matter where they are. I use it at ...
iPhone App RunKeeper: Nice, Just Not Necessary
While Apple’s television ads show off brawny and multilingual applications for the iPhone, the vast majority of those available in the much-ballyhooed app store seem to be glorified four-function calculators. Of course, just as the modern computer emerged from the simple electronic adding machine, many of these apps hold the potential to grow into something impressive. But when? This puts the app buyer in a tough spot — who’s going to shell out real money for something that do...
Rumor: AT&T May Bid For Cable & Wireless
AT&T, the largest phone company in the U.S., may buy UK-based Cable & Wireless, according to The Guardian. The rumors were prompted by a research report by a local stock broker. Cable & Wireless is one of those telecoms whose fortunes have followed the trajectory of William Shattner’s small screen career. It may have been Captian Kirk at one time, but now all it does is pitch cheap tickets and hotel rooms. Sorry, I meant it is a telecom company selling services to businesses. ...
SugarSync Sweetens Service With an iPhone Appbr
We’re obsessed with synchronizing content between computers, and SugarSync from Sharpcast not only syncs regular documents and photos between computers, but also between mobile phones. So it’s fitting that we let you know that Sharpcast has announced an iPhone app available free to anyone who subscribes to the SugarSync software. Consumers can use the iPhone to access their SugarSync file repository online and manage or view files on all their computers. For a complete rundown of Su...
Alexander Hager: 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. Alex Hager is a law student, couch surfer, and amateur photographer in Vienna, Austria. Skype helps me to stay in touch with friends and family, no matter where I am, whether I travel or stay at home. Besides enabling me to hear and see loved ones, I use it to practice different language ski...
Petr Silon: 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. Petr Silon is Managing Director at xTel Ltd which runs Skype Hardware shop in the Czech Republic. Opportunity. My Business. New friends. Everyday communication tool. Cool thing. I use Skype daily nearly for five years. I started with Skype 0.8 beta version and shortly afterwards I first tra...
Please Don’t Let Sony Determine Our Wireless Home Networking Standards
The German magazine Die Welt has scored an exclusive interview with Howard Stringer, the CEO of Sony. Maybe you have PlayStation 3 sitting in your living room or recall that Sony won the high-definition DVD format war with its Blu-Ray technology? In this interview Stringer sets his sights higher, on the domination of home networking. He says, I set the target, to be achieved by March 2011, of a product portfolio in which 90 percent of the devices will be capable of networking and connecting wir...
How To Build An ENUM Server
With ENUM ever growing in use across multiple networks and having just gone through the process of rebuilding our own ENUM server I thought I would document the overall steps. Read More… ...
Face the Music: It’s Time To Fix Licensing
I was talking to an executive at a major label the other day. We were talking about startups and he noted that they either sue these companies out of business or legitimize them out of business. That is not far from the truth. How many legitimate, standalone digital businesses can you name that rely on licenses from the labels for their primary business and are profitable? Let’s categorize by business model: E-Commerce/Transaction-based: iTunes immediately comes to mind. It may be p...
Alex Kazim: 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. Alex Kazim, former President of Skype, is now CEO of Tokoni, a true life storytelling community. Skype changed my world. I was involved in the acquisition of the company and its management. But I worked through Skype. We used it extensively to manage Skype’s offices in Tallinn, Luxemb...
BroadSoft Acquires VocalData
Interesting story from yesterday about BroadSoft acquiring what used to be known as VocalData. It’s not huge news and hasn’t received much attention, but for people like me who have followed these companies pretty much from the beginning, we notice. You can tell I’m old school because I talk about VocalData. The more current explanation - which you can see in the press release - is that BroadSoft acquired “GENBAND’s M6 Communication Applications Server” - form...
Mobile Roundup Squawk Box Podcast
Just a quick note to say Alec Saunders has now posted the podcast of yesterday’s Squawk Box session. We had a mobile roundup session, and I was able to log in and participate. Mobile VoIP has been a hot topic lately - and I’ve been posting about it - so it was a lively forum for everyone to weigh in on. So, if you’re following things like mobile VoIP, the iPhone, Android, smartphones in general, and the latest N Series phones from Nokia - and want to hear what a lot of smart, ...
Friendly Hackin at Nerdville
Daughter Kate, son-in-law Hugh, and first grandchild Jack have moved back to the US. Enroute to their new lives, they’re staying with us in Vermont. Only problem is that they got to our house before we did. Should have been no problem: the lock is electronic; Kate had the code for both it and the alarm. But the door wouldn’t open. Jack is patient but not infinitely so. They couldn’t call us on their cellphones because they hadn’t yet gotten US versions and there is no G...
Good to see James Enck blogging again at EuroTelcoblog…
It’s good to see that James Enck is blogging again at EuroTelcoblog. For quite a few years, I enjoyed reading James’ blog largely because he provided this North American writer with some perspective into telephony/telcos in Europe and also because he wrote about Fiber-To-The-Home (FTTH) a good bit and I learned from that. Then in April 2007, after about 3 years of writing, James just… stopped. But now he’s back… with an interesting explanation. Welcome back, James!...
SugarSync Sweetens Service With an iPhone App
We’re obsessed with synchronizing content between computers, and SugarSync from Sharpcast not only syncs regular documents and photos between computers, but also between mobile phones. So it’s fitting that we let you know that Sharpcast has announced an iPhone app available free to anyone who subscribes to the SugarSync software. Consumers can use the iPhone to access their SugarSync file repository online and manage or view files on all their computers. For a complete rundown of Su...
Sprint’s Xohm Adds Location to WiMAX
Despite its delays launching its Xohm 4G mobile WiMAX network, Sprint has not been idle. The carrier said this morning it would work with a variety of businesses to bring location-based services to the Xohm network when it launches in September. It sounds neat, and the partners listed below could make for a good location-based services experience, but right now mobile WiMAX is a data card strategy without handsets. That makes location more of gimmicky feature for browsing on your laptop than th...
Canadian Duo Unveils Comment Tool
Within the blogosphere, comments are a strange animal. Comments welcomed by blog writers, they’re often far more interesting and insightful as blog posts, and, of course, they’re a favorite tool of spammers. The other reality is comments are seen as the ugly cousins to blog posts. Blog posts get top ranking as the stars of the blogosphere while comments play second fiddle, even though many people get as much from comments as the blog posts themselves. (Trackbacks used to be supportin...
Fewer Clicks Equals More Conversions
Your Web advertising program is only as good as your landing page. That’s the message of this post at the Small Business Wordpress blog. “If a surfer clicked an ad expecting to find gold plated doorknobs, then you better make sure the landing page has just that. There is nothing worse than a customer who is ready to buy but can’t.” The key isn’t clever copy or design — quite the opposite. It’s clear copy and simple design that makes things easy for visi...
IPEVO will give away a Solo Skype desk phone for Skype’s birthday
Tomorrow, Skype will celebrate the launch of the first public beta five years’ ago. Honoring this, IPEVO is gifting a lovely Skype desk phone to one of the people who wrote a "What Skype Means To Me" essay for Skype Journal. Deadline: Midnight Pacific Thursday night, Friday Morning Judgment: We’ll pick a name randomly from those who submitted entries to Skype Journal. Employees of IPEVO are not eligible. How to enter: Please email your essay or short tho...
Daksh Sharma: 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. Daksh Sharma is an executive for online strategies at an IT consulting firm in New Delhi, India. Daksh follows social-media and web2.0 trends on The Marketing Blog. "Common you don’t know about Skype ? Are you kidding me mate?" That is my common reaction if I come across peopl...
Wesley Fryer: 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. Wesley Fryer is an educator, a digital storyteller, a technologist, and an innovator in bringing the three together. He is an alumnus of AT&T, lives in Oklahoma City, and is completing his doctorate in Curriculum and Instruction at Texas Tech University. Wes started Moving at the Speed of...
A Qik Look at Breakfast with Jeff Pulver (and Friends) in Tel Aviv:
Earlier today I hosted a breakfast at Cafe Aroma in Tel Aviv. The following video clips were originally broadcast live during the breakfast. Tags: Qik, Social Media, breakfast, Tel Aviv, Jeff Pulver ...
WiiWare Finally Gets Some Rhythm!
It’s about time. Last Spring, Nintendo launched WiiWare, a downloadable game service on the Wii, but I haven’t been all that impressed by the scant titles they’ve made available since then. This week’s offering is different: Helix, from indie developer Ghostfire Games. In my view it’s the first WiiWare title to truly capitalize on the game console’s unique functionality and diverse audience. More crucial, it’s WiiWare’s first music/rhythm game,...
Midweek Skypeland news roundup
Expressivo text-to-speech reader plug-in for Skype. $49. Comes in female US-English, male and female Polish, and female Romanian. Kara DioGuardi, new American Idol judge Howard Greenfield interviewed me for ZDNet Asia on The Talkification of the Web. (Should I trademark "talkification"?) UAE ISP du still blocks Skype, writes PC Magazine’s Midddle and Near East edition. The Emirates has an effective duopoly with Etisalat the other ISP. Both du and Etisalat now block Skype...
Calley Nye: 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. Calley Nye is a social media entrepreneur, a viral marketing expert, social media marketing consultant, marketing strategist, and recovering fashion model. Her blog, Silicon Calley, and her twitter stream capture the vibrant Los Angeles tech scene and Calley’s adventures in startup life...
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News, opinions and announcements about fast changing communication tools and technologies, from various blogs and ezine.