Archive for September 15th, 2008
Am I Alone in Not Liking Video Game Ads?
Just how effective is that Burger King ad in the game NFL Street? Considering that more than a third (36%) of gamers actually bought, talked about or sought information about a product after seeing an ad in a videogame, per Nielsen Games, a case can be made that they are very effective. (And who can forget that the King has his own game!) Of 534 active videogamers surveyed, 11% said they purchased a brand that was advertised in a game. Some 19% said they talked about it after seeing an ad, and ...
Congrats to Brough Turner on his move to Dialogic
More correctly, congratulations to the globetrotting Brough Turner and the whole NMS Communications team which Dialogic is buying. tags: broughturner, dialogic, nms Follow Phil Wolff on Twitter or FriendFeed or on Skype. ...
Jim and Phil on the road
We’ll both be at INTERNET TELEPHONY Conference & EXPO West (ITEXPO for short) in Los Angeles tomorrow and Wednesday and at GigaOm’s Mobilize 08 Thursday and Friday. If you’re there, please call us. Jim’s at +1 (650) 353-4610 and I’m at +1 (510) 206-1138. tags: skype, los angeles, san francisco, itexpowest08, itexpo08, mobilize08, gigaom, gigaomnimedia, events, conferences Follow Phil Wolff on Twitter or FriendFeed or on Skype. ...
Counting Down To Mobilize 08: Almost Sold Out
With three days to go, our Mobilize 08 conference is nearly sold out. It looks like we are going to have fun and interesting conversations around the topic of the Mobile Internet and its impact on the world of technology. Our two keynote speakers, Padmasree Warrior, CTO of Cisco Systems, and Rich Miner, Co-Founder of Google’s Android platform, are going to discuss the changes that come when wireless broadband converges with a whole new breed of mobile devices. They will be two of the many spe...
Citrix and VMware Want to Turn Data Centers Into Clouds
As the VMworld conference kicks off in Las Vegas, expect to see virtualization try to hook its star to cloud computing much like a tired stripper might lure a lucky gambler into marriage. Since virtualized servers act as the basic building blocks of cloud computing — and hypervisors are free — the move on the part of virtualization vendors to push beyond the marketing message of server consolidation into providing services to enable the cloud is both a logical and necessary one. Ci...
Social Networking Blundering
Speaking with a buddy this morning about MySpace and Facebook where people add so many personal things. The HR Director at his company Googles each applicant and checks their social networking profiles. Drunk or other improper photos relegate your resume to the shredder. Here’s 12 Photo blunders that have gotten folks in trouble. I’m sure there are many more. Peter Shankman, author and PR guy, likes openness in people’s profiles. But is there a line? Would you...
Giga Omni Media Acquires TheAppleBlog
Good morning and time to share some great news with our community of readers: We have acquired TheAppleBlog, making it the seventh member of our growing network of blogs. The terms of the deal are not being disclosed. Josh Pigford, who started TheAppleBlog in 2004, is going to join the company and will continue to run the blog from Denver. (His post on the announcement can be read here.) Why TheAppleBlog? Peter Lynch, the legendary mutual fund investor, once famously advised that one should i...
Best Buy Acquires Napster to Bolster Web Retail
Best Buy said today it would spend $121 million to buy former file-sharing poster child, Napster. The move gives Best Buy the ability to offer DRM-free movies and music downloads that would compete with Amazon.com’s download services as well as proprietary files offered by Apple in its iTunes store. Coming on the heels of Best Buy’s newly launched GifTag online shopping registry and its efforts to beef up its cell phone department, I’m thinking the bricks and mortar store migh...
What a Crazy Wall St. Monday
As we start Monday, we learn that Lehman Bros. filed for BK, AIG needs to re-structure (and needs another $40B! after raising $20B) and Merrill Lynch gets bought by BoA for $50B. This follows on the heels of last week’s Freddie Mac and Fannie May take over by the Fed. Interesting note from USA Today, ” When Bank of America balked at buying Lehman, the government urged it to buy Merrill instead.” Oh, and Ike smashed much of Houston, but oil still dropped below $100 per barrel....
Has Twitter Won the Microblogging War?
The always-analytical Louis Gray delivers some excellent micro-blogging insight, looking at how Twitter saw an 18% month-over-month increase in visitors last month. Meanwhile, new rivals - Identi.ca and Plurk.com - both lost traction while Friendfeed was flat. Gray contends that Twitter has “won the microblogging battle” despite its technical struggles. Now, all Twitter needs to do is figure out is ways to make money. Speaking of micro-blogging and money, I’ve been using Twiff...
Pieces of Me: My Authors Note
Back in July 2003 when I first started this blog, I had no idea that blogging would become a daily obsession in my life. To date I have posted more than 4,600 entries in this eclectic blog. I enjoy having a platform to share my passion for technology, tech policy, a sunrise or a sunset, Baseball, Poker, Entrepreneurship and a number of other topics. I first started writing on a regular basis back in the summer of 1996 when I published my first Pulver Report. From 1996 through 2004 the Pulver...
edicy: the Skype-friendly web site builder
Fraktal design/engineering studio built the new Edicy service, a free web site builder. Some of the Skype alumni: Toivo Annus is a co-founder, working on strategy, and remains a partner at Ambient Sound Investments. Paste (toivo) into a Skype chat to see a an emoticon in his honor. Märt Kelder is a co-founder, manages product and engineering management. Andres Sehr is marketing and promoting Edicy. Brought to you from Tartu (city of good thoughts), Estonia. P.S. Send Skype alumni new...
Why MySpace Music is Likely to Fail
MySpace Music, a new music service plotted by MySpace and music labels, is likely to debut soon with much pomp and show. And despite all the pre-buildup hype it is by no means a slam-dunk. Earlier today it was reported that the company is looking to raise about $100 million on a whopping valuation of $2 billion. Nevertheless, the names — Fox, Sony BMG, Universal Music Group Warner Music — involved in the project are going to draw comparisons with another service, Hulu, which had raised a si...
iPhone Gets MMS
For all its forward-thinking feature goodness, the iPhone is missing a lot of things that we’ve all come to expect from modern cellphones. On Monday JuiceCaster will plug one of those holes with the release of Flutter, a free picture message service that doesn’t require jail-breaking. It’s not a full-on MMS (multimedia messaging service) for the iPhone, because it routes messages through JuiceCaster’s servers, but for the user it looks like MMS. You open the app, take a ...
For VMware, an Uncertain Future
In Las Vegas later this week at VMworld, a trade show that celebrates the red-hot technology known as virtualization and it most visible proponent, VMware, many will wonder what the future looks like for the company that single-handedly created a market for this technology. Going into the show, the company that prompted many copycats and even more innovators to try their hand at virtualization faces a plethora of challenges, among them the threat of commoditization of its core product, increase...
Heading out to Los Angeles this week for Communications Developer Conf / ITEXPO…
As I note over in my Voxeo blog post, I’ll be out at the Communications Developer Conference (co-located with ITEXPO) this week in Los Angeles. I will be speaking twice. First on Wednesday morning I’ll be talking about SIP Trunking and security as part of the Ingate SIP Trunking workshops from 10:15-11:15am. Next, on Thursday, I’ll be speaking about “Developing Voice Applications in the Cloud”, a favorite topic of mine these days. Voxeo will also have a booth and ...
Comcast Emails Subscribers About Bandwidth Caps
Comcast, the largest cable company in the world, has started to send emails to its subscribers letting them know about bandwidth limits the company is going to impose, starting Oct. 1, 2008. As it was reported earlier, the company had said that if people go over the 250 GB/month limit, they WILL be thrown off the Comcast network. The company’s email is using metrics to make a case that the 250 GB limit is very generous, but we know it that’s a bit bogus. When we asked our readers wh...
Josh Silverman
Skype CEO Josh Silverman at the Skype Inn in San Jose, California, on 12 September 2008. tags: skype, joshsilverman Follow Phil Wolff on Twitter or FriendFeed or on Skype. ...
SightSpeed VideoChat Comes to Linux, Netbooks
SightSpeed, a Berkeley, Calif.-based Internet video chat and conferencing company is going to announce a Linux-version of its video chat service sometime later this week. The Linux app is going to help target the fast-growing netbooks (others call them mini-notebooks) category. As we have noted, Linux is the preferred operating system for NetBooks. This video chat client can work with SightSpeed software on other OS platforms. Dell is going to bundle this app on its new Mini 9, on both Windows ...
Skype Journal Interviews Josh Silverman: The Way Ahead - An Introduction
On Friday Phil and I participated in a one hour wide ranging interview with Skype’s new President, Josh Silverman. Having listened to both Skype’s team and the market over the past few months, Josh is starting to take the high level measures required to grow Skype from a technology “marvel” into a full-fledged conversation infrastructure business that is “just there” when you want to converse … anywhere, anytime. Having personally participated in a corp...
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News, opinions and announcements about fast changing communication tools and technologies, from various blogs and ezine.