Archive for October, 2008
Multi-Channel Election Night Coverage
If one channel just enough during election season, Dish Network is offering a mosiac channel with six simultaneous feeds of news channels. It started Tuesday, Oct. 28, and will run through Nov. 7. For those 11 days, you can turn to Channel 100 and catch Fox News Channel, CNN, MSNBC, CNN Headlines News, C-SPAN and C-SPAN 2. (At least the remote control will get some rest …) Since May, Dish has offered Dish Decision 2008, an interactive application with news and information about the preside...
Cisco to Release a New Router for Metro Networks
Earlier this week, when checking my referers log, I came upon TechEdgeWeekly.com, which turned out to be a blog created by Cisco Systems. It’s an attempt by the company to use humor to drum up interest in one of its products. Its effectiveness as a comic tool, however, rivals what I imagine is uber-comedian Jerry Seinfeld’s ability to hack together router software. I watched all the videos, which hinted that Cisco was launching something big. As luck would have it, I then got an invite ...
Nintendo Gets New DSi Ready
Nintendo is reportedly likely to launch a new model of its top-selling handheld player, the DS, in overseas markets by next summer. Nintendo will start selling the DSi, which can take pictures, play music and is slimmer than the current model, in Japan tomorrow for 18,900 yen ($192) in a move to revive slowing domestic sales ahead of the critical holiday season. Nintendo previously said it planned an overseas DSi launch in 2009. DS sales in the April-September fiscal first half grew 3% from a ye...
Skype’s P2P architecture supports freemium
Skype can give away free video calling because customers pay for all the expensive marginal costs. With every account, Skype hosts account creation, account backup, and presence service on their servers. These are very lightweight, low cost services but they grow linearly with the user population. Skype also provides technical support, customer service, security and R&D, spread across all users, fee and free. The costs of these services grow slower than the user population. Skype’s...
Measuring Freemium with Minutes is easier than with Money
Hudson asked me about using minutes instead of dollars and the trend of the Freemium Rate I described Monday. Comparing apples to apples, minutes-talked is the only data I have on both sides of the free/fee equation. Money as a measure is useful. It leads us to the lifetime value of a customer. How can we measure free in dollars? We might value the free minutes at some averaged rate and compare that to Skype’s overall revenue. Skype earns money from licensing its brand, the rental of Sk...
Skype is tweaking the freemium model
Following up Monday’s post about the Freemium Rate, Hudson Barton wrote "in a normal ‘freemium’ relationship, it is the higher valued services that have a fee attached to them." Most freemium services offer free but limp, shallow versions of their paid products. I show that on the chart below by the boxed "0" (free, few features) and the upgrade path to the boxed "$" (high cost, more features). In Skype’s case, that’s not how it work...
Scar Search
"Pain heals. Chicks dig scars. Glory… lasts forever." – Shane Falco, The Replacements IPEVO’s cute handheld pointercam inspired the Scar Search. IPEVO and Rockstar Energy Drinks held the contest this summer, the public voting on the best scar story video. Winners: Jeremy (Grand Prize) Danielle (Editor’s Choice) I love this promotion. Intimate, direct, sub-cultural, social, bold. The cutting edge. Scraping the bottom of the elbow. Leaving your mark. Brand...
NewTeeVee Live Countdown: 13 Days
Don’t let the ghouls today or the uncertainty of next Tuesday scare you from securing your ticket to NewTeeVee Live! Today is the very last day of our “late bird” special, so step right up and buy your ticket now. Come meet the senior executives from ABC, FOX, Netflix, Hulu, Disney, Lucasfilm, Comcast, YouTube, Sling Media, Level 3, Microsoft, and more who are driving the decisions that affect the future of online video. Hear from the producers of hit shows “CSI: Crime ...
Facebook’s Growing Pains
According to TechCrunch, Facebook may have to raise even more money to support its rapid growth. Strong growth is always a nice problem to have but growth also comes with costs: facilities, staff, utilities, etc. Facebook’s problem - if you want to call it a problem - is it’s aggressively building an operating structure to support growth but it’s still waiting for revenue to gain more traction. For anyone who thought Facebook was losing momentum, I went to a new media conferen...
Cogent and Sprint De-Peer
According to Alex Muse, DSLReports and GigaOm, Cogent and Sprint de-peered this morning in a tiff of some kind. Cogent claimed this year that it was settlement free - coupled with its roots in the PSInet backbone network made it a Tier 1 provider. Cogent has had issues with other backbones including Level3 and Telia. Cogent is incensed at the move,saying it violates a contractual obligation to exchange internet traffic on a settlement-free peering basis, and is taking legal action. It wan...
Star Trek : The Continuing Mission : Learning Curve
Just in time for Halloween, Learning Curve is out, the third episode of Star Trek: The Continuing Mission. Written by Andy Tyrer, "on the shakedown cruise of the newly refitted USS Montana, the ship is attacked without provocation by a heavily armed unknown vessel. Captain Edwards and the crew of the Montana must defend themselves and come to grips with 24th century technology or face certain destruction." Executive Producers Andy Tyrer and Sebastian Prooth use Skype for ST:TCM’...
Glum Economy Brings On Good Times for Joyent
Joyent, a Sausalito, Calif.-based cloud storage startup, says the economic downturn is bringing on the good times. Since August its annualized revenue is up more than 25 percent. Is Joyent’s good fortune a sign utility computing will get a boost from the glum economy? The 19-employee company provides scalable cloud storage. It got a start with a seed round four years ago and is cashflow positive, according to Joyent VP Rod Boothby. A very informal survey of developers at Microsoft’...
What’s New in Administration and Management with Office Communications Server 2007 R2
With Microsoft OCS R2’s pending release, I thought you’d be interested in seeing a video interview of Microsoft’s Ananad Lakshminarayanan about some of the new features in Office Communications Server R2, which is Microsoft’s popular unified communications platform. In the video you’ll see some of the IT Admin specific features in OCS R2, which includes an OCS architecture planner to make OCS much easier to deploy. Essentially, it includes a wizard that you provide ...
Why the Tech Crash May Have Been a Good Thing
Few people have good memories of the dot-com crash that crushed companies and ravaged stock portfolios between 2000 and 2002. But as we slide into an even more dire correction, a silver lining is starting to emerge around those earlier bad times. By pushing a lot of froth out of the system several years ago, the dot-com crash has spared us from a true “Perfect Storm” of an economic crisis in 2008. There are a lot of crises converging this year, most notably home foreclosures, weaker...
New 4G Conference Coming - TMC and ???
How’s this for a how-could-this-be??? scenario? TMC is partnering with some very familiar VON faces to produce a 4G conference in February. It’s not clear how much partnering is actually going on, and at face value, this 4G event is just co-locating with the Winter 2009 IT Expo, which returns again to Miami. I got wind of this Wednesday night, and shortly after, Andy Abramson went public with the news on his blog, so he’s got the scoop, no doubt. For the official news, the pres...
What About the GWriter?
Google’s pushing hard within the blogosphere with Blogger, Google Blog Search and Google Reader. But what about the idea of a blog publishing tool - aka the GWriter? It would be a standalone tool that bloggers could configure to use with Blogger, Wordpress, TypePad, et al. It would feature access to related services such as search, image search, blog search, Picasa and Google Docs. If Microsoft can offer Live Writer, you figure some brainiac within the GooglePlex could create a different/b...
meshJobs Launches
At the mesh conference last year, we put up two whiteboards - one for companies looking for people; the other for people looking for jobs. By the end of the conference, there was no space left on either whiteboard. It got us thinking that there was a need for an easy and inexpensive way to create a place for Canadian-only Web and tech jobs. One thing led to another, and on November 17, we will be launching meshJobs.com. Created with our partner, JobThread, you can check out and put up free list...
Ifbyphone Mashup With Yelp: Get Reviews Over The Phone!
Simplicity. That’s one of the key tenets at Ifbyphone. We enable our customers to use phones to get more value out of their business without a lot of fuss. That’s one reason we keep rolling out new applications (Conference Calling, Store Locator, Virtual Call Center and more on the way). Customers can have these applications live within a few minutes after signing up for an account. We provide even more value by letting our customers develop their own applications using our d...
Chipmakers Eye Inventory as Consumers Close Wallets
Two pieces of chip news indicate the recession is indeed going to put a damper on the consumer electronics industry. In in its quarterly filing with the SEC today, Intel explained that the uncertain economic climate means its revenue guidance for the fourth quarter even at the high end would be, “an increase that is at the lower end of our seasonal trends.” And yesterday two foundries reported that semiconductor firms were cutting back on orders. Intel plans to update investors on D...
Being a Hi-Tech A&R Rep in Tel Aviv:
In the music industry, The A and R (Artists and Repertoire) rep is the eyes and ears of the record label. The A&R person is sometimes involved in producer-like activities such as choosing songs and sequencing of the record. It is the A&R person who scouts bars, basements, clubs and lounges for new talent and is sometimes responsible for discovering the next BIG artist. Whenever Im visiting Tel Aviv and when I get into my mode of back-to-back meetings with early-early stage hi-...
Cogent, Sprint Disconnect Networks, May Cause Web Slowdown
Cogent Communications, one of the largest bandwidth providers in the world charged that Sprint-Nextel has severed its network from Cogent’s networks. This could cause network slowdown and decrease in web performance. In a statement today, the company said that Sprint unpeered from Cogent’s network at 4.30 p.m. on October 31, 2008. Peering is a voluntary process where two networks exchange equal amount of data amongst each other without actually paying each other. “It is no ...
Cogent, Sprint Disconnect Networks, May Cause Web Slowdown
Cogent Communications, one of the largest bandwidth providers in the world charged that Sprint-Nextel has severed its network from Cogent’s networks. This could cause network slowdown and decrease in web performance. In a statement today, the company said that Sprint unpeered from Cogent’s network at 4.30 p.m. on October 31, 2008. Peering is a voluntary process where two networks exchange equal amount of data amongst each other without actually paying each other. “It is no ...
Who’s To Blame for Tech’s Woes? You and Me
The last time technology investments took a hit, it was easy to look around at the scattered sock puppets and dark fiber, and blame the downturn on the rapid run-up in venture-backed funding for me-too companies and unproven business models. But this time around, what will haunt technology companies isn’t their wholehearted embrace of the web — it’s consumers’ wholehearted embrace of credit. That’s right, this tech downturn could be pinned in part on you and me. Before...
MasterCard Offers a Piece of the Mobile Payment Puzzle
MasterCard today announced a program that allows its issuing banks to essentially turn your cell phone into a one of the credit cards (provided you already have one, of course) at any merchant that uses the payment processing company’s PayPass program. Vendors that have PayPass systems include McDonald’s, Rite-Aid, United Artist Theaters and BestBuy. A buyer would simply wave their phone at a PayPass terminal to complete the sale, rather than use their credit card. It sounds pretty ...
Google’s PDF Search Throws Some Light on the Dark Web
Google today said on its official blog that it has developed optical character recognition technology to the point that its search engine can read any scanned document in Adobe’s PDF format, effectively turning scanned images into words that are searchable and indexable. It’s no secret that Google has been looking into OCR; the Mountain View, Calif.-based company’s efforts to make books and newspapers digitally searchable are also related to its broader efforts to expand the ...
ShareThis Is Sharing More
ShareThis, a Cincinnati-based startup whose handy plugin lets users share web site links and publishers track the popularity of web content, says it now has 91 million unique users and grew its publisher base by 15,000 to a total of 60,000 in the third quarter. With the company’s little green plugin tool, users can send web content to friends in their social networks or address books; they can also post links directly into their social networking site profiles. Publishers who install th...
HP’s Netbook/Mobile Package Plot
Hewlett-Packard wants to employ a new tactic to market netbook computers in the U.S., offering them at a steep discount to customers who sign-up for wireless service contracts. This bundling of cellular service with PCs isn’t done in the U.S., but in Asia and Europe wireless carriers routinely knock hundreds of dollars off the price of a computer if a customer also buys a long-term service contract. Maybe AT&T and Verizon Wireless are interested? For example, Taiwanese car...
TMC Celebrates 10 Year Anniversary for ITEXPO!
The next ITEXPO marks the 10th anniversary for Internet Telephony Conference & Expo. I for one cannot believe its been 10 years! We started ITEXPO way back in 1999. That was way back in the 20th century. Did VoIP even exist back then? Yep, it sure did - take a walk down memory lane. In celebration of 10 years of TMC’s most successful event, our art department has designed a new logo. Check it out: Thanks to all of you out there that have helped make ITEXPO the success that it is. I ho...
Virtual Protest Threatens Linden Lab’s Profitability
The denizens of Linden Lab’s virtual world Second Life are a passionate lot, so when the San Francisco company recently announced a steep purchase and maintenance fee increase on popular regions of their virtual land, sign-waving avatars were soon gathered outside Linden’s SL office, in protest. Some even set themselves on fire. There have been protests like this throughout the world’s five-year history, but without a competing virtual world offering all the unique features o...
Five Questions with….Alek Krstajic
Alek Krstajic wants to rock Canada’s wireless landscape. As the new CEO of BMV Holdings, he’s planning on introducing a $40/month flat-rate, no-frills, unlimited talk, unlimited text service next year. And he sees no reason why BMV won’t be wildly successful despite the fact the three major incumbents, Rogers, Bell and Telus, will make his and BMV’s life as miserable as possible. With Krstajic’s appointment as BMV’s CEO unveiled earlier today, I managed to get...
Very Handy iPhone & iPod Emergency Charger
Now you no longer have to worry about the tragic and unthinkable happening — losing power to your iPhone or iPod! Brando’s iPhone/iPod Emergency Charger puts the emphasis on simplicity, portability and usefulness. (So nice!) This compact, lightweight Emergency Charger with retractable cable can use “AA” batteries to power the Apple iPhone and iPod anytime, anywhere and at the time that you need it most. It features anytime, anywhere instant charging, and it’...
Two more reasons why SightSpeed is good for Logitech
Video cameras are being built into everything. Phones, monitors and nearly every new laptop. Logitech buying SightSpeed marks the end of the generic webcam add-on market, as Jim Courtney wrote up yesterday. Or the beginning of the end, at least. Logitech can sell its high-end webcam technology to laptop and mobile OEMs like Dell, HP, Lenovo, Acer, Asus and Nokia, Samsung, Sony Ericson, Motorola, Qualcomm. Logitech Video Inside. With Carl Zeiss Optics. With SightSpeed MultiParty Video. And Skyp...
Former JDSU CEO Pops Up at Avaya
Kevin Kennedy, who yesterday resigned his position as CEO and president of telecom equipment maker JDSU (formerly JDS Uniphase), was named CEO and president of Avaya Inc. this morning. Kennedy will replace Avaya Interim CEO Charles Giancarlo, who will become chairman of the telephone equipment maker. Kennedy helped revive JDSU, though with telcos tightening their capital spending, the firm will still have some choppy waters to navigate. At privately held Avaya, Kennedy will trade the harsh scru...
Access Line Losses Hurt: Verizon CEO
Over the past few years, I have been saying that for telecom companies, losing access lines while trying to grow the number of subscribers to their triple-play services was like walking a tightrope wearing skates. Of course, none of the telecom executives would admit that losing millions of access lines every quarter was a problem. Until this week, when Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg towards the end of his conference call with Wall Street analysts acknowledged the problems caused by customers givi...
Spooky Click-to-Call Helps Haunted House Business Despite Scary Economic Times
As Halloween approaches, so does peak season for the $1 billion haunted house industry. As part of its seasonal haunted house marketing strategy, Missouri based Raycliff Manor worked with Ifbyphone to launch a unique approach to attracting new visitors. In addition to radio ads and press, Raycliff Manor is using Ifbyphone’s Smart Click-to-Call on its promotional website, eurekascreams.com, inviting website visitors to trigger a spooky click-to-call message to friends about the Raycliff Man...
Orange Rejects Phorm But Hears The Siren Song of Ads
The Financial Times is reporting that UK ISP Orange will not use an advertising product from Phorm because of concerns about user privacy. This would make Orange the odd man out in the country. BT, Virgin Media and TalkTalk are all still on board with Phorm, although their resolve may be weakening, judging by the fact that none of them have put Phorm’s product in commercial use yet. Phorm uses deep packet inspection to serve ads based on the sites a consumer visits. A similar company, Neb...
Service Provider Views - Dealing with a Down Economy
Sooner or later this economy catches up to everyone, and telecom is not immune. My latest Service Provider Views article on TMCnet takes a look at what I think operators need to be doing to minimize the fallout in a down market. There’s a lot to explore here, and this article is Part 1. In light of Skype’s strong Q3 numbers, I decided to focus a bit on them as an example of things going right in a challenging environment. Some service providers will fare better than others, and this ...
Videoconferencing News - GIPS and SightSpeed
Two companies I have some history with in the videoconferencing space had some news yesterday - GIPS and SightSpeed. I was set to post this yesterday, but we had a power outage at an inopportune time. After that, one thing led to another, and it just didn’t happen as intended. Defeated by technology, again… I’ll start with GIPS - Global IP Solutions - since I have more history there. They’ve just published a white paper along with a video to demonstrate how far desktop vi...
How Low Can Moto Go?
Yesterday, I compared Co-CEO of Motorola and CEO of Mobile Devices Dr. Sanjay Jha’s task of restoring his company’s handset business to climbing Mount Everest without a tank of oxygen. Man, was I being generous or what? The company reported Q3 2008 earnings and delivered a forecast for the remainder of 2008 that is dismal. The once-storied name is vying for the Worst Run Business award. Why? Mobile device sales were down 31 percent year-over-vear, and the division logged an operatin...
Real Wireless Competition in Canada?
Canada’s comfortable - and profitable - wireless oligopoly (Rogers, Bell and Telus) could - and I stress could - be in a rude awakening when several new rivals enter the fray over the next couple of years. The newest player is BMV Holdings, which jumped into the spotlight today by announcing the hiring of ex-Rogers and ex-Bell executive Alek Krstajic as its CEO. BMV spent a modest $53-million during the spectrum auction but didn’t appear on the radar of analysts or the media because...
GigaOM Interview: Opera CEO Jon S. von Tetzchner
We met with Jon S. von Tetzchner, the CEO of Opera software, and Tatsuki Tomita, senior VP of consumer products at Opera, yesterday and talked about the company’s mobile browser platforms, how it sizes up against the competition and where web browsers are headed. Read on for some of the best bits of our conversation, below. What’s new for the company right now? JvT: The market is moving in our direction very, very clearly. As a company we’ve always had this idea that you acces...
Acunetix web vulnerability scanner v6 available
I blogged about it last week, and since then Acunetix has released the new version of its popular web vulnerability scanner. This is a significant release because of its ground breaking acusense technology, which can accurately identify the code that is producing the security vulnerability. This of course allows you to fix your application faster. It also reduces false positives. Download the ...
VON Joins force with TMC?
According to Andy Abramson’s post published 20 minutes ago, Carl Ford and Scott Kargman, who were big parts of the VON brain trust has joined forces with TMC. As Andy also commented - Hath hell frozen over? This is like Mirror! Mirror! where Captain Kirk and Spock meet their opposites. Or even worse the episode called The Alternative Factor where two enemies both named Lazarus who Spock concludes is Lazarus and an “anti-Lazarus”, possibly from a parallel “antimatter”...
Just Saying: Google Didn’t Start In a Downturn
Earlier today I attended How to manage your startup in a downturn roundtable organized by Matt Marshall, where seasoned venture capitalists and entrepreneurs dispensed advise on how to navigate the current downturn and be prepared for the worst. Like most of these conversations, someone on the panel brought up the fact that downturns often inspire extreme innovation and lead to creation of great companies. To expound their point, these people point to the likes of Oracle and Google. While Ora...
Next Stop: Tel Aviv
I have been on the road quite a bit this month. So much that in fact, October 2008 feels like one big blur to me. During this month I have visited: Athens, Greece, Miami, Orlando, Las Vegas, Seattle, Boston and tonight Im heading back to Israel and I will be spending time in both Tel Aviv and Rosh Pina. There have been times during the past few weeks where I have felt the effects of living in what I can best describe as a life blur. This is where things happen around me but Im so caught...
Wal-mart Lowers Music Download Prices
Wal-Mart has re-launched its new and improved MP3 Music Downloads store, with MP3 tracks starting at just 74 cents, to give us a greater value and an even bigger selection in digital music. Wal-Mart has exclusively sold MP3s through its online store since February 2008 and now offers more than 3 million MP3 tracks with content from all major labels. The enhanced MP3 online store is supported by multiple elements in Wal-Mart stores, including a free MP3 download with every CD purchased in st...
Trickle Trickle Little TrickleStar
TrickleStar, a Hong Kong-based manufacturer, will be making the U.S. debut of the ”world-first” power-saving device. TrickleStar’s products address the issue of standby power consumed by PC appliances and TV accessories by stopping the flow of standby power when in “standby” mode. The TrickleStar PC Standby Power Saver connects to a PC via a standard USB cable and detects the power status of a PC via the USB port. When a PC is “on,” ...
FCC Extends Comment Deadline on White Space Issue
The FCC extended the deadline until this Friday, Oct. 31, at 5:30 PM ET for comments on the proposal to open up so called TV white spaces for UNLICENSED use; the old deadline was Tuesday; so, if you missed it, you still have time. Despite efforts by opponents to get the issue dropped from the agenda (delay with intent to kill; a post-election FCC might start all over), the issue IS on the agenda for the 11:00 AM meeting on November 4th which the FCC published last night. The meeting itself will...
iPhone Voice Broadcast App For Soccer Coaches
One of the Ifbyphone team members coaches his daughter’s soccer team. Every week, he had to email parents about the upcoming game time and location. Every week, at least one parent would miss the email. That all changed with the release of Ifbyphone’s Voice Broadcast iPhone App. In under 5 minutes, he had entered the parents’ names, cell phone numbers and home phone numbers, and created a distribution group. Now every week, in four easy taps he can launch a voice br...
AT&T’s Free Wi-Fi for iPhone
In the on again, off again department … AT&T knows Wi-Fi is hot, and free Wi-Fi is even hotter. Which is why free AT&T Wi-Fi access is now available for Apple iPhone at thousands of hotspots nationwide, including Starbucks. Now you can can relax and access music, email and web browsing services with your favorite brew in hand from the comfort of your nearest location. (That’s if AT&T has a good signal in your area.) AT&T provided a number of early hints that the ...
Subscribes
Archives
-
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
- January 2008
- December 2007
- November 2007
- October 2007
- September 2007
- August 2007
- July 2007
- June 2007
- May 2007
- April 2007
- March 2007
- November 1999
- January 1970
Sipy...
-
News, opinions and announcements about fast changing communication tools and technologies, from various blogs and ezine.