Archive for October 8th, 2008
Venture Investment Likely to Fall Short in 2008
In the last few days, venture firms have begun to realize they are not immune from the credit crunch. At the end of next week, official data will arrive that will likely bear that out. Judging by early numbers indicating $5.71 billion went into startups from July through September, the third-quarter venture capital data gathered by Thomson Reuters for PricewaterhouseCoopers and the National Venture Capital Association is likely to show a drop of of about 27 percent from the same period in 2007....
VLAB Event — Global Mobile: Tools for Companies on the World Stage
With the huge growth of overseas markets and resources, mobile startups need to shift away from a “local” focus and go “global.” Global companies need to possess the right combination of management capabilities, innovation, market savvy, infrastructure and an overseas footprint to compete on a worldwide scale. In today’s competitive mobile markets, what are the challenges facing mobile start-ups to compete on the global stage? What go-to-market strategies and opera...
My fellow prisoners????????????????????????????????
The Freudian slip of the century: Technorati Tags: JohnMcCain, Politics ...
T-Mobile Running Out of Androids
T-Mobile may have at least a short-term shortage of its G1 Android-powered phone as customers flood the company with preorders. T-Mobile said it has already sold its presale inventory of the first Google Android phone. (Guess the service is working better, too.) T-Mobile declined to disclose the number of phones initially available, but Strategy Analytics predicted T-Mobile could sell as many as 400,000 of the G1s this year. What is known is that the devices are now back-ordered until No...
Fall-Winter-Summer growth
Jean Mercier is the Skype Numerologist and a regular contributor to Skype Journal. As usual after a Northern Hemisphere Summer, the growth of Skype users is again visible. Not that there is no growth in summer but less people are working, more people switch their computers off while they are in the garden, or they are traveling and have less access to Internet. Therefore, fewer users are online at the same time. Those summers are very visible on the "million milestones" graph t...
Life Transitions
There have been times in my life where I found myself lost in the transition between something I used to do and something I would eventually end up doing. This is what I call a Life Transition. This isnt a change I ever knowingly wished for, but something that happens from time to time. Until recently I never openly spoke about life transitions. But I found it very reassuring that just about everyone experiences these life transitions over the course of their life. It is just that sometim...
Much Ado about the Apple ‘Brick’
Mac enthusiasts have been transfixed lately by the mystery product, code-named “brick,” that’s due for release later this month. Some bloggers and pundits have suggested it might be a new iteration of Apple TV or an updated Mac Mini. But according to a report on 9to5Mac.com, “brick” refers not to what it is, but how it’s made. The Web site, which cites an anonymous source, says the code name has to do with a manufacturing process for Apple’s MacBook and...
Sprint’s Xohm Network is Only Half Open
Today marks the formal launch of Sprint’s Xohm network, and celebrants are gathered in Baltimore to show off their new WiMAX-enabled gadgets. But after chatting with an executive from Lenovo, I wonder just how open Sprint’s network will be, and how that lack of true openness might slow the adoption of WiMAX. Lenovo is on hand showing of its five laptops designed for Sprint’s WiMAX network, including the super-sleek x300 that competes with the MacBook Air. David Critchley, worl...
Is the Economy Slowing AT&T’s U-verse Down?
While I worry about buying gadgets there are plenty of people out there worried about buying far more important things like food and gas, which means that TV offerings such as those from AT&T, Comcast and Verizon might see the effects of the struggling economy. Daniel Amir, a director and semiconductor analyst at Lazard Capital Markets, seems to think so. In a note on IPTV chip maker Sigma Designs, he maintained a hold on the stock, citing a European slowdown in IPTV growth and fears that A...
The Tech Party May be Over But….
The BBC’s Rory Cellan-Jones has officially declared that the tech party is over, which means “investors and entrepreneurs may be entering a chilly period when making money from new ideas becomes that much harder”. The reality, however, that’s okay. While attracting money to finance new ideas is going to be more challenging, the technology world will continue to move forward with new, innovative products. Just because there’s economic volatility and uncertainty does...
Best Buy Grabs MSI Wind
The MSI Wind netbook will go on sale at Best Buy priced at $399 and equipped with a 120GB hard drive and 1GB of RAM; it also coms with Windows XP pre-loaded. The netbook comes in just one configuration at the store. So much for choice, but how about that price? Best Buy is one of the few major U.S. CE retailers to stock the Wind, which keeps its price lower partly by using a less powerful battery pack — a three-cell battery rather than the larger six-cell pack. More at Electr...
Voxeo switching from Blackberries to iPhones… (even as Blackberry releases the touch-screen Storm)
Over on one of Voxeo’s weblogs I wrote a piece yesterday, “Goodbye BlackBerry… Hello iPhone!“ that speaks to our vote in the evolving “RIM vs Apple” battle going on out there in the enterprise marketplace. It will be an interesting move that I’m very much looking forward to. From what I’ve seen, we join a growing number of companies that are now using Apple’s iPhone for a corporate mobile phone. Interestingly, RIM is today announcing the im...
Ifbyphone Voice Of The Web Blog 12 Month Roundup
In celebration of 12 months of Ifbyphone blogging, I’d like to feature an Ifbyphone blog post from each of the past 12 months: November 2007 Top 10 Tips For Successfully Implementing Click-to-Call On Your Website December 2007 Create Your Own Web 2.0 Style Click To Call Button January 2008 Did you ever wonder, “What is a Phone Mashup?” February 2008 Get Driving Directions To The Nearest Phone Number March 2008 Top 10 Tips For Creating A Successful Interactive Voice Response (IVR) Syste...
TOM-Skype Breach: Questions from 2006
Reblogging this post from 19 April 2006. The Financial Times‘ Alison Maitland scored an interview with Niklas Zennström that ran yesterday. In it Zennström confirms the TOM-Skype joint venture censors text messages on behalf of the Chinese government. He claims: "One thing that’s certain is that those things are in no way jeopardising the privacy or the security of any of the users." I posed the following questions to Skype but they have no comment beyond trying ...
BroadSoft Connections - Day 2
Day 2 zoomed by, and I’m going to hit the high points with photos and some brief commentary. Things started with Show Me The Apps, which was a great showcase for how Web 2.0 style apps are being developed and integrated into the BroadWorks platform. Most of these were oriented to consumers and targeted at hot spaces such as Google Apps or the iPhone. This stuff sure is fun and sexy, but I’m not so sure carriers will make money there. Others like Tom Howe (the mashup competition winne...
Google Finally Launches AdSense for Games
Almost a year after we first reported about Google’s desire to bring AdSense to online games and ultimately dominate the game-related advertising business, the company today announced AdSense for Games. We had thought that the advertising for games would go live in November 2007, but apparently even Google can’t move that fast. Google first started talking about AdSense for Games at industry events last summer. Google has roped in game developers and publishers including Konami, Pla...
Lijit Launches Publisher Ad Network
Lijit, a two-year-old startup based in Boulder, Colo., today launched the beta version of its publisher advertising network, which will allow the company to sell contextual advertising against search conducted on blogs that use Lijit’s white-label search solution. In the future the company says it will allow publishers – mostly bloggers – to sell their own keyword-based contextual ads against their search results using Lijit ad-serving technology. Todd Vernon, CEO of the company, talked a...
Vodafone, Verizon Launch Global 3G Ready Blackberry Storm
Verizon Wireless and its partner Vodafone Group are will soon release BlackBerry Storm, a touch screen smart phone to customers in the U.S., Europe, India, Australia and New Zealand, the companies announced today. The Verizon Wireless version of the device will work on the Verizon’s EVDO Rev A 3G Network and (2100Mhz) UMTS/HSPA and quad-band EDGE/GPRS/GSM for global use. The Vodafone version will use (2100Mhz) UMTS/HSPA and quad-band EDGE/GPRS/GSM networks. One of the reasons why Blackb...
Google’s Best Energy Bet: Organizing Energy Usage
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information — be it via search, email, online maps or mobile apps — but it could someday help you manage your daily energy consumption, too. At a speech at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco last week, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said that as part of its recently announced collaboration with GE, the search engine giant is currently looking at designing tools to help consumers understand their energy consumption. Google has also...
Itai Preis: Juggling with Fire at Stream08 Extravaganza
(photo taken on October 3, 2008 with a Nikon D300 and a 28-200mm lens Watch Dror Gill’s video of Itai Preis: Juggling with Fire at Stream08 here — Tags: Athens, WPP, Stream08, Itai Preis, Jeff Pulver ...
Quote of Note: Tom John
“Anybody whose home is already in foreclosure isn’t actually living in the home and might not be a valid voter.”Tom John, Marion County (Indianapolis) IN Republican County Chairman, on the use of foreclosure records as prima facie evidence that a prospective voter doesn’t reside where he or she claims to reside. [source] Technorati Tags: Bushco, Democracy, Voting, QuoteOfNote ...
TOM-Skype Breach: Does TOM-Skype bring users?
So, why Skype doesn’t just walk away from a partnership? Results matter. 86 thousand new people have signed up daily for two years. You have to do what’s right, but the temptation to stay and the cost of leaving is strong. Source material… In the 2006 Annual Report: At the end of January 2007, there were over 31.5 million registered TOM-Skype users, up from over 9.0 million at the end of February 2006, an increase of over 22.5 million new registered users. I...
Broadband Bill Needs Signature and Funding
The recent bill dedicated to improving the nation’s broadband profile has passed the Senate — albeit with a few changes to render it less problematic for telecom companies. The modified version of the Broadband Data Improvement Act that is now before President Bush is aimed at gathering better data on actual broadband speeds offered to citizens, but is pretty weak when it comes to gathering detailed competition and broadband penetration data. The final version of the bill eliminate...
Cross Platform Mobile Game Playing Now Here
Bringing another piece of the mobile future to today, Social Line Connect is a simple iPhone game with a cross-platform backbone. The free app, which looks similar to Connect Four, was added to the App Store over the weekend. The real point of the no-frills game is playing it with friends — even if they don’t own an iPhone. To that end, it’s a also proof-of-concept title for SocialDeck, a new middleware startup that’s created a server architecture for people to play gam...
Don???t Catch Falling Knives
During the collapse of the dot.com bubble, I believed that the stock of the company I’d founded, ITXC, was grossly undervalued; so I bought some both hoping to profit and also to calm the market by showing investors that I was willing to risk my own money in the stock ??? when CEOs buy it’s public information. I may have calmed the market for about five minutes. Buybacks by cash-rich companies have some good purposes ??? but they won’t stop a bubble bursting, either. I also tri...
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News, opinions and announcements about fast changing communication tools and technologies, from various blogs and ezine.