Archive for October 30th, 2008
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 ...
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News, opinions and announcements about fast changing communication tools and technologies, from various blogs and ezine.