Archive for November, 2008
Lots of Sweet iPhone Candy
According to 148Apps, 10,000 applications have now been launched for the iPhone. The ability to personalize the iPhone and extend its functionality is the iPhone’s “killer app”. I do wonder, however, how many of the applications that people happily download onto their iPhones are actually used on a regular basis. I suspect most of the applications people install are akin to those little mints that restaurants give away: they’re free, sweet but only last a short period ti...
More of the Faces from my recent Tel Aviv Breakfast
Back on November 5th I hosted my fifth Tel Aviv breakfast in 2008. About 250 people from across Israel attended this breakfast which took place at the Speedo Beach Bar in the Port of Tel Aviv. This was my largest breakfast event to date and it turned into a great morning (and early afternoon) for a combination of real-time social tagging and face-to-face networking. Below are more of the people who joined the breakfast. Other related posts: - Some of the Faces from Tel Aviv Breakfast - Video Re...
Some of the Faces from my recent Tel Aviv Breakfast
Back on November 5th I hosted my fifth Tel Aviv breakfast in 2008. About 250 people from across Israel attended this breakfast which took place at the Speedo Beach Bar in the Port of Tel Aviv. This was my largest breakfast event to date and it turned into a great morning (and early afternoon) for a combination of real-time social tagging and face-to-face networking. Other related posts: - Video Report from Jeff Pulver’s Tel Aviv Breakfast Meetup - SeoVice Episode 12 - The Jeff Pulver B...
Why the Wii Could Win the World (but Probably Won’t)
Last month I had the chance to chat with a top U.S. Nintendo exec and suggest how, with a few savvy improvements to the Wii system, the company could turn it into the living room Net appliance of choice. But despite the opportunity Nintendo has with the Wii, the company seems determined to let it remain a mere video game console. Big-screen HDTVs have reached a price point of several hundred dollars. That means consumers are now bringing home television displays both large and crisp enough for...
Another Day Another Yahoo Rumor
The Sunday Times of UK reports (more like speculates) that Microsoft is going to buy Yahoo’s search business for $20 billion in a very complex transaction. The Sunday Times claims that Jonathan Miller formerly chief executive of AOL, and Ross Levinsohn, a former president of Fox Interactive Media are going to run the new management team. Under the terms of the proposed transaction, Microsoft would provide a $5 billion facility to the Miller and Levinsohn management team. The duo would rai...
Be Skype Journal
There is so much going on with Skype that the independent Skype Journal needs help. Please Skype me if you’d like to change the world, cover Skype, its competition, products and technology, industry events, and business affairs. 2009 will be a dramatic year for the hundreds of millions of people using Skype around the world. Tell that story. The network of networks is making distance disappear, and everything is becoming the Internet. We are building pixels into the ambience of our homes,...
Event: Breakfast with Jeff Pulver and Friends in NYC on Dec 1st
On Monday, December 1st I will be in New York City and hosting another edition of Breakfast with Jeff Pulver (and Friends) in NYC at Friend of a Farmer, 77 Irving Place, from 8-10AM. Readers of my blog are invited to join us. During the course of the year I have hosted a number of breakfasts in NYC but I haven’t spoken at any of them, until now. I will be speaking at this event and sharing my perspective on Social Media and where I see things evolving in the year ahead. Looking forward...
Distributing
One thing that the VoIP Providers seem to want is Distribution. How does a VoIP Provider get his device into the hands of the consumer? Vonage spends millions on advertising and has deals with retail outlets like Amazon and Circuit City. Skype has devices on Amazon and other outlets. (It seems like Amazon has an affinity for VoIP providers, including Magic Jack and Ooma.) Now Ooma is a strange deal. There has been a lot written about Ooma (here and here and here) Sharing a PSTN line seems ...
Follow up to a Typical Situation
I wrote about a typical telecom sales situation about a week ago. Khali Henderson, editor of Phone+ magazine, has an editorial that talks about this type of scenario in the Channel. The conclusion of the story happened yesterday when the client called me to ask me to meet the direct AE’s rate and send him a contract. My best Indirect rate is $1500 per month higher than the direct rate. Same company. Go figure. This AE just gave away $18,000, which doesn’t seem like a lot, but how man...
Is It Time to Buy Google Shares?
Eric Schmidt is fond of saying it would take Google 300 years to achieve its goals. I always thought he must have been at least partly joking. The shelf life of Internet companies is short; it’s taken Yahoo and eBay little more than a decade to reach what appears to be their respective “best-if-used-by” dates. And judging from the way investors have been treating Google’s stock, you’d think it was also on track to face an early downgrade from Internet giant to also-ran. Af...
Why the Lori Drew Decision Was a Bad One
Few online events have ended as horrifically as the Lori Drew case. Befriended by a boy on MySpace who later began bullying her, a teenager named Megan Meier hung herself, and her online friend later turned out to be the mother of a school classmate, who created the persona specifically to torment the young girl. Lori Drew was found not guilty of conspiracy on Tuesday, but guilty of a lesser misdemeanor charge as a result of setting up the fake persona, which the court decided was a case of ...
What If the Recession Does Turn Into a Depression?
It’s far from certain — it’s even a fairly remote possibility — but the possibility of an economic depression is being discussed more and more these days. As is to be expected, the discussion tends to be centered around how much of what we’re used to having could be destroyed. As worthwhile as it is to brace for the damage an economic depression could wreak, this is Thanksgiving weekend — a time to reflect on what we do have, and what opportunities we see ahead. Not R...
Killing off Vampire Power for Good!
It’s been called both “vampire power” and “phantom load” – likened to the power-hungry HAL 9000 computer (at left) in Stanley Kubrick’s classic film 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s the little unblinking red light on the television set that is silently drawing energy from the grid; studies have shown it can add 10% or more to a household energy bill. Now Spanish entrepreneurs claim to have invented a way to end the problem that has bedev...
BCE Deal - How Do You Value a Telco?
The BCE privatization saga continues, and now the ball is back in BCE’s court as they try to defend their valuation and trump KPMG’s solvency opinion. There’s a lot at stake here, and both sides are pulling out all the stops to get things to go their way. It’s a bit like watching Detroit’s auto execs going hat in hand to Washington for a bailout. If the deal falls apart, there are big time winners and losers, and a whole new environment for Canadian service provider...
The iPhone and the Ensuing Wireless Broadband Boom
I have been saying for some time that the launch of the 3G iPhone was going to jump-start the demand for wireless broadband. The subsequent release of additional web-friendly mobile phones (we like to call them superphones ) — the Samsung Instinct, the BlackBerry Bold, the Google Phone, and Sony Ericsson’s Xperia X-1 — that use 3G wireless networks has now shifted that demand into high gear. According to data collected by Chetan Sharma Consulting, the U.S. wireless data market...
It’s Black Friday! America’s Retailers Need You!
Yes, Black Friday it is! (And did you know about Black Friday the movie?) And gadget retailers (and all others, too!) are looking for you to make your contribution to their coffers! Now, I know it may have been hard (very hard), even too hard, to get up before the rising sun to hit those eager merchants at 5 AM when the best (very best) deals could be had, but there is still plenty of time today to either hit the pavement for a real physical visit or simply click the keyboard to do some stylish ...
Fring lays off 10, shows Skype’s partnership with iSkoot pays
So Fring goes from 50 to 40 personnel. Big whoop. This is less a sign of trouble than of prudence. While the Fring layoff surprised Jan Geirnaert, Om Malik thinks it looks weak. It looks capital-conserving to me in light of the new economy. Skype’s clout matters in this space. Fring and EQO and iSkoot all courted Skype executives for a partnership. Only iSkoot got the nod, which led to their becoming the software behind Skype’s profitable 3 Skypephone and profitable relationships w...
Is Yahoo Stock a Bargain?
Carl Icahn, a hedge fund investor and corporate rabble-rouser, has bought 7 million shares of Yahoo for $67 million. That works out to about $9.92 a share. With that, his stake in Yahoo is now 75.6 million shares, or nearly 5.5 percent of the company, according to the AP. So how should we read into his move? After all, Icahn previously bought 70 million shares for about $25 a share and has lost $900 million on that investment. In other words, his track record thus far hasn’t exactly been...
With Twitter, a Desperate Need for Context
Increasingly, every time there is an unfortunate tragedy — be it a raging fire or a terrorist attack — we get a torrent of stories heralding the legitimacy of Twitter as a news source. Their core arguments are always the same — that social media tools allow for information to be dispatched far faster than the lumbering old media. Indeed, Twitter’s simplicity gives virtually anyone the power to send dispatches from the front line. Traditionally, eyewitness reports would ...
Two Thumbs Up for Mr. Tweet
Of all the Twitter-related services to be launched - and there are literally hundreds of them - the amount of buzz about Mr. Tweet has been particularly impressive. It’s not surprising given Mr. Tweet is all about helping you find new people to follow on Twitter - something Twitter doesn’t do at all. And while there are a few services trying to solve this problem, none of them has really nailed it yet. After waiting a few days to gain access to Mr. Tweet - they were pounded with re...
Jeff Pulver talks about Israeli Innovation and Startups with No Camels.com
During the 2008 Rosh Pina Film Festival I was interviewed by the No Camels Internet TV team while having a hummus lunch with some of my friends. The conversation covered a lot of ground, and this segment covers Israeli Innovation, The tech side of Tel Aviv and how I approach investing in Startups. - - - Tags: Internet TV, Rosh Pina Festival, No Camels , Tel Aviv, startup, Israel, Jeff Pulver ...
Making Black Friday Deals Easy
You know I scoured all of the flyers and online ads to put together a great list of Black Friday deals, but seems Gizmodo has just plain beat me to it! So just like last year, they have rounded up and sorted through all of the real deals for you, broken down by category and merchant. If you know how to survive, this is the only Black Friday deal list you need. Get it all here. Tags: Black Friday Related Entries It’s Black Friday! America’s Retailers Need You! - Nov ...
3CX Phone System v7 RC2
OK. Its finally available. 3CX Phone System v7 RC2. We’re a month late, but a few good features made it in last minute, including Secure SIP, improved logging and a feature to allow extension users to dial in and make outbound calls. Check out the 3CX Blog for the change log & announcement You can download 3CX Phone System for Windows Beta from here. Looking forward to your feedback! Please ...
10 Green Options for Black Friday
Black Friday –- the day after Thanksgiving, and one of the busiest shopping days of the year — might be a bit darker this year. Consumer spending is expected to drop slightly with 128 million shoppers planning to head to the malls Friday, Saturday or Sunday, down from 135 million the year before, according to the National Retail Federation (NRF). According to Nielsen one third of U.S. consumers expect to spend less during the holidays than last year and those still shopping are planning...
Another VoIP Startup In Trouble
Regardless of however you spin it, if you are firing 20 percent of your work force and have no real business model to speak off, you are in trouble. That certainly is true of Fring, an Israeli Mobile VoIP start-up, which has cut 10 of its 50 employees. CEO Avi Shechter told TechCrunch that his company is doing well. In addition to $13 million it raised in the past, Avi says the company has raised an undisclosed amount of money in its Series C financing. By doing well, I guess he means that Frin...
Can You Be a Good Parent and a Good Blogger?
That’s my personal struggle, but you could insert many all-consuming tasks — such as starting up a company, or training for the Olympics — for blogging and still get to the heart of my question. Most people believe good blogging is about two things: personality and passion. But where does that leave me, a professional news writer who’s passionate about technology — but not to the point where I want to think about it 24 hours a day? Technology isn’t my single-minded...
Thanksgiving Poem
Over the river and thru the wood, To grandmother’s house we go. The GPS knows the way To guide us today, Even if traffic is slow, oh. Over the river and thru the wood, We’re always in the know. My new Dash Express Has GPRS To see how the traffic does flow. Over the river and thru the wood, What if we need some gas? Live Yahoo Search, From Dash’s perch, Stuck to the windshield glass. Over the river and thru the wood, We do our part as well: We broadcast ou...
A Good Thing if LBO for BCE Fails
There’s a lot of hand-wringing going on over growing concerns the $52-billion leveraged buyout of BCE Inc., Canada’s largest telecom carrier, is going to fall apart. If the deal does go kaput, it will be the best thing to happen to BCE and its customers. How come? Well, if the deal is consummated, BCE will 10s of billions of dollars of debt to service at a time when competition from cablecos is wickedly fierce. Despite this competitive landscape, BCE would still need to jump-start ca...
Raising Money out of Thin Air: Charities and Not-for-Profits should take note of Tweetsgiving
A Project like Tweetsgiving is an example of how a charity can use social media platforms, in this case, twitter, for fund raising. Imagine being able to raise US$ 10,000 in a 48 hour period from hundreds of people who contributed $5 and $10 dollars whose only connection with a charity was when they discovered the fund raising efforts because of one of their friends on twitter? Imagine what can be done with more established charities. I believe micro giving promoted on social media networks can ...
Raising Money out of Thin Air: Charities and Not-for-Profits should take note of Tweetsgivng
A Project like Tweetsgiving is an example of how a charity can use social media platforms, in this case, twitter, for fund raising. Imagine being able to raise US$ 10,000 in a 48 hour period from hundreds of people who contributed $5 and $10 dollars whose only connection with a charity was when they discovered the fund raising efforts because of one of their friends on twitter? Imagine what can be done with more established charities. I believe micro giving promoted on social media networks can ...
Microsoft Canada Analyst Day
I spent most of today attending Microsoft Canada’s analyst day here in Toronto. It was led by Sean Seaton and his team, and they sure covered a lot of ground. Sean is the Director of their Communications Sector, and just about everything they talked about was of interest to me. Today Microsoft touches every facet of communications, and the opening vision statement sums it up pretty well: “to create experiences that combine the magic of software with the power of Internet services ac...
For New York Times BlackBerry Storm is a Dud
Looks like for once I am in agreement with The New York Times gadget columnist David Pogue, who eviscerated the new Blackberry Storm device in his review published earlier today. “But I’ve got a better name for it: the BlackBerry Dud. The first sign of trouble was the concept: a touchscreen BlackBerry. That’s right — in its zeal to cash in on some of that iPhone touch screen mania, R.I.M. has created a BlackBerry without a physical keyboard. Hello? Isn’t the thumb keyboard the d...
Trailer Park 2.0: Where All Your Data Lives
The prospect of outsourcing servers and storage to the cloud has an irresistible lure of operational simplicity and cash efficiency for today’s application developers. Cloud computing vendors help operate social networking applications, micro-blogging sites, global gaming networks and a plethora of applications that we use everyday. Yet, as successful and economically desirable as clouds have been for many organizations, outsourcing servers and storage causes a serious emotional and...
No Twitter SMS for You, Canada!
Twitter’s troubles with SMS - otherwise known as its a huge expense that it can’t really afford - have now seen it eliminate outbound SMS message for users in Canada. The move comes a few months after Twitter was forced to shut down SMS service for U.K. customers. It’s comes down to simple economics: it costs Twitter too much money, which is a challenge for a company that generates no revenue. “We can’t afford to support this service given our current arrangement with our ...
Terrorist Attacks In Bombay, Follow on Twitter
Another terrorist attack in India, this time in India’s capital city Bombay. I have been following this for a while on Twitter, where people from the city are reporting whatever updates they can get. It is a depressing start to a Thanksgiving weekend here in the US. You can follow the news here on Twitter, or watch some of the live reports on NDTV and CNN. I am just shocked at the sheer magnitude of the attack which has left over 75 killed, 200 injured along with news of people being tak...
Twitter Kills SMS in Canada
Citing changes to its billing and costs that are doubling every month, Twitter announced that it will no longer support outbound SMS to Canadians. Twitter’s searching for a business model (and a Business Product Manager to help out), and in the meantime it has to curtail costs — but it doesn’t help that Canadian carriers are trying to charge huge fees for text messaging, resulting in consumer lawsuits. Canadian Industry Minister Jim Prentice called the decision by Bell and Telus a “poo...
Skype Public Chats: Redesign the Redirect
Recruiting people into a room from the web makes a Skype public chat useful. The pattern is: Web badge (on a web page) –> Skype.com redirect page ––> Skype client As long as Skype is working on it, a few improvements come to mind. Reform the blob namespace so blob-names are short, even with a dozen hosts. Very long blobs impair our ability to use those urls in email, chat, or over the phone. Add permanence. Create public chat permalinks that don’t change with ti...
Off-Topic: Why Citibank Should Vanish
After a long day, I returned home to find a mound of junk mail clogging my mailbox. Of note was a letter from Citibank informing me that it was jacking up the interest charged on my credit card, adding more fees for foreign transactions and other such issues that might result from an economic meltdown. Not much of this impacted me personally, but something bothered me about this letter dubbed a “notice of change in terms and right to opt out.”At a time when its customers need most help, Cit...
Need more Terabytes this Christmas?
Looking for a faster, bigger hard drive this Christmas? (Two days till Black Friday sales by the way) Well, I came across this funny Youtube video of the day - filmed at famous Mac Store Tekserve in Manhattan, New York and paid for by drive manufacturer Seagate. It’s a tad long, but it features a hip-hop office drama and the desire for “A new disk drive. 1.5 Terabytes….” (don’t let that little jingle get stuck in your head) Just in time for the Christmas holiday s...
HTC Touch HD
HTC’s Touch HD is arguably the best touch-screen Windows Mobile-based phones you can buy. In fact, even before the HTC Touch HD, I always felt HTC mobile phones were the best Windows Mobile phones you could buy. I own an older HTC-based “Apache” XV6700 Windows Mobile with a cooked ROM upgraded to Windows Mobile 6.1 and I’m still pretty happy using it. I still consider my xv6700 one of the top 5 Windows Mobile phones available. Installed on it I have a standalone Youtube...
Wednesday read
Yahoo! Open Strategy (Y!OS) Developer Evening, London. Wednesday, 26 November 2008. Yahoo! UK, 125 Shaftesbury Avenue, London, England WC2H 8AD. Phonebook Art. Cheap paper that takes a pencil well. Kill Your Telephone. "A step-by-step guide to Skype, the cheapest and easiest way to make a phone call." Replace your landline. Xobni brings the internet into Outlook… 4 ways your Outlook will never be the same. New release adds your Outlook contact’s Skype calling info to your Xo...
Getting Closer to the True Numbers on Skype via Mobile
Yesterday UK web publication TelecomTV put out a post “Skype claims mobiles are involved in a quarter of its calls“. But a “correction” comment by the author, Tony Chan, disclaims his basic premise: CORRECTION: As the original author of this story for CommsDay, I am corrected by Skype that the 4 billion minute figure is actually for Skype-to-Skype minutes with video, NOT mobile. Turns out to be a confirmation of what we have heard in the past: 25% to 30% of all Skype-to-S...
Why Microsoft Fails to Win Online
Microsoft’s battle to conquer the web has a certain Moby-Dick-like quality. Me-too products, muddled branding strategy and constantly playing catchup with competitors has reduced the king of software to a punch line. The more they try, the further they get. In the third quarter of 2008, Microsoft’s online revenues were $770 million, up 15 percent from Q3 2007. But the losses jumped 80 percent year-over-year to $480 million. Adam Lashinsky succinctly sums it up: Microsoft is so busy ...
No Thanks, Mr. Paulson, We’re Repairing Our Balance Sheets
The newest push-on-a-string plan from Treasury Secretary Paulson is to force more federal money into consumer credit. The idea is that we can then max out our credit cards to new limits, buy houses and cars with too little down, and finance too much of too-inflated college bills. Presto, sales go up, housing prices become absurd again, cars roll off dealer lots and… and we can all get back to the good old days when the banks that lent us all this money could flourish. What if we don’t w...
VoxOx 1.0.1 Released
VoxOx just released a new version of their “Universal Communicator”, which aims to combine VoIP, video, and social networks. VoxOx aims to take on Skype by offering more social networking features. Last year, I wrote an article titled Skype Could Trump Facebook in Social Networking, but Skype still hasn’t added social networking functionality. In any event, today version 1.0.1 was released, less than a month after their initial launch. I was never able to get the Facebook integ...
Another example of Leveraging Social Media for the Social Good: Tweetsgiving
I just became aware of tweetsgiving.org. From the tweetsgiving.org website: Tweetsgiving is a Twitter celebration of gratitude and giving created by Epic Change, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. The project aims to demonstrate the power of the social web by raising $10,000 in 48 hours to build a classroom in Tanzania. TweetsGiving will be held from Tuesday, 11.25.08 (12pm EST) to Thursday, 11.27.08 (12pm EST). At last check, they were almost halfway to their goal. From tweetsgiving.org: ...
Who’s Watching All That TV?
I watch no television….if you don’t take into account NFL and NHL games. But according to the Neilsen Co.’s “A2/M2 Three Screen Report”, the average person in the U.S. watches an astounding 142 hours of TV a month. What I want to know is what are these people watching? It may be a 500-channel universe but there’s a lot of crap coming being broadcast. So clearly, there are a lot of non-discrimminating couch potatoes with nothing better to do than waste time on bad pro...
IPEVO gives free Skype minutes, free US shipping
A message from IPEVO’s Caroline Andreolle: Happy Thanksgiving! To celebrate and thank our customers, we’re offering free ground shipping until the end of year (to the Continental US). And to celebrate that, we’re offering 300 free Skype vouchers to all Skype lovers and to our friends at Skype Journal! Simply email iWantSkypeMinutes@gmail.com for your free minutes today! All vouchers must be redeemed this month, before 31 November 2008, limit one per household, 300 vouchers t...
Online Santa Claws For Sales This X-Mas
Online retailers are not immune to the current credit crunch and are feeling the heat in a big way. The New York Times says that online spending dropped 4% for the first 23 days of November 2008 when compared to the same period last year. According to comScore, the online spending was about $8.19 billion versus $8.51 billion in 2007. They are forecasting flat holiday season at $29.2 billion. Their estimates are more conservative than $30.3 billion in projected online spending this holiday seaso...
Broadcasters to Make TV Mobile
In a nation with more than 225 million mobile subscribers, only 1.8 million of them watch broadcast television on their cell phones, according to September data from comScore. But a group of more than 800 broadcasters hopes to change all that — by making mobile TV shows both free and available at the same time they’re shown on oldteevee. To that end, in April 2007 those broadcasters formed the Open Mobile Video Coalition, aimed at establishing a standard for the delivery of mobile ...
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News, opinions and announcements about fast changing communication tools and technologies, from various blogs and ezine.