Archive for November 11th, 2008
Once Again, the Long Tail Refuses to Be Buried
Wired editor Chris Anderson’s theories about the Long Tail have been the source of considerable controversy almost since the day his first Wired magazine piece on the topic was published in 2004. The initial criticisms of his thesis centered on whether there was such a thing as a “long tail” at all — in other words, whether digital distribution of music and other forms of content have allowed little-known songs, movies, and so on to prosper where they might otherwise hav...
Smaller, Weaker Twin Wants Higher Fiber (Optic) Diet
Cedar Falls and Waterloo are twin cities in Iowa separated by a city limits sign. The incumbent telco and cableco ignore both. So Cedar Falls decided to build a municipal fiber optic network. But Waterloo’s citizens voted against it. A study, reported here, found that 11 businesses moved from Waterloo to Cedar falls around the time the network was built. Ouch. Waterloo Mayor John Rooff complained, “I believe it has hurt us economically to not be able to provide fiber optics to busin...
Cisco ASR 9000 High-end Router Launches
Cisco Systems unveiled a supercharged router called the ASR 9000, which is capable of moving 6.4 terabytes per second of traffic. The router is aimed at service providers with next-generation networks which plan to run bandwidth heavy services such as video, IPTV, mobile broadband, and more. With the explosion of Youtube videos, and other bandwidth-hungry apps, service providers are looking to stay ahead of the bandwidth demand curve. The ASR 9000 hopes to address that need with the ability to s...
Nortel Wins CDMA Contract
Lost in the shuffle of the third-quarter results and the restructuring news was Nortel being selected as the key vendor in the evolution of China Telecom’s CDMA network in seven provinces. Nortel will supply the enhanced base station controllers and base stations. “CDMA is at the heart of networks deployed by some of the world’s largest operators, providing voice, data, and video to millions of consumers,” said Richard Lowe, president Carrier Networks, Nortel. “We&#...
Why IntelePeer Snagged $18 Million in Funding
IntelePeer is one of those startups that has little buzz but a lot of traction. Formerly known as VoEx, the San Mateo, Calif.-based company lacks the hype around, say, Ribbit, but it has been delivering on the Voice 2.0 promise of integrating voice with web and enterprise applications for a long time. And doing well — IntelePeer turned EBIDTA positive in June and is on its way to revenues that will exceed $50 million in 2009. That is one of the reasons the company was able to snag $18 mil...
Opera Mini 4.2 beta mini-review
Opera Mini 4.2 beta just launched today. Opera Mini is one of my favorite mobile phone Internet browsers. It’s a tough call between Opera Mini and Skyfire. Skyfire supports Flash and video, so it’s better at multimedia, however, I find Opera Mini better suited to regular web pages with just graphics and text. Opera Mini is much faster at loading web pages and scrolling than Skyfire. Still, I use both on my Windows Mobile. That said, today Opera Mini is trying to add video streaming s...
Robert Baird Cuts Target Price
Robert W. Baird analyst Ken Muth has reduced its target price on NT to $1 from $3, while maintaining its “neutral” rating. In a research note, RB said Nortel will likely to burn through $813 million of cash in 2009, while reducing its EPS estimates for FY08 and FY09 from -$0.06 to -$0.25 and from $0.20 to -$1.40, respectively. In an interview with the News & Observer after the third-quarters results were released, Muth said: “They’re breaking up the company to sell ...
Oh My, 80 cents
Nortel shares hit an intra-day low of 80 cents before recovering to 85 cents, which gives it a market capitalization of $425-million. Clearly, yesterday’s announcement did little to provide investors with enough confidence that Nortel has a plan in place to get back on the right track. The question is what were investors looking for Nortel to do, and/or whether anything would have been enough to bolster their confidence. For what it’s worth, Scotia Capital analyst Gus Papageorgiou ra...
Nokia Siemens Networks Makes Deeper Cuts
The troubles in telecom continue as Nokia Siemens Networks plans to cut an additional 1,300 employees in Finland and Germany as part of an overall restructuring. According to today’s Wall Street Journal, the telecommunications equipment maker has cut about 6,000 workers and plans to lay off a total of about 9,000 before the restructuring is complete. NSN is a joint venture between Nokia Corp. and Siemens AG. Laid-off NSN employees won’t be alone, as workers throughout the communica...
The Importance of the FCC
My friend Om Malik, dean of the telecom bloggers and author of Broadbandits: Inside the $750 Billion Telecom Heist, posted on the importance of the Federal Communications Commission Chair appointment Obama will make as President: “The decision as to who will be appointed FCC Chair is a critical one, for in coming years the country faces some major issues that will need to be addressed head on — not from a corporate, but from a citizen perspective, including Network Neutrality, the av...
Event: Open Mobile Summit - November 19-20 San Francisco
While I will be visiting Minneapolis, Minnesota on November 19-20, quite a number of my friends from the VoIP industry will be in San Francisco on those days attending the Open Mobile Summit. Open Mobile is a space Im currently looking at and this event now has my attention. (It helped that a number of people pinged me about it.) I am impressed with the speakers and the topics that will be covered. In fact the conversations taking place in the conference and those that take place in the ha...
Papageorgiou: Stay Away from NT
Scotia Capital analyst Gus Papageorgiou has called it like he sees it: “Given the overall economic and market environment, we do not believe NT shares are well positioned. We would prefer investors locate their capital in companies with at least two of the following three characteristics: strong balance sheet, high growth, and strong profitability. As a result we continue to suggest investors avoid the shares.” In a report, Papageorgiou goes on to say that: “We believe Nortel ...
Twitterrati, Anyone?
After thinking about it for a couple of months and dabbling with some other ideas, I recently launched a new blog, Twitterrati, focused on Twitter and microblogging. Given I had dismissed Twitter has inane about a year ago, it’s not what I expected would happen. So, what changed? For one, I started using Twitter, and discovered it is much more than just a tool to tell people what you had for breakfast or ate for lunch, although an awful lot of people use it that way. More important, I s...
snom 820 Comes to North America
The snom 820, snom’s high-end IP phone, today will debut for the North American enterprise and small and medium-sized business (SMB) markets. I remarked on the snom 820’s sleek design, large high-resolution TFT color display, and wideband codec support when the product first launched last month. The snom 820 is now generally available today in the US, Canada, and Mexico through snom’s network of North American distributors and resellers and has an MSRP of US $419. I have an 82...
IMVU Music Opens: Think iTunes For Avatars
We’ve already seen video games like Guitar Hero and Rock Band dramatically change the way music is sold and marketed. Will virtual worlds bring about even more transformation? The four major record labels are gambling on just that with an online music store on IMVU, which comes out of beta today. Users of the extremely popular web-based virtual chat room network (profiled on GigaOM last June) can purchase songs from a catalog of 1 million tracks (reg. req.), either as a stream played wi...
Rosy Future for Wireless — Both Audio and Video
Shipments of four classes of wireless audio and video connectivity products for the home will increase nearly 500% by the end of 2013, according to a new study from ABI Research. The four technologies involved are named as Bluetooth, WiFi, ultra-wideband (UWB) and 60 GHz. The last one is described by ABI Research as the “likely standard-bearer” for in-home wireless distribution of uncompressed high-definition video. The research firm adds that as the wireless home electronics market...
Wal-Mart Getting Jump on Black Friday Deals
An upcoming Wal-Mart sale will offer Black Friday-like deals, including a notebook for $298 and 46-inch 1080p LCD HDTV for $798. Just as it did last year with a sale that lured shoppers into its maze of fluorescent lighting for $350 laptops, Wal-Mart will once again begin its holiday sales early with a one-day shopping event to precede Black Friday. The company’s sale will include several high-profile deals, including a laptop for $298, a 46-inch Sanyo LCD HDTV for $798, and a PS3 that co...
Circuit City’s Lights Get Even Dimmer
Circuit City, the No. 2 U.S. consumer electronics retailer, has filed for bankruptcy – just weeks before the start of the holiday shopping season. (A sad day for the gadgets world …) CC is the largest retailer to file for Chapter 11 since Kmart in 2002. (Seems even longer ago than that!) Circuit City fell victim to tighter credit terms from vendors, a dwindling cash position and decreased consumer spending amid a deepening economic crisis. The filing comes one week after ...
For FCC Chair, Obama Should Look Outside the Beltway
BusinessWeek today has a short list of the people being considered to head up the Federal Communications Commission. The decision as to who will be appointed FCC Chair is a critical one, for in coming years the country faces some major issues that will need to be addressed head on — not from a corporate, but from a citizen perspective, including Network Neutrality, the availability of broadband, telecom competition and privacy. Among those in the running are: Julia Johnson: Florida consu...
Event: Breakfast with Jeff Pulver and Friends in Minneapolis on November 20th
On Thursday, November 20th I will be in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and hosting another edition of Breakfast with Jeff Pulver (and Friends) at Sandy’s Place, at Best Buy, 7601 Penn Ave., Minneapolis, MN from 8-10AM. Readers of my blog are invited to join us. To RSVP, please visit this event on Facebook. Everyone attending this breakfast will receive a “Personal Social Networking Toolkit as described below: — Readers of my blog are invited to join me on both twitter and Fac...
Carriers Demand More Data, Consumers Get Less Privacy
As consumers use more data on their mobile phones, carriers want to know more about what consumers are doing with that data access. While the revenue from wireless data plans is rising to about a fifth or a fourth of carrier’s wireless sales overall, a survey released today, and conducted on behalf of Nokia Siemens Networks, indicates that carriers have bigger plans for data. Taking a page from web firms such as Google or Facebook, they want to know — in detail — how their subscribers...
Sametime and Microsoft OCS integration
Rumor has it that Microsoft and/or IBM will announce integration between Office Communications Server 2007 and IBM’s Lotus Sametime “Unified Telephony” platform at this week’s VoiceCon show. If true, this would combine approximately 20 million Sametime users with Microsoft’s fast growing OCS 2007 user base creating the largest unified communications user base. There are ways of getting OCS and Sametime to integrate via 3rd party gateways, however it is somewhat limi...
Introducing Ifbyphone’s 2nd iPhone App: Conference Call
With the help of the iPhone, Ifbyphone is giving a whole new meaning to the phrase, “Don’t call us, we’ll call you”. Today we announced the release of our iPhone Conference Call app, which joins our Voice Broadcast app on the iTunes app store. Here is a video demo of the app: The idea behind the Conference Call app is simple. When you schedule a conference call you shouldn’t have to start late waiting for everyone to call in. Using Ifbyphone’s iPhone Conferen...
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News, opinions and announcements about fast changing communication tools and technologies, from various blogs and ezine.