Archive for December, 2008
Directory forming of Twitter users related to Telephony/VoIP/Asterisk/etc.
Do you use Twitter and are interested in finding people on Twitter to follow related to telephony, VoIP, Asterisk, communications, etc? Well the folks over at the VoIP Users Conference have put together a website that provides a directory of twitter users related to those topics. If you’d like, you can add yourself using this form. It’s nice to see a directory like that, although it’s unfortunate that you can’t simply click on the person’s twitter name to see thei...
Ken Camp no longer blogging at Realtime Unified Communications Community…
It seems this month is a month for VoIP/Communications-related bloggers to move around… Beyond Jon Arnold, Ken Camp has announced that his regular blogging relationship with Realtime has come to an end and that he will no longer be blogging at the Realtime Unified Communications Community that has been his blogging home for the past three years. Ken’s a great guy and a friend and I do wish him all the best in whatever comes next. For now his writing can be found at the Stardust G...
5 Trends That Will Separate the Strong From the Weak in 2009
Year-end prognosticators have their work cut out for them. Most predictions made a year ago were undone by events few actually foresaw. Now things are as uncertain as ever. 2009 could bring a healthy recovery, or another financial crisis could set us back even further. So rather than specific predictions, it seems more sensible to look at current trends that could shape the tech industry next year. Here are five that, barring further upheavals, could separate the strong companies from the weak....
VoIP is NOT Dead!
Today is December 31, 2008 and I find it real interesting some of my friends have declared 2008 as the year that VoIP died. On the eve of 2009 the promise of VoIP is alive and well and living in the hearts of many people who believe in the future of innovation in communications. Ask many of my friends including: Vint Cert, Henry Sinnreich, Joe Rinde or Daniel Berninger and they would agree with me that one day the vision and the promise of end-to-end IP based communications WILL happen. The Inte...
Where to Get Your “Daily Show” Fix and More Online
With Time Warner Cable poised to take Viacom channels off the air in New York, Los Angeles, Dallas and several other cities Jan. 1 due to a dispute over raising fees, that’s an awful lot of people who will be missing ”The Daily Show,” ”Best Week Ever,” ”Degrassi” and ”The City.” Don’t worry — we can help and have put together a list of places where you can watch these shows and other Viacom programming on NewTeeVee. ...
The Answer is Regime Change
The question is at what point can Israel end its attacks on Hamas in Gaza. The answer is “when Hamas is no longer in power in Gaza.” That does not mean that Israel, which voluntarily withdrew from Gaza, should take over governing the enclave. It doesn’t guarantee that whomever takes over from Hamas, whether that’s Fatah or some group less corrupt, will be much better. It does mean that Gaza won’t have a government which not only tolerates but encourages rocket attac...
Social Gaming in 2009: Challenges and Opportunities
Startups associated with social gaming were all the funding rage in 2008. (Think SGN’s $15 million last May, for example, or the $17 million that went to Playfish in October.) And though executives with casual game startups recently told me they’re confident they’ll survive this recession, the challenges and opportunities for social games, which still primarily exist on major social networks, are considerably different. So what about the coming year worries and excites top e...
Apple Large screen iPod Touch in Future Plus Skype & Apple Partnership?
According to Techcrunch, we can soon expect to see a 7″ or 9″ iPod touch, which would make it more akin to a tablet PC than a portable music & video player with app support. The app support is a key point here. One of the problems with the iPod touch and similarly the iPhone is the relatively small screen. Sure, it’s bigger than most portable devices, but it’s still not quite large enough for optimal productivity. By stepping up the screen size, not only will it impr...
Ifbyphone Highlighted As Big VoIP Story of 2008
Alec Saunders wrote an article yesterday sharing his thoughts on the future of VoIP. The article mentioned Ifbyphone as one of the big VoIP stories of 2008. Here is the excerpt: Well, the big VoIP stories this year were that ecosystem of applications, and platforms. Irv Shapiro’s IfByPhone ingeniously connected IVR and Google Analytics, allowing deep measurement and statistical analysis of call center traffic. Looking forward to more big stories and innovation in 2009. Happy New Year! ...
Dec 31: What’s Hot on GigaNET
Jon Stewart, others to go off the air on Jan. 1 for Time Warner customers. [NewTeeVee] It’s not easy being green. The Solar iPhone experiment fails. [jkOnTheRun] China to build a 1 GW solar plant, Portuguese happy with 46 MWs. [Earth2Tech] The ultimate Mac browser roundup. [TheAppleBlog] The set-top boxes are ready to rumble…almost. [NewTeeVee] How to pick and open source CMS for your projects (or your blog.) [OStatic] Concentric Hosted IT Solutions and Web Hostin...
The New iPod Touch: A PC Killer?
The news is rampant that Apple is going to introduce a large-format iPod Touch later this year. With a seven to nine inch screen, it’s not really a Touch as opposed to a tablet computer. To me, it’s a game-breaker because it’s a product that will slot nicely in the PC, laptop, PDA landscape. And with the iPhone and iPod Touch on such a roll with such amazing brand recognition and goodwill, the new Touch could be a monster hit. In fact, I’d want one even though I got a To...
10 Stories That Defined Broadband in 2008
With every tick of the clock, 2008 is taking its final steps toward 2009, when the year starts afresh. From a broadband perspective it has been an eventful year –- one that was good, bad and ugly. Here is a rundown of 10 stories that defined the sector in 2008: 1. Optical cable cuts bookmark the year In 2008 we saw undersea optical cables cut on two separate occasions, resulting in limited Internet and voice access in countries in Europe, the Middle East and Asia. In January two cables went ...
The Sequoia Layoff Scorecard
Back in October, when I broke the news that uber venture fund Sequoia Capital had organized a secret meeting in which it warned its portfolio companies to prepare for the pending financial apocalypse, the revelation was met with some skepticism. Some thought Sequoia was using the downturn to its own advantage by putting a chill on the startup ecosystem. The sequence of economic events since then, however, points instead to their prescience on the matter. Mike Moritz, general partner with Sequoi...
Join The Jeff Pulver 2009 Breakfast Tour (Jan / Feb) 2009
The following is my confirmed breakfast schedule for January 2009 and the first part of February. I have plans underway to host a number of breakfast events across the world in 2009. I am currently looking for sponsors for my 2009 Breakfast Tour. If you are interested in sponsoring one or more of my breakfasts please feel free to contact me. At each breakfast my guests will receive their own personal Real-Time social networking toolkit described in the video below. I hope you can join me fo...
NewTeeVee, WebWorkerDaily & OStatic Make PCMag Top 100 Blog List
As 2008 comes to a close, my dream of building a quality blog network that was more than just GigaOM has become a reality. While I have always believed in the quality of our editorial product, today we got a third-party affirmation of our efforts. PC Magazine (now exclusively on the web) has named three of our blogs — NewTeeVee, WebWorkerDaily and OStatic — to their Top 100 Blogs list. Kudos to the respective teams and site editors who have done a great job of building such strong e...
How Carbon Neutral Is Dell, Really?
I am highly skeptical when big companies get trendy and start spewing cool. Lately going green has become the new black. Dell in particular has been making a lot of noise about being “green,” most recently bragging that it has becoming carbon neutral five months ahead of its own plans. Or did it? Spurred by a brilliant article in the Wall Street Journal, Katie Fehrenbacher over on Earth2Tech helps deconstruct Dell’s claims that it is carbon neutral, a claim that is up for deba...
Adding Porn Won’t Make AWS-3 Plan Any Better
FCC chairman Kevin Martin said in a conference call today that he’s dropped the porn-free requirement from his plan to auction off AWS-3 spectrum in order to create a free wireless broadband network. This last-minute effort to get universal wireless broadband passed on his watch is heroic, but I’m still not sold on the use of this spectrum for slow, free wireless broadband. The incumbents have fought the FCC proposal, and a similar one offered by M2Z Networks, for years. Thanks to p...
Bailouts Aren’t the Answer to Memory Chip Makers’ Problems
Sales of dynamic random access memory — the chips that store information in personal computers — have plunged 20 percent in the last year, prompting calls for government-led bailouts in Taiwan, consolidation efforts, and doubts about the ability of Micron Technology, the last DRAM maker in the U.S., to function without raising more cash. But bailouts and throwing more cash at DRAM players isn’t going to work. The only viable solution is to reduce the number of industry players...
Federal Broadband Money Should Go To States
The carriers and cablecos are hard at work trying to influence the broadband portion of the Obama stimulus package according to an article by Amol Sharma in today’s Wall Street Journal. That’s no surprise, of course, and their lobbyists are just doing what they’re paid to do. But it would be a terrible mistake to have any of this money strengthen the duopoly whose uncompetitive nature has resulted in the US slipping from fourth to fifteenth place in broadband deployment since 2...
2009: The Year of Reputation Management?
A post by Mashable on tools to track personal or corporate reputations got me thinking that 2009 could be the year when a growing number of people and companies start paying more attention to what’s being said about them online. With the proliferation of social networks, micro-blogging, blogs and other social media tools, our digital fingerprints are being scattered far and wide. This makes it a challenge to determine who’s saying what about you or your company simply because there&#...
7 Tips For When To Use Your Voice Broadcast iPhone App
Have you downloaded our Voice Broadcast App for the iPhone? Voice Broadcasting enables you to record a phone message, schedule a time, and call your contacts automatically with a recording of that message at the scheduled time. Here are 7 tips for when to use your Voice Broadcast App: 7. Send your sales team an important message when you know you’ll be busy or out of town. 6. Notify parents in your class about upcoming activities or events. 5. Wake yourself up by scheduling a phone call to...
Universal Broadband: The Begging Begins
Okay, now that everyone has accepted the need for better, faster broadband (and why not if the government is paying for it), the serious negotiations can begin. Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article detailing who wants what, and laying out who it will disadvantage. Basically think of it as the telecommunications carriers fighting the cable guys, and the rural carriers begging for mercy so they don’t have to deliver 50 Mbps to every last farm in America. There are debates over t...
Prizes Beyond the iPhone
I’m not big on New Year’s resolutions but one thing I think people running contests should avoid this year is offering iPhones as prizes. Sure, the iPhone is a hot property that gives contests a little extra sizzle but it’s just so 2008. As well, everyone’s doing it so the novelty factor has disappeared. So, what could replace the iPhone as the go-to contest prize in 2009? And if you can refrain from suggesting a new iPod Touch, that would be great! Technorati Tags: adv...
Martin drops filtering from Wi-Fi plan, FCC meets today
FCC Chairman Kevin Martin has told Ars Technica that he wants to move ahead with his nationwide free Wi-Fi plan so badly that he’s willing to drop the requirement for a smut filter. Matt Lasar of Ars T says Martin told him “I’m saying if this is a problem for people, let’s take it away . . . A lot of public interest advocates have said they would support this, but we’re concerned about the filter. Well, now there’s an item in front of the Commissioners and it...
What To Read This Morning
The long decline of (book) reading. [Mssv] Hotels and conference centers want more bandwidth. [The New York Times] What is Apple going to do with all its cash? [TheAppleBlog] Tesla Backpedals on Model S [Earth2Tech] Tesla’s rough road ahead [Jeff Nolan] Social media trends in 2009. [Trendspotting] Are you tired of answering, So What do you do? [WebWorkerDaily] Concentric Hosted IT Solutions and Web Hosting Click here to save cost on your IT demands ...
The AdultFriendFinder freemium case study
Skype Journal covered Skype’s freemium business model this year. Now Andrew Chen pulls together fresh freemium business and funnel metrics from FriendFinder Networks‘ IPO filing with the US SEC. FFN runs AdultFriendFinder.com (nsfw), Penthouse, and niche dating/social sites. It’s another data point when you want to compare freemium rates. ...
Trouble topping up Skype credits - RESOLVED
Skype Heartbeat reports PayPal payments to Skype have been delayed for three days. So far. Back office operations are boring, until they stop working.UPDATE: “The issue with payment delays is solved as of 07:00 UTC 28th of December.” tags: skype, paypal, payments, delays, errors Befriend Phil Wolff on Twitter or FriendFeed or on Skype. Follow Skype Journal on twitter ...
Cisco’s Misguided Foray Into the Living Room
Cisco Systems, a company best known for selling mundane (albeit very lucrative) routers, switches and other networking gear, has designs on the consumer electronics market. To that end, at the upcoming CES trade show, the company plans to launch a whole series of products that fall under the connected, networked entertainment category. For those of us that have been covering tech for some time, the idea of Cisco as a consumer brand is chuckle-worthy! Chuckles aside, this is just like an NBA sta...
Quote of Note: Tom Friedman
There is no such thing as a free market, no more than there is a farm or a garden that grows without fertilizer, without proper plowing, without intelligence brought into it. Markets are shaped by rules, incentives and disincentives . . . Tom “Flat, Hot and Crowded” Friedman in Scientific American, December 2008 [source]. Technorati Tags: Markets ...
How Google Is Influencing Server Design
As the need for fast, large-scale computing to power sites like Facebook or even computing clouds has grown, manufacturers such as Rackable Systems are taking notes on server design from Google, which builds its own systems. The goal of their mimicry is to provide more computing power in a smaller form factor while using less energy. An article in EEtimes today details the emergence of these Google-inspired servers, which include features such as heat-tolerant processors to save on cooling cost...
Verizon, Why You Gotta Mess With My Settings?
Faced with a free moment on Saturday night, I succumbed to the temptation to check the GigaOM site on my BlackBerry. But when I clicked on my browser, I ended up in the Verizon start page. After checking that I had indeed clicked through the correct icon, I realized (with some irritation) that I had to go back in and change my settings to get my GigaOM home page back. A quick call to Verizon’s customer service elicited no information, other than a guess that the phone had been updated and...
Register TODAY for Social Media Jungle @ CES 2009
I am looking forward to being in Las Vegas on January 7th at CES to host Social Media Jungle. This event will address how social media is changing the way we work and live. A full day of program sessions includes state of the industry updates and a candid look at how companies can motivate consumers through social media to drive product sales without increasing costs. This one day summit has unique format which I have developed based on my 13+ years experience producing events and conference...
Finally BroadSoft Says It Bought Sylantro
BroadSoft, of Gaithersburg, Md., has finally said what has been rumored for so long: It has acquired Sylantro Systems Corp., a VoIP applications developer based in Campbell, Calif., for an undisclosed amount of money. From what I’ve heard, no cash changed hands, though BroadSoft might have assumed Sylantro’s debt. The real reason for this deal might be AT&T: Sylantro is the voice platform being used by AT&T for its U-verse offerings. BroadSoft is consolidating the market an...
Samsung Snubs Qualcomm, Builds 4G Chips
Samsung Electronics is making its own WiMAX and LTE baseband chips for wireless handsets, according to an article in EETimes. The move by the Korean electronics maker shows how much opportunity it sees as the wireless industry transitions to 4G, and the fortunes of the biggest wireless chipmakers shift. Samsung has built its own application processors (one is inside the iPhone), and has extensive memory chipmaking operations, including a fabrication plant in Austin. It also is one of the top ha...
It’s Not a Beta Ban But…
As someone fascinated by the groaning buffet of Web 2.0 selections, it should not come as a surprise that I love betas. If something sounds even slightly interesting, I’ll happily sign up. After all, the only cost is time and the risk of having update e-mails appear in your inbox for several months until you unsubscribe. But as 2009 appears on the horizon, one of my digital resolutions is being more selective about dining out at the beta buffet. Instead of gorging, I’m going to try t...
Broadsoft Acquires Rival Sylantro
In what could portend several acquisitions in the VoIP space, Broadsoft has acquired rival competitor Sylantro Systems, both makers of softswitches and both heavily involved in carrier infrastructure, IMS, and converged services. TMCnet’s Greg Galitzine has the full details on the acquisition. With the global slowing economy, even the VoIP industry which has had exponential growth over the last 13 years, is being affected by the global downturn. No doubt we will see more consolidation with...
Facebook Marketing 102: Using Facebook Events to Market Your Products and Services
Which Im not a fan of getting spammed by anyone, especially on Facebook, I have to give credit to Barak I Ben-Ezer for being the first person to use a Facebook Event as a platform to promote a product or service. (He may not be the first person to ever do this, but this is the first time I took notice. - mostly because he used his event to send a message to everyone he invited.) While I have been using Facebook Events to promote events, mainly my breakfast events, one of the benefits is th...
On Twitter, Followers Aren’t Really Friends
This past weekend, we had yet another tempest in a teapot here in the blogosphere, this time over what, exactly, determines the authority of a tweet on Twitter. Some argued that the number of followers is the best yardstick with which to measure how important a tweet was, while others argued that it is who you follow that’s more valuable. The high drama made me wonder: Why can’t a tweet just be a tweet? Why does it have to be about authority? (I assume authority means “power t...
The Crunchies Nominations Are Out, Time to Vote
The nominations for the 2009 edition of the Crunchies are out — which means it’s time for you to cast your votes for your favorite startup(s). There are 15 categories. The list of nominees includes tiny bootstrap operations such as 12seconds.tv and giants such as Apple and the 3GiPhone. The Crunchies are a joint effort by us, VentureBeat, Silicon Alley Insider and TechCrunch. Voting rules: We will count one vote per person per category per day as valid. Voting will end on Monday, J...
How a Gas Tax Increase Can Help Economic Recovery
One of the few economic bright spots is the historically low prices of gasoline; it’s even possible that the amount Americans are saving both by buying less and paying less for the gallons they do buy will let us replenish our damaged balance sheets quickly enough to avoid a prolonged downturn. So what kind of idiot would want to raise pump prices with a gas tax increase? Well, me, for one. So would the editors of the New York Times and Tom Friedman (but that doesn’t mean that any o...
Netbook Trademark Kerfukkle is All About The Money
Last week, jkOnTheRun broke the news that Psion Teklogix, owner of the “Netbook” trademark was sending cease and desist (C&D) letters to some blogs and smaller websites. The news stirred up enough controversy that Psion’s law firm, Origin, sent a response to jkOnTheRun to clarify a few points. For instance they said that they are only going after entities that are “making a direct, financial profit from use of the ‘Netbook’ trademark.” They clarified that 95% of the C&D ...
How Sony Can Boost PS3 Sales
As this holiday’s video game sales are tallied up, one thing is already clear: Sony’s PlayStation 3 remains in a fairly distant third place, still eclipsed by Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Nintendo’s Wii. While it’s probably too drastic for Sony to walk away from the PS3, I definitely think they need some bold and creative changes to make their console competitive, namely to acquiesce to market realities while leveraging two underutilized assets. Here’s how: Rel...
The Web’s Addicted Minority
Earlier this week, Sean Carton had an interesting post looking at how Twitter has “only” 200,000 active users and 1% of its “addicts” account for 34% of total traffic. That got me thinking about how many popular services such as Digg, Facebook, Twitter and MySpace are fueled by a very small group of engaged users. This thesis was hammered home by Louis Gray, who went through some Quantcast data that shows as a small group of “addicts” drive huge amounts of tra...
High Definition (HD) VoIP will be BIG in 2009
During my recent trip to Israel, I had a chance to sit down and catch up with my friend, Shabtai Adlersberg, Chairman and CEO of Audiocodes. I have known Shabtai for more than a decade and I appreciated the support Audiocodes gave the VON events over the years. One of the things we spoke about was my list of trends / predictions for 2009 and we both agreed that high definition (HD) VoIP would be big in 2009. We believe the time has come for HD VoIP to become part of our everyday lives and we a...
The meanings of Network Neutrality
Ed Felten has posted a nice taxonomy of the several meanings people take when they use the term Network Neutrality, briefly: End-to-End Design Nonexclusionary Business Practice Content Nondiscrimination You can read more about what Ed means on his post. I’ve been developing a taxonomy of issues that are interact with and are bound with Network Neutrality. So far there are six items: Scarcity Management — the idea that network elements are scarce and expensive and need managing by ...
Introductions from my Dec 17th Breakfast in Jerusalem:
During my recent trip to Israel, I had the pleasure of meeting Vicki Kolovou from Athens who was also visiting Israel. Vicki attended my breakfasts in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem and captured the following video from my Jerusalem breakfast: Setup to the video - After I did a brief introduction and explained real-time social tagging, we went around the room and I asked everyone to state their name and their personal tag line. — Tags: breakfast, Personal Social Media Toolkit, Jerusalem, so...
Bonus braindump
There is a long braindump of my thoughts on the future of telecoms over at Lee Dryburgh’s eComm blog. Do take a look, hurry whilst stocks of pundit opinions last. Posted by Martin Geddes at 12:27 PM Comments: (post your comment) ...
The Weekend Reader
Why Sita really got the blues. [NewTeeVee] Like RIAA, MPAA working with ISPs on 3-strike-and-out policy. [DSL Reports] Tunable eyeglasses could help poor in the third world. [The Daily Telegraph] Simple tips for new Netbook owners. [jkOnTheRun] How to turn Twitter into an Ad network in 3 easy steps. [AdAge] Zavvi, formerly Virgin Megastores is bankrupt. [BBC] What Google, WalMart & Barack Obama have in common. [O’Reilly Radar] Bright side of the clean power plunge: it’s not the ...
What infrastructure looks like
I took this picture in Amsterdam, June 23, 2001. ...
Event: Breakfast with Jeff Pulver (and friends) in San Francisco on Jan 14th
On Wednesday, January 14th I will be in San Francisco and hosting my second Breakfast with Jeff Pulver (and Friends) in San Francisco from 8-10 AM. I am looking forward to catching up with my friends. To RSVP, please visit this event on Facebook. Everyone attending this breakfast will receive a “Personal Social Networking Toolkit.” Friends can learn more about my Personal Social Networking Toolkit by watching the video below: — Tags: breakfast, Personal Social Media ...
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.