January 2007 Archives

I had to chuckle -- and scratch my head -- when I heard about the "glum" news regarding the financial performance of Ebay's VoIP operation, a.k.a. Skype. According to Ebay CEO Meg Whitman, "The monetization efforts we outlined at the time of the acquisition are not developing as quickly as we had hoped." During 2006, Skype generated $195 million in revenue -- after Ebay laid out $2.6 billion for the company in 2005.

Am I missing something here? A lackluster "monetization" result was basically guaranteed given the decision to give away free Skype Out calls for the entire 2006 calendar year for North American subscribers. But what this announcement implies is that Meg or the Ebay staff in charge of overseeing Skype's bottom line either were not included in the initial decision to provide free calling (which I have a hard time believing), weren't exactly completely in agreement with the strategy (a distinct possibility given the recent management shake ups at the company), or were completely clueless about the net results of such a strategy (which I also have a hard time believing.)

I always believed that the Free Year was a shrewd strategy to boost Skype's subscriber count, and based on the disclosure that Skype managed to triple the number of registered users to 171 million over the course of the year, it seemed to work as planned. Continue Reading...

I just returned from travels south, to Fort Lauderdale and Internet Telephony EXPO -- and arrived in Winter in New York. It was bound to arrive at some point (although I thankfully missed the deep freeze, eight-degree temperatures of a couple of days ago).


The show was great -- well-attended and full of good content in the conferences.  Jon Arnold and I spent some time together basking in the glow of our recent announcement.  See Jon's post about show highlights.

And yes, I did spend a little time in the sun -- and barely escaped serious harm. I keep forgetting that the Florida sun can burn you alive -- even in the dead of winter...
  

Here are a few takeaways from the show  -- a mix of events, observations, and the like:




Peering is Hot:

Apparently the VoIP Peering Fabric sessions had to be relocated to larger quarters due to the overflow turnout.  Greg Galitzine has more on this and other happenings in his show recap.


SIP Trunking Adoption Gaining Momentum

The other standing-room-only crowds I saw were soaking up as much as they could about SIP Trunking. Continue Reading...

Jon Arnold and I figured that since most everyone else was making some sort of announcement, issuing press releases and generally making noise  -- especially to pull in the crowds at Internet Telephony Conference & EXPO East going on right now -- that it was OK to make some noise of our own.

Hopefully it will be music to your ears

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NEW YORK, TORONTO, and FORT LAUDERDALE, January 23, 2007-- Robins Consulting Group (RCG) and J Arnold & Associates (JAA) – both leading IP Communications industry research, marketing and consulting firms – have proudly announced a new partnership that includes the two firms joining forces to provide an array of marketing, communications, strategy consulting and market research services to their growing roster of IP communications technology vendors and service providers.

In addition, RCG and JAA will be jointly developing new information resources, including an electronic newsletter and related Web site, which will offer unique industry analysis, a healthy dose of opinion, provide a new platform for other industry thought leaders, and offer valuable coverage and information not readily available elsewhere about the rapidly evolving IP communications industry.

Veteran industry thought leader Marc Robins, RCG's founder and Chief Evangelism Officer, has been involved in the IP communications industry since its inception, and has served the industry as a leading reporter and analyst, conference producer and magazine publisher, and marketing executive and consultant. Continue Reading...

For those of you who are frustrated by the sky high prices of new HD-DVD or Blue Ray players (running @$600 to $900, respectively,) there's a novel solution to getting your HD-DVD on your PC or TV on the cheap.

Apparently there's a way to "hack" the Xbox 360 HD DVD player -- officially designed to be exclusively connected to the Xbox 360 console -- that lets you watch high def movies on your PC or TV, without the need for the 360 console.




At about $200 , this currently qualifies as the cheapest  HD DVD drive around.

According to the folks at HDDVDFreak: "The hack seems to be as simple as finding a generic HD-DVD drive driver, then getting PowerDVD or WinDVD with the HD-DVD upgrade on, then plugging in the drive over USB and sticking a disc in. Presumably, you could even remove the drive from the casing and plug it directly into your PC over SATA, mounting it in a spare drive bay and earning some serious kudos."

For a full description of the procedure, the guys at uneasysilence also provide links to drivers and other related information, and provide snapshots of the surgery to free the drive for PC insertion. Continue Reading...

Just heard from Andy Mercker, one of the VoIP industry's best and brightest marketing professionals, on his new gig -- he's moved on from Sphere Communications, where he was director of marketing, and has joined VoIP call recording and monitoring specialist Telrex, as its new director of marketing.

I fully expect Andy to raise Telrex's industry profile up a few notches, and to contribute significantly to its success, just as he did at Sphere.

In addition to his move, Andy gave me an advance peek at an announcement regarding the CallRex™ Professional 3.5,  a new release that provides a bunch of enhancements to Telrex's flagship product, including greater scalability, enhanced multi-site support and a distributed-services software architecture, streamlined storage and archiving, and additional security.

CallRex was the first VoIP call recording solution verified to record encrypted VoIP calls for Cisco CallManager 5.0, and CallRex version 3.5 now provides additional security to ensure that call recording files cannot be secretly altered.

The market for VoIP call recording and monitoring seems to be heating up significantly, and there are a few companies starting to launch major marketing initiatives looking to win business, including Telrex and Teleformix.

According to Andy, VoIP call recording and monitoring refers to the process of recording and monitoring business-class IP telephony systems, and this market segment is poised for rapid growth due to the fact that:

· IP telephony obsoletes legacy call recording and monitoring technologies, creating a new market opportunity for VoIP-based solutions.

· Call recording and monitoring is becoming a standard business application used for regulatory compliance, dispute resolution, customer service, training, security and more.

Continue Reading...

Today, I received an email from Moshe Maeir, Chief Flattening Officer at The Flat Planet Phone Company. I hadn't heard of this company before, or such an unusual title, so suffice it to say I was a bit curious to check them out.

From what I could gather, Flat Planet offers hosted IP-PBX services, mobile to VoIP connectivity (the company is a member of the iotum Relevance Enabled Channel Partner Program), disposable numbers , virtual IVR and other hot communications services, geared for individuals and small businesses that aspire to become instant phone companies. Flat Planet offers to help you "Start Your Own Phone Company in an Hour", and is charging an extremely low annual fee of $199 to become a Flat Planet partner (i.e., reseller.)

According to the company's Web site, the Flat Planet Phone system includes a complete hosted softswitch, as well as a billing and customer management system -- and the pitch is that no additional investment, equipment or manpower is needed to get set up and running.

The benefits of becoming a Flat Planet partner includes a custom-branded Web site, and tools to market the Flat Planet services under their own brand name. Continue Reading...

I'm looking forward to a little travel now, just as the weather is starting to behave wintery (pretty soon NYC will look like this).

Thankfully, upcoming travel will take me south to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, for Internet Telephony Conference and EXPO East.

I'll be moderating, checking out the latest technology on the show floor and sussing out the latest trends, holding meetings in the press room and elsewhere in the convention center (maybe out on a sun-drenched  patio) and generally enjoying catching up with folk and putting new faces to new names.

I'll be attending from midday Wednesday, January 24th till the show's end on Friday afternoon. If you're also attending the show and would like to meet up, please let me know. Continue Reading...

Pandora Networks, fresh off a new round of funding, just announced that it and D-Link will jointly sell D-Link hardware with Pandora's hosted communication solutions for small and medium-sized businesses. The partnership is designed to permit SMBs to purchase “off-the-shelf” bundled solutions that include hardware and services that deliver a hosted IP-PBX along with unified communications applications.

Pandora's Worksmart UCX, or Unified Communications Exchange, delivers a complete IP communications service that includes voice, video, messaging, and collaboration services. “D-Link has pre-configured several bundled options designed for a variety of office environments. Included in the bundles will be IP phones, switches, routers, and VoIP acceleration hardware to ensure a high quality VoIP connection to Pandora Networks' Worksmart hosted service. Continue Reading...

Windows Registry optimizer software seems to be in growing demand today. Junk Windows registry entries and a host of other registry errors appear to plague every Wintel-based PC --even brand new ones -- and if you clean them up, your machine will supposedly run faster, smoother, and more reliably -- i.e, with fewer crashes. (Yeh, I've already heard the  "Get a Mac, dummy" refrain -- multiple times)

Rich Tehrani recently wrote about his experience with Registry Mechanic, and how it helped speed up a crawling laptop. I've also given Registry Mechanic a try, and really like it's elegant interface and appreciate the rapid speed of the scan it performs. Continue Reading...

Mobile Internet telephony start-up Truphone has announded that it has received a funding round of $24.5 million, making it the European technology sector’s largest Series A venture funding of 2006. The funding was led by Wellington Partners, a leading pan-European VC, with Independent News & Media (a global media group) and Burda Digital Ventures (a global media group) joining existing investors Eden Ventures and various angel investors.

In 2006, Truphone introduced VoIP to mass market mobile phones, enabling users to make free calls from their handsets to other Truphone users and low Internet-rate calls to any telephone worldwide. In late 2006, this was extended to free phone calls to a range of VoIP services.

Truphone’s true mobile VoIP service enables calls to be made between mobile devices entirely free of charge. Since calls are carried via Wi-Fi over the Internet, and not over a regular phone network, there are no operator charges to make or receive such calls.

As a result, using a Truphone-enabled handset to make an international call from a Wi-Fi hotspot abroad cuts out the usual, expensive, roaming charges, threatening one of the major sources of revenue for the existing cellular network operators. Continue Reading...

Over the last couple of weeks, most of my neighbors and fellow New Yorkers have scratched their heads a few times when it came to the weather -- with temperatures sometimes 20 degrees or more above normal (it almost hit 60 today), it seems as if this is the "Year of the Winter That Wasn't". By this time, this far into the season, we've usually had a few snowstorms and a bunch of sub-freezing days.

Unseasonally warm temperatures are present all across the Eastern seaboard, and Mother Nature appears to be genuinely confused. I've heard stories about crocus buds popping up in gardens in New Jersey, and cherry trees sprouting buds in Washington, DC. In fact, there is a growing concern that this premature growth will seriously diminish cherry blossom production in May and June -- the normal season for the trees to be budding. Continue Reading...

Word from Vizio headquarters is that the company is getting ready to announce a bunch of new HDTV flat panels at the upcoming CES show. One new model that I'm quite excited about is a new 60" Plasma, with full 1080p resolution, and even better --  a couple of new HDMI 1.3 inputs. (this is the 50" model to the left).

Vizio has rapidly become one the biggest sellers of LCD and Plasma HDTV sets in the market, due to its low pricing and decent build quality -- very much a "one-two punch" in today's HDTV marketplace.

Word is the unit will be available in late March-early April -- and although pricing hasn't been set, I expect the company to stay true to its low-cost ways and break new pricing ground with this set. Continue Reading...

Cablevision has made it a strategic imperative to develop leading-edge, interactive iTV and broadband services that leverage it's advanced digital network and interactive platform, and the company is looking to fill in the blanks in its iTV executive suite.
 
The company is currently on the hunt for a new VP, iTV and Broadband Development, Interactive Advertising & Development.


Here are the job particulars:

Job Location: Bethpage, Long Island

Background: 
With more than 1.7 million interactive customers, Cablevision has the highest digital penetration in the nation and offers access to more than 200 channels, including 50 premium movie channels, 45 channels of commercial-free digital music, more than 1,200 titles available on demand at all times, an interactive programming guide, 18 high-definition programming services and groundbreaking interactive television applications including subscription games packages. Cablevision Systems Corporation is one of the nation's leading entertainment and telecommunications companies and its cable television operations serve 3 million households in the New York metropolitan area.

Description:
The VP, iTV and Broadband Development will work with the organization to coordinate the design, development and delivery of new interactive products and features on television and broadband leveraging Cablevision’s advanced digital network and interactive platform.

Continue Reading...