March 2007 Archives

I'm off to the VON show in San Jose, CA tomorrow morning, and I'm interested to see if there's any truth behind Thomas Howe's brave post today about why he's not attending the event. I'll be meeting with other technologists while I'm there, so I'm curious whether this position is shared by them.

For my part, I'm looking forward to shooting the breeze with my industry friends, making new friends, and (hopefully) discovering new innovative solutions and sussing out relevant industry trends.

Also, let me extend an invitation to those also attending the event to contact me if you're interested in meeting up.

I knew I was onto something hot when I posted about this a short time ago.

Apparently my colleague Jon Arnold agrees, and has this much expanded analysis of the offer - and provides a well-deserved booster shot for the technology masterminds behind the scenes at DiamondWare.

Just when people started dissing voice mail, saying how they don't check their messages all that often and you should just email them (or SMS or IM them) if you want them to get back to you -- and this from people in the "voice" business!!! -- along comes a company that helps to breathe new life into the space.

GotVoice -- a company launched in 2003 but just coming out the gate with its service (it needed several years of development to make it so seamlessly transparent and easy to use -- and it truly is) -- has come up with a new free voice messaging service that allows consumers to manage their mobile, home and work voice messages online, from a single, unified web interface.

Actually, such changes have been afoot in the enterprise voice messaging space for some time now, thanks to the slow but steady burn under unified messaging technology. But I can't tell you how many times in years past I've heard people say, "This is the Year of Unified Messaging!" -- only to be quite underwhelmed by the offerings or the tepid adoption by the marketplace of even well-developed enterprise solutions. Continue Reading...

Loyal Blog Readers: Please enjoy this sneak peek at my upcoming Mind Share 2.0 column (more like a mini-whitepaper) -- co-authored by Cbeyond CTO Chris Gatch -- that will be running in the April issue of Internet Telephony magazine:

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Managed Services Providers: Delivering on the Promise of High-Value Services

As the IP communications industry continues to evolve and mature, an array of new companies offering highly reliable and robust new products and services have made their way to market, providing users with an uncommon wealth of new productivity enhancing communications capabilities at extremely competitive prices.

Foremost among these new entrants to the marketplace are a breed of companies commonly referred to as Managed Services Providers, or MSPs. These MSPs represent a special type of service provider that leverages new Internet technologies to combine the best of Web service and network service models to deliver a whole new class of hosted services to users, and also represent a new genre of investment opportunity to Wall Street.

MSPs typically provide a unique bundling of various hosted voice and data communications services and applications, often coupled with quality of service guarantees, robust security measures and Web-based administrative features. But what exactly is a managed services provider, and what differentiates an MSP from a Web services and network services company?
 
The Two Types of Integration

Service providers establish their unique identity through integration – using process and technology to make distinct systems work together for the benefit of their customers.
 
When one examines the concept of integration with respect to an IP-based services provider, there are really two distinct types of integration to consider: network integration and application integration. In fact, the types of integration that are practiced in large-part determines whether a provider is a network services operator, Web services provider, or an MSP.

The matrix represented in Figure I to the left illustrates the differentiation between these two types of integration as well as the progression of derived value as the degree of integration increases across the two planes.

For example, a basic html-based website represented in the lower left-hand quadrant functions rather autonomously and displays little or no integration with other network resources or other applications running on a network. Continue Reading...

Josh Lowenstein, over at the Webware blog from cnet.com, recently posted about a new paid-by-the-minute service from Skype called Skype Prime.

According to the post, Skype Prime is aimed at consultants and other professionals that need to monetize their phone time. Such users can set their own per-minute rates that get charged to the caller. Skype Prime takes 30 percent of the fees to pay for the service, and users can set up as many types of paid-for calls as they want, with short descriptions and custom pricing.

Each type of call gets listed on the users Skype profile for others to see, and there are two options for pricing: a one-time fee, or charging by the minute. Continue Reading...

I just received a troubling message, sent by Pandora CEO Tim Westergren to the Pandora user community, about the fact that the Copyright Royalty Board has just dramatically increased the fees Internet radio sites must pay to the record labels. 

If this is left unchanged, the resulting financial burden would effectively stymie -- and potentially kill off -- all Internet radio sites, including Pandora.

According to Tim, "The RIAA has convinced the Copyright Royalty Board federal committee to pass rates that will kill internet radio. For now, we are continuing to operate Pandora in the belief that rationality will return."

"Online radio has brought millions of music-lovers back into music radio, and has opened up a world of opportunity and promotion for thousands of musicians - both obscure and well known. Continue Reading...

Greg Galitzine just blogged about the recent FCC order “reaffirming” that wholesale providers of telecommunications services are entitled to interconnection and related items under sections 251(a) and (b) of the Communications Act.
 
As Greg reports, this order means that carriers that sell wholesale VoIP and other services are entitled to interconnect and exchange traffic with local exchange carriers (“LECs”).

However, according to leading telecom law firm Womble Carlyle, there are a number of areas and unanswered questions that leave the door wide open for confusion and potential abuse.

Namely:

1. Asymmetrical Intercarrier Compensation. Wholesale carriers (and not their customers) are obligated to pay intercarrier compensation to incumbent LECs. The FCC makes no mention of any incumbent LEC obligation to compensate wholesale carriers for traffic termination. The FCC expressly punted on addressing intercarrier compensation for VoIP traffic under
section 251(b)(5).

2. Continue Reading...

Well, it's been a rather disappointing couple of weeks in Vistaland, as it seems one disappointment (read "performance issue") after another rears it's ugly head.

I've been trolling the message boards to get a sense of Vista-related problems, and it seems most fall into the following categories:

1. Devices (printers, scanners, etc.) that won't work due to lack of updated drivers.

2. Applications that don't run because they haven't been upgraded (for example, I tried to run Second  Life, to no avail -- as of now, it won't run on Vista).

3. Big performance hits to PCs that have been upgraded from XP to Vista. Apparently installing Vista on top of XP produces extra processes or some such situation that causes new core 2 systems to crawl. It seems that this isn't a problem on virgin Vista systems. If I had  purchased an XP-based screamer, that ran  laps around older PCs, and then started behaving like an ancient 486 system after installing Vista, I'd probably be livid.
 
4. Trouble with all the application nesting -- many tools and apps that were right out in the open in XP are buried behind multiple screens in Vista. Continue Reading...