Communications and Technology Blog

Real, Live Video Conferencing of Smart Devices on LTE, WiFi and 3G

By Jim Machi on Tuesday, May 15

Last week at CTIA, during a scheduled press conference on May 8th at 11:00AM, Dialogic demonstrated the future of video conferencing...

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Tagged iPad, LTE, video conferencing, Wi-Fi | No Responses

Plixer Scrutinizer Network Traffic Analyzer Preview

By Tom Keating on Monday, May 14

I've been testing Plixer Scrutinizer, a network traffic analyzer product for several weeks now. It's a great product that supports NetFlow used...

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Tagged cisco asa, flow analytics, netflow, network traffic analysis, plixer, scrutinizer, sflow, wireshark

A New Conversation Experience: Alcatel-Lucent's 4G Consumer Communications Solution

By Peter Bernstein on Monday, May 14

Beecher Tuttle

Subscriber demand for more innovative, bandwidth-hungry services has driven most every service provider to build a 4G LTE network capable of providing greater capacity, reduced latency and improved pricing. But to unlock the power of a 4G LTE investment – and to continue to deliver revenue-generating voice and messaging services – carriers must look to embrace Voice over LTE (VoLTE), a core component for a new set of rich media and collaboration services that also enables operators to deliver voice without having to rely on legacy 2G/3G networks.

In short, VoLTE helps service providers capitalize on their new 4G investments. VoLTE enables operators to offload legacy infrastructure and to deliver data simultaneously with crisp HD voice. By blending mobile voice with video, converged IP messaging, the web and social networking, service providers can create new revenue-generating communication services that differentiate them from competitors. The technology is also proven to harmonize conversations across disparate providers, devices and apps.

But perhaps more than anything, VoLTE provides operators with the flexibility to respond to ever-changing technologies, market conditions and user demands. The competitive freedoms of VoLTE allow operators to experiment with and deliver new communication features for broad markets and even strategic industries like mobile healthcare.

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Tagged 4G, 4G LTE network, All-IP communications, IMS, LTE, New Conversation Experience (NCE), Voice over IP, VoLTE | No Responses

Netflix Temporarily Offline? On Movie Night? Ahhhh!

By Tom Keating on Friday, May 11

Oh joy - was checking my Netflix DVD queue to see if any interesting movies to stream as well as which ones...

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Tagged down, netflix, outage, unavailable, website

Telefonica Launches Skype Competitor Tu Me

By Tom Keating on Wednesday, May 9

Telefónica today launched a new mobile app called Tu Me, which essentially takes the approach if you can't beat Skype, join em'....

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Tagged mobile voip, skype, sms, telefónica, tu me

Viber Announces BlackBerry Beta and Windows Phone 7 Beta

By Tom Keating on Tuesday, May 8

Viber today announced the availability of Viber for BlackBerry Beta and Windows Phone 7 Beta.Both Viber for BlackBerry Beta and Viber...

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Tagged blackberry, free voice calls, hd, im, mobile voip, viber, voip, windows phone

Nokia City Lens Augmented Reality Launches on Lumia Phones

By Tom Keating on Tuesday, May 8

Nokia today released its City Lens app for Windows Phone, an app that is an augmented reality browser. Users open the app,...

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Tagged augmented reality, camera, city lens, lumia 800, lumia 900, microsoft, nokia, poi, windows phone

Big Mac versus Hamburger

By Peter on Monday, May 7

When selling Hosted PBX and other unified communications, it's a lot like giving someone a Big Mac. Extra sauce, more calories, cheese...

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Tagged hosted pbx, sellecom, UC

Ultrabooks Finally Get Needed Attention From Intel

By Rich Tehrani on Friday, May 4

Intel is running a new ad touting the long-lasting Ultrabook which has hours of battery life. And while I applaud Intel for...

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Tagged advertising, apple, asus, best buy, dell, hp, intel, laptop, mac, macbook, marketing, tablet, toshiba, ultrabook, xps, zdnet, zenbook

Ooma Telo Review

By Tom Keating on Friday, May 4

Back in 2007 I wrote an article "Ooma goes Booma" because Ooma's claim-to-fame feature was that it worked by 'sharing' your PSTN...

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Tagged 2nd line, cheap minutes, free calling, magicjack, nettalk, ooma, review, telo, unlimited calling, voip

Skype Aware of IP Security Flaw Back in 2010

By Tom Keating on Thursday, May 3

Some more interesting information has come to light regarding the IP revealing security flaw in Skype. Researchers from Inria, a research institute...

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Tagged privacy, security, skype, voip, vulnerability, wall street journal, wsj

Avengers Tech and Toys Assembled

By Rich Tehrani on Wednesday, May 2

Let’s face it, superheroes are pretty cool and aside from Batman and a few others, most of them are low tech. Try...

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Tagged avengers, hasbro, rich steeves, tmc

Is it Cloud versus Agents?

By Peter on Wednesday, May 2

Is it Cloud versus Agents?As an Agent, I sell bandwidth and transport almost exclusively. I am learning that the Channel does not...

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Tagged agents, cableco, cloud communications, cloud computing, commissions, price war, telco, telecom is broken, VAR

Comments on Last Week's DevCon5 HTML5 Conference

By Rich Tehrani on Tuesday, May 1

HTML5 is an important topic as cross-platform development without the need to work with app store guardians means developers are generally free...

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Tagged devcon5, html5

Skype Responds to IP Address Privacy Vulnerability

By Tom Keating on Tuesday, May 1

Yesterday it was reported that a simple script could expose any Skype user's IP address. A Microsoft representative saw my article and...

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Tagged ip address, microsoft, presence, privacy, skype, supernodes, voip, vulnerability

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GM to Facebook: Your ads Don't Work

May 16, 2012

When you are about to have one of the largest public offerings in the world - north of $100 billion and much of the reason for the size of your IPO has to do with advertising revenue, there is nothing worse than having one of the world's largest and most sophisticated advertisers telling you your ads don't work. And that is exactly what just happened to Facebook when GM pulled the plug on a $10 million dollar ad deal.

To put this in perspective, GM is the third largest advertiser in the US and its budget is absolutely huge. Last year in fact it was $1.8B. The interesting part of the situation is that even though GM won't be continuing its ad spend this year it plans on continuing to spend $30M or so for Facebook content.

What this tells us is Facebook is just becoming a driver of the Splinternet or another Internet which advertisers and developers need to take into account.

Posted in E-Commerce, Facebook, Financial, Google, Technology

Tagged: advertising, bi, facebook, gm, google, ipo, vonage, wsj : Related Tags: facebook, advertising, company, largest, content, companies

Two Get Prison over $4.4M in VoIP Fraud

May 16, 2012

Every technology which can be used for good can be used for bad as well and that is what I couldn't help but think about when I learned a federal judge sentenced Vinod Tonangi and Harjeet Bhambhani to over a year in prison for $4.4 million in VoIP fraud. They were further ordered to serve three years of supervised release, and Tonangi owes $1.7 million in restitution.

Using companies Paradise Communications, Reach Communications and Airtel Holdings they resold wholesale telecom service which didn't exist according an article in the Wall Street Journal.

They both pleaded guilty to one count to commit wire fraud.

Unfortunately they also damaged the trust level of the wholesale telecom market - and whether this is permanent damage or not remains to be seen. I expect upstart telecom wholesalers to have to deal with more red tape to prove they are legitimate going forward.

Posted in VoIP

Tagged: fraud, voip, wholesale, wsj : Related Tags: wholesale telecom, telecom, fraud

Kickstarter: Sometimes the Cloud Can't Keep a Secret

May 15, 2012

Data breaches happen - a while back Moveable Type upgraded its blogging software and posts scheduled to be seen at a later date were given away by tag pages which posted immediately. In other words if a blogger wrote about a new Version of Microsoft Word and scheduled the post for later in the week,the tag pages - for things like "word processor," "microsoft," "pc" and any others would be immediately visible to readers and search engines.

Yours Truly was hit by this bug a few times and was even accused of not honoring an embargo as a result.

Point being - data breaches are real and they happen in the cloud as well as in-house systems.

Kickstarter recently had a breach as well where 77,000 projects became accessible via an API which the Wall Street Journal was able to access until around 1:40pm EST this past Friday, May 11th.

If there is good news it is that Kickstarter has 77,000 projects and financial data wasn't disclosed - as a refresher, the company helps get new products off the ground by crowdfunding and taking a 5% cut. The highest profile project may be from Arianna Huffington who is trying to use the platform to buy back the company she founded The Huffington Post from AOL for $1B.

Will this breach result in a major problem for Kickstarter? Probably not - unless it happens repeatedly.

Posted in E-Commerce, Technology

Tagged: aol, api, arianna huffington, crowdfunding, hacker, huffington post, kickstarter, moveable type, wsj : Related Tags: house systems, breaches happen, kickstarter, happen, cloud, breaches

Ultrabooks Finally Get Needed Attention From Intel

May 4, 2012

Intel is running a new ad touting the long-lasting Ultrabook which has hours of battery life. And while I applaud Intel for finally acknowledging this category needs marketing I am still at a loss. You see battery life is one of the features which makes a MacBook great and so is the wonderful design. We all know Ultrabooks exist almost exclusively so PC makers can compete with Apple.

So this being the case why do all the Ultrabooks except the ones from Asus and possibly Samsung look like absolute crap?

Posted in Apple, Consumer Electronics, Financial, Gadget, Microsoft, Technology, Ultrabook

Tagged: advertising, apple, asus, best buy, dell, hp, intel, laptop, mac, macbook, marketing, tablet, toshiba, ultrabook, xps, zdnet, zenbook : Related Tags: ultrabooks, apple, intel, category, marketing, store

Important Stories From This Week's Business Insider Startup 2012 Event

May 4, 2012

Missed the Business Insider Startup 2012 event or just didn't take good notes? Well if either of these situations applies to you, TMC has you covered. Our network of sites has been populated with the must-know stories written by TMC's editorial team - Jamie Epstein and Juliana Kenny covered this event. Enjoy:

Posted in Apple, Financial, Google, Social Networking, Technology

Tagged: apple, arianna huffington, google, kickstarter : Related Tags: business insider, arianna huffington, startup event, insider startup, startup, business

Pirated Music, From Napster to Kazaa and Now VPNs

May 2, 2012

I was at a conference some years back where one of the panels discussed how VoIP was blocked unsuccessfully in country after country. The point the speaker made was you can't stop IP. Users and developers are always one step ahead, masking their packets in ways (HTTP, etc) which gets through firewalls and other systems designed to thwart such communications.

I remember something similar happening when Airlines provided WiFi for the first time and blocked VoIP yet Andy Abramson found a way through.

So it should come as no surprise that music sharing which started with Napster, moved onto other services like Kazaa, Pirate Bay and has now evolved to use VPNs.

Now the challenge for record labels and others looking to determine who is sharing and what has grown substantially. The downside?

Posted in Broadband, Consumer Electronics, Skype, Technology

Tagged: kazaa, music, napster, pirate bay, vpn : Related Tags: sharing, music

Avengers Tech and Toys Assembled

May 2, 2012

Let’s face it, superheroes are pretty cool and aside from Batman and a few others, most of them are low tech.

Try for example to post a status update with a hammer.

But wait, when you merge low-tech superheroes and the desire for studios to offset the millions of movie investment dollars, you get the opportunity for lots of new movie-branded paraphernalia. And who better than Rich Steeves at TMCnet to go through the numerous toys and other products which go along with the movie?

Check out the video for more.

Posted in Consumer Electronics, Technology

Tagged: avengers, hasbro, rich steeves, tmc : Related Tags: movie

Why Samsung Must Have a Successful Media Player

May 2, 2012

If Samsung is the anti-Apple and with their success in the smartphone space you have to consider them a strong alternative, then they have to have a strategy which allows them to emulate Apple in order to be as successful. By this I mean, Apple has the amazing ability to sell a range of products which are highly similar and yet each is in its own category.

You want an inexpensive music player for the kids? The Apple answer, an iPod Touch.

Posted in 4G, Android, Apple, Technology, Unified Communications, Verizon, Wireless

Tagged: android, apple, google, ipad, iphone, ipod, media player, samsung, tv : Related Tags: apple answer, media player, samsung, apple, touch, product

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Communications and Technology Blog - Tehrani.com