April 2005 Archives

No I am not kidding. I just heard from a reliable source that a company called Inveneo is working with charities in Uganda to allow for pedal-powered bikes that allow the rider to communicate via VoIP with others. The next time you hear heavy breathing when you pick up the phone – don’t hang up… It could just be a friend or relative from Africa phoning to ask about the weather.

Here is a diagram of how it all works:

An interesting article from Forbes.com details a new sort of offshoring:

Why send software work to India when you can have it done on a cruise ship 3.1 miles off California?

Whether you think Eliot Spitzer is doing a great job or you think he is overdoing it by suing what seems like a record number of companies... You have to put your hands together for his latest suit where he accuses Intermix Media of redirecting users to a number of sites owned by the company. Here is an excerpt from Yahoo News which has a really new and interesting interface BTW:

"Spyware and adware are more than an annoyance," Spitzer said. "These fraudulent programs foul machines, undermine productivity and in many cases frustrate consumers' efforts to remove them from their computers. These issues can serve to be a hindrance to the growth of e-commerce."

Christopher Lipp, senior vice president and general counsel for Intermix, denied promoting or condoning spyware, saying its toolbars and redirect applications do not collect personal information on computer users.

He added that "many of the practices being challenged were instituted under prior leadership, and Intermix has been voluntarily and proactively improving these applications and related consumer disclosure and functionality for some time."

According to Spitzer, Intermix owns and operates such Web sites as mycoolscreen.com, cursorzone.com and flowgo.com, which advertised screensavers, games and other software available for download. Though those programs are free, they often carry other software for delivering ads and can interfere with normal computer use, he said.

One of the company's ad-delivery programs, "KeenValue," delivered pop-up ads while another program, "IncrediFind," redirected Web addresses to Intermix's own search engine, Spitzer said.

The ad software sometimes comes without notice, or if a user was asked permission, it was often through a vague reference in a lengthy licensing agreement that could be misleading or inaccurate, investigators said.

The programs sometimes omitted "un-install" applications and couldn't be removed by most computers' add/remove function, Spitzer said.

Spitzer's civil suit accuses Intermix of violating state General Business Law provisions against false advertising and deceptive business practices. He also accuses them of trespass under New York common law.

Spitzer, after taking on Wall Street and the insurance industry, is taking a harder look at Internet companies he believes are stunting the growth of e-commerce.

"We are looking across the industry at these practices because it really does go to the core of e-commerce," said Kenneth Dreifach, chief of Spitzer's Internet Bureau, "Increasingly, people don't feel in control."

The advertisers, which include Fortune 500 companies, aren't targeted.

Dreifach said negotiations with the company didn't result in a settlement, and more cases are possible.

"One of Internet users' biggest frustrations today is unwanted software that sneaks onto computers without their owner's consent and cannot be uninstalled," Ari Schwartz, the Associate Director Center for Democracy and Technology, "The practices alleged in this case are widespread on the Internet."

I am not a financial expert but I have a blog and write for a living so that means I can basically sound off on anything that annoys me, will interest you or just makes me feel better to get out of my system. I had to share the following with you. I received two news alerts from MarketWatch. The first one said that Exxon Mobil profit jumps 44% (I recall last year’s profit growth being similar) and now the GDP is growing slower than at any time in the past 2-years.

What does this tell us – again, I am not a finance major – tech, I know, but macroeconomics I don’t -- It tells us we are being screwed by Exxon Mobil.

Am I too naive? Perhaps I am not a “big picture” person. The whole situation seems ridiculous. The economy of the world is linked to this precious commodity and in the last few years the price of oil has mirrored Al Jazerra’s ratings more than anything else. This is not a supply and demand economy anymore it has become “screw the consumer” instead.

Perhaps I am wrong.

I remember the world telling the US we were going into Iraq for Oil. I always assumed this meant the world thought the US would be taking Iraq’s oil for free. Apparently this isnt the case. Well at least the American consumer isnt taking the oil. Oil companies? Perhaps.

The Democrats have really lost their way as of late and the Republicans seem to really be invulnerable. If there is a weakness the Republicans have now, it is the price of oil. A Democrat that is strong on energy and can map out a way for us to reduce oil prices and find alternatives to petroleum should be a shoe-in for 2008. A politician from Texas, regardless of affiliation just can’t do what is needed to lower energy prices.

The concern I have now is that the oil companies have so much money they will be lining the pockets of politicians on both sides of the aisle.

The only savior we can hope for is some hungry start-up in Silicon Valley that comes up with a way to solve our energy problems and doesn’t sell out to big oil.

It was only a matter of time before cell phone companies came out with devices comparable to iPods in functionality. Today is that day as Nokia announced its N91, a phone with a 4-GB hard drive. Although the device will be priced between $500-$900 it gives you a phone and a music player in a form-factor about the size of a an iPod Mini.

What remains to be seen is which carriers will want such a device. Carriers are looking for ways to generate revenue from music and such a player could conceivable allow users to download songs without making use of wireless networks. The holy grail for cellular companies is to get people to pay to download music, radio and TV. A device like the N91 may sidestep what these companies see as a lucrative business model.

Will The Nokia N91 Become an iPod Killer?

Moreover, Apple iTunes service is slick and the songs from the service won’t work on the Nokia device. Still, there are an abundance of ways people can download music these days so the lack of iTunes support may not hamper the Nokia phone which the company hopes to sell 40 million of in the first year. Analysts think at the price of $500 or 2.5 times what an iPOD Mini costs, this target is over-ambitious.

In the end there is a coolness factor to the iPod which doesn’t exist with Nokia as of yet. Even the device name, N91, lacks coolness. Steve Jobs deserves a great deal of credit for naming products, amazing design and marketing. Will people want to pay hundreds more for a music player that has a phone and tell people it is called N91? I think the name limits the appeal but if enough service providers get behind this new device it could really revolutionize the cellular market.

There seems to be a criminal element in everything these days. Someone invents e-mail, spammers and virus writers hijack it. Someone invents VoIP, spammers are there to send us SPIT (spam over internet protocol). Now –say it isnt so, it hurts to write – they are coming after, are you ready? Our iPods! Seriously, they are. The subway thieves in Manhattan aren’t going after purses and gold chains, snatching the latest iPod loaded with songs is like stealing the deed to Trump Tower.

Criminals are now high-tech. Forget muggings, its all about the iPods baby. What’s next? If Willie Sutton is a prognosticator worth his salt in casket weight, can we foresee a day when the Apple store in the mall gets knocked off?

Is Steve Jobs really minting money these days? Seems like he is. According to an article in the New York Times most of the thieves and the victims are students. Cell phones by the way are up on the list as well. 50 iPods and 165 cell phones stolen so far this year, up from zero and 82, respectively, last year.

So before you wear your iPod on your sleeve as it were, consider the fact that you too can become a statistic on the New York subway. To think violence on the subway was once a concern. Nowadays, people will tell you, “Sure the subway is safe just leave your music at home with your rings and jewelry.”

Alexa.com is a great site to use to monitor how much traffic sites get. I noticed recently that Teltel, a company I have written about before in an entry titled: Teltel A Skype Killer? had a huge drop in web traffic from a 3-month average of around 10,000 to a one-day average of 31,381. I didn’t have a chance to ask the company the reason and to be honest it could even be a problem with Alexa causing this drop. Who knows? What I did do was to compare their traffic to Vonage, Skype and Packet8.

One thing I should mention is that service providers who direct callers to their site when taking or making calls will have higher Alexa rankings as they get more traffic. Here is the link to Alexa so you can try it for yourself.

Here are the rankings (Lower numbers mean they are closest to the top site in the world).

Here is the actual growth chart below:

According to the Gold Systems Webinar I am on now, AAA on Minnesota has increased customer satisfaction using speech technology from Gold Systems. They have reduced agent turnover as a result of using speech and the agents are now not as threatened as they once were. The agents are happy that the mundane calls are being handled by automation. Agents get to deal with calls that have to do with personal service. One point that Jim Blenis of AAA mentioned is that local dialects such as the “You Betchas,” have to be taken into account before implementation.

Blenis was followed up by Terry Gold of Gold Systems who mentioned that AAA did everything right. Gold said he wish he could change how people get out of a speech call if needed. We know how to do this with touch tone today. People get angry when you force them to stay in the system. AAA has made the app so nice that people want to stay in the system.

Gold also made a point of saying you should make sure the persona of your automated system should be the kind of person customers would expect to be working in your company. He also made a point of saying don’t bounce your customers around. Gold made sure to stress that if customers do have a problem with automation, please make sure they get to a live agent and don’t insult them if they can’t deal with technology.

A fairly big day for VoIP URLs. In case you are interested in who took blogvoip.com (I am); They are hiding behind a hosting company. Voipwhitepages.com is taken by John Zelenka from NY and Voipcallaccounting is also taken from someone in NY -- in this case a company named MBG.

86voip.net
apexvoip.com
blogvoip.com
blogvoip.net
cheapvoip.us
cheapvoipcall.com
cheapvoipservice.com
davoipster.com
gts-voip.com
lambanvoipc.com
multichannelvoip.com
voip-discount.biz
voip-discount.info
voip-discount.net
voip-discount.org
voip-konferenz.org
voip-saves.com
voipay.biz
voipay.org
voipcallaccounting.com
voipephone.com
voipnetworks.biz
voipnewsblog.com
voipnewsblog.net
voiprebate.com
voiprebates.com
voiptelinc.com
africavoip.net
amazonvoip.com
anywherevoip.net
aolvoip.net
ccvoip.com
cellfonevoip.com
cellphonevoip.com
cellularvoip.com
cingularvoip.com
comcastvoip.com
connectvoip.com
coxvoip.com
dishvoip.com
echostarvoip.com
echovoip.com
flashvoip.net
indiavoip.net
nextelvoip.com
nokiavoip.com
pacificvoip.us
qwestvoip.net
roadrunnervoip.com
rrvoip.com
satellitevoip.net
satvoip.net
solucionesvoip.com
solucionesvoip.net
sprintvoip.net
verizonvoip.net
voip-la.com
voipaz.com
voipeverywhere.com
voipgroup.net
voipphonesystems.net
voipspecial.com
voipwhitepages.com
voipwhitepages.net
voipwp.com
voipyellowpages.net
voipyp.net
wirelessvoip.net

TV is so addictive that this report about it being a mobile killer app is probably dead right. Between sports, 24 and Apprentice Season 11, we won’t be watching less TV any time soon. Mobile TV makes infinite sense and the question is who will benefit from the growth of the market. ABI Research has a new report on this market and here are some of the things it covers:

• What is the general outlook for TV in the cellphone for the next five years?
• What were the key enablers that allowed TV to come into the handset?
• Why do we need to move from analog to digital TV?
• What are some of the current industry objections to cellular TV, and is there any validity to these objections?
• What kinds of content will we see in the mobile handset?
• What are operators’ attitudes to mobile TV -- what are their business models and strategy?
• What are the differences between network streaming and broadcast methods of transferring TV content?
• What are the differences between DVB-H, MediaFLO, T-DMB, and ISDB-T?
• What ICs and components are required to enable TV in the handset?
• What are the form-factor, power consumption, and price of the RF tuner and the baseband?
• What software is required to enable mobile TV?
• What penetration rates and TAMs do we expect for mobile TV in handsets for the next five years?

OK so they aren’t really burning books but they are pulling all Wiley & Sons books off the shelf because of the latest book from the company named “iCon Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business,” which is an unauthorized biography of Steve Jobs. Excerpt from WSJ:

Apple, of Cupertino, Calif., removed the books last week from all 104 of its stores after failing in a monthlong attempt to persuade John Wiley & Sons not to release "iCon Steve Jobs: The Greatest Second Act in the History of Business," which is to go on sale within the next six weeks, the publisher said.

The book-spurning is only the latest attempt by Apple executives to crack down on writers who publish or distribute unauthorized or secret information about the computer maker.

It's a strategy that experts in brand management say is likely to backfire, only adding to the notoriety of Apple's critics and encouraging sales in countless other bookstores.
"Pulling books off the shelf is a little draconian," said Rob Frankel, a brand consultant. "It reeks of repression."

The book's author, Jeffrey Young, says Mr. Jobs has nothing to fear from "iCon." It's a chronicle of Mr. Jobs's rise as an innovator and entrepreneur and includes details about his personal life such as his divorce and fight with cancer, he said.

"I thought the book was pretty positive and laudatory," Mr. Young said. "It covers his personal life and there is something about his illness. I wouldn't call any of it outrageous. I'm totally bewildered."

Mr. Young said Wiley & Sons sent a manuscript to Apple two weeks ago and the company responded by demanding that the publisher halt the release. Wiley & Sons decided instead to stand behind its author. Apple spokesman Steve Dowling said company executives were declining to comment.

NPR has a nice story on public WiFi. What are the pros and cons to having governments become service providers? On the one hand I understand why service providers would be upset but then again, we need superior Internet access in this country to compete as a nation. Take a listen and make your own conclusion.

Of course it should be obvious to anyone that VoIP is wreaking havoc on service providers. This technology had two false starts but is so entrenched now that service providers are rethinking how they will exist in the future. There is safety in numbers it seems and this is why we are seeing carriers herd together in smaller groups that eventually merge together.

But in the end consumers don’t benefit when service providers get too strong. This is exactly what Qwest is telling the FCC as they petition the government body to block the proposed merger of SBC and AT&T.

SBC has many reasons to initiate this acquisition not the least of which is reducing a powerful lobbying opponent from the industry. AT&T is one of the companies that fought tirelessly against the RBOC monopoly in the interest of consumers. AT&T did this because it was smart business for the NJ based telephone giant and in this case their interests were the same as Joe six-pack.

Here is part of the Qwest release on the matter:

"To protect the public, it is essential that if the merger application is not denied outright, then the FCC must condition its approval, at a minimum, on significant divestitures of facilities and other related overlapping operations in SBC's 13-state operating territory. In addition, because the proposed merged company will benefit from the elimination of AT&T as a competitor -- and benefit from the elimination of other competitors' access to AT&T's wholesale services and access facilities -- other significant conditions must be imposed in order to attempt to level the playing field."

On the heels of the Qwest release, an opposing announcement arrived from the Communications Workers of America, available at:

SBC-AT&T Merger Merits Quick Approval, CWA Tells FCC

According to CWA, SBC-AT&T merger will (with my comments in red):

Create a "premier U.S. communications company," with the ability to "expand the delivery of advanced technologies, services and features to all classes of customers."

"Create a company with the resources and end-to-end network essential in the deployment of advanced next-generation Internet-Protocol enabled networks and services."

They don’t need to merge to do this.

Assure that "national security will be safeguarded, by ensuring that AT&T, on which the government heavily depends for national security and other needs, will be a strong American company."

Interesting perspective but the government can just block foreign purchasers of AT&T and SBC could just as easily be acquired by a foreign corporation, right?

"Enhance, not reduce, competition by combining the different strengths of the two merger partners -- AT&T's global network and research innovation and SBC's financial strength and local exchange, broadband and wireless capabilities."

I am at a loss to understand how a merger enhances competition. AT&T’s CallVantage was a strong competitor to SBC’s phone service and the service had the added benefit of having the AT&T name behind it. The service is now apparently shelved – well not really shelved but I have yet to hear CallVantage being mentioned prominently since the merger was announced.

"Provide employees at both companies with the opportunity to share in the growth of the merged entity rather than the job loss that has been the fate of all too many AT&T employees in recent years."

I know a number of people who have their resumes ready at AT&T now that this merger was announced. Again, isnt it obvious that mergers create job loss and reduce competition?

I was listening to the radio this morning and a local

Fellow blogger and TMC team member Greg Galitzine broke the news on Cisco’s acquisition of Sipura. The founders of Sipura also founded Komodo Technology who made the infamous Komodofone which became the Cisco ATA 186. Cisco seems to love what these guys produce and Sipura is a good acquisition for Cisco.