June 2005 Archives

Yes, it is possible Verizon fudged the numbers a bit but people do want competition. The most objective way to design the Verizon triple-play survey Al Bredenberg blogged about is to ask consumers:

Do you want lower process for TV
Do you want the ability to select from more features and options.

You’d probably get 75%+ affirmative answers for each question.

Basically we can assume that more competition means lower prices and more choice for consumers is a good thing.

Who doesn’t want more choice and lower prices?

I am going to be involved in a Webinar with NetCentrex on Monday and in our dry run I couldn’t help but chuckle with the term “fiber to the pillow” when discussing how to roll out triple-play services to university students and workers.

I am learning a great deal from this dry run which I am on now.

You should be on this webinar if you are interested in learning more about how real-world triple-play solutions. For example there is a case study on San Jose State allowing them to generate revenue and provide valuable services.

Here is the link: How Universities can Foster a Digital Campus Community with IP Triple Play which takes place this Tuesday, June 28, 2005.

I like the user interface of this program and have been using it for a while. It seems to do a great job for the most part but I still have an annoying spate of popups on my laptop. I don’t know what app is responsible for this and I have searched the registry and had MIS look at it to no avail. There is a new version of MS AntiSpyware out today and I hope that helps solve my problem.

I am not sure if I have written about this before or just thought it but the concept of Micros soft charging for antivirius or anitispyware tools is very amusing as the OS is supposed to protect us from many of these  problems in the first place. If we do get charged for these apps it will be like taxing us on the OS. Still the recurring revenue model is probably too good for the Redmond software giant to ignore and as an added plus, they can use these services to verify you have a registered version of Windows.

Now if they could only find a way to install new software versions without he need for a lengthy reboot.

How does the world of lobbyists work and how can these people influence politicians? The USA Today has a story on the topic which explains how non profit groups set up directly by lobbyists are able to sidestep the rules to show members of congress the world.

Here is an excerpt of the article:

In late April, the group paid for four members of Congress - three of them accompanied by spouses - to hop aboard a corporate jet, bound for the Napa Valley town of St. Helena. The weekend for the two Republicans and two Democrats included luxury accommodations at the Meadowood resort and a series of presentations on issues facing the wine industry. Meals on the three-day trip totaled $458 for each person. The total bill: $46,000.

Congressional rules allow lawmakers and their aides to take trips paid for by private interests, with a few caveats: The travel must relate to their official duties in Washington; it must not be primarily recreational; and it must not be paid for by lobbyists or representatives of a foreign interest. When lawmakers do travel, they must disclose the trip, its purpose and who paid for it.

Lobbyists also are required to report who pays them, how much they are paid and the issues they lobby on, under a 1995 disclosure law. But tax-exempt groups have minimal disclosure requirements. Paying for trips through a tax-exempt organization exploits a seam between tax law and the ethics rules, says Frances Hill of the University of Miami School of Law.

“The ethics rules invite you to set up conduits” for undisclosed money, she says. And the IRS, which oversees tax-exempt groups, “has been remarkably lacking in curiosity about cases like this.” The agency is too understaffed to thoroughly review all of the country's 1.5 million tax-exempt organizations, she adds.
Since 2000, members of Congress have taken more than 5,900 privately financed trips at a cost of $17.6 million, according to the non-partisan PoliticalMoneyLine, which analyzes data on money in politics. More than half of the spending has come from tax-exempt groups such as America's Trust.
Here is more:

It isn't hard to find examples of lobbyists connected to non-profit groups sponsoring congressional trips:

•The Islamic Free Market Institute Foundation has paid for at least 23 trips by lawmakers since 2000, at a cost of $235,839. Most of the travel was to an annual conference in the Persian Gulf country of Qatar. The group raised $456,777 in 2003, according to its latest federal tax return, but declined to disclose its financial backers. Among the organization's founders in 1998 was Grover Norquist, a Republican activist and anti-tax lobbyist. He no longer is on the institute's board, but the organization shares an office with Norquist's group, Americans for Tax Reform. The Islamic Institute also has worked with another lobbyist, Asim Ghafoor, who represented an association of Islamic banks.

•Two groups, the Korea-U.S. Exchange Council and the Malaysia Exchange Association, set up to promote trade with Asia in part by organizing trips for lawmakers, have ties to the Alexander Strategy Group, a lobbying firm founded by Rep. Tom DeLay's former chief of staff, Ed Buckham. The groups financed $224,000 in travel for a dozen House members since 2001.

The lobbying firm set up the Korea group in 2001 with the goal of making Korean businessman Seung Youn Kim, chairman of one of Korea's largest conglomerates, the Hanwha Group, “the leading business statesman in U.S.-Korean relations,” according to a strategy memo. But because the group registered as an agent of a foreign interest, it could not legally sponsor congressional travel.

The Malaysia organization, which did not register as a foreign agent, sent three House members - Roger Wicker, R-Miss., Earl Pomeroy, D-N.D. and John Doolittle, R-Calif. - to Kuala Lumpur in February “to strengthen the bilateral relationship between the U.S. and Malaysia,” according to Pomeroy's trip disclosure.

•The International Management and Development Institute has paid $534,000 during the past five years for 60 congressional trips, most of them to Germany and other Western European destinations. The institute is run by Don Bonker, a former Democratic House member from Washington state and now a lobbyist for APCO Worldwide.

Nausea keeps me from providing further insight into this topic so I invite you to form your own opinions and post your comments below.

Michael Powell will be addressing the audience at ITEXPO and I am excited to hear what he has to say. I am sure he has much more latitude now that he is no longer a sitting chairman of the FCC. I also wonder how he feels about the strict 120 day deadline given to VoIP providers after he left. I get the feeling that if he was chairman they would given our industry have six months or more to fully comply. Indeed when he speaks we will be right around the FCC deadline making it an interesting time to hear his unique viewpoints on VoIP.

There are so many positive things that happened to technology under the watch of the FCC under Michael Powell such as the launch of WiFi that you have to think he will be remembered favorably by those in technology for many years to come.

WiFi in my opinion let the genie out of the bottle in terms of showing that giving an unlicensed spectrum out to the public can immensely change the competitive landscape of the entire information technology industry.

I hope to see you at Internet Telephony Conference & Expo this October 24-24 in Los Angeles, CA.

This is the first I have heard about open source collaboration software. This is an area ripe for such a solution as many of the competitive options are so expensive. Silk could become a killer app like Asterisk.


New open-source collaboration software, Silk, aims to increase productivity and decrease operational costs across organizations

By using Silk companies can effectively organize large quantities of information through one central and open platform delivering the "context for collaboration"

Here is an LA Times story on nuclear energy and how the industry is poised to make a comeback. With all this talk of the imminent construction of new plants, I find it surprising that analysts and experts say the first new plants will take ten years or more to build. By then, who knows where oil prices will be.

Sure, you here people like Rush Limbaugh say that oil is cheaper by the gallon than milk, but Rush, kids don’t drink milk anymore but cars have become SUVs. The price of oil seems to be more volatile by the year. In a decade it could cost more for a gallon of gas than it dose for a gram of uranium.

My take? Keep working on clean burning coal, liquefied coal, wind, solar and hydro electric options. We will likely need every option at our disposal to keep the world powered. I see the need for electronics and computers and gadgets growing exponentially. Video recorders, VoIP phones, wireless CE devices that stream MP3s and TV and videos. There are countless ideas that we haven’t thought of us well that will just suck more and more juice out of today’s electric companies. Nuclear is an option that if deployed securely, can work well to help supply part of the world’s energy needs.

The drawback is where do we put all the nuclear waste. I am thinking the rugged mountainous region between Afghanistan and Pakistan as a start.

Directly anyway. It seems according to the New York Times that Eric Schmidt the CEO of Google denied the implications that their new service will compete with EBay’s online payment division in PayPal.

PayPal has thrived in the last half-decade, growing from 24 test users in 1999 to 72 million accountholders through March. Looking to profit from the fees that PayPal collects from completing online transactions, San Jose-based eBay bought the service for $1.3 billion in 2002.

My take? Google will start using their electronic payment service  for things like Froogle and their advertising programs AdSense and AdWords. In time it will evolve to become PayPal.

A more radical concept is that credit cards from Google and PayPal will be commonplace in 5-10 years.

Here is the update on the VoIP service quality I promised and a webinar we are going to be hosting on the topic. Details:

TMCnet will be hosting an exclusive webinar with Keynote Systems' Dharmesh Thakker on July 12 to discuss the findings of the VoIP QoS study. To gain insight into how end-users perceive VoIP service providers and network carriers, register for the free webinar by clicking here.

According to DM News, Microsoft’s Hotmail users will start using Sender ID today and if you don’t comply with this rule, your e-mail will go into the customer’s junk folder. Obviously this is something worth checking out if you aren’t compliant.

Here is an AP story on Sender ID.

Time Warner Cable is an interesting company in that they are decentralized to some degree in their management and autonomous regional groups decide how to manage their divisions. Having said that, the Charlotte, NC Division of the company has selected Concerto Software’s EnsemblePro for its inbound and outbound contact center implementations. They will utilize the software for outbound sales and collections.

As an enhancement to Concerto EnsemblePro, Time Warner Cable is also implementing, LYRICall , a scripting design tool that helps agents navigate through calls. LYRICall gives Time Warner agents real-time access to multiple data sources through a single view, enabling them to easily access the information they need to conduct successful customer interactions. The LYRICall Script Flow Tool enables administrators to build and deploy scripts to guide agents through calls and call flows, allowing agents to more quickly handle calls and provide a higher-quality experience for Time Warner's customers.

Here is an excerpt from a press release. My favorite part of this excerpt is where Time Warner tells us they want to have customers repeat their information less often. Thankfully a large company such as Time Warner Telecom is seeing the light and I hope that their embracing of better CRM practices rubs off on other companies in the country – and world forthat matter.


"Our focus at Time Warner Cable is to ensure that our customers are satisfied and that their cable needs are being met," said Richard Brashear, director of TeleSales for Time Warner Cable/Charlotte Division. "With Concerto EnsemblePro, we will have more functionality in the telemarketing and collections, including a desktop browser, blended outbound and inbound capabilities, as well as call recording and agent audio options. All of this allows us to achieve quicker collections, increased sales and provide superior customer service."
Time Warner Cable collections agents will use the blended call and routing functionality of Concerto EnsemblePro to handle inbound calls. In addition, the telesales group will use the predictive dialer functionality to add incremental business from existing customers, while the collections department will use Concerto EnsemblePro to initiate calls reminding customers when payments are late.

Concerto EnsemblePro unites inbound, outbound and blended multi-channel contact (voice, email, web and fax), while delivering robust queuing, routing, reporting and agent empowerment capabilities in a single solution. Built from the ground up to scale from 10 to thousand's of seats, Concerto EnsemblePro helps increase agent productivity through automated dialing and real-time access to customer information, while offering a higher level of service by providing consistent messaging through agent scripting and improves the customer experience by not asking them to constantly repeat information.

You can’t argue the fact that VoIP is the worst thing for balancing the federal and state budgets since the dotcom bust. A few years ago, you just couldn’t have imagined how much revenue is being lost on long distance to Vonage, Skype and a host of other companies eager to help consumers reduce their phone bills., But what’s great for consumers is obviously terrible for a government that feeds off the taxes we pay on local and long distance calling. Add to that the fees for the Universal Service Fund and you have a recipe for upset politicians ands federal bean counters that keep coming up a few beans short. An excellent USA Today Article details the potential crisis.

Many of life's questions can be realized when flying cross-country. For example, why when you fly over Nevada are there lots of bodies of water but nothing green in sight? Even in Africa for example, water creates life.

Another mystery, where are all the pillows on flights? I estimate millions of them have disappeared from domestic airlines in the last few years. What happened to them? Can we find all the pillows we can use on a variety of international flights now? Did they have tremendous resale value? Did they show up on eBay? Were the pillows so heavy in the first place? Sometimes I am really surprised that they didn’t just remove the chairs.

Finally, we are we told that wireless devices will interfere with the plane's normal operation and that we need to turn off such wireless products during flight. Recently though the airlines have started to tell us that they will soon have in-flight WiFi. If you pay for wireless service, you can use it. Weird, huh?

What about airline service? I flew Song to LA and Delta back. I appreciated the flexibility in switching airlines as they are owned by the same parent but I wonder why Song is so awesome and Delta so crappy. Same company, same management, different culture and service levels. It is tough to see how the low-cost carrier can be so much better than the expensive parent.

If you have flown Song you know they have near-gourmet food such as wasabi-peas and other really interesting food items. Delta – just a basic snack. Sure Song charges you but why can’t Song do the same?

When I think of the airlines and Delta in particular, I see similarities to LECs that are now investing in fiber to compete with cable and VoIP service providers. What's happening in both markets is too similar to ignore.

If the airlines are any guide, LECs are in trouble. They are too fat to compete with new entrants. The only way for them to compete is to use the lobbying pull they have and gobble up the only competitor who knows how to lobby effectively against them -- AT&T.

As Matt Drudge would say: Developing.

I know this has nothing to do with tech but I think it is pretty funny that reporters decided to squirt water in the face of Tom Cruise. In this article they say you don’t squirt water in Tom Cruise’s face and while I agree you shouldn’t do this, there is just something about his behavior lately that makes this whole incident something I can’t stop laughing at. If I every start to profess my love so frequently and forcefully and publicly in the future, I will understand if someone tries to douse me back to reality as well.

On or around July 1, 2005 please check this blog at tehrani.com and TMCnet for the results of the latest study on VoIP quality. Details forthcoming.