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Wal-Mart and the Internet
I was meaning to write today about how Wal-Mart has changed the lives of people in
Today, I noticed the local photography shop was also on the way out and the owner told me the $4,700/month rent coupled with the trend towards e-mailing photos and Wal-Mart’s inexpensive photo processing made it impossible to compete.
This is not an opinion piece as I can’t say anything bad about Wal-Mart or online photo companies like ofoto (yes Kodak renamed it but I like this name better). I just think it is worth reiterating that you need to keep an eye on your business as models change.
As I got back to the office I went to the room where SBC is installing our T3 fiber connection and marveled at how we are keeping up with the technology as the world goes online. You really need to stay one to two steps ahead of tech if you want to survive in today’s fast-paced, ever-changing business environment.
Update: Here is an article fromt he USA Today about a new book on Wal-Mart that unlike me does have a strong negative opinion on the company.
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VocalTec News
A few industry insiders sent me this article about VocalTec. I am fascinated by how such a general business site can have such great VoIP coverage. I suppose the reason is that in
Getting back to VocalTec (news, quote), I hope they find a good way out of this mess. I have known many really good people from this company over the years and they always had great technology. As we know, the best technology or being first does not guarantee success.
Perhaps it isn’t too late for someone to sweep in, pick up the pieces and create a truly leading edge VoIP company that can generate profit.
As I look back at VocalTec, and reminisce about working with them over the past decade or so, I remember when I first got the press release about their Internet Telephony gateway and how I thought this was truly huge news. As I recall they were using NMS boards at the time to develop the gateway. This announcement was one of the reasons we decided to launch our VoIP magazine in the first place.
VocalTec had the best PR people in the business. I remember Jo Lee in particular. Here is a link that discusses the Deutche Telekom MOU and Jo Lee at the same time from the first-ever issue of Internet Telephony Magazine. When TMC was going to launch Internet Telephony Magazine in 1997 their PR team was all over us.
Back in 1996 or so TMC worked with N+I to help them set up an educational center on IP Telephony and we invited a number VoIP companies to participate. None of the other companies wanted to be next to the VocalTec team. They told us it was for personal reasons. On closer inspection, the word in the industry was the company was abrasive and arrogant.
It turns out that a few of the marketing people were responsible for this reputation and these “abrasive” people left VocalTec around 1999-2000, just before the company disappeared off the US map and was said to have made their living selling product in India. I would like to point out that not all the marketing people were arrogant and I reiterate there were some very good people working for the company. As with everything in life, a few bad apples can ruin it for everyone.
The company reemerged a few years back in the
But I think the shift in focus hurt the company. You can’t easily disappear and reappear in a market and be taken seriously.
These problems could have been overcome. The new marketing team in place was good but the company needed to invest more in marketing and PR a few years back when the VoIP market picked up.
With their name and reputation, they would have been a force to be reckoned with.
VocalTec didn’t make the move to really promote themselves when they should have and now they have to deal with a slew of negative articles and as a publicly traded company it is tough to hide the fact that you aren’t doing well.
The company still has amazing technology and the name alone should be worth a significant amount of money but there is a limited window of opportunity here. Will someone step up to the plate or will the company fade into obscurity like the Osborne Computer Company, the corporation that made the world’s first portable computer?
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PETA and Pam Anderson
Last night Comedy Central roasted Pamela Anderson and while the roast was funny at times it amounted to a bunch of virtually unknown comics making the same X rated jokes using different words. Probably the funniest line of the night was that Pam Anderson screwed more rock stars than Napster. Apparently the roast took place because Comedy Central agreed to donate a good deal of money to PETA and Pam is a huge supporter of this organization.
While I have donated money to organizations that save animals I always do so with a concern in the back of my mind that I should probably be donating to causes that help humans before animals.
This morning I was thinking about PETA and their campaign a while back that compared the slaughter of chickens to the holocaust. I can’t for the life of me understand how these people live with themselves. How can you compare the slaughter of humans to chickens?
When people start to put the health and welfare of animals above or on the same level as humans I believe it is time for alarm bells to go off. Yes, I love animals so I refuse to be labeled as an animal hater but people should always come before animals. With all the starving children in the world, the abused women and children and all the persecution, how can we spend so much time, energy and effort debating the ideal way to slaughter a chicken?
This press release came to my inbox today and got me thinking. It is worth reading although I have not confirmed any of it.
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The “Animal Rights” Movement’s Cruelty to Humans
By Alex Epstein
The “animal rights” movement has pulled off a deadly deception: promote a vicious, anti-human policy, while feigning benevolent, compassionate motives. The deception takes the form of opposing life-saving medical research--in the name of opposing cruelty to animals.
Consider PETA’s ongoing campaign against Covance, a company that conducts vital medical research on animals to fight diseases such as breast cancer, diabetes, and Alzheimer’s. PETA is staging an elaborate, heavily backed PR effort claiming that Covance engages in gratuitous and unnecessary torture of monkeys. The centerpiece of the campaign is a 5-minute video allegedly proving PETA’s accusations.
In fact, PETA’s effort is a classic smear campaign. Many of the “abuses” it documents--such as the use of restraints or delivering drugs through nasal tubes--are necessary to effectively administer drugs to animals. And the few examples of seemingly inappropriate behavior they find, such as the bizarre taunting of monkeys by a few Covance employees, are treated as pervasive industry practice--even though it took a PETA operative (operating illegally within Covance) over 10 months to cull a mere handful of such instances.
No sane person seeks to inflict needless pain on animals. Such practices, where they exist, should be condemned. But anyone concerned for human life must unequivocally endorse the rightness of using animals in medical research.
Animal research is absolutely necessary for the development of life-saving drugs, medical procedures, and biotech treatments. According to Nobel Laureate Joseph Murray, M.D.: “Animal experimentation has been essential to the development of all cardiac surgery, transplantation surgery, joint replacements, and all vaccinations.” Explains former American Medical Association president Daniel Johnson, M.D.: “Animal research--followed by human clinical study--is absolutely necessary to find the causes and cures for so many deadly threats, from AIDS to cancer.”
Millions of humans would suffer and die unnecessarily if animal testing were prohibited. But this is exactly what PETA and other “animal rights” organization seek. They believe that all animal research should be banned, including research conducted as humanely as possible (the declared and scrupulously practiced policy of most animal researchers).
The founder of PETA, Ingrid Newkirk, has declared unequivocally that animal research is “immoral even if it’s essential” and that “Even painless research is fascism, supremacism.” When questioned what her movement’s stance would be if animal tests produced a cure for AIDS, Newkirk responded: “We’d be against it.” Chris DeRose, founder of the group Last Chance for Animals, writes: “If the death of one rat cured all diseases, it wouldn’t make any difference to me.”
The goal of the “animal rights” movement is not to stop sadistic animal torturers; it is to sacrifice human well-being for the sake of animals. This goal is inherent in the very notion of “animal rights.” According to PETA, the basic principle of “animal rights” is: “animals are not ours to eat, wear, experiment on, or use for entertainment”--they “deserve consideration of their own best interests regardless of whether they are useful to humans.” This is in exact contradiction to the requirements of human survival and progress, which demand that we kill animals when they endanger us, eat them when we need food, run tests on them to fight disease. To ascribe rights to animals is to contradict the purpose and justification of rights: the protection of human interests. Rights are moral principles governing the interactions of rational, productive beings, who prosper not in a world of eat or be eaten, but a world of voluntary, mutually beneficial cooperation and trade.
The death and destruction that would result from any serious attempt to pretend that animals have rights would be catastrophic--for humans--a prospect the movement’s most consistent members embrace. Newkirk calls human beings “the biggest blight on the face of the earth.” Freeman Wicklund of Compassionate Action for Animals declares: “We need a drastic decrease in human population if we ever hope to create a just and equitable world for animals.”
The central issue in the “animal rights” debate is not whether it is acceptable to torture animals, but whether it is proper to use them for human benefit. The “animal rights” movement’s emphasis on the senseless torture of animals--in the rare cases where it actually exists--is a red herring. It is a way of promoting opposition to life-saving animal research companies, and sympathy for themselves--so as to further their evil agenda of subjugating human beings to animals. They must not be allowed to get away with such dishonesty. What is needed is a principled, intellectual defense of the absolute right of animal experimentation, against the deadly notion of “animal rights.” Anything less is cruelty to humans.
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Death of Bell Labs
Many of my college engineering textbooks came from people who worked at Bell Labs. It will be sad to see it go and perhaps tragic is a more appropriate word. David Isenberg has more on the topic.
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Bronx Zoo Again
What a great time I had at the Bronx Zoo last week. One of my favorite exhibits is the butterfly room. The last time I was there, I was blown away at how many turquoise and blue butterfly varieties were on display. They were so beautiful, I couldn’t wait to see them again.
Sadly, the butterfly room had nine birds infiltrate the premises. I didn’t ask how the birds got in but one of the nine remained in the room when I was there. Sadly, the majority of the spectacular looking butterflies were eaten.
Otherwise the zoo was a great experience for me and my family and it is growing by leaps and bounds and there is a massive construction project underway. I have been there twice for a total of 7-9 hours in total and still haven’t seen the elephants. I did finally get to see the lions and sea lions though. There was no time for the reptile room or the nocturnal exhibit whose name I can’t recall exactly.
I was speaking with Greg Galitzine this morning and he was telling me he doesn’t go to the zoo that often because he lives so close (or something along those lines). It was exactly the same for me and I am so happy I have gone twice this year and I will go back again, often.
There were three tigers in a large enclosed grassy area with a viewing area located by the water. The other tiger is on the other side of the enclosure.
I feel very bad for this monkey who is in the cage. They seem to need more room to move around.
The sea lions couldn't stop playing while we were there.
Without Pink Flamingos, what would a zoo experience be?
I have no clue what this bird is called
This is a fennec fox, the smallest member of the dog family and found in arid climates
This is a gopher snake I think
A turtoise
Are these possibly Monarch butterflies? I dont really know.
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Russell Shaw on VoIP Disconnects
In what seems to be the best case of cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face, VoIP providers will soon be shutting you off if you haven’t responded to their 911 acknowledgement. While I can’t really see this happening, Russell points out how difficult it will be to get people to respond the acknowledgement requests.
I just acknowledged that I understood this situation today. Interestingly AT&T CallVantage sent me a sticker to put on my phone that explains the 911 problems with VoIP.
One of the things the sticker says is “Voice service including E-911 service DOES NOT function during an electrical power or broadband outage.”
The thing is that I have 5 phones in my house connected to my VoIP line so I need four more stickers!
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Another Podcast Without Me
TMC’s Al Bredenberg did a great job hosting this communications and technology podcast and I felt like I was up to date on the whole telecom market after listening to this for a few minutes. Our special guest was David Beckemeyer of TelEvolution who was a great resource and also talked about his company’s product, PhoneGnome.
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Sesame Place
Sesame Place has to be considered a mini-Disneyworld and I don’t mean this as a negative. It is located in
Once there – we went last week, not on a weekend and got to park across the street -- just 2 minutes away, I was blown away at all the things you could do. It is primarily a water park and there are plenty of parades and characters for your kids to interact with.
The Sesame Palce Entrance
There are traditional non-water rides and games where you can win a prize and I did win an Elmo stuffed animal for my daughter Priscilla.
You can even take a picture with Elmo but Priscilla and all the kids just before Priscilla in line were scared of this 5 foot 10 inch orange giant. The boy just before Priscilla was probably around two years old and his father had to sit him in his lap as he cried to get a shot. I think the park would be better off with a 3-4 foot Elmo but other than that, what a blast!
I got a few shots of Priscilla with Elmo before she scurried away :-)
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Took Some Time Off Last Week
After the super-successful TMC VoIP Developer Conference last week I decided to take a few days off to be with the family. We decided not to go anywhere. The last time we took Priscilla on a plane trip it was not fun and now I’ve got two daughters as Nicole is only a few months old. Don’t get me wrong… It is great to get away with young kids, it is just the two days of packing before the trip and the days of travel and going through security with children are not fun. I think this ruins the spirit of the vacation.
Still, I miss the
So my wife and I decided it would be more trouble to take a flight somewhere with two kids than it would be to just stay home and do lots of things we normally don’t have time to do.
We went tot The Bronx Zoo and Sesame Place for example.
I relaxed so much I forgot to download the photos and got up at 5:45 this morning to get the job done. I hope to have time to post some soon.
I was online for an average of an hour a day last week and am still amazed at how much e-mail I received. Even with the myriad spam filters on that delete hundreds of messages a day from the known spammer black lists, I still find myself going through 500+ messages each day if not many more.
I recently read that Americans are taking less vacation days than ever and part of the reason is that they have to deal with even more work when they get back.
The article mentioned that employers are saving billions of dollars due to this trend. I wonder though if it isn’t better for employers and employees to get out of the office and take the mini-vacation days I took where you do the essential items on your list as needed but leave the superfluous stuff for when you get back. I think the risk of burning out and becoming less productive is very real and would think that this would waste more employer dollars than unclaimed vacation days.
I guess this means this week will be a superfluous one for me. Well whatever it is I am pretty darn relaxed so far and am glad to be back.
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