February 2006 Archives

Be on the lookout for General Bandwidth to change their name. They are now six years old, will become GenBand and focus on the SIP and IMS markets. For years, Internet Telephony’s Greg Galitzine has already been using GenBand in his notes as shorthand for the company. I bet he didn’t know that the company would take his notes so seriously

Here is a real cool blog entry from fellow blogger Dan Rua, Managing Partner of Inflexion Partners on the future of audio searching. Audio data is voluminous and call center recordings alone present an invaluable resource – a virtual treasure-trove of business intelligence. Within a few years it would be corporate malpractice (thanks to Brooke Greenwald for alerting me to this term – not sure if she coined it) to not have access to all call center conversations when querying the internal database.

Information in text form is growing exponentially and you can expect voice conversations to grow even faster. Will corporations of the future archive and sift through all telephone conversations in a company? Perhaps. I can’t imaging how a business could ignore such valuable data.

Remote support is becoming a bigger part of contact centers and the support process in general. In more and more instances companies are using remote support tools to enable rapid resolution to problems.

In technical fields especially remote support solutions allow support representatives to take control of client computers in order to generate meaningful solutions to customer problems.

This Wednesday, TMC is proud to be working with Citrix on a webinar that should help you learn how you can use the latest remote support solutions to boost customer satisfaction.

Here is an e-mail that we recently sent out announcing this webinar to he world. I hope to see you there.

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As an industry professional, we wanted to let you know that a Complimentary Webinar will be occurring this Wednesday, March 1st at 11:00am PT (2:00pm EST). Please feel free to register for the event by the link given below.

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"Empowering Your People with the Remote-Support Competitive Edge"

Date: March 1st
Time: 11:00am PT (2:00pm EST)
Register here: http://www.tmcnet.com/webinar/citrix

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How can service and support professionals cut costs while significantly improving time to resolution and customer satisfaction? Today there is a better way to provide secure, cost-effective remote support while giving your organization a competitive edge: Citrix® GoToAssist.

Join us on March 1st to explore the advantages of implementing industry-leading remote support and learn how companies from a variety of industries are using GoToAssist to achieve lower operating costs, higher service levels and increased customer satisfaction.
During this informative 30-minute Webinar, you will:

Find out why remote-support technology is ranked #1 by support professionals for effectively and efficiently resolving support incidents

Discover how to take the next step in steering your organization towards world-class remote support

See why GoToAssist was selected as the winner of the prestigious CRM Excellence Award for two years running


Sponsored By: Citrix, TMCnet, and Customer Inter@ction Solutions Magazine Register here: http://www.tmcnet.com/webinar/citrix

For years I have written about how service providers have been charging the public for a non-service. What I mean is charging for the unlisted or non-published service. I think I have been writing about the topic for eight years or so but rather than find my first writing on the topic, I was satisfied locating a reference to the subject in my Internet Telephony Magazine Publisher's Outlook of August 2002.

In my earlier writings I complained about the service and frankly I was never fond of paying to have a non-published number. Later in life I realized that if people will pay $40 a month to keep their number unlisted, they might pay a service provider for anything.

Here is an excerpt from the above article making this point:

ONE WAY OUT

Domestic service providers are in a different situation. The fact is that at this point, selling services customers want is the only way out of this mess. And while many if not most people agree, there are the usual cynics who love to rain on the nearest parade. I concede to them only that building a new business model based on services in the middle of a devastated economy is tough to pull off.

And yet, we are all accustomed to paying for enhanced services such as Caller ID, call waiting, and even the mysterious-sounding non-published service, which essentially grants you an unlisted number a service, which can cost a few dollars a month. For example, in Connecticut, I pay $3.35 each month for this service over $40 per year!
Now, wouldn't you agree that if phone companies can successfully charge for a non-service, people will pay for anything?

BOILING IT DOWN

So, once again it boils down to services. There are a great many corporate desires that need to be met more inexpensively and more easily than they are today. Companies will pay if you give them something they need!

Wi-Fi & Bluetooth Telephony

For example, many of us who spend lots of time in meetings don't want to miss phone calls, but there is no universally adopted, automated, and easy way to assure your phone calls can follow you around your office. Perhaps service providers should help corporations install Wi-Fi telephony networks (802.11A or B with managed QoS). This service should be delivered after the caller comes into a central auto attendant so that corporate greetings can be leveraged. Furthermore, selling software as a service to manage Wi-Fi telephony is a great idea.

Wi-Fi networks and even Bluetooth networks that are powered by Bluetooth access points are beginning to emerge in organizations. Coupling a PDA as a GUI with a Bluetooth or Wi-Fi phone or headset all but replaces the need for a PBX with extensions. Perhaps tying systems like this into IP Centrex will yield some revenues for those service providers intelligent enough to pull it off. To get a taste of what companies are already doing in this space, check out the online article in our sister publication, Planet PDA.

SIP

The merger of SIP devices and wireless endpoints will undoubtedly open up tremendous opportunities as well. SIP makes IP telephony easier to use than traditional telephony, and in this age of widespread instant messaging adoption, allowing endpoints that chat to offload to voice is a big plus. Again, people will pay for this sort of service if sold properly.

What got me thinking about this topic is an e-mail I received from one of the VoIP service providers I use telling me that my number will soon be listed in Directory Assistance.

Here is an excerpt from the letter:

Dear Customer:

Great news! We are pleased to announce that you now have a choice to list your telephone number or, keep it unlisted or unpublished as it is today. The new Directory Listing options are as follows:

Listed - One listing per telephone number will be included in printed directories and available through Directory Assistance.

Non-Listed* - Ensures that your telephone number is not listed in printed directories. It will, however, be available through Directory Assistance.

Non-Published* - Ensures that your phone number is neither listed in printed directories nor available through Directory Assistance. This is what you have today.

Beginning in late March, your Name, Phone Number, and Address will automatically be available through Directory Assistance service and in printed directories unless you would like to change this by registering your telephone number as Non-Listed or Non-Published.

At the bottom of the letter was this:

*Charges may apply in the future for Non-Listed and Non-Published options. If you select one of these options, we will notify you prior to institution of charges pursuant to the terms and conditions of your Subscriber Agreement.

The irony is that one of the reasons I love my VoIP service is that it saves me from having a non-published number fee. I have saved over a hundred dollars over the years because VoIP numbers aren't listed. Now it seems that VoIP service providers are looking to get customers to ante up for such services as well.

Of course it isn't all VoIP providers who are doing this and I am sure there are people who want to be listed in Directory Assistance. I guess you just can't make everyone happy all the time. With this in mind, starting such a letter with "Great news!" is obviously not well received by all customers.

My take on all this is that VoIP providers are getting smarter and are looking for ways to make money from adding services. I have been telling them to do this for years. They are listening.

Of course directory assistance is not really a service but perhaps it is low hanging fruit and we will see more real services in the future.

In my opinion all service providers will have no choice but to start providing valuable services soon just to stay competitive. The first step is to make money the easy way and as time goes on we will see more services that customers don't feel like they have to pay for but want to pay for.

When these services start to roll out, it really will be "Great news!"

Here is a new service from TMCnet – News Snapshots™ that will allow you to have a single page to go to keep track of important companies and topics in communications and technology. Bill Gates even gets a page. A snapshot of Nortel for example allows you to keep track of news and articles about the company as well as a stock chart.

The service is in beta and we hope that it helps you keep track of the companies and topics you have interest in. Let us know if you have suggestions for improvement.

I was a bit harsh when I said it was game over for the LECs in a recent blog entry about content providers providing a Tivo-like service that prerecords a number of programs so as to simulate live TV. This could be done to avoid having to pay LECs for high-speed broadband access to their customers. The point is that if the LECs are going to spend all their time protecting their networks they will lose. It is that simple. What do I mean? Well if you spend your R&D, time, energy and effort exclusively in figuring out how to extract money from Google and other content providers you will lose the war.

Where is the innovation? The new services? The rolling out of new products before your competition has shown the demand is there?

I got to thinking about this after I made the above post and I was reminded again to blog about it when fellow blogger Ted Wallingford had this to say about my comments:

Rich makes another very great point about how store-and-forward caching technology could blow a hole in the "two tier Internet is needed for IPTV" argument. Not sure if it's really game over for the LECs on the neutrality debate, as Rich says, but as usual, the TMC kingpin makes a hell[uv]a point.

I am not sure if "kingpin" is positive or negative. It makes me think of the movie Daredevil which would make it negative. Then again I understand no one saw this movie (I liked it by the way) so I'll take it as a compliment.

Back to the point, Ted reminds me that I may have gone overboard.

In any business you may win a battle or two by focusing on exclusively stopping the competition but in the long run you won't be around unless you focus on the needs of the customer. On the Internet the best ideas win. It is the ultimate open and free market. If you are giving customers access to the Internet and try to block what users are doing, they will likely find ways around it.

In a perfect world the government would also be on the side of the consumer and protect us from such practices but I must admit that the LECs should be allowed to make money from their fiber roll outs. Then again they are free to charge customers for the access and should perhaps stop targeting content providers.

Of course this is just one man's opinion and I would like to introduce you to a site called PPLive before I go. I blogged about it a while back and subsequently forgot about it. The company is based in China and sells peer to peer TV software.

I went to the English version of the site and the translation is terrible and the links don't work. What I can tell you is that the traffic to this site is massive and I estimate it at around 15 million page views a month or more. The basis for this reasoning is their Alexa rank at 1,613 (out of all sites on the Internet) which is similar to TMCnet at 1,789. Last month TMCnet had just under 14 million page views.

Using such technology you can bypass the LECs two-tiered Internet. All that is left now is for LECs to outlaw p2p technology on their networks. P2p is already against the terms of service of Verizon Wireless Broadband Access service. I suppose this same rule could be applied to cable and DSL lines.

Another challenge for users is that cables companies can according to their terms of service shut your service off or restrict the bandwidth severely if you upload too much. They of course are the judge of what constitutes too much traffic.

Any way you look at it, LECs and cable companies are doing their best to protect their services but need to focus more on innovation. If they don't innovate, others will. In the short term restricting innovation may be successful but there are too many smart people in the world to hold back the advancement of communications on the Internet.

You can learn a great deal about the VoIP and broader communications and technology markets if you just listen (or in this case read) carefully. For example this week saw the launch of a new VoIP service by the name of TalkDaddy. The company differentiates itself by charging an annual fee of $179 for residential service and $299 for business. While this is not the first company to try an annual VoIP pricing plan it certainly continues a disturbing trend of service providers competing on price and not quality or features. Customers pay for better products in every product category from cars to suits. Coming out with the cheapest phone service means you are doing exactly that -- announcing a cheap service. Customers aren't thrilled to have their 911 calls carried by the el-cheapo carrier.

Before you price your VoIP service ask yourself this important question. If a close family member had to go tot the hospital what logo would you want on the ambulance -- Yugo or Honda?

Of course this doesn't mean you can price terrible service as expensive as possible but it tells you if you want to last in this business, build a Honda and price like a Honda. Even Hyundai is now trying to be Honda with upscale vehicles, upscale quality and prices.

Some thumb-inspiring news comes from the world of Blackberry where the company's recent headlines have been more like a soap opera than a typical technology company. In fact I wouldn't be surprised to see this drama recreated on the Soap Opera Channel.

The upshot this week is that Judge Spencer decided to postpone his decision on the matter of suspending the service due to patent litigation from NTP. Some predicted the handheld computer maker would be shut down this week.

My take on this is that everyone with any enterprise decision making authority is annoyed enough with RIM at this point that they will jump to a viable competitor. Now the market is just waiting to see who that might be. Palm? Microsoft? It is a bit soon to tell. If Apple's Steve Jobs was to come out with an iType or iMail or whatever he would call a handheld e-mail device, I would bet the market would standardize on it rapidly.

But getting back to VoIP, Nortel has been in the news a great deal this week with news from not one but two market researchers announcing they are leading the market in a number of PBX related categories. According to the article the two market research companies are Dell'Oro and Infonetics. Not bad.

The company stumbled a while back but seems to be more than back on its feet.

If you allow me to digress from companies to concepts I would like you to read an excellent article about customer experiences in your organization. The question the article tries to answer is do you have a Chief Experience Officer?

From concepts back to companies we take a trip to one of the largest organizations -- well at least the acknowledged search leader -- Google. The company recently got a slap on the wrist from the Justice Department. Well if you consider an 18-page brief to be a slap. When you think about it, having indexed billions of pages what's another eighteen or so?

If you recall, Google decided it didn't need to cooperate with the Justice Department on what it characterized as a child pornography witch hunt that would divulge its user's privacy. In response the government has said no way Jose, you better give us what we want or else. The Justice Department submitted a declaration recently by Philip B. Stark, a researcher who rejected the privacy concerns, noting that the government specifically requested that Google remove any identifying information from the search requests.

"The study does not involve examining the queries in more than a cursory way. It involves running a random sample of the queries through the Google search engine and categorizing the results," Stark, a statistics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said.

My take on this news is that Google is fighting a losing battle but has made its point. It doesn't want us to think that it is Evil -- after all the company's famous motto is Don't be Evil. So on behalf of my readers and of me, Google I would like you to know that we realize you aren't evil. If the government is indeed asking for anonymous records and you think they aren't going to give up... Why not give them a peek?

Speaking of a peek, Google gave us a peek at a program called Google Pages a service that allows you to design your own web pages in a drag and drop fashion. Some have complained that the service is too basic but as you can see from this page that was designed in a flash, this writer was fairly impressed.

Google pulled the service off the market temporarily due to strong demand. It is back online as of this writing. When you have as many users as Google, you're likely get used to massive amounts of immediate demand. These of course are good problems to have and while Google isn't perfect it keeps reminding us that it can instantaneously change consumer behavior as it rolls out news services.

With that, enjoy your weekend, stay out of trouble and take a gander at my Google Page that took a few minutes to create. The service is more of a Yugo than a Honda but it's free and drag and drop... What more can you ask for?

8) Meet your family for the first time since your company (or government) gave you one
7) Run to the store and buy the recently introduced Blackberry Patch
6) a) Close your eyes. b) Count to 10. c) Figure out how to get e-mail on your cell phone
5) Introduce yourself to the person who has been sitting in the next cube for 8 months now
4) Find new and exciting ways to annoy flight attendants
3) Get a thumb massage
2) Get reacquainted with your spouse – then your laptop
1) Look up

The saga that is the NTP versus Rim case may soon be (hopefully) coming to an end. The judge is impatient with the case and it seems that the pendulum is swinging ever so slowly back to RIM’s side. In addition it seems that the Judge won’t want to order a shutdown of the service – even if government workers are excluded. The reason is that it may be impossible to ascertain who the government workers are.

The irony here is that this assumes that government workers have a greater need to access immediate information than a typical Blackberry user. Perhaps the US military can make such a claim as can law enforcement agencies but I wonder if it is fair to lump all government workers into a bucket that is collectively weighed as more important than every business user.

Ahh, but I digress. The foremost Blackberry expert I know is Russell Shaw and he says today is not a day to rejoice.

Who is right? Who is wrong? Oh I don’t know but what I do know is I wouldn’t mind a brief Blackberry vacation. I wonder if other Crackberry users feel like me. Maybe I’ll finally have some free time to pick up a book.

My youngest daughter woke up a few times last night meaning of course I got a late start which translates into blogging late. I have been scanning the net for a while and here are some of the stories that caught my eye.

Ditech Communications Voice Quality Assurance solution was recognized at 3GSM with a “Highly Commended” label. While this award must seem sweet to executives at Ditech it comes without the added calories of this next story involving Dannon Yocream Frozen Yogurt going with a CRM solution from Sage Software. "Our biggest gain from Sage CRM is the ability to share customer and prospect databases with all users," explained Brad Gaylor, information systems manager for Yocream International, Inc. "We were aiming to better manage leads and accomplish more sales growth, which is what we are seeing as a result of implementing Sage CRM."

Frozen yogurt became the “in thing” when I was in college and the University I went to was still using punch cards in some departments when I enrolled. And that was 1984! The department of Computer Science at UCONN decided that to get students used to using punch cards, they would force them to submit course changes via these horrid pieces of paper.

The University of Connecticut in fact had a punch card fetish to such a degree that the school library was designed to look like a punch card. Apparently as technology left the punch card in the dust, so too the library’s brick face started to disintegrate and throughout my college years bricks would randomly fall on the ground. Thankfully I didn’t visit this building often enough to be at risk.

I recall the frustration of my first punch card experience and it ranks right up there with waiting in line for my passport to be renewed. But speaking of college, check out the leading edge applications that are being deployed at Wake Forest. This University is certainly on the leading edge using PDAs, laptops and cell phones as well as IBM WebSphere Multimodal Voice Portals. I wonder if their library is in the shape of a Blackberry. Of course today is a big day for RIM, the company that makes these addictive devices.

When you graduate college you are supposed to go out into the real world and earn money. Earning money is exactly what US LEC just did with revenues in the latest quarter of over $100 million and EBITDA of $14 million. VoIP was a factor in this sales increase and it shows you that the CLEC market is not dead at all if you made it this long.

We all know that few companies make money like Microsoft. They are basking in billions as they say (do they really say that?). Of course no one sits still at the Redmond-based software company and they are looking for ways to generate the next trillion. To that end, Steve Ballmer, the company’s illustrious leader announced the upcoming availability of Microsoft Office Communicator Mobile at 3GSM World Congress.

Communicator Mobile is a unified communications client that provides information workers with a premier mobile collaboration experience through native integration of mobile applications with enterprise-grade, real-time communications tools. The client goes beyond simple voice services, incorporating connected communication modes such as security-enhanced instant messaging (IM), presence awareness and integrated Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephony.

I am looking forward to testing this out for myself.

With that I am off to the coffee pot for cup number 2!

I have known Brian McConnell for a decade and he is one of the brightest guys in the telecom business. While others were kind of in shock that there was such a thing as a PC PBX market (before we even thought of IP PBXs) he was selling Altigen PC PBXs out of his house!

This was in 1997!

He subsequently sold his company to Hello Direct causing their stock to pop when the news was announced. This transaction took place in the bubble years.

Brian was also a frequent writer for TMC’s CTI publication and our archrival Computer Telephony. Remember them?

Anyway he is now onto a new voice communities project and you know what a fan I am of voice communities. I have been meaning to cover his new company for a few weeks but after ITEXPO everything has been a blur and I have been playing catch up.

So until I get a chance to properly delve into what Brian has done with his new product talk a gander at his blog on the topic.

I just tried out Google Pages and thought the service was pretty cool. I designed a page in about a minute with nothing to download. And while the product is still pretty basic it allows anyone to rapidly set up a web page. Sure there are other sites that do this but Google is so well known that they will likely spawn a new generation of web page designers. Anyway, take a look at my Google Page and tell me what you think. After all, it was only a few minutes of work to create this. An opposing viewpoint on Google Pages is provided by the Mashable blog.

I have been meaning top read this article for a few weeks. It is the Verizon view on network neutrality and there are some good points made by the telecom giant. But here is a thought that hasn’t come up yet. Let’s assume that Verizon charges Google for high-speed access to their customers and let’s say that Google tells Verizon to find the deepest lake they can and take a high-dive into it.

Google then sends its customers a Tivo like device that delays broadcasts a bit. Imagine a box with a huge buffer that can suck down hours of TV at a time – trying to anticipate what viewers might watch.

You really don’t even need a separate box to do this – you just tell your customers that they will need 5 gigabytes of free space to use Google TV or GTV as it is likely to be called.

The concept here would be to suck up more bandwidth and store it locally as you aren’t guaranteed quality of service.

It seems to me there would be no way for Verizon to get Google to stop this practice.

In addition this concept can be coupled with or replaced by a p2p model allowing consumers access to programming in a similar manner.

Game over for the LECs.

There are a handful of IP telephony companies around at the time TMC decided to launch Internet Telephony Magazine back in 1997. That was a long time ago and some of these industry-founding companies are still alive and kicking and even have the same name. Deltathree is one such company and they are one of the pioneers of VoIP and I remember visiting their offices in the mid-nineties.

I am always interested in hearing the thoughts of these early VoIP pioneers. The credit for the success of the VoIP market today has to go to companies like deltathree that had the early vision before more recent companies decided to latch onto the VoIP market.

A great deal has happened in the VoIP market in the last few years but I wonder where we would be if the first few companies that launched IP telephony products and services weren’t around for so many years, trying new things to see what worked and what didn’t.

Moreover, the difficulty in navigating the VoIP market with its ups and downs certainly tests a companies ability to execute under the best and worst possible conditions. I always like to hear how companies dealt with the adversity and opportunities that the VoIP market has provided.

When given the opportunity to interview deltathree CFO and Executive VP Paul White, I jumped at it. Here is that interview:

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As a pioneer in VoIP how has deltathree dealt with the ups and downs of the VoIP market?

We have literally seen a sea change a couple of times now in terms of people talking about the technology versus people adopting it. We have been at this for about a decade which makes up one of the founding companies in the Voice over IP (VoIP) space. I think the truly exciting part of the day and age we are living in right now is that we are really starting to see people interested in making use of all the great new capabilities that Voice over IP will lend them on a consumer basis.

The part that is now getting lots of attention and focus is Voice over IP to the end user, deltathree is really a leading enabler in this area.

First, we work with consumers directly via our iConnectHere brand that sells globally, which is unusual in this industry. We then leverage that business up the chain to resellers and service providers so that they can provide private label solutions and capitalize on the best of deltathree’s technology while leveraging their own selling and marketing efforts. All these services are built on the same sophisticated infrastructure and allow us to leverage the same core technology platform to cover the diverse needs of a global consumer base.

By serving individual consumers, small businesses, resellers and a wide range of service providers we have inherent diversity in our customer base to help balance the adoption rate of VoIP among our diverse customer types. We also serve customers global which adds further diversification to our customer base and helps buffer against the impact of various adoption rates and market sentiment.


Who do you see as your primary competitor today?

There are a host of different companies primarily doing small pieces of our overall offering. The competitive offering range from PC-to-phone on the narrowband side, phone-to-phone, where you would make use of virtual calling card type services, and broadband phone.

deltathree is one of the few companies that sell all three of those offering types, while most of our competitors are focused on one or the other. Skype, for example, is predominately focused on a PC-to-PC model that is actually hard to get revenues out of because it is predominantly a free model. They do spend a little bit of time on the PC-to-phone model. Vonage is totally on the broadband phone side and is almost exclusively focused in the U.S.

deltathree has the much broader span and coverage in that we support all the offer types globally, and the combination of our wider offerings and global distribution significantly differentiate us from our competitors.

When you look at customer types, we are also differentiated there. Most of our competitors are focused only on their own consumer brand. Vonage is well known for the amount of money that they spend marketing their name in the US. deltathree has a relatively large direct business, but it represents about 25% of our revenue; the other 75% is comprised of resellers and service providers. These customers are much harder to serve, because you need a much more diverse, robust infrastructure. At the same time, these relationships enable us to partner with big brands and jointly realize the significant margin opportunities where we can jointly leverage a large company’s well-known brand and marketing efforts, and our robust VoIP solutions for a win-win situation. That’s how we are differentiated.

Our primary competition on the service provider side are internal development programs and deltathree stacks up well against that option especially in terms of real VoIP market implementation experience, global capabilities, lower cost of development and most importantly time-to-market for getting a VoIP service live.

When did you realize the strength of the current VoIP upturn in the market?

We founded the company 10 years ago. At the time, consumers didn’t really have direct Internet connections, so we predominantly sold to telecom businesses. As consumers have adopted technology, they have moved from not just dial-up Internet usage, but to actual broadband connections. We have led that change with interesting applications that they can use to capitalize on those connections. So we offer PC-to-phone, which is predominantly a narrowband or dial-up type solution, on a global basis. A large percentage of the world has only narrow-band or dial-up connections, so this solution set is appealing to that market and we sell these solutions to both consumers directly under our brand and to resellers and service providers as private label offerings for their own end users.

Broadband access really changed the game for VoIP adoption, ease of use and quality of service. We have also led the industry in terms of broadband phone solutions. We were actually the first company to come up with a broadband phone type of solution several years ago. We have leveraged that experience to consumers directly, and increasingly to resellers and service providers. So at the top end, we have service providers like Verizon and SBC making use of our private label services. We also have hundreds of thousands of direct consumers through our iConnectHere brand.

What services will customers pay for?

A major trend we are seeing overall is people moving increasingly from narrowband adoption to broadband adoption. As consumers get broadband in their house, they are able to pick up a feature richness that they couldn’t get on the narrowband offering. Inbound and outbound calling is obviously a given, but it also features voicemail to email conversion, sophisticated call forwarding, find-me/follow-me features, and a significant price advantage, which is attractive to consumers.

What services are worth mentioning?

On the service provider and reseller front, which is the largest part of our business, we offer complete VoIP platforms to national and international service providers across a wide range of broadband technology platforms, including:

Traditional wireline carriers,
Cable companies,
Internet service providers,
Cellular phone service providers,
And consumer oriented retailers.

We are also seeing an increasing discussion about making use of VoIP technology on a converged wireless basis, meaning that cell phones will have two capabilities. It will be a standard cellular phone on the network of the cellular carrier, but it will allow you to plug into the wireless Internet, where Wi-Fi is the predominant technology of today, so you can get the best of both worlds. That’s where we see the emerging trends, and that’s what we are looking to capitalize on.

What does the future hold for VoIP? For deltathree?

We have three key priorities. Our first priority is to continue our track record of excellent business execution and further extend our organic growth story. We are doing this by capitalizing on the increase in the overall penetration rate of VoIP and specifically getting more market share of the overall base.

This is not a new priority - deltathree has been growing very nicely year-over-year, during the third quarter of 2005 our year-over-year growth was almost 30%. Many other companies are also growing quickly in this space, but growth alone is not the whole story. In our case, at the same time we are growing rapidly, we are maintaining and improving our margins and at the same time, simultaneously significantly improving the bottom line. That’s what I call excellent business execution, and as we move into 2006 and 2007, we are continuing to be focused on doing the same thing.

Our second key strategic priority is on potential intelligent acquisitions that will help us to accelerate our growth. By this I mean strategic acquisitions of companies that are in one or more of our primary business segments where we can move their customer base to our infrastructure and thereby capture the revenues and eliminate the costs.

The third key strategy priority is looking at other types of services that are complementary to what we do today that represent an expansion, that leverages our core capabilities. For example, we are almost entirely focused on the consumer market. We are looking hard at whether or not we want to get into the small and medium business market. So these are the three key priorities that we are focused on.