Karen Greenwald the head of the Burbank Group wrote an article for TMCnet a while back and was subsequently given an award by the prestigious Summits Awards website. She is quite talented and we are proud to have her as a contributor to TMCnet. Here is the link to the release.
April 2006 Archives
Interesting info on what VoIP adoption looks like in the education market:
Of the surveyed institutions, 43 percent reported that they are using VoIP. However, almost all of the users noted that the VoIP network currently covers less than 25 percent of their campus. Among those who assigned their VoIP network a grade, the responses averaged out to a solid B – a 3.13 grade point average. However, 25 percent gave the network an “incomplete.”
The most frequently mentioned benefits of the VoIP network were improved end-user features (cited by 46 percent of the users), cost savings (cited by 31 percent), and overall network efficiency (cited by 23 percent).
These VoIP users do have concerns and ongoing challenges when it comes to their use of the technology. Security was named by 77 percent of the users as a concern, with Quality of Service and emergency 911 issues cited by 69 percent. Sixty-two percent pointed to management as an issue.
Other challenges cited were cost, user training, complexity, and help desk issues.
“There is obviously tremendous interest in Voice over IP networking on North American campuses,” said Jeri Semer, executive director of ACUTA. “Our survey suggests that our member institutions are being very methodical about how they are migrating to this advanced and beneficial technology.”
Recently I read an article regarding MySpace.com being banned in a University (it is also mentioned in the first article link) and whether this could lead to VoIP being banned as well. I find it interesting that VoIP in universities seems to be coming up more and more recently.
Bear Stearns analyst says VoIP offerings are not of the same quality level compared to the LECs. In addition, AT&T earnings were above expectations and headcount reduction is ahead of schedule.
See video for details.
See video for details.
I wasn’t aware of yet another VoIP patent, 5,572,576. I haven’t heard about VoIP patents since the RTI Vs. Google case. It seems this patent was at the center of a lawsuit between AOL and Klausner Technologies. Klausner was seeking $200 million. The lawsuit is settled. The terms do not seem disclosed.
Here is an open letter to the industry. TMC is growing very rapidly in print, online and at our events. Many of you know our track record. If you don’t, here are some of the details.
TMC launched the first magazine in the world in the call center space, the VoIP space, the SIP space and the IMS space. We also run the best-attended events in VoIP and TMCnet, our web portal is on track to exceed a million unique visitors a month.
With that, we are looking for marketers, salespeople and editors who want to work in a great environment with an incredible team. If you have related experience and are a top performer, please respond to this post.
Please forward this post to anyone who you think is a good fit for the above positions. Thanks!
If you’re a Chinese web surfer using Skype you may notice that when you chat about certain things the person responding may not respond correctly. The reason? Not surprisingly China is filtering Skype user’s messages.
The Financial Times reported that Skype chief executive Niklas Zennstrom, confirmed that Tom Online censored messages containing references to the Dalai Lama, the banned Falun Gong spiritual group and other sensitive topics.
As more instant message programs are developed and used around the world, how will China keep up with them all? It must be a staggering amount of work keeping users from uttering phrases you don’t want them to say and keeping them from reading things you don’t want them to read. Moreover there could be new IM packages released weekly or even more often. Imagine the database required to keep track of it all.
In the end if there is one problem the Chinese government may not be able to contend with it is censoring the Internet as you can only play cat and mouse for so long. On the Internet it is more like cat and mice as there are just so many ways to communicate – blogs, e-mail, websites, VoIP, encrypted VoIP, encrypted IM, etc.
How could the government for example filter communications that are encrypted? What if a group of people knew a password that changed daily allowing them to unencrypt secret messages?
I just visited to Hushmail, one of the first websites devoted to sending encrypted e-mail. I first wrote about the company in the mid-late nineties. I was surprised to see a link on their homepage to an NPR radio show that promotes Hushmail as not a way to avoid the prying eyes of the Chinese authorities but the Bush administration.
I naturally assumed Hushmail was outlawed in China so I contacted the company to confirm my suspicions. Ben Cutler who works for the parent company Hush Communications said, “We are not aware that we have been outlawed in China, we do have some users there who are able to use our service there.”
I really can’t be more surprised by this news. Is it possible the Chinese government hasn’t decided there was a threat posed by Hushmail? Perhaps they haven’t found the site yet? Representatives of the Chinese government were likely not to respond to requests so I didn’t bother sending one.
So while this Skype news is not unexpected, I wonder how the Chinese government will be able to win this cat and mice game. It just seems impossible to police the Internet indefinitely and sooner or later the monitoring operation of the Chinese government will get so costly that it is bound to affect the entire country’s productivity and competitiveness.
Perhaps however I am overstating the control China plays in the lives of the average Chinese Internet surfer. According to Forbes, Craig Mundie, senior vice president and chief technical officer for Microsoft, suggested that hyperbole had crept into the debate over state controls over access to the Internet in China.
“There are literally hundreds of millions of Chinese people who have access to the Internet. The government here tends to control very selectively access to certain pieces of information. That's their prerogative,” he said.
This is an opposing viewpoint infrequently shared by American companies but perhaps not unexpected as Microsoft and the Chinese government forge a tighter relationship with one another. It probably isn’t good to make negative comments about China the same week the country’s president makes a historic visit to your Redmond headquarters.
Still the extent of the filtering may be difficult for anyone outside the Chinese web filtering department to ascertain.
In the mean time it is safe to say that those in China using such high-profile programs as Skype are likely to be monitored much more closely than those using less well-known products. Perhaps for those companies looking for VoIP or IM market share, being filtered by China is a sign you have become a significant player in the market. One day, news about Chinese filtering could even move the financial markets.
For now the average Chinese web surfer looking to send communications that may not be officially sanctioned may have to turn to tier two or three IM companies who are looking to become the next Skype and subsequently the next target of Chinese censors.
The Financial Times reported that Skype chief executive Niklas Zennstrom, confirmed that Tom Online censored messages containing references to the Dalai Lama, the banned Falun Gong spiritual group and other sensitive topics.
As more instant message programs are developed and used around the world, how will China keep up with them all? It must be a staggering amount of work keeping users from uttering phrases you don’t want them to say and keeping them from reading things you don’t want them to read. Moreover there could be new IM packages released weekly or even more often. Imagine the database required to keep track of it all.
In the end if there is one problem the Chinese government may not be able to contend with it is censoring the Internet as you can only play cat and mouse for so long. On the Internet it is more like cat and mice as there are just so many ways to communicate – blogs, e-mail, websites, VoIP, encrypted VoIP, encrypted IM, etc.
How could the government for example filter communications that are encrypted? What if a group of people knew a password that changed daily allowing them to unencrypt secret messages?
I just visited to Hushmail, one of the first websites devoted to sending encrypted e-mail. I first wrote about the company in the mid-late nineties. I was surprised to see a link on their homepage to an NPR radio show that promotes Hushmail as not a way to avoid the prying eyes of the Chinese authorities but the Bush administration.
I naturally assumed Hushmail was outlawed in China so I contacted the company to confirm my suspicions. Ben Cutler who works for the parent company Hush Communications said, “We are not aware that we have been outlawed in China, we do have some users there who are able to use our service there.”
I really can’t be more surprised by this news. Is it possible the Chinese government hasn’t decided there was a threat posed by Hushmail? Perhaps they haven’t found the site yet? Representatives of the Chinese government were likely not to respond to requests so I didn’t bother sending one.
So while this Skype news is not unexpected, I wonder how the Chinese government will be able to win this cat and mice game. It just seems impossible to police the Internet indefinitely and sooner or later the monitoring operation of the Chinese government will get so costly that it is bound to affect the entire country’s productivity and competitiveness.
Perhaps however I am overstating the control China plays in the lives of the average Chinese Internet surfer. According to Forbes, Craig Mundie, senior vice president and chief technical officer for Microsoft, suggested that hyperbole had crept into the debate over state controls over access to the Internet in China.
“There are literally hundreds of millions of Chinese people who have access to the Internet. The government here tends to control very selectively access to certain pieces of information. That's their prerogative,” he said.
This is an opposing viewpoint infrequently shared by American companies but perhaps not unexpected as Microsoft and the Chinese government forge a tighter relationship with one another. It probably isn’t good to make negative comments about China the same week the country’s president makes a historic visit to your Redmond headquarters.
Still the extent of the filtering may be difficult for anyone outside the Chinese web filtering department to ascertain.
In the mean time it is safe to say that those in China using such high-profile programs as Skype are likely to be monitored much more closely than those using less well-known products. Perhaps for those companies looking for VoIP or IM market share, being filtered by China is a sign you have become a significant player in the market. One day, news about Chinese filtering could even move the financial markets.
For now the average Chinese web surfer looking to send communications that may not be officially sanctioned may have to turn to tier two or three IM companies who are looking to become the next Skype and subsequently the next target of Chinese censors.
Leave it to Tom to have a baby girl and find away to weave her into an interesting story on hacking, photography and technology!
No seriously this article talks about how computers are linking directly to the human brain via the tongue. I have to watch Leno tonight. He will have a ball with this.
The concept of Apple using Intel chips seems to be gaining traction and I have seen so many glowing reports and virtually no drawbacks to these new systems. This latest article titled Testing Apples Intel-transition: iMac and MacBook Pro is no exception. The article is good and chronicles the pros and cons of these new “hybrid” systems.
Meg Whitman recently was on Bloomberg talking about the synergy of Skype and eBay. She also mentioned PayPal synergy with Skype. Furthermore she discussed new marketplaces and ways to extend e-commerce using VoIP. Take a look for the details. This seems to echo the sentiments of my voice communities articles of months past.
Microsoft lost 3 percentage points in the search market year over year. This is even after annual announcements that they will spend billions in R&D on various initiatives including search. They hope the new addition of Steven Berkowitz, the chief executive of Ask Jeeves will help them compete with Google more effectively.
There has been so much talk about how easy it is to steal market-share away from Google and we used to see survey after survey saying the majority of users would switch search engines if they found something better.
I suppose the question worth asking is why is it so difficult to make a search engine better than Google. Is it the interface? The results? Perhaps it is a combination of both.
There are thousands of ultra-smart people at Microsoft and Yahoo! for that matter. Why can't these companies slow Google down?
If the answer is because Google has the momentum, then will it be a matter of time before Google makes a mistake and gives the others an opportunity to catch up? Certainly this is a strange position for Microsoft and Yahoo to be in.
While we're at it, let's throw eBay into the mix as there seems to be a secret pact being made by Google's top competitors of the present and future.
You see Google keeps expanding its products from things like Google Base allowing it to become a competitor to the newspaper classified section to an upcoming service allowing it to take payments perhaps exactly like PayPal.
The basic problem Google competitors face is that Google is becoming the middleman of the web. How do you compete with that?
Perhaps the only way to compete is to become a better middleman. Yahoo is in the best position to be this as they have a super-strong portal offering. MSN isn't far behind.
But although Google is a loosely distributed portal they act more like a company trying to get in the middle of everything web surfers do. They do this one service/piece of software at a time. This is a killer strategy as they are becoming an essential part of web transactions whether they are financial or informational.
Admittedly the portal strategy seems like it should be an even better way to provide service as you can keep adding services and existing portal users will start to naturally explore them.
So if the portal idea is logical then banding together portals should make even more sense. Of course it isn't clear if eBay, Microsoft and Yahoo will do this but it seems like a smart strategy allowing all three players to fight what seems to be an ever-growing threat to virtually all Internet business models.
But I see banding together a short-term fix. Furthermore, the portal strategy while a great way to hold onto market share doesn't seem to be a great way to get more people to use your search engine.
Obviously superior search is the hallmark of what Google does and is its edge. The competition is going to have to build a better search engine than Google if they want to compete long-term. But even though massive investments are made continually in rival search technology, no one is able to catch up.
In the long-run the middleman of the Internet is going to own it. The question is will forming deeper partnerships with your potential competitors help you become a universal middleman? It is possible this could happen but if this partnership strategy doesn't work out, Microsoft better hope that Steven Berkowitz will be the I'm Feeling Lucky result in their search for search engine dominance.
There has been so much talk about how easy it is to steal market-share away from Google and we used to see survey after survey saying the majority of users would switch search engines if they found something better.
I suppose the question worth asking is why is it so difficult to make a search engine better than Google. Is it the interface? The results? Perhaps it is a combination of both.
There are thousands of ultra-smart people at Microsoft and Yahoo! for that matter. Why can't these companies slow Google down?
If the answer is because Google has the momentum, then will it be a matter of time before Google makes a mistake and gives the others an opportunity to catch up? Certainly this is a strange position for Microsoft and Yahoo to be in.
While we're at it, let's throw eBay into the mix as there seems to be a secret pact being made by Google's top competitors of the present and future.
You see Google keeps expanding its products from things like Google Base allowing it to become a competitor to the newspaper classified section to an upcoming service allowing it to take payments perhaps exactly like PayPal.
The basic problem Google competitors face is that Google is becoming the middleman of the web. How do you compete with that?
Perhaps the only way to compete is to become a better middleman. Yahoo is in the best position to be this as they have a super-strong portal offering. MSN isn't far behind.
But although Google is a loosely distributed portal they act more like a company trying to get in the middle of everything web surfers do. They do this one service/piece of software at a time. This is a killer strategy as they are becoming an essential part of web transactions whether they are financial or informational.
Admittedly the portal strategy seems like it should be an even better way to provide service as you can keep adding services and existing portal users will start to naturally explore them.
So if the portal idea is logical then banding together portals should make even more sense. Of course it isn't clear if eBay, Microsoft and Yahoo will do this but it seems like a smart strategy allowing all three players to fight what seems to be an ever-growing threat to virtually all Internet business models.
But I see banding together a short-term fix. Furthermore, the portal strategy while a great way to hold onto market share doesn't seem to be a great way to get more people to use your search engine.
Obviously superior search is the hallmark of what Google does and is its edge. The competition is going to have to build a better search engine than Google if they want to compete long-term. But even though massive investments are made continually in rival search technology, no one is able to catch up.
In the long-run the middleman of the Internet is going to own it. The question is will forming deeper partnerships with your potential competitors help you become a universal middleman? It is possible this could happen but if this partnership strategy doesn't work out, Microsoft better hope that Steven Berkowitz will be the I'm Feeling Lucky result in their search for search engine dominance.
Be sure to check out the TMCnet channels when you get a moment… Think of them as micro-publications on various topics. There are a number of new ones here and there are XML feeds on the channels if you would prefer to use an RSS reader.
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IP-PBX that enables your broadband network to become the foundation for a converged, integrated voice, data and video system." href="http://www.tmcnet.com/channels/ip-pbx/">IP-PBX
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billing and software upgrades." href="http://www.tmcnet.com/channels/selecting-voip-solutions/">Selecting VoIP Solutions
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Be sure to check out the TMCnet channels when you get a moment… Think of them as micro-publications on various topics. There are a number of new ones here and there are XML feeds on the channels if you would prefer to use an RSS reader.
|
IP-PBX that enables your broadband network to become the foundation for a converged, integrated voice, data and video system." href="http://www.tmcnet.com/channels/ip-pbx/">IP-PBX
|
|
billing and software upgrades." href="http://www.tmcnet.com/channels/selecting-voip-solutions/">Selecting VoIP Solutions
|
CNNMoney.com is reporting that 7 new trendy jobs have popped up. Here is my take.
Director of mobile computing:
It would be even better if Apple designed mobile computing solutions so we wouldn’t need so much support!
Director of internal controls: This is the new Sarbanes-Oxley manager. If it keeps companies ethical I am all for it. The cost of this department is making many public companies go private.
Business continuity director: Post 9/11 this is much needed.
Chief people officer: They manage that warm cushy team atmosphere. Great idea.
Parent coordinator: They deal with divorce issues such as who takes the kid to piano lessons.
Instead -- we should have less divorces.
Residence concierge:
An exclusive club. Membership includes the 24/7 services of a residence concierge who will arrange for everything from stocking your refrigerator, managing your household staff, arranging for all your transportation and setting up customized events for you and your family.
My two cents – are you serious??
Blog editor:
Of course the most important new job here. No sarcastic comment on this one
We have the video live on the site. Check it out. Fellow bloggers, feel free to blog! Thanks :-)
