November 2006 Archives

Tom has done it again with his review of the Linksys CIT30 Phone for Yahoo! Messenger. My take on this nifty new gadget is it is great but. But what you ask? How can such a cool new sleek device with built in presence and the ability to connect with all your Yahoo! contacts need improvement?. Well simply these devices are not interoperable and as such they stink. Sure they work fine with other users of the same service but we need all these devices federated and ideally everyone will support SIP. I don’t want a Yahoo! phone, a Google phone a Skype phone and why not a bat phone while I am at it. I want a single phone allowing me to use VoIP to speak with other people who also use VoIP. Why must this be so difficult?

It is time for a hardware manufacturer to come up with a phone that works with all the various frequencies and protocols. Just make it simple and make it work and I will buy it.

It is worth noting that Tom touched on these points as well:

Room For Improvement

Currently, the Linksys CIT310 doesn't support incoming instant messages (IMs) - neither does the Linksys CIT200 Skype model. I'd even settle for a simple alert message on the phone that an incoming IM came in, in case you're away from your desk, but obviously the actual message would be even cooler. As with all these proprietary phones I've tested - whether they work exclusively with Skype, or now exclusive to Yahoo, I wish they'd be more open and support industry standards, such as SIP. Yahoo! Voice does use SIP, but as far as I can tell, the Linksys CIT310 is "locked" to using Yahoo. If instead of "replacing" Yahoo Voice as the SIP termination service provider, it would be nice if the phone at least supported adding in your own SIP credentials in addition to supporting Yahoo Voice. But alas, as with any industry, exclusive partnerships are often the key to success, so who am I to knock Linksys and Yahoo for doing this?

Many in the industry have told me how concerned they are about the open-source telecom movement and how the margins in the telecom business are being stripped out. But in the brave new world of the internet companies like Skype seem to have a model others need to emulate.

As we know Skype gives away software and many features but charges for many calls – incoming and outgoing.

Asterisk and Pingtel took the concept further with an open-source PBX which effectively gave the enterprise a free software based phone system.

Now the concept has evolved again as companies such as Pactolus look for ways to leverage the open-source movement to help them gain traction in the more complicated application server, and software media server markets.

To launch this effort, the company has introduced its online developer community, www.SIPdev.org, which features a SIP-based service creation environment, application server, and software media server-a comprehensive environment including everything developers need to rapidly create innovative, media-rich applications for next generation VoIP and IMS networks.

So what does this mean for the market? It seems taking your proprietary products and “open-sourcing” them is the next big thing. Perhaps we will call this VoIP 3.0. There will likely be a huge land grab here to see who can have the best development environments in telecom. One thing we have learned from Asterisk is being first is important. In addition the open-source community is a different beast than the commercial developers we are used to. For them the whole use of open source is more like religion than a way to make money.

So now a slew of these so called penguin-worshippers will have an opportunity to play with the Pactolus development environment and give great products back to the community.

The question worth asking of course is how to make money in a world where increasingly more and more of the intellectual property is given away for free.

If you can gain critical mass, you can monetize open source with service agreements, consulting and business edition type plays. Digium the creator of Asterisk also sells hardware – which puts them at odds with many of the other companies selling hardware for the Asterisk PBX. How Pactolus makes money from all this will be worth watching.

In the end, open-source success is about scale and your ability to attract top-ranked talent to your platform. There is a limited window of opportunity for companies to go open source as the developer community is likely not endless.

I applaud Pactolus for making this leap and taking the risk to do what they have done. Now I can’t wait to see if some truly cutting edge open-source IMS applications are developed on their platform.

Vector Capital and former Inter-Tel CEO Steven Mihaylo said they withdraw their bid for Inter-Tel. Recently Inter-Tel shareholders rejected the takeover proposal. 11,272,46 shares were voted against the Mihaylo Resolution, representing slightly over 50% of the 22,524,535 shares of the Company's common stock that were represented in person or by proxy.

Stockholders who voted, other than Mihaylo, rejected the resolution by approximately a two to one margin. This is obviously a very substantial number. Mihaylo owns approximately 19.4% of Inter-Tel's outstanding common shares.

Personally I think current management at the company is doing a good job and it would seem shareholders agree. The company is coming out with many new and innovative products and is aware of the need to get developers on their platform and moreover has a steady and consistent policy on PR and marketing.

The worst companies in this or any business are the ones who go dark – meaning they stop producing news for months or years at a time. They then seem to remember to start promoting themselves again after 18 months have passed. A surprisingly large number of unsuccessful companies seem to thrive on this principle.

I have yet to hear anything negative about Inter-Tel’s management. This isn’t to say they can’t improve but I would put management at the top-end of the IP-PBX scale. I am not sure what purpose a shakeup would serve.

Well, perhaps the only benefit of this plan would have been going private and all of the benefits of reduced compliance and reporting. I wonder in the Democrats will roll back some of the Sox rules and regulations to make it more business friendly without neutering its intent.

The next move for telecom companies is to look outside telecom

It would seem that if cable and phone companies are set for a war, the phone companies need to hurry up and catch up in one of the areas cable has a stronghold; video content. This is not news to France Telecom who recently created a new unit that will invest in French and European movie rights and produce between 10 to 15 films per year.

Some people were surprised by the move but what France Telecom has done makes perfectly good sense for a number of reasons. We all know content is king. Consumers will be watching more and more video on devices like iPods, phones and soon watches. There seems to be no end to the ways consumers will have access to video programming.

As this happens the splintering of media will continue meaning consumers will align themselves into narrower and narrower communities of interest.

All this is well know to TV and telecom business.

But the hidden truth in this announcement is what France Telecom is not saying. They are acknowledging that their role in the future may be a provider of pipes of not much more. The “dumb pipe” business is not where phone companies want to be but it seems inevitable that this direction is their future.

That is of course unless they can become producers of content themselves or find a way to tax other companies looking to use their pipes to transmit content.

Aleksandra Bosnjak, Analyst at Ovum has the following comments about this news:

"This pact with content industry insiders sets a new scene both for France Telecom and European telco positioning as a whole. They are embarking on the riskiest route of all: financing local production industry and European/independent content, which was typically backed by French or European broadcasters. Film producers and filmmakers see this as a logical and welcome move, and in keeping with the pace at which the convergent content-telco industry is evolving."

However, she points out that "the giant telco's move into the film acquisitions business, particularly co-productions, will increase pressure on its margins and the new outfit will have to perform and compete for film rights against an army of existing local and international content players, including the French Tier 1 production companies, major broadcasters, and the broadcasters' own film subsidies."

According to the Wall Street Journal, A France Telecom representative stressed that the company would stick to financing and wasn't plunging into a new business it knows little about, saying, "We won't be setting up a studio or choosing actors."

But it seems inevitable that content is going to be a differentiator in the telecom world and as such phone companies will need to get more involved in the content side of the business.

One would expect acquisitions as one means of doing this. I also envision cooperatives of phone companies working together to produce content.

In the end, the content game is much more risky and volatile than providing pipes but it can be much more lucrative as well. Just ask Steve Jobs.

We seem to have entered a brave new world of telco/movie production convergence and it is anyone’s guess who the new winners and losers will be as once disparate industries continue to merge.

One Number for Life is the tagline of GrandCentral the brainchild of Craig Walker who by the way was one of the Internet Telephony Magazine's Top 100 voices of IP Communications. He was also president and CEO of DialPad and stayed on with Yahoo! for a while when the online portal purchased the company.

GrandCentral is a telecom dashboard that is future proof. The main benefit is as long as the company is around they will save your voicemails and allow you to keep your phone number.

In addition you can forward calls to any phone number and provider certain callers or groups of callers with special rings, specific rules, etc.

This is exactly the sort of service that would have saved Tom Keating from having a Vonage number porting problem a few months back.

In addition this service -- assuming everyone used it -- could have saved service providers from having to spend millions on local number portability solutions.

Other benefits of GrandCentral? You can also use a ring back tone derived from an MP3 file so callers can hear the song of your choosing.

In addition you can have call screening on your calls so you will know who is calling before you answer. You also will have phone-number@grandcentral.com as your e-mail address so this is a unified messaging/unified communications solution.

But wait, there is more. You can listen in when people leave voicemail and pull people out. You can block callers. You can even switch calls from one phone to another mid-call. This is something we thought we needed IMS for.

My take on this service is -- what's not to like?

The service is in beta at the moment so everything is free. It is worth trying it out. This is the type of service that could change the world of telecom. Then again many of these features have been around for 10 years and they haven't caught on.

But people are getting used to using the web as a telecom dashboard and I expect this trend to continue.

It is worth noting that many of these features are the advanced services we hope people will pay the telephone companies for. I continue to wonder how service providers will be able to compete against myriad free services like this.

It would seem to compete is such an environment service providers will need IMS to enable smaller and more nimble application developers to develop applications they can share the revenue in. Service providers will never be able to innovate rapidly on their own. So in a way this is the exact sort of service that puts service providers on notice. Start innovating or prepare to cease existence. I am sorry to be put it in such absolute terms but GrandCentral is the sort of application that can really change the telecom landscape if it continues to gain momentum.

Here are some articles mentioning GrandCentral:

Driving Revenue into the Network Through Higher-Margin, Value-Added Services
GrandCentral Gives You One Number To Ring All Your Numbers

Lyme disease is a potentially debilitating disease generally caused by deer ticks. While I am not an expert on this disease I know several people who have it. Today one person I know who has this disease sent me this e-mail:

The Infectious Disease Society of America is changing their criteria so that if you are tested for Lyme disease and it is negative and/or you do not have a rash, then you do not receive antibiotic treatment. This is very serious, especially for someone like me who has symptoms and is sick, but not does not always test positive. It takes 10 seconds. Please help. Thanks.

So I thought I would pass this along to the blogosphere and others so you are aware of the change in guidelines. Here is the petition site. It takes only a few seconds to fill out and send. My friend Sue and many others will really appreciate your efforts.

Thanks for your help.

I suppose selling your business for almost 2 billion dollars is great but does this make your invention worthy of being the Invention of the Year from Time Magazine? There have been many video sharing sites over the years and YouTube can be considered if anything to be a copycat on many levels. Do the Time Magazine people just don’t get it? Here is a good blog post explaining why YouTube should (or should not) win this coveted award.

But really, do you think at this point the founders of YouTube really care one way or another? These guys are probably glued to MarketWatch all day tracking Google’s stock price.

Here is the story from USA Today.

It would seem the cost for mobile computing is set to increase across the board. Now NTP is going after Palm. As you may remember a while back the nation was worried that Blackberry service was going to be shut down because Blackberry parent RIM did not want to settle a related patent dispute. As you recall the US military and politicians are Blackberry users and although they would have been exempt from the shut down there was fear that such a shut down would wreak havoc on the US economy and political system.

Ken Camp thinks NTP is going to make out nicely from this lawsuit and I agree. Here is what CIO Magazine thinks.

As he waited in line at the supermarket, Rich wondered if we have taken this I am in a hurry lifestyle a bit too far.


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