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Pen Phone
November 8, 2007
Would a pen phone sell? I wonder. I suppose having a smaller and smaller phone makes sense but while this is happening I am also noticing a trend towards phones with bigger screens with the ability to check e-mail. While this design of this pen phone is very interesting it is not clear how good this device is as a platform for sending messages and browsing the web.
Here are the details from gizmodo on a pen phone prototype that is potentially being shopped around to see if there is enough interest to make it a viable product.
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Encryption Vs. Recording Industry
November 8, 2007
In p2p sharing networks the latest weapon the file sharers are deploying is encryption. Sure encryption has been around for years but it seems the file sharers are now using the technology coupled with services like BitTorrent.
According to The Register, a large UK ISP says the number of encrypted files being shared has risen tenfold in the last 12 months. Obviously this is nothing to sneeze at.
As the article points out, files which are encrypted draw more attention and law enforcement agencies spend more time on these files than more theoretically innocuous ones.
As always happens in these electronic espionage wars, one side finds a new weapon and the other responds with something else more sophisticated. The record labels have found their business has turned more into a Spy vs. Spy cartoon than the good old business of making CDs and selling them at Tower Records.
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iPhone Hits UK
November 8, 2007
It was bound to happen and now it has. Apple’s handheld smartphone has been beamed across the Atlantic and will be sold starting tomorrow evening. And guess what? The lines have started forming already.
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ITEXPO East 2008 Brochure Available
November 8, 2007
I know my loyal readers have been waiting with baited breath to get a hold of the latest ITEXPO brochure. For those of you who have, consider this your very own early holiday season. Here it is… Please enjoy this brochure. BTW, it will be updated continually so feel free to download it often to track all the new and exciting additions to the world’s leading IP communications event.
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A Date-Rape-Drug-Free Christmas
November 8, 2007
Buying toys is riskier than ever. I remember when I was a kid and falling off your bike was the worst problem you might have. You would get scraped, bruised, a bit beat up but you would get back on your feet quickly. We never had had the excitement of lead-paint coated toys and date-rape-drug filled items in the kid’s playroom.
If you are fed up with all the problems out there in toyland, be sure to check out this blog post on alternative companies to buy toys from this holiday seasin.
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Mobile News From iPhone to Business Intelligence
November 8, 2007
The mobile market continues to generate massive amounts of news… It almost seems we have crossed over the critical mass border where everyone on earth has one of these devices and now we need to find ways o force them to upgrade or provide them better access to information while on the road.
For example, Information Builders now provides a mobile-ready business intelligence dashboard. With merely a couple of clicks, content can be effortlessly added or eliminated from the Mobile Favorites folder in Information Builders’ standard BI Dashboard. The procedure closely resembles the method for adding content to the favorites folder in a Web browser.
In addition, Broadcom and Electronic Arts have teamed up to provide high-performance gaming on mobile phones. A direct quote from the release is as follows: “The Broadcom BCM2727 processor continues to set the bar for low power, extreme mobile multimedia performance and is receiving significant recognition within the mobile device and gaming communities.”
For those of you who already have a device – like let’s say a smartphone, you can now turn it into an iPhone with a little help from TransMedia. Sure there is some marketing spin here but it is a cool idea so I thought it worth sharing.Rounding out the mobile news of the day is ShoZu, a company allowing 2-way mobile social networking services. The company has new features to make it possible for consumers to get the latest Flickr photos and YouTube videos posted by their friends on their handsets. The new capabilities offer automatic content feeds and a way for consumers to keep actively in touch with their social life and entertainment even while on the go.
Although the above news transcends the enterprise and heads into the consumer markets, note the goal in all of the above stories seems to be tying together people while on the go. It seems if you have the right applications you can continue to be just as productive on the road as you are in the office.
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Ditech Networks
November 8, 2007
In the many IP communications demos I hear each year I am consistently amazed at just how good the quality of VoIP can be. With today’s wideband codecs the sound is remarkably better than the PSTN. This is especially true when I listen to 3D stereo VoIP.
The first issue of Internet Telephony magazine which was the first publication in the world focusing on IP communications came out in February, 1998 and in all the years since we have seen the IP communications space explode with growth. Sure there have been ups and downs but we can safely say at this point the technology behind internet telephony has changed the world for the better.
But this does not mean every VoIP call today sounds fantastic. There are obviously many factors which can affect the quality of a call from bandwidth available to transcoding issues and the conversion from the circuit switched to the packetized world.
When you think about it, IP communications is just so much more complicated today than ever before. In the late nineties if you made a VoIP call from one computer to another that was about as complicated as it got.
Nowadays you have to worry about things like voice peering which can wreak havoc on call quality if you aren’t paying attention.
As transcoding in peering networks can sometimes be responsible for quality loss, I thought it made sense to speak with Ditech Networks CEO Todd Simpson as his company is a leader in the transcoding space and also plays in the session border control market.
He started our discussion by explaining there is a lot of interest in SLA management between peering partners… People are paying more attention to peering quality and his customers use Ditechs’s technology to measure the quality of each call, the network connection (packet loss, jitter etc) and other artifacts such as noise, echo, etc that haven’t been cleaned up.
He says “Lots of people have quality issues on their networks and they don’t know how to track them down.” He continues, “Our products give you the knowledge to see where quality problems are coming from, which means customers can enforce stricter SLAs.” In addition he says their Voice Quality Assurance (VQA) product helps providers find network problems which can then be fixed.
I also asked about the board-level transcoding competitors and to this he responded Ditech is confident they have the best algorithms in the industry around voice quality. Whenever they are put up against any other solution, their algorithms tend to win he explains. This is the essence of our value proposition he said. Our platforms are very good as well and we would tend to compete more with a company like Tellabs than board vendors.
According to Simpson, the reason for transcoding is to trade off voice quality optimization on one network with voice quality optimization on another network. To this he added that having the algorithms sitting in the middle gives you much more flexibility in making such choices.
When queried about the International vs. domestic markets Simpson explained in developing countries there is tremendous mobile growth – such as India, Africa, etc. There is much potential for the company’s mobile products in these areas.
In the US and Western Europe VoIP is accelerating and this is where they see their biggest growth potential.
I asked about how the company is going to market – either direct or through partnerships. He said the company is selling more direct today and is looking for new partnerships. He says they do interoperate with many networks but bundling products more tightly could add value for customers.
When asked if the transcoding market will grow he says yes because in peering networks it makes too much sense to have different codecs for different networks. “A single codec just doesn’t make sense,” he exclaimed.
I asked about how the Jasomi acquisition is playing out and Simpson explained the company was acquired for their signaling expertise and they continue to invest in the signaling side of their products as well as media processing. Their SBC sales are typically to tier 3-4 service providers which are sold through channels.
From there our conversation went into churn due to voice quality. The company’s research shows wireless and VoIP providers will lose over 26% of their subscribers due to churn with a total churn price tag in the tens of billions of dollars.
This number makes more sense when you realize 170,000 people terminate contracts daily around the world because of poor voice quality
With numbers this high it does seem to be a matter of time before service providers start to take subscriber churn due to poor quality more seriously. As they do they are likely to spend more of their resources on solutions which enhance voice quality.
Responding to a question of where the company will be in five years the Ditech Networks CEO answered we have the strongest assets in quality. He continues by saying voice will still be a killer application on these networks even if it may be monetized differently.
He ended by saying, “Ditech will be voice quality experts for FMC, wireless and wireline.”
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Vonage in Settlement Talks with AT&T
November 8, 2007
Here are the details on what is happening with Vonage and AT&T settlement talks. The New Jersey based internet telephony company may be able to put this whole messy situation behind them for a cool $39 million. It would seem Vonage has a good deal of experience with these lawsuits at this point and the company realizes a rapid settlement is in their best interest.
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Tellabs CEO Steps Down
November 8, 2007
RTTNews reports Tellabs President and CEO Krish Prabhu will Resign March 1, 2008. This could be good news for company’s shareholders as Tellabs is one of the most introverted companies in the communications space. Tellabs certainly ranks in the top 10 of companies that don’t respond to the media. Hopefully this change will help the company warm up to many of the media companies who are looking for interviews and to help tell their story.
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Symbian CEO Disses Open Handset Alliance
November 8, 2007
Symbian may be the closest competitor to Google’s Open Handset Alliance and not surprisingly the head of Symbian had nothing flattering to say about this latest open source mobile handset initiative.
Symbian’s CEO Nigel Clifford said, There's 10, 15, 20, maybe 25 different Linux platforms out there. It sometimes appears that Linux is fragmenting faster than it unifies." He continued, “Symbian recognizes Google's commitment to ‘openness’ and sees that as a good thing, but I probably would say there is no such thing as free software."
The problem for Clifford and company is the fact that many companies already working with Symbian have become part of the OHA. What this means for Symbian long term is unknown but the competition has not put a dent in Clifford’s resolve as he said, “We're the market leader, and we aim to remain the market leader."
For more, check out this well-written piece from InfoWorld.
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Comcast Gets Beat up
November 8, 2007
If you haven’t been watching, you may have missed the fact that the telcos are becoming serious competitors to the cable companies. For the last few years it seemed cable companies were invincible but recently the phone companies with products like FiOS are giving very good value and customers are buying it. I mean this literally and figuratively of course. My informal discussions with FiOS customers tells me the product is great and many people tell me their FiOS service is much better than cable.
If you are interested in learning more about how Comcast is doing competing against the phone companies, be sure to check out this Wall Street Journal article titled Cable's Picture Gets Fuzzier.
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