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Apple Doubles Capacity

Out of guilt -- I really don't think it is important news, I need to share with my readers that today Apple doubled the capacity of the iPhone and iPod Touch. The new 16 GB iPhone will cost $499 and 32 GB iPod Touch is $499.

The iPod Touch 8 GB model still costs $299 and the 16 GB model is $399.

Why guilt? I don't know really. It seems that whatever Steve Jobs does must be blogged. This guy has some sort of control over bloggers and the media... It is amazing.

If I had to consider this news it would be only because it shows that Apple can do anything it wants and get away with it.

I just purchased a digital camera with an SDHC slot allowing me to expand the memory as I see fit. I have a cell phone with a MicroSDHC card which also allows me to upgrade as I like.

Apple gets away with forcing you to throw your device away if you want to upgrade. At least there will always be a use for eBay.

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Undersea Cable Cuts

Undersea cables are a weak spot in internet connectivity worldwide and with all the recent undersea outages taking place around the world, we need to be concerned that in the US and Canada that these cables are unprotected. Not only do we need to worry about the cables under the ocean but as they come up f to above ground locations they are often unprotected and visibly marked allowing anyone who wants to do damage to do so easily.

This is yet another area we need to be focused on to ensure that terrorism does not bring down global communications/commerce.

See more from TMCnet's Erik Linask.

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Podcast Interview: 8x8 VP Marketing Huw Rees

8x8, the company behind Packet8 service has been doing a terrific job running their company with positive financial results and new services which are innovative and unique. Some are video-based, some are mobile and others are in the call center market.

Two weeks ago I had a chance to speak with Huw Rees the VP of Sales & Marketing at the company onstage at ITEXPO in Miami, FL. The talk went very well and there was tremendous feedback from the audience so I decided it made sense to talk with Rees in a podcast format allowing listeners who couldn't make the keynote to hear what is happening at his company and the industry as a whole.

Some of the items discussed have to do with Gov. Schwarzenegger's recent California Broadband Task Force report, mobile services, the SMB, and a host of other issues.

One area worth mentioning is marketing as the company is competing against at least one competitor who has told Wall Street that they will buy market share at all costs. We also delved a bit into patents and how intellectual property can be used as a defense and offense.

Hope you enjoy the podcast.

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Aretta's Hosted Asterisk Tastes Great

In the nineties when communications manufacturers gave the market few choices and there were many proprietary options, companies like Dialogic, NMS Aculab and others came on the scene and gave users choice by allowing them to purchase DSP resource boards which let computers become communications processors. For the first time you could build your own PBX, prepaid calling card system or anything else you could want.

Best of all, you could have it any way you wanted it… Not just the way the manufacturer of a product-line dictated.

At this time Marc Fribush was working at Dialogic and was selling DSP boards for a variety of the applications outlined above. More recently, Mark is the president of Aretta Communications and when he started his company he had a vision of leveraging open-source communications to change the market the way the DSP resource board changed communications in the nineties.

Fribush took hold of Asterisk and decided the market needed an embedded IP PBX that was dropped in on premise, eliminating the need for custom installation.

Just as they he was going to market with this idea, Digium decided to launch its own appliance. So the idea was then to push the Asterisk idea up into the cloud where it would benefit from diesel generated backup and a direct internet connection.

The next step was to use virtualization and to pack 50-70 instances of Asterisk on a single server.

This business model is awash in successful buzzwords. Consider there is open source, software as a service (SaaS)/hosting, Asterisk and virtualization. From a Wall Street perspective I just can't think of a more attractive combination of hot trends and topics.

Oh, I almost forgot the company is selling into the SMB which is literally on fire at the moment.

In addition to hosted Asterisk the company offers SIP trunking and preconfigured Polycom phones yielding what Fribush calls, "The ultimate solution for SMBs."

Fribush explained the cost of competitive hosted carriers was about $35-$40/month per extension and they decided to revolutionize the pricing model. You basically pay for the system and get unlimited extensions and instead you pay for simultaneous active calls.

For less than $100/month you get a full blown system he tells me.

You start at 2 simultaneous lines and go up by powers of 2 (4, 8, 16) and you get a dedicated server after 32 simultaneous lines.

You get your own hosted server with an IP address and every feature on Asterisk such as conferencing, ACD, queuing, etc.

But this is just the start of this business model. Fribush explains that no one has taken cool open-source apps into a production-ready environment with support, allowing you to run your business on it. He alluded to the fact that just most technical among us have tried such things.

For example they have built-in IVR, an outbound dialer, A2Billing (a popular open-source prepaid calling platform), Vicidial (a popular outbound dialer) and more. This as a reminder is all hosted.

My two cents? There is a certain magic to providing hosted best-of-breed Asterisk solutions in a SaaS model to small business customers. The open source market is incredible in how rich it is but it is scary to many small companies who don't really want to deal with the problems of keeping their phone system up and running themselves.

What Aretta Communications does is take much of the pain away from utilizing the best open source applications. This is truly a great way to enjoy the great taste of open-source communications while enjoying the less filling sensation of keeping the hardware and backup problems out of your office.

The company sells direct to small business and they have over 500 customers so far.

Check out the company's Asterisk channel on TMCnet for more.

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Super Tuesday Web Traffic

I was curious to see how much web traffic the various candidates have for today's Super Tuesday election and I was a bit surprised to see the results. This is where it stands so far (candidates in random order):

Candidate	Unique US Visitors/Month
Hillary Clinton	245,113
Barrack Obama	378,900
Mitt Romney	227,442
Mike Huckabee	383,016
John McCain	139,694

I used Quantcast to get these numbers by the way.

I would have expected Obama to have more unique visitors because of the younger demographic that he attracts. I would expect McCain to have low numbers because of the combination of his attraction to more "seasoned" (read less web savvy) voters and the fact that voters know him well already and don't need to check out his website to learn about his positions.

The surprise here for me is without a doubt Mike Huckabee. Either he is spending more on online marketing than others or there is more interest in him than others. I wonder how these numbers will equate to votes today. It will be very interesting to see.

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Target Blows off Bloggers

Recently Target responded to a blogger request with the following message...

"Unfortunately we are unable to respond to your inquiry because Target does not participate with nontraditional media outlets. This practice is in place to allow us to focus on publications that reach our core guest."

Apparently Target doesn't consider bloggers to be worthy of their time and energy. While I understand that not every company has the resources to engage every blogger, I think companies that don't realize just how important bloggers have become are out of touch with reality and obviously don't search the web themselves to see where the search engines are sending their potential customers.

To think that in this day and age any company can control their messaging via  a few large media outlets is a big mistake. This will certainly be a lesson that Target learns over time.

More at Chief Marketer.

See also NY Times vs. Blogs: A Surprise Winner

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Foundry Powers XM

Good news for Foundry Networks as XM Satellite radio has allowed the company to go public with the fact that the leading satellite radio company has chosen Foundry's BigIron, FastIron SuperX, FastIron SX 800 and FastIron Edge X series Layer 2/3 switches to power their satellite broadcasts to subscribers.

Foundry seems to have been doing very well lately and this announcement is certainly a boost to the company's reputation.

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Level3 Cuts

It seems that Level3 will have some more cuts as a result of a steep loss this quarter. Over 1,000 people or 16% of the company's workforce will be getting the axe according to TheStreet.com. I was a bit surprised by this news actually. I didn't think things were this bad for the company.

Part of the reason I was caught off guard is that I have been hearing that in many regions, the company has pursued an acquisition strategy which put them in the position of being one of a few fiber carriers and this resulted in increased pricing power.

My contacts in the carrier hotel space however predicted the company would continue to have problems. It seems that in this case the carrier hotel people hit the nail on the head. This is not surprising as they are generally "well connected."

By the way, I don't mean to make light of the situation as it is terrible news whenever there are job losses at a company. Still, this move should result in a stronger Level3 which will hopefully be better for the remaining workers.

I should mention that Level3 has been pretty quiet these past few years which is probably not a great sign. I suppose at some point they need to go on a positive PR/marketing campaign to boost employee and market confidence in choosing the company as a business partner.

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Worldgate Problems

I read on Tom Keating's blog that Worldgate, the maker of the Ojo Videophone was in trouble. Apparently Worldgate has been short or out of money for about six months and industry insiders tell me that they have high expenses and the revenue just wasn't there to support it all.

A while back, the company started to have good success calibrating their phones for the hard of hearing and deaf but it seems this market did not bring the ROI in a timely fashion due to the delays associated with government funding.

I agree with Tom that this phone is an incredible device/service and it is a shame to see these problems.

Some think that once the government money comes in, that the company will be in better shape but it seems that once news like this gets out, it becomes that much more difficult to become a viable entity again.

I have heard the reason the company hasn't done better is that they decided that their video quality has to be very good and subsequently the cost of the devices and service was very high. This of course reduced the number of people who could afford the product/service.

According to sources in the know, the potential investors who considered throwing a life-line were put off buy the fact that the company did not reduce the functionality of the device so it could interoperate with cheaper devices. Instead, customers needed to have all Worldgate devices and this reduced the viability of the company being successful.

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