I wrote about how the government has rewarded failure and punished smart decisions just yesterday and today a friend sent me some photos which sum up the situation.
Anyone else sensing a pattern?
Anyone else sensing a pattern?
February 2009 Archives
You might have noticed I write about the iPhone a good deal. I just wonder if as often as I cover it if I am writing about it enough. You see the pocket-sized gadget has over 15,000 apps which run on it and even its drawbacks seem to spawn new industries. For example you can't use typical gloves on your iPhone so if you get a call in the winter and you don't have an exposed finger you have to use your nose to unlock the phone.
But letting your nostrils do the dialing was so yesterday when there is an assortment of new-aged, iPhone friendly gloves for you to choose from. Is this getting ridiculous or what? But wait, I remember one of my recent trips to New York on the train; I was stuck in an unheated space between cars with numerous holes in the floor. It must have been 20 below with the wind chill and I had one hand on the iPhone fighting frostbite while the other hand had a glove. I bet I would actually use these things...
Maybe I should get some to review.
What I've learned from the US government - regardless of party...
The more irresponsible you are, the more money you get and the better you do. Sorry - just blowing off steam, I am not sure how much of this we can take. Every person who made a bad decision seems to win the lottery.
Never in my life do I remember the rewards for doing the wrong thing being so great. As bad as the Ponzi-scheme bandits have been, they pale in comparison to the businesspeople and consumers who failed to exhibit any sense of responsibility in their spending and business philosophies and then reached into the pockets of citizens in good standing and the pockets of their descendants.
How will I ever teach my kids about responsibility with a straight face?
The more irresponsible you are, the more money you get and the better you do. Sorry - just blowing off steam, I am not sure how much of this we can take. Every person who made a bad decision seems to win the lottery.
Never in my life do I remember the rewards for doing the wrong thing being so great. As bad as the Ponzi-scheme bandits have been, they pale in comparison to the businesspeople and consumers who failed to exhibit any sense of responsibility in their spending and business philosophies and then reached into the pockets of citizens in good standing and the pockets of their descendants.
How will I ever teach my kids about responsibility with a straight face?
With all the talk of broadband stimulus, many of us in the more densely populated areas of the nation probably wonder just why this is such a big deal as we have cable and companies already competing for our business. For regions of the country where cable modems and DSL are not viable options, you have to make do with satellite and hope for WiMAX to give you higher speeds.
Another more viable option is being brought to market by IBM and International Broadband Electric Communications, Inc. (IBEC) -- an Internet Service Provider - who just announced they have begun to establish Broadband over Power Line (BPL) networks for nearly 200,000 rural customers served by seven electrical cooperatives in Alabama, Indiana, Michigan and Virginia. TMC's Michael Dinan first reported on the story last November.
IBM and IBEC, with the aid of government funding, are building broadband over power line networks in cooperation with member-owned electric utility co-ops across the nation. The first seven co-ops to participate include: Cullman Electric Cooperative in Alabama; Utilities District of Western Indiana REMC, Parke Country REMC and South Central REMC in Indiana; Midwest Energy Cooperative in Michigan; and BARC Electric Cooperative and Central Virginia Electric Cooperative in Virginia.
Bruce King, CEO of BARC Electric Cooperative in Virginia is looking forward to bringing broadband access to his community of 11,000 households and small businesses in the coming months. "I cannot go to church or rotary club meetings on the weekend without someone in the community asking me when we'll have high speed Internet access. Our members are orphans in the Internet world," said King. "I'm proud to be able to tell our members that it will only take us 1 percent of the money we invested in the electric system to begin with to enable it for broadband. I am a financial guy, and that is an overwhelming reason to do it."
Going forward, it seems the choices for rural broadband will be satellite, 3G, 4G (WiMAX/LTE), BPL, and perhaps white space technology (TMC will be announcing a new white spaces conference soon BTW - drop me a line if interested.) It will be interesting to see where this broadband stimulus money goes. It could dramatically accelerate BPL technology adoption which could have a negative effect on WiMAX or other wireless technologies. Conversely it could benefit wireless at the expense of BPL. The jury is still out.
Broadband stimulus plan evolution will be worth watching as it will be the ultimate public/private partnership where lobbying and other "relationships" rather than survival of the technology fittest will determine which companies and technologies are left standing. While at first blush this should scare the hell out of us, the government has been an important advocate of technologies in the past such as UNIX and their early support is partly responsible for the open-source revolution. I hope this stimulus plan is more like the UNIX example and less like the never-ending banking and automotive "stimulus" the government has been experimenting with these past months.
![georgesoros_203ap[1].jpg](http://blog.tmcnet.com/blog/rich-tehrani/uploads/georgesoros_203ap%5B1%5D.jpg)
Billionaire investor George Soros seems to be a fan of tech and telecom as evidenced by the recent Soros Fund Management SEC filing. Holdings include a ton of familiar tech and telecom names and I listed some of them below. Amazingly, about 50% are tech or telecom related.
Here is the complete list for those of you who are interested.
- AT&T
- Agere Systems
- Amdocs
- Audiocodes
- Avnet
- BigBand Networks
- Bluefly
- CA
- Cadence Design Systems
- Ciena
- Cirrus Logic
- Digirad (nuclear cardiology - it is tech - just not something I write about)
- Digital River (ecommerce solutions)
- EMC
- Emulex (storage networking products)
- Flextronics
- Harmonic Inc. (Interactive network video)
- HP
- Hologic (Digital Mammography - again - tech - not something I cover currently)
- Informatica
- Internet Brands
- LSI Corp
- Lattice Semiconductor
- Microsoft
- PAETEC Holdings
- Red Hat
- RF Microdevices
- Sprint Nextel
- Symantec
- Symmetricom
- TW Telecom
- Tech Data
- TI
- Time Warner Cable
- Verizon
- Wind River
- Yahoo
- Radware
Here is a solid article on how CRM is recession-resistant. Now more than ever it is critical that companies realize they need to invest to keep their existing customers and to get new ones. Business in general is tougher to get which means you need better tools and CRM is exactly what the doctor ordered.
Verizon is thinking about offering a $5/month landline for incoming calls and E911 access. Another idea is a $10/month line for limited local calls. These offers would be available only to the company's broadband customers and the idea is to come up with price points below the $40/month mark that would retain customers. The idea of course is to push the fact that phone service over copper works in the event of emergency.
The classic challenge for the company is how to retain customers without cannibalizing revenue. In my opinion the price points under consideration are perfect but I would use $4.95 and $9.95. In addition, I would roll out the service to companies who opt for cable phone service as well. Why? To keep the customer relationships alive and to hopefully upsell these customers over time.
Company spokesman Eric Rabe explains that customers see security in land lines as they do not require batteries to work effectively. If Verizon goes forward with these price points the goal will be to minimize cannibalization while being careful not to talk down the security of the company's other services such as wireless and FiOS.
Thanks to all the editors and bloggers who covered ITEXPO East 2009 in Miami and/or posted photos. Also, thank you all for the nice comments about the show. Most can be found here and some are in this blog entry with photos. To keep this post manageable, I have not posted every entry I found, just most. I did try to get at least one post per writer and if I missed you, it was a sincere mistake and if you send me a link I promise to update this post to make it more accurate.
Of the 15,000 applications now available on the iPhone, it figures one would allow you to count cards. Not surprisingly A Blackjack Card Counter allows you improve your odds of winning in stealth mode meaning you can benefit from computer-assisted card counting without giving yourself away. As you might imagine the Nevada State Gaming Commission is less than amused and has sent warnings to casinos about this new application. By the way if you are caught using it in Vegas, you will go to jail. And that is just not the kind of enhanced service you want to subscribe to.
In 1998 I was walking the halls of a prepaid calling card trade show in New York's Javits center and I mentioned to one of the vendors that the future for service providers was enhanced services. The reply from the vendor was blunt. "Service providers don't want to sell enhanced services," he exclaimed.
And it seems a decade later, this random exhibitor was right on. I have seen dozens of really cool services which I would think customers would pay for only to find they just don't get rolled out in the US. Sometimes they emerge in Asia but never in the west. Exceptions -- SMS and ringtones, seem almost silly in their simplicity and grotesque in their profit margins.
IMS was supposed to change all of this allowing a framework for developers to give us the next generation of sticky, viral applications. But this just didn't happen. It is obvious to me the service provider culture is as far-removed from that of rapid application development as possible.
And then there is the app store craze launched by Apple and allowed by AT&T. Can service providers ever profit from new services when app store apps are so compelling? And free?! Don't forget about Google. The search leader never met a service it didn't give away for free. Just how do you compete with an army of iPhone and Google developers if you are a provider? Can you launch a better Facebook? Twitter? Even if you could, how do you generate SMS-sized revenue if these two web juggernauts can't?
But from a revenue perspective, does it even matter if the carriers have the walled garden they once sought? Perhaps not if the growth of wireless broadband continues at its current rate. Just think of it, the majority of people in the developed world want at least one wireless broadband-enabled device. Some, like me have two devices - one for typing like a Blackberry and another for surfing like an iPhone. Then there is the Kindle, another broadband-enabled mobile device which lets you read your books, newspapers and blogs on the go. What's next? What other devices, applications and services will become popular and drive ever-more service provider revenue?
These are the sorts of questions being asked and answered by the new multi-industry ng Connect Program, founded by Alcatel-Lucent. The goal of the group is to establish a rich and diverse ecosystem of infrastructure, devices, content and applications for both mobile and fixed broadband networks including 4G, LTE, GPON and other ultra high bandwidth technologies.
The group will accelerate deployment of new devices and services by helping to determine interoperability across industries such as automotive, entertainment, wireless and consumer electronics. One area where there is a need for better integration is consumer electronics and automotive where in many cases a simple headphone jack is the extent of the integration. Or even worse, a car's stereo system tuned to a predetermined FM frequency to play music from a handheld music player which has an attached FM transmitter.
The value proposition for members include access to research, reduced development costs and a first mover advantage across markets. For carriers there is the increased use of broadband, reduced OPEX and churn and accelerated time to market.
For consumers the benefits include better integration of disparate entertainment systems, a higher level of value for devices which are part of this initiative, enhanced payment options and perhaps lower cost for a variety of next-gen services and devices.
Other participants in this association include HP, Samsung, and 4DK, Buzznet, chumby, Connect2Media, dimedis, FISHLABS, QNX, SIGNEXX, Total Immersion, TuneWiki and Words & Numbers. My thoughts are the group is filling a much-needed void but it is biting off more than most groups and success will be a challenge. I am encouraged by the participation of Samsung and HP but this group needs many more big names before it has a chance to make a dent in the disciplines it hopes to bring together. Sony, Dell, Microsoft and Google are obvious targets and Apple is needed but I wonder if they think there is a benefit in joining forces with any of these companies.
So the opportunity is there and service providers - if you are smart, you will watch this group closely and get involved at the appropriate time. It should be obvious that the next-generation of devices, services and media can generate much more revenue. As consumers look to have their media delivered on a variety of devices, we have seen they will pay more for the privilege. If this group can insert itself appropriately and accelerate this trend, all members should be able to benefit and I hope I can finally prove that random trade show guy that I was right.
Resources
You may have heard Apple is allowing third party browsers on the iPhone but which is right for you? The first thing you probably need to know is all the browsers allowed on the iPhone by Apple have to be based on Safari. For more on Apple's latest view on jailbreaking and their argument that the iPhone does not need to be more open, see my thoughts from yesterday.
I downloaded and tested five of these browsers and each has its own strengths and weaknesses.
The first is Edge Browser which is free and allows web browsing to the edge of the screen with no pesky URL bar to get in the way. You are pretty much limited to a single website since you have nowhere to type a URL. You can use the options screen to specify the URL, a user name, password and other parameters. I tried to get this working with a security camera which has a web-based console but couldn't. The first problem was the browser seemed to not like URLs that did not start with WWW. So I used a few URL redirection services such as tinyURL and doiop but for whatever reason these didn't work with the Edge Browser. In the end I just used Google as my default home page which was the least limiting option I could think of.
The next browser is Incognito ($1.99) which allows you to surf anonymously. There isn't much to say about this browser except that I wish it allowed me access to my Safari bookmarks.
Shaking Web at $1.99 allows you to surf while riding the bus, etc and it uses proprietary technology to minimize shaking. I gave it to a colleague in my car who gets nauseous when reading and moving and sure enough he immediately gor nauseous using this program. The jury is out on this one... I am just not sure it is useful.
Webmate: Tabbed Browser is a very cool browser as it allows power browsing on the iPhone. Basically when you turn it on by pressing a button on the lower left, it causes every link you click on to be opened in the background in another window. This allows you to focus on the main page and go to the others when ready. Unlike Safari, you can use the forward and back buttons to get to the next or previous browser window (it also does not limit you to eight windows/tabs -- I didn't hit the upper limit but 30 was no problem) and a simple press on the garbage can closes the browser window you are on. This one can be useful.
Webmate Allows at Least 30 Browser Tabs to be Open
WebSave ($.99) is another interesting browser option with a twist. It allows you to save HTML files for offline viewing and when you click on a link such as a PDF it also allows you to save the file right to the iPhone. You can then use WiFi to have the program function as a web server allowing you to get access to the saved files from other computers on your network. When ready to share, the program gives you an IP address like 191.127.7.151:12345. You just have to add a preceding http:// and you can instantly get access to all saved files from any nearby browser.
WebSave Allows You to Save PDFs and other files
While these browser tweaks are useful, it would be even better to have other browser options like we do on our computers. It just seems unfair (is the word anticompetitive a stretch?) that Apple has a Safari browser which runs on a PC but does not allow an IE browser to run on the iPhone. But until this happens, enjoy what the censors in charge of the iTunes app store allow you access to.
It is amazing to me that we still need to have this conversation in an industry which is over a decade old but VoIP does not mean calls on the internet. Of course VoIP calls could traverse the internet but this is only if this is how the network is designed.
Having said that, it is worth pointing out the definition of telephony is the transmission of voice, video, fax, etc at a distance using electrical signals. Thus IP telephony is roughly equivalent to IP communications and neither has to travel over the internet.
Internet telephony on the other hand refers to the transmission of voice, video and/or fax, etc over the internet.
Hunter Newby brought to my attention that there needs to be more education on the topic and he is right on. Thanks Hunter.
Here is a well-written piece by Timothy B. Lee at the Cato Institute which focuses on how we can improve the patent system. It points out that patent trolls are merely a symptom of a patent system which is dysfunctional. In addition it touches on VoIP patents and is worth a read if you have interest in our patent system.
Remember that a patent system which favors trolls and large companies reduces innovation and is bad for society as a whole. It is easy to dismiss the patent system as something esoteric but in reality we lose out on innovation when the system works in a less than ideal fashion.
For those of you in the US - please enjoy the long weekend - everyone else - enjoy the weekend - and feel free to call in sick Monday. 
Here are some news stories of interest:
First off there is Dan York who finally tells us why he hasn't blogged in a while. He has been quite busy as he explains. Then there is the fight between the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Apple - the EFF is looking to have the jailbreaking of iPhones be an exception to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act's rules against breaking access protections. Apple says there are lots of apps out there so no need to jailbreak. The counterargument of course is if you open up, there will be more apps.
It is obvious consumers would benefit if the iPhone were to improve and the fact there are people willing to destroy their devices by jailbreaking them so they can do things like multitask seems like evidence enough that the market would be better served by allowing jailbreaking. Or perhaps the easier route is for Apple to allow multitasking and not decide which apps can get into the app store.
And if Apple isn't feeling the pressure from the EFF, they may want to look west - to Toshiba who is gunning for the iPhone with the TG01... And what Toshiba lacks in naming creativity they make up for in pixels as this device packs a whopping 800x480 resolution screen! Memo to Toshiba, Nokia beat you to this news (and resolution) with their N800 which came out years ago and I might add it kicks the crap out of the iPhone's graphics. Still, the product and the successor - the N810 were duds in the market. I guess the point is I will write nice things about you if you increase the resolution of your devices, but will people line up to buy a device from Toshiba because of a kick-ass screen? Stay tuned.
Then there is talk of the call center space booming. A new call center is opening in Vegas adding over 1,000 jobs to the area and this report explains there are other positive trends taking place in the market.
Finally, Twitter is in the news - they are the most talked about phenomenon of the year. I tell you, if we didn't have a banking system filled with incompetents and politicians who spend our money like an eastern European hacker who just broke into your bank account, I think all we would hear about is Twitter. BTW have you checked out the TMC Twitter page and mine as well? 
Anyway, the company has no business model and people punish them for this. Meanwhile it seems that every other person I know uses this service and if I don't tweet for a day, I feel guilty. The sort of feeling I get when I forget to get my wife a gift for Valentine's Day.
Whoops - hold on a sec, gotta logon to Proflowers. OK, back now.
The service has gained critical mass now and if properly managed can generate serious cash. At least that is what the investors who just put in $35 million into the company hope.
If these guys ever figure out a way to monetize their service and keep it from crashing, they will be a force to reckon with.
Signing off for now... Hope your weekends are stellar.
Good news for those of you who have been asking me when the videos of the major sessions at ITEXPO will be posted. They now are. The video page is located here and I cut and pasted some of them below -- as well as some interviews for you to enjoy.
One of my favorites is this one by the way.
Watch as several vendors pitch their Unified Communications solutions and position their products against one another!
02/12/2009
Get perspective from leading service providers exploring next generation solutions
02/12/2009
John Frederiksen, General Manager of Microsoft Response Point Keynote address at ITEXPO
02/12/2009
Interview with Grandstream Sr. Director of Business
Development, Khris Kendrick
Development, Khris Kendrick
02/08/2009
Interview with Voxeo's Director of Emerging
Communications Technology, Dan York
Communications Technology, Dan York
02/08/2009
Interview with New World Brands CFO/Pre-Sales Engineer, Shehryar Wahid/Daniel Engelman
02/05/2009
Interview with Smart Network Solutions President, Sandra Diax-Hoyos
02/05/2009
Interview with Polycom Director of Product Marketing, Desktop and Conferencing Business, Tim Yankey
02/05/2009
Interview with Fujitsu Principal Product Marketing Manager, Joseph Mocerino
02/05/2009
Interview with TelcoBridges Director of Sales Support, Marc St. Onge
02/04/2009
Interview with VoltDelta Vice President, Enterprise Services and Solutions, Craig DiAngelo
02/04/2009
Interview with Presence Technology Technical Director, Todd Gould
02/04/2009
Interview with Microsoft Response Point General Manager, John Frederiksen
02/04/2009
Interview with Texas Instruments Director of Service Provider Marketing for TI's Communications Infrastructure and Voice Business, Debbie Greenstreet
02/04/2009
Interview with Digium Switchvox Product Line Director, Tristan Degenhardt
02/03/2009
Interview with NET Quintum Director of Business Development, Peter Nelsen
02/03/2009
Interview with Juniper Senior Manager, Service Provider Marketing, Scott Heinlein
02/03/2009
Interview with Alcatel-Lucent Senior Director of Product Line Management for Alcatel-Lucent Unified Communications, Peter Anderholm
02/03/2009
Interview with IntelePeer Senior Vice President, Business Development, John Hart and Vice President, Product Management & Marketing, Charles Studt
02/02/2009
Interview with AudioCodes Director of Business Development, Alan Percy
02/02/2009
