Gmail Outage, Safari, Skype go 4.0 and Neutral Tandem Outperforms

This has been a very busy news week and I have tagged dozens of stories to cover but haven’t had time to write about them all in separate entries so here is a summary of what you need to know from today.

Stacy Higginbotham over at GigaOm has a short but sweet summary of the recent 2.5 hour Gmail outage with lots of interesting links. Google did post a nice apology by the way but I am sure it comes as little consolation to people affected.

In a sign we could be at the bottom (let’s hope) of the financial mess, consumer confidence hit an all-time low and perhaps more surprising is the fact that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke testified today and made markets go up by sating we could see an economic light at the end of the tunnel in 2010.

From the guts of the economy I take you to the guts of computing where TMC’s own Zippy Grigonis explains like no one else can the importance of the new Emerson Network Power Dual Core AdvancedMC module.

From there we go to the new Apple Safari 4 which is Apple’s latest browser which is not only much faster but now sports a home page with graphical icons similar to Google’s Chrome. It claims to be 30 times faster than Microsoft IE and my informal tests I have trouble disagreeing.

Skype too has a 4.0 version out and the word at TMC is this is a much better iteration – slicker and it now displays a number on the taskbar corresponding to how many conversations you have going on.

The final bit of news is about Neutral Tandem, the company is completing its IP voice network transformation with Sonus. What these two companies have in common is their low profiles. Since the demise of VON you barely see Sonus and they have a new management team which I haven’t had time to connect with. During the telecom bubble the company had a market cap of $20 billion but has come down to $326 million this month.

Neutral Tandem, the company providing an alternative carrier network to the ILECs is as under the radar as you get yet they have stock performance which is staggering. Over the past five years they have gone down in value under 10% and the stock is about as Stable as McDonalds, one of the brightest companies in this economy. Perhaps these bullets from the company’s earnings announcement earlier this month are the reason. Wow.

Full Year 2008 Highlights

  • Revenue of $120.9 million, up 41.2% from $85.6 million in 2007
  • Pretax income of $36.8 million, up 194.4% from $12.5 million for 2007
  • Net income of $24 million, compared to $6.3 million for 2007
  • Adjusted EBITDA of $51.4 million, up 73.1% from $29.7 million in 2007
  • Billed minutes of 61 billion, an increase of 48.8% over 2007
  • Commenced operations in 36 additional markets

The company’s market cap is holding steady at $602 million. I look forward to covering Neutral Tandem in greater detail going forward.

  • Christina
    February 26, 2009 at 4:00 am

    I’m very interested in seeing if Apple’s Safari 4.0 performs any better than the past version. Since switching over to a MAC I found Safari to be lacking in features. I’m going to try the beta with the hopes that this new version isn’t just pretty but also functional.

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