Communications and Technology Blog

10 Lessons from Volleyball, Part 2

By Peter on Thursday, May 23

Part 1 of the 10 Business Lessons from Volleyball can be found here. In volleyball, the only play you control yourself is...

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Tagged sales, strategy, volleyball

CloudTC and N-Able Acquired

By Peter on Wednesday, May 22

"Australian-owned IP PBX systems company, Vixtel, has completed the acquisition of Silicon Valley based glass phone developer, CloudTC, for an undisclosed figure,"...

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Tagged hosted pbx, itexpo, mergers, phone system, RMM

ProfitBricks: Where InfiniBand Meets Cloud 2.0

By Rich Tehrani on Wednesday, May 22

In a recent meeting with William Toll and Pete Johnson of ProfitBricks, the pair were ecstatic to explain how their company has...

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Tagged amazon, cloud computing, data center, ec2, infiniband, interop, profitbricks, public cloud, technology

Proactive Care Puts Operators One Step Ahead

By Peter Bernstein on Monday, May 20

By Thomas Fuerst, Senior Director, Multimedia Solutions MarketingAlcatel-Lucent

Monitoring and analyzing network data proactively saves operators time, money, and customers.

When a network service fails, it makes headlines, ticks off customers, and costs that network operator money. When a failure is headed off in advance, on the other hand, there might not be praise-laden headlines, but it's newsworthy nonetheless.

The traditional approach to customer care has typically been: a disgruntled customer calls customer service and complains of a service interruption or problem; the rep, learning of it for the first time, sends out a technician the next day, and eventually finds a resolution. Often, customers are left feeling put out, and the operator has spent significant time and money resolving the problem. Even worse is the customer who doesn’t call and just feels this is ‘typical’ of their network experience. That is a customer at risk of leaving.

Proactive care flips this dynamic on its head by using predictive analytics to identify potential outages or errors in the network and stop them before they occur. It consists of three main parts: one, constantly monitoring and measuring data on the network; two, real-time analysis of the data; and three, the most important, acting on that analysis to fix the problem.

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Tagged Alcatel-Lucent, big data, customer care, KPIs, network monitoring, procativecare | Responses

10 Lessons from Volleyball

By Peter on Monday, May 20

I've played volleyball for over 25 years. I have traveled around the US to watch the pros live - both indoor...

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Tagged hiring, strategy, volleyball

Emerging Threats Combats a Million Plus Pieces of New Malware a Week

By Rich Tehrani on Friday, May 17

There are 250,000 plus new pieces of malware being produced each day equating to one piece per person in the US in...

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Tagged emerging threats, interop, malware, security

NFV-Based Software Telcos Need OSS/BSS Interoperability

By Rich Tehrani on Friday, May 17

One of the goals of ETSI NFV is to allow new entrants to provide solutions to carriers based on software instead of...

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Tagged bss, carrier, ericsson, huawei, interoperability, nfv, nokia siemens networks, nsn, oss, sdn, software telco

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GM to Facebook: Your ads Don't Work

May 16, 2012

When you are about to have one of the largest public offerings in the world - north of $100 billion and much of the reason for the size of your IPO has to do with advertising revenue, there is nothing worse than having one of the world's largest and most sophisticated advertisers telling you your ads don't work. And that is exactly what just happened to Facebook when GM pulled the plug on a $10 million dollar ad deal.

To put this in perspective, GM is the third largest advertiser in the US and its budget is absolutely huge. Last year in fact it was $1.8B. The interesting part of the situation is that even though GM won't be continuing its ad spend this year it plans on continuing to spend $30M or so for Facebook content.

What this tells us is Facebook is just becoming a driver of the Splinternet or another Internet which advertisers and developers need to take into account.

Posted in E-Commerce, Financial, Google, ITEXPO, Technology

Tagged: advertising, bi, facebook, gm, google, ipo, vonage, wsj : Related Tags: facebook, advertising, company, largest, content, companies

Two Get Prison over $4.4M in VoIP Fraud

May 16, 2012

Every technology which can be used for good can be used for bad as well and that is what I couldn't help but think about when I learned a federal judge sentenced Vinod Tonangi and Harjeet Bhambhani to over a year in prison for $4.4 million in VoIP fraud. They were further ordered to serve three years of supervised release, and Tonangi owes $1.7 million in restitution.

Using companies Paradise Communications, Reach Communications and Airtel Holdings they resold wholesale telecom service which didn't exist according an article in the Wall Street Journal.

They both pleaded guilty to one count to commit wire fraud.

Unfortunately they also damaged the trust level of the wholesale telecom market - and whether this is permanent damage or not remains to be seen. I expect upstart telecom wholesalers to have to deal with more red tape to prove they are legitimate going forward.

Posted in VoIP

Tagged: fraud, voip, wholesale, wsj : Related Tags: wholesale telecom, telecom, fraud

Kickstarter: Sometimes the Cloud Can't Keep a Secret

May 15, 2012

Data breaches happen - a while back Moveable Type upgraded its blogging software and posts scheduled to be seen at a later date were given away by tag pages which posted immediately. In other words if a blogger wrote about a new Version of Microsoft Word and scheduled the post for later in the week,the tag pages - for things like "word processor," "microsoft," "pc" and any others would be immediately visible to readers and search engines.

Yours Truly was hit by this bug a few times and was even accused of not honoring an embargo as a result.

Point being - data breaches are real and they happen in the cloud as well as in-house systems.

Kickstarter recently had a breach as well where 77,000 projects became accessible via an API which the Wall Street Journal was able to access until around 1:40pm EST this past Friday, May 11th.

If there is good news it is that Kickstarter has 77,000 projects and financial data wasn't disclosed - as a refresher, the company helps get new products off the ground by crowdfunding and taking a 5% cut. The highest profile project may be from Arianna Huffington who is trying to use the platform to buy back the company she founded The Huffington Post from AOL for $1B.

Will this breach result in a major problem for Kickstarter? Probably not - unless it happens repeatedly.

Posted in E-Commerce, Technology

Tagged: aol, api, arianna huffington, crowdfunding, hacker, huffington post, kickstarter, moveable type, wsj : Related Tags: house systems, breaches happen, kickstarter, happen, cloud, breaches

Ultrabooks Finally Get Needed Attention From Intel

May 4, 2012

Intel is running a new ad touting the long-lasting Ultrabook which has hours of battery life. And while I applaud Intel for finally acknowledging this category needs marketing I am still at a loss. You see battery life is one of the features which makes a MacBook great and so is the wonderful design. We all know Ultrabooks exist almost exclusively so PC makers can compete with Apple.

So this being the case why do all the Ultrabooks except the ones from Asus and possibly Samsung look like absolute crap?

Posted in Apple, Consumer Electronics, Financial, Gadget, Microsoft, Technology, Ultrabook

Tagged: advertising, apple, asus, best buy, dell, hp, intel, laptop, mac, macbook, marketing, tablet, toshiba, ultrabook, xps, zdnet, zenbook : Related Tags: ultrabooks, apple, intel, category, marketing, store

Important Stories From This Week's Business Insider Startup 2012 Event

May 4, 2012

Missed the Business Insider Startup 2012 event or just didn't take good notes? Well if either of these situations applies to you, TMC has you covered. Our network of sites has been populated with the must-know stories written by TMC's editorial team - Jamie Epstein and Juliana Kenny covered this event. Enjoy:

Posted in Apple, Financial, Google, Social Networking, Technology

Tagged: apple, arianna huffington, google, kickstarter : Related Tags: business insider, arianna huffington, startup event, insider startup, startup, business

Pirated Music, From Napster to Kazaa and Now VPNs

May 2, 2012

I was at a conference some years back where one of the panels discussed how VoIP was blocked unsuccessfully in country after country. The point the speaker made was you can't stop IP. Users and developers are always one step ahead, masking their packets in ways (HTTP, etc) which gets through firewalls and other systems designed to thwart such communications.

I remember something similar happening when Airlines provided WiFi for the first time and blocked VoIP yet Andy Abramson found a way through.

So it should come as no surprise that music sharing which started with Napster, moved onto other services like Kazaa, Pirate Bay and has now evolved to use VPNs.

Now the challenge for record labels and others looking to determine who is sharing and what has grown substantially. The downside?

Posted in Broadband, Consumer Electronics, Skype, Technology

Tagged: kazaa, music, napster, pirate bay, vpn : Related Tags: sharing, music

Avengers Tech and Toys Assembled

May 2, 2012

Let’s face it, superheroes are pretty cool and aside from Batman and a few others, most of them are low tech.

Try for example to post a status update with a hammer.

But wait, when you merge low-tech superheroes and the desire for studios to offset the millions of movie investment dollars, you get the opportunity for lots of new movie-branded paraphernalia. And who better than Rich Steeves at TMCnet to go through the numerous toys and other products which go along with the movie?

Check out the video for more.

Posted in Consumer Electronics, Technology

Tagged: avengers, hasbro, rich steeves, tmc : Related Tags: movie

Why Samsung Must Have a Successful Media Player

May 2, 2012

If Samsung is the anti-Apple and with their success in the smartphone space you have to consider them a strong alternative, then they have to have a strategy which allows them to emulate Apple in order to be as successful. By this I mean, Apple has the amazing ability to sell a range of products which are highly similar and yet each is in its own category.

You want an inexpensive music player for the kids? The Apple answer, an iPod Touch.

Posted in 4G, Android, Apple, Technology, Unified Communications, Verizon, Wireless

Tagged: android, apple, google, ipad, iphone, ipod, media player, samsung, tv : Related Tags: apple answer, media player, samsung, apple, touch, product

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Communications and Technology Blog - Tehrani.com