TMCnet

Comcast Digital Voice passes two million

March 1, 2007

Comcast, a major provider of cable, entertainment and communications products and services, today announced it has surpassed the two million customer milestone for Comcast Digital Voice. The company celebrated by awarding a customer in southeast Michigan with a digital home makeover to take advantage of the new integrated features that are available through its Triple Play package of phone, high-speed Internet
and video services.

Relatedly, in December of last year, TMCnet reported that Cablevision had also reached two million VoIP customers and also announced a major upgrade to their Optimum Online high-speed Internet. It raised the speed of its core Optimum Online service, from up to 10 megabits-per-second (Mbps) downstream and 1 Mbps upstream, to new speeds of up to 15 Mbps downstream and 2 Mbps upstream, at no additional charge. Almost makes me wish I still had Cablevision (I switched to DSL).

Posted in TMCnet, VoIP

AT&T Lightspeed ahead! (NOT!)

March 1, 2007

AT&T won't be reaching 18 million homes this year with its "Lightspeed" U-Verse IPTV & VDSL broadband network, giving more credence to my AT&T U-Verse Doomed? article. The ironic thing is that AT&T just a few days go stated it was ready for an aggressive rollout of U-verse. They told the San Antonio Express News that it had ironed out technical glitches with the service and is readying a breakneck expansion that will take it to all major cities in its 22-state service area and 8 million households by year-end.

Posted in Home Entertainment, TMCnet, Triple Play, Video Hardware & Software, VoIP

CompUSA store closings

March 1, 2007

CompUSA will close more than half of its retail computer and electronics stores in the next two to three months. CompUSA said it would shutter 126 stores - it currently operates 225 in the U.S. and Puerto Rico - within 90 days as part of a massive restructuring. Wow, first Radio Shack closes 700 stores, and now this? What's happening to these major name-brand brick-n-mortar electronics and PC stores?

Meanwhile, Apple seems to be opening a new Apple Store every week - 174 and counting... Maybe it's part of Steve Jobs diabolical plan to give Bill Gates a 15 year head start on being the leading revenue generator for bring-n-mortar electronics/PCs/software stores. Something smells fishy in Cupertino!

Posted in News, TMCnet

Skype Prime Allows Users to Charge for Calls

March 12, 2007

A beta of the Skype client recently made available allows users to charge for voice and video calls placed to their account through a new service called Skype Prime. eBay-owned Skype has developed Skype Prime to grant users the ability to either charge by the minute or a single charge for the entire call. Fees would be taken out of the caller's Skype account, and the called party would receive 70 percent of the proceeds collected, payable through PayPal, another eBay-owned proprietary. This is very similar to Ether, a service I have written about, except Ether gives you a separate phone number.

Posted in Skype, TMCnet, VoIP

Microsoft - Tellme - What does it mean?

March 14, 2007

Microsoft has acquired Tellme Networks, a hosted provider of speech-recognition solutions. I had dinner with some Microsoft reps last night at Tao Restaurant in NYC and asked about the pending Tellme deal, but their lips were sealed and they wouldn't even acknowledge such an acquisition was pending. But I saw right through their poker faces, and with a wink and a smile they changed the subject. I was actually meeting with them to check out a demo of Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 which combines VoIP, presence, and other features for a "unified communications" experience.

Posted in Microsoft, Mobile Phones, TMCnet, Wireless

Cisco acquires WebEx

March 15, 2007

Cisco has acquired WebEx for approximately $3.2 billion, according to the Cisco website. WebEx is one of the most well-known companies in the hosted on-demand collaboration application space. Although WebEx is very well-known (who hasn't used it?), in my opinion Cisco overpaid for WebEx. First, the hosted collaboration space is very crowded. You have Raindance, Placeware (now part of Microsoft), Genesys, and a dozen other smaller players all in the web collaboration space.

Posted in Microsoft, TMCnet, VoIP

Clocky the alarm clock hides to block your snooze addiction

March 15, 2007

Do you hate getting up and the blaring alarm clock only results in you hitting the snooze 5 times and arriving to work late? Surely, you curse the alarm clock and accuse it of snoozing for only 9 minutes instead of 10, robbing you of 1 minute extra sleep. (Actually, little known fact, most alarm clocks snooze for 9 minutes not 10.)

Truly, you want to make it to work on time, but ohhhhh how tempting hitting the snooze button just 1 more time is. More Americans suffer from "snooze button addiction" than any other.

Posted in Gadgets, Home Entertainment, TMCnet, Technology and Science

Tello bites the dust

March 18, 2007

Tello, a Pulver-backed startup, apparently has packed it in. I covered Tello pretty in-depth last year (Jan 2006) in a skeptical article titled Tello, a near term solution? Apparently, it was very "near term" as it only lasted a little over a year. In my January post, I wrote, "At first glance, this hosted solution to the IM interoperability dilemma seems like a great idea. However, it seems like a near-term solution to me.

Posted in Microsoft, TMCnet, VoIP

Fonality's trixbox appliance Part 2

March 19, 2007

Fonality's release of their Linux-based trixbox appliance certainly is creating some buzz in the Asterisk community. According to Fonality, the trixbox appliance has the following features:

The appliance comes with a 4-port network card, so (just like the Digium appliance) you can do your office networking on it.
It comes pre-loaded with the trixbox software – which saves you time
It comes with two 80GB hard drives so it has lots of storage (the Digium appliance comes with 1 1GB flash drive).
The appliance comes with a powerful Intel processor (vs.

Posted in Asterisk, Linux, Reviews, TMCnet, VoIP

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