Suzanne Bowen
32 yrs in telecom, teaching, blog & grant writing, biz development, marketing, & PR. Favorite moments in life involve time w/ family & friends, networking, IP communications industry verticals & horizontals, running, traveling, foreign languages
| 1. "Focusing your life solely on making a buck shows a certain poverty of ambition..." Barack Obama .....
2. "One of the sad signs of our times is that we have demonized those who produce, subsidized those who refuse to produce, and canonized those who complain." By Thomas Sowell
10 Lessons from Volleyball, Part 2
Part 1 of the 10 Business Lessons from Volleyball can be found here. In volleyball, the only play you control yourself is...
Full Story »
CloudTC and N-Able Acquired
"Australian-owned IP PBX systems company, Vixtel, has completed the acquisition of Silicon Valley based glass phone developer, CloudTC, for an undisclosed figure,"...
Full Story »
ProfitBricks: Where InfiniBand Meets Cloud 2.0
In a recent meeting with William Toll and Pete Johnson of ProfitBricks, the pair were ecstatic to explain how their company has...
Full Story »
Proactive Care Puts Operators One Step Ahead
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.
Full Story »
10 Lessons from Volleyball
I've played volleyball for over 25 years. I have traveled around the US to watch the pros live - both indoor...
Full Story »
Emerging Threats Combats a Million Plus Pieces of New Malware a Week
There are 250,000 plus new pieces of malware being produced each day equating to one piece per person in the US in...
Full Story »
NFV-Based Software Telcos Need OSS/BSS Interoperability
One of the goals of ETSI NFV is to allow new entrants to provide solutions to carriers based on software instead of...
Full Story »Participate in the DIDX and Level3/Comcast Debacle Talk with me on VUC
December 2, 2010Every Friday at 12 Noon Eastern Time (9AM Pacific) – 12 noon EST! Check for world timezone conversion.
The VoIP Users Conference is a weekly live discussion about VoIP, SIP, Asterisk and all kinds of telephony-related topics. The conference has been running for three years.
Dec. 3, 2010 at 12 noon EST (USA time zone), login to the VoIP Users' Conference via Skype:vuc.me, +1 (415) 800-5469, or sip:200901@login.zipdx.com and be a part of a live conversation with me Suzanne Bowen, vice president of Super Technologies, about my trek in VoIP since 1994, issues and benefits of DIDX and virtual phone lines, and ideas on the future of voice, as well as the Comcast and Level 3 peering story.
See http://www.voipusersconference.org/ and http://gigaom.com/2010/12/01/comcast-level-3-battle/.
Friendly Business Fraud and Preventing Chargebacks
November 23, 2010Image by Cody Simms via Flickr
One annual expense our company gladly pays for is our Better Better Business Bureau membership. The organization holds us accountable to certain objective criteria that points to ... what else? Integrity, honesty, quality and other such professional characteristics and ideals.Ask Mobile Guru James Body Anything about Travel and Phones
November 23, 2010Image via Wikipedia
[11:12:18 AM]Hi James. Do you have a moment? I have a friend who will be traveling through Europe on business for about a month.[11:12:58 AM] James Body: Did you know that I was in Florida last week?
[11:13:32 AM] James Body: Truphone has TWO different offerings:
[11:14:00 AM] James Body: - Truphone VoIP (moble apps on smartphones that do SIP VoIP over WiFi and/or 3G data)
[11:14:47 AM] James Body: - Truphone Local Anywhere - a multi-IMSI SIM which morphs as you travel between different countries in order that you are always 'local'
[11:15:01 AM] James Body: The two can work together
[11:15:55 AM] James Body: I did check Google maps to see how far away Pensacola was from where I was - but it was a horribly long way
[11:16:16 AM] James Body: Florida is just a bit bigger than England!
[11:17:23 AM] Suzanne Bowen: So he has a Flipphone. Shouldn't he get something different while he is there?
[11:17:46 AM] James Body: I have no idea what a Flipphone is....
[11:17:47 AM] Suzanne Bowen: Yes, Florida could be a nation all on its own.
Need Persons with Knowledge and/or Experience of State of Mobile in Pakistan
November 16, 2010Image via Wikipedia
All who wish to help out, do not need to answer all the questions, just the ones that you believe you have some verifiable knowledge of and/or experience with. Feel free to answer here in comment or send me answers via Facebook email, on Linkedin or directly to my work email @didx.net.
Also, you will receive recognition for all of your responses with credit to your name, your company and your company or blog website, but please don't forget to provide that to me.
4G World Goes to China April 2011
November 12, 2010
Heard of 4G World? 2011's event was held Oct. 18-21 at McCormick Place in Chicago. It attracted over 10,000 registered attendees and more than 250 sponsors* (including our company's DIDXhange), and had over 150 exhibitors.
Mobile operators, MVNOs, M2M service providers, and all companies and individuals with an interest in global broadband connectivity products, services, issues and collaborations ...
Mobile operators, MVNOs, M2M service providers, and all companies and individuals with an interest in global broadband connectivity products, services, issues and collaborations ...
As an Introvert and a Lifelong Addicted Learner, I read open source telephony lists
November 8, 2010
I recommend that others in IP communications and related industry join the forums for Asterisk-Biz, freeSWITCH, and Kamailio lists. Even if you do not have time to read the posts at the moment they arrive in your mailbox, just filter them to go to some archive and read them when you can. Our company has developed business with thousands of developers and entrepreneurs around the world through the lists, but we also learn quite a bit about APIs, open source code advice, PBX, and such.
A couple TMC blog posts ago of mine was a copy of my response to many accusations by Asterisk-Biz list members regarding DIDX, its service, its website, the customer service, me, my colleagues, one of our customers and vendors and my business partner Rehan Allahwala.
Time Warp ... Well, One Hour's Worth
November 7, 2010Image via Wikipedia
In preparation for international business teleconferences, as of today November 7, 2010, we will have to ask first; who observes this time saving and who does not? Whereas, we might have been '11 hours apart' in time yesterday; today we are 10 hours apart in 'time.'
Do we need daylight added to afternoon hours? Some Wikipedia contributors state and believe that "the practice has never been criticized."
But it has been criticized.
Discussion of DIDX on Asterisk-Biz List Includes Culture Clashes
November 5, 2010
As the Internet and mobile services bring together more and more from the East and West, cultural issues will cause clashes. It is scary to see that there is another way than the way we or you are used to doing things, isn't it? This discussion has only made my company team even more excited about serving our customers the very best we can.
Read the whole set of threads in DIDX Query at http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-biz/2010-November/thread.html.
Here is a copy of my second and final response on this topic.
From: Suzanne Bowen Date: Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 8:20 AMSubject: Re: DIDX Query (Dan Journo)To: asterisk-biz@lists.digium.com
Just finished studying every item regarding Dan's DIDX Query on whether or not buying 50 USA DIDs at $.15 per month would satisfy the 50 minimum DID quantity fee on DIDX. Follow-ups:
1.
Read the whole set of threads in DIDX Query at http://lists.digium.com/pipermail/asterisk-biz/2010-November/thread.html.
Here is a copy of my second and final response on this topic.
From: Suzanne Bowen Date: Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 8:20 AMSubject: Re: DIDX Query (Dan Journo)To: asterisk-biz@lists.digium.com
Just finished studying every item regarding Dan's DIDX Query on whether or not buying 50 USA DIDs at $.15 per month would satisfy the 50 minimum DID quantity fee on DIDX. Follow-ups:
1.
Verizon Stops Fee to Customers Paying for Service with Credit Cards
October 19, 2010
Bravo, Verizon!
Verizon (NYSE: VZ) apparently realized that if it wants to attract more FiOS subscribers, not to mention keeping its current subscribers happy, it should not charge users $3.50 to pay their bill on line with a credit card.
On its Twitter account, Verizon spokesman Bill Kula says the company is going to "evaluate" the fee.
More at FierceTelecom...
I hope consumers and organizations see more of this from their service providers and vendors. It has always made me cringe when I knew that our company or any other company considers charging its customers for paying them money. I mean ... think about it.
Verizon (NYSE: VZ) apparently realized that if it wants to attract more FiOS subscribers, not to mention keeping its current subscribers happy, it should not charge users $3.50 to pay their bill on line with a credit card.
On its Twitter account, Verizon spokesman Bill Kula says the company is going to "evaluate" the fee.
More at FierceTelecom...
I hope consumers and organizations see more of this from their service providers and vendors. It has always made me cringe when I knew that our company or any other company considers charging its customers for paying them money. I mean ... think about it.
