December 2005 Archives

I spent the day with my wife and son hiking through the rain forest in North Vancouver, very refreshing indeed. If anyone is interested in some of the best mountain biking and hiking on the continent, check out Seymour Mountain in North Van, even now it's like +10 C.

As for VoIP Predictions, I will give only one... there will be a free VoIP service in 2006 not unlike Dial Pad, if you can sell minutes at 1 cent you can certainly give them away + advertising. Since online advertising is on the rise (faster than most expected) it's very possible this could work. Yep, all one needs is a few peering agreements and a good marketing plan, the company could easily become the chosen service provider, that is until the major providers follow along. 2006 should be another interesting year.

I wish you all the very best and may you all be healthy and happy!! Happy New Year!!

Hey everyone, for those who do not know how to create podcasts in a hurry you can do so for free over at Odeo.com. My channel is listed below.

My Odeo Channel (odeo/bdadba8304097712)

It's pretty easy to get started and you can also call in from a telephone line, the call is recorded and then converted to MP3 and posted on the web in your Odeo channel. It can then be listened to via the odeo player or downloaded to an iPod etc. Ok, so most of this is nothing new. Audioblog.com has been around for awhile but there is 1 significant difference, Odeo is free, at least as far as I can see. Yes, the telephone call is certainly not free but there is no monthly fee for using the service.

It's cool, check it.

Video Blogging will become real when those watching TV can view aggregated, edited and hosted shows. It looks like VHI's purchase of online video aggregator iFilm will come to life by way of Web Junk.

The show will apparently take over where traditional film shorts left off.

"Our intention as creators and aggregators of content is to treat our audience as publishers," Harrison said. "Now that we're going to be delivering a fully automated tool, users will be able to upload whatever video they want and they'll get a chance to get on TV as well.

"Web Junk 20" will include "celebrity material, current news material, local TV and clips like "cop shoots self in foot," an all-time classic, Hirschorn said. "The goal is to be reasonably current if something really stupid happens."

The Hollywood Reporter has more.

I am not a huge fan of SVP (Sue via Patent) and here is another example. Google's new IM / VoIP softphone is apparently using protected technology and is now being sued for patent infringment. Om has all the details and tips his hat at Rich.

Personally this issue really pisses me off. Patents were meant to protect companies from having their technology and secret sauce from being ripped off. To see that some companies have come up with some crafty way of manipulating these laws makes me sick.

It seems to me that most of these patent companies operate as a shell, as to not be sued themselves. If they did operate and provide service or build product they would most likely be violating many patents held by some of the companies they are going after. Instead these parasites hitch a ride sucking the lifeblood from those who ARE making a difference.

Go and build something already, make your own revenue, employ some engineers and contribute back to the economy of your country!

What does this deal mean for Google's VoIP and IM strategy? Hmm, I would guess that GTalk will federate with AIM not unlike Yahoo! and MSN. Going a little further I can see GTalk's super grande VoIP service working over the AOL network and visa versa. Yep, that's cool I guess but I still have boatloads of contacts that are spread over 4 different networks. Which means I will still have to run 2 IM clients.

Om has some details and insight on the deal.

I guess we can put the expectations of that IPO on hold temporarily since Vonage just raised $250M in convertible debt funding. This brings the grand total raised to $658M. The press release didn't say much apart from the fact that they needed the money for continued operations and E911 deployment.

Andy and OM are not impressed and don't buy the 2B valuation. Well, I didn't believe that anyone would pay 3.5-4B for Skype either but apparently I was wrong about that and for what its worth, I think Vonage brings more to the table and should be valued at least as much as Skype.

Vonage uses SIP which will make it easier to roll out new services and peering with other networks is a snap. Vonage is going after primary line replacement and shows no sign of slowing the pace. Marketing is still huge and they are delivering partnered service everywhere.

If Skype made 20M last year and sold for 4B then Vonage should sell for more than that, hmm.. maybe not.

The one thing I can say is that more people in North America will probably use Vonage in the long run. The reason I say this is becasue market research shows that most people do not want to make calls from a computer when at home. For example, when Telus, the local phone company, went on strike I went down to the local Future Shop and bought a Vonage package and was up and running in literally minutes. My wife was not too happy about using the computer to make/receive phone calls. I even tried using a USB dongle attached to my normal phone, not unlike the Actiontec device, still no dice. Since our computer has multiple login the dongle idea didn;t work.

She just wanted to pick up the phone and call. Lisa is not unlike most other consumers in Canada. Softphones have become easier to use but they still can't replace the telephone in my home, unless of course the softphone is IN my telephone and I just don't know it

So my buddy Andy just sent me this fancy shmancy cell phone that does everything a video blogger would want. The video capture is so easy to use anyone can do it, really... I am not kidding.

Just pull down the camera cover on the back of the phone and you are ready to film. Push the big button in the middle of the phone to start recording and push it again to pause. You now have a video already in MP4 format.

Here is one I shot of my son Kyler as an example, my Mom and Dad are in Australia visiting my bro and my other bro is in Calgary, I thought they would all appreciate this

Kyler - What is that thing?
355x288, Streaming MP4, 2MB, 2min, 500kbps
Click on the image to start the video.
http://sipthat.com/movies/kyler1205.mp4

The audio is pretty good and the quality of the Carl Zeiss 2 megapixel camera is also quite good. I could not get Lifeblog to work, not even for a text posting so uploading the movie from my direct to my blog was a no go, but I am sure I will figure this out. I could not get the USB cable to work with the software on XP either, good thing I have a MMC card reader in my laptop and PC, yes the MAC is coming

For me this is a handy tool, good for impromptu interviews and it actually works quite well as a cell phone. It's too bad these manufacturers are still struggling to combine a good keyboard with a multimedia cell phone. I would love to be able to IM on this thing as well but alas the keyboard sucks for that.

Fellow TMCer Tom Keating has something to say about the new Yahoo! Voice offering including PSTN service, I guess I do as well or I would not be writing this He made some interesting comments about an impending price war with PC based service providers including Skype, Yahoo with Google sure to follow up with yet another trump card here.

Andy is always on the ball, and it's no surprise that he is all over this. Andy makes mention that when it comes to content, Yahoo is currently the king. Skype is going to have to play catch-up there, no question. Andy goes into to detail, a good read.

Russel Shaw chimes in with some great comments... "Softphone providers are fighting each other over price point, but I don't think the average user cares about whether a call is 1.7 cents a minute or 2 cents a minute. What matters to them is quality of service. How is the connection? " Good point Russell, how about call completion? Are the majority of those calls getting through? Madhu over at Yahoo! seems to think so, watch his White board video "Is VoIP Ready for Primetime?"

Forbes has a great piece on how SBC is taking Yahoo! to market on cell phones. "Instead of leasing part of Cingular's wireless network, which SBC co-owns, Yahoo! leveraged its preexisting and wide-ranging relationship with SBC (the companies have sold DSL and e-mail packages together since 2001) to put its services on a cell phone to be sold by SBC and Cingular." Combine that brand power with VoIP and watch out eBay!

Om reminds us that AOL and Microsoft are entering the fray "There is word that Microsoft has started to integrate its Microsoft Live with MCI network, and AOL is already offering some of the same features. Skype’s partnerships with hardware makers, while increasing the risk of drawing the ire of incumbents, take away the need for a computer. Yahoo, however could leverage its IM position to become a default “presence manager” but that’s sometime in the future." and don't forget the DialPad purchase... "While, the older Yahoo Messenger had dial-out/dial-in features through an arrangement with Net2Phone, the new messenger will be exclusively using the DialPad back-end to route calls to Yahoo partners such as SBC, Verizon and BellSouth. (That should keep them happy!) The prices of calls within US are almost half that of Skype, something to ponder about!"

What does this mean for open standards? Guess what Yahoo! is using for their VoIP signaling today? Yep, that's right, it's SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) which will make it damn easy to federate Yahoo!'s Voice Calling. Google has some catching up to do there but seems to be on the right track.

SIP is it for VoIP and Video signaling, XMPP is it for IM (for now) and together these protocols will deliver us from the proprietary silos of IP communication we have today.

Make sure you check out the new SIP mag when it hits the stands!

Looks like Mike Jazayeri, Product Manager over at Google (formerly of Microsoft I think) is using aquired Blogger to deliver the news about Google's new IM client Google Talk.

In the first paragraph in this first post Mike makes mention of open standards and interoperability, and take that Skype!

One of the users in their forums posted a Request For Features, the initial contribution went something like this...

Post your feature requests in this topic.
This requests i've seen so far are:

• Post to Blogger from Google Talk

I like this, but as mentioned in earlier posts we need to go a little further. I want to be able to blog to ANY of the top blogs (MT, Wordpress, MSN, Yahoo, Blogger, etc.) right from the Text Chat window and include Audio and Video in that post.

• Change color of text (emoticons can do it)
• Change sounds
• File sharing
• Reverse integration of Gmail with GTalk
• Voice Conferencing
• Offline messages
• Change nickname
• Other operating systems (mac,linux)
• Archived chats in Gmail
• Avatars
• Emoticons
• Conference Calls
• Support for other networks (msn,aol,icq,..)
• Web based version
• Grouping users
• Search ppl by gender, age, location, occupation,...
• Record voicemail when user is away
• S2S: open the doors and allow open server to server connections without each server having to "federate" with Google
• something like yahoo draw