By David Sims
david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Dave Brubeck’s landmark 1959 album Time Out, the first jazz album to feature all original compositions, and the first jazz instrumental album to sell a million copies:

Cingular Wireless is offering Good Technologies Inc.’s mobile e-mail service for business customers – at a nice price: free.

Cingular, the largest mobile phone service provider in the United States, will bundle the GoodLink service with its wireless Internet service for mobile phones free of charge, the Associated Press reports, “charging $45 a month for unlimited usage. Previously, users also paid the equivalent of $27.50 a month to GoodLink.”

The one-time account fee of $1,500 and one-time set-up fee of $99 for each individual user still apply, though. Gotta make money somewhere.

This is a huge boost for Good, still far short of BlackBerry and their over three million customers. Under a previous agreement Good Technology users had to sign separate contracts with the company and Cingular. They’ll now use the single-contract system Cingular does for BlackBerry.

Cingular Wireless executive Michael Woodward told Reuters there aren’t any problems with BlackBerry, but “we heard our customers saying… they were looking for some choice, a little bit of flexibility.”

This is the first time GoodLink, compatible with other providers’ mobile devices “will be sold directly by a major carrier in nearly a year,” according to AP: “By contrast, Cingular and the other four national cell carriers already sell BlackBerry devices… and its complimentary e-mail system directly to corporate customers.”

Good’s growing fast, but it’s nowhere near BlackBerry.

By David Sims
david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Al Stewart’s 1975 album Modern Times, glittering, intelligent songwriting:

Maybe First CoffeeSM should be listening to Led Zeppelin’s first album, since “communication breakdown” is the reason given for Australia’s Telstra to announce that yes… no… yes, the telco will offer retail clients VoIP in 2005/06.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Telstra Corp Ltd is officially – as of now, anyway – retracting its earlier statement that it had “scrapped plans to offer its retail clients the ability to make calls over the internet for at least another year.”

So to sum up: Telstra will offer VoIP to retail clients either this year or next. Honest.

Telstra is saying that its VoIP isn’t quite ready for prime-time, though. “The company does hope to have a consumer launch in the coming financial year, depending on customer demand,” a Telstra spokesman told the Morning Herald. “But we still have a lot more work to do… the trial found that the consumer experience was below expectations in terms of voice quality and reliability.”

Telstra group managing director of technology, innovation and product Ted Pretty told AAP in March that the company wanted to see the service being taken by broadband customers with a BigPond connection before the end of calendar 2005, the Morning Herald reports.
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By David Sims
david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra’s recording of Ignacy Paderewski’s Symphony in B minor (Polonia), Op. 24 in Greyfriars Church, Edinburgh in January 1998, Jerzy Maksymiuk conducting:

Consummating a deal which had been announced Monday, Norwegian state telephony provider Telenor ASA today paid over $1 billion for two broadband services providers in Sweden and Denmark “as the switch to IP telephony threatens to crank up competition in the whole of Europe,” according to Computer Wire.

The price breaks down to $821.8 million for Bredbandsbolaget AB in Sweden, and $202.6 million for Cybercity A/S in Denmark. Growth in broadband is big in the Nordic region now, and this purchase moves Telenor, 53 percent owned by the Norwegian government, ahead of Sweden’s TeliaSonera AB in the lucrative market.

“Strategically, this is a necessary move for Telenor,” Poul Jessen, an analyst at Danske Bank A/S in Copenhagen tells Bloomberg. “Fixed and wireless services are converging, and Telenor needs to be able to provide a complete package to compete” with TDC A/S and TeliaSonera AB.

According to TheDeal.com, the purchase will double Telenor’s broadband customer base to about 800,000.

By David Sims
david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is John Mellencamp’s 1994 Dance Naked. If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for all links:

First CoffeeSM had an interesting conversation Friday evening (Antalya time) with Adeeb Shanaa and Amit Desai, CEO and Vice President Products respectively for Voxify. The company is launching ten automated speech-recognition agents this morning, using a new patented technology that  renders obsolete the old practice of hard-coding responses to questions.

Voxify Automated Agents, according to technical descriptions, differ from other speech automation systems in that they are “imbued with the intelligence needed to follow a customer’s conversation, gather data, and complete a transaction – even when only incomplete information is available,” as opposed to other approaches that hard-code expected responses and stall when they encounter a response not in their database.

It always impresses First CoffeeSM when someone puts their money where their mouth is, and “we tell them to hold us responsible for concrete numbers and deliverables, we’re paid by a percentage of calls successfully handled,” Shanaa says. In other words, if you don’t have any success with Voxify’s agents they don’t get paid.

By David Sims

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is the 1969 album Crosby, Stills and Nash by – wait for it – Crosby, Stills and Nash:

Qualcomm’s CEO took time out from the Seoul Digital Forum to tell Reuters that, in his opinion, demand for cell phones worldwide will decrease this year. He attributes the soft demand to “a slow transition to next generation mobile services.”

Noting that “last year we saw very strong growth,” Irwin Mark Jacobs said “this year it will be little slower than that,” leading Qualcomm to revise their shipment forecast downward from 55 million to 50 million.

No moss growing on Qualcomm, though – they’re planning to test a wireless broadcasting service in the U.S. at the end of the year, according to Dow Jones. They’re also in talks with Korean “broadcasters, content providers and operators.”

“I expect first commercial trials to occur in the U.S.

By David Sims

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Willie Nelson’s 1978 album Stardust, his heartfelt tribute to Tin Pan Alley:

The next version of Microsoft Office will center on VoIP, IM and XML technology, according to Ina Fried.

It adds up to an emphasis on collaboration, Fried thinks, and Microsoft’s “gotten some help in that effort from Groove Networks, the Ray Ozzie-led company that Microsoft acquired earlier this year, strategy executive Bill Hilf said at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in San Francisco.”

Hilf says Microsoft is building the ability to handle VoIP technology as “one of the core features in the next version of Office.”

Microsoft promises that the so-improved Office 12 will ship next year, and First CoffeeSM knows how reliable Microsoft ship dates are, of course.

 Hilf refused to discuss details or specifics, but said for an idea of what Office is going to look like consider Microsoft Office Communicator 2005, the instant messaging add-on currently in beta.

Fried notes that with the program, “out-of-office messages pop up automatically, as does a user’s IM presence information. If companies integrate the software with their traditional or VoIP gear, workers can also start phone calls through their PC and redirect incoming calls when they are going to be away from their desk.”
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Disturbing little news bit on the invaluable Engadget: Donald Melanson posts that “a Redwood City-based tech start-up called Rosum has found a way to track individuals using television signals, reaching places even GPS can’t (like inside buildings).”

Melanson claims that “Q-Tel, the investment arm of the Central Intelligence Agency, is one of the investors in the company.” The first actual working device using this capability is still in prototype, but Rosum does expect “commercial navigation products using the technology to start showing up next year.”

So the CIA gets this technology, but when an organization that knows what it’s doing gets ahold of it, such as New York City parking enforcement, First CoffeeSM will be concerned.
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The Israeli telecom provider ECI Telecom is opening a subsidiary office in Moscow, in the words of company officials, “to further broaden and establish ECI’s direct presence in Russia in addition to a local support company.” The office should open in June.

ECI, which has been working in Russia for twelve years, says there is “increasing customer demand for ECI’s solutions in the Russian market,” a market which has grown extensively over the past few years.

ECI must think pretty highly of the Russian market, they held a recent Board of Directors meeting in Moscow, and it probably wasn’t for the food or scenery. The company specializes in metro optical networks, broadband access, bandwidth management and carrier-class VoIP solutions.
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Continuing with First CoffeeSM’s coverage of the former Second World (you knew what First World and Third World were, “Second World” was used to refer to the Soviet Union and its satellite states), Teleunit Spa, an Italian telecom wholesale service provider has signed a direct interconnection agreement with Albania Online SP Ltd.

Albania Online, frequently confused with America Online, was founded in 1997 and provides Internet connection through dial-up, leased lines, ADSL and Wireless, VOIP, VPN, E-mail and hosting solutions. It’s the only private entity in Albania that has fiber-optic interconnection with state operators Albtelecom and Telecom Montenegro, which in that part of the world is technically known as “one heck of a competitive advantage.”

Teleunit and Albania Online will exchange international voice and IP traffic, and Teleunit has put in place a new Internet Protocol gateway direct to Albania to transmit voice data using VOIP technology.

Gianfranco Cimica, Chief Executive of Teleunit explained that “a large amount of voice traffic is directed to Albania due to the historical relationship between Italy and Albania and the large Albanian population in Italy.”
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Shifting back to the First World, in an interview with Renai LeMay security vendor Check Point’s Australia manager, Scott McKinnel, argues that voice and Internet “camps” have different security priorities.

According to McKinnel, when implementing VoIP-based systems traditional telephony experts “try to address the primary concerns as they would see them in a telephony world – which are latency, PABX and voice-mail functionality, quality of service, things of that nature.”

McKinnel doesn’t see security as a pressing issue, saying that telephony gurus “haven’t even had encrypted voice circuits,” let alone anything more sophisticated than that – “there’s never been a shared network infrastructure.”

In his completely unvendorly-influenced opinion, Internet security experts could show their telephony counterparts the way.

By David Sims

Regular readers of this space know that First CoffeeSM is endlessly amused by these studies “forecasting” broadband connections over the next ten years, VoIP usage in six years, Wi-Fi penetration in three years or whatever, all down to the tenth of a percentage point.

This morning Datamonitor’s announcing the availability of “The Definitive Guide to the IVR Marketplace: North America and EMEA,” which “finds” that spending on traditional IVR licenses will dip from $277 million to $179 million in North America and EMEA by 2009 even as spending on open-standards IVR licenses will grow from $166 million to $332 million.

“‘Traditional’ touchtone interactive voice response used by businesses over the past two decades for the purposes of phone-based routing and self-service functionality, is firmly in its twilight years,” Datamonitor concludes, confidently predicting that revenues from proprietary touchtone IVR in North America and EMEA will decrease by more than 35% through 2009.

Where will this smart money go? To open-standard IVR platforms such as Voice-XML and SALT which make better use of web infrastructure, improve functionality and can graduate to speech technology.

Traditional IVR is based on proprietary languages. As such, maintenance, upgrades and back-end data integration is expensive, complex and causes vendor lock-in. No doubt Datamonitor’s on the money when they say the emergence of open standards will improve the functionality and availability of higher quality phone-based applications in the market.

Datamonitor predicts fairly aggressive growth, forecasting the North American and EMEA businesses spending in open-standards IVR platforms to double in the next five years to over $330 million and the average annual spending on speech-enabled IVR in the US and EMEA markets to increase by 13.4% during that time.

Point-four, now, not 13.5%. Sheesh.
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The U.S. Justice Department is dropping its antitrust investigation of Philippine Long Distance Telephone Co., the largest telecommunications company in the country, as well as investigations of several other Philippine telecommunications firms.

U.S.

By David Sims

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Rod Stewart’s absolutely glorious 1971 album Every Picture Tells A Story:

Evidently British Telecom is fretting over the “competitive impact” of AT&T merging with SBC and MCI with Verizon. New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer is too, but all it takes is a kid to buy out another kid’s lemonade stand for Spitzer to start picking at his shorts.

BT has gone so far as to meet with the FCC and ask them to block the two mergers, according to a filing just unsealed, saying that they would create a classic duopoly in the telecommunications market and consolidate control of the internet backbone, leading to less competition, higher prices, lower quality, reduced innovation, floods, earthquakes and a plague of ravenous locusts.

BT estimates that 50% of the relevant market is US-based and that SBCs and Verizon’s geographic franchises cover 70% of customer locations. Not that BT cares all that much about the American market, but they foresee a day when internationally it would be difficult for any other competitor – itself, Colt, Cable & Wireless, Global Crossing, Equant, T-Systems, Vanco, et al – to compete.

Spitzer hasn’t actually opposed the two mergers, but has asked the FCC consider whether Verizon should be forced to offer naked DSL, broadband internet connectivity without the requirement to take phone service, if it buys MCI. He also thinks Verizon should be dissuaded from preferentially routing IP over MCI's internet backbone.

Vonage, who’s just signed a deal with Verizon to handle 911 emergency calls, thinks the FCC should examine whether the merger will negatively affect the ability of standalone VoIP providers to gain nondiscriminatory and reasonable access to number porting, necessary access, Internet backbone facilities and wireless platforms.

First Coffee© hears that EarthLink threw their two cents in the filing as well.
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BlackBerry has just signed up its three millionth user, going from two to three million in the past six months after needing five years to hit one million.

Mobile operators such as Vodafone and T-Mobile, resentful of having to offer a hardware product with someone else’s branding, have struck deals with ISVs developing rival push e-mail technology such as Visto and Seven.

By David Sims

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is The Best Of The Beach Boys 1970 – 1986: The Brother Years by The Beach Boys, gems from such grossly underrated post-surf music albums as Holland, Sunflower and the ironically-titled Surf’s Up:

Qwest isn’t giving up on its quest for MCI. The Wall Street Journal is reporting this morning that MCI could be facing shareholder dissent over its acceptance of an $8.5 billion sale to Verizon. A shareholder vote could as soon as late June or early July.

Qwest withdrew a $9.9 billion offer last week, but was in talks with MCI shareholders and “believed there could be enough support to vote down Verizon’s bid,” the paper said, citing people close to the situation.

MCI, the second-largest U.S. long-distance carrier, said at the time it had accepted Verizon’s lower price because its large business customers had threatened to defect if it was sold to Qwest.

Qwest had not decided whether to re-enter the bidding, the article said.

Picture released by the U.S. Army Tuesday, May 3, 2005 shows a U.S. Army soldier comforting a child fatally wounded in a car bomb blast in Mosul, 360 km (225 miles) northwest of Baghdad, Iraq, Monday, May 2, 2005.

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is the 2003 three-CD set Swing Brother, Swing, 54 big band favorites from 1925 – Fletcher Henderson’s “Sugar Foot Stomp” – to Artie Shaw’s “The Continental” in 1950:

Qwest has lost the bidding for MCI to Verizon’s $26 a share (or up to $27.70, depending on triggering clauses) offer for a $8.44 billion package, as everyone knew they would, and First Coffee© wishes they’d be more of a man about the whole thing.

Qwest has been issuing self-pitying statements ever since, claiming the whole process “seems to be permanently skewed against Qwest,” “MCI never intended to negotiate in good faith with Qwest” and that MCI had allowed Verizon to “impugn” Qwest.

Bushwa.

First Coffee© would like to remind Qwest that they’re a company with $17.5 billion in debt and a measly $14 billion in annual revenue, they’re one of the most highly leveraged carriers in telecom, that their stock price has fluctuated wildly the past year – dropping from $4.85 to $3.42 since their takeover bid, that many analysts believe the stock price was illegally manipulated Friday just to keep their bid for MCI alive, and that they still haven’t resolved shareholder lawsuits from $2.5 billion in overstated earnings.

Verizon, on the other hand, is the country’s largest communications company, the country’s No. 1 phone company with more than $70 billion in annual revenue and a majority stake in Verizon Wireless, the No. 2 carrier behind Cingular.

MCI looked at the relative financial strength of the two companies, the achievability of the projected cost savings, the expected competitive position of a combined Verizon/MCI vs. a combined Qwest/MCI, Qwest’s lack of its own wireless network operation and stockholder lawsuits stemming from Qwest’s accounting scandal and, to their credit, did right by their fanatically loyal customers, who were almost unanimous in preferring a Verizon takeover to Qwest.

Some analysts have suggested Qwest consider bankruptcy reorganization.

But MCI's board has favored Verizon's past offers even though they were lower than what Qwest was offering because of Verizon's larger size and presumed healthier prospects.

Under the sweetened deal with Verizon, each MCI share would be exchanged for cash and stock worth at least $26, consisting of $5.60 in cash plus the greater of 0.5743 Verizon shares for every common share of MCI or a sufficient number of Verizon shares to deliver $20.40 of value.

Under this price protection feature, Verizon may elect to pay additional cash instead of issuing added shares over the 0.5743 exchange ratio.

New York-based Verizon had previously agreed to buy MCI by for $23.10 per share, but MCI declared more than a week ago that the Qwest offer was superior although it stopped short of accepting the Qwest bid.

Qwest has said its nearly $10 billion offer will be withdrawn at midnight on Monday night if MCI's board does not officially switch its support away from a deal with Verizon by that time.

In a statement on Monday embracing the latest Verizon offer, MCI said that MCI shareholders will benefit from a "floor" of $20.40 on the value of stock to be delivered in the deal as well as from the upside potential of an increase in Verizon's stock price.

In addition, MCI's board noted that a large number of MCI's most important business customers had indicated that they prefer a transaction between MCI and Verizon rather than a transaction between MCI and Qwest. As their contracts come up for renewal, MCI said a number of customers have also requested rights to terminate their arrangements with MCI in the event of a Qwest transaction.

These customer concerns, in the board's view, pose risks in connection with a Qwest transaction that could negatively impact the value of the equity stake in a combined Qwest/MCI to be received by MCI's shareholders under Qwest's offer.

"From the standpoint of risk versus reward, Verizon's revised offer presents MCI with a stronger, superior choice," said Nicholas deB.