May 2005 Archives

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. As of this morning’s announcement it claimed about 6,000 corporate accounts. Cingular claimed 50.4 million customers, both business and personal, at the end of March.
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First Coffee^SM’s heard from Voice Genesis, which claims that customers can create and respond to e-mail on mobile phones up to 20 times faster by speaking. They’re announcing the immediate availability of Vemail, voice-enabled e-mail for mobile phones, to customers of Alltel and other major wireless carriers.

Using Vemail, customers can not only retrieve, read and type e-mail, but they can also speak e-mail messages. "Vemail is unique in its combination of a visual interface for message review and voice interface for message response," says J. Gerry Purdy, principal analyst with Cupertino-based MobileTrax.

Customers can download Vemail over the air directly into their mobile phones and enjoy unlimited use for a monthly fee of about $5.

Using Vemail, you can speak e-mail messages, ead incoming e-mail on a mobile phone with no additional device required, type e-mail messages when silence or a text format is needed, import up to 10,000 contacts from your computer to your phone (supports most popular e-mail programs, including Outlook) and access messages most recently viewed or heard, even without a signal.

Company officials say it’s easy to install, learn and use with an intuitive user interface with help for every screen. Users can access multiple e-mail accounts as it supports AOL, Yahoo! Mail Plus, Hotmail Mail Plus, MSN, Earthlink, Netzero, and most other standard POP or IMAP e-mail addresses.
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Motorola is announcing an $80 million one-year frame agreement with Mobile TeleSystems, the largest mobile operator in Russia.

Under the agreement, Motorola will supply Global Systems for Mobile/General Packet Radio Service infrastructure, letting MTS to increase its coverage area and the capacity of its network across the Moscow region, Central Russia and the Urals.

Approximately $20 million of this revenue has already been recognized so far this year and the one-year agreement has a projected value of $80 million.

The GSM/GPRS infrastructure, which includes Motorola’s Horizon II 900/1800 MHz base stations, should simplify the future development of the MTS network as the company looks to incorporate 2.5G GPRS.

Although Motorola and MTS have worked together for eleven years, Margaret Rice-Jones, corporate vice president and region management, Motorola Networks EMEA said this is “the largest contract we have signed with MTS.”

Mobile TeleSystems is the largest mobile phone operator in Russia and the CIS. Together with its subsidiaries, the company services over 40 million subscribers. Since June 2000, MTS’ Level 3 ADRs have been listed on the New York Stock Exchange as “MBT.”
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Parature is announcing this morning that Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center, a hospital – First Coffee^SM refuses to polysyllabificate “hospital” to “healthcare provider” – in Baton Rouge, Louisiana has replaced Peregrine’s Service Center with Parature’s Help Desk Support Solution.

“The biggest obstacle we experienced with Peregrine was its inability to adapt to our changes as we continued to grow,” stated Shannon Simpson, Director of MIS at Our Lady of the Lake Medical Center. Simpson added that Parature’s wide range of modules, which include self-service customer support features “will provide us with an immediate return on investment.”

Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center is the dominant institution in health care – see, we can cut “dominant institution in health care “ to “biggest hospital” – in the Greater Baton Rouge area and is the largest private medical center in Louisiana, with 763 licensed beds. Established in 1923 by the Franciscan Missionaries of Our Lady, in a given year Our Lady of the Lake treats approximately 25,000 patients.
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Just before the Memorial Day weekend Workopolis, which bills itself as “the largest job site in Canada” announced that it has picked NetSuite CRM for sales force automation, customer service/support “and more,” according to NetSuite officials.

Workopolis wantsNetSuite to track sales orders from lead to close, provide customer support and deliver real-time, accurate reporting capabilities to employees. Workopolis will use NetSuite’s advanced customization capabilities via NetFlex, customizing SFA to have multiple service reps attached to a single customer record.

Previously using Siebel, Workopolis came to NetSuite for attributes that fit the specific needs of Workopolis’ fast-growing business, including integration with the existing e-mail and calendar system, customer support/case support, and level of customization.
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You may have seen this one before, but just before the Memorial Day weekend the International Packet Communications Consortium announced the completion of several technical white paper drafts that cover a variety of topics including interconnection, session border controllers, wireless and wireline convergence, and a process for evaluating voice quality for VoIP calls.

Michael Khalilian, chairman of IPCC, said they’re trying to drive “common methodologies and metrics for VoIP,” and says IPCC’s Working Groups, comprised of IPCC member companies “have worked hard to ensure each document is company and vendor-neutral, and represents an unbiased view of solutions to critical VoIP issues.”
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A little more about today’s music, The Dave Brubeck Quartet’s Time Out, that rare work popular with the non-jazz set yet highly respected among jazz musicians. A good parallel in American art would be the poetry of Robert Frost, which can be read from kindergarten to post-grad seminars with enjoyment and meaning.

According to a good review by Steve Huey in All Music, it was a risky move – “Brubeck’s record company wasn’t keen on releasing such an arty project, and many critics initially roasted him for tampering with jazz’s rhythmic foundation,” Huey writes. But with a smash single in “Take Five,” Time Out became an unexpectedly huge success, today second only to Stan Getz’s Jazz Samba in commercial success.

Brubeck, almost kicked out of college when they found he couldn’t read sheet music (he graduated after promising he’d never teach piano), served four years in World War II with Gen. Patton’s Third Army, fighting in the Battle Of The Bulge. He formed The Dave Brubeck Quartet in 1951, and after he hired a black bassist, Eugene Wright, he cancelled many shows when club owners insisted he use a white bassist for the gig.

Despite Time Out’s ubiquity it’s hardly wallpaper music, like some popular jazz albums (cough Norah Jones cough). “Blue Rondo à la Turk” blends jazz with classical form and Turkish folk rhythms (which Brubeck heard in Istanbul), and “Take Five” itself is written in 5/4 meter – the entire album was the first jazz work to make full use of time signatures outside the standard 4/4 or 3/4 time.

The pretentious set sniffs at Time Out because of its enduring popularity among – shudder – the non-pretentious, but you’ll find few jazz musicians working today who haven’t been in some way inspired or influenced by it.

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content placement, so after much deliberation and consultation with his 7 and 6-year old sons has concluded that the coolest animals are definitely owls, dolphins and snow leopards.

By David Sims
david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Primal Scream’s 1992 album Screamadelica:

Kuwaiti mobile operator Wataniya Telecom and Nokia  have signed a $125 million contract for Nokia to provide Wataniya with a network to support the carrier’s high speed packet access network.

Wataniya, the second-largest mobile operator in Kuwait, in a statement said Nokia would deliver state-of-the-art radio and core networks technology for “beyond 3G” mobile technologies. CEO Harri Koponen said the deal gives Wataniya “a platform to provide the most advanced, capable and reliable network services in the region.”

First Coffee^SM isn’t up to scratch on the validity of that claim, but Wataniya is getting advanced mobile services such as Push to Talk, video calls and video sharing for its subscribers in Kuwait. Nokia will also modernize Wataniya’s GSM network in order to create an EDGE layer that will support advanced services even outside 3G coverage.

Nokia will support High Speed Packet Access technology, which will give Wataniya the ability to offer mobile broadband Internet access at up to two megabits per second in the first phase.

The agreement was signed yesterday in the presence of Finnish Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen during his state visit to Kuwait.
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InnoMedia, a privately-held supplier of Internet and broadband access IP telephony today unveiled the “new generation of entry-level videophones with 3G interoperability and VoIP International call capability,” according to company officials.

The MTA 5410S videophones, according to reports, feature a stylish yet classical design, in a black and grey color combination, as well as a simple to use icon-based graphical user interface.

First Coffee^SM favors most anything that is stylish, classical and simple to use, but is grateful videophones have not caught on in a big way – what if the person on the other end of the call could see your facial expressions and hand signals while you’re talking? First Coffee^SM cringes to think.

The MTA 5410S will be marketed to “value-conscious consumers,” according to company officials: “The MTA 5410S is designed with a classical touch and ease of use that will appeal to the general public, especially with a competitive pricing that will enable carriers to put a videophone in every household,” says Alex Chua, Senior Director, Product Management, InnoMedia Pte Ltd.

The MTA 5410S is compatible with 3G networks and mobile videophones. Calls can be made between fixed line videophones and 3G mobile videophones.
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Catching up on the weekend news, yesterday Bloomberg reported that Verizon and SBC were rebuffed in their efforts to get a Texas law enacted that would have made it easier for the telephone companies to sell television services in the Lone Star State.

As it stands now Verizon and SBC need to go from town to town to get permission to do so, instead of being able to secure permission statewide in Austin. And folks, Texas is a pickin’ big place.

Verizon and SBC, the two-biggest U.S. phone carriers, realize this makes it a whole lot more difficult for them to compete with cable TV providers such as Comcast. They’re working on state legislatures and Congress to try to get more favorable laws passed.

“Competition for video services will occur much slower without a statewide video franchise,” Steve Banta, president of the Southwest region for Verizon was quoted as saying by Bloomberg. “We regret Texas lawmakers did not have enough time to reach a compromise.”

Last Monday Texas’s House of Representatives did approve a bill allowing any cable or video provider to get statewide permission to sell TV services, instead of having to go town by town, but the Senate did not act on the bill before the biannual session closed.

Verizon Chief Executive Officer Ivan Seidenberg and SBC Chief Operating Officer Randall Stephenson have been grousing about the need to get approval from local governments. Seidenberg calls it the “biggest barrier” to Verizon offering television, and Stephenson has said his company’s video effort would “hit a brick wall,” Bloomberg reports, if SBC is forced to seek franchises in each target city.
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Soffront Software Inc., a provider of enterprise and hosted CRM for the mid-market, is announcing that integration is available between Soffront CRM and the Perforce software configuration management system.

Perforce tracks and manages changes to source code and digital assets for software development environments. Change request and status information entered into the Soffront system is linked with Perforce data and can be easily accessed from one central repository by support agents, developers, and QA engineers.

The integration provides complete traceability between defects and source code changes in either system.

Manu Das, president and founder of Soffront says the integration will increase developers’ productivity “by allowing them to easily track and verify the completed work associated with each defect,” according to a statement.

The bi-directional integration allows users to work in the application with which they are most comfortable. Developers can work entirely within Perforce without having to switch to the defect tracker and re-enter data. In both environments, users can see relevant data related to source changes and their relation to change requests entered in the Soffront system.
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Beth Carney has an interesting article in the online Business Week about American businessman Malcolm Glazer buying 76 percent of the stock of Manchester United and taking it private. Glazer, who owns the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers, has been subjected to intense hostility from fans of Man United, the most popular – and profitable – soccer team in England, and probably the world.

First Coffee^SM wonders why. When some shady Russian zillionaire bought the British team Chelsea there wasn’t the vitriolic hatred now splashed across the British press – Glazer, an almost reclusive man whose sons are the front men for his business interests, has been burned in effigy in England.

Man United fans say oh, they don’t want it to be like American football – cheerleaders, fans waving sponge hands, as if anybody’s proposing such nonsense. You’d think Glazer, who has not announced a single change to anything, was using the American flag as the new symbol of United with Uncle Sam as the mascot. If there was an outcry when Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea about how he was going to Russianize the team, introduce Cossack dancers and sell vodka instead of beer First Coffee^SM missed it.

The anti-Glazer fans are also complaining about the debt he’s loading on the team, as if any of them could intelligently discuss the financial realities of the deal for three minutes. “He’s going to place all the debt on United, and we’re going to lose all the players. It’s going to go downhill completely,” Kirsty Gilliatt, 17, an optimistic student who has already canceled her United sponsor Vodafone service in protest, tells Carney. Gilliatt’s sources for these clairvoyant revelations was not given.

First Coffee^SM thinks that English football is England’s problem – except when English hooligans express their team pride by trashing whatever they can find. Still, Americans own a lot in Britain and there doesn’t seem to be any problem.

It certainly wouldn’t be because Glazer’s Jewish.

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content placement, so after much deliberation and consultation with his 7 and 6-year old sons has concluded that the coolest animals are definitely owls, dolphins and snow leopards.

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 Coffee^SM 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 best currently available Donovan anthology, Troubadour: The Definitive Collection 1964 – 1976:

Luxembourg-based Gemplus International S.A., one of the world’s largest providers of smart card based products has been picked by “operator galaxy” T-Mobile to provide its new GemXplore Generations operating system as the basis for future card and service deployment.

T-Mobile evidently liked GemXplore’s ability to comply with the latest multimedia features and standards releases, both of which can be updated over the air at any stage of the SIM lifecycle – thereby reducing time to market.

Przemek Czarnecki, Executive Vice President Terminal Technology, T-Mobile said the Gemplus’ GemXplore Generations was “revealed to be the most technologically advanced concept of OS.”

First Coffee^SM lives on the Mediterranean coast and loves how foreigners use English. Locutions that would never occur to a native speaker sound almost… poetic.

T-Mobile will use GemXplore Generations to provide a common smartcard platform for the T-Mobile group.

Gemplus International S.A. is, company officials claim, according to Gartner-Dataquest (2005), Frost & Sullivan and Datamonitor “the world’s leading player in the smart card industry in both revenue and total shipments.” It has sold over 5 billion smart cards, and its 2004 revenue was just north of a billion dollars.
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First Coffee^SM hopes you’re sitting down, because the latest Network Management Group study shows – hold onto something – that “commercial-free radio over mobile phones and the ability to download music to phones are the two most interesting advanced mobile services to young adults,” according to Reuters.

They’d also rather put up with ads and get free mobile video than sign up – and pay – for subscription video services of the kind offered by Verizon Wireless and Sprint for about $15 a month, the survey finds. Streaming music or video and music downloads might not be as heavily-demanded, in other words, as wireless service providers hope.

Reuters reports that “about 40 percent of 1,000 phone users between 13 and 34 years old would be very interested in commercial-free radio over their mobile phone… nearly 35 percent of those surveyed showed an interest in wireless music downloads.”

40 percent of users showed “strong interest” in ad-supported video services, while “less than 20 percent” would be “very” or “extremely” likely to pay either a monthly mobile video subscription of $4 a month or a fee of 30 cents per video clip.

Oh, here’s another shocker – teens are more interested in multiplayer video games on their phones than other demographics. Right, First Coffee^SM can’t either.
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AltiGen Communications, Inc., a provider of next generation IP telephony systems, has announced it is partnering with Commtech, a distributor of Internet, networking and security products in Ireland, to distribute AltiGen’s IP phone systems and call center tools to the Irish market, in line with AltiGen’s hitting the European markets.

AltiGen lost $858,000, or 6 cents per share in Q2 this year, which Gilbert Hu, AltiGen’s president and CEO partly blamed on the Asian lunar new year.
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FYI: Argentine firm Nektra Advanced Computing is announcing the release of a new version of its flagship product, OEAPI, “to enhance Outlook Express with new extensions,” according to company officials.

Nektra officials say Outlook Express API makes it possible to write plug-ins using many programming languages, develop products and services for use in horizontal markets, CRM, mail encryption, antiphishing, antispam, mail automation, and Outlook Express integration with an ERP project.
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C-Media Electronics, a Taiwan-based manufacturer of audio controller ICs, is announcing a series of new products, aimed at boosting its penetration into the growing VoIP and wireless audio controller markets, Digi Times reports.

The new products include new controller chips for USB VoIP phones, four Wi-sonic controller chips for 2-channel speaker systems, the CMI 8788 multimedia audio controller, the CM108/109 single-chip USB VoIP audio controllers and the CM220 updatable USB 2.0 card reader controller.

The company has also received orders from global vendors for its new CM220 updatable USB 2.0 card reader controllers.
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Also, more in the way of a public service announcement, Montreal-based software evaluation firm Technology Evaluation Centers has created an enterprise content management evaluation center to “help companies navigate through the demanding process of choosing an ECM software solution,” according to company officials.

The company’s projections suggest that revenue in licensing for ECM will grow from $1.28 billion to $1.86 billion through 2009 due to “current governance and regulatory compliance regulations” making ECM “more and more important in order for organizations to be able to meet the requirements of these acts,” thinks Hans Mercx, ECM and BPM analyst at TEC.

The TEC ECM Evaluation Center “enables end users to match their requirements to the functionality provided by a variety of ECM solutions,” according to company officials: “Organizations can use the center to analyze vendors on approximately 1,200 criteria covering ECM functionality.”
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First Coffee^SM’s heard that Nuasis Corporation, the IP contact center company, has integrated its software-only, IP-based contact center system with Siebel’s CRM.

The Nuasis NuContact Center handles customer inquiries via the phone, e-mail, Web and fax. The integration of the Siebel CRM application with the software-only, IP-based Nuasis contact center system theoretically increases efficiency and productivity.

When CRM applications are integrated with the NuContact Center, companies can “pop” existing customer information from the CRM database onto the contact center agent’s desktop, giving the agent detailed customer information to use during the call.

Kevin McPartlan, vice president, product direction, Nuasis said the company chose to use open standards such as VoIP, SIP, and SOAP rather than proprietary CTI protocols.
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Bored by baseball, soccer’s too slow, missing basketball, waiting for football? Try one of North America’s other pro sports leagues for low-cost family fun this summer:

Major League Lacrosse fields teams in Baltimore, Philadelphia, New Jersey, Long Island, Rochester and Boston. The season began on Friday, May 20 and runs through August. The league was founded in 1999 by fitness entrepreneur Jake Steinfeld and Timothy B. Robertson, former CEO of The Family Channel.

Or check out World Team Tennis, the “successful failure” of a pro tennis league with ten or so teams scattered around the country. Started by Billie Jean King thirty years ago, it has music, mascots and even NFL-style instant replay challenges. This year Patrick Rafter, Martina Hingis, John McEnroe, Venus Williams and Martina Navratilova will appear.

There’s also “The Toughest Game Of All,” First Coffee^SM’s favorite, the American National Rugby League just starting their season, with teams mostly in the Northeast. Play rugby, drink beer, give blood.

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content placement and, uncompensated, recommends ‘72 VW Beetle ragtops, dark roast coffee, monogamy, T.S. Eliot and Moose Drool Beer.

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. Telenor expects the move to save about $390 million over the next few years on its existing Sweden and Denmark operations.

With its core wireline revenue in decline, Computer Wire says, “Telenor sees growth prospects of the triple play of voice, data, and TV to the home, and a whole raft of IP-based services to business users.”

“There is huge growth potential in the broadband market in this region,” Berit Svendsen, head of Telenor’s fixed line division tells TheDeal.com. “We expect the market to grow from [$3.9 billion] to [over $6 billion] over the next five years and we want to be a part of that.”

As Robert Parker’s Spenser or Susan Silverman might say, “anybody would.”
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The Taiwan telecom industry is “making history today,” in the words of Taiwan Mobile company officials, with the initial launch of Taiwan’s first 3G service by Taiwan Mobile.

Primary amongst such 3G offerings will be Hong Kong-based Artificial Life’s products V-girl – “Your Virtual Girlfriend!,” “Virtual Disco” and “Virtual News Reporter Service.” The launch of the 3G products in Taiwan is scheduled for Q3, 2005.

Virtual girlfriend, disco and news reporter? Cue up the old Sesame Street song – “One of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn’t belong…”

“Closely supported” by Nokia throughout the long process leading up to this milestone, the initial launch, branded “catch 3! catch your eyes!” (First Coffee^SM supposes it reads better in the original Chinese) will give Taiwanese subscribers “their first taste of 3G services,” according to company officials.

As Taiwan Mobile’s sole supplier of its WCDMA system, Nokia, reasonably enough, is keenly interested in the success of the venture. They’ve provided 3G products and technologies, shared global 3G business experience with Taiwan Mobile, provided handset customization and facilitated mobile content development.

Taiwan Mobile, formerly named TCC Group is Taiwan’s largest private mobile operator, carrying over six million mobile subscribers and three portfolio operators: Taiwan Mobile, TransAsia Telecommunications and Mobitai Communications.
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Darius Wey posted on Pocket PC Thoughts that Telecom New Zealand is making “MSN Messenger connections free on their wireless LAN (Wi-Fi) hotspots.”  You don’t need an account with Telecom or Xtra (their ISP) to use the wireless service, Wey writes, which is available in some airports, hotels and Starbucks across New Zealand:

“While they still limit the full use of this wireless service to current Telecom account holders (which defeats the purpose for overseas visitors and people who do not use Telecom’s services), it seems that there’s some work in the background to enable roaming with some large wireless LAN provider, plus some other cool features.”

By David Sims
david@firstcoffee.biz

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is Bob Dylan’s unequaled 1965-1966 run of brilliance, Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, Blonde On Blonde and Live 1966 in honor of ol’ Minnesota Mudthroat’s 64^th birthday today:

Looks like Vodafone Group Plc’s having a good year: The world’s largest mobile company by revenue, according to Reuters, is buying back $8.23 billion worth of their stock and doubling their dividend as “as higher full-year earnings and revenues topped average market forecasts.”

Earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization rose by 7 percent to 13.041 billion pounds on 2 percent higher revenues of 34.13 billion pounds. Vodafone has 154.8 million subscribers and a dividend of about “4.07 pence,” about seven cents, “as part of its strategy to increase a payout ratio that, at 22 percent of earnings, had been low by industry standards.”
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Mitel has chosen Texas Instruments as the primary supplier for both its IP phone sets and VoIP gateway systems. The Ottawa-based broadband communications products provider is specifically interested in TI’s TNETV1050 IP phone technology, TNETV1xxx and TNETV2xxx series of VoIP gateway technology.

New products based on TI’s VoIP technology will be available from Mitel later this year.

Mitel plans to use TI’s technology in both its business telephone sets and its core Integrated Communications Platform portfolio. TI’s TNETV1050 gives Mitel a “highly integrated IP phone system-on-a-chip” with a comprehensive feature set and robust integrated LCD controllers, according to company officials. Mitel plans to use the flexible TNETV series to build feature-rich platforms for customer premises gateway applications.

Ron Wellard, Vice President, Product Development, Mitel said TI “share(s) our vision for the future of our IP-based products.” Bill Simmelink, general manager of TI’s Packet Voice and Video business says “Mitel captures the imagination of how VoIP potential can be realized in products, services and trends.”

First Coffee^SM thinks it’s wonderful when you find a soul mate like that.
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Cincom Systems is announcing an alliance agreement with Intervoice, Inc., a converged-voice and data tool producer headquartered in Dallas to offer a combination of Intervoice’s phone-based customer self-service solutions and Cincom’s customer experience management software, Synchrony.

The pair’s combined efforts will be marketed to companies “looking to enhance the efficiency and productivity of the contact center environments and improve the customer experience,” according to company officials.

Shawn Reynolds, Director of Cincom’s Customer Experience Management Products explained that the combined efforts are meant to present “all of the relevant customer information automatically to the agent at the start of an interaction,” so “customer issues are resolved more quickly, call handling times decrease, and the overall customer satisfaction and productivity of the contact center improve.”

Cincom’s Synchrony is a contact center tool architected to link multi-channel contact center functionality with a smart agent desktop that lets call center agents punch up info for different customers when they call in.
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Salesforce.com’s act is getting obnoxious. Here’s how they chose to release their latest financial numbers – bear in mind that this is not First Coffee^SM’s purple prose:

“Salesforce.com continues to embarrass its traditionally focused CRM counterparts with surging quarterly financials that have outstripped its own previous performance and the average of analysts expectations.

“For the quarter ending April 2005 the hosted market maker saw revenue soar by 84% compared to the previous year, to $64.2 million. Net income grew a headline-grabbing 902% year on year to come in at $4.4 million, while also managing a 22% sequential increase.

“Although the actual sums are comparatively modest the rate of increase on both a yearly and sequential basis shows that Salesforce.com continuities to tap into an unfulfilled need. With the growth rate also indicating that the market is still in a fairly early stage, there is also plenty of opportunity for continued growth while the lack of a strong direct challenger also confirms Salesforce.com’s position.”

Aren’t we great? Don’t the rest of you guys suck? Ha ha. And of course they have to get in their gratuitous shot at tottering Siebel: “Siebel is already showing signs of attrition. Earlier this year it said it had 28,000 subscribers and had added 5,000 new subs, but due to attrition its total was hovering at around 30,000.”

And sorry, guys, but net income of $4.4 million is not “headline-grabbing.” What was Siebel’s 2004 profit, something like $110 million? That’s a headline-grabber.

Lots of us who follow CRM are impressed with salesforce.com’s products and business savvy, but this kind of talk belongs in-house, for Marc Benioff to fire up the troops in the lunchroom to go out and kick Siebel’s butt. It almost – almost – gives one sympathy for Siebel to see some yappy little brat snapping at their ankles like this.

Besides, chest-thumping about profit’s a little more impressive when aforesaid profit is greater than what a slumping left fielder or backup point guard makes in a quarter. $4.4 million’s a budgeting mistake in serious businesses, not a champagne-popping press releases.

Boasting about numbers like this is a nine-year old wearing a Superman costume flexing his “muscles.”
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End2End, a European B2B managed service solution provider for mobile data services and content has announced the successful rollout of a local service delivery infrastructure in the US as part of its North American business expansion.

End2End has deployed a local Point-of-Presence in New Jersey, providing the company with “more robust service delivery capability for the North American and Latin American markets,” according to company officials.

Companies across the Americas can now access End2End’s products and service delivery infrastructure by connecting to a local PoP rather than integrating to the data centers or PoPs in Europe.

Commercial service delivery from the New Jersey PoP is expected to start in June.
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Thank God for the blogosphere. Relying on the MSM – the blogs’ derisive shorthand for the mainstream media – we’d believe Iraqis spend all day car-bombing, cowering in fear of car-bombers and protesting America.

Fortunately, thanks to Australian blogger Art Chrenkoff, we have a running summary of all the positive news from Iraq which doesn’t seem to make it into the pages of Newsweek or on CBS news. His “Good News From Iraq, Part 28” was posted yesterday, hit http://chrenkoff.blogspot.com/ and search “Good News From Iraq.”

There’s an ocean of good news. Journalists who actually leave their Baghdad hotels and the carefully-choreographed terrorist bombings find that coalition troops are rebuilding the country, are loved by the Iraqi people, and that Iraqis are making unbelievable progress in construction, health, education, the arts, politics and everything else.

After ten minutes’ reading First Coffee^SM was furious at the pathetic, lazy, one-sided job the MSM is doing covering the actual news in Iraq – the pace of construction and the depth of affection ordinary Iraqis feel for coalition troops alone are stunning. Find out here what’s really happening, that the reality is a lot better than you’ve been led to think.

If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/ for the fully-linked version. First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content placement and, uncompensated, recommends ‘72 VW Beetle ragtops, dark roast coffee, monogamy, T.S. Eliot and Moose Drool Beer.

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 Coffee^SM 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 Coffee^SM 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. First Coffee^SM wishes other businesses – the Washington Redskins, say – worked the same way.

Desai says in the reservations area, for example, “our metric of success is completion rates of reservations. For Continental Airlines we handle 100,000 calls and get an 88% completion rate. For Windham Hotels we achieved over 90%.”

Industry averages are 15 to 20 percent lower – “Industry averages are 38 percent automation completion rates, 40 to 60 is pretty good,” Shanaa says.

The heart of the technology is Voxify’s patented Conversation Engine, which “imbues the Automated Agents with advanced conversational skills, enabling them to engage callers in sophisticated dialogue, and understanding multiple pieces of information in a single response or adjusting to unexpected information provided by the caller,” according to product descriptions.

“The results are tangible, measurable, we know what happened on every single call. Since we’re a partner we’re equally incentivized to hit those numbers. Agents are fully-managed service, we’re paid by our completion rate,” Shanaa explains.

Voxify’s new Automated Agents include a shopping agent, order-taking agent, order status agent, catalog request agent, inventory check agent, lead capture agent, store locator agent, loyalty program/account agent, welcome agent and gift card agent.
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Is Vonage offering mobile soon? Reports suggest mobile VoIP is moving closer, as “Vonage is testing wireless routers, a sign the company is on the verge of debuting a mobile offering,” according to Edittech International.

Reports say ongoing customer trials involve “a new Linksys Wi-Fi router that Vonage could market along with its calling plans, according to an e-mail sent to customers and seen by CNET News.com.” Vonage has in the past acknowledged that its customers are also testing a handset equipped with a Wi-Fi antenna and radio, Edittech says:

“With the special router and handset, individual customers would be free to roam about their home or office, untethered from a modem or phone jack and without a connection to a laptop or desktop computer. Vonage could also market the routers to hot spot providers such as Boingo Wireless for installation in airports, coffeehouses and other such locations where wireless hubs have slowly begun to appear.”
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With “comprehensive enhancements” to its Internet Protocol telephony software announced today, including new automatic call distribution, support for silent monitor/whisper/barge-in, account code dialing and verification and support for two cordless IP phones for retail and small office applications, 3Com now offers a total of eight IP phones to complement the 3Com NBX system.

Pass-thru ports on 3Com IP phones also allow users to conserve LAN switching ports. For example, users can connect a personal computer to the 3Com IP phone, which is connected to the Ethernet port in the wall. Details at Bios.
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Dutch global communications provider Equant has requested the suspension of the trading of its shares on both the New York Stock Exchange and the Euronext Paris at the close of business today, since it’s selling all of its assets and liabilities to France Telecom S.A. in a deal announced February 10.

Equant works with thousands of companies, has an extensive portfolio of communications services and network solutions as well as the IP Virtual Private Networks used by nearly 1,300 global businesses.
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Surfing around First Coffee^SM ran across a piece titled “Sony’s PSP = Portable VoIP and IP Videoconferencing?” picked up on Addict3d:

“Looks like Sony has their crosshairs clearly focused on providing a feature-full portable communications and entertainment system,” Erik Lagerway writes on his blog SIPThat.com. “Since we can browse the web on this thing, and it has a USB port, Wi-Fi and a TCP stack you would think we should be able hack together a softphone for VoIP. Video will come later, camera attachment.”

The Addict3d piece has a cool picture of how it might work.
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Fast Search & Transfer, a developer of enterprise search and real-time alerting technologies, today announced an OEM partnership with EMC Corporation, a provider of enterprise content management products.

Under the terms of the agreement, FAST InStream will be integrated into the recently released Documentum 5.3 platform, an ECM offering based on a completely unified architecture.

Supporting both structured and unstructured data, FAST InStream can be used with different types of software applications, including enterprise portals and intranet sites, ECM systems, Customer Relationship Management products, Enterprise Resource Planning, Business Intelligence suites and applications, as well as storage and archiving.

That’s right, EMC Corp. offers ECM. It confuses First Coffee^SM too.
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Acom Solutions, Inc., a cyber store dealing in inkjet and laser printer supplies, printing paper and blank security check stock has created a program to recycle used cartridges and reduce their presence in landfills. Free packaging, labels and shipping are available at the website.

Long Beach, California-based Acom said the program recycling used laser printer and inkjet cartridges is open to customers and non-customers. According to Gregory T. Church, vice president of marketing and communications, they’ll accept all printing supply cartridges.

“We re-use them wherever possible, but never more than once,” Church said.

Acom will send whatever shipping supplies you need to send in your used cartridges – boxes, bags and labels that can be downloaded for printing – at “no cost whatsoever.” Postage is prepaid and there is no charge for shipping, Church said.
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Readers keep asking First Coffee^SM when a Giant Madagascan Hissing Cockroach will be used to control a robot’s movements. Finally Garnet Hertz has found a way to do this, with his “Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine.”

According to the description, “The system uses a living Madagascan hissing cockroach atop a modified trackball [i.e. a ping-pong ball] to control the three-wheeled robot. Infrared sensors also provide navigation feedback to create a semi-intelligent system, with the cockroach as the CPU.” The pictures at http://www.conceptlab.com/control/ must be seen.

First Coffee^SM can assure readers that the United States military is not funding the project.
...

First Coffee^SM accepts no sponsored content placement, and uncompensated recommends ‘72 VW Beetle ragtops, dark roast coffee, monogamy, T.S. Eliot  and Moose Drool Beer.

By David Sims

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is last year’s release The Platinum Collection, Frank Sinatra’s three-discer from what’s probably his artistic peak, his 1953 – 1961 tenure on Capitol Records:

By now you may have heard about the Federal Communications Commission’s ruling yesterday that Voice-over Internet Protocol telephony providers have about four months to offer the sort of standard 911 service you get from your telco – you dial in and you’re automatically connected to an emergency dispatcher, and the address you’re calling from shows up on their screen.

First Coffee^SM is all for VoIP telephony providers including 911 in their services, favors making it an opt-out feature instead of opt-in, and believes the four Bells which control the nation’s 911 system should be required to strike reasonable deals to allow VoIP providers to offer 911 to their customers.

The Heartless Bastard agrees.

First Coffee^SM views government regulation as a necessary evil, many things are better off left to the common sense and personal freedom of Americans, who can be trusted to act in their own best interests far more frequently than government can be trusted to legislate it for them and who learn by suffering consequences when they do not, and notes that in recent weeks VoIP providers have, in fact, been striking deals with Bells to gain 911 access for their customers.

Okay, everybody knew the FCC’s ruling was imminent, maybe Vonage and SkyRocket, two of the more prominent VoIPers to get 911 access deals were just staying a step ahead of legislation, and maybe they wouldn’t have been so keen to get deals done if they hadn’t seen the FCC in their rear-view mirrors.

But the fact is that before the FCC issued a rather draconian 120-day deadline for providing standard 911 deals were being made, and the VoIP industry was moving a lot faster to get standard 911 than the cellular industry, which didn’t have it for years and years.

Maybe the FCC could have said six months to a year, since once you have a VoIP provider offering standard 911 customers have the option available to them. In that case the market can take over and weed out the responsible carriers from the irresponsible ones.

The Heartless Bastard finds this the best solution.

Anyway, the Bells will be more or less forced to negotiate in good faith with the VoIPers, and First Coffee^SM thinks extensions will be fairly generously granted to companies who are genuinely trying to get something done, the FCC will realistically only shut down those scofflaws who don’t even pretend to be in serious negotiations or on a timetable to include standard 911. People like that don’t need to be offering VoIP in the first place. Good riddance to ‘em.

Yesterday before issuing the ruling the Commission heard from Florida resident Cheryl Waller who recounted, in heartbreaking detail, how in March her three and a half-month old daughter Julia died after she stopped breathing, and Waller tried to call 911 from her Vonage connection, reached a sheriff’s administrative office, took what by the account First Coffee^SM’s seen “seconds” to find a 911-enabled phone and call emergency personnel. By the time help arrived the child had, sadly, died.

The Heartless Bastard wipes his eyes, but has a few questions here.

First Coffee^SM is a father of three, and can’t imagine the grief Mrs. Waller must be feeling. There’s nothing but sympathy for her loss. A mere two months on the pain must still be raw.

It’s understandable that she would want to testify before the commission, she could feel she’s doing something give her daughter’s death meaning, something to help other parents avoid the devastation she’s suffering.

It’s the FCC which is to blame for exploiting a lachrymose appeal to sentiment to herald what’s supposed to be a fair, logical ruling.

The Heartless Bastard is aware of two or three instances, is sure there are a few more, where people with VoIP phones tried to call 911 and weren’t connected to an emergency dispatcher. This is the first death he can recall connected with such a situation. The question, since we’re imposing government fiat to fix this problem affecting such a huge swath of the population, is who’s at fault?

Right. If you believe that’s the question keep believing everything you see on CBS and read in Newsweek. Oh that’s what the question should be, but who wants to be seen as the Heartless Bastard, poking around and asking uncomfortable questions which might offend the grieving mother?

First Coffee^SM reads where in the Waller case Vonage’s 911 calls were directed to a Volusia County Sheriff’s administrative number, not emergency personnel. That problem has evidently been rectified.

So putting on the Heartless Bastard hat for a minute – hm, fits uncomfortably well – it’s fair to ask if the Wallers did the “due diligence” to ascertain the level of 911 service they were receiving with their free decision to use Vonage. Since Ms. Waller’s been quoted as saying “I think we lost our daughter because of this,” a thinly-veiled way of saying “Vonage is responsible for the death of our infant daughter,” the Heartless Bastard would ask if that is, in fact, what the responding emergency personnel corroborated – “If we had been called ____ seconds sooner we would have saved her life, the time you took to find a 911-enabled phone is what cost your daughter her life?” If anybody’s seen the medical evaluation of the Waller child please contact First Coffee^SM.

Blaming Vonage for the death of a three-month old girl when there are so many other variables we haven’t seen examined strikes even the Heartless Bastard as unfair. Corporations have feelings too. Of course if Vonage deliberately misled the Wallers on what they were getting with the 911 service, to the stake with them, First Coffee^SM will light the First Torch^SM.

First Coffee^SM hasn’t seen the Vonage information Ms. Waller saw, but the Heartless Bastard suspects that if there were legally actionable negligence on the part of Vonage – if they really were responsible for Julia’s death – some lawyer would have sniffed it out by now. A dead baby is chum in the water for lawyers.

If First Coffee^SM had VoIP and his child had a medical emergency, and he tried to call 911, was told to try again, spent seconds finding a 911-enabled phone to call emergency personnel who arrive to find a dead child, most likely there would be the naturally-occurring, if probably unjustified guilt of “Oh it’s my fault, I shouldn’t have tried to save money on long-distance by using VoIP.” A careful inquiry would be needed to show whether call time would have made any difference at all.

But the temptation to blame someone, something, anyone, anything – a cruel uncaring God, the VoIP provider – would be overwhelming. As rational beings humans need reasons, understandings of “why?” especially for senseless death. But nothing the Heartless Bastard or First Coffee^SM’s seen confirms that the 911 delay was the cause of, or even a contributing factor to, Julia Waller’s death.

To be fair to everyone involved, the Wallers, Vonage, the millions of Americans who want VoIP, what’s needed is a thorough examination of the VoIP package, informational and promotional materials and specific 911 representations Vonage offered to the Wallers and to check for discrepancies with what was actually provided, an accounting of the Wallers’ installation of the system, a medical determination of the cause and time of the child’s death – all First Coffee^SM has heard is Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, basically a medical catch-all for “We have no idea what happened” – and then for an impartial commission to sift the evidence and issue an even-handed report laying out the facts of the matter and determining what happened when and what the parents, Fate and Vonage’s roles or non-roles in the tragedy actually were.

But that would mean being Heartless Bastards as long as there’s a mother crying for her dead child in the room. Comfort the mother, gently escort her to her supportive family back at home, close the door, examine all the facts at hand and make sensible policy.

First Coffee^SM would like to reassure readers that neither Michael Isikoff nor Newsweek magazine were used as sources for this column.

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. We gained a (broadcasting) license on channel 55 that covers the entire U.S. and we’ll be able to introduce the service in a number of cities,” Jacobs told reporters in Seoul.

Gartner echoes Jacobs’s damp forecast for cell phone sales. The market research group said that while cell phone sales spiked 30 percent last year, they’ll be surprised if it hits double figures this year. First Coffee^SM suspects firms in the business of making expensive guesses are frequently surprised.

Basically, in the absence of any compelling technological improvements consumers aren’t as likely to upgrade to a new model cell phone this year just for the kick of it. Reuters says Qualcomm cut its revenue target to $5.5 billion $5.7 billion “citing global product inventory gluts and weak demand in Western Europe for advanced cell-phone services such as mobile video and Web surfing.”

Qualcomm still plans to spend about $800 million to build a network to broadcast TV to phones next year, Reuters reports, and “expects video on phones to be the most popular advanced service.” Irwin said he doesn’t expect the broadcast technology – MediaFLO – to generate “interesting” amounts of revenue “at least for a year” after the service is introduced.
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The Chinese government will begin to provide third generation-based mobile telecommunications service before 2008, said Minister of Information Wang Xudong at the recently-concluded 2005 Fortune Global Forum.

According to that bastion of truth, People’s Daily Online, Wang said the licensing depends on the maturity of the technology and of the Chinese telecom market.

China has worked out a frequency program for 3G and organized the largest experiment with the technology worldwide, involving some world-class manufacturers and operators. On the world 3G market, the TD-SCDMA developed by China, WCDMA by Europe and CDMA 2000 by the United States have become the three major competing systems.

At the Forum Wang also promised that China will go on “adhering to the principle of opening up,” if not the actual practice thereof. The Chinese government will encourage domestic information technology enterprises to invest abroad and “welcomes transnational companies to establish business in China.”

Why does anyone care? Because, my friend (draping arm around shoulder), according to Wang, there are now 349 million subscribers to mobile telecom services in China, the most in the world.
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Cbeyond Inc., which filed for an IPO late Monday, says they don’t see Vonage, deltathree or 8x8 as direct competitors. Rather, the IP-based carriers “biting huge chunks out of the Baby Bells’ revenue,” according to ComputerWire, sees itself in the ring with Qwest, SBC and BellSouth.

The first Internet telephony company to venture in the public market, according to TheDeal, it plans to raise $172.5 million in an IPO on Nasdaq, partly to pay back Cisco, which has bankrolled them so far, the outstanding loan of $64.1 million the vendor provided to buy Cisco’s equipment. Cisco gets options to buy up to 2.7 million shares at $0.01 per share and 24,969 shares at $1.00 per share.

Atlanta-based Cbeyond is using an IP-based network linked to customer premises with T-1 lines. They’re selling local and long distance VoIP, broadband internet access, e-mail, voicemail, web hosting, secure backup and file sharing and VPNs aimed at SMEs with about 4 to 200 employees “in large metropolitan cities, using five or more phone lines,” of which they believe there are over 1.4 million such in the United States, if Dun & Bradstreet is anything to go by.

They saw $20.9 million in revenue in 2003, which jumped 72.9% in 2004 to $113.3 million while its net loss went from $29.5 million to $11.4 million.
…

First Coffee^SM is fully aware that companies frequently try to whip up mini-”trends” that serve mostly to boost business – in college First Coffee^SM worked for a student magazine which one month ran a splashy feature on how Casablanca nostalgia was sweeping campuses across America, how Casablanca posters were the must-have feature of all hep dorm rooms, and in the back ads was a large spot advertising Casablanca posters for sale, and the campus post box for collecting orders just happened to be the editor’s who had written the feature article.

Still, Jeff Minich, VP of Business Development at iRadeon.com has a point in statements released today saying that while much has been made of the potential of Linux to upset Microsoft’s dominance of operating systems, “little attention has been given to rapidly evolving open source software applications which may someday threaten products like Microsoft Office.”

IRadeon.com’s business is managed application services, deploying and managing open source software through the web for companies, and First Coffee^SM is aware that it’s self-serving of them, but their point is valid: A new wave of freely available open source business applications such as NetOffice and SugarSuite is proving popular among small and medium sized businesses.

The open source CRM application SugarSuite, which has much of the functionality one finds in Microsoft and Siebel’s CRM, is “really a killer open source app that greatly extends the capabilities of applications like Outlook” says Minich. “It doesn’t directly compete with Outlook, rather it does a number of things Outlook should do on its own but doesn’t,” things like shared calendaring, contact databases, and e-mail archives which either aren’t supported in Outlook or need a complicated and expensive deployment of Microsoft Exchange and Windows Server.

SugarSuite and NetOffice have had over 100,000 downloads in less than a year, and while there’s nobody who pretends to know exactly how many businesses are using these open source products as their standard CRM apps, they’re part of the landscape now, viable alternatives to the pricey stuff from Redmond and San Mateo.

Minich’s dreaming when he says open source poses “a direct threat to Microsoft’s preeminent position in desktop applications,” but check back in five years.
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You know how you can read x-number of pages free from a book you’re browsing on Amazon – and as many as you can get away with in a bookstore? And on Amazon and in Barnes and Noble stores you can listen to twenty-second snatches of songs on a CD? That’s the low end of tryvertising.

First Coffee^SM tends to live on the low end of things, so those are the only forms of tryvertising which come to mind, but according to The New Zealand Herald tryvertising is more than handing out samples on toothpicks in grocery stores, or putting a sachet of shampoo or perfume in a magazine. It’s about “getting samples to the right people at the right time and in the right place,” says Amsterdam-based agency Trendwatching.

For instance, Ritz-Carlton Club Level guests at selected hotels get the use of a Mercedes CLS500 with unlimited mileage for the duration of their stay. The car is waiting with a full tank of gas each morning and is valet-parked at night. “According to Ritz Carlton,” Trendwatching reports, “dozens of guests decided to buy a new Merc based on these integrated test-drives.” There’s even a program to tryvertise the $385,000 Mercedes Maybach at certain hotels, Porsche and Mini Cooper have similar hotel deals.

It works at any level: IKEA outfits budget hotel rooms in Germany, that’s tryvertising. There’s a Playstation bar or a “Heineken Room” in hotels (prime tryvertising points)? Tryvertising at work. There are VinoVenue’s “wine jukeboxes” where with prepaid smart cards you can sample a shot glass of wine for a buck or two and buy the bottle on the spot. Nike providing running shoes at the start of the Vancouver half-marathon, Cadillac providing shuttle cars at Sundance Film Festival, Starbucks giving you free coffee at events, all tryvertising.

The best one, of course, is that at certain Dutch bus stops you can get free fresh-brewed coffee from machines installed by Senseo Coffee Machines.

First Coffee^SM would like to reassure readers that neither Michael Isikoff nor Newsweek magazine were used as sources for this column.

By David Sims

The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music is the Jim White trifecta on the changer: 1997’s The Mysterious Tale Of How I Shouted “Wrong-Eyed Jesus!”, 2000’s No Such Place and 2004’s Drill A Hole In That Substrate And Tell Me What You See. Yes, First Coffee^SM’s Lovely And Talented Wife is gone for the day, how did you guess:

Yahoo! is set to introduce today a test version of instant messaging software that promotes VoIP communication and the internet media company’s new social network, according to an early review on silicon.com.

Yahoo! will offer their estimated 65 million users a free update to Yahoo! Messenger during its test phase. The new feature, in addition to letting people send standard instant text messages, should make it “easy to call friends free via computer, send a short text message to a mobile device, share photos or post content to a personal web log,” according to the review.

There will also be increased spam protection, file and photo sharing.

Yahoo! said it focused particularly on VoIP enhancements by placing a click to call button “front and center,” adding voicemail features and optimizing voice connections to and from those with broadband and those with dial-up.

Frazier Miller, director of Yahoo! Messenger, told silicon.com that while e-mail and instant chat have been the “killer app” of their day, today it’s VoIP.

As USAToday notes, “instant messaging has become a hotly contested battleground. In the USA, AOL boasts 22 million users for its free AIM service, on top of 23.2 million AOL subscribers who have the AIM service, according to ComScore Media Metrix. Yahoo has 18.7 million IM users, MSN 13.7 million.”
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Nokia is unveiling its plans for its evolution of connected mobile gaming, which they’re hoping will “make it easy to search for, purchase and play high-quality mobile games using a range of Nokia smart phones,” according to company officials.

The aim of this next generation of mobile gaming is to expand the N-Gage platform’s rich connected multiplayer experience across a wide range of Nokia’s multimedia devices. The games will work with a number of different Nokia smart phones.

The N-Gage game deck is a mobile and connected game deck with online 3D multiplayer game play over Bluetooth wireless technology and GPRS.

The technology in smart phones these days is such that Nokia can – and will – offer enhanced 3D game graphics capability, user-friendly search, purchase and installation of high-quality rich games, as well as “connected gaming with instant access to a global mobile gaming community,” which loosely translated means “a bunch of other guys who also have nothing better to be doing except maybe paying attention to the ROADLOOKOUTFTHKID!”

Gerard Wiener, Director and General Manager, Games, Nokia says in 2005 they expect to sell 25 million smart phones. “We see the global smart phone market exceeding 250 million devices in 2008,” he added.

The first Nokia smart phones to support the new Nokia mobile gaming solution are expected to be in the market during the first half of 2006. A “robust development environment” for developers with the first set of tools is expected to be available in Q4 2005.

In a related announcement of which First Coffee^SM understood about nine words, Nokia and Red Lynx are announcing the “exclusive follow up to the hugely successful and critically acclaimed Pathway to Glory,” called “Pathway to Glory Ikusa Islands,” which was, they claim, “carefully enhanced” to provide a “faster and more approachable game play experience” based on feedback gathered from the “whole gaming community,” including gamers and the games press.

Evidently this means there’s more “black humor” and “great characters.” It’s been tweaked to be more “hectic and intense,” there’s a “more comprehensive tutorial,” the “missions” have been made more “full-on and fast paced,” and for gamers’ pleasure there are “improved maps” and an expanded “selection of weaponry” as well as an “in-game chat system” for an “even richer experience.”

But don’t fret, purists, there’s the same attention to detail and “gritty realism” you evidently loved so much in the original game.
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In a nicely dovetailing announcement Royal Philips Electronics is unveiling a high-performance transflective liquid crystal display module for increased picture quality in high-end mobile phones, the Nemesis P8894-I, which features the industry’s first implementation of Philips’ LifePix patented algorithms designed, they claim, “around how the human eye perceives color.”

It’s compliant with the Series 60 Platform built on the Symbian operating system. It’s said to have a 41.2 mm x 53.8 mm screen size, built-in low-power features, “excellent” color quality with backlighting for “increased readability in all external conditions, even direct sunlight.”
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The Swedish telecommunications operator Tele2 AB is providing further detail on the company’s guidance in their Q1 2005 report today, regarding the marketing investments related to Tele2’s ADSL operations in France and the launch of mobile services there, as well as on the launches in Croatia and Turkey.

The investments related to these areas will, in total, amount to approximately $1.26 million for the current year.

Tele2 sees a great opportunity for its ADSL operations in France following their agreement with Neuf Telecom, and intends to step up its marketing there. They’re betting pretty heavily on France, as there’s also an upcoming launch of mobile services there.

Tele2’s CEO Lars-Johan Jarnheimer said churn reduction continues to be a priority across the business, and hopes the expanded ADSL activities, “in combination with the launch of mobile services to our large customer base in France, we will increase cross selling which reduces churn.”

Billing itself as “Europe’s leading alternative telecom operator,” Tele2 offers fixed and mobile telephony, Internet access, data networks, cable TV and content services, and with 28.7 million customers in 25 countries, $900 million EBITDA profit on operating revenue of  $5.8 billion in 2004 First Coffee^SM isn’t of a mind to argue the point.
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In a couple other quick VoIP announcements, PMC-Sierra is announcing the availability of a VoIP Analog Telephone Adapter platform, the first in what they say is “a family of turnkey designs for residential Customer Premises Equipment.”

The product is said to deliver “carrier-validated high quality voice service, secure voice channel support, and robust software design, to ensure service revenue maximization for VoIP service providers.” It’s an open source-based customizable platform designed on Linux for original equipment manufacturers who wish to “meet the growing VoIP service provider requirements.”

Also, Reignmaker Communications and Communications Xchange, a VoIP service provider are announcing a partnership to “create a complete portfolio of VoIP phone system services for business customers across the United States.”

Reignmaker will provide a capital investment to Communications Xchange in return for access to Communications Exchange’s Softswitch and PSTN interconnection arrangements. The two companies will also combine their purchasing of customer equipment, local access and interconnection services to improve network scale economies.
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On a bit more serious note than the usual dregs of the column, Norwegian telecommunications operator Telenor and the Swedish National Criminal Investigation Department have introduced a child pornography filter for the Internet which blocks access to Internet sites containing material that involves sexual abuse of children.

The Swedish National Criminal Investigation Department’s Sexual Assaults against Children and Child Pornography Unit will update the filter, and Telenor will provide the technical work. The filter’s based on a successful child porn filter developed by Telenor in Norway last September.

Moniqa Lofstedt, head of information at Telenor AB said “We are aware that a number of Internet providers are developing similar solutions, and we would welcome a cooperative effort in the industry.”

The filter works by Swedish police providing current and updated information to Telenor, including lists of Internet sites that violate Swedish law. Using the filter Telenor can then block all further traffic to such sites. Users attempting to access sites blocked by the filter will be directed to a site containing general information about the filter.

First Coffee^SM would like to reassure readers that neither Michael Isikoff nor Newsweek magazine were used as sources for this column.

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 Coffee^SM 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 Coffee^SM 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 Coffee^SM’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. Even if VoIP software was adhering strictly to standards, he tells LeMay, malicious binary information could still piggyback on connections.

First Coffee^SM fervently desires greater telephony security, wishing the world to be spared replays of such gruesome security breaches as the contents of professional rich airhead Paris Hilton’s mobile phone address book being hacked and posted online.
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Happy 36^th World Telecommunications Day! After the keg party you might want to, well, call someone. How exactly is World Telecommunications Day celebrated, and when did it start? First Coffee^SM finds the answer on that bastion of truth and honesty, China’s People’s Daily Online:

“On 17 May 1865 to realize a smooth telegram communication in the world the ‘International Telegraph Convention’ was undersigned by some 20 such European countries as France, Germany, Russia, Italy and Austria in Paris. This announced the establishment of the International Telegraph Union (ITU).

“In 1932, representatives from over 70 countries held a meeting in Madrid, Spain and decided to change the name into the ‘International Telecommunication Union’ as from January 1, 1934 onwards. On 17 May 1969 the 24th executive council meeting of the International Telecommunication Union passed an official resolution, deciding to make the date of May 17 the ‘International Telecom Day’ and requesting every member country to conduct commemorative activities on every May 17 since 1969.

“To make the commemorative activities more systematized there is a theme topic for every May 17 – the International Telecom Day. The theme topic for this year is ‘to get mobilized for creating a fair information society’ and activities are conducted every year in China in commemoration of the International Telecom Day.”

As part of the gala festivities Chinese officials promise that the approximately 28,384 administrative villages in China without telecommunication services will be so equipped by the end of this year, “thus realizing the objective of the Tenth-Five-Year plan.”

So there you have it, and everybody, let’s go get mobilized for creating a fair information society – just like China’s.
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First Coffee^SM would like to reassure readers that neither Michael Isikoff nor Newsweek magazine were used as sources for this column.

By David Sims

Regular readers of this space know that First Coffee^SM 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. justice authorities were probing Philippine telecommunications firms for alleged unfair competitive practices when in February 2003 they increased to a similar rate the fee they charged for handling calls originating from U.S. telephone companies.

No action will be taken against the firms.
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3 Hong Kong has launched what it’s billing as “the world’s first 3G user-self-enabled video conference service.” It’s designed to allow up to four 3’s customers to participate in a video conference anytime and from different parts of the world.

The product combines 3G UMTS video conference tools, Radvision’s Scopia video services platform and WiseSpot’s WiseVSAA video service application architecture.

3 Hong Kong explains rather redundantly that the new tool is an “easy-to-use video conferencing service completely self-enabled by the 3G user” without the need for pre-booked, operator-assisted service.
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First Coffee^SM remembers when cell phone technology went mainstream it was embraced by Eastern European countries as a way of leapfrogging the whole tiresome put-in-a-national-telephone-wiring-infrastructure-that-actually-works phase and cutting straight to wireless. It appears that the Voice over Internet Protocol could do the same thing for Africa and other underdeveloped parts of the world.

What makes wireless technologies attractive to Africa is the continent’s lack of fixed infrastructure, according to Paul Budde, the managing director of BuddeComm, an Australia-based telecommunication business consultancy company which tracks the African communications sector.

In the Philippines the government-owned Telecommunications Office is acting to use VoIP to provide telecom to unserved areas in the countryside. One step towards progress was to reclassify VoIP from a voice service to a value-added service, which any company can offer. Naturally this has squared ISPs off against traditional telcos, which quite reasonably fear ISPs offering commercial VoIP services.

“Algeria, Kenya, Mali and Mauritius have within the last year enacted telecommunication regulations that allow for the deployment of both VoIP and Wi-Fi,” according to Michael Malakata. In many countries special laws are needed to get commercial VoIP around heavily-regulated national telecommunications providers.

Kenya has just made VoIP legal, and South Africa wants to use it to attract the sort of call center business India’s profited from. Algeria’s approved licenses allowing ISPs VoIP and Wi-Fi for international calls.
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The World Wide Web Consortium has started a Mobile Web Initiative designed to improve the quality of the web experience for mobile devices.

At the WWW2005 conference in Chiba, Japan, web inventor and W3C director Tim Berners-Lee said mobile access to the web has been “a second-class experience” for far too long: “MWI recognizes the mobile device as a first-class participant, and will produce materials to help developers make the mobile web experience worthwhile.”

The Mobile Web Initiative’s participants will initially focus on two areas: best practices and mobile device descriptions. The best practices group will develop authoring guidelines, checklists, and best practices to help content providers develop web content that works well on mobile devices.

The Device Description Working Group will address the development of improved device description solutions, a database of descriptions that can be used by content authors to adapt their content to a particular device.

Preliminary results, in the form of standards recommendations, are slated to be available in late 2005. So far, W3C has raised about $640,000 for three years to fund the initiative.
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Those who suffer from paraskevidekatriaphobia are going to have a rough day today. They’re in good company, however, as fear of Friday the 13^th is probably the most widespread superstition in the United States.

With real-world effects: Few hospitals, high-rise buildings or hotels have a 13^th floor. Airports rarely have a Gate 13. A British study found that fewer people drive on Friday the 13^th than on Friday the 6^th, yet hospitals report more accidents.

And Donald Dossey, founder of the Stress Management Center and Phobia Institute in Asheville, North Carolina cites estimates that $800 or $900 million is lost in business because people won’t fly or pursue other normal routines on Friday the 13^th.

The origins of the superstition are lost in the mists of time – it’s not some ancient Christian/Catholic thing, a study done in 1894 found that the Islamic Turks so disliked the number 13 they practically never used it if they could at all help it, and ancient Hindus and the Norse believed it was unlucky for 13 people to gather.

First Coffee^SM finds a credible theory in the fact that ancient Egyptians considered the quest for spiritual fullness to occur in 12 steps in this life and the 13th was the eternal afterlife. So 13 came to mean death, in a good way, since you were transformed into spiritual glory, but after the nice connotations perished with their culture the death imagery remained with the number 13.

Couple that with the fact that there were 13 people at the Last Supper and Jesus Christ was crucified on a Friday – the day of the week for executions in pagan Rome – and you have a practically shrink-wrapped superstition for Western culture. Readers of The Da Vinci Code know that the Knights Templar were effectively destroyed on Friday the 13^th, October 1307.

What’s strange is that the number 13 has long been considered unlucky, Friday’s been considered unlucky, yet there is no evidence that people before the 20^th century considered Friday the 13^th a particularly unlucky day. It’s a purely modern superstition which nobody can explain. Which, of course, is how a good superstition ought to be.

First Coffee© would like to remind the world at large, preferably with a substantial fine, that it’s “espresso,” not “expresso.”

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. These are companies who effectively white-box their products to the operators, who then offer them to their subscribers on a range of mobile phones, rather than just on dedicated devices like the BlackBerry.

Research In Motion is fighting back, cutting licensing deals of its own for the software with such heavyweights as Nokia. Still, hardware sales made up 66% of its revenue in 2004, so it’s not rushing to abandon that market any time soon.
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If you want to turn your landline phone into a VoIP phone you need a thingamajig to do that. Here’s a review on Hardware Zone of one such product, the Linksys PAP2.
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eStarNetwork, a two year-old Texas-based network marketing company has partnered with Packet8 to add VoIP to their menu of services, which includes local phone service, high speed internet, cellular, long distance and satellite TV, among others.

Ben Sturtevant, who left a top position with Excel Communications (VarTec) before joining eStar as a start-up in July of 2003, said “while VoIP is still years away from being mainstream – meaning years from being a ‘mom and pop’ product – it will be a great addition to our product line.”
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First Coffee© dearly loves wild guesses masquerading as “industry projections,” and so was pleased to see this morning that ABI Research is “forecasting” over 100 million cellular/VoWi-Fi phones in 2010 in its new study, “Voice over Wi-Fi.”

Isn’t this great? We’re talking about products, dual-mode handsets, that even ABI admits “are virtually unknown to consumers, and have not penetrated the enterprise space to any degree either.”

These dual-mode mobile phones can connect to either a conventional cellular service or a Wi-Fi network. Sure that sounds like a nifty product, and if the world were populated by four billion tech junkies sure, 100 million sales easy, but First Coffee©’s seen far too many neato techie toys flop on the open market, which unfortunately is comprised of, well, real people who simply want products to do a job.

According to ABI Research senior analyst Philip Solis, some of the giants of global telecommunications – he cites British Telecom and Korea Telecom – plan to offer dual-mode services by the end of 2005. “That could start a very large ball rolling,” he says.

“The advantages of dual mode handsets and services, when they arrive, can be summed up in two words: seamless and economical,” Solis says, noting that the full spectrum of capabilities won’t appear in the first generation of products – danger, Will Robinson, danger!

So what’s the big deal about dual mode? According to Solis, when these services are mature you will be able to start a phone call at home on your residential Wi-Fi network and broadband VoIP service, continue it in your car where the phone switches to your cellular provider’s network, and wind it up at work, where the phone switches to your organization’s 802.11 LAN, and VoIP. All the time the handset would sense the available signals and switch automatically from one network mode to another, “keeping you connected and saving money.”

Look, First Coffee© loves technological improvements as much as the next guy, but would like to ask why a simple cell phone couldn’t fill the above job for the vast majority of Americans, and who the heck has phone conversations that last from before they leave work until they get to their desk?

See, it’s one thing to have a product that can do gee-whiz things like that, it’s another thing to have a product that does things people need.

Anyway, there are those who bet on Giacomo to win the Derby last Saturday, maybe those who bet on dual mode handsets’ll strike it rich on a long shot too. But let’s at least let the product roll out and get a year under its belt before we start betting on how many users it’ll have in five years.
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The Rolling Stones have announced an album of all-new material – “85% done,” according to Mick – and a world tour sponsored by Geritol and Depends adult diapers.

At the announcement at the Lincoln Center in Manhattan the Stones tore into their classic hit “Start My Pacemaker Up,” before offering a new song and their 1971 chestnut “Brown Dentures.”

The tour will kick off August 21^st – First Coffee©’s birthday – in Boston at Fenway Park. They’ll continue through December in America before taking an Air Ambulance to South America, Asia and Europe.

Prices will average $100-105 per ticket, with seats for the first shows — in Boston, Washington, Atlanta, Miami, Charlotte, N.C., and Calgary, Alberta — going on sale Saturday. Shows will continue next year in South America, Asia and Europe. The band will play a combination of stadiums, arenas and smaller venues equipped with wheelchair ramps.

Drummer Charlie Watts, the only Stone to have the decency to act his age and contract some form of cancer underwent six weeks of radiation therapy for throat cancer last year. Watts said this was the last Stones’ tour, but his band mates were quick to contradict that claim.

“We don’t plan that this is the last tour, and we certainly don’t announce it,” said Jagger. Besides, “they’re doing amazing things with cryogenic preservation these days,” he pointed out.

First Coffee© would like to remind the world at large, preferably with a substantial fine, that it’s “espresso,” not “expresso.”