By David Sims
[email protected]
The news as of the first coffee this morning, and the music
is John Rich’s “One Bud Wiser” (“Well, I’m one Bud wiser/Than I was a minute
ago…”)
Boy, the Saturday after Thanksgiving and the news wires are humming,
boy, lemme tell you, so much hard industry news it’s hard to know what to say
first…
Right. We have to go out of North America to find
any news at all.
From Israel comes the news that InterObject, a provider of
turnkey outsourced software development projects, as well as customized
software products, has announced that Global IP Sound has chosen to integrate the company’s MPEG-4 and H.264
video encoding and decoding technology with its own technology base.
Global IP Sound, whose voice processing tools enable
real-time communication over packet networks and are integrated in such VoIP
software products as Skype, has chosen to embed InterObject’s technology within
the foundation of its VoiceEngine Multimedia.
Eli Schwarzfuchs, InterObject co-founder and general manager, says their suite
of MPEG-4 and H.264 software components are available for a wide range of
processor platforms.
Gary Hermansen, President and Chief Executive Officer of
Global IP Sound said easy integration of these codecs with their own technology
base will “keep development efforts down to a minimum while enabling us to
remain focused on our core capabilities.”
…
Happy birthday, Charles
Schulz. The first Peanuts
comic strip featuring Charlie Brown, Snoopy, Lucy, Schroeder, Linus and Sally
appeared October 2, 1950. As Writer’s
Almanac says, “Charlie Brown was
the first character in an American comic strip to suffer anxiety and
insecurity, and Peanuts became the
most popular comic strip of all time.”
…
In a canned announcement released late yesterday, Net2Phone, Inc. says that the
Independent Committee of Net2Phone’s board of directors is “expressing no
opinion and is remaining neutral” with respect to IDT Corporation’s unsolicited
tender offer for all of the outstanding shares of Net2Phone’s common stock
that IDT Corporation and its affiliates do not currently own for $2.00 per share in cash, net to the seller,
without interest.
Consequently, stockholders should “make their own decisions
on whether to tender their shares and accept the offer, based on all of the
available information, including the factors considered by the Independent
Committee.”
These factors are described in Net2Phone’s
Solicitation/Recommendation Statement on Schedule 14d-9, which is being filed
with the Securities and Exchange Commission and mailed to stockholders.
A week ago Net2Phone announced getting $18.8 million from Altice One,
an investment fund with interests in cable properties, due to “a recent change
in ownership of those cable properties.”
On November 15, Altice notified Net2Phone that a third party
had acquired a controlling interest in Altice, that the third party would not
agree to be bound by all of Altice’s obligations under the Agreements, and that
therefore, the Agreements were being terminated. Simultaneously, Altice wired
an $18.8 million buyout payment to Net2Phone.
This amount is less than the predetermined buyout payment
Net2Phone believes is required by the Agreements, and Altice has indicated that
they would welcome further discussions with Net2Phone in this regard.
Net2Phone has informed Altice and its third-party acquirer
that the buyout provisions of the Agreements require an additional payment of
approximately $29 million and that it reserves its rights to all claims that
may result from the termination.
…
Today, in 1942, the movie Casablanca
premiered at New York’s Hollywood Theater to mixed reviews.
…
In Australia, “New South Wales
electricity utility Country Energy will soon
follow its Tasmanian counterpart Aurora and start selling broadband Internet services over
its power line infrastructure,” according to industry observer Renai
LeMay.
LeMay says the company has been “evaluating broadband over
powerline technology [a technology that can see broadband delivered at speeds
of up to 200Mbps through a normal electrical wall socket] for several months
through a limited trial in the NSW town of Queanbeyan but is preparing to kick
off a more widespread trial in about three months’ time.”
“We’ll continue to use that particular Queanbeyan trial site
as a technical trial,” the company’s telecommunications chief Geoff Fietz told LeMay. “In parallel, we’re putting
together a business case to go to the company early next year, for a commercial
pilot.”
Aurora Energy is running a trial of BPL in Tasmania. That
trial, LeMay says, “will last for nine months and is initially providing
broadband and Internet telephony services to Hobart homes and businesses.”
The Aussie government’s in the process of thrashing out its attitude towards VoIP,
and thankfully they seem to get the picture. Communications Minister Helen
Coonan said the government saw no “immediate need for any changes to the
regulatory framework” for VoIP communications, report Louisa Hearn and Sam
Varghese in the Sydney
Morning Herald, but “would support the introduction of a new number
range to help develop the services,” in the reporters’ words.
These include “creating a non-geographic number range so
customers can keep the same number when they move home, improving connections
to emergency services, and regulation of customer service.”
…
Interesting opinion from Louis Columbus, a former
senior analyst with AMR Research, who thinks that Google won’t drop the ball on CRM
the way Microsoft
did.
He passes on the rumor that Google’s interested in buying Friendster, which will give them a low-end,
widely-used sales force automation product, and says watch the positions Google’s
hiring for, as he does: “Google is hiring for CRM right now.”
“It’s only a matter of time until Google unleashes a free
low-end hosted CRM suite,” Columbus writes. The heart of the business model for
free CRM, he thinks, “will be the potential for driving up advertising revenue
while at the same time up-selling advanced CRM features.”
Microsoft could have done this, Columbus thinks, but they
decided to make users wait. Bad move: “With Google Analytics launched and
delivering a depth of features other free analytics packages can’t touch, the
progression of Google’s product strategy is starting to take shape.”
Columbus is impressed Google Analytics’ ability to “parse
site metrics by the three roles of Executive, Marketer and Webmaster,” and
given that there is also support for Marketing and Content Optimization, “when
Google brings out CRM expect to see multiple roles or views of customer data
and the opportunity to upload various CRM-specific file formats.”
…
Now here’s what First CoffeeSM calls real CRM: The
Hindu Business Line is reporting that, as part of their Customer
Relationship Management strategies, Toyota and Daimler-Chrysler are both
offering free gas to car buyers.
In America, purchasers of certain Daimler-Chrysler cars are
given a card worth $2,000 to swipe at gas stations. In India certain Toyota
purchasers are given “1,200 liters of petrol” (about 300 gallons of gas) free
for a year or 100 liters of gas every month for a year.
Sure it’s just moving “rebates” and “discounts” around under
a shell, but it’s a cool idea.
If read off-site hit http://blog.tmcnet.com/telecom-crm/
for the fully-linked version. First CoffeeSM accepts no sponsored
content.
