First Coffee

News Corp. is still looking to buff up their five-year old $580 million investment in MySpace, and company officials say they're planning a relaunch of the most probably passé social network site this year. Agence France Presse reports that in an effort not to slide into permanent irrelevancy vis-a-vis the Facebook juggernaut, MySpace will target a younger audience. Facebook has 500 million members. MySpace has "a healthy user base," according to AFP's reporting of comments by News Corp. chief digital officer Jon Miller. "It's still around," Miller said of MySpace at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in Colorado, according to AFP, "adding that the site attracts around 65 million to 70 million unique users a month in the United States alone." MySpace evidently has largely abandoned competing with Facebook as a lost cause, and is set to be the go-to "platform for musicians and their fans," according to Miller, who told AFP that it intends to "go younger, go youthful" and put a premium on "creativity and self-expression... A little more rock and roll." Read more here. ... It appears Google's failure to meet a deadline to implement Google Apps into the city of Los Angeles' various departments will cost it about $135,000 in reimbursements to the city. They can take it out of the $7.25 million the contract's worth. As The Register reports, Google is upgrading LA's computer system from Novell tech to its email and collaboration software. MarketWatch revealed the delay in a report last Friday, using LA's tech boss Randi Levin as its source. Google officials say all the concern is overblown. " It's not surprising that such a large government initiative would hit a few speed bumps along the way, and we're working closely with CSC and the City to meet their evolving requirements in a timely manner and ensure the project is a great success for Los Angeles," company officials said in a prepared statement. Lalawag puts it a bit more trenchantly: "Google now claims that they didn't quite catch all the details in the requirements for the contract. " Read more here. ... Is it constitutional for the government to require that mobile phones carry labels with radiation information? We'll find out pretty soon -- according to The Register, the cellular trade body The CTIA is "challenging a San Francisco ordinance that requires radiation labels on every mobile phone sold, claiming that such a rule breaches the US constitution." The ordinance passed last month requires buyers to be informed "at the point of sale" about the radioactive properties of different mobile phones, The Register explains, adding that "the CTIA reckons that requirement undermines the FCC's (national) rulings and is thus unconstitutional - states can't go around overruling federal bodies." PCWorld's Jared Newman is a bit too subtle and undecided on his take on the law: "It's a good thing the CTIA is suing San Francisco over an inane law that will publicize cell phone radiation levels in stores, because this a rare case where more information is too much." Read more here. ... Nothing like a good new product launch to goose the stock shares. Reuters reported that the phenomenon worked fine for Research In Motion, whose stock jumped "on speculation that next week it would unveil a new touchscreen BlackBerry that could compete more effectively with other smartphones." Good news, the Blackberry was looking rather dowdy next to all the iPhones and smartphones all the other guys at the health club pull out. Industry observer Marguerite Reardon writes that, "while RIM has done well selling low-end BlackBerry devices throughout the world, it is starting to slip in the high end of the smartphone category, especially in North America, where new iPhones and Android devices get more attention from consumers." She notes that RIM is also facing more competition from other smartphone makers in the enterprise market, "as more companies start letting employees swap BlackBerrys for other smartphones." RIM should announce the launch of the BlackBerry 9800 at a joint event with AT&T Inc in New York this Tuesday, Reuters reported, adding that "AT&T is expected to get exclusive U.S.

Ixia, a provider of technology for testing wireless networks, has reported its financial results for the second quarter ended June 30, 2010, racking up record revenue and slashing the net loss from $2.7 million to $361,000. Total revenue for the 2010 second quarter was a record $66.1 million, an increase of 72 percent over $38.4 million reported for the 2009 second quarter and an increase of seven percent over the $62.0 million reported for the immediately preceding quarter. Revenue for the 2010 second quarter includes approximately $15.3 million attributable to sales of the IxN2X and IxCatapult products following the acquisition of Agilent Technologies' N2X Data Network Testing Product Line in October 2009 and the acquisition of Catapult Communications in June 2009. "We are pleased with our 2010 second quarter results," said Atul Bhatnagar, Ixia's president and chief executive officer. "We are seeing strong demand for our wireline testing products, including our high-speed Ethernet products and our newly introduced NGY Fusion-enabled offering." TMC's CEO Rich Tehrani had a chance to interview Bhatnagar at Interop 2010 in Las Vegas, who told him the best time to change is when business is slow, as you can do things you cannot when the business is running at a faster clip. "In the company's business planning they realized convergence is the driver," Tehrani noted, adding that "this convergence applies to wireless and wired. And this convergence has the effect of causing the testing tools to converge as well." Read more here. ... A Webinar scheduled for Tuesday, July 27th, "Five Steps to Cut VoIP Operational Support Costs and Boost VoIP ROI," will feature TMC's  very own Stefania Viscusi, our in-house VoIP maven. Analysts say the payback for VoIP deployments typically ranges from 4 to 19 months, according to the Webinar's organizers, "but when VoIP quality problems overwhelm operational support teams and VoIP service levels disappoint corporate stakeholders, that ROI metric is just wishful thinking." Convergence technologies, as the Webinar will elucidate, bring with them complex configurations, hyper-critical performance demands, and un-relenting quality issues that can seriously strain your voice network support teams - "putting your converged communications services and VoIP ROI at risk," organizers say. You'll learn why you must integrate operational methodologies across your voice, data, and IP network domains and how to cut the operational costs of deploying and supporting VoIP and converged voice services. Read more here. ... Just last year, at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention, Voxeo, a vendor of Unified Communications and self-service platforms announced that the Tropo.com cloud telephony service source code would be made available to developers for free under open-source licenses. At the time, Voxeo officials said the release, "demonstrates that cloud computing vendors can subscribe fully to open-source ideals, and avoid the proprietary lock-in typically found in cloud services." 

Tropo.com provides a cloud telephony service that lets developers write voice applications in popular programming languages including Groovy, JavaScript, PHP, Python and Ruby. 

Since then, the company has announced a number of open-source projects. Also in support of developers, the company made headlines in May of this year with the announcement that it expanded its free developer program to include international SMS numbers, support for European languages and local direct inward dialing "DID" numbers. Read more here. ... Suzanne Bowen, vice president of Super Technologies, Inc. and DIDX, recently participated in a blog conversation titled, "Intelligent Things You Can Do with Phone Calls or Numbers?

If the telecom market seems like it's in a state of flux - you're right. According to a recent white paper from Alcatel-Lucent, that's because "traditional operators and emerging players vie for competitive advantage by delivering a wide array of new content and service offerings." Operators need a new strategy in order to differentiate and compete successfully, the paper finds: "Instead of relying solely on the deployment of new technologies and rollout of new services, operators need to think in terms of adopting new strategic operations approaches and outsourcing business models." Among other useful content, the paper outlines several approaches: Assistance and consolidation. This can be viewed as something like consultancy and support. The operator has decided to implement change management but not to outsource the processes to a partner; rather, the operator calls on the managed services partner for help in analyzing the processes, to propose the change that's needed, and to implement the change. The operator, meanwhile, maintains operation of the network, but begins to consider a managed services approach for operations with cost or technology challenges. Read more here. ... A recent look by Alcatel-Lucent at the way service providers are losing out even as traffic volume increases finds the three following to be true: Operators can monetize multimedia services by selectively exposing high value network capabilities. Service provider network assets offer quantifiable value to third-party developers.

According to an Intermedia blog entry, according to a 2009 Radicati Group study, "more than 67,000 American businesses rely on an out-of-date Microsoft Exchange server for their e-mail, calendar and address books." So what, you say. We still run Windows 95 at home. Well, fine and dandy, but as Intermedia notes, "given this reliance, it's not surprising that 33 percent of our customers come to us in crisis after their email server breaks, leaving their organization without e-mail -- or access to critical contacts, calendar information and files." And if you're all caught up on your Microsoft updating - we're being theoretical here - how about your IT department? Is it overworked?

Admit it - you'd really, really like to see some of the lofty promises your CRM vendor made come true. Not all of them, you know the game, but, well... some of them would be nice. Step back and consider the question of open source versus the CRM you probably went with, let's guess Microsoft. Industry observer Stephen T. Richards notes that the main thing putting open source ahead "is its adaptability.