February 2007 Archives

The popular, virtual reality site "Second Life", run by Linden Labs, will shortly unveil a new limited service beta trial in which they will give users the option of chatting up other avatars with voice instead of text.

Prior to this announcement, Second Life users wanting to communicate with one another have had two basic choices: text chat (either personal or in a group setting) or the use of third-party voice applications like Skype.

Linden Labs  has teamed up with VoIP technology partners Vivox and DiamondWare to engineer the service, which goes live on March 6 for a limited group of users. By the end of the month, Linden Labs hopes to extend the feature to all Second Life inhabitants.

Second Life's new integrated voice chat feature will offer a group mode that lets users hear voice conversations in their immediate proximity, and personal and regular group voice chat, where users don't need to be near each other to have a conversation.

After There.com added voice chat to its site in late 2003, many Second Life users have been clamoring for the same feature.  And after seeing users add Skype and other applications like TeamSpeak or Ventrilo into the site, Linden Labs apparently got serious about development.

The plan is to initially provide voice free of charge during the beta. Down the road, Linden Labs is considering limiting the offering to mainland property owners and island owners who pay a $295 monthly maintenance fee, and charging users living on the wrong side of the virtual train tracks an additional fee or making them upgrade to the current plan.

It's clear the site is at the very early stages of incorporating real-time voice chat, and it will be interesting to see what emerges from the user community and how people incorporate it into their virtual business and personal lives. Continue Reading...

GE has just introduced new incandescent light bulbs that supposedly match the new compact fluorescent type in efficiency and energy savings.

See this post from the Green Tech blog on this announcement. I agree with some of the comments that this appears to be taking two steps back, one step forward, but if the energy savings (and consequent reduction in carbon dioxide) rival fluorescents -- and the prices are right -- then we are still far better off going with either option than doing nothing at all.

Also of note, check out a new Yahoo! site -- 18seconds.org -- designed to encourage people to change to compact fluorescent bulbs -- a task that supposedly takes 18 seconds. The site, sponsored by Wal-Mart, shows a running tally of dollars saved and amount of carbon dioxide reduced as a result of replaced bulbs.
Continue Reading...

I was sorry to hear that Costco recently ended their amazing 2-year, no-questions-asked return policy for a bunch of electronics products, including TVs, computers, cameras, camcorders, cell phones, MP3 players and iPods, It was a wildly popular, if occasionally abused, policy -- and helped make Costco the go-to place to snag a great deal on a new flat screen HDTV.

Now, customers have 90 days to return these products for a full refund (although Costco will extend manufacturers warranties up to two years and offer free phone-based tech support).

Apparently, the company was experiencing a noticeable financial hit from its largesse, and the bean counters couldn't allow it to continue.

When I first blogged about the amazing energy savings -- and competitive pricing -- of new compact fluorescent light bulbs, I wrote about 2 common versions of the twist type bulb -- 60 and 100 watt incandescent replacements. Easily found at Costco or Walmart on the cheap.

  I've basically replaced every standard bulb in my house with a fluorescent one -- except for the more "specialty" bulbs, like chandelier bulbs, globe bulbs (for bathroom vanities), reflector and spot bulbs, outdoor bulbs, dimmer bulbs, 3-way bulbs, bug bulbs, grow bulbs, blue light bulbs, red light bulbs, and very very bright bulbs. In fact, any light bulb you can think of has a fluorescent replacement.

In other words, we're still talking a heck of a lot of incandescent light bulbs still burning in my house.

Why aren't they more readily available, and at more reasonable pricing? If you surf around, you can see little chandelier bulbs priced at $9 at piece -- and globes even higher -- and that's not including shipping charges! Continue Reading...

I just absorbed some sobering statistics, courtesy of Fareed Zakaria's excellent column "Hassle and Humilation" in the February 26 issue of Newsweek magazine,  about the state of our International visitor visa process and the negative impact it is having on business travel and tourism.

Apparently, the situation is getting so bad that many important meetings scheduled to be held in America are being passed up by International business travelers due to an "increasingly demeaning process for visa applications."

Prepare to sober up: According to the piece, a group of Arab leaders recently landed at John F. Kennedy airport to attend a meeting of the Arab and American Action Forum, launched last September at the Clinton (as in Bill Clinton) Global Initiative meeting in New York: The idea: to bring together 100 young Arab leaders from all walks of life and introduce them to a similar group of Americans. The Arab backers are all pro-American, pro-business individuals who have attended American universities and who have spent extensive time in the U.S.

According to Fareed: "the first group of participants, mostly CEOs of large companies, were pulled out of the regular immigration lines...made to stand for two to five hours as Department of Homeland Security officials grilled them {about} why they had come to America, and whether they had any experience using weapons, what they thought of the Iraq war, and other such questions."

And if you think this is just an Arab issue, when "Discover America, a group set up by the tourism industry to encourage travel to America, polled 2,000 randomly selected international travelers and asked them "'which one location on the map is the worst'" in terms of visa hassles and nasty immigration officials, the United States topped the list by far."  If you're thinking they were probably anti-American to begin with, 72% still had a overall favorable view of the United States when asked.

The impact of all this hassle: "Total international arrivals into the United States declined 10 percent between 2000 and 2004, and business travel has declined 10% in the last 2 years...Once No. 1, the United States has dropped to third as a travel destination."

What's more:  "Over the last 14 years, global tourism has been thriving, having increased by 52 percent. But America's share has been declining, down 36 percent in the same time frame...with travel and tourism...employing 17 million people and generating $105 billion in tax revenues."

So, what are we to do while we wait and wait and wait for our State Department to significantly improve the situation? Continue Reading...

I've been noticing that prices are starting to drop for a range of consumer VoIP devices, particularly for phones and kits that support Skype that have been around for a while.

Case in point: the Linksys CIT200 handset, first introduced in late 2005. Although the device lists for @$100, I've seen it priced for $50-60 on places like buy.com and newegg.com. There are also rebates available that knock the price down even further.

In fact, when I found it available on buy.com at a total price of $50 with free shipping, I jumped. And I'm glad I did. Continue Reading...

According to a piece by Thomas Claburn of Information Week, Microsoft and BT are offering  prizes for telecom mashups.

Here's the text from the writeup:

At the 3GSM World Congress 2007 in Barcelona this week, Microsoft and British Telecom announced a series of telecom service mashup competitions. The two companies are seeking applications that merge mobile phone services such as voice communication and text messaging with Internet applications like mapping and search.

The Connected Services Sandbox competition offers prizes ranging from $2,500 to $25,000 and will be managed by TopCoder, a company that administers online programming competitions.

Microsoft launched the Connected Services Sandbox in December 2006 as an online development community for independent software vendors, systems integrators, network equipment providers, and telecommunications service providers. To date, it has produced more than 50 registered services and mashups.

"We believe the Connected Services Sandbox will play a critical role in making Telco 2.0 a reality," said Michael O'Hara, general manager for the Communications Sector at Microsoft.

Freelance developers who register and Sandbox member organizations can review the competitions and rules online. The competitions consist of several usage scenarios defined by Microsoft and BT and typically require the combination of services like e-mail or document collaboration with Web services provided by the likes of Amazon, eBay, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo.

Microsoft plans to announce the winners at NXTcomm in Chicago this June 18-21, and to demonstrate the winning entry at its booth at the conference.

Continue Reading...

I was joking with Rich Tehrani the other day, when I sent him an email telling him I was sure he hadn't completed the 12-step Alexaholic program

Alexaholic.com is a mini-mashup of sorts, where you can enter in up to 5 URLs and the site will then create a graph on the fly that shows each of the sites comparative Alexa rankings.

Apparently Alexaholic.com is so hot that it made it into the ranks of the top 2000 most heavily trafficked sites on the Web. And this with only 12 unique visitors, including Rich....Just kidding!

RADVISION, a provider of video network infrastructure and developer tools for unified visual communications over IP, 3G, and emerging next-generation IMS networks, just released it's new Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) DIAMETER Toolkit.

The IMS DIAMETER Toolkit, as it's called, is a software tool designed for the development of IMS DIAMETER-compliant network elements. The IMS DIAMETER Toolkit is standards-based (3GPP and TISPAN) and allows seamless integration with IMS based IP networks.

The IMS DIAMETER Toolkit is part of RADVISION’s IMS Developer Suite, which includes all the signaling and media protocol toolkits, development frameworks, and testing tools needed to easily and cost-effectively meet the IMS challenge. The DIAMETER Toolkit works seamlessly with all RADVISION signaling protocol tools and enables the development of all IMS network entities. Continue Reading...

I recently received an email from Redknee, a leading provider of infrastructure software that monetizes and personalizes services and content for mobile users, that listed the Seven Laws of Converged Billing. According to the company, these laws highlight how operators can use real-time, converged rating and billing to reduce churn and improve subscriber offerings.

The Seven Laws of Converged Billing includes best practices and tips for operators worldwide, as they seek to improve their offerings and reduce operational costs. I thought they were worth running in their entirety:

1. A Firm Foundation for the Future: The communications industry will be embarking on a transformation characterized by ubiquitous broadband access, mobility, and low power multimedia/computational capabilities. Continue Reading...

I've recently noticed an alarming trend: I've been receiving a growing number of spam Skype chat messages recently -- a sign that people are farming the Skype database to send promos and other distracting stuff.

Here's the latest one I received today:

[1:26:48 PM] Best Wishes says: Hi,
I’m Sarah, a volunteer at the New Tang Dynasty Television (NTDTV). In the spirit of celebrating the upcoming Chinese New Year, I would like to invite you, your family and friends to join us on a journey across oceans and centuries to the world of China’s legendary golden age- the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD). The 2007 NTDTV Chinese New Year Spectacular at Radio City will bring you world-class vocalists, a live pit orchestra, and large-scale traditional folk dances along with fantastic scenery and beautiful costumes.

Continue Reading...

Rafe Needleman, who contributes to the excellent Webware blog from cnet.com, recently posted a review about a new Web 2.0 mashup site called FindNearby.net.

In a nutshell, the site mashes up Google Maps, Amazon, eBay, Craiglist, and WalMart.com. Once you enter in your location and an item you are looking to purchase, the site locates the items for sale that are nearby. A cool feature is the color coding of pins on the map that identifies whether the item is being auctioned off, sold at a retail store, or put up for sale by a private party.

There are also a number of related "spinoff" sites including wii.findnearby.net (image above) and ps3.findnearby.net to search for game consoles, and new ones on the horizon including datesnearby.net.

Now, all that's needed is some click-to-talk and other real-time communications functionality to put the proverbial cherry on the sundae! Highly recommended!

Continue Reading...

In dire need of a new laptop, I decided to make the plunge into Vistaland. I shopped around for "the best value for the buck" deal and after  much debate -- and after discovering a 20% off coupon on Dealcatcher.com -- I ordered a new Dell Inspiron E1505.

Actually, when I went looking for a new system, I was going to stick with Windows XP, since it's working for me and I saw no compelling reason to change. But when I placed the order for the E1505 about a week ago, Dell gave me a choice of Vista Premium or Vista Business -- no sign of XP on the configuration screen. Continue Reading...

Word on the street is that two of the country's largest cable companies, Time Warner Cable and Comcast, are gearing up to introduce new SMB VoIP packages in the next few months.

After winning large numbers of residential customers in their respective markets (Comcast has signed up over 2 million and Time Warner over 1.9 million), they're now setting their sights on the "commercial" VoIP market.

Comcast will be upgrading its network to the tune of $250 million this year to ready it for business class services, and estimates that there are 3-5 million prospect companies throughout the region it serves -- a legion of SMBs with 20 employees or less that represents a $12-15 billion revenue opportunity.

The cable MSOs have been formidable competitors in the markets they play in, and the plans by these two players follow in the footsteps by Cox Communications, Cablevision Systems, Charter Communications and Videotron Telecom -- all of which have started to dip their toes into the SMB space.

I expect the going will be slow throughout the year, as these companies get the wrinkles ironed out of their offerings. But the handwriting is on the wall: look out all ye incumbents -- the cable cos are a' comin to take your customers away...
Continue Reading...

Brilliant Telecommunications Inc., a developer of ultra-precise Network Timing Protocol (NTP) server technology, has secured $7.1 million in a Series A funding round led by ONSET Ventures. Also investing in the round were Asset Management, Draper Associates, Draper Richards, and Intellect Capital Ventures, LLC.  Brilliant plans to use this financing to accelerate product development, streamline operations, and fund commercial deployments.

Brilliant has developed an intelligent platform for packet-based networks that addresses the growing need for highly accurate timestamps across broad markets. Continue Reading...