Did Yahoo kill their blog search service? That’s the top meme on Techmeme, but since it is based on just one report, it is prudent to wait for Yahoo to officially say something. Yahoo had launched blog search with much fanfare in October 2005 as part of Yahoo news search. The results for something, say Skype resulted in results from mainstream media sources and from blogs. Well, apparently that is not the case anymore. If they indeed did kill the service, I am not going to miss it, since I wasn’t a fan in the first place.
Kevin Burton says that some blogs are being included in the Yahoo News search results like those of Lifehacker. We found results from Gizmodo, both publications from the Gawker stable. Still, he does make a good point when he writes…
Most consumers just want to search. They don’t think about blogs. If you’re searching Google for ‘Firefox’ and the top result is from a blog and the second result is mozilla.org why would you not show the first result? The trick is to ship a decent algorithm that can build a composite index.
There have been some doubts about the viablity of the while notion of blog search. My contention has been that when doing blog search, contextual relevance is more important. Other people think that instant or near real time results are more important. What do you think?
Written by Om Malik on August 26th, 2006 with no comments.
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BBC America fans are quite familiar with a delightful show called, Cash In The Attic. The premise of the show is that antique experts go to someone’s house and find things which might look like trash but end up being valuable, selling for a lot of money at an auction. Same can be said of Kiko, the calendar company backed by Paul Graham.
The company recently became talk of the blogs, when the founders decided to cut their losses, and put the company on sale on eBay. Niall and I devoted a big portion of our latest podcast, Snakes on a Business Plan to the Kiko affair. Well, the auction just closed and brought in $258,100. A tidy sum! This explains why Paul was smiling today at The FOO Camp 
Apparently, Kiko’s angel round was $50,000 in convertible debt, and this sale should cover that. Graham’s YCombinator which did the seed round could come out ahead as well. Kiko founders’ new idea has already been funded by YCombinator.
Greg says eBay makes close to $3800 on the deal. A new floor for the ibanker fees? Just kidding… nevertheless, it makes you wonder despite all the hand-wringing about too many calendar companies, and presence of Google, there was after all a sucker buyer. Especially is you look at Skobee’s slow lingering slide to nowhere.
Written by Om Malik on August 26th, 2006 with no comments.
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I stumbled upon this cool application for Skype which allows you to change from headset to speaker phone, or any other audio device using Hotkeys (keyboard shortcuts) or voice command. It is highly unlikely that I am going to use the voice command, but the Hotkeys-based switching is already coming in handy. The product is the offering from NHANDZ, an independent developer with many Skype-related products. AudioID for Skype on Windows sounds especially interesting.
Written by Om Malik on August 26th, 2006 with no comments.
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Asterisk-Java 0.3-m1, a Java library for Asterisk PBX integration, has been released. The Asterisk-Java package consists of a set of Java classes that allow you to easily build Java applications that interact with an Asterisk PBX Server. Asterisk-Java supports both interfaces that Asterisk provides for this scenario: The FastAGI protocol and the Manager API.
The 0.3-m1 milestone release focuses on ease of use and provides the new org.asteriskjava.live package that takes care of the lowlevel action and event handling of the Manager API and offers an intuitive API for Java developers. Asterisk-Java has been updated to take advantage of the new features of Java 5.0 and therfore requires a Java Virtual Machine of at least version 1.5.0.
Asterisk-Java is used in several commercial environments and by the following Open Source projects:
* Asterisk-JTAPI
JTAPI implementation for Asterisk.
http://asterisk-jtapi.sf.net/
* Asterisk-IM
A plugin for the Jive Messenger XMPP (jabber) server. It provides integrated presence between your IM client and phone, notification of incoming calls by IM and originate calls from supported IM clients.
http://www.jivesoftware.org/asterisk-im/
* Asterisk Desktop Manager (ADM)
A desktop application that will allow for automatic on-call volume reduction, one click dial from clipboard, integrated phonebook and more.
http://adm.hamnett.org/
Asterisk-Java is available under Apache 2.0 license at:
http://asteriskjava.org
Written by Dal on August 26th, 2006 with no comments.
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Perched on a chair above the VoiceCon show floor, in a dimly lit loft just right for quiet chats, Digium's vice president of product management and marketing was surprised by the vantage point. "Wow, I never knew this place existed," Bill Miller said. The position above the crowd pretty much represents where Digium is sitting today. The seven-year-old original maker and primary developer of open source PBX, Asterisk, has been profitable since 2002. And the company just received a whopping $13.8 million cash infusion from Matrix Partners, a high-profile venture capital firm that funded open source company JBoss (which was recently acquired by open source Red Hat).
Like most startups, Digium has humble beginnings. Founder and CEO Mark Spencer had launched a small company to provide Linux support services, and the story goes that he wrote Asterisk to save money on his phone system. "It wasn't like he had this grandiose opinion of open source," Miller said.
Spencer made all of Asterisk's technology available to the open source crowd. Today it boasts a community of developers 400 to 500 strong, and Asterisk receives about 1,000 downloads per day. "It's … unique," Miller said, "in the fact that we have such a following whose entire lives and businesses revolve around Asterisk."
In fact, echoing that phone system strategy, startup Switchvox, before it began making its own Switchvox PBX, changed from cell phones to a phone system based on Asterisk because it was a low-cost solution. The question was: What advantages does an open source PBX provide? The answer -- other than the usual one of lower cost of ownership -- was: New features make it into the product faster.
"We are able to leverage the open source community," said Joshua Stephens, president and CEO of Switchvox. "If someone wants to put in some crazy feature, we take it and make it presentable."
Digium has accrued 130 partners that have production-class solutions around Asterisk. For its part, Digium sells Asterisk Business Edition, the Digium-certified, professional-grade version of open source Asterisk, along with hardware and software products that enable telephony applications including legacy PBX, IVR, auto attendant, gateways, media servers and application servers.
The company also offers a full range of professional services, including consulting, technical support and custom software development services. In addition, Digium leverages VARs to help distribute its products.
Digium's challenge today is to move into the enterprise, where it hasn't yet done much damage. SIPBox, a Digium VAR located in Tinley Park, Ill., primarily counts education and municipalities among its customers.
"I don't have anything at the enterprise level right now," said Chad Agate, co-founder and CEO of SIPBox, a provider of end-to-end telephony solutions for companies with 200-plus users. "Asterisk is a good option for SMBs [small and midsized business] or branch offices."
One of Digium's most recent customer wins was the University of Pennsylvania, which is deploying a campus-wide unified messaging system using Asterisk.
Digium has its eye on the enterprise prize, however. According to Miller, Matrix's stake will be used for developing applications and enhancements to Asterisk to make it more appealing to the enterprise audience.
"We took [the investment] on because we want to take the company to the next level and use that cash to fuel our growth and to scale into the enterprise," Miller said. "It will create more of an opportunity for enterprise-class applications like email."
To that extent, Digium faces a challenge among picky enterprise shoppers who want to shop by brand and also match products to technology skills within the company, according to Yankee Group's Vanessa Alvarez.
"Only the most tech-savvy companies can do open source, otherwise the cost structure is too high," Alvarez said. "But the question is: Has Digium achieved enough customer base so that if you're not a brand shopper, but you are the type to do due diligence, should you also consider Asterisk?"
Source: Amanda Mitchell
Written by Dal on August 26th, 2006 with no comments.
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I'm not sure why the media is so fussed about the Canadian military's decision to temporarily shut down a blog being written by a soldier, Matt Austin, in Afghanistan. I mean, he's involved in a dangerous military operation in which dozens of Canadian soliders have been killed. Does it really make sense from an intelligence, morale or strategic perspective to let Austin blog even though - as his mother told the Toronto Star - he was being "pretty careful about what he wrote"? Hey, I'm all for freedom of speech and the power of blogging to communicate but there are circumstances and situations where limitations have to be enforced for the greater good. I'm sure Austin, a University of Waterloo engineering student, is trying to carefully blog but what he may see as non-essential information could be easily regarded by the Taliban as insightful. One of the questions that begs to be asked is why Austin feels he needs to blog when there are other ways (letters, telephone calls, e-mail) to communicate with friends and family. Sure blogs are the new, cool tool (other than, I guess, having a MySpace account) but sometimes common sense needs to come into play. Maybe Austin's just a well-intentioned 21-year-old trying to stand out from the crowd but he needs to ask himself whether blogging in Afghanistan is appropriate.
Maybe the key lesson to be gleaned from this situation is the Canadian military's need to have a well-defined blogging policy to replace the current rules that gives it "the right to remove any content that puts the safety of personnel of the mission at risk". Instead, there has be rules on whether soliders can blog or not. If they're allowed to blog, then it must be clearly spelled out when, where and how - with proper checks/systems in place to ensure the safety of themselves and fellow soliders.
Update: Austin's blog is back online. You can read his side of the story, which comes across as fairly pragmatic, although I still believe phone calls, e-mail and letters are more viable ways to communicate with friends and family as opposed to a public blog.
Note: For more, check out p2pnet and Blogging Times.
Written by Mark Evans on August 26th, 2006 with no comments.
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Hampton Software, a UK-based small software developer has released Articulation, a SIP client that allows you to well make SIP/VoIP calls from your Treo, as long as they are running Palm OS 5. If you are using Treo 700p, don’t bother trying this software. Of course, there are other Palm models with built in WiFi connectivity and use Palm OS 5 that can use this software. (You can download it from here.) I am not sure, but is this the first VoIP application for the Palm platform? What is your experience with this application - let me know!
Written by Om Malik on August 26th, 2006 with no comments.
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