October 23rd, 2006
You are currently browsing the articles from the VoIP Digest written on October 23rd, 2006.
We've been bursting at the seams to tell you, and finally we can: mesh is back! "Canada's Web conference" will be held again at MaRS in Toronto on May 30-31. Check out Mathew Ingram's post on the mesh blog for more details, although we're not quite ready to start selling tickets yet. In the meantime, we'd like to give everyone an opportunity to get together to talk about what's happening on the Web (and give us some input about mesh '07) so we're hosting an after-work meet-up at the Irish Embassy pub on Nov. 15. As an added bonus, you'll also get to meet the b5media gang, including Darren Rowse and Duncan Riley, who will be in town from Australia (we haven't told them about the frigid weather yet!). If you've got any comments, insight, feedback, suggestions about mesh '07, feel free to pass 'em along. For anyone interested in listening to last year's keynotes, we've finally got podcasts available on the mesh site.
Update: More mesh enthusiasm can be found from Mathew, Stuart, Rob and Mike...:)
Written by Mark Evans on October 23rd, 2006 with no comments.
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For all of us techno-geeks obsessed with gadgets and having a big, honking connection to the Web, the New York Times has a fascinating story about North Korea, which isn't connected to the Internet at all (although some high-power politicians apparently have access). Can you imagine a world with no e-mail, no Google, no YouTube, no Daily Show clips? There's a wonderful quote from Julien Pain, head of the Internet desk at Reporters Without Borders, who describes North Korea as "by far the worst Internet black hole". One more thing, North Korea banned cell phones in 2004.
Written by Mark Evans on October 23rd, 2006 with no comments.
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Well, there are video teleconferencing solutions over IP, some of which are more dependable and advanced than others. But the point of all of these are, as collaboratively well as they work, you kind of know the people you are videoconferencing with aren't really there.
It's not just the quality of the connection, or the [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on October 23rd, 2006 with no comments.
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Video conferencing, after fading into the background for a while, is back in news again. Microsoft, last week let us know about their new video conferencing system called RoundTable that is likely to debut in mid-2007. The $3000-a-pop RoundTable is a tabletop device, not much bigger than a traditional speakerphone at the base. Of course, the timing of Microsoft outreach program timed perfectly with Cisco Systems’ announcement about a new video conferencing system called Telepresence. The HD-based system costs a whopping $79,000 and competes with similar devices from the likes of Hewlett Packard (Halo) and Polycom.
A bigger system costs $299,000. (You can see it on Fox show, Vanished on October 27, 2006.) The news should not come as a surprise – Cisco CEO John Chambers spent a considerable time on the potential of video during the last conference call.
Video conferencing has been long time coming, and has been marred by poor quality, and complexity. Proprietary nature of the video conferencing systems did not help either. But broadband removed the network bottleneck, and open standards, and communication protocols are making it easier for video conferencing to work in an optimal fashion.
“Over the next year or so we should see demand for this kind of technology double as early adopters buy more and other companies realize the benefits,'’ Howard Lichtman, president of Human Productivity Lab told Reuters. This should not come as a surprise to anyone. Many computers are coming with built-in cameras and fairly simple systems such as Apple’s iChat and SightSpeed offer sophisticated yet cheap options for video conferencing.
Cisco’s entry into the market is basically a way to get the buyers of Telepresence to upgrade their corporate networks and buy what else – Cisco gear. “I don’t see it being a big seller,” Elliot Gold, of TeleSpan Publishing Corp tells The Wall Street Journal, and points out that are cheaper options out there.
Options from Austin, Texas-based, LifeSize Communications, a start-up we wrote about in April 2005. Now their products aren’t cheap, but are cheaper when compared to what big companies have to offer. They are working on cheaper versions, and if they can replicate the quality of their flag ship product, then they might be sitting on a winner.
We recently caught up with the company, and got a first hand demo of their system running over a fairly vanilla 1.5-megabit broadband connection, and the picture quality was like watching a TV talk show. On a 37-inch screen, sitting about six feet away from the phone/base unit, it had no jitter, or echo.
Craig Malloy, co-founder and CEO of the company explained to us that they use some proprietary chips, compression and software technologies to achieve HD broadcast quality video. (If there was too much movement on the camera, the quality is going to suffer, but since corporate video conferences only beat drying paint in terms of excitement, LifeSize does the trick.)
The company is working on lowering the cost of their chips, and thus bringing down the overall price of their system. They want to sell their lower cost versions of the system to companies in locations such as India and China. With many US companies having operations in offshore locations, the cost saving on long distance calls alone would make it worth buying this device.
Written by Om Malik on October 23rd, 2006 with no comments.
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Simplifying fellow blogger and friend Andy's comments relating to assertions contained in a Computerworld article wrapped around some Gartner analyst perspectives:
Andy believes that advanced Internet applications are necessary to push the IP Telephony space beyond 1.0 to a type of 2.0 world.
True, there will always be users who only want cheap calls. But […]
Written by Russell Shaw on October 23rd, 2006 with no comments.
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Martin Geddes of the independently-run Skype Journal is not what you would call a huge fan of the Gizmo Project Login screen.
While I love and use Gizmo, I tend to agree with Martin's assertions that the screen layout can be confusing, with what he calls a "high cognitive load."
Martin doesn't like the placement [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on October 23rd, 2006 with no comments.
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Private sharing of digital files is one of those things that just makes sense to people who spend a lot of time online. Everyone thinks the problem’s not solved yet, so people keep launching startups. ToPeer, based in Ottawa, is the latest personal P2P effort we have come across. It is a (Windows only, for now) browser plug-in that assists in file transfer but also adds in layers of tools to manipulate and manage digital content. ToPeer is currently in private beta, though you can sign up for a public beta to be released “this quarter.”
We met CEO Parm S. Gill and VP Technology Stefan Van Kessel when they were in town recently to raise money and explore setting up an office. The team’s background is in running a Canadian ISP. The company raised a Series A round last year, but would not disclose the amount or its investors.
Many aspects of personal P2P, like we said, are compelling: no hosting, so better privacy controls; speedy transfer, even for big files; and if done well, better organization options than simply sending an email. However, personal P2P will generally leave you in the lurch with regards to backup and syncing across multiple computers.
We have covered many companies in this space, including Pando, Zapr, AllPeers, Grouper, Perenety, Wired Reach, Google (Talk), and other IM clients that allow personal file sharing. However, these companies rarely have distribution across multiple operating systems and browsers and other software; Pando and Wired Reach’s BoxCloud seem to have the most diverse distribution options. ToPeer is only available for Windows, but should work within any browser. A Mac client is due next year.
The business model for personal P2P is not established yet; ToPeer does not seem that concerned with making money. We noticed Google ads when we poked around the private beta but were told they may be removed before launch. Gill thinks he will eventually charge for premium features.
ToPeer is trying to make file transfer dead simple, but it’s not quite there yet. The interface mimics a desktop with an IM contact list on the left (internal IM, not integrated with outside). Your contacts within the system make certain files available and then you can browse through what they’ve exposed. I had quite a bit of trouble navigating around but once I figured out how to do things I was pleased with the quick downloads.
The coolest thing ToPeer is adding is adding is tools for playing with and displaying files; so, for instance, you could build a personal Flickr that’s not hosted on anybody else’s servers. For the first release, basic editing and album creation is the only step in this direction, but Gill says video and other tools are next.
At the same time, it doesn’t make sense to build this out too much. imeem, for instance, tried to combine social networking and personal P2P into a full client, and it evolved too far away from the simple file transfer between friends that’s the core issue here.
Written by Liz Gannes on October 23rd, 2006 with no comments.
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The digital age often requires ‘the treadmill difference’. It requires a way to grab consumers’ attention to help separate one offering from another. The more crowded the marketplace, the harder it is to do that.
By Ken Yarmosh
Two months ago, I never heard of the group OK Go. Now, I’m hanging out in Panera, listening to Here it Goes Again through my Yahoo! Music Jukebox…and it’s all because of some treadmills.
Today’s music consumers have more than their fair share of music outlets. And with destinations like MySpace Music, their choice is not limited to traditional labels or what plays on the radio. Garage bands can now have followings too - from across the globe. The result is a lot more competition than there ever before in the past. But how do bands with good music get noticed? How do they even get the opportunity for potentials fans to hear their stuff?
OK Go decided that one way to grab people’s attention would include dancing on treadmills - to one of their songs no less (”Here it Goes Again” - check it out on YouTube). They were not totally unheard of to that point. But I’m certain their treadmill antics didn’t hurt, especially since they were given the opportunity to re-enact it at the MTV Music Awards.
The digital age often requires ‘the treadmill difference’. It requires a way to grab consumers’ attention to help separate one offering from another. The more crowded the marketplace, the harder it is to do that. Such as web-hosting. It is very difficult to distinguish one provider from the next.
One of the key issues in the shared server world is the resource hog - the one or two websites that continually monopolize the bandwidth, CPU time, and other limited server resources, all to the detriment of the other sites that live on the same server. Signing up for a shared server environment is often a lottery. You might just get lucky enough to land on a server that does not have any resource hogs. Then again, you are just about as likely to see poor response time or frequent outages. It’s a shot in the dark.
Given that all these companies do is provide hosting, that core part of their business should simply work. That is the only job of many of these companies, to provide hosting. Earlier this week, Media Temple offered us a glimmer of hope, thanks to their treadmill difference in the web hosting market - Grid-Server hosting, at an affordable price.
Of course, the treadmills only provided the opportunity for the likes of OK Go to succeed. They needed good music to win over listeners - and that’s exactly what happened. Media Temple has consumers’ attention. Now it’s a matter of time to see if they deliver. I can guarantee you that if their Grid-Server hosting plan does what it promises - offer a robust, scalable hosting environment at $20/month - it truly will be “the last hosting plan you’ll ever need.”
Ken Yarmosh is a web strategy consultant, Duct Tape Marketing contributor, and latest to join the ranks of GigaOM guest columnists.
Written by Guest Columnist on October 23rd, 2006 with no comments.
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The banking haven of Switzerland is looking to mandate broadband as a universal service for all Swiss citizens. The country is going to issue a new license to ensure this mandate is carried out. The universal service license is currently granted to Swisscom and will expire at the end of 2007.
The Swiss FCC notes that from January 1, 2008, the entire population will be able to access at speeds of 600 kilobits per second. The uplink speeds are capped at 100 kilobits per second for this network. It is not quite fast, but for a mandatory service, it is still a great first step.
The connection costs are capped at $46, and the service includes phone service and phone numbers which are also listed in the phone directory. The new network’s upper price limit will be reviewed in 2010 and can be lowered there after.
It is an enlightened approach taken by the Swiss, something politicians in the US should pay attention to. Of course we understand that US is much larger country and the challenges are huge, but so are the collections from our Universal Service Fund, and they should be put to better use. The problems with USF are explained in great detail here.
Written by Om Malik on October 23rd, 2006 with no comments.
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Another week, another
Talking Tech podcast. We've gone high-tech, migrating from an Olympus digital recorder (which mysteriously locked up and remains so until someone from Olympus returns my e-mail) to Apple's
GarageBand (sweet!). Anway, where was I? Oh yeah, Talking Tech. This week, Kevin and I take a look at Apple's stellar
fourth-quarter results, including the fact more than 39 million iPods were sold in fiscal 2006. We also explore the "new and improved"
Internet Explorer 7, and take a skeptical look at the virtual world/Second Life phenomena. If you have suggestions, comments, etc., you can
e-mail us.
Written by Mark Evans on October 23rd, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Web 2.0 and iPod and internet explorer and Podcasting and Page principale.
Having started my weight loss efforts in earnest, it seems I am noticing things from a whole different perspective. For instance the phones, that are getting increasingly thin, and in a good sort of a way. This Friday, when I came home, there were a package from T-Mobile USA. They had sent me their newest windows mobile smart phone, The Dash.
Boy, it is feature packed. Sure its got Windows Mobile, not exactly my favorite OS, but others feel differently. The WiFi, the keyboard, and overall contour of the device are quite appealing. But it is its profile - slim and skinny which is most impressive. I have not put it through the entire battery of tests, and will report on that some other day.
Another phone/smartphone which is skinny and sexy - the Blackberry Pearl. Late September when visiting New York, a VC buddy of mine sang paeans to the Pearl and described it as the best phone he has ever owned. I dismissed this as typical VC hyperbole. Folks from RIM, somehow felt that I should try one out, and they have sent one. And guess what he was spot on.
Pearl is small, light, pretty, feature packed and more importantly thin. Thin enough to slip into the inside pocket of the Burberry blazers I so love, and not show up like a lump. It is unfortunate that it is only available for T-Mobile, because after five days of use, I would have easily dumped my various Nokia(s.)
The Dash, and The Pearl are the latest in the growing list of mobile phones that qualify as Skinny. Sharp, LG, Samsung - they all have come to market with Slimmer phones. We owe this weight loss trend to Motorola RAZR, that has become the Atkins of the mobile phone business. Q became the lightening rod for lighter smartphones. The downside of the skinniness is that the battery doesn’t last very long. Pearl has to be plugged in every night, and Dash’s WiFi gulps, not sips the power.
The big question, which I cannot answer is: do people buy phones because they are thin? What do you think?
Written by Om Malik on October 23rd, 2006 with no comments.
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