October 26th, 2006
You are currently browsing the articles from the VoIP Digest written on October 26th, 2006.
I made a major mistake yesterday. I wrote a post about an article in Maclean’s magazine called “The Internet Sucks” that I didn’t read. Instead, I based my post on the views of someone else - Shane Schick - who had read it. Not surprisingly, the story’s author, Steve Maich, who I worked with at the National Post, called me on it. Guilty as charged. So, I’m going to do something I’ve never done before: buy a copy of Maclean’s. Then, I’m going to write another post based on my own thoughts. I’ve also invited Steve to write a guest post about his thinking.
Update: I still haven’t found the Maclean’s story online but there is a press release with this intro: “After 15 years and a trillion dollars of investment, just about everything we’ve been told about the Internet and the information age has come up short. Instead of the promised enlightened utopia built on mutual understanding, we have constructed a virtual Wild West where the masses indulge their darkest vices, pirates of all kinds troll for victims, and the rest of us have come to accept that cyberspace isn’t the kind of place you’d want to raise your kids.”
Written by Mark Evans on October 26th, 2006 with no comments.
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Online shopping is supposed to be worth $211 billion in the U.S. alone this year, according to Forrester. At this point everyone from the big guys, the established names, on down, has a shopping comparison site, helping people find their way to hundreds of thousands of web-based stores and often taking a cut of consequent sales.
We’ve come across a couple of stealthy startups, TheFind and Ugenie, that promise to polish up online comparison-shopping. Both swear off paid placement in their business models, choosing alternatives like advertising and affiliate fees that don’t affect search results. And both have taken nice chunks of venture money to play out their experiments.
Branding is going to be really important for these vertical search engines, from the “shopcasting” of companies like ThisNext, to review aggregation from ViewScore and others, to bookmarking tools like Kaboodle — not even counting all the shopping, auction, and bazaar sites themselves — there are just too many names in this space. Pretty soon we’re going to need a comparison shopping engine for comparison shopping engines.
The first new site, TheFind, is the second coming of FatLens, the ticket search engine. We’d been told more than once that FatLens is a proof-of-concept; now the company has taken the password protection off the real concept: a product index generated by a shopping-optimized web crawler. The Mountain View-based company claims 500,000 stores and 150 million products are currently loaded up.
TheFind’s most interesting features are monitoring demand and supply to find the most popular products among retailers and bring them higher in results, registering price changes to flag sales, and saving marked items in a tray that’s anchored to the bottom of your screen no matter where you navigate.
The company, which has 27 employees and is based in Mountain View, has taken $8 million in first-round funding from Redpoint Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Cambrian Ventures, and is closing a Series B round now.
Another new startup in the space, Ugenie, which plans to launch in beta next week, is singularly focused on price comparison. The company adds two nice features to online shopping: first, computing taxes, shipping, discounts, and coupons (even finding coupon codes for you) to compare the actual “credit card damage”; and second, taking your multiple-item shopping list and finding the best way to bundle products across sites to minimize shipping charges and maximize discounts.
Ugenie also does its own crawling and extraction but for now it is manually limited to about 40 sites and the categories of books, music, movies, and games. The company says it hopes to get more involved with merchants in order to bundle products on the merchant side as well and to do online/offline price comparison.
The company was founded last May by two Amazon alums, Krishna Motukuri and Harish Abbot. It has raised $5 million in funding from BlueRun Ventures and Sierra Ventures and now has 15 employees.
Elsewhere in online comparison shopping, Mpire added features similar to both TheFind and Ugenie: increased support for coupons, pricing information, and trends, this week. Become.com added color search.
C’mon now. Isn’t the point of comparison-shopping to save us from going to a whole bunch of sites? We think TheFind and Ugenie make nice incremental improvements on what’s out there; let us know if it’s enough to draw you in.
Written by Liz Gannes on October 26th, 2006 with no comments.
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Twenty months after raising $5-million of venture capital and several strategic mistakes later, Odeo's founder has decided to buy back the company from investors, and rename itself Obvious Corp. What's particularly interesting about Odeo's move is whether this is just the beginning of a trend in which Web 2.0 entrepreneurs will take control of their companies again after interest from investors disappears due to a lack of progress. The silver lining within the Web 2.0 environment is start-ups can be fairly low-cost operations if you eliminate the frills (marketing, traveling, major application upgrades, etc.). This makes it easier for a start-up to survive when its VCs bail on the idea - rather than having to shut down. Odeo's founder, Evan Williams, obviously believes there is lots of potential in the podcasting market and the company's prospects can improve with some strategic tweaks. Don't be surprised to more entrepreneurs refuse to walk away from their creations even when "the money" disappears. The unwillingness to concede defeat is another thing that separates today's Web landscape from the dot-com days when many companies had little choice but to close their doors when the investors checked out. For more, check out GigaOm and Ben Metcalfe.
Written by Mark Evans on October 26th, 2006 with no comments.
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Samsung will soon be releasing it’s Samsung EW-700 WiFi phone. Through a partnership with Korean giant Edicom, Samsung is latest in a long-list of manufacturers to get in on the WiFi phone buzz. The Samsung EW-700 features an new mobile OS software, web browser, instant messaging, 2 mega-pixel camera, full color screen, an MP3 and video player, in addition it’s VoIP capabilities.
For more information on the Samsung EW-700, check out the following sites:
Written by Garrett Smith on October 26th, 2006 with no comments.
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Odeo, a San Francisco-based podcasting start-up has decided to call it a day. The company started by Pyra Labs (Blogger) co-founder Evan Williams has completed a management buyout. Evan Williams, Biz Stone and other Odeo employees have started a new company called Obvious Corp., which has acquired Odeo assets from podcasting company’s venture capital backers. The news was first reported by Valleywag. (Update: Ev outlines his plans and vision on his blog. George Zachary of Charles River writes about the deal on his blog.)
Odeo had raised millions in funding from Charles River Ventures, Mitch Capor, Josh Kopelman and Ron Conway amongst others in August 2005. Obvious Corp is full funded by Williams, and now owns the assets of Odeo and Twitter.com. It was a move that should not come as a surprise to readers of GigaOM.
Sources familiar with the transaction say the VCs and angels investors were made whole (they made their money back) and some common shareholders such as Odeo co-founder Noah Glass have made a modest gain on the transaction. Obvious will continue to operate Odeo.com and Twitter.com.
Our sources say that the parting was very amicable. The reasons for this management buyout, according to sources on both sides of the transaction was Williams desire to run a less structured and more experimental startup. Despite starting out as a podcasting startup, recent blog posts on Evan Williams blog hinted his disillusionment with the opportunity in the podcasting space, and if it really justified a VC investment. The company apparently tried to shop itself, though, we have not been able to identify and confirm their dance partners. In the end Williams put his money where his heart was.
Williams’ very public mea culpa at the Web Apps conference was an example of his willingness to zig, when everyone zagged. In private conversations, he had expressed doubts about the current model - where everyone wants to sell to an Internet giant. He wanted a model that was different - small, experimental and almost lab like. Future plans, according to those close to the company, include charging for all new things they come-up with. Given that a handful of engineers came up with Twitter in a few days, Williams might be onto something.
There will be some debate about if this is yet another example of a broken VC model. My personal belief is that is not the case. Williams had the means (Google dollars) to do the right thing by him. For others the in-fashion “flip it” equation of selling to large players will still be the preferred exit ramp. For some, building a profitable operation will be the ultimate goal. As far as Odeo is concerned, the reasons are Obvious.
Written by Om Malik on October 26th, 2006 with no comments.
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Looking to VoIP enable your BlackBerry?
Check out this slick new software from EQO Communications. EQO Communications is a leading developer of platforms for mobilizing VoIP, Instant Messaging and online social networks. The software, EQO Mobile, is an evolution of the EQO for Skype service introduced at DEMO 2006. Since the launch of EQO for Skype, EQO has established itself as the premier mobile solution for Skype, with users in more than 130 countries across 260 carrier networks.
EQO Mobile allows users to:
- See who’s online on Skype
- Make calls to Skype contacts
- Use Skype Instant Messaging
- See who’s calling and decide how you want to answer a Skype call
The best part about EQO Mobile is that it is free. Look for a full review of EQO Mobile here in the next few days.
Written by Garrett Smith on October 26th, 2006 with no comments.
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Looking to VoIP enable your BlackBerry?
Check out this slick new software from EQO Communications. EQO Communications is a leading developer of platforms for mobilizing VoIP, Instant Messaging and online social networks. The software, EQO Mobile, is an evolution of the EQO for Skype service introduced at DEMO 2006. Since the launch of EQO for Skype, EQO has established itself as the premier mobile solution for Skype, with users in more than 130 countries across 260 carrier networks.
EQO Mobile allows users to:
- See who’s online on Skype
- Make calls to Skype contacts
- Use Skype Instant Messaging
- See who’s calling and decide how you want to answer a Skype call
The best part about EQO Mobile is that it is free. Look for a full review of EQO Mobile here in the next few days.
Written by Garrett Smith on October 26th, 2006 with no comments.
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I need to move to the UK.
In what is now a daily occurence, there is yet another dual mode VoIP phone coming out of the UK. But this is not your typical dual mode phone. The Rimax Mystic does not make calls over the PSTN. The Rimax Mystic does not calls over a WiFi network. The Rimax Mystic is reportedly the first portable media player with VoIP cababilities.
As a portable media player, the Rimax Mystic is available in 512MB, 1GB or 2GB sizes, it features a 1.5-inch OLED screen with audio playback. It also has an FM radio on board with 20 presets, a picture viewer, and recording from voice or radio. As VoIP phone, the Rimax Mystic needs only to be plugged into a USB port and you ready to make calls via your favorite VoIP service.
With a street price of $112 to $169 US, this is well within the discretionary item budget, so if it makes its way to the states anytime soon you’ll definitely see a review of this item here.
Written by Garrett Smith on October 26th, 2006 with no comments.
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Tom Keating has an excellent overview of the the newest release of the ever increasingly popular TrixBox open source pbx project. TrixBox 2.0, as Tom points out features,
“a new ‘overall’ web GUI to make the whole process “point and click”. From this new web GUI you can simply select the modules you want (HUDLite, FreePBX, PHP, lame, etc.) and the web interface will automatically install them. Some of the packages are directly related to Asterisk such as HUDlite or FreePBX, while other options are ancillary, such as SugarCRM. “
With this move it looks as if Fonality is positioning themselves to go “toe-to-toe” with the kings of open source telephony, Digium. Both companies have VC funding, both companies have large loyal developer communities, their own appliance, and plug-in-play hardware (Digium and Sangoma). The company that will win this match-up, if it occurs, will be the one who can produce a product for the masses that passes the “mother” test. From the looks of this newest TrixBox release Fonality and company are one step closer to the average user, something that delights small businesses - who are just waiting for the a real free pbx - around the globe.
Written by Garrett Smith on October 26th, 2006 with no comments.
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As the hundreds of online video sites give themselves a hard look following the YouTube deal (and the Universal lawsuit), more and more of them are telling us they want to polish things up. Two things in particular keep coming up: partnering with a digital fingerprinting service (like Snocap) to weed out copyrighted content, or licensing a web-based video editing service to get visitors more engaged with a site’s content.
Now we hear that Eyespot, which is just such a video editing service, has raised $3.7 million from Gabriel Venture Partners, Express Ventures, and individuals from MP3.com and DivX (the company got a seed round led by Express Ventures, but it is not disclosing the amount we are waiting for a fact-check on Eyespot’s total amount of funding to date). This comes a month after competitor Jumpcut got snatched up by Yahoo — effectively eliminating it from licensing deals for the foreseeable future.
Eyespot, which offers simple Flash-based tools for cutting, adding effects, and sharing video clips, currently has deals with Lions Gate Entertainment, Blip.tv, Veoh Networks, Current TV and artists from labels including Zomba/Jive, TVT, Columbia, Epic, Island Records, and Concord Records.
Written by Liz Gannes on October 26th, 2006 with no comments.
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For some reason Technorati has not updated my blog in over two months. Numerous attempts to ping them and or contact their support department has been unsuccessful. So I am writing this post and inserting this like to my Technorati Profile in hopes that they will start to update my blog on the site.
If anyone out there might know a better way to get them to update my blog profile, please let me know!
Written by Garrett Smith on October 26th, 2006 with no comments.
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TiVo "moment" would refer to a tv show scene, or even a microsecond burst of something so compelling, that the frame(s) are worth playing over and over again over your TiVo PVR.
Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction comes to mind.
But now, with CBS and other providers licensing content to the to-be-acquired-by-Google YouTube, those freeze-frame moments are […]
Written by IP Telephony, VoIP, Broadband on October 26th, 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 IP Telephony, VoIP, Broadband on October 26th, 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 IP Telephony, VoIP, Broadband on October 26th, 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 IP Telephony, VoIP, Broadband on October 26th, 2006 with no comments.
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There's a lot of Techmeme and Digg juice being spread around today surrounding Peter Poffenberger's VoIP Lowdown piece he's entitled, 33 Reasons why VoIP is Destroying Traditional Telecoms.
But I have a fundamental problem with this piece.
What purports to be an analysis-based think piece seems to be- and I'm being a bit charitable here- more [...]
Written by IP Telephony, VoIP, Broadband on October 26th, 2006 with no comments.
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Thanks to all you angels and ministers of grace for the fact that the Internet has not crashed down on our heads with continuous episodes of bandwidth scarcities and resulting gridlock.
That would be one way of interpreting the worst-case- but not implausible scenario- posited by Nortel's chief technology officer, John Roese.
"The only reason YouTube [...]
Written by IP Telephony, VoIP, Broadband on October 26th, 2006 with no comments.
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A week ago Sunday, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales put out this enticing sounding open letter asking Wikipedia users for recommendations about how the collaborative, free online encyclopedia might spend an um, maybe-not-so-hypothetical $100 million war chest to acquire the rights to digital works.
OK, Jimbo.
First you should, in conjunction with experts, draw up a list [...]
Written by IP Telephony, VoIP, Broadband on October 26th, 2006 with no comments.
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As far as net neutrality issues are concerned, The Bush Administration- and a majority of his fellow Republicans- may favor established telephone companies over huge bandwidth users such as Google.
It's companies like Google, and their giant bandwidth suck, that make the telecom lobby and the CEOs they represent make occasional utterances that they ought [...]
Written by IP Telephony, VoIP, Broadband on October 26th, 2006 with no comments.
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Still struttin' about blogtown with my now-coming-to-pass prediction that Google might buy YouTube, I now find myself replicating my neural cogitations for my next big question:
Who will buy red-hot real-estate information site Zillow?
By the way, that screencap is Zillow's view of some of the prices in my 'hood.
OK, let us call the roll on [...]
Written by IP Telephony, VoIP, Broadband on October 26th, 2006 with no comments.
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EQO has just announced that its free multi-format IM and VoIP platform now makes it possible to make and receive Skype calls over BlackBerry as well as most Windows Mobile devices.
This is done via EQO Mobile, which is an Internet Communications platform that enables mobile VoIP calling and instant messenger services including AOLInstant [...]
Written by IP Telephony, VoIP, Broadband on October 26th, 2006 with no comments.
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Techcrunch reports that News Corp., had expressed interest in buying Digg, but nothing has happened thus far, and Digg might raise more money. I think the world of Digg, but frankly have no idea what it is worth. Some say $150 million.
One blogger thinks Google should buy them. His argument - since Google is based on the concept of “page rank,” and Diggers manually “rank” each post by digg-ing it, there could be some mutual benefit. From a pure eyeballs perspective, C/net would be ideal buyer. Digg could add some serious punch to their overall pageviews, and with their sales force, and Digg’s tech-heavy audience, it could be a profitable pairing. What do you think?
Written by Om Malik on October 26th, 2006 with no comments.
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Sprint Nextel has turned on its EVDO Rev A network, and started offering the service in (where else) San Diego, home of Qualcomm and Padres. (Most Qualcomm related technologies make a debut in San Diego.) The company is planning to turn on 20 additional markets by end of 2006, including our fair city of San Francisco.
Sprint is trying to beat Verizon to the punch by rolling out a faster network. The new EV-DO Rev A technology allows peak burst rates of 3.1 megabits per second (downlink) and 1.8 megabits per second (uplink.) But in reality the network can offer average speeds of between 450-to-800 kilobits per second and average upload speeds of 300 to 400 Kbit/s. Since it is Sprint, we will take that with a pinch of salt.
However, those speeds are enough to do some casual voip-ing? I know Andy is already heading out to the store to buy his card. Sprint has benefitted from its wireless data business quite handsomely, and it is now pushing hard to get more users. A poll on our site showed that nearly 36% of 558 GigaOM readers were likely to buy an EVDO Rev A Service from Sprint.
A reader had pointed out that “EVDO Rev. A allows for the foundation for better ReadyLink PTT and QChat. I am betting that there is Rev. A in some towers near Qualcomm in San Diego right now.” Spot on! QChat is Qualcomm push-to-talk technology Sprint just adopted for future PTT efforts.
Given how accurate our readers have been in making predictions, one can imagine Sprint is onto something. A Broadband USB Modem by Novatel Wireless Ovation U720 should get you connected and cost $250. However, sign a 2-year-deal and you could get the same card for $50.
This could be potentially good news for MacBook owners, who have to connect to a phone to get broadband access for now. Other Rev A cards include the Pantech PX-500, Sierra Wireless Aircard 595 and the Novatel Wireless S720.
Written by Om Malik on October 26th, 2006 with no comments.
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A survey by In-Stat says that US and Canadian consumers believe that they cannot live without broadband. For someone who has been champion the speedy connections for a while, this does come as a great bit of news, though it does seem obvious.
According to the survey, nearly 72% of all leading-edge BB households in North America already have a cable service bundle. Don’t take that stat too seriously - leading edge - is bound to create confusion. We don’t know what it really means. Cable’s share of broadband market is around 57% in the US. Of course people have a “cable service bundle.” Try buying cable broadband without television package!
The survey also shows that that 85% of the broadband household segments favor the quadruple play.They favor it - of course, because who wouldn’t want a single bill, and single point of failure: I keep forgetting to send in the check all the time. However, in order for four-play to work, the solutions have to be simple and easy to use.
Despite all that, the fact that we are thinking about broadband as our most important communication service - that is good news.
Written by Om Malik on October 26th, 2006 with no comments.
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