November 2nd, 2006
You are currently browsing the articles from the VoIP Digest written on November 2nd, 2006.
While the Net Neutrality has raged in the U.S., it's been quiet in Canada....until now. Yesterday, Videotron CEO Robert Depatie said the federal government should levy a "transmission tariff" on content providers so they can support the cost of building and maintaining networks. "If the movie studio were to mail a DVD . . . they would expect to pay postage or courier fees,” he told Canadian Press. "Why should they not expect a transmission tariff?". Depatie said he also concerned "Canada lags behind in pricing competitives and technology because the regulatory regime discriminates against new providers like Videotron". If there was ever a public shot across the bow of the federal government and telecom regulator, Depatie just delivered a one-two punch. In a sense, his move is a positive because it could compel the CRTC (Canada's telecom and media regulator) to finally get involved in the Net Neutrality issue/controversy. So far, the CRTC's standard response to inquiries about Net Neutrality is it won't act until it receives a complaint, which is hardly pro-active or forward-thinking. It is somewhat interesting to see a cableco push forward the Net Neutrality issue given it's the carriers who are losing customers and revenue as cablecos get deeper in the local telephone business. Then again, the cablecos are being forced to make large investments in their networks to stay competitive with increasingly-desperate carriers so the interest in external "help" is hardly a surprise. As for Depatie's contention the CRTC discrimminates against providers such as Videotron, that's just off-base given Canadian cablecos are barely regulated while carriers are still in regulatory shackles. I wonder my what my friend, Mark Goldberg, thinks about Depatie's comments.
Written by Mark Evans on November 2nd, 2006 with no comments.
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Kermitt Quirk, consult your accountant quick!
Online world entrepeneurs and gold farmers dodged the tax bullet only a couple weeks ago, when an American policymaker announced there’d be no taxing of income earned by activity in virtual worlds and MMOs. (At least any time soon.) Turns out their sighs of relief were premature, because the Australian Tax Office just laid down the law to its own country’s citizens: “If you are getting a monetary benefit then it’s not treated any differently– normal rules apply.” The ATO spokesperson even went so far to single out Second Life’s official currency by name. “The real world value of a transaction may form part of your taxable income, even if it is in Linden dollars.”
(Stop a moment and take in the full strangeness of that statement: a government official from a leading G20 nation just declared they have a taxation policy on a currency that only exists in a virtual world inhabited by subscribers from around the globe.)
Anyway, this is where Kermitt comes in, because the green-haired lizard is the Second Life avatar of Nathan Keir, a New Zealand programmer now living in Australia– which is where he created Tringo, a Tetris-meets-Bingo mini-game in SL that became so popular there, it soon dominated the culture. (Nice YouTube video of Keir demonstrating Tringo here.) It became so popular that he sold the non-SL rights to an American media company, which then went on to convert Tringo into a Gameboy Advance title. (SL subscribers retain the IP rights to their in-world creations.) There’s even talk of Tringo, the game that began in a virtual world, being turned into a TV show.
Of course, the last two spin-offs involve deals with real world companies and exchanges of actual money. The real question is what will Australian-based Second Life players like him do, now that they’re on the Ozzie taxman’s radar?
By Keir’s own estimate, he’s sold about 300 copies of Tringo for the L$ equivalent of $50– meaning a windfall of $15,000 that he’ll somehow have to figure out how to itemize on his next tax return. He’s not the only one: according to a recent article, at least 3,000 Second Life subscribers are making over $20,000 a year from their in-world activities; my educated estimate is that 5% of those earners are from Australia, which would mean 150 very confused people down under during tax time.
What happens then is anyone’s guess, but you have to think the tax boards of other developed nations will be watching what happens in Australia, and taking notes. It may actually be a boon to the economic growth of virtual worlds, to confer governmental legitimacy on their internal activity. Then again, it’ll also be a headache for the private companies that own these worlds, because when the first audit of a virtual world millionaire happens, it’ll be their server records that’ll get subpoenaed.
Written by Wagner James Au on November 2nd, 2006 with no comments.
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VoIP News is looking for The Top 25 People in VoIP. With so many innovative individuals in the industry, this is undoubtedly a difficult task so help them out by submiting your nomination here.
Written by Garrett Smith on November 2nd, 2006 with no comments.
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VoIP News is looking for The Top 25 People in VoIP. With so many innovative individuals in the industry, this is undoubtedly a difficult task so help them out by submiting your nomination here .
Written by Smith On VoIP - Insights on VoIP Products and Serv on November 2nd, 2006 with no comments.
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That’s the number Fusion Telecommunication is reporting for the first three month’s of their Efonica VoIP service. What peaked my interest about this announcement was not the 750,000 subscribers, but the number of paid subscribers. Out of a massive 750,000 subscribers only 1.33% (10,000) of them are paid subscribers. That is a pretty low conversion rate, but it is not that surprising. Most websites operate on the same sort conversion rates and do just fine.
This Efonica data directed my attention to other services, such as Skype, and got me wondering what their “conversion rate” is. It would be interesting to compare the conversion rates of all of the “free” VoIP services offering premium services.
Does anyone out there have data on any of the other free VoIP services we can use?
Written by Garrett Smith on November 2nd, 2006 with no comments.
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Thats the number Fusion Telecommunication is reporting for the first three months of their Efonica VoIP service . What peaked my interest about this announcement was not the 750,000 subscribers, but the number of paid subscribers. Out of a massive 750,000 subscribers only 1.33% (10,000) of them are paid subscribers. That is a pretty low conversion rate, but it is not that surprising. Most websites operate on the same sort conversion rates and do just fine. This Efonica data directed my attention to other services, such as Skype, and got me wondering what their conversion rate is. It would be interesting to compare the conversion rates of all of the free VoIP services offering premium services. Does anyone out there have data on any of the other free VoIP services we can use?
Written by Smith On VoIP - Insights on VoIP Products and Serv on November 2nd, 2006 with no comments.
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Philips has released a new cordless dual mode phone for Skype. The Philips VoIP 321, allows users to make both Skype and PSTN calls. Utilizing DECT 6.0, the Philips VoIP 321 comes with a base station for USB and RJ11 connectivity and one handset. The VoIP 321 features a speakerphone and a wide variety of call features such as, Caller ID, Call Waiting, Call on Hold, Message Waiting, and Call Transfer. With ten hours of talk time and almost 100 hours of stand-by time, the only thing the Philips VoIP 321 is missing is a color LCD screen.
Currently, the Philips VoIP 321 is only available through Philips Australia. For those of you who are still interested, the Philips VoIP 321 has a retail price of $129.99 and can be found be searching here.
Written by Garrett Smith on November 2nd, 2006 with no comments.
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>Philips has released a new cordless dual mode phone for Skype . The Philips VoIP 321 , allows users to make both Skype and PSTN calls. Utilizing DECT 6.0, the Philips VoIP 321 comes with a base station for USB and RJ11 connectivity and one handset. The VoIP 321 features a speakerphone and a wide variety of call features such as, Caller ID, Call Waiting, Call on Hold, Message Waiting, and Call Transfer. With ten hours of talk time and almost 100 hours of stand-by time, the only thing the Philips VoIP 321 is missing is a color LCD screen . Currently, the Philips VoIP 321 is only available through Philips Australia . For those of you who are still interested, the Philips VoIP 321 has a retail price of $129.99 and can be found be searching here .
Written by Smith On VoIP - Insights on VoIP Products and Serv on November 2nd, 2006 with no comments.
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The last time mobile video startup MobiTV said they raised $70 million in a third round of funding, we used them as an example of the return of the big VC money. Now the Emeryville-based company is announcing today that it has raised even more money as part of its Series C: $30 million with additional investors Hearst Corporation and Adobe Systems. The company says their total Series C funding comes to over $100 million bringing the company’s total to $125 million raised since the company started in 1999 — now that is a lot of money.
What are they going to do with it? The company was a little vague on the details and cited the usual laundry list — customer acquisition, international expansion, etc. — but the additions of Hearst and Adobe are interesting moves for the company. Hearst has various media outlets, including television, radio, Internet, magazines and newspapers, so help with content deals could be a nice addition to an investment. Adobe on the other hand has been looking to invest in companies that use Adobe platforms, especially the new Apollo, as Liz wrote recently. MobiTV’s AT&T Broadband TV service uses Flash.
MobiTV CEO Phillip Alvelda says that among other assets the two new investors are “neutral” companies, meaning not many other content, hardware or media partners would take offense to the investment. MobiTV has a lot of deals under its over six-year life span, so it’s probably a good idea to tread carefully. Now the company just needs to get more subscribers; its last released numbers were just at one million.
Written by Katie Fehrenbacher on November 2nd, 2006 with no comments.
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Written by Skype Journal on November 2nd, 2006 with no comments.
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Insanely, ragingly mad props to Karl, who writes the Municipal Report for Broadband Reports.com.
Karl puts the smackdown on a buncha libertarians and right-wingers (like there is a difference) who have banded together as the Freedom Foundation in order to, as they say, serve the cause of "optimizing broadband deployment" in the U.S.
Documenting the Freedom Foundation [...]
Written by IP Telephony, VoIP, Broadband on November 2nd, 2006 with no comments.
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Techmeme is the ultimate aggregator of Web-posted technology news.
More ultimate than Digg (user-generated) more ultimate than the Technology area of Google News.
Why? Because of its almost instantaneous updating and peer-group feel,Techmeme has a way about it that no other technology resource does.
Talk to any technology blogger whose work appears on the Web with any [...]
Written by IP Telephony, VoIP, Broadband on November 2nd, 2006 with no comments.
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Blake Ross, one of the more high profile members of the Firefox team, has been quietly working on a new start up for a while. He has been successful in keep the wraps on his new startup, Parakey, but now it seems is close to revealing plans for his next big idea.
Ross and Hewitt had started the company back in February 2005 with seed funding from Sequoia Capital, and since then have kept a very low profile. In an interview with IEEE Spectrum, he reveals some details about the core offering of his startup he co-founded with Joe Hewitt.
Ross describes Parakey as a WebOS that does what a traditional OS can do. It allows you to set up a site that can be shared by say all member of the family, and can be accessed from within a web browser. In order to make it work, you need to download a small application that turns your local machine into a server. You can decide which part of the Parakey site is viewable to the outside world.
Best of all, the part of Parakey that’s online communicates with the part of Parakey running on your home computer, synchronizing the contents of your Parakey pages with their latest versions on your computer. That means you can do the work of updating your site off-line, too.
The offline availability of the web applications is crucial and Ross seems to understand that. [ I wrote about this in my recent column for Business 2.0, in case you are interested. ]
“We all know people…who have all this content that they are not publishing stored on their computers,” he says. “We’re trying to persuade them to live their lives online.” Ross wants independent developers to create a variety of applications for Parakey. To that end, he and Hewitt have created a programming language for Parakey that they call JUL, a mashed-up acronym that stands for “Just another User interface Language.”
For rest of the details, you can read the story at the IEEE Spectrum website. via Matt
Written by Om Malik on November 2nd, 2006 with no comments.
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When Cingular, the largest and generally the least aggressive U.S. carrier when it comes to new services, moves into a market, you know the market has been set to take off for awhile. Cingular will launch a mobile music service with deals in place with Napster, Yahoo Music and eMusic, says the WSJ. Supposedly the service will enable users to transfer those subscription music services as well as ripped songs via a cable, with over-the-air transfers set for next year.
Cingular is just the latest company that is looking to tap the mobile music market. Why now? A lot has to do with the availablity and the success of phones with music capabilities. Nokia says it sold 46.5 million music-enabled phones last year and has a target for 80 million this year. And we all know about the iPhone rumors.
While both the cell phone companies and MP3-device companies try to downplay the competition between the two sides, Jupiter Research says that the number of people that have cell phones that play MP3 quality songs will surpass the number of music device users beginning in 2009 in the U.S — though that doesn’t consider usage. The ongoing iPhone rumors, the underwhelming Cingular/iTunes/Motorola phones, the Zune’s WiFi capability, and Nokia’s increasingly sophisticated music-media devices all point to the fact that companies are trying to figure out what kind of converged and connected devices consumers will want for mobile music.
But while Jupiter says the iPod will reign supreme for at least the next 12 to 18 months in the U.S., there are so many big players in this market that Apple’s dominance isn’t necessarily assured in the long run. Cingular follows Verizon and Sprint into the mobile music market and Sprint says today that it has sold eight million songs through its Sprint Music Store. Cingular was rumored to be a launch partner for the much-speculated iPhone, but who knows how Cingular’s solo music plans will affect that deal (if there is one.)
Nokia is another major player that is investing a lot into mobile music, see “Nokia Starts its Big Music Push”. The company acquired LoudEye in August for $60 million, announced a music recommendation service and is working on services for discovering, purchasing and managing mobile music. Then there’s Microsoft, which is launching the connected Zune, but also provides its software for phones like Verizon’s music Vcast service — Steve Ballmer was at Verizon’s music launch event in Vegas — and it has its digital rights management. And Sony Ericsson has all those popular Walkman phones.
Outside of the U.S. the market is whole different ballgame. Carriers in South Korea and China are increasingly trying to become music media companies. According to Instat the size of South Korea’s mobile music industry has already surpassed the country’s conventional music industry, Japan will have $3.4 billion in mobile music revenues in 2010 and China $2.8 billion in revenues by 2010 (those figures include ringtones.) It helps when there is a really neglected music industry to begin with. In Europe the market is taking off too, and the European full track music download market is thought to reach 674 million euros ($857 million) by 2011.
E-Marketer puts the total global mobile music market at $7.5 billion by 2010 — no wonder everyone is trying to grab a piece.
Written by Katie Fehrenbacher on November 2nd, 2006 with no comments.
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Written by Skype Journal on November 2nd, 2006 with no comments.
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Written by Skype Journal on November 2nd, 2006 with no comments.
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When you're top dog, people start to throw dirt at you. It's just the way of the world, right? Michael Arrington, who's caught the Web 2.0 by the tail these days with his growing TechCrunch empire, has had enough. He's had enough of having his integrity attacked and motives questioned. Truth be told, TechCrunch is a business. It's not a public service to the Web 2.0 community, it's not a charity, and it's not a traditional news organization that promises to be objective and balanced. As Arrington says "TechCrunch is different". Everyone needs to accept it, deal with it, and move on. If you don't like what TechCrunch or Arrington are doing, don't read it. For more thoughts, check out Deep Jive Interests, which has replaced Dead 2.0 as my favourite Web 2.0 voice of reason. (By way, whatever happened to Dead 2.0? Is he really dead?).
Written by Mark Evans on November 2nd, 2006 with no comments.
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A Seattle startup founded by RealNetworks alums launched today, promising to halve the cost of distributing movies online. The company, GridNetworks, is hoping to sign up content distributors and set-top boxes, and already has a few customers using its distributed network, a command-and-control form of P2P that clusters all the bits well enough to do streaming.
GridNetworks requires download of its (Window-only, for now) player. In our tests high-quality video streamed quite fast, without jerks or annoying pauses for buffering. The company says it can deliver a 1.2GB movie at a cost of 25 to 50 cents, and it will handle packaging, pricing, geographic distribution, release windows, and all the messy stuff involved with selling movies.
We met up with GridNetworks co-founder and VP of sales and marketing Bo Wandell at Digital Hollywood last week. He and CEO Jeff Payne had previously collaborated on Spry’s “Internet-In-A-Box” way back in 1995. Payne was recently at network appliance maker Bivio Networks. For the new company, the two have raised $500,000 in angel funding and have built a team of 15 employees — nothing on the scale of competitor Kontiki, which was bought for $62 million by VeriSign after raising $46.5 million and signing customers such as Sky, AOL, and the BBC. GridNetworks’ first deployed customer is online video store ReelTime Rentals, which launched in September. It is also in trials with some web-based television channels for gaming and healthy living.
We think instant gratification for online movie-watchers is a big opportunity. The P2P sector has been quiet recently, but hopefully companies like GridNetworks and the highly anticipated the Venice Project can bring the energy back.
Written by Liz Gannes on November 2nd, 2006 with no comments.
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I’ve been playing with Vox… the new social network-enabled blogging platform recently launched by Six Apart (also owners of TypePad, Moveable Type, and LiveJournal). Although I don’t do new product/service reviews, I will say that Vox is very well done and the new service could prove itself to be a vortex within a scattered social media marketplace.
I’m probably also one of the very few that felt Facebook made the absolute right decision when they opened up its social network. Their timing, in my opinion, could not have been better, particularly in terms of competitive positioning against MySpace. With the move, there is no doubt in my mind that Facebook has placed itself on a new growth curve… one that will benefit from the churn of members from competitors as well as newbies to social networks.
Having said that, let me qualify my thesis a bit. As I wrote in my last post, Facebook has a low “narcissism” ratio, relative to more “Hollywood-oriented” social media services… and it’s very important that it stay that way as it pulls back its velvet rope to the masses. But doing so puts Facebook on the same evolutionary path with Six Apart… at the conceptual level, both companies are ultimately aimed at becoming personalized portal platforms (what I’ve previously referred to as “consoles for consumer control“).
As such, it is increasingly likely that Facebook and Six Apart, given their new initiatives, will be competing for the same customers (both users and advertisers). And if I were running one or the other, I would immediately run a strategic/financial analysis to look at the costs and benefits of a merger. But I would do so with one very specific objective in mind… to see if a combination could flip into an IPO.
An IPO of a merged Six Apart/Facebook would represent the market’s first pure-play social media listing. Judging from the view of Wall Street analysts, and the stock market reaction, to previous deals like Rupert Murdoch’s purchase of MySpace and Google’s pending acquisition of YouTube (in addition to the street’s punishing of Viacom and Yahoo! for being too complacent), it’s pretty safe to say that a qualified pure-play social media IPO could easily become the next Nasdaq darling.
Of course, the combined company would need to be profitable (which I’m guessing they would be) and it would have to demonstrate meaningful revenues… I would guess the combined entity is currently generating over $150 million annually. That said, I would only go IPO if the underwriters priced the company at a bubble-like valuation of at least $2 billion. 
Written by Robert Young on November 2nd, 2006 with no comments.
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Everyone's favourite whipping VoIP whipping boy, Vonage, posted third-quarter results that left a lot to be desired. Churn climbed to 2.6% from 2.3% in the second quarter, the cost of acquiring a new customer rose to $254 from $239, while the number of net new subscribers was 205,000 compared with 256,000 in Q2. While the company had a smaller loss ($62-million) than analysts expected, the investment community was disappointed with guidance of 2.2 million to 2.3 million new users in 2006, compared with a previous estimate of 2.3 million to 2.4 million. The company now has 2.05 million customers, compared with 1.85 million at the end of Q2 and 1.06 million a year earlier. Vonage shares were down 1% in early-morning trading to $6.80 (compared with the 52-week low of $6.30). The question facing investors is whether Vonage can gain enough critical mass and reduce marketing/acquisition costs so it can compete with the cablecos, which are aggressively gaining market share.
Written by Mark Evans on November 2nd, 2006 with no comments.
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I'm heading down to New York on Sunday morning with b5media colleagues Jeremy Wright and Aaron Brazell for Ad Tech. On Sunday afternoon, we'll be hanging out at Gatsby's at 53 Spring St. to watch Aaron's beloved Baltimore Ravens take on the Cincinnati Bengals. If you're a blogger and/or attending Ad-Tech, come join us! Aaron has more details here.
Written by Mark Evans on November 2nd, 2006 with no comments.
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