December 9th, 2006
You are currently browsing the articles from the VoIP Digest written on December 9th, 2006.
According to TeleGeography , VoIP subscriptions grew by 18% in the third quarter to 8.2 Million, but growth has slowed for the second consecutive quarter. Although the number of VoIP subscribers has double from last year, and Telegeography predicts that the market will grow to almost 2.5 times it current size by this time next year, this recent lag in growth makes me wonder if the lack of consumer education on VoIP by VoIP service providers has finally caught up. With the second phase of potential subscribers less tech savvy, the importance of education increases, but to date no provider has stepped-up and sold the value of VoIP. I have a feeling this second-wave, no matter how low the price, will be more hesitant to migrate to VoIP if the technology continues to be a mystery.
Written by Smith On VoIP - Insights on VoIP Products and Serv on December 9th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Uncategorized.
In case you’ve been dozing over the day or so…
Robert proposes Yahoo should build its own Facebook internally.
Katie finds enough evidence to suspect Google is investing in Chinese P2P company Xunlei.
Om highlights the remarkable paydays top tech shareholders had in November. We know Bill Gates is beyond rich, but man! He sold $581 million worth of shares in a single month.
Jackson ponders “a generation that takes their browsing home with them and are accustomed to always-on connectivity, instant access to content and mobile social networking.” He notes, “Getting them to sit quietly in cubicles may prove difficult.”
Chris wonders about how to kick-start inspiration.
Paul pulls out two articles about the webification of TV and the TV-ification of the web.
Liz hooks up readers with access to the private beta of a new French video-sharing site.
Written by Liz Gannes on December 9th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Uncategorized.
Late Friday FCC lawyers said that commish Robert McDowell could indeed participate in the review of the AT&T-BellSouth merger, a process McDowell had been abstaining from due to possible conflicts of interests with a previous employer. Watch next week to see if McDowell, a Republican, listens to Democrats like Ed Markey and keeps himself out of the merger discussions, or whether he bends to chairman Kevin Martin’s wishes and ties the deal up in a big bow for the holidays. Equipment providers like Cisco, who are waiting for the deal to go through so that AT&T can start spending BellSouth money, are likely to give McDowell a ring soon.
Written by Paul Kapustka on December 9th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Broadband.
Google is offering click to call service to its Indian users. VoIP Inc. emailed us and let us know that they are partnering with Google on this new rollout.
The click-to-call service is no different from a similar service that the search giant started offering in the US in November 2006. Since then there was talk that the service was pulled due to prank callers, but it seems to still work in some cases.
Regardless, the wisdom of click to call features in India doesn’t make much sense, given the low PC density in that nation. If they are offering such features on their mobile version, it would make a lot of sense. Mobile phones are a more viable platform for offering new services in India.
Interestingly, the Indian government announced a ban today on Skype and other VoIP services such as Net2Phone. The government warned call centers and said they will face harsh penalties if they continue to use such VoIP services. Call center operators will have to furnish the names of carriers from whom they are buying bandwidth and VoIP minutes. The Indiatimes says:
The companies will also have to give an undertaking that they will not use the services of unlicensed foreign service providers such as Net2Phone, Vonage, Dialpad, Impetus, Novanet, Euros, Skype and Yahoo. As per Department of Telecommunications’ (DOT) estimates, these unlicensed service companies provide 30 million minutes of internet telephony per month to corporates, call centres and BPOs in the country.
For a country which views itself as part of Planet Technology, its government is failing to take into account the changing telecom and technology environment. These moves to ban low cost voice providers must have come at the behest of large phone companies - Bharti Telecom and Reliance Telecom - which are major long distance minute providers and of course, some of the biggest political donors.
Written by Om Malik on December 9th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on VoIP and India, Inc..
Today a GPS chip can fit in a cell phone and can cost as little as a dollar. Thirty years ago a GPS device cost tens of thousands of dollars, was bigger than a bread box (see picture) and was used only by the military. Bob Rennard, chief technology officer at mobile navigation company TeleNav, remembers those days. He was a principal engineer of GPS technology in the ’70s and earlier this week he regaled a fascinating story to me:
Rennard says when he was working on designing the original GPS system his team had three goals:
1) Be able to drop 5 bombs in the same hole during combat.
2) Make a GPS receiver that could be worn on a soldier’s back.
3) Make that device for under $20,000.
Wow. Well, 30 years later those goals look as dated as room-sized computers. At Santa Clara-based TeleNav, Rennard and TeleNav executives like CEO HP Jin are making GPS navigation services available on the average cell phone for about $10 per month. The company has been winning over carriers and handset makers and announced that it has added carrier Alltel Wireless this week.
We reviewed TeleNav’s service on a Sprint Katana Sanyo phone a few months ago, and found the service flawless while driving around the Bay Area. I even took it to remote Placerville in the Sierra foothills and it was accurate on backwoods rural roads. The only exception was driving in downtown San Francisco, where tall buildings confused the signal.
I also wanted a way to connect the audio driving directions to my speakers, so, say, I can play loud music and then be interrupted when there is an important direction. Without a service like that sometimes the audio directions were hard to hear. The Telenav execs say they are working on these types of features.
There are a few other companies selling into this market as well, like Networks in Motion, which is behind Verizon’s VZ Navigator, and Wave Market.
Sadly, such new navigation techniques are in greater focus after the recent tragic loss of James Kim. As GPS technology improves, maybe we will all be a little safer in the future.
Written by Katie Fehrenbacher on December 9th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Featured and Mobile.
Another week, another Talking Tech podcast. This week, we've actually got a live guest - technology analyst Duncan Stewart, who has been part of Canada's tech landscape for the past decade as a fund manager and equity analyst. In a spirited roundtable discussion (fueled by some Starbucks java), we talked about Nortel's decision to end a 92-year-old auditing relationship with Deloitte Touche; Yahoo's decision to appoint Susan Decker as chief operating officer; the start-up landscape within Canada's technology industry, and the hottest holiday gifts (Wii, Zune, Xbox, etc.)
Written by Mark Evans on December 9th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Main Page and Podcasting.
Now that Yahoo has announced its reorg, many are wondering and speculating as to what the ailing Internet giant might do in terms of M&A. Put another way, will Yahoo rely on acquisitions to fix its problems and plug up its holes? Or will it depend on its internal resources, now that they have streamlined for improved execution, to strengthen its strategic weaknesses. Given the company’s weak stock price, itís much more likely that they will opt for the latter path if at all possible.
Take Facebook as an example. Rumors of on-again, off-again acquisition talks notwithstanding, Yahoo must take steps to gain a leadership position in social networking. As the Internet’s largest community and communications company, the fact that Yahoo is not a leader in social networking represents one of the biggest missed opportunities in our industry’s history.
Just as Viacom’s Tom Freston got fired by Sumner Redstone for losing the MySpace deal to Rupert Murdoch, someone’s head should roll at Yahoo for the fact that they have virtually no meaningful presence in social networking.
But what to do? Should Yahoo take the highly dilutive plunge and buy Facebook for $1 Billion-plus? In my opinion, no, they should not — there is an alternative that is better, and a lot cheaper.
Yahoo should immediately clone Facebook. But as not Facebook is today; rather, as Facebook was before they opened up. In other words, Yahoo should develop and launch a social network designed exclusively for college and high school students. This market opportunity, which is the exact same opportunity that Facebook exploited several years ago, is now available once again. It’s a low-hanging fruit in the social networking space, one that would be very easy for Yahoo to pluck off. Cloning the original Facebook would also shore up one of Yahoo’s most glaring weaknesses it would bring back the 14-22 student demo.
For a company like Yahoo, social networking is not a market that they should buy into. Yes, Murdoch needed to, being a traditional media company with no real Internet competency. Even Google’s acquisition of YouTube made sense from the perspective of core competency since Google is notoriously bad when it comes to anything “social.”
But for Yahoo, social media is as natural a market as they come. It already possesses everything it needs to lead and succeed in that space. But they got lost during the last few years. Bringing in someone like Lloyd Braun to head up their Media Group was indicative of how misguided they were. Don’t get me wrong.
Braun is a tremendous TV executive. After all, he’s the one at ABC that green-lighted “Lost” and “Desperate Housewives”. But inside Yahoo, when the big opportunity in the market was clearly social media, it was inevitable that someone like Braun would himself become lost and desperate.
Written by Robert Young on December 9th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Media and Featured and Software 2.0.
It's still early days but I think Google's move into the radio advertising business could revolutionize (or perhaps evolve) the way the industry does business. In a test project, Google is providing 20 AdWords customers with access to more than 730 stations, which run ads in more than 260 U.S. markets. The AdWords system is linked through Google's dMarc, division, which was acquired for as much as $1.13-billion earlier this year (it was Google's biggest deal before YouTube came along). According to CNet, the 20 selected customers will see a new "audio ads" tag when they log into the AdWords system, which allows them to bid on air spots and target their ads by geography, station type, listener demographics and time of day. Given that the radio business has operated in much the same way for decades, Google is trying to implement a huge new approach to selling advertising. It could be the wave of the future or it could fall flat on its face. Nevertheless, give Google credit for trying something that could potentially be extremely disruptive. As well, the beta test and Google's deal with BSkyB are more evidence of the company's strategic thrust into new markets beyond the online paid-search business.
Written by Mark Evans on December 9th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Uncategorized and Google and Main Page and Media.
Technology’s big boys are taking the current wave of optimism in Silicon Valley and stock markets, and selling some of their holdings, perhaps in preparation for some serious shopping this season. Thomson Financial sent us their Insider report for the month of November, and pointed out that “Technology saw a doubling of sales from last month.”
They also pointed out that “given the market performance this year, coupled with November having the largest sales value for 2006, we do not expect the trend to change as the markets move to lighter trading for the holidays.” So who is selling for say buying a new jet, changing the world, or simply taking money off the table? Find out after the jump.
Written by Om Malik on December 9th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Random Access.
According to Pierce Mattie Public Relations, I'm one of the blogosphere's movers and shakers - along with Jessica Coen, Steve Rubel, Corynne Steindler and Robert Scoble, which is awful flattering company. The criteria for making the list was using a blog as platform for landing a job in the blogging industry. Truth be told, I started to blog in early-2004 as an experiment to see what all the fuss was about. From there, it took on a life of its own before b5media emerged on the scene. (Note: the list was compiled by Shannon Nelson, who writes a few blogs for b5).
Written by Mark Evans on December 9th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Uncategorized and Main Page.
If you live in the US, probably you haven’t noticed it. But fiber networks are growing in popularity, luring people with faster speeds, and now lower prices. PointTopic, the company that tracks the broadband markets says that fiber networks for consumer broadband access are now in fact cheaper than cable connections.
According to a PointTopic report, FTTx tariffs went down 12% to US$28.1, three percent than the average monthly rental for cable modem services. Average access price for a monthly DSL connection is about $25; while cable costs $29.50 a month. Fiber is now going for $28.10 a month.
Fiber is getting a lot of traction in the overseas market, and has higher visibility in Asia and Europe. In the US, Verizon FiOS is the most visible manifestation of the FTTx trend.
Now we might not care much for the Verizon Wireless phone UI, but we would switch to FiOS with all its issues in a heartbeat.
Especially if Verizon promised us a future bandwidth upgrade, and of course if we live in Verizon territory. And better pricing.
Currently, for a 30Mbps/5Mbps Verizon FiOS connection you pay $179.95 per month and for a 15Mbps/2Mbps connection you pay $44.95 per month.
Regardless, the falling fiber access prices are going to help convince consumers switch away from DSL and cable.
‘DSL rentals had been undergoing major price reductions since the beginning of 2006′, points out Vince Chook. ‘But with such a small drop over the quarter, cable modem is certainly losing its price competitiveness.’
Written by Om Malik on December 9th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Broadband.