December 13th, 2006
You are currently browsing the articles from the VoIP Digest written on December 13th, 2006.
You've heard of Big Brother right?
Well, he's here and his name is the Federal Trade Commission.
In a move that the agency says is aimed to crack down on deceptive, word-of-mouth marketing, the consumer protection agency will start to insist that online peer-to-peer communication in which a marketer is paying for promotional consideration must be [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on December 13th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on General and Regulatory.
To be formally unveiled today, Skype's new upfront, $29.95 a year Unlimited Calling subscription plan ($14.95 for signups by January 31)for calls within the U.S. and Canada is a milepost in Skype's move to be a major Internet phone provider within North America- as opposed to predominantly an international calling service.
It's also a major [...]
Written by Russell Shaw on December 13th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Skype and General.
Earlier this month, Qualcomm and LSI Logic went on a nano-based shopping spree. LSI spent $4 billion and snapped up Agere Systems, a company that shared DNA with AT&T, Lucent Technologies and Bell Labs. Qualcomm, which is well known for its CDMA and W-CDMA technologies, snapped up Airgo and a division of RF Micro Devices.
With chip sector growth falling into single digits, industry insiders are predicting frenzied deal making, whether it is through mergers and acquisitions. Many are betting on leveraged buyouts. EE Times, the one true bible of the chip business says that companies that specialize in analog chips or FPGA chips could be taking a private road out of the public markets.
Who could go private? EET says Xilinx, Altera, Maxim, Linear and National Semiconductor are all go-private candidates. Philips Electronics’ chip division has already gone this route, through a $10 billion-plus KKR/Silver Lake deal back in August. It is amazing how quickly the fortunes of these companies have turned. During the go-go 1990s, analog and FPGA chipmakers were the darlings of the stock markets, soaring to new highs by the day.
The chip sector has certainly changed – from one dominated by personal computers and telecom gear to one that is increasingly reliant on the consumer electronics and mobile phones. In a recent research report, Gartner Inc. said that chip revenues for 2006 totaled about $261 billion, up 11% from global chip sales in 2005.
While 11 percent growth sounds great, in reality it is only a handful of companies that are doing well – especially those who are in the memory chip or wireless semiconductor business.
“Outside of DRAM, wireless semiconductor sales once again drove strong performance in the industry,” said Jeremey Donovan, research director at Gartner, in a press release. Intel, the world leader in chip revenues, saw its sales decline by almost 9.5 percent and market share drop by about 2.7 percent.
The telecom industry, once a voracious consumer of specialist chips and high-priced FPGAs has itself fallen on hard times, and has seen a consolidation of its own. The end customers, aka service providers who bought chip-laden gear have merged and become more powerful, squeezing the telecom gear makers, who in turn have been passing on the pressure to their suppliers.
It is no surprise that everyone is looking at the consumer electronics market as the panacea for all that ails the chip industry. The shift has become pronounced in recent years as demand for application-specific chips has shot up. A case in point: PortalPlayer, which benefited from the growing popularity of Apple’s iPod music player.
While digital cameras, LCD televisions, and music players are high-volume products, they are also very price sensitive, and leave little room for failure as far as chip makers are concerned. Again, a case in point is PortalPlayer, which got designed out of one generation of Apple iPod devices and was punished by the stock markets with the abandon of a dominatrix.
But that is going to change as well. More on that in part two of this three-part series, to be published on later this week.
Written by Om Malik on December 13th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Featured.
Skype has finally released their much anticipated Windows mobile software that allows smartphone users to make Skype calls anywhere there is a Wi-Fi access point or HotSpot. Skypes 2.2 Beta for smartphones requires a minimum 12MB of free storage memory on your device to install Skype or 6MB free if you are installing from a memory card. In order to use Skype for Windows Mobile, your device must have a high speed wireless Internet connection over WiFi or 3G. > > > The Skype 2.2 Beta for Windows Mobile is available for immediate download .
Written by Smith On VoIP - Garrett Smith's Insights on VoIP P on December 13th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Uncategorized.
The Venice Project, the much-awaited Internet TV project from the founders of Skype, started bringing in outside beta testers today. The beta program will be viral, with each user able to distribute invites to new testers. As soon as we give it a spin we’ll do some more in depth coverage here and on NewTeeVee.
Writes Janus Friis on his blog,
We set out to try to merge the best of TV and the best of the Internet and I think we have just taken a big step on a long journey. For a few months we have been quietly testing with a small circle of people. Now, we’re going to expand that circle – with more and more people getting invited. If you want to take it for a spin, get an invitation from an existing beta tester.
From Om: Someone who got to use the service wasn’t very kind. “To sum up, very bad interface, no text description of what the buttons mean, quality of video goes up and down very much, not really much better than a good flash file that you size up 250%.”
Exclusive screenshots beneath the fold:
Written by Liz Gannes on December 13th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Media and Startups.
With the Canadian government intent on de-regulating the country's $10-billion local telephone market and giving the incumbent carriers the freedom to set their own prices, it will be interesting to see the impact this decision will have on Canada's VoIP marketplace. To be perfectly frank, VoIP hasn't been overly successful in Canada. By this, I mean Real VoIP with all the bells and whistles that a Web-based service can offer. What Videotron and Rogers are offering right now is VoIP-lite because it's just plain old telephone service (POTS) with none of the online frills such as voice-mail to e-mail that rivals such as Vonage, Primus and BabyTel are offering.
Perhaps the reason the cablecos haven't rolled out the value-added features that makes VoIP such a compelling proposition is they haven't been compelled to do it yet. With the carriers being regulated in the local market and an unwillingness to become more aggressive with VoIP until the rules became more clear, the cablecos have been able to get away being an alternative option to attract consumers. In Quebec, Videotron has used ultra-low prices if you have a multi-service bundle, while Rogers and Shaw have been content to pick off customers pissed off with Bell and Telus respectively.
But what happens if Bell and Telus suddenly get more aggressive with their phone prices (both traditional and VoIP) to win back customers who may have strayed to the cablecos, Vonage, etc.? And what happens if Bell really starts to push Bell Digital Voice as a premium, multi-feature VoIP service, while cutting prices on traditional local service? This could become a strategic conundrum for the cablecos because they would have to determine whether to compete on price against traditional service, which looks and smells the same as cable telephone service provided by Rogers and Videotron. Or do the cablecos go upstream and go head to head with Bell Digital Voice by adding all the Web-based features of Real VoIP.
If I had to guess, the cablecos will go the premium route because it fits into their focus/obsession with disciplined pricing and ARPU. If this materializes, it would be terrific for VoIP and customers who want Real VoIP because the cablecos and carriers will have to compete on features and services - much like they do in the high-speed Internet access market where both sides are intent to increase speed and add more features as opposed to - heaven forbid! - drop prices.
Technorati Tags: VoIP
Written by Mark Evans on December 13th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Main Page and Telecom Regulation and VOIP Services, Competition.
It’s time to grow up! And that’s exactly what we are doing over here at GigaOM - growing a little bigger and adding two new members to the core GigaOM team. I present to you some of the changes we are making, as we expand our little publishing business.
For first six months, three of us - Katie, Liz and I – were running pretty hard, multitasking and watching out for each other, preempting our individual choke points without even trying.
Still, as we have grown, we have struggled to keep the wheels on the cart. From my own personal standpoint, it has been a new lesson in time management, and multitasking. Switching roles between business functions, reporter and editor, and part-time janitor has been tough – and very humbling. It is even harder for someone who has lead a relatively care-free life of a magazine writer.
Perhaps it was about month ago, a good friend (a non-techie to boot!) suggested that in order to grow you have to work with people who have a multiplier impact on your productivity. Productive teams are efficient teams, and eventually lead to profitable, stable companies. Good advice, and perhaps that was the yardstick I used when we started to look for new team members.
Given how closely Katie, Liz and I work, it was also important for me to make additions to the team, and still maintain that fine balance. Two people who fit the bill perfectly are Paul Kapustka and Joey Wan.
Paul, as some of you might have noticed, has already started as the Managing Editor of GigaOM Network. His primary task will be shepherding our two new properties – NewTeeVee and GigaGamez (to launch soon) – working with the writers and contributing bloggers to ensure that we maintain quality, and continue to offer a premium experience across the network.
In addition, Paul is going to write about video over IP and voice over IP. Why Paul? Simple – I have known him for years and always enjoyed his work, especially when he was writing for Information Week, Advanced IP Pipeline, and most recently at Pulver.com. VoIP bloggers know him well…. all too well.
He is a stable, sensible veteran who has been in the reporting trenches for a long time. He understands how to meld the new-fangled blogging with old-fashioned gumshoe styled reporting.
Paul would be an ideal mentor for some of our younger team members. But more than anything, he believes in our model of combining classic journalism with blogging and analysis. And perhaps, there will be fewer of those spelling errors, misplaced commas and late night rambling posts by me! Welcome buddy!
Next up is Joey Wan, who is joining us as Manager of Business Operations. While she starts on Monday next, she has already initiated some procedural changes that will help streamline the business aspect of GigaOM.
I owe Nick Douglas, former editor of Valleywag, for introducing me to Joey. He ran a poll, which Joey obviously won! Let’s just say, we had a reason to chat when I ran into her at a SF TechSessions event, and we started talking about the challenges of running a business … blah! blah! blah! She did not have the classic ‘manager’ experience, but her organizational skills impressed me.
She worked on STIRR events; she knows pretty much everyone in the little geek world we call Silicon Valley, and oh, did I say, she is organized. A blogger herself, she understood our business quite well. Rest of the team gave their thumbs up – and to make a long story longer – she starts on Monday. Maybe she can get that About page fixed and updated! Welcome Joey!
In addition to these two fine people, we have added Judi Sohn to our growing team of bloggers. Judi is going to be contributing to Web Worker Daily on a regular basis, and already she is busy making our lives better. She has 11 tips on how to better manage your time. (Judi, mind reading is not part of the job… Seriously!)
Sohn, who lives on the right side of the country, is an awesome blogger. Anne 2.0 introduced me to her, and I spent an entire evening reading her blog. I think she is destined for blogging stardom. Judi will be working with Anne Zelenka, Chris Gilmer, and Jackson West on WWD, a site that is very near and dear to my heart. We are putting out some great content on that site, and hopefully you will pay us a visit there.
So what does this all mean? First and foremost, we are responding to the needs and wishes of our reader community. This frees me up to write more, spend time with start-ups and also be able to bring more clarity into what we are doing and where we are going.
The addition of new members to the team comes at an opportune time. The next few weeks will be quite challenging for me on a very personal level, and I can rest assured that our blogs are in good hands, even when my eyes are turned away from the browser.
Finally a big thanks to our readers – old and new – for rewarding us with your time, thoughts and patronage. We strive to do better, and hopefully your tips, suggestions and criticisms will flow freely!
Photo by Joey Wan via Flickr
Written by Om Malik on December 13th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Uncategorized and Featured.
SAN JOSE, Calif. — 8:50 a.m. PST — Cisco CEO John Chambers just said that “if there is a killer app, it is video,” as part of his keynote speech kicking off the Cisco C-Scape analysts conference here.
“Things like YouTube are just the baby steps of the impact video will have on networks,” said Chambers, who has already introduced the company’s new big-vision theme (”The Human Network”) and the technology vision that supports it (”Network as the Platform.”)
Live-blogging this, so quotes may not be word for word… Chambers opened talking about how Cisco differentiates by combining vision, strategy and execution… said it took 6-7 years to change the company internally (”changing the reward system, who got promoted or not”) to get buy-in on the current track.
Singapore to get 1 Gbps to the home: Getting to some good stuff now about India, focus on globalization… “moving 10 of our top execs into our globalization center in India. Use our own technologies… (videoconferencing) to change support… Drive all four elements of our strategy from India. This is a huge investment for the future.”
Says Singapore is planning for 1 Gbps to the home… “not that much more expensive to do a gig.”
now transition into service provider market
why did US stop innovating? Stopped investing
SPs going to be experience providers, not plumbers.
“we define service providers today by their access technologies. Who cares! Want to define them by the experience [they deliver].”
More as we catch up!
8:50 a.m. — Showing off now… it is impressive though how Cisco strategy slides from the past are pretty good at predicting the future, especially the gradual improvements in networks.
Next level: Quad play
9:07 a.m. — Jim Grubb demo now, showing a Cisco media player — small box with Ethernet jack and video input/output to make any display a smart device on the network.
Waiting for the inevitable Grubb salary/budget joke… there it is, Chambers says Grubb’s staff doesn’t need to be that big… ha ha ha
Before demo, Chambers said about video: “I really do not want to store all the “Desperate Housewives” and Duke basketball games on the DVRs in my house.” Content should be in the network, he says.
Applications are going to drive the service provider business… and video is going to be a large part of that. Telepresence (Cisco expensive teleconferencing). The data center will be virtualized first, and then it will go all the way out to the end…
9:12 — We are now hearing about Cisco plans with Oakland (Fremont!) Athletics to build a new baseball stadium.
(Will reserve my arguments against this stuff)… he is talking about watching multiple replays, multiple cameras (because of how wired/networked the stadium is)… use cell phones as credit cards… “we’re learning how to push experiences.”
End to end SP quad play. Consumer iHome end to end play. New services.
Telepresence? “It’s my favorite new technology.”
save $140 million? “it will change the way we collaborate” play texas hold em, see pupils dilate.
Thought this year was all about execution… wrong. Need to keep innovating as well.
9:20 a.m. — Big close, puts up the slide that shows how Cisco market cap dwarfs that of closest 10 competitors combined.. says the opportunity “to be the major company in IT and communications is in front of us.”
Whew! Watch this space for more from the conference today and tomorrow. (As long as the Cisco folks don’t kick me out of my “reserved Cisco” seat up front, heh)
Written by Paul Kapustka on December 13th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on India, Inc. and Broadband.
Television on the mobile is slowly becoming a big business in the U.S. Don’t ask us why people want to watch even more television on a tiny screen, but some do — there are at least 1 million subscribers watching what Emeryville, Calif.-based MobiTV has to offer.
MobiTV’s technology allows the company to send optimized video signals over wireless data networks, and has helped the company win over most of the large carriers. Mobile carriers who fight over pennies are happy to make a deal with MobiTV, just to get subscribers to use their data services. A mobile television customer can easily tack-on $10-a-month to the phone bill, and that is something no carrier can ignore.
In sharp contrast, you have the two mobile TV-only standards, MediaFLO and DVB-H, which are still waiting in the wings in the U.S.
There are several trials, and Qualcomm has managed to convince several U.S. carriers to test out its MediaFLO, but commercial deployments have not really materialized. I had written about this fourth-TV network back in 2005 with much enthusiasm, but the lack of progress is reading like a litany of broken promises. Qualcomm had predicted nationwide service in 2006 … we are still waiting. Modeo, which is wholly-owed by Crown Castle, a large owner of cellular towers, was supposed to launch its Mobile TV network that uses DVB-H before the end of the year.
I have my doubts about the launch, especially since CEO Michael Schueppert quit weeks before the network was supposed to go live. “If it pulls off its planned launch in New York in the next three weeks, it would beat its competitors Qualcomm and HiWire as the first multicast TV provider with commercial service,” writes Telephony magazine.
Schueppert recently told EE Times that the carriers were not all that engaged with mobile TV. (Or maybe just Modeo’s version.) Modeo needs to launch the network in order to generate some excitement around the technology and the product, and more than anything needs to win over a big carrier.
Modeo is said to be in dire need of fresh investment from new partners, private equity firms or venture capitalists, sources said. For the time being, Crown Castle is standing by Modeo for the New York service launch. But Crown Castle, whose core business is in managing cellular towers and tower sites, may not be interested in supporting Modeo over the long haul, sources said. (EETimes)
Verizon is working with Qualcomm and its MediaFLO technology, but one cannot expect any live deployments for another few months. Perhaps that is why we take any subscriber forecasts with a pound of salt. If Schueppert was speaking the truth, then the confusion only helps MobiTV. At least that explains why the California-based company has attracted $125 million in venture funding.
Written by Om Malik on December 13th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Featured and Mobile.
I've been dabbling with Wordpress but I really need to take a course or sit down with someone (in Toronto) to get a running start. If anyone can help, let me.
Written by Mark Evans on December 13th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Uncategorized and Main Page.
For some odd reason I have never gotten around to writing about Sharpcast, a company that has gotten rave reviews from the traditional guys and the new new media barons. What Sharpcast does is sync all sorts of files between your phone and computers. Its like Sync-4-everything and doesn’t take much effort. Its like Blackberry for all your digital files. Anyway today I got my reason why I have not written about Sharpcast: lack of mac support for its brilliant photo syncing service. Well, that excuse is out of the window.
Sharpcast just launched an iPhoto uploader for Mac, which allows the click crazy to export iPhoto albums directly from their Macs into their Sharpcast Photos Web albums and are automatically synced all the way down to the person’s mobile phone and PC desktop. While you are at it, check out their Hummingbird technology.
Written by Om Malik on December 13th, 2006 with no comments.
Read more articles on Software 2.0 and Mobile and Startups.