VoIP Watch

Apple Tablet-Questions

The buzz is building around the Google Phone and the potential of Apple finally bringing out a Tablet.

My questions about the tablet are simply this:

1) Will you handle Voice Apps (Skype, Truphone, iCall) the way the iPod Touch and iPhone already do? I mean, don't you want to TELL someone what yu just read, watched or heard?

2) Will it have a front facing camera which the iPod touch and iPhone currently do not have capable of delivering an HD video stream, as well as a back side camera? This will do more for multimedia, for Skype and for SightSpeed faster than anything seen to date if it does.

3) Will it have built in 3G or 4G? It sure needs it to be like the Kindle.

4) Will it work with a BlueTooth or some Apple created wireless keyboard, headset and more?

5) Can it "talk" wirelessly to an Cinema display and be the info/multimedia hub, allowing those who use it to toss away so many other devices (phone, iPod and yes Kindle--remember there already is a Kindle app for the iPhone/iPod touch...

Oh, the possibilities this device could have, when left to Steve Jobs' team....my my. Yes, I do want one....

Jajah Goes To Telefonica

The rumor mill was right on, and Jajah has indeed become part of Telefonica.

RIM Has A Problem

Last night around 7 PM or so I caught a tweet that made me check my Blackberry. Yes indeed, there must be an outage. Then another tweet came in. Then another, and another.

All the while RIM was silent.

This is not the first time that Research In Motion was off the air and I don't mean the devices. But the reason is simple. All the people who work there use RIM devices so like the rest of the RIM user base in the Americas they couldn't be reached. What was also down was perhaps the most important aspect of the Blackberry, the app simply called Messenger. RIM's Blackberry Messenger is a blend of Instant Messaging and SMS. It works across networks and is as fast as any communications tool. It is also part of everyone's BlackBerry Data Plan, if one has installed it. So in the world of Mission Critical apps, the Blackberry Messenger plays that role.

Unfortunately, RIM's reaction time, and its statements to what I think is at least the third major outage this year has been the opposite to what a company that excels in speed should be. Here's why:

1) No real answer has been given overnight, other than confirming what everyone already has figured out

2) There isn't any official statement on the press page

3) The home page to their web site says nothing at all about the outage, not even a "We're Sorry"

4) RIM lacks a front person who communicates to the social communications world. They have zero interface with their most important constituency, the users

Sites like Crackberry and other blogs and Forums are full of loyal and very patient users, and no product is without the risk of a black out, but every time RIM goes silent they magnify the problem.

Since we no longer live in a world where tomorrow is soon enough to provide an answer, RIM needs to bring the same kind of responsiveness when it comes to letting their users know when things go wrong that their users already experience in communications. Anything short of that, they're missing what makes them what they are.

Silicon Valley Xmas Wish List Report For 2009

The great thing about the Internet is that you can get connected to just about everyone these days. Well this afternoon, my old friend Nick called me via his new SIP connection. It seems the new 100 meg fiber line to his winter abode has finally been connected, giving him even faster access. That means the wants and desires of so many of our world's less mature types will now be received and read faster.

Well, before we spoke, I had to make sure the usual claus of non disclosure was not in effect for holiday consulting, as it is always in the spirit of good cheer, good tidings and good wishes. This saint of a man said "of course," and he then quickly shared some of the requests he's received this year from the venture capitalists, investors and directors of many of our world's leading technology companies.

He also said he'd be dashing off in the snow a few days early this year to keep his schedule in tact....as it seems some of the requests seem to be kind of demanding......

For Google he revealed they've asked for more ads. It seems they're not done yet with buying, and they need more clicks to drive the cash. As if Google needs any more "yelp" I replied. Oh, I meant help. He promised to do his part to save the trees, by seeing what newspapers could be closed, where broadband could be enabled and to lower the price of mobile phones to under 100 with Android for all good people of the earth. With that triple play, he mused, he figured they could continue to stay ahead of dear bada Bing.

For Cisco they asked for more sales of more of the same. My reply, does Cisco ever do anything that doesn't sell more routers and switches? He promised that their holiday stocking would be full of orders of increased demand, especially from some folks in Dallas and Atlanta who it seems have been wishing and praying for more of that as well.

When we got to AT&T it became hard to hear. Every time he said their name the signal got flakey. To him it sounded like I had been visiting the bar, but in many more places. We decided that their wish this year was for some much needed bandwidth along with backhaul, but most of all the big request from them this year had to be for graduates from a leading university that teaches both advertising and the law, as they seem to not have any of those already. He said something about stopping off at Northwestern...on his way to the South as they seem to have a few of those this year.

For Verizon the request was for updated GPS devices. With all those maps they keep using, someone figures eventually their execs will get lost and end up in the new AT&T HQ not the old one that is now their HQ.

From Skype he revealed was the requests was for new faces in management. With some recent giant size departures and new investors its time for some new blood in new roles and some troops to be shaken up.

From Apple the request was an easy one. It was for simply, more Jobs.

For Yahoo....everything.

At that point my friend Nick said he had to feed the deer. He been keen to reduce the gas, and he's been using the new low carbon emission feed. What's more he told me that his suit's color this year may again be red, but his donning a green cap and his guide deer Rudy will have a green light.

And with that we said, to all, a good night.

Congressman Sets Realistic Broadband Speed Goals

Congressman Rick Boucher of Virginia is my kind of elected official. He wants us all to have 50 megs down and 20 megs up of broadband.

And as the post on DSL Reports mentions, with Docsis 3.0 coming to a cable box near you rather soon, those speeds are more than attainable. In my Sacramento California house we have 50/50 (up and down) from SureWest via FTTP and the difference between regular cable modem that we had before with Comcast and what we now have is striking. The key is not so much the speed, but the clear drop in latency, and how fast we can ping a distant server. What's more VoIP and Video calling become amazingly bright in tonal quality.

Boucher's goal isn't unattainable. It also means that we'll see a rise in push back, most likely from AT&T as their in ground network isn't quite ready for this yet, while Verizon's is.

Do you think we'll see a similar "whose network is faster" from Verizon vs. AT&T for wireline Internet connectivity, just like we have seen for wireless?

Free Gets 3G License in France

I recall once having a cigar with the founder of Free at Atelier Berger, on Rue Berger in Paris one rainy night back in 2006. As a disruptive force in telecom they have clearly been that in France.

Now they have 3G spectrum, which can't be good news for Orange and SFR.

Why 02 Wants Jahja

Om has a meme on why O2/Telefonica wants to buy Jajah.

The answer is Voype.

The 21st Century Phone

Give Charlie Stross a read on his well authored post on his blog, Charlie's Diary.

My take is simply this. If you have GoogleVoice in calling party pays environment, you can eliminate a large monthly base mobile bill for unlimited minutes, because every call is received back to you after being triggered by the data side of the phone. So put your money into a data plan instead.

By reading this, I'd say the mobile operators now have more to worry about than Apple does with Google Voice. The GooglePhone, as a 3G data device will allow Google to manage the entire calling experience. The only issue will be when the user goes outside of a 3G area.

Startup Time at IT Expo

While the holiday season is getting into full swing it is hard to believe that we're now less than a month away from the Winter Edition of IT Expo. To me it only feels like yesterday when Rich Tehrani and his team put on one of the best telecom events they ever have in Los Angeles back in September. That event, which clearly filled the giant hole that was left when VON was shuttered and then sold by their investors, who exercised their rights to take the company away from their founder, and VoIP's fearless leader/visionary, Jeff Pulver.

Well, beyond the usual cast of characters at IT Expo this year in Miami Beach, we'll see a steady stream of additional events that will continue to show why attending is so important. I've already booked flights, hotels and am contemplating a wine dinner, if I can find a BYOB establishment. I'm looking forward to the second edition of the 4G Wireless Evolution event, hosted by VON Alum, and longtime friend, Carl Ford, as that's the future, because in all practicality, VoIP is really the here and now. Tangental to that is the M2M event that Carl is also into in a big way as well.

Another event of course is Jon Arnold's SmartGrid summit. SmartGrids will be in our changing environmental era, one of the most important topics in the new decade, so Jon's work in this area certainly has to be part of the knowledge base in that transformation.--Now only if he would stop using that as his excuse for not blogging about VoIP....

But what I'm most excited about personally is the newest event that's being put on by pal Larry Lisser. It's Startup Camp. According to Larry, "over 10 startups applying to present with more on the way we hope. And as hoped, they are all quite early stage."

Larry's also collaborating very closely with "Mr. Mashup" Thomas Howe on a number of things, including a cross-over voice app contest that promises to be quite fun. Given how every Mashup is like a startup, Thomas brings keen insight to the game as well, especially from the developer's perspective.

So if you're par of a startup, this is an The IT Expo Startup Camp is really going to be, the "place to be." Knowing Larry as I do from what he did with Mobivox, literally turning the company around, and getting them on the kind of footing that led to their sale, his "startup" expertise comes from being hands on, so being a start up and applying to be one of the presenters will bring all kinds of visibility leading up to, during and after the event as Larry has put together several initiatives to expose the entrepreneurs behind them by profiling online, having them speak and also of course network at the event. Much like DEMO or GigaOm's LaunchPad, not every applicant makes it to the stage, but the five selected startups will clearly have the most visibility, including a free 'table' on the ITExpo show floor during the week. These five presenting startups will be announced by January 6th so time is running down. So if you're part of a true startup, now's the time to make your call and take action:

To register

Additionally here is the micro-site as part of the the TMC site

http://www.tmcnet.com/voip/conference/east-10/attendees/e10-startupcamp-telephony.htm

MaxRoam Disruptor Pat Phelan To Quit

I woke up this morning to what will be big news for anyone who knows Pat Phelan. Love, hate him, be his friend, or his competitor, but this news can only be viewed as a very self-serving decision by Pat. As part of an overall slimming down, to focus more on what's important to him, Pat has made a series of life altering decisions, and posted about it.

He's quitting.

This means that the cigarette shops and machines are all crying across the globe.

As for Pat's second decision, to hit the gym to lose weight, it will be a harder road than quitting. But knowing Pat, the next time I see him, he'll be below his posted weight, trying to sell us all on a new found diet that he's discovered, and why it has been so good for him.

Morgan Stanley's Mobile Internet Report

The latest edition of the the annual Mobile Internet Report, from Morgan Stanley, is a must read if you make a living in mobile. I spent a few hours flipping through the decks that comprise the report and remain just amazed at the level of detail, research and on the mark insight their team has put forth yet again.

I'm fairly sure most of the more serious VC's and Angel investors will be using this as a barometer of where to put their money, at least over the first half of 2010.

ITSPA Winners

Over in the UK, the ITSPA announced their annual winners at their House of Commons event.

Dean Bubley Predictions for 2010

Master analyst, Dean Bubley, has penned a post glancing into the new year about the winners and losers.

Since I know Dean well, I'm not at all surprised at most of his observations.

Happy Anniversary To My Friend Om

To my friend Om, Happy # 8. Andy

Amazon Web Services Launches CloudFront

When the email arrived, I got giddy. My head spun and the world turned all the colors of the rainbow.

Amazon Web Services launch Cloudfront is a web based streaming and content delivery network that democratizes the whole game in a new and different way. As I read the teaser and visited the site, I thought back to my early days with Ken Rutkowski, on what was first TechTalk.com and now KenRadio.com. When we started a company called PlusMedia back in 1999, we were stymied by the costs for hosting and streaming, but to his credit, Ken found, and always has discovered ways around it. The more I read, the more I thought about companies like Intervu (who pioneered so much of the shuttling of content around the net) which was later acquired by Akamai.

What Cloudfront will do, is empower a whole new group of YouTube like services, but that offer more in the way of add-on services and flexibility to the streaming media content producer. Roll in a package of some of what Sorenson Media is up to (run by pal Peter Csathy) and companies like BrightCove all of a sudden lose their mojo. What AWS has done with Cloudfront is delivered "an easy way to distribute content to end users with low latency, high data transfer speeds, and no commitments."

The no commitments part is what matters. Now, upstart producers can easily and quickly get reliable, low cost, and very efficient content delivery, without the overhead they used to need to pay.

As a streaming media participant for over ten years, this is a big breakthrough move, and will create a whole new game for those who want to stream better, and for less.

HotSpots Are Hot

Let's face it, the idea of WiFi by the major mobile operators in the USA has been more trial and error, or when they chose to explore it, for the most part it was more like seeing someone dip their toes in the water in the past, as in reality only T-Mobile and to some extent, AT&T even played in the WiFi world with any real skin in the game.

Sprint, whose network folks operated a WiFi network in some airports (now part of Boingo) and AT&T, up until the Wayport snatch and grab, really was using WiFi more as a way to sell wholesale data capacity, than including it in their so called Wireless strategy. T-Mobile, long the leader in the WiFi game of the majors, pretty much walked away from their key access deal with Starbucks, in exchange moving their in ground network capacity over to their new 3G play. That left Verizon Wireless, which had the foresight some years back to stop parent Verizon from deploying hotspots in phone booths in New York City and elsewhere, when the wireline side of the house wanted to make WiFi access easy, as a benefit to their DSL customers, thereby offering something different than their competitors, the cable companies, Cablevision and Time Warner.

Ironically, Cablevision is mopping up the floor with Verizon in their backyard, and their WiFi play is showing why the cable guys are winning the wireline customer race, and creating their own mobile world at the same time. While Verizon initially viewed WiFi as a stunt from their land based competitor, history is starting to show that it was anything but a stunt, but a core plan by the cable giant to begin offering phone service over WiFi at some point in the future, but more than that, it means their customers have a single network to play on. A concept AT&T is chasing, but on a far larger level

So after all this mucking about, came the thaw, as somehow, as mobile broadband uptake started to outrun capacity, the mobile folks realized that WiFi was their savior. The first real snowcap to melt was in reality the Starbucks deal with AT&T, followed by AT&T's Wayport purchase. Then came the big ice flow, as Verizon began overall to start to bundle in WiFi for FIOS and other broadband customers.

This has all led up to this week's moves by Verizon and AT&T, both of whom seem to be in a race to get traffic off of their 3G networks and onto other networks.

Verizon's News for their mobile customers

AT&T's Move with McDonalds

For fast food lovers, now you can get WiFi for free with your burger and fries, plus linger around McDonalds. This is a huge boon to the road warrior because now between Starbucks and McDonalds, you can pretty much find WiFi all across America. Toss in a Boingo or Boingo Mobile account, and all the hotspots you'll ever need, pretty much become yours to connect to.

So, it makes you wonder, why the mobile operators never embraced WiFi until they needed it. Just think how much farther ahead WiFi would have been with just some plain old common sense on their part, instead of protectionist practices, that only ended up costing everyone more money.

Take 'Em Down

I can hear the music video now, playing in my head. The song is from The seminal New Wave band of the 70's, The Talking Heads, and it's "Burning Down the House" as the AT&T network goes down in tatters all around a bunch of stunned and wide eyed executives in Dallas and Atlanta.

Start by reading the post on Mashable. Then read the "Fake Steve Jobs" rant. Both make total sense.

While there's a ton of humor/sarcasm in the FSJ post, in reality the points all hit the mark. So, do you wonder why Apple and Google both are both lobbing laying down tracer fire at the FCC with their current antics? Do you question why Skype doesn't want to be called a telecom company? All three are doing all they can to distance themselves from the likes of AT&T....and for good reason.

Google StreetView Goes Inside

A few weeks ago at the Intercontinental Hotel in San Francisco, CA I spied the Google StreetView team taking photos outside of the hotel while I was waiting for a colleague.

Then a few minutes later the photo crew was wandering inside the lobby with tripod and cameras taking photos of INSIDE the hotel.

Is this something that's due up next for StreetView? Or is Google about to debut, what I'm calling InsideView? How will that be for you?

Google Takes A Page Out of Best Buy's Playbook

Everyone who knows consumer electronics knows that in the USA, BestBuy is considered one of the savviest of retailers around, ranking up there with WalMart. So it's not a surprise to me that Google has taken a page out of the BestBuy playbook that basically broke the price controls, ludicrous terms and changed the personal computer industry around. That's what Google is aiming to do with the GooglePhone.

The time was 2002, and BestBuy decided it had had enough of Toshiba, Gateway, IBM and other brands who were pretty much in control of the personal computer industry. Their response was a Porsche designed laptop, that had just about the best of everything, and at a very favorable price. Dubbed the VPR Matrix, there was one model ever made, and in its day, both its styling and performance rivaled and out shined just about everything on the market.

When BestBuy did what they did, about the only innovative PC manufacturer around was Apple (does that sound familiar?) Google, like others in Silicon Valley, and around the globe are fairly tired of the antics of the carriers. And unlike Nokia, who is back playing ball with the carriers in hopes of better market share in the USA, Google is saying-the heck with them. What Google is saying basically is "customers pay for a pipe from you" to the carriers. You supply transport, and we'll do everything else.

The everything else is services. And services like VoiceMail and transcription GoogleVoice has covered. So while the mobile operator delivers voice mail that you have to dial into hear (running up your minutes) GoogleVoice give you options. Where the carrier charges for SMS, Google gives it away for free. When it comes to apps and applications markets, Google is rapidly transforming it's entire suite of applications to be mobile centric. Maps now does all that previously high priced GPS devices did on the Android. Other services like Picasa are being optimized for mobile use with greater simplification.

Here's what I think Google is seeking to do:

1) Drive more use of Google services, starting with Search

2) By driving more use of Google, they sell more ads and deliver more impressions

3) Provide Equal Access-Break the monopoly in the long distance arena that the mobile operator basically has as for the most part, all LD calls go over the carriers network as mobile phones do not have equal access to any choice of carrier. This goes beyond the call though and applies to Voice Mail, SMS, etc. Imagine if your could pick the best provider for LD, Voice Mail, SMS, Contact backup, etc. This will all happen as a result of GoogleVoice, Mail, Gizmo, Picasa

4) Even more, imagine if you could pick you preferred data provider. You may want voice over an MVNO, but your data over only WiFi when you're at home or in the office. The Android can be a very smart phone

5) Be manufacturer agnostic. Android will be Android on all devices, and will function that way.

6) Allow users to SIM swap as they go from country to country, but not worry about their services as they will always be there for you when you log on.

7) Make your Google identity--your GMAIL address, the one key to all your online activity

8) Sell you more of what you need online through the Google Android Market, using more of Google Check Out

9) Be carrier agnostic. Google doesn't care who you use to get to them. They just want to make it easier to get there.

Let's see how all this shakes out.

Here are some other stories on the subject of the Google Phone:

TechCrunch

Engadget

Wall Street Journal

Short Takes on VoIP and Mobile

Rumors have Texas based VoIP provider iCall being bought by Apple.

A new VoIP service that works with mobiles including Nokias, Windows Mobile and Blackberry is out. It's named Spokn.

The Google Phone is sounding more and more real everyday.

AT&T network is fastest.