VoIP Watch

SightSpeed Guy Moves Up

Peter Zottolo, aka "The SightSpeed Guy" has moved up as he becomes the cohost of the new DirectTV "Fizz Newzz" program.

CEO of SightSpeed, Peter Csathy provides his take on the changing talent spotting scene while fellow bloggers Ted Wallingford, Paul Kapustka add additional perspective as well as Jon Arnold's analyst's perspective.

USA Today On The State of VOIP

While longtime blog readers will not find much new here in this USA Today story, it does provide a state of the VoIP world as the mass media sees it.

It would be interesting to hear what the researchers at Level3 have to say about this.

Did Nokia Launch A Real Blackberry Threat ?

For those of us who ever had a Nokia 9000 series phone in the past and wished it did more, the new E90 announced at 3GSM today may be a dream come true.

If TruPhone, AbbeyPhone and GizmoProject can be made to run on this, and if GoodLink comes out running on it as it does on the E62 already, there may be a real threat to the BlackBerry for reasons that only a user of all of the above could appreciate.

Update--TruPhone today confirmed that they will be supporting the new E series phones from Nokia, but I also hear reports locally here in San Diego that GizmoProject will be installed on the phones just like it is on the N80-Internet Edition.

Voice over WiFi To Grow

WiFi Net News reports that the WiFi Alliance has certified almost 100 phones that can work on WiFi networks. Some are dual mode, others are WiFi only.

My experience has been once you get the phones set up, which is the major hurdle, they tend to work very well.

Ted On iTunes

As I started to read Ted's very logical but almost to altruistic post about music and iTunes all I kept thinking was of MP3.com which was kidnapped by the music industry through the courts. If the industry, courts and lawsuits hadn't slowed down MP3.com the idea would be very much alive and well today.

Every idea that Ted outlines and many others were executed back in the late 90's and early 2000's by the team there. That team was led by the same person running mp3tunes.com and SipPhone, the master disruptor himself, Michael "Golden Boy" Robertson.

In the past I've written about Michael's head being in the cloud, something that even today with GizmoCall he's stayed true to. The problem here with Ted's ideas, and with Michael's aren't that they are wrong. They're not. It's that they are just not going to be allowed by the old guard that runs an industry because they literally don't get what doing things a different way can mean.

Stealing Minutes Back from JaJah

So the story in Stuff.co.nz about JaJah is mostly a rehash of what we know, until you get to the last four paragraphs.

It's there that the story takes a very interesting twist, and that twist is one I have been waiting to have happen. It's when the carrier starts to fight back using the same type of offer to keep the customer, but ends with a point I made before about the carriers' future growth and development.

What does this mean? Simple. It means that services like JaJah are great for proving a model, but if carriers want to come out with the same kind of services they can, as they are clearly in positions where they can subsidize the programs.

I keep saying offline what happens to JaJah and Mino when Vodafone or Orange says "we can offer that too" just like the New Zealand Telecom company has.

Goggle Worried Net May Snarl Over Video

There is no question that Google is looking to justify a significant investment in dark fiber, so while there is some FUD associated with this, I tend to think that there is also a great deal of truth that bandwidth and capacity is getting scarcer, especially for consumers.

PhoneBoy: VoIP Hardware is Boring

Last weekend I wrote a thought piece on the lack of innovation in not only VOIP but in companies and placed the root of the problem at being how marketing is so misunderstood by so many who make new products, services and companies possible. So, when I read Dameon's thoughtful post about boring hardware, I had to say...Heck Yeah!

He's right...and the reason for this goes back to marketing. First off, marketing isn't promotion. Promotion is a strategy. So is Market Research and Consumer Research.

Smart companies RESEARCH the market before they put out a product.

We're not in the era of FIRE, READY, AIM...It's companies which AIM, READY, FIRE that win.

Cisco and Apple..Just Say I

First, as I commented recently on one of the KenRadio.com daily newscasts, I am unconvinced that Apple and Cisco won't in the end be working together.

Here's three reasons why...and it starts with the concept of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend."

1. Apple is the enemy to Microsoft and Microsoft and Cisco are not friends.

2. Cisco's biggest partner is IBM and IBM and Microsoft are really not friends.

3. Microsoft's biggest partner is HP and HP is not Cisco's friend.

Those are very good reasons why it would pay both Apple and Cisco to be working together.

From the Apple perspective it makes even more sense.

1. Anyone building a PC is their enemy.

2. Apple wants to get into the business and enterprise market and no one has better access in that channel than Cisco via IBM.

3. The world is moving away from text to visual and Cisco's Telepresence and Apple's UI are naturals. Apple was the first with built in webcams. iChat is standard on every Mac, and webcams are going out on every new Mac laptop and iMac which makes it the entry point for Telepresence use in the future.

So beyond those reasons, why do I feel that Apple and Cisco make perfect bedfellows?

First, becuase the Internet is where Cisco lives and Internet phone call technology is something Cisco has been touting for some time with Call Manager while also buying up the kind of core assets, patents and technologies (Sipura, Dynamicsoft) that make what they have (distribution, hardware manufacturing, software development) better. Those purchases (Cisco buys, they don't invest) are not bought for immediate return, but for the kind of return that puts money in their pockets over time as more packets get placed on the Internet pipes which as demand for capacity increases in turn drives the sale of more and bigger Cisco hardware.

Second, Voice and video content are the two biggest forms media out there that already is transmitted over some kind of pipe, IP or Analog. For Cisco, the more of that traffic that moves to IP the better, which also explains why they made a strategic acquisition last week of Five Across. They want to fuel the enterprise pipe with more and more fatter pipe content.

In technology, Apple is clearly the best at creating an easy to use consumer experience. Cisco, via Linksys, has hundreds of thousands of feet of retail space that is geared for getting people online in more places through the sales of wireless routers, media extenders, WiFi cards, access points, etc.

For the two companies, finding a way to make peace is far more logical than having them war.

VoIPGirl Loves Her PhoneGnome

Leanne has a post about PhoneGnome's newest feature, Reach Beyond. It's a neat way to call your regular called friends in a manner similar to T-Mobile's Faves.