VoIPWatch

Next Week IT EXPO and DEMO

The last few weeks have been a blur. Mobilize and a lot of clients there. Las week was RIM Jam Americas, client meetings, new client signings, and strategy sessions. More of all that is ahead, and of course there's TMC's IT Expo and IDG's DEMO.

I'm moderating two panels at IT Expo, one on Tuesday dealing with Collaboration and a second on Wednesday about The ROI of Video Conferencing and Collaboration. Given how much I use services like GoToMeeting, TurboBridge, Vidtel and a new Magor system in the office or when on the go, I'm honestly realizing how much I can work with my all virtual team and our globally growing list of clients from just about anywhere.

While local alcohol laws made a wine dinner difficult in Austin, I am looking forward to the invite only Startup Camp dinner and StartUp Camp on Thursday. It's one of the reasons I'm sticking around IT Expo all four days. The event is really one of the highlights of the event, and hats are off to pal Larry Lisser and the TMC folks for pulling off another great keynoter in Mike Tessler, of Broadsoft fame.

Demo will be great also, but I'm sorry to miss it....

See you all in Austin.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

T-Mobile UK To Offer VoIP Service

It looks like T-Mobile UK is going to offer a competitor to Skype and Rebtel in order to keep revenue from going elsewhere when it comes to international long distance. The new service called CleverConnect is different than what they offer in the USA using the Kineto UMA stack in select phones that allows for Wi-Fi calling from any hotspot by connect to their network over the Internet. 

CleverConnect will be an app, similar to client Truphone's app, and will be available on iOS and Android platforms only-with a twist, according to IT Portal. The twist is the auto-selection of the best available network, Wi-Fi or 3G. 

Techcrunch has more details, including rates, and draws the comparison to Bobsled. They revealed that the app has been developed by former mVoip client Vopium.

 

How Not To Work With Bloggers

The Next Web story about Samsung and their reported treatment of bloggers at the IFA is horrible. When compared what I did with the Nokia Blogger Relations Program from 2005-2010, where we supplied bloggers with N and some E series devices as part of a seeding program and then expanding the program to invite bloggers to attend Nokia World and Mobile World Congress, shows more than ever before that the approach we took was spot on.  We set out to be transparent. We treated bloggers with respect, never asking them to do anything more than consider to review the devices, consider attending events in conjucntion with device releases and in the future, with simply no strings attached.

For the record, it was back in the spring of 2005 via a Skype chat session with Martin Geddes who was consulting to Nokia, that I created the framework for the Nokia Blogger Relations Program. In November of that year the program launched and basically propelled Nokia into Social Media (prior attempts were an admitted failure.)

The Nokia Blogger Relations program, which was the archtype of corporate sponsored blogging programs was deemed a success by peers and media both in the tech and traditional media,  spawning many copycats and imitators, most of which were failures. Now we see one more example of just how badly corporations and PR firms can poorly execute these programs when it comes to dealing with bloggers, as the account in The Next Web indicates.

Honestly, the Nokia Blogger Relations program wasn't hard to do.

We started with the premise that there was no real requirements on the part of the blogger to do anything at all, though we did hope they would end up reviewing the devices, because thats what reviewers do. They could review, not review or trash us. They were supplied devices, collaterial material, and we aggregated their posts on a now defunct blog. On the blog were files for the bloggers to use. They also received a Fed Ex return airbill, to return the phone when they were done with it.

The program worked and in the end Nokia was loved in the social media realm. Reviews ran regularly and interest in the program grew to where the number of bloggers desiring review units grew from the original 50 that included Geddes, Om Malik, Michael Arrington, Rich Tehrani, Stowe Boyd, Rafat Ali, Matt Miller, James Kendrick and Kevin Tofel (then of JK on the Run), Stuart Henshall, Oliver Starr and others, all back then mostly independent or just starting out who had a passion for two things. Mobile and change. We also agreed with Nokia upfront that transparency would be the key to success.  And, it was.

With the Nokia Blogger Relations we never looked at bloggers as shills. We didn't bribe them, or threaten them. When they traveled to our events we covered airfare and hotel, some meals and transportation. We didn't care if they disclosed that the devices and travel were courtesy of Nokia, and actually encouraged them to, so at the end of the day, Nokia won and other brands lost when it came to the court of blogger opinion.

When I was growing up in Philadelphia, a DJ named Pierre Robert (aka Pete Roberts) used to refer to the Grateful Dead as the band that was "often immitated, never duplicated" and that's how I felt when I read about the Samsung utter failure. They set out to immitate something that was successful. To work with bloggers to generate social media visibility. Well they did alright. They ended up with negative visibility. 

If your company wants to do it right, call me on my alternate Google Voice number 1-(858) 461-9990. And yes, we handled Grand Central's blogger relations program back then too. 

End Note-There are always two sides to the story always. This one though sounds like the typical matrixed organization, with a multi-country ring. Global comms, country comms, multiple agencies and of course "lost in translation." Net Net-someone delivered a message, and someone did something. My guess is the blogger didn't get it wrong.

 

Skype Turns 9

With the holiday weekend some things fell through the cracks. One was the 9th birthday of Skype. To help depict their story Skype has released an infographic that highlights their various milestones throughout the years.

Skype may have been the single most disruptive service ever to hit the telecommunications world. For starters Skype really defined the idea of "free" calling. Up until its arrival, making free calls was largely geared around h.323 and a fledgling protocol called SIP (session initiation protocol) that was developed by the IETF and now Skype's Chief Technology Strategist, Jonathan Rosenberg. 

Skype success was in it's simplicity. Username and password are all that's needed. Skype had the benefit of it's own audio codec, compression and incryption, plus a swarming technology that found open ports and to get around firewalls. It leveraged a peer to peer (P2P) technology that is named JOLTID and was the subject of a legal fight between Skype's original founders and eBay that eventually paved the way for a sale to Microsoft via Silver Lake.

Skype's only real threat was Gizmo Project started by Michael Robertson of MP3.com fame as an offshoot of his SIPphone service. Gizmo was eventually acquired by Google for $30 million dollars. (Robertson is about to launch UberTalk-an easy way to tune into talk radio that will work in conjunction with DAR.fm.)

 

Net Talk Duo Wi-Fi Means Your Landline ANYWHERE

Net Talk, a direct competitor in many ways to MagicJack but with many more features, options and capabilties, have come out with the Net Talk Duo Wi-Fi.

It's jam-packed with all kinds of capabilities and goes into the territory of the OBI and PhoneGnome as well as OOMA in many ways. Like MagicJack it offers an annual fee for unlimited "Free" calling. Though not for my type of phone use, there is a market for people who want to shed their phone company and make use of really low priced calling. I see this as something that's good for families who have kids and want to give them a phone without the big monthly bill.

Disney Parks Adding Free Wi-Fi

The Disney theme parks are known for customer service, and usually are ahead of the curve when it comes to deploying things that make for a better guest experience. Today the Orlando Sentinel reports that they are adding free Wi-Fi to their guest experiences.

Wi-Fi is really helpful to guests because the size of the theme parks that Disney operates are so large that always receiving cellular signals isn't easy, plus with the concentration of attendees backhaul networks get challenged. By adding free Wi-Fi Disney also gets to use the Wi-Fi and apps to help communicate with their patrons. Imagin the pass being a QR code on your smartphone. Now imagine real time location tracking with a Wi-Fi phone. Add in Disney maps, the ability to stream media to their guests and to deliver more new services.

Mobile Moves In the News

The Newark Star-Ledger, Triangle Business Journal and Wireless Week all covered the opening of client Truphone's new Engineering Center that's housed inside NJIT's Enterprise Development Center in Newark under the direction of longtime friend, Dr. Ed Guy who has been with Truphone since their earliest days. Truphone will be part of GigaOm's Mobilize later this month.

Joikusoft, the Finnish company whose JoikuSpot app was one of the first to enable sharing of data plans on smartphones which they pioneered on Nokia smartphones some years back running the Symbian OS, will be coming out with media sharing. What that means is an upcoming app called JoikuShare that will allow content on a smartphone to be shared.

Huawei, the Chinese manufacturer of Android devices will ship a new 10" tablet worldwide this month. Tabbed the MediaPad 10 FHD, the new tablet includes radios to support LTE and HSPA+. With all the controvery surrounding Samsung devices, the Huawei devices may be a nice alternative for mobile operators to market.  The company has also released a 7" MediaPad, called MediaPad 7 Lite.

Bloomberg tells us that France's Illiad, the mobile phone division of FREE.tv, is racking up amazing adoption levels. This past week they reported that they now have 5.4 percent of the French market, up from 4 percent the previous quarter. They are now outpacing companies like Yoigo and Three which operate in other European countries when it comes to growth. Clearly their entry into the wireless market in France is impacting the incumbent operators, with SFR dropping 5.6 percent in sales, according to Fierce Wireless.