Digital Common Sense

So many things to comment on and write about and so little time. If you’re a passing reader or past client and want to se some really neat stuff going on, go start clicking the links on the right and read what some of those online friends are up to. There’ s some pretty fascinating activity and some very cool projects in the mill for many of them.

Life here has been busy. Connor is now 5 months old. Grandpa discovered 52 the other day. Work projects are many, varied and frenzied. Lots going on, some of which I may be able to share updates on soon. For now, back to work…

Cheers

*** mo:Blogged ***

Filed by Ken at 5:35 pm under General
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Always wear clean underwear in public, especially when working under your vehicle… From the Northwest Florida Daily News comes this story of a Crestview couple who drove their car to Wal-Mart, only to have their car break down in the parking lot. The man told his wife to carry on with the shopping while he fixed the car in the lot. The wife returned later to see a small group of people near the car. On closer inspection, she saw a pair of male legs protruding from under the chassis. Although the man was in shorts, his lack of underpants turned private parts into glaringly public ones. Unable to stand the embarrassment, she dutifully stepped forward, quickly put her hand UP his shorts, and tucked everything back into place. On regaining her feet, she looked across the hood and found herself staring at her husband who was standing idly by. The mechanic, however, had to have three stitches in his forehead.

Filed by Ken at 7:47 pm under General
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A lecturer, when explaining stress management to an audience, raised a glass of water and asked, “how heavy is this glass of water?” Answers called out ranged from 20g to 500g. The lecturer replied, “The absolute weight doesn’t matter. It depends on how long you try to hold it.”

“If I hold it for a minute, that’s not a problem. If I hold it for an hour, I’ll have an ache in my right arm. If I hold it for a day, you’ll have to call an ambulance. “In each case, it’s the same weight, but the longer I hold it, the heavier it becomes.”

He continued, “And that’s the way it is with stress management. If we carry our burdens all the time, sooner or later, as the burden becomes increasingly heavy, we won’t be able to carry on. As with the glass of water, you have to put it down for a while and rest before holding it again. When we’re refreshed, we can carry on with the burden.”

“So, before you return home tonight, put the burden of work down. Don’t carry it home. You can pick it up tomorrow. Whatever burdens you’re carrying now, let them down for a moment if you can. Relax; pick them up later after you’ve rested. Life is short. Enjoy it!”

And then he shared some ways of dealing with the burdens of life:

• Accept that some days you’re the pigeon, and some days you’re the statue.
• Always keep your words soft and sweet, just in case you have to eat them.
• Always read stuff that will make you look good if you die in the middle of it.
• Drive carefully. It’s not only cars that can be recalled by their maker.
• If you can’t be kind, at least have the decency to be vague.
• If you lend someone $20 and never see that person again, it was probably worth it.
• It may be that your sole purpose in life is simply to serve as a warning to others.
• Never buy a car you can’t push.
• Never put both feet in your mouth at the same time, because then you won’t have a leg to stand on.
• Nobody cares if you can’t dance well. Just get up and dance.
• Since it’s the early worm that gets eaten by the bird, sleep late.
• The second mouse gets the cheese.
• When everything’s coming your way, you’re in the wrong lane.
• Birthdays are good for you. The more you have, the longer you live.
• You may be only one person in the world, but you may also be the world to one person.
• Some mistakes are too much fun to only make once.
• We could learn a lot from crayons. Some are sharp, some are pretty and some are dull. Some have weird names, and all are different colors, but they all have to live in the same box.
• A truly happy person is one who can enjoy the scenery on a detour.

Filed by Ken at 12:19 pm under General
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While these aren’t really all new or unique, thanks to McGee’s Musings
for Mensa wordplay courtesy of John Dvorak’s blog. Some very clever wordplay.

Although I’ve never seen this printed in the Washinton Post it’s called the The Washington Post Mensa Invitational. And once again it supposedly asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition. The University of California Alumni Magazine does somethihng similar to this every month, by the way, but has failed to post it on the net for a decade. Maybe I’ll post a few of the better ones myself.

Here are this year’s winners. None of them get through spellcheck.

1. Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.

2. Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly.

3. Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.

4. Foreploy: Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.

5. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period.

6. Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.

7. Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn’t get it.

8. Inoculatte: To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.

9. Hipatitis: Terminal coolness.

10. Osteopornosis: A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)

11. Karmageddon: It’s like, when everybody is sending off these bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it’s like, a serious bummer.

12. Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.

13. Glibido: All talk and no action.

14. Dopeler effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.

15. Arachnoleptic fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you’ve accidentally walked through a spider web.

16. Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.

17. Caterpallor (n.): The color you turn after finding half a worm in the fruit you’re eating.

And the pick of the literature:

18. Ignoranus: A person who’s both stupid and an asshole.

*** mo:Blogged ***

Filed by Ken at 10:34 pm under General
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Well, posts have scrolled off to archives and I can’t seem to make the last one show up. Not going to take time to figure it out since the archives seem to work. More frustrating is that mo:Blogging seems to give every indication of success then utterly fail to post an update. Curious.

Filed by Ken at 10:22 pm under General
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but they sure have some good ideas.

Filed by Ken at 10:33 pm under General
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Ok, so Seth knows lots of stuff and has lots to say. But Seth. You don’t know WiFi and you don’t know networking.

Don’t give up your day job dude.

Post not deleted, but undid the link and turned comments/pings off. I won’t remove it, but upon a bit further reading determined that I just don’t want to bother wasting my time.

Filed by Ken at 10:07 am under General
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Larry Borsato has posted an excellent observation that seems to continually escape the VoIP proponents who are so enthused with the technology that they can’t embrace the reality.

Mark Evans and Ronald Gruia are both wondering just how good Voice over IP (VoIP) phone service has to be to reach mass acceptance. They both believe that customers will be willing to live with less that 99.999% (”five nines”) reliability, if the price is low enough.

To put this into perspective, 99.999% reliability means that phone service may potentially be unavailable for 5.3 minutes over the course of a year. By comparison, 98% reliability sounds reasonable, but actually the service could be unavailable for more than 7 days.

Could you live without phone service for hours or days at a time? Probably not.

That’s a key difference brought about by 100 years of engineering maturity. One of the benefits the PSTN has over the Internet I’ve always been vocal about is traffic engineering. The PSTN was designed to support a single type of traffic (voice) very, very well. The Internet was designed to support all types of traffic (packetized in IP) using best efforts over available resources. This is one difference that is not well understood.

And that still requires further analysis. Do you personally feel you get 98% uptime from your ISP?

As to why telcos would cannibalize their own revenue stream, they’ve always done that. And in many way (see his comments on cellular) we’ve lowered our standards to accept less that 5 nines reliability as the norm. How do we quantify the impact of accepting lesser quality or availability?

Filed by Ken at 11:04 am under General
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David said There’s no “I” in “team” but there are two “me”s in meme.

But we put the fun in dysfunctional.

Filed by Ken at 5:17 pm under General
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No links in here because I’m tired and lazy right now. I’ve thought a lot about Shelley’s comments about the blogroll hurting. I take them to heart really. But I also see lots of reasons to keep a blogroll. I think it’s even important to keep one.

The hard part is actively and proactively managing it. But I’m giving that a whirl. Now in the sidebar on the right you’ll see some different categories. No I’m not only spreading linky love to people I know and read, I’m pigeonholing and stereotyping them by attempting to force them into categories. For the moment the Affinity Group is the people I seem to have lots of interactions with. People I’ve developed online friendships with. Shared meaningful dialogue with. And the New Voices to me category represents just that. New people appearing on my radar. Sometimes brand new. Sometimes resurfacing. My plan is new discoveries will go there, but not stay there. Folks will either move to somewhere appropriate or the links will go away. I have to manage that.

But the whole blogroll chatter made me realize something that I really hate. Aggregators. Aggravators. RSS. I mean sure it’s convenient, but you know what? It sucks dirty pond water. Through a skinny straw.

Using and RSS reader, I don’t get to see peoples pretty web pages. That doesn’t bother me because if you look at mine you’ll see inelegant simplicity. All I care about from aesthetics is simplicity.

In RSS I don’t see your blogroll. You don’t see mine. And if you put up a link log, I promise I not only won’t subscribe, I’ll never even go look at it. If you don’t have something to say about those people, I’ll likely never find them.

And comments? Well I don’t find RSS very comment friendly either. Most people don’t push those out through RSS so I don’t see them. And if you write something I want to comment, well then I have to work. I have to click over to your site, wait for it to load up, and then try to remember what the heck I wanted to say? How conducive is that to stimulating conversation.

I guess one of the things all this has made me aware of, is I was more engaged in comment dialogue when I used my blogroll as my own bookmark list of the people I wanted to read. And when I could make it flag a place that had updated in the last 4 hours or so, I could focus on people who were saying things.

After months of using an RSS aggregator more, I maintain what I said in my disagreement with Scoble months and month ago. RSS turns readers from interactive engaged readers into baleen whales sucking down all the krill we can handle. I don’t like feeling that way.

By the way - That New to Me category is an invitation for you all to go read the new friends I’m discovering. - Troy and Elisa have become almost immediate daily reads for me. The others are moving that way too.

Filed by Ken at 7:57 pm under General
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I’m posting the graphic here because given current conversations, it delivers a very particular tongue-in-cheek message.

I debated posting the graphic in the sidebar, but someone finding it at some future point might interpret it out of context. Particularly someone from outside the US from a generation that might not recognize the gentleman in the picture.

In truth, I take pride in many things. Neither whiteness nor maleness are among them. These are two characteristics about me that I can’t change. They don’t matter in the big picture.

Just to amplify from one easy to grasp example, take the movie Dances with Wolves for instance. There’s a movie that makees me ashamed to be a white man in America. Because white men in America really did that sort of thing.

Every job is a portrait. Autograph your work with excellence.

I have that quote on a paperweight on my desk at work. Our work speaks for us. Our words speak for us. Our actions speak for us. We define ourselves many ways. Ethnicity and gender shouldn’t be among the ways us.

As for pride, speaking as a proud persons, I think there ar legitimate sources if pride.

• I take pride in the caliber of work I produce and how I conduct myself in business with others. I believe in integrity but I know sometimes my honesty is too brutal. I struggle with it, but take pride in the fact that I focus on it every day.
• I take pride in being married over 32 years, against the odds for my generation. And I give my wife the credit for that. She’s put up with me for most of our lives. and that’s no small task.
• I take a great deal of pride in seeing the men my sons havee turned out to be. I certainly can’t take the credit, but I’m very proud to be part of the livees of the meen they’ve become.

There are legitimate things to be proud of. Being white or male, fat, thin, well endowed in some regard, popular, hundreds of other reasons are……well, superficial. Being superficial isn’t something to be proud of.

*** mo:Blogged ***

Filed by Ken at 6:35 pm under General
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Tuesday, 3/15/05 2:06pm
As an excerpt to Steve Levy, Dave Sifrey, and NZ Bear: You are Hurting Us, Shelley says the following:

In fact, to every weblogger who has a blogroll: you are hurting all of us.

Rarely do people discover new webloggers through blogrolls; most discovery comes when you reference another weblogger in your writings. But blogrolls are a way of persisting links to sites, forming a barrier to new voices who may write wonderful things — but how they possibly be heard through the static, which is the inflexible, immutable, blogroll?

So for all of you who have a blogroll, you are also hurting us.

I have to think about this a bit as I confess that I’ve often thought of doing away with my blogroll. In my case, people come and go and while the core is static, the blogroll really isn’t. But some part of me agrees that my blogroll is doing more harm that good, especially when I see the lack of diversity shown there. I too rarely ever discover a new person to read through anyone’s blogroll. I rarely look at blogrolls. I read more in an aggregator, which devalues the blog by eliminating all that information anyway.

I’ve debated just killing the blogroll and posting “I’m a white male and I killed my blogroll.” I still may well do that. But I’m going to save this as a draft and think about it a bit before I jump the gun.

Tuesday, 3/15/05 6.42pm
I’ve thought about this a bit more. I haven’t yet killed my blogroll, but some things change. For one, when I switched to Wordpress I quit using Blogrolling for my blogroll and took a much more handcrafted approach. A little investigation and I found I can have things on my blogroll that aren’t visible to you. So I’ve toggled a bunch to invisible that will likely be removed. In the meantime, I’m still thinking through how I’ll manage this and how easy it will be to maintain.

A-listers (as defined in my own mind) don’t need a link on a blogroll from me. And it’s damn sure they aren’t throwing links my way. But I don’t really care. Shelley’s earlier post still rings true. If I’m more diligent about linking to posts and things people say and less to people themselves, fairness ensues. On the other hand, there are some people I really do like and read that I want to maintain links to on the right. It boils down to I think I personally need to manage how I link differently.

That means in the next week or two, the blogroll at the right will take on a slightly new look. I haven’t figured out the architecture just yet. Some sites will remain because they’re resource places. Some people will remain because they’re friends and family. And maybe any new links will go in a new people I’ve found section for a time. I need to begin categorizing those and being more attentive to them. That’s a start. It sounds like work. And the flip side is that if it’s too much bother, I may indeed kill the blogroll entirely.

Don’t be offended and don’t take it personally if that happens. But if you must take it personally, feel free to drop me from a blogroll or not link to me too. Because I don’t take anything that happens on here personally. After all, you all just live inside this little box and I can turn it off and make you all go away.

Filed by Ken at 6:35 pm under General
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Lots of stories on this today, but I liked this one best - VOA News - US Businessman Found Guilty of $11 Billion Fraud

A U.S. businessman who built a small phone company into a telecommunications giant has been convicted of an $11 billion accounting fraud. Former WorldCom chief Bernard Ebbers faces a possible 85-year prison term.

A federal jury in Manhattan found the 63-year-old Mr. Ebbers guilty of nine counts, including fraud, conspiracy and filing false documents. During the trial, jurors heard how Mr. Ebbers had inflated the earnings and hidden the expenses of WorldCom to fool investors and lenders.

Things happen for a reason. Sometimes people get what they deserve. Sometimes justice prevails. Sometimes what goes around really does come back around.

Filed by Ken at 6:24 pm under General
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Doc hits the nail right on the thumb. I hate it when I do that. It’s gonna leave a mark.

My own 2¢: Nobody dominates the blogosphere. What makes the ’sphere is indomitability. Of anyone. By anyone else.

Filed by Ken at 6:19 pm under General
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Great stuff in The Lazy Way to Success: Newtonian Workaholics versus Quantum Laziness

When most people do less, they accomplish less. When most people do nothing, they accomplish nothing. So from this experience, most people have concluded that to accomplish more they have to do more.

Obviously, this is how workaholics think.

Lazy-aholics, on the other hand, see the world differently. They wisely know there is always an easier way where doing less accomplishes more. Lazy-aholics know the power (and glory) of Quantum Laziness.

Filed by Ken at 7:22 pm under General
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There’s been a lot of interesting conversation lately in one circle I read. Two strains of conversations echoing out there catch my attention, but only enough for brief comment.

BlogHerCon is an interesting thread kicking around. Speaking as one of the boys, we are inherently too damn male dominated. That’s pretty obvious to anyone who reads with an open mind. There’s a closed circle. A boys club that exists. And the fella who deny it are blind, stupid or obtuse. (Hey, I call ‘em like I see ‘em). No matter what the espoused philosophy of conferences has been, they’re male dominated, to our detriment.

Then there’s the whole theme of diversity in general. Jeneane made some outstanding points that set me off to thinking and writing about some of my adult experiences having grown up in the salad bowl that is Los Angeles. Those thoughts, that writing, have not made it here yet. I don’t know if they will. Halley jumped on the bandwagon by making it a point to note some diverse links. Noble and just causes indeed.

But I did note that in general, the gals all seem to link to the guys, spreading the linky love around and boosting the rankings of the guys, while in most cases (most, not all) didn’t link back to the girls except with some patronizing comments. Now I notice I linked three of the gals, but no guys here. If you must read something into that, read that I’m too tired and lazy to do the research to name names and dig any further. In short, I don’t care enough to dig deeper.

Observation
I said the other day on the Internet we’re all equidistant. But there’s more. On the Internet, we have no gender. On the Internet we have no color or ethnicity. On the Internet we have no sexual preference. On the Internet we have no geographic boundaries.

On the Net we are embraced or rejected, loved or hated, admired or despised for our words and actions. And loathe as I am to offer another disclaimer, my policy on such is here.

Filed by Ken at 7:16 pm under General
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Thanks to Misanthropyst for an email note pointing out some comments on slashdot

Ant writes Broadband Reports says Internet News is exploring how telemarketers world-wide are realizing they can dodge long-distance costs (and U.S. “Do Not Call” restraints) by voice spamming VoIP users. Different from SPIT (spam over internet telephony) because it’s not automated, an analyst in the article predicts homes and businesses could see some 150 calls a day from overseas call centers.”

Ths Internetnew article elaborates -

Voice over IP (VoIP) promises to radically change the way companies do business, but one side effect of less expensive communications threatens to give the whole ecosystem a black eye.

Overseas telemarketers are quickly learning that they can use IP voice calls to “dial for dollars,” getting around both traditional long-distance cost constraints and U.S. Do-Not-Call regulations to flood Internet traffic with phone calls that would make even the most egregious spammer blush

“If you thought spam was bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet,” Burton Group analyst Fred Cohen told internetnews.com. “The average enterprise or household could see as much as 150 calls a day from these telemarketers. It has to happen, because it is a market force that takes the market feedback and makes it into a profitable approach.”

.

I’m not going to repost the entire article here. If this is a topic of interest, you’ll click the link and read. it does give pause to contemplate the future of SPIT (SPAM over Internet Telephony).

Since I was asked about Vonage in particular, I’ll relay this note from the article as well -

Common Carrier Loopholes Remain
In addition to some of the technical shortfalls, Cohen points out that ISPs and VoIP providers could find “Common Carrier” laws a double-edged sword when it comes to telephony.

While the law protects providers from being responsible for the content of the call, that rule is enforceable in the U.S. but not in India, China or elsewhere. If a provider selectively blocks calls based on content, it loses its Common Carrier status and then becomes responsible for every call.

“So if some company overseas decides to call everyone in the United States, they could do it cheaply and easily using VoIP,” Cohen said. “Add in the ability of any of these companies to find out your personal data, and telemarketers can sell to you right after you get a new credit card or as you are looking for a specific product over the Internet.”

“Unless you eliminate Common Carrier rules, this won’t get fixed. But if you do, that will create a bigger problem,” he said.

Cohen said this is also a problem for VoIP providers like Vonage and Skype, which do not own any of the infrastructures their services run on.

Would you like SPIT with that SPAM?

Filed by Ken at 6:50 pm under General
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I found some comments from three credible sources that I think all lend weight to my preceding observations.

VoIP: Terror in the suites?
“If you’re a big incumbent and you’ve sort of enjoyed a competitive advantage . . . you, in my opinion, ought to be terrified,” FCC Chairman Michael K. Powell talking about VoIP at NCTA conference, 5/4/04. From article in Rocky Mountain News.

Note that was 10 months ago. Competitive advantage has become commodity pricing. That’s why companies like Vonage are succeeding to the degree they are.

Jeff Pulver - Time to Move beyond the HYPE of VoIP

When looking at the state of VoIP HYPE, it is the best of times, the worst of times.

Excessive hype of Internet Telephony back in 1996 brought forth the ACTA Petition. Let’s try not to relive our past by learning from our past mistakes. The reality of today is that voice traffic is moving off of the public switched network (PSTN) but it is not just going to IP Networks. Traffic is moving from the PSTN to wireless (cellular) networks, broadband networks, Wi-Fi Networks and quite a few other hybrid networks. This is not a threat but a market reality.

Looking at some of the recent local and regional news coverage in the US regarding “VoIP”, it is clear to me that the term “VoIP” is now being used to describe a new wave of competition to incumbent telephone service and not much more. For me, this is a disturbing trend. When I speak to some consumer reporters who refer to VoIP, in many cases they believe they are referring to a high tech technology, but when pushed, there seems to be a hollow understanding of what VoIP really is. <>As an industry we can do so much more to educate the world about VoIP and I would like to believe that we could be so much better about it. Taken to a far extreme, over time, the entire IP Communications food chain could be at risk if enough people collectivity minimize the role which IP Communication technologies will contribute to the near term future of the communications industry.

I’m not sure how long ago I snipped those comments from Jeff, but I believe the underlined part (emphasis mine) still holds and is playing out.

Martin Geddes

The voice calling industry has been shifting from landline to cellular for a number of years. Cellular minutes of use have exploded while landline talk has stagnated. No news there. [This is bleedin’ obvious already. Ed.]

Landline networks let you place calls from one fixed point in space to any other point on the network. One to many. Mobile calls can be made from any point in space (within coverage) to any other point on the network. Many to many. [You’re fired. Ed.]

This difference is the driver that creates fundamentally different economic structures for fixed and mobile telephony. It isn’t the wirelessness, but the mobility that matters. Why?

Well, when you have a fixed network you can use any technology you like to do the “local loop”. Cable, MMDS, laser, copper twisted pair, glass fiber, etc. You just have the appropriate adapter box in your home or office to let you plug into that physical layer technology.

From your perspective, you don’t care at all what the technology is or who supplies it. From your network operator’s perspective, they want a vendor with low prices likely to stay in business for a while. …

As usual, Martin is dead on the money. We don’t care who the vendor is. We don’t care what the technology is. We want a stable, low cost vendor that lets us communicate whenever we want from where we are with whoever we wish to communicate. Voice and data are merely communication. We don’t care about the underlying technology at all.

And here’s a secret. We never cared about the technology. Never. When Ma Bell ran the world, we really didn’t care. We only ever cared that it worked and was affordable. The only things that have changed are our constructs around what works and what affordable (or cost effective value) mean.

Filed by Ken at 4:54 pm under General, Unified Communications
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I was asked recently about my thoughts on Vonage. I promised to respond, but that led me to give some other thought to Skype, Freeworld Dialup and the state of VoIP in general. I’d considered reposting another excerpt from my book, but decided not to at this point.

Vonage
Perhaps first, let’s put Vonage’s success in perspective. We saw the news recentlyVonage Becomes First Broadband Telephony Provider To Activate Over 500,000 Lines. Lest that strike you as successful, consider that 500,000 lines is the real-world equivalent of the state of Vermont having IP phones while the rest of the US is left out. Significant yes. Interesting yes. A trend, not really. An interesting growth in a vocal, yet miniscule market.

Personally I don’t use Vonage. If I were working as an independent consultant, I might. Certainly their price plans are attractive for some. Take the base plan of $24.95 for unlimited calling within the US and Canada. If I’m tethered to an IP-connected workstation all the time, that’s not bad. Add voice mail, call waiting, 3-way calling and you have a budding wannabe telco. You have a player competing on price to enter a dead market that’s doomed to shrink. Yep, the wireline market will shrink, and quickly once momentum takes over in the US.

Sure, Vonage uses IP, and isn’t tied entirely to wired networks, but just how much wireless is there really? And when you factor in the cost of WiFi, is there a financial gain for me as a customer? I don’t see one. I don’t see new. I don’t see innovation. I see POTS over IP. Whoopee. I’m excited.

Sorry, but Vonage is a phone company that’s taking advantage of a brief window of opportunity to take boring, vanilla telco business from boring, vanilla telcos. And then become one and fade into the telecommunications museum of companies that passed through.

Their service struggles put them in danger. The market’s competitive and consumers are brutal. And becoming more so every day.

I’m not saying Vonage won’t provide good service or succeed. I believe they will. If you’re looking for leading innovation and enterprising new uses of technology, look somewhere else. Vonage’s play is to leverage what can be done in 2000 today, and do it well in competition with traditional telcos. That’s not a sustainable long-term business to my way of thinking. If I were to use it, it would be to save pennies for the short term. I wouldn’t and don’t use it as a residential consumer. I wouldn’t and don’t use it as an enterprise customer. I would use it as a small business that isn’t dependent on the telephone for business. That’s the leverage point I see.

No value add for me today.

Skype
Earlier I snipped a line where Skype CEO Niklas Zennström is back to taunting telecoms, this time at CeBIT. His rallying cry: “Free is good. Free service is very, very good. We think you cannot charge for phone calls.”

Free service is worth every penny. Caveat emptor. You get what you pay for. How many times have we learned this.

Skype is IM for voice. Sure the quality is good. And while it’s simple, it’s not grandma friendly and folks do struggle with making it work. IM and P2P meet voice in a blended possible way. The innovation? Take something that’s been around a long time (IM) and mix it with P2P (by folks who do know how to do P2P). Again, just not something I see as exciting. Interesting yes. Exciting no. Sustainable? Not from anything I’ve seen so far. I’ve looked at it yes, but it’s no longer installed on my systems.

No value add for me today.

Freeworld Dialup
Jeff Pulver is perhaps one of VoIP’s greatest friends. He launched Freeworkd Dialup and gained some immediate inroads among the tech community. It’s an interesting application that’s evolved over time. Now we have a blend of Skype-like IM networking, internal and external buddylisting capability, and increasing integration with the PSTN.

Is it ready for mom? Not hardly. It’s still something that requires a bit of geek factor to use well. It works, and seems as reliable as the others, but it too has drawbacks.

If there’s a benefit to FWD, it’s Jeff and his constant pressure with the FCC to minimize and elimnate undo regulation. I see FWD as a practical solution for keeping visibility and pressure on the regulators, and an approach to continually stretch the linkages of what can be done with VoIP and legacy technology integration.

Again, I’ve installed it, used it, tested it, but it’s not on my systems today.

No value add for me today.

Where is VoIP Working?
In the backbone. Traditional carriers using IP networks as a transport mechanism, over ATM, MPLS-IP networks and high capacity optical streams have been the real winners. Wait a minute? The old, dying telcos? The ones who are failing, cooking books and laying people off? Yep. As Om would call them The Broadbandits. They’re the real winners today in VoIP. They won’t hold a lead, but these are companies that know how to wring every dollar out of a penny invested and have shown that repeatedly. Don’t underestimate their ability to hang on investing less, profiting more, and gouging prices through market babble that sounds like new technology but isn’t.

Sleeping Giants
There are two sleeping giants to watch. They slumber, but barely. Cisco and Microsoft both play and want to play. Keep in mind, for these two play means dominate the market. They don’t dabble the way other companies dabble.

Cisco is focused on being a VoIP player, and they’re a far larger player than many people realize. If there’s a company winning in enterprise VoIP space today, it’s Cisco. They’re winning more and deploying more than the popular press notices. They are quietly become a force to be reckoned with in VoIP.

Microsoft isn’t as visible, but this could just be an area where MS is showing the smartest strategy they’ve ever used. Quietly build SIP into the market dominant OS and stealthily move into becoming the next generation IP phone as an integrated component. Microsoft is a company to watch in VoIP. We’ll see innovation from Redmon, but it will be very Microsoftish innovation, leveraging all their own internals that they leverage best.

Of course there are Nortel, Lucent and others that just continue to quietly thrash about. They lay people off. Their news is rarely good. They’re the historical centers of innovation, but they have no edge. No edge to win.

So where is the change? Where’s the action?
Cell phones are boring and PDAs are dying. But handheld devices are growing and winning. Whether it’s a Blackberry, a Treo, or a Pocket PC toy, the market is on the rise. Functionality keeps increasing. The networks fight over standards, but slowly progress. Look at the cost of cellular minutes and calling plans. They’re commodity prices. VoIP didn’t drive the cost of long distance down like we all thought. Wireless did. Wireless carriers killed the long distance business.

On the Internet, we are all equidistant. On the wireless network, the same applies. I’m as close to friends in Burlington or Atlanta as I am to my next door neighbor on my wireless phone. The death of distance hit both networks. Now the competition is to win the untethered market. Do consumers want to be untethered with a laptop, notebook or tablet PC? Or would they rather be untethered with a Blackberry, Treo or Pocket PC handheld? Do you want more functionality in your device or less? Supersize or portable size? If you can do more with less, why get the bigger package?

I haven’t stayed as vocal in VoIP as I once was for a reason. It’s a boring technology that’s going nowhere slowly. It’s taken so long to achieve critical mass that it’s mirroring the success of ISDN in the US. The most expensive technology to ever deploy over such a long timeframe that it never got off the ground. VoIP is struggling to achieve that kind of success. If that excites you, go for it. IP is a transport technology and VoIP is just using the transport. There’s nothing wondrous about it except that it’s taken so long to reach toddler capability. The next giant leap can only come from some wireless technology. Wireless networking (the 802.11barf family) is still a fixed network. It’s replication of what we already do. The gains are in bandwidth and throughput. Those beat old dialup POTS to death. But the mobility and ubiquity won’t come fast. They’ll be surpassed by other things.

Watch the mobile market. Think untethered. Untethered Internet. Untethered telephony. Untethered communications. 3G and 4G wireless. Slow advances. EVDO. Things happening in this environment are slowly doing two things. Shifting the network away from traditional networking deployments (telcos and traditional ISPs) and shifting workstations to portable devices.

We really want ubiquity more than we want mobility for data services, but we want both. We have them today and we’re getting more all the time. They’re being delivered by folks like Verizon, Sprint, Cingular and T-Mobile. If there’s a segment to watch in the telecom market, that’s it.

Filed by Ken at 4:21 pm under General, Unified Communications
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Thanks to Fourboros for the reference to The Empathy Economy

Quality-management programs can’t give you the kind of empathetic connection to consumers that increasingly is the key to opening up new business opportunities. All the B-school-educated managers you hire won’t automatically get you the outside-the-box thinking you need to build new brands — or create new experiences for old brands. The truth is we’re moving from a knowledge economy that was dominated by technology into an experience economy controlled by consumers and the corporations who empathize with them.

Balance that thought against Once you recognize that the Internet is defined by selfishness…

Filed by Ken at 2:36 pm under General
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