My pal Andy Abramson just posted this and it’s a pretty thoughtful look at what’s coming in IP communications. As such, it led me to rethink some of my recent comments, and seems a good opportunity to revisit these two subjects.

What’s Next In IP Communications? Here’s An Idea To Look At

Last week two stories seem to generate a lot of interest all across the blogs and in the news. The first was the rumor of a “Skype Killer” being planned by the leading telcos around the world. The second was the blockbuster move by the new WiMax consortium of players including Intel, ClearWire, Sprint plus the cable companies, along with online leader Google, to take over what Sprint and Clearwire were both not really doing yet, that to create a national WiMax footprint here in the USA which will deliver, in theory, both Mobile and Fixed broadband solutions.

These two topics are really pretty central to IP communications as we look ahead. Skype isn’t a panacea, but it’s the largets VoIP deployment in the world, and remains wildly popular. And it’s still growing. WiMax is arguably a successor to WiFi, or a fit somewhere in between WiFi and carrier wireless broadband. It could be the next carrier wireless broadband for data if it really succeeds.

Here’s a point Andy makes that the two technologies may be interwoven -

You see, the genie is out of the bottle and there’s no putting the Skype Genie back in, so another more robust and accepted flavor of IP communications that does the same thing and more, but without the already known concerns that Skype raises, could overtake them in time,
especially if its primary purpose was to supplant the existing analog base of installed users as the telcos move them to IP on their own or see them migrate to cable or WiMax.

I’m not sure I fully agree with the details, but I’m absolutely on the same page as Andy with regard to the problems.

The telcos don’t like Skype. Fair enough. They don’t like competition of any kind. They’ve struggled with it since divestiture of the old Bell System in 1984 and have a a long history of killing competition. But they’ve done too little for too long, and it’s far too late. What was once the leading technology industry (think 1956 and Bell Labs invention of the transistor), has fallen into a malaise of maintaining status quo and a sense of the right to be the incumbent forever.

Skype is in play. It may not be openly, actively courting, but Skype is clearly in play. And eBay has demonstrated their inability to leverage their huge investment in Skype toward any substantial success. Yet Skype continues to grow and improve. There’s been some speculation that some consortium of telcos might actually make a move to buy Skype. I think it’s highly unlikely. One of the biggest negatives Skype has shown is its disinterest in open standards for VoIP. for the telcos to embrace Skype, they’d have one of two paths to follow - (a) radically alter Skype to use open standard VoIP in fitting with their infrastructure, or (b) radically re-architect their own networks to use or add Skype’s protocols.

Either presents major problems, and would take on a lifetime of reinventing telephony all over again. They telcos believe they already know telephony, because they know it as it was. Frankly, they don’t have the innovative wherewithall to pull off either of those options successfully. What they might be able to do is mediocritize Skype by building a series of gateways to the PSTN. This could work from a technical standpoint. It also makes sense from a regulatory perspective to manage Skype in a fully separate environment.

Given the innovation shown by the telcos for the last fifty years (please note the tongue-in-cheek…there has been no substantive innovation by the telcos for fifty years), this last option seems a slippery slope, fraught with business, technology, and customer satisfaction problems.

So pick your analogy. Andy said the genie is out of the bottle. Others have said the horse is out of the barn, the water’s over the dam. For the telcos, their response to the Skype threat is simply too little, too late. Skype came on their horizon at a time every telco executive had been forced to read The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen. Every one of them knew full well that disruptive technologies come with a set of known characteristics. Disruptive technologies generally:

• Arrive substantially “downmarket”
• Less complex and expensive (off-the-shelf)
• May sometimes be more costly
• Lower performance than mainstream technology
• Offer lower margins than mainstream technology
• Are introduced into insignificant markets
• May have to make their own markets
• Are perceived as unnecessary by mainstream customers
• Do not fit mainstream value model
• Are difficult to deal with by established players
• Carry significant first-mover advantage

They knew this and ignored Skype until it was too late. Years too late. Skype ate the telcos lunch, and in many ways now has the mindshare that the traditional telcos can never win back. They rested on their laurels as a sustaining technology.

Just as radically as the 3.5″ disk drive disrupted the old traditional disk makers out of business, Skype has forever changed the face of voice communications.

• Of leading 14” drive makers, none survive the 8” drive
• Of leading 8” drive makers, 1 survives the 5.25” drive
• Of leading 5.25” drive makers, only 35% introduce a 3.5” product!

It’s nice that the telcos finally woke up to smell the coffee, but the pot’s almost empty and there’s a hole in your cup. Too little too late. Like many of us have been saying for years to the telcos - the bell tolls for thee.

Andy goes on to bring in the WiMax angle as a related topic -

WiMax. Last week’s announcement of the mega players all joining hands was a very good deal for Clearwire and Sprint.
Clearwire’s investors cashed out. Sprint got someone else to carry the
ball in the USA market, plus this now provides another option to offer
IP based communications versus the already existing 3G solutions.

As a result I chose to think how the very much-ballyhooed WiMax play
could be differentiated versus being looked at as only a substitute for
the mobile phone. As I like to say “too much me too, me also, not me
different” is nothing really new. I mean, what good is going the 4G
route if all it does is give a less expensive experience to make phone
calls on the go, and not work everywhere for many years to come. That’s
what the cable guys already did with VoIP, where the only difference
from what we’ve always had from the phone company is the wire the phone
service travels over and the bill.

WiMax as a substitute for the mobile phone is a boneheaded idea for the reasons Andy states.He’s pretty open with his “too much me to, me also, not me different” description of ideas he sees as off the mark. I tend to be less charitable and call a boneheaded idea just that. A carrier-based approach to WiMax will take years to deploy. I compare carrier WiMax with ISDN in the United States. Never has a technology cost so much, to do so little, and arrive on the scene so late. By the time ISDN for consumers was generally available, it was overpriced, under-featured and obsolete. So now the telcos are going to make WiMax the next ISDN.

Sprint is among one of the least innovative companies I’ve watched for the past ten years. They’re slow to market with solutions that under-deliver, if they work at all. So know they’re going to partner with Clearwire. I’m just not as impressed as a number of my colleagues.

The success of WiFi has not been driven, extended or enlarged by the pitiful efforts we’ve seen that put WiFi in Starbucks and McDonalds. WiFi succeeded because it was unlicensed spectrum that you and I could deploy quickly, easily and cheaply in our homes, offices and businesses. Just like the disruptive technologies Christensen so aptly described, WiFi came in at the low end of a different market. It created its own market. I don’t believe WiMax has that same kind of potential. It’s too direct a competition potentially to existing wireless technologies. I believe we’ll see WiMax widely deployed, but it’s not a wireless technology I believe will sustain momentum long enough to become a major incumbent technology…at leastw not with the carriers driving it. They’ll drive it to mediocrity in their effort to stave off their own painful death while they tell themselves they’re innovating.

The next generation of wireless isn’t here yet. I don’t think we’ve really seen it yet. While the US runs a 2.5G network at best, much of the world is moving toward real 3G wireless. 4G is another animal and what we’re seeing today is a lot of experimentation in the space as players try to find the technology mesh that will gain the critical mass of user acceptance.

I don’t think this mesh will come from any company we see today as a telco. The telcos are innovating us into the dark ages of FCC largess protecting their business. The telcos exist in an environment of cronyism, back room handshakes and political contributions. That’s an approach that may stave off death a while longer, but it won’t create an environment where innovation thrives. They’ve still got their heads in the sand. While they’ve been beat over the head with a clue-by-four repeatedly for years, the telcos, to a very large degree, still haven’t a clue. They don’t have a ten year roadmap that’s got any grit to it.
Technorati Tags: telcos, WiMax, Skype, 4G, next generation networks, unified communications

Filed by Ken at 3:34 pm under Mobility & Handheld, Tech in General, Technology, VoIP/Unified Communications
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I’ve been watching Zobni closely ever since my friend Jeff Bonforte took the reins as their CEO in February. I’ve been waiting for a peek at how Xobni will turn Outlook from a pain into a really productive and useful tool.

Today I finally got the email telling me I’ve got an invitation to join their invite-only beta testing. I immediately went to the download install and set up, and I have to szy they’ve done a dazzling job and Outlook suddenly seems…well…useful.

I’ll keep testing and playing, but so far, given my use of MS Outlook dating back over ten years, this is the best add-on I’ve seen. LookOut as a search add-on is the only other one that I found exciting, and since Microsoft bought them, that tool died. Crushed out of existence by aquisition, a phenomenon not unheard of in the industry.

Keep your eyes out for Xobni. I know I’ll keep testing and be using it. Consider me impressed.

Filed by Ken at 12:15 pm under Technology
5 Comments

Posting a reminder about this free webinar tomorrow in which I’ll be one of the panelists, and since my pals over at TMCnet are putting this on with sponsorship from other friends at Jaduka, I’ve copied wholesale again. The webinar is tomorrow - Tuesday, April 29, 2008, 2:00pm EST 11:00am PST.

You can find the TMCnet page here.

Free Webinar Register Now!

Communications Enabled Business Services Tuesday, April 29, 2008, 2:00pm EST 11:00am PST Companies are more productive and more successful when their employees and customers are better connected to the processes that drive business. Communication Enabled Business Processes (CEBP) combines communication technologies with business processes and applications to more effectively communicate between customers, suppliers, and employees. And, integrating new tools shouldn’t be a difficult or risky proposition. It should be easy to implement and compatible with the latest technologies. By connecting people, information, and the workflow process, a business can streamline operations, provide better customer service, and make a positive impact on its bottom line. After the presentation, the Webinar will be open for a live Q&A. Be sure to have your questions ready! Register Now! PRESENTERS: Trevor Baca Vice President of Software Engineering Jaduka Trevor Baca is Vice President of Software Engineering at Jaduka and oversees software engineering, real-time systems engineering, telephony services development, information architecture, usability, and user-experience engineering teams. He has ten years’ experience in telephony and software development and has held senior leadership roles in software development, systems engineering, strategy, product development, and human-computer interaction. Baca also holds a similar title at NetworkIP, the parent company of Jaduka, and a leading platform provider of prepaid telephony since 1998. At NetworkIP, he led research and development of the second-generation Kodiak services platform. He was instrumental in bringing both metrics-based and user-centered development to the product life cycles of the different parts of the Jaduka technology portfolio. Baca also researched and directed the development of the NetworkIP iQT® realtime QoS analysis and correction system, registered as U.S. Patent #6,914,967. Baca received a Bachelor of Arts in the honors program from the University of Texas. Ken Camp Independent Consultant Ken Camp has more than 25 years of experience in information technology. Ken spent 17 years with AT&T and Lucent Technologies successfully designing and implementing voice and data networks. He later worked in the security marketplace and played a key role in early IPSec VPN deployments. As an independent consultant, Ken’s primary focal areas include network performance improvement, security practices and the design and deployment of integrated voice and data solutions. He may be contacted at: ken_camp@realtimepublishers.net Erik Linask Associate Editor Technology Marketing Corporation In addition to his work with TMC’s IP Communications publications, Erik is a contributor to TMCnet. Prior to joining the TMC team, he was Managing Editor at Global Custodian, a global securities services publication, where he also managed the magazine’s survey research. Erik began his professional career at management consulting firm Leadership Research Institute.

Filed by Ken at 1:11 pm under Technology
1 Comment

This may sound like a silly quesiton, but every now and then I get an email from FON because since moving I haven’t reconnected their WiFi access router.

It begs a question, though. Has anyone ever seen a Fonera connection in the wild? I haven’t, and expect I’ll just toss this thing in the dumpster when we move later this week. I know I could reflash it and make it useful, but it’s hardly even worth the bother.

Earlier today I saw someone mention how available FON hotspots are, but I’ve never seen one in any part of the country I’ve visited. Ever. The only one I have ever noted was my own.

So what’s the point>

Filed by Ken at 1:08 pm under Technology
3 Comments

Last week Sheryl and I had the opportunity to see a demo of something new. Many of our friends and colleagues use an array of what we affectionately refer to as social networking tools. Facebook, Jaiku, Twitter, Hictu, and Seesmic are great examples of social networking tools that are used primarily for social interactions. With a bit of focus, they can be used as business tools as well. On the other hand, LinkedIn is almost exclusively a business tool, but has very limited social networking capability. Each have their focus, and each present some features that can be very useful depending on the user’s individual needs.

As social media expands and grows, we might think about how collaboration fits into the sphere of social media. Participating on Alec Saunder Squawkbox call this morning brought that point to light as we all collaborated on the phone, but talked about various news on the web.

Social media as we’ve thought about it up to this point is a broad and general genre of application and network service. From a tactical perspective, in the day-to-day operation of many specialities, there’s a collaborative aspect to our work that requires integration of social media tools to effectively use technology.

We had the pleasure of exploring an example of that in a solution that was quite impressive (thanks JP). It’s called GeoConference. from TGIS Technologies . TGIS Technologies Inc. is a 100% Canadian-owned company. It was founded in 1990 under the name Consultants TGIS Inc. and is legally incorporated under Canadian law. Its headquarters is
located in Chelsea (Québec). We had the chance to chat with Yves Carbonneau, President of TGIS.

Here’s some of the basic background we learned:

Overview
The GeoConference is a multi-tiered client/server application. It was created in C# and C++ and
functions in the .Net Framework 1.1+ environment. The Server can easily support several
hundereds of users simultaneously in different sessions.

The GeoConference system is constituted of the following modules:

• GeoConference Server
• GeoConference Client Application
• IIS Plug-in
• DataProvider
• BasicVector, GeoTiff, RasterImage, Photo and WMS Connectors
• GeoConference Remote Admistrator Tool.

Technological Innovation
The GeoConference system is innovative. No other equivalent commercial civil product exists at
the present time. It is the only product on the market that allows users to hold a “live
conference” in real-time using geospatial data. The unique technology that we have
developed lets us protect the geospatial data, pass through firewalls and install the client
application without IT assistance. Thanks to our technology, it is as easy to participate in a
GeoConference session as it is to make a phone call.

In business terms, the solution offers:

• Improved crisis response time(s)
• Better access (to information) and team co-ordination
• Availability of a shareable, real time COP (Common Operational Plan)
• Better preparedness for future situation management
• Improved cost control.

That’s what we learned. What we experienced was far more compelling. Anyone who’s ever worked with geospatial data knows that the tools are cumbersome, and provide only rudimentary useful information unless they’re in the hands of a power users. GIS data holds a wealth of information, but the tools fo extraction and analysis of that data just are not user friendly.

We joined a GeoConference and looked at a real-world example of how GeoConference might be used. Here’s a picture of what we saw.

What was most notable was the ease with which conference particpants can chat and ask questions, pass control back and forth, paint boxes and annotate areas on the screen and collaborate in a very comfortable social media-like setting.In short, Sheryl and I were in the drivers seat in a collaboration session that let us explore how physical disaster response teams might quickly and easily collaborate with extremely friendly tools to work the logistics of a disaster response.

I’ve done some work with GIS solutions and geospatial data in the past. I’m a novice at best, but I was positively wowed by this solution. It delivers the power to actually use GIS data in a practical way into the hands of incident managers and responders with a very minimal learning curve. No training. No huge downloads. No pain.

What struck me quickly is the wide number of uses this solution can have across a number of business sectors:

• Disaster response - Fire, flood, earthquake. Whatever the physical incident might be, coordinating logistics quickly and effectively is a challenge. Recall the deploreable response from FEMA during the Katrina disaster, and you have a sterling example of why tools are needed.
• Incident response - Think about fires and th elike in crowded cities. GIS data contains far more information that shown in the one screenshot I’ve invluded. High rise building sprinklers, electrical systems, plumbing and the like are all built in layers with the geospatial data schema. Imagine a fire truck en route to a scene with full GIS data about all the floors of the building, where the hot spots are, where the people are likely too be, Coordinating on the run via wireless broadband with an incident commander who’s remotely looking at the big picture.
• Transportation - Whether it’s mapping truck routes or railways, or planning a new highway, geospatial data plays a vital role. Here’s a solution that lets designers work with field engineers to collaborate effectively.
• Telecommunications - Think about the challenge of mapping antenna footprint coverage with geopspatial data. This tool could provide huge felxibility in antenna positioning for a wireless carrier simply exploring the “what if” questions of what it might take to deliver service in a new market.

The opportunities here are positively mind-boggling to me. It’s made me step back and think more about how social media can move into a tactical role, providing tools that we use in our everday lives in a number of different way. I think what we’re seeing in social media today is barely scratching the surface of where solutions like GeoConference are going to take us.

Technorati Tags: GeoConference, TGIS Technologies, GIS, geospatial data, incident response, collaboration, social media

Filed by Ken at 11:44 am under Tech in General, Technology
2 Comments

That’s probably not a fair question, but let me step back a moment. You might want to take a look at two earlier posts I wrote -

Yoohoo Yahoo. Where are you?
Hey Yahoo - Knock, knock. Is anyone home?

They were posts moitivated, at least in part, by comments from friend and colleague Stuart Henshall. I link to his comments in both.

Stuart and I were sharing observations about Jerry Yang at Yahoo and his plan to spend 100 days in silent reflection within Yahoo to sort out their plan of attack. Now it’s perhaps time to reflect on the outcome.

First, 100 days was far too long. In Internet time, that’s the life of some companies. To think time would stand still for Yahoo to spend 100 days contemplating its navel was ludicrous. Secondly, we’ve gone well beyond 100 days. Laughably beyond.

In the time that’s passed, now we hear rumblings of layoffs at Yahoo. I don’t have any direct confirmation, but certainly there are a lot of rumblings. And I have enough connections who work at Yahoo that the barometer shows there’s a climate of change sweeping in, but it seems mostly unknown. I get the feeling that for many Yahooligans,, they’re like mushrooms - being fed manure and kept in the dark. That’s just a sense I get from casual conversation.

In one of my earlier posts, I aimed this comment at  Jerry Yang:

I hope while you’re radio silent you’re talking with and listening to
people like Jeff Bonforte and Daniel Raffel and not just talking in an
echo chamber. If you’re staring into the abyss with a deer in the
headlights look, please don’t let the great people at Yahoo all ride
that train until it derails. I hope you aren’t doing all the talking
and failing to listen to the people who made Yahoo what it was. Because
it can be again, but not if you fail to act.

From the outrsiders perspective, when Yahoo went radio silent, they went comatose. They’ve failed to act, failed to plan, failed to think. None of those may be true. What they’ve really failed to do is provide a clue. They’re pretty much stuck in radio silence.

When you’re a company like Yahoo, competing with the likes of Google and Facebook silence isn’t a weapon. It isn’t a defense. It surely isn’t an attack. Silence is tantamount to cowering in fear.

I said Yang could revitalize Yahoo by talking and listening to the right people, but it’s something that had to be done in a timely manners.

The question in my mind now is whether or not Yahoo has any relevance at all. Is there enough left to salvage and maintain some degree of leadership. For me personally, I’ve realized that I use my Yahoo ID for one thing and only one thing. It’s my Flickr identity. If not for FLickr, Yahoo wouldn’t exist on my personal radar.

So here’s a question for you  - do you Yahoo? How and why? What is it you use Yahoo for these days. And if you don’t use it at all, I’d like to know that too. I can identify a number of things most of us don’t use Yahoo for -

• It’s not the search engine of choice. Google has that.
• It’s not the social network of choice. Facebook seems to have that, although I wouldn’t discount MySpace just yet either.
• It’s not the IM chat medium of choice. With Gtalk, AIM, MSN and Jabber, the real leader is probably a cross-platform tool that let’s us chat on multiple networks. If we’re talking pure messaging chatter, I don’t think we can discount either Twitter or Jaiku.
• It’s not the video tool of choice. Sure lots of people used Yahoo video, but I think Skype has actually overtaken it, and SightSpeed has a continually growing use base.
• It’s not the default home page. My Yahoo just isn’t. The most common home pages I see are Google, MSN, news or sports pages. I can’t remember the last time I saw Yahoo come up as anyones default home page.

If we don’t live in Yahoo, and we aren’t using Yahoo, how sustainable is it? And frankly, what the heck is Jerry Yang doing about it?

As an interesting comparison, there’s been a lot of talk about the senior leadership team at Skype and what’s been going on over there. Is Yahoo as interesting as Skype in terms of what lies ahead? Not in my book. And not if you read the chatter on the web.

Yahoo has lost relevance and is still in decline. The question for me is whether Yahoo is sliding into the abyss or will be able to pull out and salvage a respectable leadership role in any segment. Or will we simply write them off as another also-ran?

Technorati Tags: Yahoo, relevance, Jarry Yang

Filed by Ken at 10:37 pm under Tech in General, Technology, Unified Communications
5 Comments

I was quite surprised to read the post below from Om Malik just a bit ago. Om’s a good friend, but as is a hazard in our industry, one with whom I’m not in close contact with on a regular basis. While not happy to hear he’d had a heart attack, I’m very happy to know he’s on the mend and doing well.

A Heart-to-Heart with GigaOM Readers

Om Malik, Thursday, January 3, 2008 at 12:35 PM PT 

Happy New Year. As you may have noticed, my byline hasn’t been up on the site for a few days. That’s because the holidays weren’t exactly my most jolly.

I had a heart attack on Dec. 28. I was able to walk into the hospital for treatment that night and have been recovering here ever since. With the support of my family and my team, I am on the road to a full recovery. I am going to be OK.
[Read Om’s full post]

I want to post my good wishes for a full and speedy recovery here, and to chide Om to remember that the smokes, scotch and fatty foods, enjoyable though they are, really do need to be a thing of the past. Take care of yourself, my friend.

Technorati Tags: Om Malik, GigaOm

Filed by Ken at 3:02 pm under Tech in General, Technology
No Comments

Last year the O’Reilly ETel event was perhaps the most exciting conference venue in the industry. O’Reilly wasn’t able to continue the event, but that’s not enough to let something so exciting and powerful fade away. Thanks to the tireless efforts of Lee Dryburgh, this year we’ll see the kickoff of eComm2008. It’s what I believe will be the first of a revitalized, high-energy conference that will set the industry aflame with passion and innovation.

The conference takes place at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA from March 12th-14th.

Established in 1996, the Computer History Museum is a public benefit organization dedicated to the preservation and celebration of computing history. It is home to one of the largest collections of computing artifacts in the world, a collection comprising over 13,000 objects, 20,000 images, 5,000 moving images, 4,000 linear feet of cataloged documentation and 5,000 titles or several hundred gigabytes of software. The mission of the Computer History Museum is to preserve and present for posterity the artifacts and stories of the information age. As such, the Museum plays a unique role in the history of the computing revolution and its worldwide impact on the human experience.

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Here’s just a small sampling of speakers on the agenda. These are just a few that are my personal highlights. Check the speakers page for a complete list.

Bob Frankston

Frankston Innovating, Achieving connectivity from the edge.

Bob Frankston may be best known for writing VisiCalc. He has been working on online services and networks since 1966 and while at Microsoft initiated the home networking effort. Since then he’s focus his attention on a post-telecom model that builds on the Internet dynamic to achieve connectivity from the edge rather than the center.

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Brough Turner

NMS Communications, SVP and CTO

Brough Turner is SVP, CTO and co-founder of NMS Communications wherehe oversees evolution of technology and product architectures andworks on business strategy and new market development. Brough writesand is quoted widely on telecommunications topics in trade and generalbusiness publications and he is a frequent speaker at telecom industryevents around the world. His current interests include mobilewireless access, broadband policy, mobile video, and user createdcontent and communities. Brough blogs athttp://blogs.nmss.com/communications/ on the technology, economic andsocial issues of communications at the intersection of telecom,mobility and the Internet.

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David Isenberg

Awaiting…, Founder

David S. Isenberg spent 12 years at AT&T Bell Labs until his 1997 essay,”The Rise of the Stupid Network,” was received with acclaim everywhere in the global telecommunications community with one exception — at AT&T itself! So Isenberg left AT&T in 1998 to found isen.com, LLC (an independent telecom analysis firm based in Cos Cob, Connecticut) and to publish The SMART Letter, an open-minded commentary on the communications revolution and its enemies.

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Jeff Bonforte

Yahoo! Inc., Vice President, Product Management

Jeff has founded a few startups including i-drive, an online storage pioneer, in 1998. He served as President for SIPphone, where he lead the development and release of Gizmo Project (www.gizmo5.com). He began working at Yahoo! in 2005, where he initially lead Voice. Shortly after, he was promoted to run Messenger, Voice and Chat. He was promoted to Vice President in 2007. Today he works in early product development in Search.

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Lee S Dryburgh

SS7 Networks Limited, Director

Lee S. Dryburgh is a person-to-person communications technologist. He is an engineering doctoral candidate at UCL (with sponsorship from Cisco), SS7 consulting engineer via his company SS7 Networks and the initiator of the Emerging Communications (eComm) conference. He has performed work for numerous operators including British Telecom, O2, Sprint, T-Mobile, Orange, Verisign, Hutchinson, as well as vendors including Marconi, Nokia, Alcatel-Lucent, Nortel, and Cisco. He is an acknowledged expert in the telecommunication protocol suite Signaling System #7 and lead-authored the bestselling book on the topic. His research focus is the future of telephony and enabling conversation between relevant strangers.

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Martin Geddes

STL, Chief Analyst

Martin Geddes is author of the popular telecom strategy blog Telepocalypse, as well as chief analyst at STL and co-instigator of the Telco 2.0 initiative (www.telco2.net) — helping network operators and vendors make money in an all-IP world.

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Thomas McCarthy-Howe

The Thomas Howe Company, CEO

Thomas McCarthy-Howe has nineteen years of experience in telecommunications product development. He is currently an independent consultant to service providers, enterprises and equipment vendors in the design and development of next generation communications equipment and services. Thomas has held senior management and engineering positions at industry leaders such as Comverse, Versatel Networks, PictureTel and Aware. As a member of the PictureTel engineering team, Mr. Howe designed audio and video software of the first PC-based video conferencing system, as well as software for the original version of NetMeeting, and as Aware Inc.’s software architect for the first commercially available ADSL chipset. In 2007, Thomas won the O’Reilly Emerging Telephony Mashup Contest. In addition to his writing and teaching, he currently serves on several technical advisory boards and boards of directors.

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That list is just a few of the fabulous speakers on the eComm agenda. Yes, those were chosen because they represent some personal friends we look foward to spending time with, but they’re also trusted colleagues who represent the voice of wisdom in the industry. The speaker’s list for this event is incomparable with that of many conferences.

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Looking over the agenda yields such a depth and breadth of conversations that this is truly an even not to be missed.

My partner Sheryl and I are making sure we won’t miss it. We’ll be there, and expect to be presenting one of the lightning talks on the last day. We’ll be talking about why enabling a hyperconnected state with voice and data services is one of the most vital competitive differentiators in the industry.

We’re also lined up to speak should schedules change or anyone’s travel plans go awry. We will definitely be there blogging, interviewing, podcasting, doing video, and sharing the excitement and frenzy of action from the conference.

We hope you’ll look for us and come say hello. We want to meet and talk with as many of you as possible.

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Special Bonus

The cost of this conference is already low, one of the lowest cost conferences in the industry. Early bird registration is still in effect right now, for another $300 off.

As a special bonus if you email either Sheryl or Ken, we’ll provide a special discount code that will get an additional 15% discount. The early bird registration will end soon, so make your plans now.

Drop us an email to let us know if you’re going to be there so we can set aside time to meet in person.

Technorati Tags: eComm, Lee Dryburgh, Ken Camp, Sheryl Breuker

Filed by Ken at 4:43 pm under Mobility & Handheld, Technology, Unified Communications, VoIP/Unified Communications
No Comments

Art Rosenberg always writes some pretty thoughtful pieces over at Unified-View. I’ve only met Art once, but have read his work for a long time. The other day he posted his thoughts on How Mobility and UC Will Really Change The Pace of Business Communications in 2008.

Art’s post set me thinking about unified communications, mobility and social network attributes in a slightly different want as I look ahead to 2008. I really encourage you to go read Art’s full post, but in the meantime, I’ll share some thoughts.

UC Means All Business Communications
Now that the term “unified communications” (UC) has subsumed real-time telephony, wired and wireless connectivity, and all forms of messaging, it has become synonymous for all aspects of business communications. It has also become increasingly difficult to define everything that UC is really supposed to do for the enterprise. Microsoft and its Alliance partner Nortel wisely recognized this problem last year, and proceeded to establish hundreds of demonstration sites around the world in order to show business management what UC does for business operations and end users, rather than just explain how the technology infrastructure works.

This is a call to the burgeoniong unified communications community. Business communications and real-time telephony are what business cares about. I’ve written recently about VoIP being pumbing, or simply more infrastructure. Art’s saying something very similar. It’s not about technology. It’s about business. The industry has to wake up to that.

Simplifying The User Perspective of UC – Contacting People Quickly Any Way
…UC is all about making contact and communicating with people easily, flexibly, and quickly in a variety of ways.

What a great summary right there. Simplify. That sounds easy, but I realized how hard it is. Let me give you my perspective. Simplification is something that small, creative innovators do well. Simplification comes from companies like MOBIVOX, iotum, Cubic Telecom, GrandCentral, and the like really provide powerful tools that simplify life for users. When’s the last time you really say Cisco, Nortel or Avaya simplifying things for your communications needs? Really?

That’s part of the changing landscape that will impact unified communications and social networking in 2008. More powerful tools with simpler interactions are going to be a very hot item. They’re where the quickest successes will be found. That means the majority of innovative changes, the ones that catch our attention, will still be coming from small innovators next year. They’re the people to watch.

Here’s Art’s take on the traditional industry -

On the other hand, traditional telephony will be a big target for the most drastic changes in business contact procedures, since it has traditionally been based upon the inflexibilities of wired connections, restrictive user interfaces, and location-based devices. So, not only will business calls “integrate” with flexible messaging facilities, but, from a user perspective, all aspects of traditional call management will be changing as well. Much of what will happen to business call management will be derived from the experience of traditional customer call center technologies that can now be implemented more efficiently through IP telephony infrastructures and multimodal endpoint devices.

My view is more direct. Traditional telephony is a dead business that hasn’t keeled over yet. When I left Lucent Technologies in 1996, I told friends that I thought the old AT&T, Lucent and everything that spun out of that was a dead industry. But that like a large animal shot on safari, it would run for miles and miles before it finally fell over dead. It’s an industry that was repeatedly shot and has been running for a long time now, but still bleeding profusely. The traditional carriers are flagging and faltering. They haven’t innovated in years. That ability is gone from their genetic makeup. Sure, they may have divisions or business units that offer wireless and innovate a bit, but let’s face it, the traditional telcos aren’t she sharpest knives in the drawer. They only surprise with the stupid things they do.

When is the last time a traditional telephone company surprised customers with something really new and innovative? Think hard. Real hard. Was it direct dial long distance? or touch tone dialing? Look at your phone. Unless you have an iPhone, you’re using a very old and tired UI to do anything with it. That ten-digit touch pad was an interface to an old network. The new network of today really needs a more useful interface - one that’s simple and powerful.

Here are some areas where Art sees unified communications impacting business communications -

• “Contextual” Presence and Availability
• Proactive Notifications From Automated Business Process Applications
• Multimodal Messaging Communications
• “Instant” Conferencing

These are important because they’re all about the things we’ve been watching for a while now.

Presence and availability aren’t new concepts, but they’re becoming key attributes that successful business people have to manage. That’s a social media overlay into business service networking that’s on a collision course. It’s what I’d call a cataclysmic event on the horizon. And my prediction is that Microsoft will be a non-player, fumbling with how to get in the game and own that segment. They want it badly. I don’t believe they have a clue where to begin. They may indeed become a dominant player at some point but Microsoft is like the traditional telcos when it comes to innovation - it simply isn’t there.

Proactive notification is a vital part of the evolution to a Software Oriented Architecture (SOA) in some fashion. It’s all about making business processes and workflows interact easily with network communications services (voice, video and data). This is the convergence we’ve been talking about for ten years now. Tight coupling between business applications and network services will engender a change in corporate culture that will enable some companies to become the new enterprise we’ve never seen before. Some enterprise will become the nimble, innovative giants that have only been dreamed of. They’ll dominate their respective markets. They’ll also be incredibly vulnerable since they can be leapfrogged by a competitor at any point. That’s going to drive a time of mergers, acquisitions, and bloodletting across the industries involved.

Multimodal Messaging Communications speaks to me as mobility. What to we really want? Ubiquituous, easy access, anywhere, any time. We want always on, always connected, always ready to go services. This is a combination of mobile computing services and enhanced wireless networking. Technologies that couple with tools to give us powerful resources. I like to call it casual computing, but mobile computing will also do. It’s the always on mentality. That’s something my life partner Sheryl and I experience every day of our lives as a hyperconnected couple. I believe, Sheryl and I believe that the world is becoming more hyperconnected. We realize that our particular integration of mobile and network technologies into our daily lives isn’t the norm today. But we believe that’s changing for many people.

Instant Conferencing that Art mentions is a sore spot for many. Anyone who’s ever had to set up a conference call on the fly knows what a nightmare that can be. Even when we set one up in advance, the industry is fraught with a feature set that’s daunting and and uses an arcane set of keystrokes (mostly on that obsolete ten0digit dial pad) to operate. The conferencing segment of the industry really needs to be wiped out, and a fresh start. But there’s hope and light. iotum recently put up a free conference calling application on Facebook that gives a glimmer of hope to how conferencing might be set up in a business environment one day soon in an SOA world.

I think the key point, the real power in Art’s post, comes in the closing section - Managing The New I/O For Business Process Applications – People!. Then again, he’s a great writer who knows how to set us up. It also made me think of one of my favorite books of all time, Prometheus Wired: The Hope for Democracy in the Age of Network Technology by Darrin Barney. The core concept is that we, as humans, are now really an I/O tool of the network, the large I Internet that collects and gathers information about everything on our planet. In short, we feed the machine. And after all, isn’t the Internet really a large data collection engine gathering input from all of us for the biggest data warehouse ever imagined?

Technorati Tags: unified communications, mobility, casual computing, always on, hyperconnected couple

Filed by Ken at 10:42 am under Mobility & Handheld, Tech in General, Technology, Unified Communications, VoIP/Unified Communications
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Please don’t call me.  I’m not in law enforcement. I’m not in a position to investigate or assist in any way. I’m not sure why anyone would think I could, but the voice mail messages lately are just something I delete.

I’d suggest you contact your local law enforcement agency for assistance.

Yes, I write about technologies. Yes I have a passing familiarity with CALEA because of my years of experience in telecommunications. Yes I understand how it can be done in either traditional TDM telecommunications or potentially in VoIP services.

No, I can’t make the NSA stop if they’re really listening to you.

Technorati Tags: wiretapping, CALEA

Filed by Ken at 6:35 am under Technology
4 Comments

I’ve hinted many times on Digital Common Sense over the past few months that I was working on something new. Something looking forward to the future.

Today, my partner in life and business, Sheryl Breuker, and I unveiled the first peek at our joint venture, Stardust Global Ventures.

Sheryl and I share many interests in broad areas of technology, its impact on society, how human behavior adapts to use technology and the aspects of both mobile and casual computing.

Our focus will shift and evolve, but we’re going to be actively engaged at the center of how social media, communications technologies, and the evolution of the Internet are used by people across all walks of life. I’ve focused for years on enterprise business needs. We believe that we can help business enterprises large and small better understand how to embrace and adopt emerging technologies to compete in new, stronger ways. The work force of tomorrow will demand access to the tools and resources they’ve grown up using. Corporate culture, for many organizations, must shift to a new paradigm of embracing social networks, instant messaging, chat, video and mobile solutions.

Just as business must adapt, society also evolves. These tools are used by kids in school, with their friends, educators, non-profit organizations, churches and families. As a hyper-connected couple, using leading edge technologies and tools ourselves, our mission is to help others understand how to embrace change, incorporate the tools in ways that make sense, and maximize the value of a constantly shifting technology.

I will continue to blog here, but Sheryl and I hope you’ll come follow us in our new home together at Stardust Global Ventures.

Technorati Tags: Stardust Global Ventures, Sheryl Breuker, Gabby Geek, Ken Camp, social medai. mobility

Filed by Ken at 4:38 pm under General, Mobility & Handheld, Portable Pleasures - PDA/Smartphones, Tech in General, Technology, Unified Communications
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I’ve never met Irwin Lazar, but he’s one of those people I read frequently and highly respect. Irwin’s a well known industry analyst at Nemertes Research and his interests and mine seem to overlap in a number of very different technology areas. Earlier today I got an email from him about The Internet Singularity, Delayed: Why Limits in Internet Capacity Will Stifle Innovation on the Web, a recently released Nemertes report.

The basic conclusion of the report is that based on current trends in carrier investment and traffic growth, there’s a good chance that there will be bandwidth contention issues primarily in North American access networks. This could lead to a situation where Internet Infrastructure is insufficient to support emerging bandwidth intensive applications. The study is based on models we developed and validated using best available data.

Nemertes has also released a FAQ on the report (http://www.nemertes.com/ii) to address some of the criticisms of the model, and we’ve opened up a discussion board at the same link.

At 62 pages, I haven’t made it through the entire report in depth myself. I’ve skipped around and done some reading. I’ve got it queued up for weekend study in depth. And my plan is to come back here and post some more cogent thoughts after some time digesting it. Looks to be a very solid piece of work, but Nemertes work (and Irwin’s) always is.

Technorati Tags: Nemertes Research, irwin Lazar, Internet, capacity

Filed by Ken at 9:14 pm under Technology
2 Comments

The other day I wrote about Yahoo’s ongoing failure to pull up out of the tailspin they’re in. (See Yoohoo Yahoo. Where are you?). As I mention there, many people are watching Yahoo closely. This morning, pal Andy Abramson weighed in with some more thoughts.

Yahoo Getting Hung Up By The Carriers
Of late, the usually forward and information giving Yahoo executives have been playing “mums the word” on anything and everything. They’ve gone into a professionally counseled and constructed defensive PR mode, commenting on things through their high priced handlers, making only well choreographed statements, and doing their best to provide an altered state of reality, all under the guise of investor relations over public relations.
[Read full post]

Andy’s always on the mark, in part because he’s got some of the most reliable and solid contacts in the industry. But at this point, even his contacts are failing. Like he said, Yahoo’s hunkered down. Are they try to weather the storm or do they have their head in the sand? That’s anyone’s call, but given their silence, I fear the latter.

Things don’t bode well for Yahoo. The carriers have finally figured out they’re the enemy. They’re taking a beating at every turn by others who are moving faster and more effectively. Yahoo’s in serious decline and methinks it’s going to get worse before it gets better over there.

Technorati Tags: Yahoo

Filed by Ken at 9:26 am under Technology
1 Comment

Back some time ago, Jerry Yang at Yahoo said he’d be off spending 100 days seeking answers internally. It was a bad idea at the time, and several of us chided Yang in blogs for taking a vague and ambiguous approach that pretty much showed that Yahoo was lost, adrift, and hunkering down to their own internal dialogue.

The other day Stuart Henshall posted this -

Yahoo 100 Days and… We’re at 98!
98 days and counting. Just two to go. I doubted Yahoo’s hundred day plan on day two. Over the weekend I linked to two posts that further compounded my doubts. If we get a plan I still suspect it will be very 1.0 and not 2.0 focused. Why? It’s in the language.

• Still no cure for what ails Yahoo | CNET News.com
• Hey Yahoo - Knock, knock. Is anyone home? - Unified Communications (My earlier post)
• BuzzMachine » Blog Archive » Poor Yahoo
• Yahoo Still Struggling to Please Shareholders

Well, we’re beyond 100 days now and Yahoo is simply becoming a bigger non-event every day. Hey Jerry, what the heck is going on inside there. Judging from the stories about, Stuart and I aren’t the only ones who’ve noticed Yahoo’s in trouble.

100 days in Internet time is an eternity, but it’s workable if something comes out of it. So far, nothing’s coming from Yahoo but silence.

Some of us are watching to see how Yahoo is going to re-emerge, but the truth is that if they don’t pull out of that funk they’re in pretty quick, there won’t be a whole lot left. The competition is moving forward while Yahoo appears to have its head up its in the sand.

It’s time to wake up and smell the coffee.

Technorati Tags: Yahoo, crisis, lack of direction

Filed by Ken at 12:14 pm under Tech in General, Technology, Unified Communications
2 Comments

Posting here will be light and sporadic for the next few days. Off to the Internet Telephony Expo in Los Angeles

Filed by Ken at 4:02 am under Technology, Unified Communications
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My pal Dameon turns the tightest phrase I’ve seen with this question -

Who Will Be Smart Enough To Hire Dan York?
Inter-Tel and Mitel just recently finished merging. As is the case with many mergers, some people are let go. Unfortunately, Dan York was recently thrown overboard from the good ship Mitel.

I’ve been “laid off” in corporate reorganizations several times in my life. It’s never a good time. Even when handled well, it just plains hurts. As an outsider looking in - watching Mitel - I can’t help but believe they’ve made a serious mistake. But for a company in that mode, mistakes are common too.

Dan’s speaking at the ITExpo in Los Angeles next week, and frankly, I’ll be quite surprised if people there aren’t in pretty aggressive courting mode trying to woo Dan’s talent. He’s one of the sharpest knives in the technology drawer. He’s got uncommon breadth and depth, coupled with superb writing skills and stage presence that aren’t always present in a technologist.

I’m really interested to see who’s lucky enough to win Dan over. That’s going to be a company to watch.

Technorati Tags: Dan York, VoIP, security, unified communications

Filed by Ken at 12:07 pm under InfoSec, Information Security, Technology, Unified Communications, VoIP/Unified Communications
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Ok, I wrote this the other day about these bastards. See Social Networking VD

I immediately unsubscribed and sent them a screed demanding they not spam my address bok that they harvested. This is an elegant use of social networking to perform a pharming attack on an individual in a way. They don’t do anything but harvest email. The fuckers.

So I figure since they snookered a bunch of friends and me. so they are fair game. They’re a disease. So I’m sharing some intelligence here.

Hostnames :	quechup.com
IP Addresses :	83.138.155.212

Ok, so Quechup.com is part of iDate™ Ltd. whose privacy policy says:

Information Collection:

iDate gathers two types of information about users:

1. Information that users provide through optional, voluntary submissions. These are voluntary submissions requesting information about our services and online C.V’s.

2. Information iDate gathers through log files and aggregated tracking information. These files contain absolutely no personal information.
Information Use:

iDate Gathers User Information In The Following Processes:

1. Optional Voluntary Information:
1.1 Contact Form requesting information on iDate’s services. Gathers company name, address, contact person, e-mail, telephone number and information regarding their interest in iDate. This information is used to understand a visitors interest in iDate and enable us to provide additional information about our services.

1.2 Online Curriculum Vitae. Gathers personal details and contact details, specifically: name; address; e-mail; telephone number; age and marital status. And educational qualifications, professional experience and employment details. This information is used to assess suitable candidates to work with iDate.

2. Log Files and Aggregated Tracking Information:
Like most web sites we use log files located on our servers. These include internet protocol (IP) addresses, browser type, internet service provider (ISP), referring/exit pages, platform type, date/time stamp, and number of clicks to analyze trends, administer the site, track user’s movement in the aggregate, and gather broad demographic information for aggregate use. IP addresses, etc. are not linked to personally identifiable information. We use a tracking utility called Webalizer that uses log files to analyze user movement.
Sharing

Legal Disclaimer
Though we make every effort to preserve user privacy, we may need to disclose personal information when required by law wherein we have a good-faith belief that such action is necessary to comply with a current judicial proceeding, a court order or legal process served on our Web site.

Aggregate Information (non-personally identifiable)
We do not share any aggregated demographic information with any 3rd parties.

Ok, so they’re liars, address book harvesters, and generally vermin. They are pond scum or worse. They truly do represent the venereal disease of Web 2.0.And I will call them out by name:

• Mark Finch, President and Chief Executive Officer
• Glen Finch, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer
• Chris Morley, Chief Communications Officer
• Audrey Ragg, Chief Financial Officer
• Paul Sugden PhD – Project Development Manager
• Mathew Graham PhD – Project Development Manager
• Justin Small - Marketing Manager

You fuckers better never show up at a conference I’m at. I can pretty much guarantee we’ll be pillorying your sorry asses until the end of time.

Think I’m unfair? One of you pick up the phone and call me at 360-545-4050. We’ll record the call as a podcast and the the whole net hear your side of misuse of trust and email harvesting. That, or rot in hell.

Does my irritation with this truly sociopathic behavior of theirs show through?

Technorati Tags: QUeshup, spammers, emali harvesters, malicious social network attack, social network disease

Filed by Ken at 10:27 pm under Technology
28 Comments

I’m so glad to see the head lemur back online and engaging. He’s one of the most direct people I’ve ever encountered. His laser-beam view cuts right to the heart of things.

I was one of those infected with this particular online disease recently. And he nails the problem precisely and accurately

Quechup The Clap of FaceBook

Well it didn’t take long for the first Socially Transmitted Disease to infect the sharecroppers on the FaceBook Plantation. Gonorrhea is a sexually transmitted disease also know as the Clap. You get it from fucking around.

Quechup is the Clap of Social Networking. You get it from letting Quechup touch your address book.

Having to admit publically that you gave all your FaceBook ‘Friends’ the Clap has gotta hurt.

Technorati Tags: Quechup, veneral disease of social networks

Filed by Ken at 12:37 pm under Technology
3 Comments

First thanks to Pat Phelan for this great photo of my pals Alex Saunders and Howard Thawe, the business brains behind iotum’s Relevance Engine.

Just a today someone asked me if the Relevance Engine did everything they claim. It isn’t often I can answer a question like that so easily. Yes, 100%.

One of the approaches I’ve often taken is to explain that iotum is the David Allen’s Getting Things Done of online tools. It takes my daily life and puts things in context. Presence and availability our powerful data elements, but they’re only really useful when they are in context. iotums Relevance Engine puts my life in context. Now they give easy context to my conference calls too.

I can’t possibly tell the story as well as Alec, so I’m taking the liberty of sharing. In an email this morning, Alec said

I wanted to give you a small update on what we’ve been up to. After all, I am sure you’ve seen the odd blog post over the weekend hinting about an iotum and Facebook tie-in. Well, ten weeks ago we paused, re-evaluated the market and opportunity landscape and put development of the Talk-Now Blackberry application on hold.

Why?
A huge opportunity presented itself to us that we felt we could not ignore. Facebook, the white hot social networking platform that is all the rage today, opened itself up to third party developers to allow them to integrate their applications within the portal directly.

We were already evaluating how to enlarge the network of Talk-Now users with a web presence. In addition iotum had previously planned to incorporate social networking features into our Talk-Now platform eighteen months in the future (do you remember our briefing on the “Minerva” concept Luca?). We have always seen the growth of social networks in business as a huge opportunity. As I’ve written previously, business is social. We meet, talk on the phone, arrange events, dine together and socialize just as we do in our personal lives. Business social networking simply happens for different reasons, and it’s the natural evolution of the portal.

Facebook’s platform announcement presented the opportunity to accelerate our plans by 18 months.

The first application that we chose to build for Facebook was conferencing. Coincidentally, this is also the service Blackberry users of Talk-Now have indicated a high desire for. Tomorrow we will be launching the beta of iotum Conferencing on Facebook, bringing free conference calls to the Facebook platform. It’s a dial-in system, which may present problems for you, Luca and Paul, since the only numbers are in North America at this point. We will roll out international numbers in the future.

There are a few things I want to bring to your attention.

1. The conferencing application feels nearly identical to the Facebook Events application. Our goal was to model a conference call exactly like an event, except that it takes place over the telephone. By integrating with the Facebook portal in this way, conferencing becomes a natural extension of Facebook, rather than a separate application.
2. To make conferencing easier to use (after all, who hasn’t scrambled looking for a dial-in number and PIN), we are planning to send you the dial in number by text message before the call (this feature will be implemented in the next couple of days), and we use your mobile phone number as your personal identifier. In fact, if you’re calling from your mobile line, our software simply uses your caller ID to validate you and puts you automatically into right conference room. And there is an added benefit. In 60% of calls today, at least one person is missing. Often, it’s simple forgetfulness. Our text message acts as a reminder.
3. The application also takes advantage of the Facebook integration to allow you to post an agenda, and see who is already on the bridge (a bit of AJAXy magic we did allows that to be refreshed without you having to reload the page…). In future, we’ll do more Facebook integration, with features like a wall to allow notes to be captured, and recordings and documents to be posted. Plus, we’ll add more features allowing for live interaction with users, based on the AJAX work we’ve done.
4. You can operate the conferencing service in two ways – either as a standard scheduled call, or an unscheduled “instant” call. We think instant calls have the potential to change how people use conferencing, and make it much more useful for quick ad-hoc calls to arrange an activity amongst multiple people, or to manage unexpected events and crises.

I know you’re probably asking “what does this have to do with the iotum Relevance Engine?”. Everything. Although our presence capabilities aren’t in the application as you will see it today, they will become part of it over time. We made a strategic decision to get to market quickly with the conferencing system, and then roll out additional features, like presence, as quickly as possible afterward. Also, later this fall the capabilities we have developed for Facebook will be re-integrated with the Talk-Now application on BlackBerry, allowing users to create instant conference calls from the BlackBerry driven by the iotum Relevance Engine. Users will be able to see at a glance who is available for a conference call, and then immediately bring all available people into that call. We’ve had interest in this feature from organizations ranging from sales groups, to political parties, IT professionals and public relations companies.

Over the weekend, I’ve been giving restricted access to the app to anyone from the blogging community who has asked. Later today (we’re targeting 1 PM Eastern time) we will completely remove the restrictions, allowing anyone to sign up and use the software. It’s still beta, and we may reset the database one more time between now and tomorrow, but it’s good enough that you can begin using it now. I encourage you to try the software, and let us know what you think. I suggest you begin by looking at who else has also installed the app, and try a call or two them.

As always, both Howard and I are grateful for your continued friendship and support.

I knew the beta was underway, but I’ve been time constrained and also knew I couldn’t really test it. So first, I’m not happy that TalkNow is frozen in time. It is by far the single most powerful business productivity tool I’ve used, but it’s severely limited to Blackberry users only. You will have to trust me that I’ll be taking Alec to task in person next week for this. TalkNow needs multiplatform support, and now. There’s power there that iotum needs to leverage.

But this addition to Facebook, and it’s live/available now, is one of the first and few genuinely useful apps for business to hit Facebook so far. It’s a powerful tool, and I expect iotum to reap the reward of widespread adoption very quickly.

Kudos Alec and Howard, and the whole iotum team!

Technorati Tags: iotum, Relevance Engine, Facebook, unified communications

Filed by Ken at 6:15 pm under Technology
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If you got spammed with an invitation because I got snookered into signing up on this before I figured out that all the invitations I was getting were my friends and colleagues getting snookered, please forgive me and disregard.

I’ve sent a cease and desist and killed my account on this farce. But that took 10-15 minutes and I suspect some of you got spammed. I encourage you not to invest time or effort in this system, which appears to to nothing more than harvest address books and spam others really.

Technorati Tags: social networking spam, abuse of trust. losers

Filed by Ken at 10:59 pm under Technology
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