Month: December 2008
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It’s the End of The Year As We Know It – And I Feel…
Continue Reading: It’s the End of The Year As We Know It – And I Feel…… Fine, actually[1].2008 turned out to be a great year on so many different fronts… despite all the larger economic challenges. I had hoped to write up a longer end-of-year retrospective post, but alas, here it is, the end of the last day of the year…. That fact, in and of itself, speaks volumes about what a year 2008 was – A blur!
I think the single biggest thing I want to say right now as 2008 draws to a close is simply this:
THANK YOU!
Thank you to all of you who have continued to read my various posts… who have provided comments… who have answered the many questions I’ve thrown out there… who have challenged my viewpoints and forced me to defend – and refine – my positions… who have commiserated and rejoiced… who have sent me email suggestions… who have met up with me at conferences… who have generally just participated in this larger community. I’ve met some amazing people throughout the last year, learned an incredible amount and had a lot of fun along the way.
Thank you.
The community around this wacky industry in which we work and play continues to awe and inspire me.…
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Ken Camp no longer blogging at Realtime Unified Communications Community…
Continue Reading: Ken Camp no longer blogging at Realtime Unified Communications Community…It seems this month is a month for VoIP/Communications-related bloggers to move around… Beyond Jon Arnold, Ken Camp has announced that his regular blogging relationship with Realtime has come to an end and that he will no longer be blogging at the Realtime Unified Communications Community that has been his blogging home for the past three years. Ken’s a great guy and a friend and I do wish him all the best in whatever comes next. For now his writing can be found at the Stardust Global Ventures site that he and his wife Sheryl Breuker maintain. He promises to let us know of some of his new ventures in the next little while.
P.S. You don’t need to worry about me joining this trend… I own this domain and it’s hosted on TypePad, so as long as I keep paying that annual fee…. 😉
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Can the new VON recapture the energy/enthusiasm of the old VON?
Continue Reading: Can the new VON recapture the energy/enthusiasm of the old VON?As has been widely reported within the VoIP corner of the blogosphere, the VON brand has now been reborn under the new ownership of Virgo Publishing. After the demise of Pulvermedia and the VON tradeshow in the spring of 2008, many of us wondered if new owners would be found to bring back the show – or was its demise just a sign of the times and the fact that the conference / tradeshow space related to VoIP is already quite crowded. We watched both Jeff Pulver and Carl Ford move on with their lives and new endeavors… and it seemed that maybe VON would just be consigned to the annals of IT trade show history. Or would it?
The answer came earlier this month when Virgo announced the launch of www.von.com as a portal for VoIP news and also announced a new VON Conference and Expo for September 2009 in Miami.The rebirth is intriguing on a couple of levels. First, with Pulvermedia, "VON" was the conference/tradeshow and magazine brand, but the web portal was Pulvermedia.com. Now, it's all "von.com". The portal, newsletters, tradeshow and everything else. The tag line is also no longer "Voice On the Net" (or later "Voice/Video…
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Does the Skype/Mangosoft patent settlement about “dynamic directory service” bode ill for the emerging P2P landscape?
Continue Reading: Does the Skype/Mangosoft patent settlement about “dynamic directory service” bode ill for the emerging P2P landscape?Now that we see some incredibly powerful peer-to-peer (P2P) technology models emerging in the telephony/communication space, will we see that innovation being challenged or delayed by patent lawsuits?The New Hampshire Business Review reported this week that Skype has settled a patent lawsuit with Mangosoft for $2.3 million over a patent apparently related to “dynamic directory service”. Now per the NHBR article, it would appear that Mangosoft is fading away as a company and indeed while the website appears on initial view to be there, the management team is simply the one CEO and the newest “news” on the web site dates from early 2007. Their news release about the settlement with eBay is very brief and refers now to “MangoSoft Intellectual Property, Inc.” Phil Wolff over at Skype Journal notes that MangoSoft’s SEC filing is also brief (but discloses the amount). Looking back at MangoSoft’s 2007 annual report, they are themselves very clear on what they are doing:
BUSINESS STRATEGY
We no longer develop new software products or services. We continue to market, sell and support our software services. Our strategy also includes seeking strategic business partnerships and distribution channels to leverage our patented technology. All of our business…
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Skype launches 4.0 Beta 3 … still only on Windows… and still a fragmented product strategy..
Continue Reading: Skype launches 4.0 Beta 3 … still only on Windows… and still a fragmented product strategy..In Skype’s continued fragmented and confused product strategy, they came out with Skype 4.0 Beta 3 for Windows. Coverage:- Main Skype blog post (with pretty screen shots)
- Skype Developer “Garage” blog post
- Windows Release Notes (Interesting to see what has been added/fixed and what still remains)
- Skype Download Site for 4.0 Beta 3
Parts of it look nice… but I won’t experience it myself… I’ve been on a Mac for the last year (like a lot of the bloggers I know) and so we have Skype 2.7. At least I’m not a Linux user, though, as they are stuck much farther behind.
Every time we ask Skype personnel about why their product strategy is so incredibly fragmented across operating systems we get the same stock answers along the lines of “each product group decides what is best and most appropriate for their operating system… blah, blah, blah” along with the reminder to us whining Mac users that we sometimes get functionality that Windows users don’t get. (And in full disclosure, I’m in Skype’s beta program and I am aware of tentative plans for the next Mac version.)
But that’s the point – why are Skype’s versions so incredibly fragmented across…
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Skype brings in new CxO management team…
Continue Reading: Skype brings in new CxO management team…As long-time readers know, I have written a good bit about Skype on this blog in part because while I started out perhaps 4 years ago as a bit of a skeptic, I’ve become quite a fan of Skype’s over the years… they also were one of the more interesting and definitely disruptive companies in the communications/telecom space. In the past year or two, though, they haven’t quite had the same buzz as they once did, even while they have continued to grow.This may perhaps be changing… and as per usual the Skype Journal has the best writeup with Jim Courtney’s piece on Skype’s restructuring and hiring of a CTO and Chief Strategy Officer as well as a head of HR. I look forward to seeing what this new team will do to help Skype’s direction. I agree with Jim, too, that one other major appointment would be good:
There’s still one more major executive move I am expecting – a Chief Marketing Officer who bring the badly needed messaging and market communications strategies and disciplines required for a business that’s expected to attract sufficient usage to generate those multi-billion dollar sales.
Skype’s messaging and communication has seemed disjointed over…
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So many things to write about… so little time…
Continue Reading: So many things to write about… so little time…Whew… it’s been a crazy couple of weeks… between the Voxeo announcement of the VoiceObjects acquisition on Tuesday… the launch of my Emerging Tech Talk video podcast… my traveling to Orlando this week… and, well, just the general craziness of the holiday season, I have gotten far behind in posts that I want to put up here… so there may be a flood of posts coming out in the next few days… (or may not, if the pace keeps up! 🙂We certainly do live in fascinating times…