Category: Telecom Industry
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Telephony… *disrupted*: "Dudes in suits looking down at their hands and getting increasingly frantic"
Continue Reading: Telephony… *disrupted*: "Dudes in suits looking down at their hands and getting increasingly frantic"If you are a Blackberry user (I am), you probably discovered sometime early this morning that you were not receiving email messages… and then you no doubt learned that pretty much all Blackberries in the entire Western hemisphere were offline since last night. For email, that is… they still worked as a phone, but I mean, you don’t really get a Blackberry for the phone aspect. At this point, basically every major news outlet is covering the story, and I’m sure we can expect the stories to continue for quite some time. The service seems to be back up now (mine is, anyway), but I’m sure it will take a bit for it to be restored everywhere.
Working in my home office today, I actually didn’t notice the outage until I did one of my very occasional scans of Twitter and saw Chris Brogan complaining being stuck on a train without email access. Knowing Chris, I figured I’d give him a quick call and was rewarded with this great quote about his trip around New York:
“Yeah, I was just in Penn Station and there were all these dudes in suits looking down at their hands and getting increasingly frantic!” (Chris Brogan)
Indeed! …
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Are you enslaved or liberated by your crack^H^H^H^H^HBlackBerry?
Continue Reading: Are you enslaved or liberated by your crack^H^H^H^H^HBlackBerry?That’s the question that both Alec Saunders and Ars Technica ask in regard to a news release out of “Digital Life America” entitled “BlackBerry Backlash? Americans Split on ‘Always On’ Culture” (PDF). The release, timed to coincide with the 3GSM event in Barcelona last week, covers some of the group’s research and includes this:
- 33% agreed with the statement “devices like BlackBerry chain you to work more than they liberate you.” 34% were neutral and the balance, 34%, disagreed.
- Surprisingly, among those who own a BlackBerry or a similar device, the results were not all that different: 34% agreed with the statement, 37% disagreed and 29% were neutral.
The news release went on to highlight other stats that BlackBerry owners do in fact work longer hours and have higher incomes… but both of these are kind of “duh!” statements to me. Look at who are typically the ones with BB devices in any company (i.e. management, executives). When was the last time any of us in those job roles (at most North American companies) worked a 40-hour week? (I think I actually might have in January, but that was because we had a vacation day.)
As a BlackBerry…
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Mark Spencer changes roles at Digium/Asterisk… new CEO
Continue Reading: Mark Spencer changes roles at Digium/Asterisk… new CEOWow! Some big changes down in Alabama… per the news release yesterday (hat tip to Alec Saunders), Mark Spencer is changing roles within Digium and stepping aside as CEO to bring in ADTRAN’s Danny Windham as the new CEO. Mark will remain as Chairman and CTO of Digium. They also announced a new worldwide VP of Sales. Tom Keating has a good writeup of the announcement and also has a link to a podcast of the conference call announcing the changes. It makes for good listening.
As noted, ADTRAN has had a long relationship with Digium… if I recall correctly, Mark started out as an intern there at ADTRAN and when he went on to launch Linux Support Services and needed a phone system, it was his background at ADTRAN that made him think that if he could just get telephony onto a PC, he could manipulate it. Thus was born Asterisk. (And then later Digium, the company, to support Asterisk.)
I’m glad for Mark to see the change. I’ve come to know him a bit over the years through conferences/trade shows and the interviews we’ve done with him for Blue Box… and he’s definitely a hard-core techie and…
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Richard Zhao’s new blog URL – sbin.con/blog – telecom and voip with a Chinese view…
Continue Reading: Richard Zhao’s new blog URL – sbin.con/blog – telecom and voip with a Chinese view…I’ve long enjoyed Richard Zhao’s posts at “Telecom, Security and P2P” because, living in Beijing and working for Lenovo, he brings a distinctly different view into the global conversation. For instance, earlier this year he posted about Chinese security standards, something that few of us outside the country would probably have noticed or commented on. However, as he mentions over on his Chinese language blog (in English), access to Wordpress.com, where he previously had the blog, is apparently being blocked or degraded in China. So he has now moved his blog to:
As the title states, he covers primarily telecom and security. Do check him out…
Technorati tags: voip, security, voip security, telecommunications, china, lenovo -
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A satirical take on the history of AT&T and the mergers that brought it almost full-circle
Continue Reading: A satirical take on the history of AT&T and the mergers that brought it almost full-circleDean over at VoIPuser.org sent me this video link and I did have to laugh at the chart showing the various mergers that have created the new AT&T. It has, indeed, been a strange trip for that company name.