http://odeo.com/channels/4483-GigaOM GigaOM no Business, Internet, Technology & Strategy Business, Internet, Technology & Strategy Business, Internet, Technology & Strategy en 40 Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:00:27 -0800 Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:00:27 -0800 http://odeo.com/episodes/25428343-Satellite-Cos-Pitch-Their-Spectrum-to-the-FCC-and-Eventually-Carriers The FCC has had conversations with Qualcomm and Skyterra in the last few weeks about an effort to use a combination of satellites and a terrestrial network known as ATC (Ancillary Terrestrial Component), which could make 100 MHz of spectrum available for mobile broadband. Given that both the wireless industry and the FCC are unified in calling for more spectrum for mobile data services, the satellite companies are setting themselves up for a potential payday, but I still think it’s a sucker’s bet. The FCC is interested in learning more about ATC, Dean Brenner, VP of government affairs for Qualcomm, told me. SkyTerra’s VP of regulatory affairs, Jeff Carlisle, said he was meeting with the FCC to point out that companies holding ATC licenses could get 100 MHz of spectrum online within the next couple of years. Back in 2003, the FCC overruled objections from the CTIA and the wireless industry, and told satellite companies holding spectrum in the L and S bands that they... The FCC has had conversations with Qualcomm and Skyterra in the last few weeks about an effort to use a combination of satellites and a terrestrial network known as ATC (Ancillary Terrestrial Component), which could make 100 MHz of spectrum available for mobile broadband. Given that both the wireless industry and the FCC are unified in calling for more spectrum for mobile data services, the satellite companies are setting themselves up for a potential payday, but I still think it’s a sucker’s bet. The FCC is interested in learning more about ATC, Dean Brenner, VP of government affairs for Qualcomm, told me. SkyTerra’s VP of regulatory affairs, Jeff Carlisle, said he was meeting with the FCC to point out that companies holding ATC licenses could get 100 MHz of spectrum online within the next couple of years. Back in 2003, the FCC overruled objections from the CTIA and the wireless industry, and told satellite companies holding spectrum in the L and S bands that they could offer broadband as long as it had a both a satellite and a terrestrial network component. Companies with this ATC approval promptly went out and raised billions to create such networks. However, the cost of launching a satellite, and a lack of partners to help offset the price of a terrestrial network, means that for now, there are satellites but no terrestrial component. Another issue is the fact that a handset would need to operate on both networks, and so far the efforts to produce one that would appeal to consumers look pretty lame. One of the bigger beneficiaries of the ATC decision, a company called TerreStar, appears to have switched its goal from providing broadband to offering satellite communications as a backup to existing cellular network — a strategy I still question. TerreStar could not be reached for comment. SkyTerra’s Carlisle believes a consumer-serving combination network has value, but that the likeliest route to the spectrum will be from existing carriers that license it from the satellite companies and then build out the terrestrial component. At that point, the satellite may become an albatross given the challenges of creating a dual-mode handset and the fact that all of the real speed and action will be delivered via the terrestrial network. (Satellite broadband speeds so far are unimpressive.) Carlisle pitches the bird as a nice form of backup service that public safety professionals and even consumers would still find valuable. Yet that’s not going to stop the CTIA, which has been against ATC and satellite broadband for years. In a filing with the FCC last week it asked the commission for more spectrum, including that used by satellite providers. From its filing: Finally, CTIA urges the Commission to undertake an examination of spectrum allocated to U.S. satellite providers. CTIA believes that a review of current satellite authorizations, coupled with an assessment of whether such providers are fully and efficiently utilizing their spectrum allocations, will inform whether this spectrum should be reallocated for licensed CMRS wireless broadband use. The CTIA is asking the FCC for 800 MHz and isn’t afraid of going up against broadcasters to get it, so this plea for a rethink on satellite may just be the organization’s effort to throw everything including the kitchen sink, at the spectrum issue. And even if the industry accepts that it needs the 100 MHz of spectrum that SkyTerra claims is available, it comes attached with some pretty big risks. Image courtesy of SkyTerra The FCC has had conversations with Qualcomm and Skyterra in the last few weeks about an effort to use a combination of satellites and a terrestrial network known as ATC (Ancillary Terrestrial Component), which could make 100 MHz of spectrum available for mobile broadband. Given that both the wireless industry and the FCC are unified in calling for more spectrum for mobile data services, the satellite companies are setting themselves up for a potential payday, but I still think it’s a sucker’s bet. The FCC is interested in learning more about ATC, Dean Brenner, VP of government affairs for Qualcomm, told me. SkyTerra’s VP of regulatory affairs, Jeff Carlisle, said he was meeting with the FCC to point out that companies holding ATC licenses could get 100 MHz of spectrum online within the next couple of years. Back in 2003, the FCC overruled objections from the CTIA and the wireless industry, and told satellite companies holding spectrum in the L and S bands that they could offer broadband as long as it had a both a satellite and a terrestrial network component. Companies with this ATC approval promptly went out and raised billions to create such networks. However, the cost of launching a satellite, and a lack of partners to help offset the price of a terrestrial network, means that for now, there are satellites but no terrestrial component. Another issue is the fact that a handset would need to operate on both networks, and so far the efforts to produce one that would appeal to consumers look pretty lame. One of the bigger beneficiaries of the ATC decision, a company called TerreStar, appears to have switched its goal from providing broadband to offering satellite communications as a backup to existing cellular network — a strategy I still question. TerreStar could not be reached for comment. SkyTerra’s Carlisle believes a consumer-serving combination network has value, but that the likeliest route to the spectrum will be from existing carriers that license it from the satellite companies and then build out the terrestrial component. At that point, the satellite may become an albatross given the challenges of creating a dual-mode handset and the fact that all of the real speed and action will be delivered via the terrestrial network. (Satellite broadband speeds so far are unimpressive.) Carlisle pitches the bird as a nice form of backup service that public safety professionals and even consumers would still find valuable. Yet that’s not going to stop the CTIA, which has been against ATC and satellite broadband for years. In a filing with the FCC last week it asked the commission for more spectrum, including that used by satellite providers. From its filing: Finally, CTIA urges the Commission to undertake an examination of spectrum allocated to U.S. satellite providers. CTIA believes that a review of current satellite authorizations, coupled with an assessment of whether such providers are fully and efficiently utilizing their spectrum allocations, will inform whether this spectrum should be reallocated for licensed CMRS wireless broadband use. The CTIA is asking the FCC for 800 MHz and isn’t afraid of going up against broadcasters to get it, so this plea for a rethink on satellite may just be the organization’s effort to throw everything including the kitchen sink, at the spectrum issue. And even if the industry accepts that it needs the 100 MHz of spectrum that SkyTerra claims is available, it comes attached with some pretty big risks. Image courtesy of SkyTerra tag:odeo.com,2009-11-09,25428343 Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:00:27 -0800 no GigaOM Mobile, Broadband, fcc, qualcomm, Terrestar, Skyterra, Ancillary Terrestrial Component) http://odeo.com/episodes/25428344-The-Scorecard-Who-Wins-Loses-With-EA%E2%80%99s-400M-Playfish-Buy Social games — a subset of the gaming industry that offers simple games that run across various social networks — today received what is the equivalent of a Good Housekeeping seal of approval from Electronic Arts, the $4.2 billion-a-year gaming giant. EA today snapped up Playfish, a London-based company which is well-known for social gaming titles such as Restaurant City and Pet Society, for $400 million. Here is my take on the winners and losers in this deal, including its ramifications for the overall industry. Electronic Hurts: Electronics Arts is paying $300 million ($275 million in cash and $25 million in equity retention money) and another $100 million in earn outs for Playfish. EA is paying top dollar because its internal social gaming efforts have been a flop. This past summer, Electronic Arts was hesitating to offer $200 million for Playfish. I would guess EA’s internal social gaming efforts (or lack thereof) were the reason why it almost doubled the money... Social games — a subset of the gaming industry that offers simple games that run across various social networks — today received what is the equivalent of a Good Housekeeping seal of approval from Electronic Arts, the $4.2 billion-a-year gaming giant. EA today snapped up Playfish, a London-based company which is well-known for social gaming titles such as Restaurant City and Pet Society, for $400 million. Here is my take on the winners and losers in this deal, including its ramifications for the overall industry. Electronic Hurts: Electronics Arts is paying $300 million ($275 million in cash and $25 million in equity retention money) and another $100 million in earn outs for Playfish. EA is paying top dollar because its internal social gaming efforts have been a flop. This past summer, Electronic Arts was hesitating to offer $200 million for Playfish. I would guess EA’s internal social gaming efforts (or lack thereof) were the reason why it almost doubled the money. Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello clearly understands the changing distribution and monetization dynamics of the game business, but he is on the wrong side of history. The company today reported a big loss — $391 million on sales of $788 million — and cut nearly 1,500 employees. (Related post: “Game Business and Its Crisis of attention“) EA is way too dependent on the console market and has been slow to embrace the shift to web-based gaming. Despite buying Playfish, Electronic Arts will continue to see its revenue come under pressure. Overall trends are against EA, as we have noted previously. EA will find itself on the treadmill of buying companies for growth and diversification into new markets — never an easy task. Verdict: Loser. Game on: Playfish’s management, including co-founders Kristian Segerstråle, Shukri Shammas, Sami Lababidi, and Sebastien de Halleux, are the biggest winners in this deal. They kept a low profile, stayed far away from the hype and fury of Silicon Valley, and by building a business based on solid fundamentals, they were able to form a respectable company — rumored to have revenue between $40 million and $50 million. The company says it is profitable and has enough cash on hand to remain an ongoing business. Verdict: Winner Index-ed: The biggest winner in this deal is Index Ventures, the London-based investment house headed by Danny Rimer. The deal validates the firm’s consistent backing of virtual goods and virtual world/gaming companies. Most importantly, the deal shifts focus away from the firm’s very public humiliation. The fund had to bow out of the Skype buyout, even though it was the original instigator. As they say, in the VC world, you are as good (or bad) as your last exit. Verdict: Winner Game Side Story: The biggest winner in this deal will be the entire social gaming sector. “EA’s acquisition validates this space, and shows how big this is about to become. Now, this is going to grow on a really massive scale,” de Halleux, Playfish’s COO, told Inside Social Games. Thanks to EA’s bet, most of the second-tier game publishers will jump into the fray, picking up all the good companies. Activision/Blizzard is looking at the social gaming space and is a likely buyer. Others like THQ and Ubisoft need a play of their own and might loosen their purse strings. That is good news for the likes of Playdom and Social Gaming Network. I am actually surprised that Disney and other large media companies have been playing it cool and not buying in the space. Verdict: Winner Zynga-ed: Over the past few weeks, TechCrunch has been running a much-needed campaign against the crummy offers in games that are mere lures to get virtual points. The issue is impacting some social gaming companies more than others, including Zynga, which until recently has been a media darling. It’s in the eye of the hurricane, but then it’s the biggest (and most aggressive) social gaming company. I could call it a loser for now, but a long-term winner. Think of it this way: If Zynga cleaned up its act, walked the thin and narrow, and in the process lost, say, a third of its revenue, it would still be making somewhere between $175 million and $200 million a year. Given that Playfish was acquired for 10 times its revenue, Zynga could get between $1.75 billion and $2 billion. That’s a big number, and Zynga will be hard-pressed to find a buyer. So it has to go for an initial public offering — and that can take some time. Verdict: Loser Social games — a subset of the gaming industry that offers simple games that run across various social networks — today received what is the equivalent of a Good Housekeeping seal of approval from Electronic Arts, the $4.2 billion-a-year gaming giant. EA today snapped up Playfish, a London-based company which is well-known for social gaming titles such as Restaurant City and Pet Society, for $400 million. Here is my take on the winners and losers in this deal, including its ramifications for the overall industry. Electronic Hurts: Electronics Arts is paying $300 million ($275 million in cash and $25 million in equity retention money) and another $100 million in earn outs for Playfish. EA is paying top dollar because its internal social gaming efforts have been a flop. This past summer, Electronic Arts was hesitating to offer $200 million for Playfish. I would guess EA’s internal social gaming efforts (or lack thereof) were the reason why it almost doubled the money. Electronic Arts CEO John Riccitiello clearly understands the changing distribution and monetization dynamics of the game business, but he is on the wrong side of history. The company today reported a big loss — $391 million on sales of $788 million — and cut nearly 1,500 employees. (Related post: “Game Business and Its Crisis of attention“) EA is way too dependent on the console market and has been slow to embrace the shift to web-based gaming. Despite buying Playfish, Electronic Arts will continue to see its revenue come under pressure. Overall trends are against EA, as we have noted previously. EA will find itself on the treadmill of buying companies for growth and diversification into new markets — never an easy task. Verdict: Loser. Game on: Playfish’s management, including co-founders Kristian Segerstråle, Shukri Shammas, Sami Lababidi, and Sebastien de Halleux, are the biggest winners in this deal. They kept a low profile, stayed far away from the hype and fury of Silicon Valley, and by building a business based on solid fundamentals, they were able to form a respectable company — rumored to have revenue between $40 million and $50 million. The company says it is profitable and has enough cash on hand to remain an ongoing business. Verdict: Winner Index-ed: The biggest winner in this deal is Index Ventures, the London-based investment house headed by Danny Rimer. The deal validates the firm’s consistent backing of virtual goods and virtual world/gaming companies. Most importantly, the deal shifts focus away from the firm’s very public humiliation. The fund had to bow out of the Skype buyout, even though it was the original instigator. As they say, in the VC world, you are as good (or bad) as your last exit. Verdict: Winner Game Side Story: The biggest winner in this deal will be the entire social gaming sector. “EA’s acquisition validates this space, and shows how big this is about to become. Now, this is going to grow on a really massive scale,” de Halleux, Playfish’s COO, told Inside Social Games. Thanks to EA’s bet, most of the second-tier game publishers will jump into the fray, picking up all the good companies. Activision/Blizzard is looking at the social gaming space and is a likely buyer. Others like THQ and Ubisoft need a play of their own and might loosen their purse strings. That is good news for the likes of Playdom and Social Gaming Network. I am actually surprised that Disney and other large media companies have been playing it cool and not buying in the space. Verdict: Winner Zynga-ed: Over the past few weeks, TechCrunch has been running a much-needed campaign against the crummy offers in games that are mere lures to get virtual points. The issue is impacting some social gaming companies more than others, including Zynga, which until recently has been a media darling. It’s in the eye of the hurricane, but then it’s the biggest (and most aggressive) social gaming company. I could call it a loser for now, but a long-term winner. Think of it this way: If Zynga cleaned up its act, walked the thin and narrow, and in the process lost, say, a third of its revenue, it would still be making somewhere between $175 million and $200 million a year. Given that Playfish was acquired for 10 times its revenue, Zynga could get between $1.75 billion and $2 billion. That’s a big number, and Zynga will be hard-pressed to find a buyer. So it has to go for an initial public offering — and that can take some time. Verdict: Loser tag:odeo.com,2009-11-09,25428344 Mon, 09 Nov 2009 15:56:44 -0800 no GigaOM web, electronic arts, Zynga, Playfish, Om's Stuff, John Riccitiello http://odeo.com/episodes/25428345-GigaOM-Pro-The-Ultimate-Guide-To-TV-Everywhere Over the past three years, the Internet has become a major secondary distribution platform for free-to-air broadcast programming. Whether through network programmers’ own sites, such as ABC.com, or through aggregators like Hulu and TV.com, ad-supported broadcast programming today is generally available online shortly after its initial airing at no cost to the user. However, programming such as ESPN, TNT and the Discovery Channel, which originates on pay-TV platforms (i.e. cable, satellite and telco TV services) has been a different story. Read more over on GigaOM Pro, our subscription only research service. (Subscription required and costs $79 a year.) Over the past three years, the Internet has become a major secondary distribution platform for free-to-air broadcast programming. Whether through network programmers’ own sites, such as ABC.com, or through aggregators like Hulu and TV.com, ad-supported broadcast programming today is generally available online shortly after its initial airing at no cost to the user. However, programming such as ESPN, TNT and the Discovery Channel, which originates on pay-TV platforms (i.e. cable, satellite and telco TV services) has been a different story. Read more over on GigaOM Pro, our subscription only research service. (Subscription required and costs $79 a year.) Over the past three years, the Internet has become a major secondary distribution platform for free-to-air broadcast programming. Whether through network programmers’ own sites, such as ABC.com, or through aggregators like Hulu and TV.com, ad-supported broadcast programming today is generally available online shortly after its initial airing at no cost to the user. However, programming such as ESPN, TNT and the Discovery Channel, which originates on pay-TV platforms (i.e. cable, satellite and telco TV services) has been a different story. Read more over on GigaOM Pro, our subscription only research service. (Subscription required and costs $79 a year.) tag:odeo.com,2009-11-09,25428345 Mon, 09 Nov 2009 15:11:15 -0800 no GigaOM interesting, gigaom pro, TV Everywhere http://odeo.com/episodes/25428346-How-Skype-Can-Quickly-and-Easily-Become-a-Social-Network-and-Clean-Facebook%E2%80%99s-Clock As a longtime Skype user who never felt that the service fit with eBay, I was thrilled to hear that it’s being spun off. And now I have some thoughts on how it can quickly and easily become an equally successful social network. In some respects, Skype already is the world’s largest social network, with hundreds of millions of users. And as a peer-to-peer system that generates revenue primarily through outbound phone minutes, Skype doesn’t need to sell advertising, which means that it doesn’t need to infringe on users’ privacy by turning their personal information into a salable commodity for advertisers — in my mind the fundamental flaw of web-based social networks. In other words, Skype has in place a well-established foundation for a social networking system based on privacy and trust. So what might a social Skype look like? Skype already has a great client for real-time communication: a social graph of people its users know and call. It’s... As a longtime Skype user who never felt that the service fit with eBay, I was thrilled to hear that it’s being spun off. And now I have some thoughts on how it can quickly and easily become an equally successful social network. In some respects, Skype already is the world’s largest social network, with hundreds of millions of users. And as a peer-to-peer system that generates revenue primarily through outbound phone minutes, Skype doesn’t need to sell advertising, which means that it doesn’t need to infringe on users’ privacy by turning their personal information into a salable commodity for advertisers — in my mind the fundamental flaw of web-based social networks. In other words, Skype has in place a well-established foundation for a social networking system based on privacy and trust. So what might a social Skype look like? Skype already has a great client for real-time communication: a social graph of people its users know and call. It’s available for every major platform, and given Skype’s popularity, there are a large number of people online at any one time. Each Skype client could serve a XML file with the user’s current status, media files, link feeds and so forth, and to obtain a real-time view of what’s happening with other users, it could call around to folks in a user’s Skype list to get the latest updates. Such a system could be highly decentralized, with most content served directly from one user to another, and largely self-hosted, which means the infrastructure costs would be much lower than a centrally run web service. The user experience would be effortless. Users would simply see more social features appear in upgrades to the Skype client, with, for example, Twitter-like functionality to broadcast to friends and followers in one panel, a link/news-sharing interface in another. By moving this functionality into the client, apart from a caching mechanism to temporarily store content for users while they’re offline, the need for a centralized web-based infrastructure is greatly reduced. Apart from poking Facebook in the eye, why should Skype become a social network? Because it would drive phone minutes and SMS messages between friends, which drives revenues — which makes it a smart business decision. Besides, I’ve never bought the idea that a dominant position in a market guarantees long-term success. Skype took out a whole slew of early VoIP networks to become the world’s phone company — it could quickly and easily become the world’s social network, too. As a longtime Skype user who never felt that the service fit with eBay, I was thrilled to hear that it’s being spun off. And now I have some thoughts on how it can quickly and easily become an equally successful social network. In some respects, Skype already is the world’s largest social network, with hundreds of millions of users. And as a peer-to-peer system that generates revenue primarily through outbound phone minutes, Skype doesn’t need to sell advertising, which means that it doesn’t need to infringe on users’ privacy by turning their personal information into a salable commodity for advertisers — in my mind the fundamental flaw of web-based social networks. In other words, Skype has in place a well-established foundation for a social networking system based on privacy and trust. So what might a social Skype look like? Skype already has a great client for real-time communication: a social graph of people its users know and call. It’s available for every major platform, and given Skype’s popularity, there are a large number of people online at any one time. Each Skype client could serve a XML file with the user’s current status, media files, link feeds and so forth, and to obtain a real-time view of what’s happening with other users, it could call around to folks in a user’s Skype list to get the latest updates. Such a system could be highly decentralized, with most content served directly from one user to another, and largely self-hosted, which means the infrastructure costs would be much lower than a centrally run web service. The user experience would be effortless. Users would simply see more social features appear in upgrades to the Skype client, with, for example, Twitter-like functionality to broadcast to friends and followers in one panel, a link/news-sharing interface in another. By moving this functionality into the client, apart from a caching mechanism to temporarily store content for users while they’re offline, the need for a centralized web-based infrastructure is greatly reduced. Apart from poking Facebook in the eye, why should Skype become a social network? Because it would drive phone minutes and SMS messages between friends, which drives revenues — which makes it a smart business decision. Besides, I’ve never bought the idea that a dominant position in a market guarantees long-term success. Skype took out a whole slew of early VoIP networks to become the world’s phone company — it could quickly and easily become the world’s social network, too. tag:odeo.com,2009-11-09,25428346 Mon, 09 Nov 2009 15:09:20 -0800 no GigaOM web, skype, Voice, social networks http://odeo.com/episodes/25426734-With-Wireless-Data-Smaller-Carriers-Must-Mind-the-Gap The floundering economy hasn’t kept consumers from spending on mobile data, according to the latest quarterly report on the wireless industry from Chetan Sharma, one of our GigaOM Pro analysts. U.S. data service revenues grew 27 percent year-over-year in the third quarter, Sharma reported, with Verizon Wireless and AT&T accounting for 80 percent of the rise, underscoring what I wrote last week about how the rich carriers are getting richer. Given the investment needed to build out new networks, and the incredible growth in data, both the smaller carriers and U.S. regulators should mind the growing gap between those that are raking in the wireless data dough and those that are not. Verizon’s data revenue exceeded $4 billion during the quarter, and is now approaching longtime global leader NTT DoCoMo.  Overall, the top four U.S. carriers “are now a permanent fixture” among the top 10 worldwide carriers in terms of mobile service revenues. Other nuggets from... The floundering economy hasn’t kept consumers from spending on mobile data, according to the latest quarterly report on the wireless industry from Chetan Sharma, one of our GigaOM Pro analysts. U.S. data service revenues grew 27 percent year-over-year in the third quarter, Sharma reported, with Verizon Wireless and AT&T accounting for 80 percent of the rise, underscoring what I wrote last week about how the rich carriers are getting richer. Given the investment needed to build out new networks, and the incredible growth in data, both the smaller carriers and U.S. regulators should mind the growing gap between those that are raking in the wireless data dough and those that are not. Verizon’s data revenue exceeded $4 billion during the quarter, and is now approaching longtime global leader NTT DoCoMo.  Overall, the top four U.S. carriers “are now a permanent fixture” among the top 10 worldwide carriers in terms of mobile service revenues. Other nuggets from Sharma’s report include: 3G penetration in the U.S. stayed at “a healthy” 43 percent in the third quarter of 2009, with Verizon outpacing its competitors and T-Mobile slowly expanding its 3G coverage. The growth in 3G and smartphones helped offset some of the downward pressure on the data revenues and overall ARPU. Flat-rate pricing continued to gain steam in the U.S. market with industry-wide flat-rate pricing plans that included data. Almost all of the major carriers are offering flat-fee access plans for most of the new smartphones being introduced in the market, and roughly 20 percent of the consumers have flat-rate data plans. The subscriber gap between the two largest carriers (AT&T and Verizon) and the next-largest two (Sprint and T-Mobile) will continue to increase, Sharma predicts, rising from 28 percent. U.S. mobile data traffic is likely to exceed 400 petabytes by the end of 2009, according to Sharma, up 193 percent from 2008. And that increased usage is forcing carriers to accelerate their 4G strategies and adopt a multipronged model to manage traffic more effectively. With the larger carriers seeing the greatest revenue gains from data, it stands to reason that as more investment is needed to “keep up with the Verizons” both AT&T and Verizon will continue their data lead. That’s bad news for T-Mobile and Sprint. Sprint’s investment in WiMAX was its attempt to get out in front of this demand for data, but so far it looks like its timing may have been off. The floundering economy hasn’t kept consumers from spending on mobile data, according to the latest quarterly report on the wireless industry from Chetan Sharma, one of our GigaOM Pro analysts. U.S. data service revenues grew 27 percent year-over-year in the third quarter, Sharma reported, with Verizon Wireless and AT&T accounting for 80 percent of the rise, underscoring what I wrote last week about how the rich carriers are getting richer. Given the investment needed to build out new networks, and the incredible growth in data, both the smaller carriers and U.S. regulators should mind the growing gap between those that are raking in the wireless data dough and those that are not. Verizon’s data revenue exceeded $4 billion during the quarter, and is now approaching longtime global leader NTT DoCoMo.  Overall, the top four U.S. carriers “are now a permanent fixture” among the top 10 worldwide carriers in terms of mobile service revenues. Other nuggets from Sharma’s report include: 3G penetration in the U.S. stayed at “a healthy” 43 percent in the third quarter of 2009, with Verizon outpacing its competitors and T-Mobile slowly expanding its 3G coverage. The growth in 3G and smartphones helped offset some of the downward pressure on the data revenues and overall ARPU. Flat-rate pricing continued to gain steam in the U.S. market with industry-wide flat-rate pricing plans that included data. Almost all of the major carriers are offering flat-fee access plans for most of the new smartphones being introduced in the market, and roughly 20 percent of the consumers have flat-rate data plans. The subscriber gap between the two largest carriers (AT&T and Verizon) and the next-largest two (Sprint and T-Mobile) will continue to increase, Sharma predicts, rising from 28 percent. U.S. mobile data traffic is likely to exceed 400 petabytes by the end of 2009, according to Sharma, up 193 percent from 2008. And that increased usage is forcing carriers to accelerate their 4G strategies and adopt a multipronged model to manage traffic more effectively. With the larger carriers seeing the greatest revenue gains from data, it stands to reason that as more investment is needed to “keep up with the Verizons” both AT&T and Verizon will continue their data lead. That’s bad news for T-Mobile and Sprint. Sprint’s investment in WiMAX was its attempt to get out in front of this demand for data, but so far it looks like its timing may have been off. tag:odeo.com,2009-11-09,25426734 Mon, 09 Nov 2009 11:08:06 -0800 no GigaOM sprint, verizon, Mobile, Broadband, s, t, t-mobile, at&t, VZ, Chetan Sharma http://odeo.com/episodes/25426735-Google-May-Have-Bought-Gizmo5 Gizmo5 founder Michael Robertson Google is rumored to have bought Gizmo5, provider of a SIP-based service, for an undisclosed amount of money, according to a report on TechCrunch. If true, the deal would add another arrow to Google’s quiver as it takes on incumbents Microsoft and Cisco Systems in the hotly contested collaboration market. While it does have Google Voice, the search engine giant lacks a truly enterprise-quality VoIP offering. Given that most of Google’s customers are also likely Skype users (aka web workers), it makes perfect sense for it to buy Gizmo5. The San Diego-based company recently developed OpenSky, a gateway that allows you to call Skype from any VoIP-based phone/application. As founder Michael Robertson told us at the time: What we’ve done is create a SIP alias for every Skype user. So if you want to call a Skype user named echo123 you simply dial echo123@opensky.gizmo5.com from any SIP-aware device (which is just about every piece of VOIP equip... Gizmo5 founder Michael Robertson Google is rumored to have bought Gizmo5, provider of a SIP-based service, for an undisclosed amount of money, according to a report on TechCrunch. If true, the deal would add another arrow to Google’s quiver as it takes on incumbents Microsoft and Cisco Systems in the hotly contested collaboration market. While it does have Google Voice, the search engine giant lacks a truly enterprise-quality VoIP offering. Given that most of Google’s customers are also likely Skype users (aka web workers), it makes perfect sense for it to buy Gizmo5. The San Diego-based company recently developed OpenSky, a gateway that allows you to call Skype from any VoIP-based phone/application. As founder Michael Robertson told us at the time: What we’ve done is create a SIP alias for every Skype user. So if you want to call a Skype user named echo123 you simply dial echo123@opensky.gizmo5.com from any SIP-aware device (which is just about every piece of VOIP equipment). Users can even have any SIP call forwarded to their Skype address using my.gizmo5.com. This application could come in handy for Google to capture some of the Skype magic as it tries to expand into the enterprise and increase its collaboration offerings. Gizmo5 could also help Google extend its reach on mobiles and bring much-needed expertise for soft clients for voice calls. Gizmo5 says it has 6 million users; that number is unverified. If the deal is indeed true, Robertson, who been desperately looking for an encore since his first company, MP3.com, must be thrilled. Gizmo5 has raised closed to $20 million, a majority of it coming from Robertson. P.S.: I want to apologize to readers for writing the original post outlining that Skype had bought Gizmo5. I guess the rumors of Skype buying Gizmo5 were still swirling in my head. Gizmo5 founder Michael Robertson Google is rumored to have bought Gizmo5, provider of a SIP-based service, for an undisclosed amount of money, according to a report on TechCrunch. If true, the deal would add another arrow to Google’s quiver as it takes on incumbents Microsoft and Cisco Systems in the hotly contested collaboration market. While it does have Google Voice, the search engine giant lacks a truly enterprise-quality VoIP offering. Given that most of Google’s customers are also likely Skype users (aka web workers), it makes perfect sense for it to buy Gizmo5. The San Diego-based company recently developed OpenSky, a gateway that allows you to call Skype from any VoIP-based phone/application. As founder Michael Robertson told us at the time: What we’ve done is create a SIP alias for every Skype user. So if you want to call a Skype user named echo123 you simply dial echo123@opensky.gizmo5.com from any SIP-aware device (which is just about every piece of VOIP equipment). Users can even have any SIP call forwarded to their Skype address using my.gizmo5.com. This application could come in handy for Google to capture some of the Skype magic as it tries to expand into the enterprise and increase its collaboration offerings. Gizmo5 could also help Google extend its reach on mobiles and bring much-needed expertise for soft clients for voice calls. Gizmo5 says it has 6 million users; that number is unverified. If the deal is indeed true, Robertson, who been desperately looking for an encore since his first company, MP3.com, must be thrilled. Gizmo5 has raised closed to $20 million, a majority of it coming from Robertson. P.S.: I want to apologize to readers for writing the original post outlining that Skype had bought Gizmo5. I guess the rumors of Skype buying Gizmo5 were still swirling in my head. tag:odeo.com,2009-11-09,25426735 Mon, 09 Nov 2009 10:27:25 -0800 no GigaOM skype, google, VoIP, Voice, Gizmo5 http://odeo.com/episodes/25426736-My-Dad-Doesn%E2%80%99t-Want-to-Talk-to-Me-Anymore Yesterday I called my dad on my cell phone (neither of us have landlines) to tell him about something his granddaughter did, and a few minutes into the conversation he asked if I were near my computer. If I was, couldn’t we Skype instead? In my home Skype is both the P2P telephony program and a verb for video chat. My dad now prefers to Skype with me rather than talk on the phone, a tipping point of sorts in the way we communicate. He said he grew up watching cartoons where folks like the Jetsons talked via videophone, and since the possibility is here today he wants to use it. In this multimodal communications world, the phone companies, which still rely on voice for both wired and about a quarter of their wireless revenue, should be worried. Voice revenue isn’t growing in the U.S., but that doesn’t mean that it couldn’t if carriers got a bit more creative. So far, data is helping phone companies that have wireless networks as well as those that are providin... Yesterday I called my dad on my cell phone (neither of us have landlines) to tell him about something his granddaughter did, and a few minutes into the conversation he asked if I were near my computer. If I was, couldn’t we Skype instead? In my home Skype is both the P2P telephony program and a verb for video chat. My dad now prefers to Skype with me rather than talk on the phone, a tipping point of sorts in the way we communicate. He said he grew up watching cartoons where folks like the Jetsons talked via videophone, and since the possibility is here today he wants to use it. In this multimodal communications world, the phone companies, which still rely on voice for both wired and about a quarter of their wireless revenue, should be worried. Voice revenue isn’t growing in the U.S., but that doesn’t mean that it couldn’t if carriers got a bit more creative. So far, data is helping phone companies that have wireless networks as well as those that are providing Ethernet backhaul for anticipated growth in data. However, the real focus at carriers should be about getting beyond merely providing the pipe in this multimodal world. Check out what BT is doing with its Ribbit acquisition, as an example. Skype CEO Josh Silverman would certainly be thrilled to hear about my dad’s preferred form of communication, as would the Telepresence folks at Cisco hoping to get the same thing happening in the business world. Silverman told Om in September: “We are pretty big on video calling,” Silverman told me. The company is putting a lot of resources into building a better video conferencing experience, he said, because he believes that person-to-person video calling is going to be as big as video. That absolutely makes sense because today the definition of communication is constantly changing. In the past, the world was all about voice, then instant messages and now video calling. People are sending messages and status updates via Twitter and Facebook. The communications are now multimodal. Perhaps in the not-too-distant future my phone calls with be less about voice and more about video, voice, link sharing, and even media sharing all within the context of a television or PC screen. I can turn parts of it on or off as needed. It’s like the vision for social TV that Liz outlined back on March (subscription required) rather than the Jetsons-style videophone that my dad is so excited about right now. The carriers are implementing on this social vision for television, but they should be thinking about adding this to voice as well. Yesterday I called my dad on my cell phone (neither of us have landlines) to tell him about something his granddaughter did, and a few minutes into the conversation he asked if I were near my computer. If I was, couldn’t we Skype instead? In my home Skype is both the P2P telephony program and a verb for video chat. My dad now prefers to Skype with me rather than talk on the phone, a tipping point of sorts in the way we communicate. He said he grew up watching cartoons where folks like the Jetsons talked via videophone, and since the possibility is here today he wants to use it. In this multimodal communications world, the phone companies, which still rely on voice for both wired and about a quarter of their wireless revenue, should be worried. Voice revenue isn’t growing in the U.S., but that doesn’t mean that it couldn’t if carriers got a bit more creative. So far, data is helping phone companies that have wireless networks as well as those that are providing Ethernet backhaul for anticipated growth in data. However, the real focus at carriers should be about getting beyond merely providing the pipe in this multimodal world. Check out what BT is doing with its Ribbit acquisition, as an example. Skype CEO Josh Silverman would certainly be thrilled to hear about my dad’s preferred form of communication, as would the Telepresence folks at Cisco hoping to get the same thing happening in the business world. Silverman told Om in September: “We are pretty big on video calling,” Silverman told me. The company is putting a lot of resources into building a better video conferencing experience, he said, because he believes that person-to-person video calling is going to be as big as video. That absolutely makes sense because today the definition of communication is constantly changing. In the past, the world was all about voice, then instant messages and now video calling. People are sending messages and status updates via Twitter and Facebook. The communications are now multimodal. Perhaps in the not-too-distant future my phone calls with be less about voice and more about video, voice, link sharing, and even media sharing all within the context of a television or PC screen. I can turn parts of it on or off as needed. It’s like the vision for social TV that Liz outlined back on March (subscription required) rather than the Jetsons-style videophone that my dad is so excited about right now. The carriers are implementing on this social vision for television, but they should be thinking about adding this to voice as well. tag:odeo.com,2009-11-09,25426736 Mon, 09 Nov 2009 10:10:56 -0800 no GigaOM skype, verizon, Mobile, Broadband, Cisco, FiOS http://odeo.com/episodes/25426737-What-to-read-on-the-GigaOM-network Autodesk to give away free carbon management tool (Earth2Tech) SCALE 8X announces call for papers (OStatic) Will the cloud lead me away from the Mac? (TheAppleBlog) Happy 5th Birthday, Firefox! (WebWorkerDaily) I’m putting my Palm Pre on notice (jkOnTheRun) Evolving online strategy: MTV vs. Fox News (NewTeeVee) Autodesk to give away free carbon management tool (Earth2Tech) SCALE 8X announces call for papers (OStatic) Will the cloud lead me away from the Mac? (TheAppleBlog) Happy 5th Birthday, Firefox! (WebWorkerDaily) I’m putting my Palm Pre on notice (jkOnTheRun) Evolving online strategy: MTV vs. Fox News (NewTeeVee) Autodesk to give away free carbon management tool (Earth2Tech) SCALE 8X announces call for papers (OStatic) Will the cloud lead me away from the Mac? (TheAppleBlog) Happy 5th Birthday, Firefox! (WebWorkerDaily) I’m putting my Palm Pre on notice (jkOnTheRun) Evolving online strategy: MTV vs. Fox News (NewTeeVee) tag:odeo.com,2009-11-09,25426737 Mon, 09 Nov 2009 09:57:09 -0800 no GigaOM GigaNET http://odeo.com/episodes/25426738-Microsoft-Launches-Exchange-Server-2010-%E2%80%94-But-Free-Competition-Looms Microsoft unveiled Exchange Server 2010, which has been in beta testing since April, at its TechEd conference in Berlin today, and showed it working with Outlook 2010.  Exchange 2010 is the company’s latest server technology for on-premise software deployments, but it also incorporates many features aimed at web and online services. It has a new, integrated email archive designed to help companies increase compliance and respond quickly to legal and e-discovery concerns, and there are now previews of voice mails in Microsoft Outlook. It’s also very apparent that Microsoft officials are aware of the new kinds of competition that Exchange is facing. It was clear from the product positioning that Microsoft is feeling the heat (GigaOm Pro, sub. req’d) from enterprise adoption of tools from Google, such as Gmail, many of which are free or available in low-cost versions for business use. Cisco — a long-time Microsoft partner — is also taking aim at Microsoft ... Microsoft unveiled Exchange Server 2010, which has been in beta testing since April, at its TechEd conference in Berlin today, and showed it working with Outlook 2010.  Exchange 2010 is the company’s latest server technology for on-premise software deployments, but it also incorporates many features aimed at web and online services. It has a new, integrated email archive designed to help companies increase compliance and respond quickly to legal and e-discovery concerns, and there are now previews of voice mails in Microsoft Outlook. It’s also very apparent that Microsoft officials are aware of the new kinds of competition that Exchange is facing. It was clear from the product positioning that Microsoft is feeling the heat (GigaOm Pro, sub. req’d) from enterprise adoption of tools from Google, such as Gmail, many of which are free or available in low-cost versions for business use. Cisco — a long-time Microsoft partner — is also taking aim at Microsoft Exchange with a new enterprise email service, WebEx Email. Steve Elop, president of Microsoft’s business solutions division, made numerous mentions of cost savings that enterprises can purportedly reap with Exchange 2010, and there was much focus on the email archiving and legal compliance features to be found in both it and Outlook 2010. Among cost-saving citations, Elop noted that companies can now run Exchange Server on lower-cost storage platforms than SANs. Indeed, Google CEO Eric Schmidt has been very vocal recently about that company’s “next billion-dollar opportunities” when it comes to delivering web-hosted applications and other tools that can serve as alternatives to Microsoft’s solutions — and its licensing fees. In fact, many of Schmidt’s recent comments are decidedly anti-Microsoft. No doubt with Google’s focus on online-hosted applications in mind, many new features in Exchange and Outlook are designed to allow email inboxes and archives to migrate easily between on-premise deployments and online-hosted ones. For example, a demonstration at the Berlin event included taking an existing on-premise email inbox and transferring it to a web-hosted implementation. Exchange Server is available now for trial use, here (Microsoft Silverlight req’d.). Microsoft officials also announced that the company is acquiring SourceGear’s Teamprise technology. Teamprise allows Java and Eclipse developers to create applications with Microsoft’s Visual Studio. We’ll be on the lookout for more announcements slated to arrive at TechEd this week and will update you as they come in. Stay tuned. Microsoft unveiled Exchange Server 2010, which has been in beta testing since April, at its TechEd conference in Berlin today, and showed it working with Outlook 2010.  Exchange 2010 is the company’s latest server technology for on-premise software deployments, but it also incorporates many features aimed at web and online services. It has a new, integrated email archive designed to help companies increase compliance and respond quickly to legal and e-discovery concerns, and there are now previews of voice mails in Microsoft Outlook. It’s also very apparent that Microsoft officials are aware of the new kinds of competition that Exchange is facing. It was clear from the product positioning that Microsoft is feeling the heat (GigaOm Pro, sub. req’d) from enterprise adoption of tools from Google, such as Gmail, many of which are free or available in low-cost versions for business use. Cisco — a long-time Microsoft partner — is also taking aim at Microsoft Exchange with a new enterprise email service, WebEx Email. Steve Elop, president of Microsoft’s business solutions division, made numerous mentions of cost savings that enterprises can purportedly reap with Exchange 2010, and there was much focus on the email archiving and legal compliance features to be found in both it and Outlook 2010. Among cost-saving citations, Elop noted that companies can now run Exchange Server on lower-cost storage platforms than SANs. Indeed, Google CEO Eric Schmidt has been very vocal recently about that company’s “next billion-dollar opportunities” when it comes to delivering web-hosted applications and other tools that can serve as alternatives to Microsoft’s solutions — and its licensing fees. In fact, many of Schmidt’s recent comments are decidedly anti-Microsoft. No doubt with Google’s focus on online-hosted applications in mind, many new features in Exchange and Outlook are designed to allow email inboxes and archives to migrate easily between on-premise deployments and online-hosted ones. For example, a demonstration at the Berlin event included taking an existing on-premise email inbox and transferring it to a web-hosted implementation. Exchange Server is available now for trial use, here (Microsoft Silverlight req’d.). Microsoft officials also announced that the company is acquiring SourceGear’s Teamprise technology. Teamprise allows Java and Eclipse developers to create applications with Microsoft’s Visual Studio. We’ll be on the lookout for more announcements slated to arrive at TechEd this week and will update you as they come in. Stay tuned. tag:odeo.com,2009-11-09,25426738 Mon, 09 Nov 2009 09:42:03 -0800 no GigaOM web, microsoft, outlook, Teamprise, Exchange Server http://odeo.com/episodes/25426739-Google-to-Buy-AdMob In a clear sign that mobile advertising has arrived and become a major revenue opportunity, Google today announced that it is buying AdMob, the upstart mobile advertising company based in Mountain View, Calif., for $750 million in stock. On AdMob’s blog, Google’s Susan Wojcicki, VP of product management, and Vic Gundotra, VP of engineering, write: For publishers of mobile websites and applications, this deal will mean better products and tools and more effective monetization of their content — allowing them to focus more on their users and less on how to generate revenue. For advertisers who want to reach users when they are engaged with mobile content, this deal will bring better, more relevant ads and greater reach. It will also mean more interesting, engaging ad formats. AdMob has long been the dominant pure-play ad company in mobile, gaining traction as a kind of automated ad clearinghouse for inventory on the mobile web. The company has also expanded into mobile app... In a clear sign that mobile advertising has arrived and become a major revenue opportunity, Google today announced that it is buying AdMob, the upstart mobile advertising company based in Mountain View, Calif., for $750 million in stock. On AdMob’s blog, Google’s Susan Wojcicki, VP of product management, and Vic Gundotra, VP of engineering, write: For publishers of mobile websites and applications, this deal will mean better products and tools and more effective monetization of their content — allowing them to focus more on their users and less on how to generate revenue. For advertisers who want to reach users when they are engaged with mobile content, this deal will bring better, more relevant ads and greater reach. It will also mean more interesting, engaging ad formats. AdMob has long been the dominant pure-play ad company in mobile, gaining traction as a kind of automated ad clearinghouse for inventory on the mobile web. The company has also expanded into mobile app advertising, which has exploded thanks to uptake of superphones such as the iPhone and Android handsets. Google, meanwhile, has primarily focused its mobile ad business on search. As Google pointed out, the deal follows a handful of similar acquisitions by traditional online companies looking to move into mobile: AOL bought Third Screen Media more than two years ago, Yahoo picked up Actionality several months later and Microsoft bought its way onto the field with the pickup of ScreenTonic. But Google’s move raises the stakes for all the players in the game, and fires a warning shot across the bow of smaller mobile startups. Expect Google to move quickly to integrate AdMob’s business with its own mobile ad division as the company’s Android platform picks up steam. In a clear sign that mobile advertising has arrived and become a major revenue opportunity, Google today announced that it is buying AdMob, the upstart mobile advertising company based in Mountain View, Calif., for $750 million in stock. On AdMob’s blog, Google’s Susan Wojcicki, VP of product management, and Vic Gundotra, VP of engineering, write: For publishers of mobile websites and applications, this deal will mean better products and tools and more effective monetization of their content — allowing them to focus more on their users and less on how to generate revenue. For advertisers who want to reach users when they are engaged with mobile content, this deal will bring better, more relevant ads and greater reach. It will also mean more interesting, engaging ad formats. AdMob has long been the dominant pure-play ad company in mobile, gaining traction as a kind of automated ad clearinghouse for inventory on the mobile web. The company has also expanded into mobile app advertising, which has exploded thanks to uptake of superphones such as the iPhone and Android handsets. Google, meanwhile, has primarily focused its mobile ad business on search. As Google pointed out, the deal follows a handful of similar acquisitions by traditional online companies looking to move into mobile: AOL bought Third Screen Media more than two years ago, Yahoo picked up Actionality several months later and Microsoft bought its way onto the field with the pickup of ScreenTonic. But Google’s move raises the stakes for all the players in the game, and fires a warning shot across the bow of smaller mobile startups. Expect Google to move quickly to integrate AdMob’s business with its own mobile ad division as the company’s Android platform picks up steam. tag:odeo.com,2009-11-09,25426739 Mon, 09 Nov 2009 09:32:43 -0800 no GigaOM Mobile, AdMob http://odeo.com/episodes/25426740-Murdoch-We-May-Block-Google Rupert Murdoch, founder and head honcho of News Corp., the largest media company in the world, wants to block access to his content and set up pay walls around it. News Corp. already does it at The Wall Street Journal. “The people who simply just pick up everything and run with it — steal our stories, we say they steal our stories — they just take them,” Murdoch says in an interview with David Speers of Sky News Australia, which is one-third owned by News Corp. “That’s Google, that’s Microsoft, that’s Ask.com, a whole lot of people…They shouldn’t have had it free all the time, and I think we’ve been asleep.” The move is aimed at Google, as outlined in this conversation: Rupert Murdoch, founder and head honcho of News Corp., the largest media company in the world, wants to block access to his content and set up pay walls around it. News Corp. already does it at The Wall Street Journal. “The people who simply just pick up everything and run with it — steal our stories, we say they steal our stories — they just take them,” Murdoch says in an interview with David Speers of Sky News Australia, which is one-third owned by News Corp. “That’s Google, that’s Microsoft, that’s Ask.com, a whole lot of people…They shouldn’t have had it free all the time, and I think we’ve been asleep.” The move is aimed at Google, as outlined in this conversation: Rupert Murdoch, founder and head honcho of News Corp., the largest media company in the world, wants to block access to his content and set up pay walls around it. News Corp. already does it at The Wall Street Journal. “The people who simply just pick up everything and run with it — steal our stories, we say they steal our stories — they just take them,” Murdoch says in an interview with David Speers of Sky News Australia, which is one-third owned by News Corp. “That’s Google, that’s Microsoft, that’s Ask.com, a whole lot of people…They shouldn’t have had it free all the time, and I think we’ve been asleep.” The move is aimed at Google, as outlined in this conversation: tag:odeo.com,2009-11-09,25426740 Mon, 09 Nov 2009 09:27:54 -0800 no GigaOM Media, rupert murdoch, News Corp http://odeo.com/episodes/25426741-Skype-Names-SIP-Guru-as-Chief-Tech-Strategist Skype has hired well-known VoIP expert Jonathan Rosenberg as its chief technology strategist, the company announced today. Rosenberg was highlighted as one of the Cisco executives Index Ventures’ Michael Volpi would bring over to Skype in order to help the company figure out a way around the JoltId stranglehold. As you might know, Skype and Joltid, the company that owns the technology used by Skype (and controlled by founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis), settled with the company last week. Rosenberg is well-regarded in SIP circles and his hiring means that Skype is making a stronger push into the enterprise. Rosenberg was a Cisco Fellow at Cisco Systems, where he directed technology strategy for its enterprise voice product portfolio. When I last spoke to Skype CEO Josh Silverman, he was pretty clear about his desire to turn Skype into a major enterprise voice and collaboration player. Rosenberg’s hiring is a smart step by Skype. (Related post: How Skype Plans to D... Skype has hired well-known VoIP expert Jonathan Rosenberg as its chief technology strategist, the company announced today. Rosenberg was highlighted as one of the Cisco executives Index Ventures’ Michael Volpi would bring over to Skype in order to help the company figure out a way around the JoltId stranglehold. As you might know, Skype and Joltid, the company that owns the technology used by Skype (and controlled by founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis), settled with the company last week. Rosenberg is well-regarded in SIP circles and his hiring means that Skype is making a stronger push into the enterprise. Rosenberg was a Cisco Fellow at Cisco Systems, where he directed technology strategy for its enterprise voice product portfolio. When I last spoke to Skype CEO Josh Silverman, he was pretty clear about his desire to turn Skype into a major enterprise voice and collaboration player. Rosenberg’s hiring is a smart step by Skype. (Related post: How Skype Plans to Dominate Business Telephony.)   Skype has hired well-known VoIP expert Jonathan Rosenberg as its chief technology strategist, the company announced today. Rosenberg was highlighted as one of the Cisco executives Index Ventures’ Michael Volpi would bring over to Skype in order to help the company figure out a way around the JoltId stranglehold. As you might know, Skype and Joltid, the company that owns the technology used by Skype (and controlled by founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis), settled with the company last week. Rosenberg is well-regarded in SIP circles and his hiring means that Skype is making a stronger push into the enterprise. Rosenberg was a Cisco Fellow at Cisco Systems, where he directed technology strategy for its enterprise voice product portfolio. When I last spoke to Skype CEO Josh Silverman, he was pretty clear about his desire to turn Skype into a major enterprise voice and collaboration player. Rosenberg’s hiring is a smart step by Skype. (Related post: How Skype Plans to Dominate Business Telephony.)   tag:odeo.com,2009-11-09,25426741 Mon, 09 Nov 2009 08:55:37 -0800 no GigaOM skype, VoIP, Voice http://odeo.com/episodes/25426742-Broadband-Growth-Will-Come-From-New-Tech-Not-New-Adds Broadband growth in the U.S. has slowed considerably in the last two years and future growth for online access technologies will come less from people adopting broadband for the first time and more from people upgrading from one technology to another, according to a report out today from Forrester. In addition to new technologies, Americans will also see speed boosts — even those on the slower service tiers — as providers attempt to offer more value on the low end rather than lower prices. For many, the elimination of the 768 kbps or 1.5 Mbps connection options will go unnoticed, but for those that really only use email, a price decrease for barely broadband speeds will be welcome indeed — it could even spur a few laggards holding out on broadband because of pricing to step up. However, the big takeaway of the report is that most of the U.S. — at 80.9 million homes — has some access to broadband, and that such access will continue to improve. When it co... Broadband growth in the U.S. has slowed considerably in the last two years and future growth for online access technologies will come less from people adopting broadband for the first time and more from people upgrading from one technology to another, according to a report out today from Forrester. In addition to new technologies, Americans will also see speed boosts — even those on the slower service tiers — as providers attempt to offer more value on the low end rather than lower prices. For many, the elimination of the 768 kbps or 1.5 Mbps connection options will go unnoticed, but for those that really only use email, a price decrease for barely broadband speeds will be welcome indeed — it could even spur a few laggards holding out on broadband because of pricing to step up. However, the big takeaway of the report is that most of the U.S. — at 80.9 million homes — has some access to broadband, and that such access will continue to improve. When it comes to ISPs, subscriber growth will only help drive sales through the next two years; after that, revenue growth will have to come from new technologies, services and pricing schemes. Cable companies so far are winning, with 45 percent of homes expected to be subscribing to cable broadband by the end of 2009, but fiber to the home will make the most gains over the next five years, by which time it’s projected to grow to account for 10 percent of all access technologies from just 4 percent. And during that time, alternative wireless technologies aren’t forecast to be competitive to cable, fiber or even DSL. While the speed boosts are welcome, I think the report needs to spend more time discussing how to make broadband access a differentiated service, beyond price and bundles. It recommends that providers focus their competitive strategies less on a bundle and more on  access to online storage, TV Everywhere and in-home entertainment that require higher speeds, and help keep subscribers from switching. The irony, of course, is that such high-bandwidth applications are apparently the same ones leading providers to cry uncle under an onslaught of heavy usage. Broadband growth in the U.S. has slowed considerably in the last two years and future growth for online access technologies will come less from people adopting broadband for the first time and more from people upgrading from one technology to another, according to a report out today from Forrester. In addition to new technologies, Americans will also see speed boosts — even those on the slower service tiers — as providers attempt to offer more value on the low end rather than lower prices. For many, the elimination of the 768 kbps or 1.5 Mbps connection options will go unnoticed, but for those that really only use email, a price decrease for barely broadband speeds will be welcome indeed — it could even spur a few laggards holding out on broadband because of pricing to step up. However, the big takeaway of the report is that most of the U.S. — at 80.9 million homes — has some access to broadband, and that such access will continue to improve. When it comes to ISPs, subscriber growth will only help drive sales through the next two years; after that, revenue growth will have to come from new technologies, services and pricing schemes. Cable companies so far are winning, with 45 percent of homes expected to be subscribing to cable broadband by the end of 2009, but fiber to the home will make the most gains over the next five years, by which time it’s projected to grow to account for 10 percent of all access technologies from just 4 percent. And during that time, alternative wireless technologies aren’t forecast to be competitive to cable, fiber or even DSL. While the speed boosts are welcome, I think the report needs to spend more time discussing how to make broadband access a differentiated service, beyond price and bundles. It recommends that providers focus their competitive strategies less on a bundle and more on  access to online storage, TV Everywhere and in-home entertainment that require higher speeds, and help keep subscribers from switching. The irony, of course, is that such high-bandwidth applications are apparently the same ones leading providers to cry uncle under an onslaught of heavy usage. tag:odeo.com,2009-11-09,25426742 Mon, 09 Nov 2009 07:19:17 -0800 no GigaOM Broadband, forrester http://odeo.com/episodes/25423973-Another-1-5B-Infusion-for-Clearwire It shouldn’t come as a surprise: Clearwire, the WiMAX-based wireless network operator, is looking for a $1.5 billion infusion from Sprint and other backers including cable giant Comcast. Clearwire executives, including CEO William Morrow, have been publicly talking about a need for new capital. The announcement is likely to be made later this week, The Wall Street Journal reports. The investment once again shows that networks cost a lot of money, especially ones that are based on new technologies. It also shows that Sprint CEO Dan Hesse doesn’t have any choice but to go all in. He was the man who made the decision to merge Sprint’s Xohm business (and spectrum) with Clearwire to form a new company. As a result, Sprint is the largest shareholder of the WiMAX network operator, and “Sprint will use money from its own cash pile or raise new debt for the $1 billion investment,” the Journal reports. About a year-and-a-half ago, Sprint, Intel, Google, Comcast, ... It shouldn’t come as a surprise: Clearwire, the WiMAX-based wireless network operator, is looking for a $1.5 billion infusion from Sprint and other backers including cable giant Comcast. Clearwire executives, including CEO William Morrow, have been publicly talking about a need for new capital. The announcement is likely to be made later this week, The Wall Street Journal reports. The investment once again shows that networks cost a lot of money, especially ones that are based on new technologies. It also shows that Sprint CEO Dan Hesse doesn’t have any choice but to go all in. He was the man who made the decision to merge Sprint’s Xohm business (and spectrum) with Clearwire to form a new company. As a result, Sprint is the largest shareholder of the WiMAX network operator, and “Sprint will use money from its own cash pile or raise new debt for the $1 billion investment,” the Journal reports. About a year-and-a-half ago, Sprint, Intel, Google, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Brighthouse put a total of $3.2 billion in Clearwire. Intel is the company’s biggest investor, even though Sprint is the largest shareholder because of its spectrum and other contributions to company. In August, Stacey pointed out that the money Clearwire had was enough to offer service to about 75 million possible subscribers, not enough in its battle against large phone companies. Interestingly, Google is not likely to participate in this next round of funding. I wonder if that has something to do with Google’s new, cozy relationship with Verizon. With over half a million subscribers, Clearwire hasn’t been a raging success. Its service is available in Chicago, Dallas, San Antonio, Austin, Texas, parts of North Carolina, Philadelphia and Portland, Ore. (Related: “When and Where to Find 4G in Q4″) Both Clearwire and Sprint are in a race against time: They need the new networks rolled out before Verizon and AT&T launch their next-generation high-speed wireless networks based on Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology. Sprint has been bleeding customers at an alarming rate and soon might find itself at a point of no return. Let’s hope for Hesse’s sake, the Clearwire bet pays off! (Related post: “WiMAX’s Future Is in Emerging Markets”) It shouldn’t come as a surprise: Clearwire, the WiMAX-based wireless network operator, is looking for a $1.5 billion infusion from Sprint and other backers including cable giant Comcast. Clearwire executives, including CEO William Morrow, have been publicly talking about a need for new capital. The announcement is likely to be made later this week, The Wall Street Journal reports. The investment once again shows that networks cost a lot of money, especially ones that are based on new technologies. It also shows that Sprint CEO Dan Hesse doesn’t have any choice but to go all in. He was the man who made the decision to merge Sprint’s Xohm business (and spectrum) with Clearwire to form a new company. As a result, Sprint is the largest shareholder of the WiMAX network operator, and “Sprint will use money from its own cash pile or raise new debt for the $1 billion investment,” the Journal reports. About a year-and-a-half ago, Sprint, Intel, Google, Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Brighthouse put a total of $3.2 billion in Clearwire. Intel is the company’s biggest investor, even though Sprint is the largest shareholder because of its spectrum and other contributions to company. In August, Stacey pointed out that the money Clearwire had was enough to offer service to about 75 million possible subscribers, not enough in its battle against large phone companies. Interestingly, Google is not likely to participate in this next round of funding. I wonder if that has something to do with Google’s new, cozy relationship with Verizon. With over half a million subscribers, Clearwire hasn’t been a raging success. Its service is available in Chicago, Dallas, San Antonio, Austin, Texas, parts of North Carolina, Philadelphia and Portland, Ore. (Related: “When and Where to Find 4G in Q4″) Both Clearwire and Sprint are in a race against time: They need the new networks rolled out before Verizon and AT&T launch their next-generation high-speed wireless networks based on Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology. Sprint has been bleeding customers at an alarming rate and soon might find itself at a point of no return. Let’s hope for Hesse’s sake, the Clearwire bet pays off! (Related post: “WiMAX’s Future Is in Emerging Markets”) tag:odeo.com,2009-11-08,25423973 Sun, 08 Nov 2009 20:30:16 -0800 no GigaOM google, sprint, Mobile, comcast, wimax, 4G, LTE, clearwire, Wireless Broadband http://odeo.com/episodes/25423974-Cisco-vs-the-World-Rough-Seas-Ahead Cisco Systems, the Wall Street darling, might soon find itself in a street brawl with not only former enemies but also allies who are turning on it. The company, which once made its living selling core infrastructure products such as routers and switches, has more recently been chasing new markets such as video conferencing and data center-focused technologies including servers. Sure, over the long term, the upside of these markets is huge, but in the near term these moves could prove to be painful. Why? Because these moves into new markets are pitting the company against one-time supporters. It has already been skirmishing with Microsoft (in collaboration and unified communications) and Google, and soon it’s going to find itself locked in mortal combat with behemoths that are going to be merciless in protecting their turf. On GigaOM Pro (subscription required), Derrick Harris points out that almost everyone has a vested interest in keeping Cisco down. This includes Hewlett-Pa... Cisco Systems, the Wall Street darling, might soon find itself in a street brawl with not only former enemies but also allies who are turning on it. The company, which once made its living selling core infrastructure products such as routers and switches, has more recently been chasing new markets such as video conferencing and data center-focused technologies including servers. Sure, over the long term, the upside of these markets is huge, but in the near term these moves could prove to be painful. Why? Because these moves into new markets are pitting the company against one-time supporters. It has already been skirmishing with Microsoft (in collaboration and unified communications) and Google, and soon it’s going to find itself locked in mortal combat with behemoths that are going to be merciless in protecting their turf. On GigaOM Pro (subscription required), Derrick Harris points out that almost everyone has a vested interest in keeping Cisco down. This includes Hewlett-Packard and IBM. Last week, Cisco announced a partnership with storage giant EMC and virtualization leader VMware to set up a joint venture called Acadia based on the concept that the data center is the computer. I wonder how service providers feel about using Cisco’s unified computing products now that it has made known its intentions to compete with them. (Related post: “What the Cisco/EMC/VMWare Trinity Means for Cloud Computing“) More importantly, because these new efforts cut into the storage sales of HP, Dell and IBM, it is more than likely they are going to respond aggressively with scorched-earth strategies. Cisco’s opponents are already aligning with each other, trying to figure out ways to pulverize the company and its partners. What do you guys think? Do you agree that Cisco is in for a rough ride? Or do you think the company’s rivals should be quaking in their boots? Cisco Systems, the Wall Street darling, might soon find itself in a street brawl with not only former enemies but also allies who are turning on it. The company, which once made its living selling core infrastructure products such as routers and switches, has more recently been chasing new markets such as video conferencing and data center-focused technologies including servers. Sure, over the long term, the upside of these markets is huge, but in the near term these moves could prove to be painful. Why? Because these moves into new markets are pitting the company against one-time supporters. It has already been skirmishing with Microsoft (in collaboration and unified communications) and Google, and soon it’s going to find itself locked in mortal combat with behemoths that are going to be merciless in protecting their turf. On GigaOM Pro (subscription required), Derrick Harris points out that almost everyone has a vested interest in keeping Cisco down. This includes Hewlett-Packard and IBM. Last week, Cisco announced a partnership with storage giant EMC and virtualization leader VMware to set up a joint venture called Acadia based on the concept that the data center is the computer. I wonder how service providers feel about using Cisco’s unified computing products now that it has made known its intentions to compete with them. (Related post: “What the Cisco/EMC/VMWare Trinity Means for Cloud Computing“) More importantly, because these new efforts cut into the storage sales of HP, Dell and IBM, it is more than likely they are going to respond aggressively with scorched-earth strategies. Cisco’s opponents are already aligning with each other, trying to figure out ways to pulverize the company and its partners. What do you guys think? Do you agree that Cisco is in for a rough ride? Or do you think the company’s rivals should be quaking in their boots? tag:odeo.com,2009-11-08,25423974 Sun, 08 Nov 2009 19:45:08 -0800 no GigaOM microsoft, Hewlett-Packard, Cisco, ibm, hardware, infrastructure http://odeo.com/episodes/25423975-Apple-Still-Not-Allowing-VoIP-Calls-Over-3G Earlier today in response to my post about Nimbuzz, a good pal emailed to find out why the service didn’t work over the iPhone’s 3G connection. After all, a few weeks ago AT&T announced support for VoIP over 3G with much fanfare, a move that was widely applauded, including kudos from FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. A month has passed since the decision was announced, and there is still no support for VoIP over 3G. “Apple actually did not approve the 3G calling — so they completely broke their promise of allowing VoIP calls on 3G,” a Nimbuzz spokesperson said. Even Skype doesn’t work over 3G (see attached screenshot). Truphone is not working either, much like Fring. I am not sure if these services work over 3G data connections in Europe and other parts of the world, but it looks like Apple is the one putting in the roadblock here. Earlier today in response to my post about Nimbuzz, a good pal emailed to find out why the service didn’t work over the iPhone’s 3G connection. After all, a few weeks ago AT&T announced support for VoIP over 3G with much fanfare, a move that was widely applauded, including kudos from FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. A month has passed since the decision was announced, and there is still no support for VoIP over 3G. “Apple actually did not approve the 3G calling — so they completely broke their promise of allowing VoIP calls on 3G,” a Nimbuzz spokesperson said. Even Skype doesn’t work over 3G (see attached screenshot). Truphone is not working either, much like Fring. I am not sure if these services work over 3G data connections in Europe and other parts of the world, but it looks like Apple is the one putting in the roadblock here. Earlier today in response to my post about Nimbuzz, a good pal emailed to find out why the service didn’t work over the iPhone’s 3G connection. After all, a few weeks ago AT&T announced support for VoIP over 3G with much fanfare, a move that was widely applauded, including kudos from FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski. A month has passed since the decision was announced, and there is still no support for VoIP over 3G. “Apple actually did not approve the 3G calling — so they completely broke their promise of allowing VoIP calls on 3G,” a Nimbuzz spokesperson said. Even Skype doesn’t work over 3G (see attached screenshot). Truphone is not working either, much like Fring. I am not sure if these services work over 3G data connections in Europe and other parts of the world, but it looks like Apple is the one putting in the roadblock here. tag:odeo.com,2009-11-08,25423975 Sun, 08 Nov 2009 18:09:19 -0800 no GigaOM iphone, skype, VoIP, apple, Mobile, Voice, nimbuzz http://odeo.com/episodes/25421860-Mobile-Location-Is-Charting-a-Quick-Path-to-Growth Location is a core element in mobile applications and smartphones. We take our mobile devices with us everywhere we go. Their location, and the context in which we use them, changes constantly. In the next two years, location will become central to user experience and performance on hundreds of millions of handsets and applications. We most commonly think of location within traditional mobile applications. Navigation apps were the first to use it. Local search results and social-networking apps are more relevant when mapped to a person’s current location. But location can do more than simply drive people to places where they can shop, eat or meet friends. Soon, all mobile applications will need to be tied to location if they want to stay relevant. Applications that we currently do not think of as location-relevant, such as books, sports, reference, music and cooking all become more interesting when a user’s location is taken into account. Home cooks will be able to check... Location is a core element in mobile applications and smartphones. We take our mobile devices with us everywhere we go. Their location, and the context in which we use them, changes constantly. In the next two years, location will become central to user experience and performance on hundreds of millions of handsets and applications. We most commonly think of location within traditional mobile applications. Navigation apps were the first to use it. Local search results and social-networking apps are more relevant when mapped to a person’s current location. But location can do more than simply drive people to places where they can shop, eat or meet friends. Soon, all mobile applications will need to be tied to location if they want to stay relevant. Applications that we currently do not think of as location-relevant, such as books, sports, reference, music and cooking all become more interesting when a user’s location is taken into account. Home cooks will be able to check out the most popular recipes in their neighborhoods. Music lovers will see where others are listening to their favorite artists around the country. Sports fans will be able to interact with other spectators in the same stadium, and book enthusiasts will be able to search for books written about their neighborhood, or find nearby book clubs to join. Some apps are already beginning to experiment with location in unusual ways. Sportacular, a top iPhone sports app, allows users to vote for which team they predict will win an upcoming game. The votes are tallied and categorized by region and state. Three days before a recent Red Sox v. Angels baseball game, we saw that every state in the country thought the Red Sox would win except for the Angels’ home state of California. In the end, the Angels dominated, but the voting process encouraged debate and banter among users, fostering a deeper sense of community. TuneWiki takes over a mobile device’s music player and offers a more compelling user experience by displaying song lyrics and adding community features. The app also ties in location with TuneWiki music maps, which displays the songs that are currently playing around a user’s current location. The community feature lets people see what songs are popular in their area for the current hour, day, week, month or year. Over 3 billion mobile applications like Sportacular and TuneWiki will be downloaded in 2009. This market will explode to 7 billion applications in 2013 alone, The Yankee Group projects. These apps will make already-powerful mobile devices more functional, social and customizable to a person’s interests and style. Neither Sportacular nor TuneWiki need location. But serving up music and sports content within the context of location makes the information more relevant, engaging, and socially connected. Data represents location apps from the iPhone App Store, Android Market, Ovi Store, Palm App Catalog, and BlackBerry App World. The developers of these applications are driving the mobile marketplace. Some are generating millions of dollars in revenue, and are becoming hot acquisition targets. Amazon acquired Lexcycle’s Stanza, an iPhone eBook reader, in April 2009, and SnapTell, a location-based image recognition and shopping application in June. Also in April, IAC purchased Urbanspoon, a location-based restaurant search app. In July, Blackboard, an educational software provider, purchased TerriblyClever, developers of the location-based MobileEdu applications for college campuses, for $4 million. The location-based TomTom iPhone navigation app generated $4.8 million in the third quarter, Distmo estimates, while the location-aware I Am T Pain app from Smule is projected to generate $3 million alone in 2009. The applications generating real revenue and that have been targeted for acquisition are not simple, gimmicky apps. They are highly functional and take full advantage of device capability, like location, accelerometers and graphics. Millions of dollars in revenue and high-profile acquisitions are classic early signs of a lucrative tech investment sector. As these trends continue, the size of the mobile application market will continue to accelerate. Massive growth in these types of rich and context-relevant mobile applications will change the way consumers purchase and interact with mobile devices. Ultimately, the growth of mobile apps will help drive the device market. And while apps get even cooler over the next five years, mobile devices and data will get more accessible. Handset prices will fall, and hot devices like the iPhone, Palm Pre and netbooks will capture even more consumer attention. 3G networks will get more powerful; the demand for mobile data and connectivity will increase; and operator subscription fees will get more affordable worldwide. We’re seeing a shift in the market away from feature phones (voice and SMS-only) to smartphones. An estimated 63 million mobile phone users upgraded to smartphones from feature phones in 2008, from approximately 15 million upgrades in 2005. We will see massive growth of the market over the next four years with 503 million smartphones projected to ship in 2013, RBC Capital Markets projects. The netbook market will also expand — 50 million netbooks will ship in 2012 alone, Gartner projects. Consumer demand for location-aware applications will help drive the distribution boom of these devices. Developers of today’s most lucrative applications are applying location to their apps in compelling, new ways, and there’s every reason to expect this trend to continue — and to open up new revenue models in the future. Kate Imbach is the head of marketing at Skyhook Wireless and co-founder and organizer at Mobile Monday Americas. You can follow her on Twitter @Kate8. Location is a core element in mobile applications and smartphones. We take our mobile devices with us everywhere we go. Their location, and the context in which we use them, changes constantly. In the next two years, location will become central to user experience and performance on hundreds of millions of handsets and applications. We most commonly think of location within traditional mobile applications. Navigation apps were the first to use it. Local search results and social-networking apps are more relevant when mapped to a person’s current location. But location can do more than simply drive people to places where they can shop, eat or meet friends. Soon, all mobile applications will need to be tied to location if they want to stay relevant. Applications that we currently do not think of as location-relevant, such as books, sports, reference, music and cooking all become more interesting when a user’s location is taken into account. Home cooks will be able to check out the most popular recipes in their neighborhoods. Music lovers will see where others are listening to their favorite artists around the country. Sports fans will be able to interact with other spectators in the same stadium, and book enthusiasts will be able to search for books written about their neighborhood, or find nearby book clubs to join. Some apps are already beginning to experiment with location in unusual ways. Sportacular, a top iPhone sports app, allows users to vote for which team they predict will win an upcoming game. The votes are tallied and categorized by region and state. Three days before a recent Red Sox v. Angels baseball game, we saw that every state in the country thought the Red Sox would win except for the Angels’ home state of California. In the end, the Angels dominated, but the voting process encouraged debate and banter among users, fostering a deeper sense of community. TuneWiki takes over a mobile device’s music player and offers a more compelling user experience by displaying song lyrics and adding community features. The app also ties in location with TuneWiki music maps, which displays the songs that are currently playing around a user’s current location. The community feature lets people see what songs are popular in their area for the current hour, day, week, month or year. Over 3 billion mobile applications like Sportacular and TuneWiki will be downloaded in 2009. This market will explode to 7 billion applications in 2013 alone, The Yankee Group projects. These apps will make already-powerful mobile devices more functional, social and customizable to a person’s interests and style. Neither Sportacular nor TuneWiki need location. But serving up music and sports content within the context of location makes the information more relevant, engaging, and socially connected. Data represents location apps from the iPhone App Store, Android Market, Ovi Store, Palm App Catalog, and BlackBerry App World. The developers of these applications are driving the mobile marketplace. Some are generating millions of dollars in revenue, and are becoming hot acquisition targets. Amazon acquired Lexcycle’s Stanza, an iPhone eBook reader, in April 2009, and SnapTell, a location-based image recognition and shopping application in June. Also in April, IAC purchased Urbanspoon, a location-based restaurant search app. In July, Blackboard, an educational software provider, purchased TerriblyClever, developers of the location-based MobileEdu applications for college campuses, for $4 million. The location-based TomTom iPhone navigation app generated $4.8 million in the third quarter, Distmo estimates, while the location-aware I Am T Pain app from Smule is projected to generate $3 million alone in 2009. The applications generating real revenue and that have been targeted for acquisition are not simple, gimmicky apps. They are highly functional and take full advantage of device capability, like location, accelerometers and graphics. Millions of dollars in revenue and high-profile acquisitions are classic early signs of a lucrative tech investment sector. As these trends continue, the size of the mobile application market will continue to accelerate. Massive growth in these types of rich and context-relevant mobile applications will change the way consumers purchase and interact with mobile devices. Ultimately, the growth of mobile apps will help drive the device market. And while apps get even cooler over the next five years, mobile devices and data will get more accessible. Handset prices will fall, and hot devices like the iPhone, Palm Pre and netbooks will capture even more consumer attention. 3G networks will get more powerful; the demand for mobile data and connectivity will increase; and operator subscription fees will get more affordable worldwide. We’re seeing a shift in the market away from feature phones (voice and SMS-only) to smartphones. An estimated 63 million mobile phone users upgraded to smartphones from feature phones in 2008, from approximately 15 million upgrades in 2005. We will see massive growth of the market over the next four years with 503 million smartphones projected to ship in 2013, RBC Capital Markets projects. The netbook market will also expand — 50 million netbooks will ship in 2012 alone, Gartner projects. Consumer demand for location-aware applications will help drive the distribution boom of these devices. Developers of today’s most lucrative applications are applying location to their apps in compelling, new ways, and there’s every reason to expect this trend to continue — and to open up new revenue models in the future. Kate Imbach is the head of marketing at Skyhook Wireless and co-founder and organizer at Mobile Monday Americas. You can follow her on Twitter @Kate8. tag:odeo.com,2009-11-08,25421860 Sun, 08 Nov 2009 09:00:38 -0800 no GigaOM Mobile, location, navigation, Mobile Applications, Sportacular, Tunewiki http://odeo.com/episodes/25421861-Nimbuzz-Takes-on-Skype-Launches-New-Calling-Service Nimbuzz, a Netherlands based VoIP & Messaging start-up is introducing a premium calling service called NimbuzzOut. This premium calling service is available via an upgrade of their mobile client, which is currently available from the iPhone’s iTunes Apps Store, the Ovi store and GetJar. So far Nimbuzz has offered a meta-client that works on PC, Mac, Symbian, Android and the iPhone and allows you to sign-in into any IM service including Skype. NimbuzzOut is the first step towards revenues for the company that has taken in an undisclosed amount of funding from Mangrove Capital Partners, original backers of Skype. In addition to Skype, Truphone and Fring are two other competitors for this fast growing service. Nimbuzz has been adding about 40,000 users a day or about million new registrations every month and now has a total of over 10 million registered users. The company says nearly 30 percent of those registered are regular users. Nimbuzz has certainly come a long way &#821... Nimbuzz, a Netherlands based VoIP & Messaging start-up is introducing a premium calling service called NimbuzzOut. This premium calling service is available via an upgrade of their mobile client, which is currently available from the iPhone’s iTunes Apps Store, the Ovi store and GetJar. So far Nimbuzz has offered a meta-client that works on PC, Mac, Symbian, Android and the iPhone and allows you to sign-in into any IM service including Skype. NimbuzzOut is the first step towards revenues for the company that has taken in an undisclosed amount of funding from Mangrove Capital Partners, original backers of Skype. In addition to Skype, Truphone and Fring are two other competitors for this fast growing service. Nimbuzz has been adding about 40,000 users a day or about million new registrations every month and now has a total of over 10 million registered users. The company says nearly 30 percent of those registered are regular users. Nimbuzz has certainly come a long way — almost three years ago. At the time of its launch, we were pretty critical of the VoIP-on-mobile service because it was a me-too offering that was quite a pain to use. A year-and-a-half later Nimbuzz introduced a new meta client for the Symbian phones. It allowed you to sign-in to various different IM clients. In addition, it allowed some basic VoIP calling, but it wasn’t really till they introduced the new iPhone client that Nimbuzz started to see some serious traction. My previous post gives a good overview of the Nimbuzz feature set. The company just announced a super communication client for the iPhone that allows you to communicate in a many different ways. For instance, you can make free calls over Wi-Fi to your IM buddies. You can now also call folks on their landlines and mobile phones with Skype Out using any one of Nimbuzz’s 10 VoIP partners including Gizmo5, Vyke, sipgate and A1 and of course Skype. This is a new feature in the service, and makes Skype In/Out Services more valuable. These services also work over 3G and are described as “Nimbuzz Dial-Up VoIP” which essentially makes it possible to call others by dialing a local access number which then connects to anywhere in the world via Nimbuzz VoIP servers. For past month, I have been using the pre-release of NimbuzzOut on the iPhone to place calls to my far flung group of friends and family. The calling prices are pretty good– about 8 cents a minute to India, 2 cents to the US and 3 cents to the UK. If you look around, that is pretty much what you pay with most services – Skype is a tiny bit more expensive. The voice call quality is on par with Skype, which is still my communication method of choice for work-related calls. NimbuzzOut is dead simple to place calls: just hit the call button and you are good to go. You can of course use other calling services, but I don’t see any reason why you have to do it considering that Nimbuzz is offering good rates. NimbuzzOut has a few features I personally like — you can natively use the phone client to buy additional minutes. I also like the fact that the client uses the native address book and doesn’t create a duplicate contact list. The Symbian client actually lets you edit, add and delete contacts from your address book. There are a few things I don’t like about this client: if you leave the notifications on, the client will run down your battery and leave the phone pretty useless. If you are using it on an iPhone, then you have to use the WiFi connection, which makes me a tad upset because you can make Skype calls over 3G. You can make NimbuzzOut calls via 3G on the Symbian phones however. Bottomline: If you are looking for a well designed, easy to use and dead simple all-in-one messaging client that also makes cheap long distance calls, well then you don’t need to look no further than Nimbuzz. I have no qualms in recommending NimbuzzOut. PS: There is a reward for those who read the complete post. If you are among the first 50 people who send their name and Nimbuzz username to gigaom@nimbuzz.com, the company will give you a $25 NimbuzzOut credit . Update: This offer is now closed. Thanks for participating. Nimbuzz, a Netherlands based VoIP & Messaging start-up is introducing a premium calling service called NimbuzzOut. This premium calling service is available via an upgrade of their mobile client, which is currently available from the iPhone’s iTunes Apps Store, the Ovi store and GetJar. So far Nimbuzz has offered a meta-client that works on PC, Mac, Symbian, Android and the iPhone and allows you to sign-in into any IM service including Skype. NimbuzzOut is the first step towards revenues for the company that has taken in an undisclosed amount of funding from Mangrove Capital Partners, original backers of Skype. In addition to Skype, Truphone and Fring are two other competitors for this fast growing service. Nimbuzz has been adding about 40,000 users a day or about million new registrations every month and now has a total of over 10 million registered users. The company says nearly 30 percent of those registered are regular users. Nimbuzz has certainly come a long way — almost three years ago. At the time of its launch, we were pretty critical of the VoIP-on-mobile service because it was a me-too offering that was quite a pain to use. A year-and-a-half later Nimbuzz introduced a new meta client for the Symbian phones. It allowed you to sign-in to various different IM clients. In addition, it allowed some basic VoIP calling, but it wasn’t really till they introduced the new iPhone client that Nimbuzz started to see some serious traction. My previous post gives a good overview of the Nimbuzz feature set. The company just announced a super communication client for the iPhone that allows you to communicate in a many different ways. For instance, you can make free calls over Wi-Fi to your IM buddies. You can now also call folks on their landlines and mobile phones with Skype Out using any one of Nimbuzz’s 10 VoIP partners including Gizmo5, Vyke, sipgate and A1 and of course Skype. This is a new feature in the service, and makes Skype In/Out Services more valuable. These services also work over 3G and are described as “Nimbuzz Dial-Up VoIP” which essentially makes it possible to call others by dialing a local access number which then connects to anywhere in the world via Nimbuzz VoIP servers. For past month, I have been using the pre-release of NimbuzzOut on the iPhone to place calls to my far flung group of friends and family. The calling prices are pretty good– about 8 cents a minute to India, 2 cents to the US and 3 cents to the UK. If you look around, that is pretty much what you pay with most services – Skype is a tiny bit more expensive. The voice call quality is on par with Skype, which is still my communication method of choice for work-related calls. NimbuzzOut is dead simple to place calls: just hit the call button and you are good to go. You can of course use other calling services, but I don’t see any reason why you have to do it considering that Nimbuzz is offering good rates. NimbuzzOut has a few features I personally like — you can natively use the phone client to buy additional minutes. I also like the fact that the client uses the native address book and doesn’t create a duplicate contact list. The Symbian client actually lets you edit, add and delete contacts from your address book. There are a few things I don’t like about this client: if you leave the notifications on, the client will run down your battery and leave the phone pretty useless. If you are using it on an iPhone, then you have to use the WiFi connection, which makes me a tad upset because you can make Skype calls over 3G. You can make NimbuzzOut calls via 3G on the Symbian phones however. Bottomline: If you are looking for a well designed, easy to use and dead simple all-in-one messaging client that also makes cheap long distance calls, well then you don’t need to look no further than Nimbuzz. I have no qualms in recommending NimbuzzOut. PS: There is a reward for those who read the complete post. If you are among the first 50 people who send their name and Nimbuzz username to gigaom@nimbuzz.com, the company will give you a $25 NimbuzzOut credit . Update: This offer is now closed. Thanks for participating. tag:odeo.com,2009-11-08,25421861 Sun, 08 Nov 2009 06:59:48 -0800 no GigaOM skype, VoIP, Voice, truphone, Fring, nimbuzz, nimbuzzout http://odeo.com/episodes/25417605-How-Priceline-Got-Its-Mojo-Working-Again Of all the dot-com superstars that appeared in the ’90s, shone brightly and then disappeared from sight, few have been granted a second act. One exception is Priceline, which 11 years after it was founded — and 10 years after its stock price collapsed — is quietly thriving. It’s no superstar now, but it’s an interesting case study of how an online company once written off for dead can in fact age gracefully. At its peak, Priceline’s “name-your-own-price” business model created a stir. Its founder, Jay Walker, trumpeted the idea as a revolution that would upend the travel industry, and a lot of smart people bought it. George Soros and Paul Allen invested their money, and the stock surged to a $15.7 billion market cap, larger than most airlines. Forbes called Walker a “modern-day Edison,” and Priceline expanded into new markets like gasoline and groceries. The revolution was over before it began. Priceline’s stock peaked nearly a year before the Nasdaq did, and it ju... Of all the dot-com superstars that appeared in the ’90s, shone brightly and then disappeared from sight, few have been granted a second act. One exception is Priceline, which 11 years after it was founded — and 10 years after its stock price collapsed — is quietly thriving. It’s no superstar now, but it’s an interesting case study of how an online company once written off for dead can in fact age gracefully. At its peak, Priceline’s “name-your-own-price” business model created a stir. Its founder, Jay Walker, trumpeted the idea as a revolution that would upend the travel industry, and a lot of smart people bought it. George Soros and Paul Allen invested their money, and the stock surged to a $15.7 billion market cap, larger than most airlines. Forbes called Walker a “modern-day Edison,” and Priceline expanded into new markets like gasoline and groceries. The revolution was over before it began. Priceline’s stock peaked nearly a year before the Nasdaq did, and it just kept falling: By the end of 2000, its market cap had shrunk by 99 percent to $220 million. Forbes regretted its praise for Walker, admitting he “hasn’t lived up to our label,” and Walker left the company soon after. Priceline backed out of the gasoline and grocery businesses, retreating to online travel, where it faced increasing competition from Expedia, Orbitz and others. But writing off Priceline as another failed dot-com also proved premature. Its approach wasn’t revolutionary after all, but neither was it a bad idea. Somewhat ironically, it took another market crash for Priceline to begin to deliver on its promise. Its stock, which has risen 265 percent in the past year, has joined the S&P 500 — the market’s way of saying you’ve finally arrived. Its capitalization is back above $7 billion, making it larger than Expedia. In the first six months of 2009, Priceline booked $4.3 billion in travel services, an increase of 12 percent during a period when overall bookings declined by 8 percent. The company will update those numbers for the third quarter next week, and analysts are expecting bookings to grow by more than 25 percent, faster than many of Priceline’s online rivals. What changed for Priceline? Its management avoided the hype about the revolutionary potential of naming your own price. William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy did refer to it in commercials, but Priceline waited patiently for the concept to take root — the way Amazon has been patient about free shipping, or Netflix has been about streaming movies online with no extra fee. The company has also expanded piecemeal, buying up smaller companies like Bookings.com when it could, and expanding abroad. It now offers travel in 78 countries. There’s a lesson in Priceline’s riches-to-rags-to-riches story for other Web companies. A lot of people watching tech companies — especially ones like me who write about them — get all antsy about their ability to deliver on their promise. This comes up when we talk about companies like Facebook not being public yet, or Twitter looking for revenue. But often, consumers move at a much slower rate. It can take years to grow comfortable with a new business model. There is a lot to be said about moving quickly in a fast-evolving industry. But there’s just as much to be said about being patient with the people who are going to make you money. Of all the dot-com superstars that appeared in the ’90s, shone brightly and then disappeared from sight, few have been granted a second act. One exception is Priceline, which 11 years after it was founded — and 10 years after its stock price collapsed — is quietly thriving. It’s no superstar now, but it’s an interesting case study of how an online company once written off for dead can in fact age gracefully. At its peak, Priceline’s “name-your-own-price” business model created a stir. Its founder, Jay Walker, trumpeted the idea as a revolution that would upend the travel industry, and a lot of smart people bought it. George Soros and Paul Allen invested their money, and the stock surged to a $15.7 billion market cap, larger than most airlines. Forbes called Walker a “modern-day Edison,” and Priceline expanded into new markets like gasoline and groceries. The revolution was over before it began. Priceline’s stock peaked nearly a year before the Nasdaq did, and it just kept falling: By the end of 2000, its market cap had shrunk by 99 percent to $220 million. Forbes regretted its praise for Walker, admitting he “hasn’t lived up to our label,” and Walker left the company soon after. Priceline backed out of the gasoline and grocery businesses, retreating to online travel, where it faced increasing competition from Expedia, Orbitz and others. But writing off Priceline as another failed dot-com also proved premature. Its approach wasn’t revolutionary after all, but neither was it a bad idea. Somewhat ironically, it took another market crash for Priceline to begin to deliver on its promise. Its stock, which has risen 265 percent in the past year, has joined the S&P 500 — the market’s way of saying you’ve finally arrived. Its capitalization is back above $7 billion, making it larger than Expedia. In the first six months of 2009, Priceline booked $4.3 billion in travel services, an increase of 12 percent during a period when overall bookings declined by 8 percent. The company will update those numbers for the third quarter next week, and analysts are expecting bookings to grow by more than 25 percent, faster than many of Priceline’s online rivals. What changed for Priceline? Its management avoided the hype about the revolutionary potential of naming your own price. William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy did refer to it in commercials, but Priceline waited patiently for the concept to take root — the way Amazon has been patient about free shipping, or Netflix has been about streaming movies online with no extra fee. The company has also expanded piecemeal, buying up smaller companies like Bookings.com when it could, and expanding abroad. It now offers travel in 78 countries. There’s a lesson in Priceline’s riches-to-rags-to-riches story for other Web companies. A lot of people watching tech companies — especially ones like me who write about them — get all antsy about their ability to deliver on their promise. This comes up when we talk about companies like Facebook not being public yet, or Twitter looking for revenue. But often, consumers move at a much slower rate. It can take years to grow comfortable with a new business model. There is a lot to be said about moving quickly in a fast-evolving industry. But there’s just as much to be said about being patient with the people who are going to make you money. tag:odeo.com,2009-11-07,25417605 Sat, 07 Nov 2009 09:00:59 -0800 no GigaOM web, PCLN, interesting, william shatner, priceline, Expedia, dot-com bust, Expe, online travel, Jay Walker http://odeo.com/episodes/25417606-Android-This-Week-Two-Droids-Hit-Big-Red-Carrier-Channels-Debut Verizon has been all over the Android news this week, with two of the hottest phones finally arriving on the scene. The Motorola Droid, a stylish phone almost as thin as the iPhone but with a sliding QWERTY keyboard, debuted Friday. Early reviews are not finding the keyboard to be much of a bonus, but it’s amazing to find one at all in a thin handset. Verizon is also offering the HTC Droid Eris for just $99 with a contract. It’s shipping with the HTC Sense interface on top of the stock Android UI, making it the cheapest phone thus equipped. Some Droid phone reviewers have taken note of the Verizon Channel in the Android Market. This channel offers apps that have met Verizon’s approval before offering them to customers. T-Mobile announced its own channel for the Android Market this week. Both channels allow customers to buy apps and have them charged to the phone bill, eliminating the need for a credit card transaction. Meanwhile, two recently announced e-book reade... Verizon has been all over the Android news this week, with two of the hottest phones finally arriving on the scene. The Motorola Droid, a stylish phone almost as thin as the iPhone but with a sliding QWERTY keyboard, debuted Friday. Early reviews are not finding the keyboard to be much of a bonus, but it’s amazing to find one at all in a thin handset. Verizon is also offering the HTC Droid Eris for just $99 with a contract. It’s shipping with the HTC Sense interface on top of the stock Android UI, making it the cheapest phone thus equipped. Some Droid phone reviewers have taken note of the Verizon Channel in the Android Market. This channel offers apps that have met Verizon’s approval before offering them to customers. T-Mobile announced its own channel for the Android Market this week. Both channels allow customers to buy apps and have them charged to the phone bill, eliminating the need for a credit card transaction. Meanwhile, two recently announced e-book readers could have more than the Android OS in common. Spring Design this week sued Barnes & Noble over the Nook reader, claiming it has features the bookseller gleaned from information Spring Design shared with B&N under NDA. It has requested an injunction to prevent the Nook from being sold. Verizon has been all over the Android news this week, with two of the hottest phones finally arriving on the scene. The Motorola Droid, a stylish phone almost as thin as the iPhone but with a sliding QWERTY keyboard, debuted Friday. Early reviews are not finding the keyboard to be much of a bonus, but it’s amazing to find one at all in a thin handset. Verizon is also offering the HTC Droid Eris for just $99 with a contract. It’s shipping with the HTC Sense interface on top of the stock Android UI, making it the cheapest phone thus equipped. Some Droid phone reviewers have taken note of the Verizon Channel in the Android Market. This channel offers apps that have met Verizon’s approval before offering them to customers. T-Mobile announced its own channel for the Android Market this week. Both channels allow customers to buy apps and have them charged to the phone bill, eliminating the need for a credit card transaction. Meanwhile, two recently announced e-book readers could have more than the Android OS in common. Spring Design this week sued Barnes & Noble over the Nook reader, claiming it has features the bookseller gleaned from information Spring Design shared with B&N under NDA. It has requested an injunction to prevent the Nook from being sold. tag:odeo.com,2009-11-07,25417606 Sat, 07 Nov 2009 06:00:28 -0800 no GigaOM android, verizon, Mobile, t-mobile, eris, droid, Android This Week, Spring Design, Verizon Channel, B&N http://odeo.com/episodes/25414872-Free-Conferencing-CEO-Asks-FCC-to-Keep-on-Google-Voice Even though less than 1 percent of the population uses Google Voice, David Erickson, president of the Free Conferencing Corp., a conference call company whose numbers are blocked by the service, is pretty aggrieved. So he met with the FCC and filed a letter urging the regulatory agency to get Google to play fair. He also offered to help Google find lower rates for its rural call termination fees. “Google shouldn’t be able to tell consumers where they can call and where they can’t,”  he said in an interview with The Hill, a trade publication. Actually, I’m with him on this issue. Erickson’s company may be taking advantage of a legal loophole that the telecommunications companies and now Google want closed, but it’s not clearly illegal (although the loophole is closing). And by providing voice service for customers even as an “Internet application” Google’s decision to limit certain aspects of the service because of the costs might be re... Even though less than 1 percent of the population uses Google Voice, David Erickson, president of the Free Conferencing Corp., a conference call company whose numbers are blocked by the service, is pretty aggrieved. So he met with the FCC and filed a letter urging the regulatory agency to get Google to play fair. He also offered to help Google find lower rates for its rural call termination fees. “Google shouldn’t be able to tell consumers where they can call and where they can’t,”  he said in an interview with The Hill, a trade publication. Actually, I’m with him on this issue. Erickson’s company may be taking advantage of a legal loophole that the telecommunications companies and now Google want closed, but it’s not clearly illegal (although the loophole is closing). And by providing voice service for customers even as an “Internet application” Google’s decision to limit certain aspects of the service because of the costs might be reasonable for a restaurant owner running a buffet, but is less so for someone providing a telecommunications service. Such so-called traffic pumping is an issue the FCC has known about for a while, so clearly companies like Erickson’s, which appear to be benefiting from an arbitrage play that boosts costs for carriers that have to terminate calls on higher-cost rural lines, haven’t been morally repugnant enough to get the FCC or Congress to take definitive action to stop them. Erickson doesn’t think the FCC should step in at all on the issue of overhauling the pricing schemes that result in higher termination costs on rural lines (and generates sales at his company), he says in a letter filed this week with the FCC, but he does request more scrutiny over Google Voice. He’s lost me at this point. If you’re gonna run to a regulator to force someone to play your game, you can’t get upset when the regulator wants to make sure the rules by which you play that game are fair. Even though less than 1 percent of the population uses Google Voice, David Erickson, president of the Free Conferencing Corp., a conference call company whose numbers are blocked by the service, is pretty aggrieved. So he met with the FCC and filed a letter urging the regulatory agency to get Google to play fair. He also offered to help Google find lower rates for its rural call termination fees. “Google shouldn’t be able to tell consumers where they can call and where they can’t,”  he said in an interview with The Hill, a trade publication. Actually, I’m with him on this issue. Erickson’s company may be taking advantage of a legal loophole that the telecommunications companies and now Google want closed, but it’s not clearly illegal (although the loophole is closing). And by providing voice service for customers even as an “Internet application” Google’s decision to limit certain aspects of the service because of the costs might be reasonable for a restaurant owner running a buffet, but is less so for someone providing a telecommunications service. Such so-called traffic pumping is an issue the FCC has known about for a while, so clearly companies like Erickson’s, which appear to be benefiting from an arbitrage play that boosts costs for carriers that have to terminate calls on higher-cost rural lines, haven’t been morally repugnant enough to get the FCC or Congress to take definitive action to stop them. Erickson doesn’t think the FCC should step in at all on the issue of overhauling the pricing schemes that result in higher termination costs on rural lines (and generates sales at his company), he says in a letter filed this week with the FCC, but he does request more scrutiny over Google Voice. He’s lost me at this point. If you’re gonna run to a regulator to force someone to play your game, you can’t get upset when the regulator wants to make sure the rules by which you play that game are fair. tag:odeo.com,2009-11-06,25414872 Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:05:34 -0800 no GigaOM GOOG, google, Broadband, Voice, AT&T. T, free Confeerence Corp. http://odeo.com/episodes/25414873-Thanks-to-Our-GigaOM-Sponsors We’d like to say thanks to this week’s GigaOM sponsors: PEER 1: Fully Scalable Hosting Solutions Concentric: Hosted IT Services Mozy: Simple, Automatic, Secure Online Backup SoftLayer: SoftLayer delivers on-demand virtual data center services and solutions. Salesforce: Force.com Cloud Platform PayPal: Innovate 09 – The Intersection of Ideas and Money We’d like to say thanks to this week’s GigaOM sponsors: PEER 1: Fully Scalable Hosting Solutions Concentric: Hosted IT Services Mozy: Simple, Automatic, Secure Online Backup SoftLayer: SoftLayer delivers on-demand virtual data center services and solutions. Salesforce: Force.com Cloud Platform PayPal: Innovate 09 – The Intersection of Ideas and Money We’d like to say thanks to this week’s GigaOM sponsors: PEER 1: Fully Scalable Hosting Solutions Concentric: Hosted IT Services Mozy: Simple, Automatic, Secure Online Backup SoftLayer: SoftLayer delivers on-demand virtual data center services and solutions. Salesforce: Force.com Cloud Platform PayPal: Innovate 09 – The Intersection of Ideas and Money tag:odeo.com,2009-11-06,25414873 Fri, 06 Nov 2009 17:00:56 -0800 no GigaOM sponsorthanks, @Not for Syndication http://odeo.com/episodes/25414441-11-Top-Open-source-Resources-for-Cloud-Computing Open-source software has been on the rise at many businesses during the extended economic downturn, and one of the areas where it is starting to offer companies a lot of flexibility and cost savings is in cloud computing. Cloud deployments can save money, free businesses from vendor lock-ins that could really sting over time, and offer flexible ways to combine public and private applications. The following are 11 top open-source cloud applications, services, educational resources, support options, general items of interest, and more. Eucalyptus . Ostatic broke the news about UC Santa Barbara’s open-source cloud project last year. Released as an open-source (under a FreeBSD-style license) infrastructure for cloud computing on clusters that duplicates the functionality of Amazon’s EC2, Eucalyptus directly uses the Amazon command-line tools. Startup Eucalyptus Systems was launched this year with venture funding, and the staff includes original architects from the Eucalyptus... Open-source software has been on the rise at many businesses during the extended economic downturn, and one of the areas where it is starting to offer companies a lot of flexibility and cost savings is in cloud computing. Cloud deployments can save money, free businesses from vendor lock-ins that could really sting over time, and offer flexible ways to combine public and private applications. The following are 11 top open-source cloud applications, services, educational resources, support options, general items of interest, and more. Eucalyptus . Ostatic broke the news about UC Santa Barbara’s open-source cloud project last year. Released as an open-source (under a FreeBSD-style license) infrastructure for cloud computing on clusters that duplicates the functionality of Amazon’s EC2, Eucalyptus directly uses the Amazon command-line tools. Startup Eucalyptus Systems was launched this year with venture funding, and the staff includes original architects from the Eucalyptus project. The company recently released its first major update to the software framework, which is also powering the cloud computing features in the new version of Ubuntu Linux. Red Hat’s Cloud. Linux-focused open-source player Red Hat has been rapidly expanding its focus on cloud computing. At the end of July, Red Hat held its Open Source Cloud Computing Forum, which included a large number of presentations from movers and shakers focused on open-source cloud initiatives. You can find free webcasts for all the presentations here. The speakers include Rich Wolski (CTO of Eucalyptus Systems), Brian Stevens (CTO of Red Hat), and Mike Olson (CEO of Cloudera). Stevens’ webcast can bring you up to speed on Red Hat’s cloud strategy. Novell is also an open source-focused company that is increasingly focused on cloud computing, and you can read about its strategy here. Traffic Server. Yahoo this week moved its open-source cloud computing initiatives up a notch with the donation of its Traffic Server product to the Apache Software Foundation. Traffic Server is used in-house at Yahoo to manage its own traffic, and it enables session management, authentication, configuration management, load balancing, and routing for entire cloud computing software stacks. Acting as an overlay to raw cloud computing services, Traffic Server allows IT administrators to allocate resources, including handling thousands of virtualized services concurrently. Cloudera. The open-source Hadoop software framework is increasingly used in cloud computing deployments due to its flexibility with cluster-based, data-intensive queries and other tasks. It’s overseen by the Apache Software Foundation, and Yahoo has its own time-tested Hadoop distribution. Cloudera is a promising startup focused on providing commercial support for Hadoop. You can read much more about Cloudera here. Puppet. Virtual servers are on the rise in cloud computing deployments, and Reductive Labs’ open-source software, built upon the legacy of the Cfengine system, is hugely respected by many system administrators for managing them. You can use it to manage large numbers of systems or virtual machines through automated routines, without having to do a lot of complex scripting. Enomaly. The company’s Elastic Computing Platform (ECP) has its roots in widely used Enomalism open-source provisioning and management software, designed to take much of the complexity out of starting a cloud infrastructure. ECP is a programmable virtual cloud computing infrastructure for small, medium and large businesses, and you can read much more about it here. Joyent . In January of this year, Joyent purchased Reasonably Smart, a fledgling open-source cloud startup based on JavaScript and Git. Joyent’s cloud hosting infrastructure and cloud management software incorporate many open-source tools for public and private clouds.  The company can also help you optimize a speedy implementation of the open-source MySQL database for cloud use. Zoho . Many people use Zoho’s huge suite of free, online applications, which is competitive with Google Docs. What lots of folks don’t realize, though, is that Zoho’s core is completely open source — a shining example of how SaaS solutions can work in harmony with open source. You can find many details on how Zoho deploys open-source tools in this interview. Globus Nimbus . This open-source toolkit allows businesses to turn clusters into Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds. The Amazon EC2 interface is carried over, but is not the only interface you can choose. Reservoir . This is the main European research initiative on virtualized infrastructures and cloud computing. It’s a far-reaching project targeted to develop open-source technology for cloud computing, and help businesses avoid vendor lock-in. OpenNebula . The OpenNebula VM Manager is a core component of Reservoir. It’s an open-source answer to the many virtual machine management offerings from proprietary players, and interfaces easily with cloud infrastructure tools and services. “OpenNebula is an open-source virtual infrastructure engine that enables the dynamic deployment and re-placement of virtual machines on a pool of physical resources,” according to project leads. It’s good to see open-source tools and resources competing in the cloud computing space. The end result should be more flexibility for organizations that want to customize their approaches. Open-source cloud offerings also have the potential to keep pricing for all competitive services on a level playing field. Open-source software has been on the rise at many businesses during the extended economic downturn, and one of the areas where it is starting to offer companies a lot of flexibility and cost savings is in cloud computing. Cloud deployments can save money, free businesses from vendor lock-ins that could really sting over time, and offer flexible ways to combine public and private applications. The following are 11 top open-source cloud applications, services, educational resources, support options, general items of interest, and more. Eucalyptus . Ostatic broke the news about UC Santa Barbara’s open-source cloud project last year. Released as an open-source (under a FreeBSD-style license) infrastructure for cloud computing on clusters that duplicates the functionality of Amazon’s EC2, Eucalyptus directly uses the Amazon command-line tools. Startup Eucalyptus Systems was launched this year with venture funding, and the staff includes original architects from the Eucalyptus project. The company recently released its first major update to the software framework, which is also powering the cloud computing features in the new version of Ubuntu Linux. Red Hat’s Cloud. Linux-focused open-source player Red Hat has been rapidly expanding its focus on cloud computing. At the end of July, Red Hat held its Open Source Cloud Computing Forum, which included a large number of presentations from movers and shakers focused on open-source cloud initiatives. You can find free webcasts for all the presentations here. The speakers include Rich Wolski (CTO of Eucalyptus Systems), Brian Stevens (CTO of Red Hat), and Mike Olson (CEO of Cloudera). Stevens’ webcast can bring you up to speed on Red Hat’s cloud strategy. Novell is also an open source-focused company that is increasingly focused on cloud computing, and you can read about its strategy here. Traffic Server. Yahoo this week moved its open-source cloud computing initiatives up a notch with the donation of its Traffic Server product to the Apache Software Foundation. Traffic Server is used in-house at Yahoo to manage its own traffic, and it enables session management, authentication, configuration management, load balancing, and routing for entire cloud computing software stacks. Acting as an overlay to raw cloud computing services, Traffic Server allows IT administrators to allocate resources, including handling thousands of virtualized services concurrently. Cloudera. The open-source Hadoop software framework is increasingly used in cloud computing deployments due to its flexibility with cluster-based, data-intensive queries and other tasks. It’s overseen by the Apache Software Foundation, and Yahoo has its own time-tested Hadoop distribution. Cloudera is a promising startup focused on providing commercial support for Hadoop. You can read much more about Cloudera here. Puppet. Virtual servers are on the rise in cloud computing deployments, and Reductive Labs’ open-source software, built upon the legacy of the Cfengine system, is hugely respected by many system administrators for managing them. You can use it to manage large numbers of systems or virtual machines through automated routines, without having to do a lot of complex scripting. Enomaly. The company’s Elastic Computing Platform (ECP) has its roots in widely used Enomalism open-source provisioning and management software, designed to take much of the complexity out of starting a cloud infrastructure. ECP is a programmable virtual cloud computing infrastructure for small, medium and large businesses, and you can read much more about it here. Joyent . In January of this year, Joyent purchased Reasonably Smart, a fledgling open-source cloud startup based on JavaScript and Git. Joyent’s cloud hosting infrastructure and cloud management software incorporate many open-source tools for public and private clouds.  The company can also help you optimize a speedy implementation of the open-source MySQL database for cloud use. Zoho . Many people use Zoho’s huge suite of free, online applications, which is competitive with Google Docs. What lots of folks don’t realize, though, is that Zoho’s core is completely open source — a shining example of how SaaS solutions can work in harmony with open source. You can find many details on how Zoho deploys open-source tools in this interview. Globus Nimbus . This open-source toolkit allows businesses to turn clusters into Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) clouds. The Amazon EC2 interface is carried over, but is not the only interface you can choose. Reservoir . This is the main European research initiative on virtualized infrastructures and cloud computing. It’s a far-reaching project targeted to develop open-source technology for cloud computing, and help businesses avoid vendor lock-in. OpenNebula . The OpenNebula VM Manager is a core component of Reservoir. It’s an open-source answer to the many virtual machine management offerings from proprietary players, and interfaces easily with cloud infrastructure tools and services. “OpenNebula is an open-source virtual infrastructure engine that enables the dynamic deployment and re-placement of virtual machines on a pool of physical resources,” according to project leads. It’s good to see open-source tools and resources competing in the cloud computing space. The end result should be more flexibility for organizations that want to customize their approaches. Open-source cloud offerings also have the potential to keep pricing for all competitive services on a level playing field. tag:odeo.com,2009-11-06,25414441 Fri, 06 Nov 2009 13:00:39 -0800 no GigaOM Open Source, infrastructure, puppet, Cloud Computing, ecp, zoho, Enomaly, Red Hat, reservoir, Joyent, Cloudera, Open Nebula, Globus Nimbus, Eucalyptus Systems http://odeo.com/episodes/25414443-Rich-Carriers-Got-Richer-in-Q3 The rich mobile carriers got a little richer in the third quarter, as the nation’s top two operators increased their leads over the rest of the field. Verizon Wireless added a million subscribers and posted revenue of $15.8 billion, up 24.4 percent year-over-year, while AT&T reported 2 million net adds — thanks largely to the iPhone — and $13.65 in revenue, up 8 percent over the year-ago period. Meanwhile, the increasingly heated prepaid space took its toll on Leap Wireless and MetroPCS, as both service providers saw customer growth slide in the third quarter.  Leap Wireless: Reported Nov. 5 Wireless Service Revenue: $541.3 million Wireless Operating Income: N/A Wireless Data Revenue: N/A Net Prepaid Subscriber Adds: 102,000 Total Subscribers: 4.5 million Prepaid Churn: 5.4 percent Prepaid APRU: $39.60 Metro PCS: Reported Nov. 5 Wireless Revenue: $896 million Wireless Operating Income: $158 million Wireless Data Revenue: N/A Net Prepaid Subscriber Adds: 66,157 ... The rich mobile carriers got a little richer in the third quarter, as the nation’s top two operators increased their leads over the rest of the field. Verizon Wireless added a million subscribers and posted revenue of $15.8 billion, up 24.4 percent year-over-year, while AT&T reported 2 million net adds — thanks largely to the iPhone — and $13.65 in revenue, up 8 percent over the year-ago period. Meanwhile, the increasingly heated prepaid space took its toll on Leap Wireless and MetroPCS, as both service providers saw customer growth slide in the third quarter.  Leap Wireless: Reported Nov. 5 Wireless Service Revenue: $541.3 million Wireless Operating Income: N/A Wireless Data Revenue: N/A Net Prepaid Subscriber Adds: 102,000 Total Subscribers: 4.5 million Prepaid Churn: 5.4 percent Prepaid APRU: $39.60 Metro PCS: Reported Nov. 5 Wireless Revenue: $896 million Wireless Operating Income: $158 million Wireless Data Revenue: N/A Net Prepaid Subscriber Adds: 66,157 Total Subscribers: 6.3 million Prepaid Churn: 5.8 percent Prepaid APRU: $41.08 T-Mobile: Reported Nov. 5 Wireless Revenue: $5.38 billion Wireless Net Income: $417 million Wireless Data Revenue: N/A Net Prepaid Subscriber Adds: 63,000 Total Subscribers: 33.4 million Blended Churn: 3.4 percent Postpaid APRU: $52 Sprint: Reported Oct. 29 Wireless Revenue: $6.9 billion Wireless Operating Loss: $448 million Wireless Data Revenue: N/A Net Prepaid Subscriber Adds: 666,000 Net Postpaid Subscriber Loss: 801,000 Total Subscribers: 48.3 million Churn: Postpaid 2.17 percent, prepaid 6.65 percent APRU: Postpaid $56, prepaid $35 Verizon: Reported Oct. 26 Wireless Revenue: $15.8 billion Wireless Operating Income: $4.47 billion Wireless Data Revenue: $4.1 billion Net Prepaid and Postpaid Subscriber Adds: 1 million Total Subscribers: 89 million Churn: Postpaid 1.13 percent APRU: Postpaid $51.04 AT&T: Reported Oct. 22 Wireless Revenue: $13.65 billion Wireless Operating Income: $3.4 billion Wireless Data Revenue: $3.6 billion Net Prepaid Subscriber Adds: 641,000 Net Postpaid Subscriber Adds: 1.4 million Total Subscribers: 81.6 million Blended Churn: 1.43 percent APRU: Postpaid $61.23 The rich mobile carriers got a little richer in the third quarter, as the nation’s top two operators increased their leads over the rest of the field. Verizon Wireless added a million subscribers and posted revenue of $15.8 billion, up 24.4 percent year-over-year, while AT&T reported 2 million net adds — thanks largely to the iPhone — and $13.65 in revenue, up 8 percent over the year-ago period. Meanwhile, the increasingly heated prepaid space took its toll on Leap Wireless and MetroPCS, as both service providers saw customer growth slide in the third quarter.  Leap Wireless: Reported Nov. 5 Wireless Service Revenue: $541.3 million Wireless Operating Income: N/A Wireless Data Revenue: N/A Net Prepaid Subscriber Adds: 102,000 Total Subscribers: 4.5 million Prepaid Churn: 5.4 percent Prepaid APRU: $39.60 Metro PCS: Reported Nov. 5 Wireless Revenue: $896 million Wireless Operating Income: $158 million Wireless Data Revenue: N/A Net Prepaid Subscriber Adds: 66,157 Total Subscribers: 6.3 million Prepaid Churn: 5.8 percent Prepaid APRU: $41.08 T-Mobile: Reported Nov. 5 Wireless Revenue: $5.38 billion Wireless Net Income: $417 million Wireless Data Revenue: N/A Net Prepaid Subscriber Adds: 63,000 Total Subscribers: 33.4 million Blended Churn: 3.4 percent Postpaid APRU: $52 Sprint: Reported Oct. 29 Wireless Revenue: $6.9 billion Wireless Operating Loss: $448 million Wireless Data Revenue: N/A Net Prepaid Subscriber Adds: 666,000 Net Postpaid Subscriber Loss: 801,000 Total Subscribers: 48.3 million Churn: Postpaid 2.17 percent, prepaid 6.65 percent APRU: Postpaid $56, prepaid $35 Verizon: Reported Oct. 26 Wireless Revenue: $15.8 billion Wireless Operating Income: $4.47 billion Wireless Data Revenue: $4.1 billion Net Prepaid and Postpaid Subscriber Adds: 1 million Total Subscribers: 89 million Churn: Postpaid 1.13 percent APRU: Postpaid $51.04 AT&T: Reported Oct. 22 Wireless Revenue: $13.65 billion Wireless Operating Income: $3.4 billion Wireless Data Revenue: $3.6 billion Net Prepaid Subscriber Adds: 641,000 Net Postpaid Subscriber Adds: 1.4 million Total Subscribers: 81.6 million Blended Churn: 1.43 percent APRU: Postpaid $61.23 tag:odeo.com,2009-11-06,25414443 Fri, 06 Nov 2009 12:30:13 -0800 no GigaOM sprint, Mobile, verizon wireless, earnings, at&t, Leap Wireless, MetroPCS, mobile carriers http://odeo.com/episodes/25412656-Vint-Cerf-Plugs-His-Plucky-Space-Web-Protocol-Into-Android Google evangelist Vint Cerf, who many people think of as one of the fathers of the Internet, has his eyes on some interesting Earth-based applications that can work with his long-standing interplanetary extensions of the Net. He announced at the Open Mobile Summit this morning a software stack that sits on top of the open-source Android operating system that could strengthen wireless network communications through his DTN (Delay Tolerant Netorking) Interplanetary Net protocol. Cerf has been working with NASA since 1998 to develop DTN as a way to overcome limitations in the TCP/IP protocol when fast, one-to-one communications aren’t possible, especially over long distances. NASA has already show DTN to be effective for communications between Earth-based networks and outposts in deep space.  Can the protocol greatly increase the coverage and service reliability of our mobile networks and devices? The protocol uses a store-and-forward, rather than a continuous communication model... Google evangelist Vint Cerf, who many people think of as one of the fathers of the Internet, has his eyes on some interesting Earth-based applications that can work with his long-standing interplanetary extensions of the Net. He announced at the Open Mobile Summit this morning a software stack that sits on top of the open-source Android operating system that could strengthen wireless network communications through his DTN (Delay Tolerant Netorking) Interplanetary Net protocol. Cerf has been working with NASA since 1998 to develop DTN as a way to overcome limitations in the TCP/IP protocol when fast, one-to-one communications aren’t possible, especially over long distances. NASA has already show DTN to be effective for communications between Earth-based networks and outposts in deep space.  Can the protocol greatly increase the coverage and service reliability of our mobile networks and devices? The protocol uses a store-and-forward, rather than a continuous communication model, to reliably communicate packets back-and-forth over long distances, as explained in this NASA note on its successes with DTN: Unlike TCP/IP on Earth, the DTN does not assume a continuous end-to-end connection. In its design, if a destination path cannot be found, the data packets are not discarded. Instead, each network node keeps the information as long as necessary until it can communicate safely with another node. This store-and-forward method, similar to basketball players safely passing the ball to the player nearest the basket means information does not get lost when no immediate path to the destination exists. Eventually, the information is delivered to the end user. DTN is also slated for many applications involving communications between Earth-based networks and satellites, and even long-distance underwater communications tasks. Cerf also has his eyes squarely on high-reliability DTN deployments for use with Earth-based wireless networks, as The Register’s Cade Metz reports: “Mobile operations are highly stressed,” Cerf said. “Mobiles are used where people congregate…In a sense, mobile is already a dense and hostile environment. We all know that when you drive around, coverage isn’t very good. It’s so hostile, it’s clear that mobile could take advantage of these more-resilient protocols. TCP/IP is very brittle.” Cerf’s work on DTN has been space-focused for many years, but, just as the Android operating system is open source and forking into many new types of deployments, DTN is moving beyond Cerf’s initial intent for it. Given its roots in space applications, doesn’t an operating system dubbed Android have the perfect name for it? Google evangelist Vint Cerf, who many people think of as one of the fathers of the Internet, has his eyes on some interesting Earth-based applications that can work with his long-standing interplanetary extensions of the Net. He announced at the Open Mobile Summit this morning a software stack that sits on top of the open-source Android operating system that could strengthen wireless network communications through his DTN (Delay Tolerant Netorking) Interplanetary Net protocol. Cerf has been working with NASA since 1998 to develop DTN as a way to overcome limitations in the TCP/IP protocol when fast, one-to-one communications aren’t possible, especially over long distances. NASA has already show DTN to be effective for communications between Earth-based networks and outposts in deep space.  Can the protocol greatly increase the coverage and service reliability of our mobile networks and devices? The protocol uses a store-and-forward, rather than a continuous communication model, to reliably communicate packets back-and-forth over long distances, as explained in this NASA note on its successes with DTN: Unlike TCP/IP on Earth, the DTN does not assume a continuous end-to-end connection. In its design, if a destination path cannot be found, the data packets are not discarded. Instead, each network node keeps the information as long as necessary until it can communicate safely with another node. This store-and-forward method, similar to basketball players safely passing the ball to the player nearest the basket means information does not get lost when no immediate path to the destination exists. Eventually, the information is delivered to the end user. DTN is also slated for many applications involving communications between Earth-based networks and satellites, and even long-distance underwater communications tasks. Cerf also has his eyes squarely on high-reliability DTN deployments for use with Earth-based wireless networks, as The Register’s Cade Metz reports: “Mobile operations are highly stressed,” Cerf said. “Mobiles are used where people congregate…In a sense, mobile is already a dense and hostile environment. We all know that when you drive around, coverage isn’t very good. It’s so hostile, it’s clear that mobile could take advantage of these more-resilient protocols. TCP/IP is very brittle.” Cerf’s work on DTN has been space-focused for many years, but, just as the Android operating system is open source and forking into many new types of deployments, DTN is moving beyond Cerf’s initial intent for it. Given its roots in space applications, doesn’t an operating system dubbed Android have the perfect name for it? tag:odeo.com,2009-11-06,25412656 Fri, 06 Nov 2009 10:13:54 -0800 no GigaOM News, android, Space, Vint Cerf, mobile phones, DTN http://odeo.com/episodes/25412657-My-Thoughts-on-the-Skype-Settlement-Winners-Losers-Scorecard The final results are in: eBay and private investors led by Silver Lake Partners have struck a deal with Skype founders and JoltID, the technology company controlled by Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis. They are also transferring the ownership of intellectual property needed to make sure that Skype works as an Internet telephony service. More than 500 million Skype subscribers can breathe a sigh of relief. Skype founders will be making an investment in the new entity and will get a 14 percent stake in the company. The deal is likely to close in the fourth quarter. Those are the facts. Below the fold you can read my winner-and-loser scorecard on this deal. Found Money: Zennström and Friis are the real winners here. For a few hundred thousand in legal bills, they have not only managed to wipe out an investor competitor, they have shifted the focus away from the ignominious failure that was Joost. They have turned their ownership of a P2P technology into yet another payd... The final results are in: eBay and private investors led by Silver Lake Partners have struck a deal with Skype founders and JoltID, the technology company controlled by Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis. They are also transferring the ownership of intellectual property needed to make sure that Skype works as an Internet telephony service. More than 500 million Skype subscribers can breathe a sigh of relief. Skype founders will be making an investment in the new entity and will get a 14 percent stake in the company. The deal is likely to close in the fourth quarter. Those are the facts. Below the fold you can read my winner-and-loser scorecard on this deal. Found Money: Zennström and Friis are the real winners here. For a few hundred thousand in legal bills, they have not only managed to wipe out an investor competitor, they have shifted the focus away from the ignominious failure that was Joost. They have turned their ownership of a P2P technology into yet another payday and, most importantly, they are now sitting in the catbird seat to reap the rewards of Skype again. Verdict: Winners Double Dipped: In order to get the deal done, both the investors and eBay took a hair cut. Investors now control 56 percent of the Skype while eBay’s stake is down 5 percent to 30 percent of the new Skype. There is a lot of spin in the press release issued by Skype, but the fact remains as I pointed out on the day this deal was announced, Zennström and Friis had them by the curlies. It was clear that this deal wasn’t going to get done without their blessing. “Skype will be well positioned to move forward under new owners with ownership and control over its core technology,” said eBay President and CEO John Donahoe. “At the same time, eBay continues to retain a significant stake in Skype and will benefit from its continued growth. We look forward to closing the deal and focusing on growing our core e-commerce and payments businesses.” Poor John is stuck being the mop-up man. eBay, thanks to the stellar work of its previous management team including Meg Whitman, currently running for governor of California, is paying twice for its mistakes. If my previous employer, Business 2.0, was still publishing the 101 Dumbest Things list, I would make eBay’s original Skype deal as the No. 1 dumbest thing…ever! Verdict: Losers. Index-ed to Nothing: Now let’s look at this great spin quote: The investor group will no longer include Index Ventures, which has withdrawn from participation. Commenting on its decision to withdraw, Danny Rimer of Index Ventures, said: “We are pleased that Skype will now be able to put litigation behind it, and we wish Josh Silverman, his team and the Skype investors well in continuing to grow a great business. Although Skype has the potential to be a great investment, the deal terms changed for Index such that it no longer matches our investment criteria and thus we have decided not to participate in the transaction.” Index Ventures and Mike Volpi were the architects of the deal from day one, and so no, they didn’t opt out of the agreement. No one opts out of a deal for which they are happy to bend a few rules. What it means is that they were hustled out, and that tells me two things: This was way, way personal. I have heard it from my sources that there is no love lost between the various entities involved and the lawsuits just brought the hostilities out in the open. Verdict: Losers Making a Marc: Earlier this morning I spoke with Marc Andreeseen of Andreessen Horowitz and asked him about the deal. “We wouldn’t go through this for just a company, but this is Skype, so from our standpoint it was worth going through,” he said. He pointed out that his firm is all about founders and “we like founders being part of the company.” He added that there is “no emotional baggage and we didn’t take this personally.” This was a high-profile deal for a new fund. Given that Andreessen Horowitz bet so much of their fund’s total money on this deal ($60$50 million of $300 million), any successful conclusion is a win. Verdict: Winners Silver Lake Partners: The rest of the investors can breathe easy that this got through. Those personal emails didn’t make pretty reading. The fact that they don’t have to deal with Volpi and Index might be a blessing in disguise. Verdict: Winners Canada Pension Plan Investment Board: Are they still there…oh cool! Verdict: Meh! No Silver Lining?: One person who I totally feel for is Silverman, the current CEO of Skype. He gets to run a company which will have the looming presence of its founders. Whatever the press spin might say, the new investor group is like a poisoned well. It will be a polarized group, always looking over their shoulders. Silverman is going to need to keep a lot of people happy, and those board meetings with nearly two-dozen people aren’t going to be fun, either. But as Biggie Small once said: “It’s like the more money we come across, the more problems we see.” The final results are in: eBay and private investors led by Silver Lake Partners have struck a deal with Skype founders and JoltID, the technology company controlled by Skype founders Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis. They are also transferring the ownership of intellectual property needed to make sure that Skype works as an Internet telephony service. More than 500 million Skype subscribers can breathe a sigh of relief. Skype founders will be making an investment in the new entity and will get a 14 percent stake in the company. The deal is likely to close in the fourth quarter. Those are the facts. Below the fold you can read my winner-and-loser scorecard on this deal. Found Money: Zennström and Friis are the real winners here. For a few hundred thousand in legal bills, they have not only managed to wipe out an investor competitor, they have shifted the focus away from the ignominious failure that was Joost. They have turned their ownership of a P2P technology into yet another payday and, most importantly, they are now sitting in the catbird seat to reap the rewards of Skype again. Verdict: Winners Double Dipped: In order to get the deal done, both the investors and eBay took a hair cut. Investors now control 56 percent of the Skype while eBay’s stake is down 5 percent to 30 percent of the new Skype. There is a lot of spin in the press release issued by Skype, but the fact remains as I pointed out on the day this deal was announced, Zennström and Friis had them by the curlies. It was clear that this deal wasn’t going to get done without their blessing. “Skype will be well positioned to move forward under new owners with ownership and control over its core technology,” said eBay President and CEO John Donahoe. “At the same time, eBay continues to retain a significant stake in Skype and will benefit from its continued growth. We look forward to closing the deal and focusing on growing our core e-commerce and payments businesses.” Poor John is stuck being the mop-up man. eBay, thanks to the stellar work of its previous management team including Meg Whitman, currently running for governor of California, is paying twice for its mistakes. If my previous employer, Business 2.0, was still publishing the 101 Dumbest Things list, I would make eBay’s original Skype deal as the No. 1 dumbest thing…ever! Verdict: Losers. Index-ed to Nothing: Now let’s look at this great spin quote: The investor group will no longer include Index Ventures, which has withdrawn from participation. Commenting on its decision to withdraw, Danny Rimer of Index Ventures, said: “We are pleased that Skype will now be able to put litigation behind it, and we wish Josh Silverman, his team and the Skype investors well in continuing to grow a great business. Although Skype has the potential to be a great investment, the deal terms changed for Index such that it no longer matches our investment criteria and thus we have decided not to participate in the transaction.” Index Ventures and Mike Volpi were the architects of the deal from day one, and so no, they didn’t opt out of the agreement. No one opts out of a deal for which they are happy to bend a few rules. What it means is that they were hustled out, and that tells me two things: This was way, way personal. I have heard it from my sources that there is no love lost between the various entities involved and the lawsuits just brought the hostilities out in the open. Verdict: Losers Making a Marc: Earlier this morning I spoke with Marc Andreeseen of Andreessen Horowitz and asked him about the deal. “We wouldn’t go through this for just a company, but this is Skype, so from our standpoint it was worth going through,” he said. He pointed out that his firm is all about founders and “we like founders being part of the company.” He added that there is “no emotional baggage and we didn’t take this personally.” This was a high-profile deal for a new fund. Given that Andreessen Horowitz bet so much of their fund’s total money on this deal ($60$50 million of $300 million), any successful conclusion is a win. Verdict: Winners Silver Lake Partners: The rest of the investors can breathe easy that this got through. Those personal emails didn’t make pretty reading. The fact that they don’t have to deal with Volpi and Index might be a blessing in disguise. Verdict: Winners Canada Pension Plan Investment Board: Are they still there…oh cool! Verdict: Meh! No Silver Lining?: One person who I totally feel for is Silverman, the current CEO of Skype. He gets to run a company which will have the looming presence of its founders. Whatever the press spin might say, the new investor group is like a poisoned well. It will be a polarized group, always looking over their shoulders. Silverman is going to need to keep a lot of people happy, and those board meetings with nearly two-dozen people aren’t going to be fun, either. But as Biggie Small once said: “It’s like the more money we come across, the more problems we see.” tag:odeo.com,2009-11-06,25412657 Fri, 06 Nov 2009 08:05:21 -0800 no GigaOM skype, Voice http://odeo.com/episodes/25412658-Voice-Is-Cable%E2%80%99s-Secret-Weapon-for-Growth Earlier this decade, when cable companies started their foray into the phone business, not many gave them much of a chance to succeed. Sure, they could sell a lot of broadband connections, but no one thought they would be players in telecom services such as voice. Fast-forward to today, and the situation is entirely different. During the first half of 2009, cable companies across the globe generated about $30 billion in telecom service revenues, according to Telegeography, a market research company. Voice, in fact, has become the secret weapon for cable companies around the world. Those revenues come from 49 million voice subscribers and 82 million broadband customers worldwide. Cable companies’ revenues have grown 28 percent every year since 2003 vs. overall wireline business growth of 4 percent. CableCos now account for 29 percent of broadband subscribers and 9 percent of voice subscribers in countries where they are allowed to compete with the phone companies. That works ou... Earlier this decade, when cable companies started their foray into the phone business, not many gave them much of a chance to succeed. Sure, they could sell a lot of broadband connections, but no one thought they would be players in telecom services such as voice. Fast-forward to today, and the situation is entirely different. During the first half of 2009, cable companies across the globe generated about $30 billion in telecom service revenues, according to Telegeography, a market research company. Voice, in fact, has become the secret weapon for cable companies around the world. Those revenues come from 49 million voice subscribers and 82 million broadband customers worldwide. Cable companies’ revenues have grown 28 percent every year since 2003 vs. overall wireline business growth of 4 percent. CableCos now account for 29 percent of broadband subscribers and 9 percent of voice subscribers in countries where they are allowed to compete with the phone companies. That works out to about 15 percent of residential telecom revenues in countries where cable and telecoms are allowed to compete. The reason we are seeing this growth is primarily because of North America. The presence of highly competitive players such as Time Warner Cable and Comcast is a major reason why telecoms are on weak footing in the U.S. And there is no sign that U.S. CableCos are easing up the pressure on phone companies. For instance, during the third quarter (ending Sept. 30), Time Warner added 117,000 new residential high-speed Internet customers (up 32 percent from second-quarter net additions of 88,000 subscribers) and 62,000 voice subscribers (down 39 percent from 103,000 new voice customers added during the second quarter). Comcast, on the other hand, added another 361,000 broadband subscribers (up 455 percent from 65,000 new additions during the second quarter)  and 375,000 voice customers, up 61 percent from 233,000 subscribers added during the second quarter. Even in the highly competitive and mature markets of North America and Western Europe, the leading cablecos have grown their telecoms revenue by almost 10 percent relative to the third quarter of 2008. Despite the added pressure of a deep recession, these leading cablecos have seen their broadband Internet subscriber bases grow by 7 percent and their telephony subscriber bases by 13 percent over the last 12 months. “Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Liberty Global all now feature in the top 15 ranking of broadband Internet service providers, and telecoms remains an engine for growth for many cablecos around the world,” added TeleGeography’s John Dinsdalee.(Telegeography) CableCos are likely to have a major impact in Eastern Europe and Latin America. In Asia, the role of cable is being viewed as limited. In places like China and India, cable is not allowed to compete with phone companies. Earlier this decade, when cable companies started their foray into the phone business, not many gave them much of a chance to succeed. Sure, they could sell a lot of broadband connections, but no one thought they would be players in telecom services such as voice. Fast-forward to today, and the situation is entirely different. During the first half of 2009, cable companies across the globe generated about $30 billion in telecom service revenues, according to Telegeography, a market research company. Voice, in fact, has become the secret weapon for cable companies around the world. Those revenues come from 49 million voice subscribers and 82 million broadband customers worldwide. Cable companies’ revenues have grown 28 percent every year since 2003 vs. overall wireline business growth of 4 percent. CableCos now account for 29 percent of broadband subscribers and 9 percent of voice subscribers in countries where they are allowed to compete with the phone companies. That works out to about 15 percent of residential telecom revenues in countries where cable and telecoms are allowed to compete. The reason we are seeing this growth is primarily because of North America. The presence of highly competitive players such as Time Warner Cable and Comcast is a major reason why telecoms are on weak footing in the U.S. And there is no sign that U.S. CableCos are easing up the pressure on phone companies. For instance, during the third quarter (ending Sept. 30), Time Warner added 117,000 new residential high-speed Internet customers (up 32 percent from second-quarter net additions of 88,000 subscribers) and 62,000 voice subscribers (down 39 percent from 103,000 new voice customers added during the second quarter). Comcast, on the other hand, added another 361,000 broadband subscribers (up 455 percent from 65,000 new additions during the second quarter)  and 375,000 voice customers, up 61 percent from 233,000 subscribers added during the second quarter. Even in the highly competitive and mature markets of North America and Western Europe, the leading cablecos have grown their telecoms revenue by almost 10 percent relative to the third quarter of 2008. Despite the added pressure of a deep recession, these leading cablecos have seen their broadband Internet subscriber bases grow by 7 percent and their telephony subscriber bases by 13 percent over the last 12 months. “Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Liberty Global all now feature in the top 15 ranking of broadband Internet service providers, and telecoms remains an engine for growth for many cablecos around the world,” added TeleGeography’s John Dinsdalee.(Telegeography) CableCos are likely to have a major impact in Eastern Europe and Latin America. In Asia, the role of cable is being viewed as limited. In places like China and India, cable is not allowed to compete with phone companies. tag:odeo.com,2009-11-06,25412658 Fri, 06 Nov 2009 07:00:41 -0800 no GigaOM VoIP, Broadband, comcast, time warner cable, CableCos http://odeo.com/episodes/25412659-Motorola-Should-Steal-Some-of-Droid%E2%80%99s-Spotlight We’re only a few hours into the official Droid era, but already it appears that Motorola’s bet on Google’s mobile OS was a good move. The first Android 2.0 device is conjuring memories of the iPhone’s debut, prompting techies to line up by the dozen in Manhattan, inspiring a tweeting frenzy on Twitter and helping to boost shares of the Schaumburg, Ill.-based phone manufacturer. But to fully leverage all the hype, Motorola should invest in ads that push its brand and increase consumer awareness. Verizon Wireless isn’t the largest carrier to join the Android bandwagon — that honor goes to Vodafone, which launched the HTC Magic in February — but the debut of the Droid looks to be the operating system’s biggest single step since Android debuted with the HTC G1 last year. And while Verizon is also launching the $100 HTC Eris today, Motorola clearly has more at stake in the Google/Verizon tie-up than any other OEM. In fact, Droid “prom... We’re only a few hours into the official Droid era, but already it appears that Motorola’s bet on Google’s mobile OS was a good move. The first Android 2.0 device is conjuring memories of the iPhone’s debut, prompting techies to line up by the dozen in Manhattan, inspiring a tweeting frenzy on Twitter and helping to boost shares of the Schaumburg, Ill.-based phone manufacturer. But to fully leverage all the hype, Motorola should invest in ads that push its brand and increase consumer awareness. Verizon Wireless isn’t the largest carrier to join the Android bandwagon — that honor goes to Vodafone, which launched the HTC Magic in February — but the debut of the Droid looks to be the operating system’s biggest single step since Android debuted with the HTC G1 last year. And while Verizon is also launching the $100 HTC Eris today, Motorola clearly has more at stake in the Google/Verizon tie-up than any other OEM. In fact, Droid “promises to reverse Motorola’s fortunes” in mobile, according to a statement this morning from iSuppli: “Droid is potentially a game changer for Motorola,” said Tina Teng, senior analyst, wireless communications for iSuppli. “Motorola now is no longer just emphasizing slick form factors, such as it did with its RAZR handset. The company now has focused on the hottest segment of the global mobile handset market — providing compelling smartphone products that are usable and expandable through third-party applications.” Indeed, Motorola wisely joined the Android bandwagon ahead of some of its competitors, and it appears to have produced a compelling handset at a competitive price. Just as importantly, it is benefiting from a big-budget marketing campaign backed by the nation’s largest carrier. But that campaign is focused entirely on Verizon Wireless and its Droid initiative — not on Motorola or any other manufacturer. For Motorola to fully leverage the momentum it’s gaining from the launch of the Droid, it should produce its own marketing campaign to push its suddenly hot brand — just as HTC is doing with its compelling “You” campaign. We’re only a few hours into the official Droid era, but already it appears that Motorola’s bet on Google’s mobile OS was a good move. The first Android 2.0 device is conjuring memories of the iPhone’s debut, prompting techies to line up by the dozen in Manhattan, inspiring a tweeting frenzy on Twitter and helping to boost shares of the Schaumburg, Ill.-based phone manufacturer. But to fully leverage all the hype, Motorola should invest in ads that push its brand and increase consumer awareness. Verizon Wireless isn’t the largest carrier to join the Android bandwagon — that honor goes to Vodafone, which launched the HTC Magic in February — but the debut of the Droid looks to be the operating system’s biggest single step since Android debuted with the HTC G1 last year. And while Verizon is also launching the $100 HTC Eris today, Motorola clearly has more at stake in the Google/Verizon tie-up than any other OEM. In fact, Droid “promises to reverse Motorola’s fortunes” in mobile, according to a statement this morning from iSuppli: “Droid is potentially a game changer for Motorola,” said Tina Teng, senior analyst, wireless communications for iSuppli. “Motorola now is no longer just emphasizing slick form factors, such as it did with its RAZR handset. The company now has focused on the hottest segment of the global mobile handset market — providing compelling smartphone products that are usable and expandable through third-party applications.” Indeed, Motorola wisely joined the Android bandwagon ahead of some of its competitors, and it appears to have produced a compelling handset at a competitive price. Just as importantly, it is benefiting from a big-budget marketing campaign backed by the nation’s largest carrier. But that campaign is focused entirely on Verizon Wireless and its Droid initiative — not on Motorola or any other manufacturer. For Motorola to fully leverage the momentum it’s gaining from the launch of the Droid, it should produce its own marketing campaign to push its suddenly hot brand — just as HTC is doing with its compelling “You” campaign. tag:odeo.com,2009-11-06,25412659 Fri, 06 Nov 2009 06:34:07 -0800 no GigaOM android, google, Mobile, motorola, verizon wireless, smartphones, droid, smartphone OSes http://odeo.com/episodes/25412660-Look-Ma-No-Mouse “Remember the scene in the movie “Minority Report” where Tom Cruise uses hand gestures instead of a mouse to interact with a computer screen displayed on the wall? The idea isn’t really that far-fetched, and software developer Pranav Mistry has been working on making it a reality.” Mistry has created SixthSense, writes Lisa Hoover on OStatic today, a wearable gesture interface that uses a camera and mini projector to display data and information onto surfaces, walls, and even your hand. Customized fingertip sensors let you manipulate the data and use your hands to interact with it. The Ph.D. student announced plans during a presentation at the TEDIndia conference this week to release SixthSense under an open-source license in the coming months. You can check out a video of SixthSense here, and more photos here. And, find out more about the accelerating gesture control space here. “Remember the scene in the movie “Minority Report” where Tom Cruise uses hand gestures instead of a mouse to interact with a computer screen displayed on the wall? The idea isn’t really that far-fetched, and software developer Pranav Mistry has been working on making it a reality.” Mistry has created SixthSense, writes Lisa Hoover on OStatic today, a wearable gesture interface that uses a camera and mini projector to display data and information onto surfaces, walls, and even your hand. Customized fingertip sensors let you manipulate the data and use your hands to interact with it. The Ph.D. student announced plans during a presentation at the TEDIndia conference this week to release SixthSense under an open-source license in the coming months. You can check out a video of SixthSense here, and more photos here. And, find out more about the accelerating gesture control space here. “Remember the scene in the movie “Minority Report” where Tom Cruise uses hand gestures instead of a mouse to interact with a computer screen displayed on the wall? The idea isn’t really that far-fetched, and software developer Pranav Mistry has been working on making it a reality.” Mistry has created SixthSense, writes Lisa Hoover on OStatic today, a wearable gesture interface that uses a camera and mini projector to display data and information onto surfaces, walls, and even your hand. Customized fingertip sensors let you manipulate the data and use your hands to interact with it. The Ph.D. student announced plans during a presentation at the TEDIndia conference this week to release SixthSense under an open-source license in the coming months. You can check out a video of SixthSense here, and more photos here. And, find out more about the accelerating gesture control space here. tag:odeo.com,2009-11-06,25412660 Fri, 06 Nov 2009 06:30:59 -0800 no GigaOM Open Source, innovation, SixthSense, gestures, Pranav Mistry http://odeo.com/episodes/25412663-Google-CEO-We-Won%E2%80%99t-Repeat-Microsoft%E2%80%99s-Mistakes Google CEO Eric Schmidt is on a bit of a Microsoft offensive. Earlier this week, while talking to press in Boston when Schmidt was asked to comment on a statement by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, he said, “I’ve learned not to respond to quotes by Steve Ballmer.” Oh Snap! “Hopefully we won’t repeat the same mistakes that Microsoft did 10 years ago that ultimately led to all these things that have been happening with them,” Schmidt zinged back today when FOX Business Network’s Neil Cavuto asked him about recent comparisons with Microsoft. I bet Bill Gates must have said the same about IBM. He also talked about Twitter and Facebook, the economy, the recession, and a whole bunch of other current events during his interview. Actually, this clip is worth watching, and Cavuto is rational in his questions. So if you have time, check it out. Photo courtesy of Charles Haynes via Flickr. Google CEO Eric Schmidt is on a bit of a Microsoft offensive. Earlier this week, while talking to press in Boston when Schmidt was asked to comment on a statement by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, he said, “I’ve learned not to respond to quotes by Steve Ballmer.” Oh Snap! “Hopefully we won’t repeat the same mistakes that Microsoft did 10 years ago that ultimately led to all these things that have been happening with them,” Schmidt zinged back today when FOX Business Network’s Neil Cavuto asked him about recent comparisons with Microsoft. I bet Bill Gates must have said the same about IBM. He also talked about Twitter and Facebook, the economy, the recession, and a whole bunch of other current events during his interview. Actually, this clip is worth watching, and Cavuto is rational in his questions. So if you have time, check it out. Photo courtesy of Charles Haynes via Flickr. Google CEO Eric Schmidt is on a bit of a Microsoft offensive. Earlier this week, while talking to press in Boston when Schmidt was asked to comment on a statement by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, he said, “I’ve learned not to respond to quotes by Steve Ballmer.” Oh Snap! “Hopefully we won’t repeat the same mistakes that Microsoft did 10 years ago that ultimately led to all these things that have been happening with them,” Schmidt zinged back today when FOX Business Network’s Neil Cavuto asked him about recent comparisons with Microsoft. I bet Bill Gates must have said the same about IBM. He also talked about Twitter and Facebook, the economy, the recession, and a whole bunch of other current events during his interview. Actually, this clip is worth watching, and Cavuto is rational in his questions. So if you have time, check it out. Photo courtesy of Charles Haynes via Flickr. tag:odeo.com,2009-11-05,25412663 Thu, 05 Nov 2009 20:57:29 -0800 no GigaOM web, google, microsoft, tv, Eric Schmidt http://odeo.com/episodes/25410282-Google-CEO-We-Won%E2%80%99t-Repeat-the-Mistakes-of-Microsoft Google CEO Eric Schmidt is on a bit of a Microsoft offensive. Earlier this week, while talking to press in Boston when Schmidt was asked to comment on a statement by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, he said, “I’ve learned not to respond to quotes by Steve Ballmer.” Oh Snap! Today when FOX Business Network’s Neil Cavuto asked him about recent comparisons with Microsoft, Schmidt zinged back: “Hopefully we won’t repeat the same mistakes that Microsoft did ten years ago that ultimately led to all these things that have been happening with them.” I bet Bill Gates must have said the same about IBM. He also talked about Twitter and Facebook, the economy, the recession and a whole bunch of other current events during his interview. Actually this clip is worth watching and Cavuto is rational in his questions. So if you do have time, check it out. Photo courtesy of Charles Haynes via Flickr. Google CEO Eric Schmidt is on a bit of a Microsoft offensive. Earlier this week, while talking to press in Boston when Schmidt was asked to comment on a statement by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, he said, “I’ve learned not to respond to quotes by Steve Ballmer.” Oh Snap! Today when FOX Business Network’s Neil Cavuto asked him about recent comparisons with Microsoft, Schmidt zinged back: “Hopefully we won’t repeat the same mistakes that Microsoft did ten years ago that ultimately led to all these things that have been happening with them.” I bet Bill Gates must have said the same about IBM. He also talked about Twitter and Facebook, the economy, the recession and a whole bunch of other current events during his interview. Actually this clip is worth watching and Cavuto is rational in his questions. So if you do have time, check it out. Photo courtesy of Charles Haynes via Flickr. Google CEO Eric Schmidt is on a bit of a Microsoft offensive. Earlier this week, while talking to press in Boston when Schmidt was asked to comment on a statement by Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, he said, “I’ve learned not to respond to quotes by Steve Ballmer.” Oh Snap! Today when FOX Business Network’s Neil Cavuto asked him about recent comparisons with Microsoft, Schmidt zinged back: “Hopefully we won’t repeat the same mistakes that Microsoft did ten years ago that ultimately led to all these things that have been happening with them.” I bet Bill Gates must have said the same about IBM. He also talked about Twitter and Facebook, the economy, the recession and a whole bunch of other current events during his interview. Actually this clip is worth watching and Cavuto is rational in his questions. So if you do have time, check it out. Photo courtesy of Charles Haynes via Flickr. tag:odeo.com,2009-11-05,25410282 Thu, 05 Nov 2009 20:57:29 -0800 no GigaOM web, google, microsoft, tv, Eric Schmidt http://odeo.com/episodes/25410283-One-Voice-Means-Your-LTE-Calls-Will-One-Day-Be-VoIP A large group of carriers and equipment makers yesterday came out in support of a standard called One Voice to provide voice over the next-generation Long Term Evolution mobile networks. For those adopting the standard, LTE mobile calls would become VoIP calls. The standard is necessary to ensure you can call people on 3G networks from a 4G network and across different providers, and reduces the complexity of making that happen. 4G networks are all IP-based, while voice calls are still routed over circuit-switched networks, which could cause communication problems. Figuring out how to deliver circuit-switched calls on a packet network was going to result in compromises and costs I detailed back in April. So enter AT&T, Orange, Telefonica, TeliaSonera, Verizon, Vodafone, Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Nokia Siemens Networks, Nokia, Samsung Electronics, and Sony Ericsson, which are all stepping behind the One Voice effort that will use a standard version of the IMS framework to route v... A large group of carriers and equipment makers yesterday came out in support of a standard called One Voice to provide voice over the next-generation Long Term Evolution mobile networks. For those adopting the standard, LTE mobile calls would become VoIP calls. The standard is necessary to ensure you can call people on 3G networks from a 4G network and across different providers, and reduces the complexity of making that happen. 4G networks are all IP-based, while voice calls are still routed over circuit-switched networks, which could cause communication problems. Figuring out how to deliver circuit-switched calls on a packet network was going to result in compromises and costs I detailed back in April. So enter AT&T, Orange, Telefonica, TeliaSonera, Verizon, Vodafone, Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Nokia Siemens Networks, Nokia, Samsung Electronics, and Sony Ericsson, which are all stepping behind the One Voice effort that will use a standard version of the IMS framework to route voice calls between the IP and circuit-switched networks. It’s easy to understand why the equipment makers are behind this — they’ve been trying to sell IMS gear for years, and because most of the carriers involved have their own IP-based wireless network they’ve already got their own IMS equipment. However, a few notable players are missing from the One Voice effort, such as T-Mobile and some of the Chinese carriers. There is also still the question of when these standards will actually be implemented and, thus, able to be deployed in the network. Verizon plans to have its LTE network covering 100 million people by the end of next year, and AT&T will start trials at that time as well. Given that yesterday’s announcement was the beginning of a process that could take a year or longer to cement, we’re still going to need an interim solution if carriers want to provide voice on LTE networks. This standard shows that voice over LTE is finally a big issue for carriers, said Steven Shaw, VP of marketing for Kineto, which is part of a competing LTE voice effort called VoLGA. He denied that One Voice obviates the need for VoLGA given how long it will take for a standard to be ratified and implemented. Carriers can use VoLGA in the meantime, he notes, which would generate revenue for Kineto. Regardless, getting big industry players to get a standards effort rolling is a key step for those who want 4G handsets — even if they won’t be out in 2011. A large group of carriers and equipment makers yesterday came out in support of a standard called One Voice to provide voice over the next-generation Long Term Evolution mobile networks. For those adopting the standard, LTE mobile calls would become VoIP calls. The standard is necessary to ensure you can call people on 3G networks from a 4G network and across different providers, and reduces the complexity of making that happen. 4G networks are all IP-based, while voice calls are still routed over circuit-switched networks, which could cause communication problems. Figuring out how to deliver circuit-switched calls on a packet network was going to result in compromises and costs I detailed back in April. So enter AT&T, Orange, Telefonica, TeliaSonera, Verizon, Vodafone, Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, Nokia Siemens Networks, Nokia, Samsung Electronics, and Sony Ericsson, which are all stepping behind the One Voice effort that will use a standard version of the IMS framework to route voice calls between the IP and circuit-switched networks. It’s easy to understand why the equipment makers are behind this — they’ve been trying to sell IMS gear for years, and because most of the carriers involved have their own IP-based wireless network they’ve already got their own IMS equipment. However, a few notable players are missing from the One Voice effort, such as T-Mobile and some of the Chinese carriers. There is also still the question of when these standards will actually be implemented and, thus, able to be deployed in the network. Verizon plans to have its LTE network covering 100 million people by the end of next year, and AT&T will start trials at that time as well. Given that yesterday’s announcement was the beginning of a process that could take a year or longer to cement, we’re still going to need an interim solution if carriers want to provide voice on LTE networks. This standard shows that voice over LTE is finally a big issue for carriers, said Steven Shaw, VP of marketing for Kineto, which is part of a competing LTE voice effort called VoLGA. He denied that One Voice obviates the need for VoLGA given how long it will take for a standard to be ratified and implemented. Carriers can use VoLGA in the meantime, he notes, which would generate revenue for Kineto. Regardless, getting big industry players to get a standards effort rolling is a key step for those who want 4G handsets — even if they won’t be out in 2011. tag:odeo.com,2009-11-05,25410283 Thu, 05 Nov 2009 17:00:15 -0800 no GigaOM nokia, verizon, Mobile, vodafone, Alcatel-Lucent, ericsson, orange, telefonica, at&t, sony ericsson, Nokia Siemens Networks, TeliaSonera, Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. http://odeo.com/episodes/25409100-Not-to-Be-Missed-at-NewTeeVee-Live-Stars-and-Startups With only a week left until our NewTeeVee Live conference, we’re raring to go. Some of the sessions I’m most excited about for next week’s conference are the startups and the stars, so I wanted to call them out for you. We are getting close to a sell-out crowd, so you’re highly encouraged to snag your ticket ASAP. Presenting startups at NewTeeVee Live include: Hotshot box maker Roku Parallel processing pioneer Elemental Technologies Video advertising manager FreeWheel Cord-cutting darling Boxee Live event powerhouse Inlet Technologies And we’ve also got some stars of the PC screen: Ryan Higa , operator of the No. 1 most-subscribed YouTube channel of all time Michael Gregory , creator of the fantastically irreverent “Auto-Tune the News” Lindsay Campbell , former host of Wallstrip and Moblogic and web video entrepreneur at Bright Red Pixels And — bonus! — we’ll throw in some sessions with tech giants like Comcast, Netflix, Ad... With only a week left until our NewTeeVee Live conference, we’re raring to go. Some of the sessions I’m most excited about for next week’s conference are the startups and the stars, so I wanted to call them out for you. We are getting close to a sell-out crowd, so you’re highly encouraged to snag your ticket ASAP. Presenting startups at NewTeeVee Live include: Hotshot box maker Roku Parallel processing pioneer Elemental Technologies Video advertising manager FreeWheel Cord-cutting darling Boxee Live event powerhouse Inlet Technologies And we’ve also got some stars of the PC screen: Ryan Higa , operator of the No. 1 most-subscribed YouTube channel of all time Michael Gregory , creator of the fantastically irreverent “Auto-Tune the News” Lindsay Campbell , former host of Wallstrip and Moblogic and web video entrepreneur at Bright Red Pixels And — bonus! — we’ll throw in some sessions with tech giants like Comcast, Netflix, Adobe, Microsoft and Cisco as well as media titans like CBS, CNN, Comedy Central and the NFL. So don’t delay, if you buy your ticket by Friday you get $50 off. With only a week left until our NewTeeVee Live conference, we’re raring to go. Some of the sessions I’m most excited about for next week’s conference are the startups and the stars, so I wanted to call them out for you. We are getting close to a sell-out crowd, so you’re highly encouraged to snag your ticket ASAP. Presenting startups at NewTeeVee Live include: Hotshot box maker Roku Parallel processing pioneer Elemental Technologies Video advertising manager FreeWheel Cord-cutting darling Boxee Live event powerhouse Inlet Technologies And we’ve also got some stars of the PC screen: Ryan Higa , operator of the No. 1 most-subscribed YouTube channel of all time Michael Gregory , creator of the fantastically irreverent “Auto-Tune the News” Lindsay Campbell , former host of Wallstrip and Moblogic and web video entrepreneur at Bright Red Pixels And — bonus! — we’ll throw in some sessions with tech giants like Comcast, Netflix, Adobe, Microsoft and Cisco as well as media titans like CBS, CNN, Comedy Central and the NFL. So don’t delay, if you buy your ticket by Friday you get $50 off. tag:odeo.com,2009-11-05,25409100 Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:10:43 -0800 no GigaOM Media, NewTeeVee Live, @Not for Syndication http://odeo.com/episodes/25409101-Facebook-Pokes-XMPP-MSN-Yahoo-AIM-Better-Watch-Out The instant messaging world should prepare for a major quake — thanks to Facebook, which seems to be all set to launch a new connection interface that would allow Facebook Chat to work with any kind of XMPP client. The news of this development was first reported by Mickaël Rémond on the company blog of Process One, a Paris-based messaging startup. “It now seems the launch is close as the XMPP software stack has been deployed on chat.facebook.com,” writes Rémond, who is a leading expert on instant messaging and ejabberd and is an active member of the XMPP Standard Foundation. About a year-and-a-half ago, Facebook had announced that it would build “a Jabber/XMPP interface for Facebook Chat” and that “users will be able to use Jabber/XMPP-based chat applications to connect to Facebook Chat to” communicate, check their friends’ profiles, and set their statuses. Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, or XMPP, has surely become the de f... The instant messaging world should prepare for a major quake — thanks to Facebook, which seems to be all set to launch a new connection interface that would allow Facebook Chat to work with any kind of XMPP client. The news of this development was first reported by Mickaël Rémond on the company blog of Process One, a Paris-based messaging startup. “It now seems the launch is close as the XMPP software stack has been deployed on chat.facebook.com,” writes Rémond, who is a leading expert on instant messaging and ejabberd and is an active member of the XMPP Standard Foundation. About a year-and-a-half ago, Facebook had announced that it would build “a Jabber/XMPP interface for Facebook Chat” and that “users will be able to use Jabber/XMPP-based chat applications to connect to Facebook Chat to” communicate, check their friends’ profiles, and set their statuses. Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, or XMPP, has surely become the de facto standard for messaging and presence. After a big push from Google Talk, XMPP is going to get the next major push from Facebook. The world’s largest social-networking service, with over 350 million subscribers, is about to launch the XMPP connection interface. That will allow users to use Facebook Chat with any XMPP client — whether on the desktop or mobile. A good example of how this works is Adium, a popular open-source IM client that allows you to communicate with disparate IM networks. The latest version of Adium supports Facebook Chat. Why is this news disruptive? Simple: Until now, in order to use Facebook Chat to communicate, one needed to be logged into the Facebook web site or mobile service. However, if the chat can be accessed on any device regardless of whether you are logged into Facebook’s web site, the usage of that IM is only going to increase. This would, in turn, mean tough times for older IM networks such as AOL’s AIM and Microsoft’s MSN. To understand why independent Facebook Chat on the web (and on the wireless networks) is disruptive, just take a look at its amazing rise. It was prototyped in January 2007 at a Hackathon and become a real project in the fall of 2007 with four engineers. In April 2008, the service went live for consumers and was available to 70 million Facebook users at the time. As of September, nearly a billion user messages were being exchanged every day with 1GB traffic at its peak, according to a presentation made by the Facebook development team at a conference in Edinburgh in September. The instant messaging world should prepare for a major quake — thanks to Facebook, which seems to be all set to launch a new connection interface that would allow Facebook Chat to work with any kind of XMPP client. The news of this development was first reported by Mickaël Rémond on the company blog of Process One, a Paris-based messaging startup. “It now seems the launch is close as the XMPP software stack has been deployed on chat.facebook.com,” writes Rémond, who is a leading expert on instant messaging and ejabberd and is an active member of the XMPP Standard Foundation. About a year-and-a-half ago, Facebook had announced that it would build “a Jabber/XMPP interface for Facebook Chat” and that “users will be able to use Jabber/XMPP-based chat applications to connect to Facebook Chat to” communicate, check their friends’ profiles, and set their statuses. Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, or XMPP, has surely become the de facto standard for messaging and presence. After a big push from Google Talk, XMPP is going to get the next major push from Facebook. The world’s largest social-networking service, with over 350 million subscribers, is about to launch the XMPP connection interface. That will allow users to use Facebook Chat with any XMPP client — whether on the desktop or mobile. A good example of how this works is Adium, a popular open-source IM client that allows you to communicate with disparate IM networks. The latest version of Adium supports Facebook Chat. Why is this news disruptive? Simple: Until now, in order to use Facebook Chat to communicate, one needed to be logged into the Facebook web site or mobile service. However, if the chat can be accessed on any device regardless of whether you are logged into Facebook’s web site, the usage of that IM is only going to increase. This would, in turn, mean tough times for older IM networks such as AOL’s AIM and Microsoft’s MSN. To understand why independent Facebook Chat on the web (and on the wireless networks) is disruptive, just take a look at its amazing rise. It was prototyped in January 2007 at a Hackathon and become a real project in the fall of 2007 with four engineers. In April 2008, the service went live for consumers and was available to 70 million Facebook users at the time. As of September, nearly a billion user messages were being exchanged every day with 1GB traffic at its peak, according to a presentation made by the Facebook development team at a conference in Edinburgh in September. tag:odeo.com,2009-11-05,25409101 Thu, 05 Nov 2009 14:24:22 -0800 no GigaOM web, Facebook, XMPP, Google Talk http://odeo.com/episodes/25409102-Predictably-Google-Exec-Smacks-Apple-with-Android-Talk Mario Queiroz, VP Production Management for Google Android, talked about Android and its competition, the iPhone, in an interview with FOX Business Network’s Liz Claman. Queiroz touts his company’s approach to form partnerships and alliances with carriers and handset makers as a better way of doing business compared with the iPhone. You can watch the video, which comes across as an Android advertorial. // Mario Queiroz, VP Production Management for Google Android, talked about Android and its competition, the iPhone, in an interview with FOX Business Network’s Liz Claman. Queiroz touts his company’s approach to form partnerships and alliances with carriers and handset makers as a better way of doing business compared with the iPhone. You can watch the video, which comes across as an Android advertorial. // Mario Queiroz, VP Production Management for Google Android, talked about Android and its competition, the iPhone, in an interview with FOX Business Network’s Liz Claman. Queiroz touts his company’s approach to form partnerships and alliances with carriers and handset makers as a better way of doing business compared with the iPhone. You can watch the video, which comes across as an Android advertorial. // tag:odeo.com,2009-11-05,25409102 Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:18:07 -0800 no GigaOM iphone, android, google, apple, Mobile, mobile phones http://odeo.com/episodes/25409103-Hermit-Nation-Does-Tech-Boost-Social-Isolation We’re all familiar with the stereotype of the tech cave dweller, perusing a list of arcane Linux commands on a lonely Saturday night, no friends in sight. In the age of ubiquitous — and social — technology, though, can we conclude that the Internet, smartphones and new technologies isolate us and encourage cocooning, or the opposite? The Pew Internet & American Life Project sought answers to such questions through phone interviews with 2,512 adults in the U.S., and there are surprises in the survey results. I  do wonder, though, how the results might skew differently if people under 18 had been included. Here are just some of the findings, with more results below the fold: “We find that the extent of social isolation has hardly changed since 1985, contrary to concerns that the prevalence of severe isolation has tripled since then,” Pew researchers report. The survey, released yesterday, also found that the overall diversity of the average person&#82... We’re all familiar with the stereotype of the tech cave dweller, perusing a list of arcane Linux commands on a lonely Saturday night, no friends in sight. In the age of ubiquitous — and social — technology, though, can we conclude that the Internet, smartphones and new technologies isolate us and encourage cocooning, or the opposite? The Pew Internet & American Life Project sought answers to such questions through phone interviews with 2,512 adults in the U.S., and there are surprises in the survey results. I  do wonder, though, how the results might skew differently if people under 18 had been included. Here are just some of the findings, with more results below the fold: “We find that the extent of social isolation has hardly changed since 1985, contrary to concerns that the prevalence of severe isolation has tripled since then,” Pew researchers report. The survey, released yesterday, also found that the overall diversity of the average person’s social network — including close family and friends as well as acquaintances — is greater through usage of social networks such as Facebook: “For instance, frequent Internet users and those who maintain a blog are much more likely to confide in someone who is of another race.” Internet use does not pull people away from places such as parks, cafes and restaurants, Pew researchers conclude: “Internet access has become a common component of people’s experiences within many public spaces.” Also, in opposition to the conclusion that Internet usage primarily bridges gaps between people who are geographically far from each other, the survey found that there is little difference between local social usage of technology and distant communication. The following graphic based on the survey results shows that people who belong to a neighborhood online forum are much likely than the average person to have diverse interactions with neighbors: Does mobile phone usage outpace face-to-face contact as a primary way for people to stay in touch with their closest family and friends? No, according to the survey results: “On average in a typical year, people have in-person contact with their core network ties on about 210 days; they have mobile phone contact on 195 days of the year.” The following graphic breaks out days of contact per year via various communication mediums, according to how far away others are: Younger people are overwhelmingly more likely to belong to social networks than older people are, the Pew survey also finds, and it’s worth noting that all the people surveyed were over 18. Results could be different for teenagers and children. There are many more findings and graphics from the survey, found here.  For the most part, although your smartphone still doesn’t make you the life of the party, the results argue against the long-standing presumption that technology usage is social poison. We’re all familiar with the stereotype of the tech cave dweller, perusing a list of arcane Linux commands on a lonely Saturday night, no friends in sight. In the age of ubiquitous — and social — technology, though, can we conclude that the Internet, smartphones and new technologies isolate us and encourage cocooning, or the opposite? The Pew Internet & American Life Project sought answers to such questions through phone interviews with 2,512 adults in the U.S., and there are surprises in the survey results. I  do wonder, though, how the results might skew differently if people under 18 had been included. Here are just some of the findings, with more results below the fold: “We find that the extent of social isolation has hardly changed since 1985, contrary to concerns that the prevalence of severe isolation has tripled since then,” Pew researchers report. The survey, released yesterday, also found that the overall diversity of the average person’s social network — including close family and friends as well as acquaintances — is greater through usage of social networks such as Facebook: “For instance, frequent Internet users and those who maintain a blog are much more likely to confide in someone who is of another race.” Internet use does not pull people away from places such as parks, cafes and restaurants, Pew researchers conclude: “Internet access has become a common component of people’s experiences within many public spaces.” Also, in opposition to the conclusion that Internet usage primarily bridges gaps between people who are geographically far from each other, the survey found that there is little difference between local social usage of technology and distant communication. The following graphic based on the survey results shows that people who belong to a neighborhood online forum are much likely than the average person to have diverse interactions with neighbors: Does mobile phone usage outpace face-to-face contact as a primary way for people to stay in touch with their closest family and friends? No, according to the survey results: “On average in a typical year, people have in-person contact with their core network ties on about 210 days; they have mobile phone contact on 195 days of the year.” The following graphic breaks out days of contact per year via various communication mediums, according to how far away others are: Younger people are overwhelmingly more likely to belong to social networks than older people are, the Pew survey also finds, and it’s worth noting that all the people surveyed were over 18. Results could be different for teenagers and children. There are many more findings and graphics from the survey, found here.  For the most part, although your smartphone still doesn’t make you the life of the party, the results argue against the long-standing presumption that technology usage is social poison. tag:odeo.com,2009-11-05,25409103 Thu, 05 Nov 2009 12:45:45 -0800 no GigaOM web, Social networking, survey, pew, social isolation http://odeo.com/episodes/25409104-Deezer-Another-Startup-That-Will-Face-the-Music-on-Premium-Streaming French startup Deezer, a venture-backed streaming music provider that competes directly with much-discussed Spotify in Europe, today announced a two-tiered premium service model intended to extract revenue from power users. The site claims 16 million visitors and 11 million registered users, some of whom will now be expected to pay €4.99 ($7.42) each month to remove advertising and hear higher-quality streams, or €9.99 monthly to add a desktop app and mobile streaming to phones including iPhones, BlackBerrys and Android devices. As we’ve seen with Spotify’s still-too-low paid-user conversion rate, the vast majority of users are loath to shell out monthly fees to improve on the free-streaming experience. Drawing subscription revenue from a low percentage of power users to cover streaming costs that aren’t offset by advertising income isn’t yet proven as a business model, and Deezer is going to have a difficult time showing that it’s different from its ri... French startup Deezer, a venture-backed streaming music provider that competes directly with much-discussed Spotify in Europe, today announced a two-tiered premium service model intended to extract revenue from power users. The site claims 16 million visitors and 11 million registered users, some of whom will now be expected to pay €4.99 ($7.42) each month to remove advertising and hear higher-quality streams, or €9.99 monthly to add a desktop app and mobile streaming to phones including iPhones, BlackBerrys and Android devices. As we’ve seen with Spotify’s still-too-low paid-user conversion rate, the vast majority of users are loath to shell out monthly fees to improve on the free-streaming experience. Drawing subscription revenue from a low percentage of power users to cover streaming costs that aren’t offset by advertising income isn’t yet proven as a business model, and Deezer is going to have a difficult time showing that it’s different from its rivals in that respect. Paid subscriptions for music have always been a tough nut to crack, and mobile apps aren’t yet bringing in new customers. And as free desktop streaming services continue to improve, largely due to better user interfaces and shorter loading times, premium offerings from stream providers actually become less attractive rather than more appealing. Unlike Spotify’s, Deezer’s service is already available in the U.S., though its Stateside catalog is severely limited at present. (Want one of Green Day’s hits? You’ll have to settle for a cover band.) The company reportedly has agreements with all four majors, but its licenses obviously vary from country to country. The premium services will be rolled out first in France, then elsewhere in Europe. Deezer revealed a €6.5 million round of funding from AGF Private Equity and CM-CIC Capital Prive last month, bringing its total funding to €12.2 million over two years. But with a far-better-funded rival in Spotify, Deezer still has an uphill climb to win consumers’ attention. French startup Deezer, a venture-backed streaming music provider that competes directly with much-discussed Spotify in Europe, today announced a two-tiered premium service model intended to extract revenue from power users. The site claims 16 million visitors and 11 million registered users, some of whom will now be expected to pay €4.99 ($7.42) each month to remove advertising and hear higher-quality streams, or €9.99 monthly to add a desktop app and mobile streaming to phones including iPhones, BlackBerrys and Android devices. As we’ve seen with Spotify’s still-too-low paid-user conversion rate, the vast majority of users are loath to shell out monthly fees to improve on the free-streaming experience. Drawing subscription revenue from a low percentage of power users to cover streaming costs that aren’t offset by advertising income isn’t yet proven as a business model, and Deezer is going to have a difficult time showing that it’s different from its rivals in that respect. Paid subscriptions for music have always been a tough nut to crack, and mobile apps aren’t yet bringing in new customers. And as free desktop streaming services continue to improve, largely due to better user interfaces and shorter loading times, premium offerings from stream providers actually become less attractive rather than more appealing. Unlike Spotify’s, Deezer’s service is already available in the U.S., though its Stateside catalog is severely limited at present. (Want one of Green Day’s hits? You’ll have to settle for a cover band.) The company reportedly has agreements with all four majors, but its licenses obviously vary from country to country. The premium services will be rolled out first in France, then elsewhere in Europe. Deezer revealed a €6.5 million round of funding from AGF Private Equity and CM-CIC Capital Prive last month, bringing its total funding to €12.2 million over two years. But with a far-better-funded rival in Spotify, Deezer still has an uphill climb to win consumers’ attention. tag:odeo.com,2009-11-05,25409104 Thu, 05 Nov 2009 12:22:15 -0800 no GigaOM music, deezer, Streaming music, spotify, premium service http://odeo.com/episodes/25407369-When-It-Comes-to-Job-Creation-Startups-Are-More-Fertile Startups may have a high failure rate, but they also are a leading driver of job creation in the U.S., according to a report put out by The Kauffman Foundation this morning. As part of a deeper look at what small business means for the U.S. economy, the study found that 1- to 5-year-old companies create the highest average number of jobs, at roughly four jobs per year. From the report: The dynamics of firm age, moreover, point us away from a discussion on the existing distribution of employment and toward a focus on the annual changes in jobs. Let’s ask not where people work, but where each additional increment in net job creation occurs. This approach immediately forces one to recognize that companies in a given size class are not necessarily homogenous: a company with fifteen employees that is twenty-five years old will behave differently than one that is only two years old (differences that will multiply if we classify firms according to economic sector). First the report points ... Startups may have a high failure rate, but they also are a leading driver of job creation in the U.S., according to a report put out by The Kauffman Foundation this morning. As part of a deeper look at what small business means for the U.S. economy, the study found that 1- to 5-year-old companies create the highest average number of jobs, at roughly four jobs per year. From the report: The dynamics of firm age, moreover, point us away from a discussion on the existing distribution of employment and toward a focus on the annual changes in jobs. Let’s ask not where people work, but where each additional increment in net job creation occurs. This approach immediately forces one to recognize that companies in a given size class are not necessarily homogenous: a company with fifteen employees that is twenty-five years old will behave differently than one that is only two years old (differences that will multiply if we classify firms according to economic sector). First the report points out that, while companies with more than 500 people make up about half of the nation’s employment and payroll, a business’s size is not a good indicator of where new jobs come from. Dane Stangler and Robert E. Litan, who wrote the report, offer up this graph to show that without startups overall job creation in the U.S. would have been negative in most of the years since 1977. There’s also discussion, but no data, about how M&A at large companies — through which they typically acquire smaller, younger firms — accounts for the job growth at larger companies. The report offers a ton of data about economic sectors, and acknowledges that relying on startups for job creation is both messy and hard to track. It’s all very well to say at a macro level that young companies create jobs even though they have a high likelihood of failure, but at the individual level, relying on an uncertain startup for employment can create enormous personal risk. The report recommends that to foster job creation, young companies need help. The authors think credit should be made more accessible to businesses as well as banks, and note efforts happening in these area today. They also suggest a payroll tax holiday for new and young businesses, while noting that such a move could add to the deficit. I would suggest rather, that the government consider some level of universal health care that would reduce costs for a young company, as well as offset the difficulties faced by employees who have to navigate the turbulent nature of working at a startup. Overall, it’s an interesting report, although I’m not sure big business should be written off so easily. They may not be engines of job growth, but in many cases they are engines for startup growth as they buy services, equipment or even ads from them. Startups may have a high failure rate, but they also are a leading driver of job creation in the U.S., according to a report put out by The Kauffman Foundation this morning. As part of a deeper look at what small business means for the U.S. economy, the study found that 1- to 5-year-old companies create the highest average number of jobs, at roughly four jobs per year. From the report: The dynamics of firm age, moreover, point us away from a discussion on the existing distribution of employment and toward a focus on the annual changes in jobs. Let’s ask not where people work, but where each additional increment in net job creation occurs. This approach immediately forces one to recognize that companies in a given size class are not necessarily homogenous: a company with fifteen employees that is twenty-five years old will behave differently than one that is only two years old (differences that will multiply if we classify firms according to economic sector). First the report points out that, while companies with more than 500 people make up about half of the nation’s employment and payroll, a business’s size is not a good indicator of where new jobs come from. Dane Stangler and Robert E. Litan, who wrote the report, offer up this graph to show that without startups overall job creation in the U.S. would have been negative in most of the years since 1977. There’s also discussion, but no data, about how M&A at large companies — through which they typically acquire smaller, younger firms — accounts for the job growth at larger companies. The report offers a ton of data about economic sectors, and acknowledges that relying on startups for job creation is both messy and hard to track. It’s all very well to say at a macro level that young companies create jobs even though they have a high likelihood of failure, but at the individual level, relying on an uncertain startup for employment can create enormous personal risk. The report recommends that to foster job creation, young companies need help. The authors think credit should be made more accessible to businesses as well as banks, and note efforts happening in these area today. They also suggest a payroll tax holiday for new and young businesses, while noting that such a move could add to the deficit. I would suggest rather, that the government consider some level of universal health care that would reduce costs for a young company, as well as offset the difficulties faced by employees who have to navigate the turbulent nature of working at a startup. Overall, it’s an interesting report, although I’m not sure big business should be written off so easily. They may not be engines of job growth, but in many cases they are engines for startup growth as they buy services, equipment or even ads from them. tag:odeo.com,2009-11-05,25407369 Thu, 05 Nov 2009 10:43:23 -0800 no GigaOM Startups, entrepreneurs, Kauffman Foundation http://odeo.com/episodes/25407378-Data-Usage-Be-Damned-T-Mobile-Losing-Its-Grip-on-Customers T-Mobile USA lost 77,000 customers and saw revenue continue to slide in the third quarter even as its operating profit margin increased two percentage points. But the nation’s fourth-largest carrier continued to enjoy a surge in mobile data uptake and said it will continue to aggressively — if belatedly — roll out its 3G network next year. T-Mobile USA is fighting heated battles on both ends of the mobile spectrum: It has introduced competitive prepaid plans in an effort to compete with cut-rate service providers such as Leap Wireless and MetroPCS, and it is vying for revenue-boosting, smartphone-using consumers with devices such as the Android-based Motorola Cliq and myTouch 3G. But while the carrier’s strategy may be paying dividends for shareholders of parent company Deutsche Telekom, it will have to address the serious network hiccups that have infuriated customers in recent weeks. DT blamed increasing competition and competitors’ “handset inn... T-Mobile USA lost 77,000 customers and saw revenue continue to slide in the third quarter even as its operating profit margin increased two percentage points. But the nation’s fourth-largest carrier continued to enjoy a surge in mobile data uptake and said it will continue to aggressively — if belatedly — roll out its 3G network next year. T-Mobile USA is fighting heated battles on both ends of the mobile spectrum: It has introduced competitive prepaid plans in an effort to compete with cut-rate service providers such as Leap Wireless and MetroPCS, and it is vying for revenue-boosting, smartphone-using consumers with devices such as the Android-based Motorola Cliq and myTouch 3G. But while the carrier’s strategy may be paying dividends for shareholders of parent company Deutsche Telekom, it will have to address the serious network hiccups that have infuriated customers in recent weeks. DT blamed increasing competition and competitors’ “handset innovation” for its 2.4 percent churn rate, which was unchanged from the previous quarter. T-Mobile USA’s $5.57 billion in revenue was up 2.8 percent from the year-ago period, and its all-important data traffic grew by 45 percent quarter over quarter. The carrier spent $800 million to build out its 3G network in the U.S. during the quarter, though, and said the network will cover 200 million Americans by the end of the year. T-Mobile brought 5,200 cell sites online during the period and said it plans to add nearly 4,000 more sites by the end of the year, reaching 25,000 total sites. That build-out will be necessary to meet the demands of T-Mo’s rapidly expanding base of data-hungry customers. T-Mobile USA lost 77,000 customers and saw revenue continue to slide in the third quarter even as its operating profit margin increased two percentage points. But the nation’s fourth-largest carrier continued to enjoy a surge in mobile data uptake and said it will continue to aggressively — if belatedly — roll out its 3G network next year. T-Mobile USA is fighting heated battles on both ends of the mobile spectrum: It has introduced competitive prepaid plans in an effort to compete with cut-rate service providers such as Leap Wireless and MetroPCS, and it is vying for revenue-boosting, smartphone-using consumers with devices such as the Android-based Motorola Cliq and myTouch 3G. But while the carrier’s strategy may be paying dividends for shareholders of parent company Deutsche Telekom, it will have to address the serious network hiccups that have infuriated customers in recent weeks. DT blamed increasing competition and competitors’ “handset innovation” for its 2.4 percent churn rate, which was unchanged from the previous quarter. T-Mobile USA’s $5.57 billion in revenue was up 2.8 percent from the year-ago period, and its all-important data traffic grew by 45 percent quarter over quarter. The carrier spent $800 million to build out its 3G network in the U.S. during the quarter, though, and said the network will cover 200 million Americans by the end of the year. T-Mobile brought 5,200 cell sites online during the period and said it plans to add nearly 4,000 more sites by the end of the year, reaching 25,000 total sites. That build-out will be necessary to meet the demands of T-Mo’s rapidly expanding base of data-hungry customers. tag:odeo.com,2009-11-05,25407378 Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:40:34 -0800 no GigaOM Mobile, T-Mobile USA, mobile carriers, Deutsche Telekom http://odeo.com/episodes/25407384-Verizon-Offers-Prepaid-Data-Plans-With-a-Pretty-Big-Catch Amid the slew of exciting, new phone announcements (the HTC Hero turned Droid Eris!!!) Verizon Wireless said it would offer prepaid data plans, something we’ve been saying the industry should do for a while. The company is offering folks the chance to pick up data on an as-needed basis, instead of having to buy it as part of a monthly contract. That’s mighty fine of them, and should net the carrier some extra dollars, especially since the convenience charge for the prepaid data is pretty darn high. But if there’s no expiration date on how long people can use the data, even at a huge markup, these plans might help get people hooked on mobile broadband by allowing them to start using data without an expensive monthly commitment. However, folks will need to purchase a $130 USB modem in order to access the cell network. I’m waiting to hear from Verizon to see if the data expires or if the daily, weekly and monthly titles are mere suggestions of how much someone s... Amid the slew of exciting, new phone announcements (the HTC Hero turned Droid Eris!!!) Verizon Wireless said it would offer prepaid data plans, something we’ve been saying the industry should do for a while. The company is offering folks the chance to pick up data on an as-needed basis, instead of having to buy it as part of a monthly contract. That’s mighty fine of them, and should net the carrier some extra dollars, especially since the convenience charge for the prepaid data is pretty darn high. But if there’s no expiration date on how long people can use the data, even at a huge markup, these plans might help get people hooked on mobile broadband by allowing them to start using data without an expensive monthly commitment. However, folks will need to purchase a $130 USB modem in order to access the cell network. I’m waiting to hear from Verizon to see if the data expires or if the daily, weekly and monthly titles are mere suggestions of how much someone should use in that time period. The plans are as follows: Daily – $15 for 75 MB (20 cents a MB) Weekly – $30 for 250 MB (12 cents a MB) Monthly – $50 for 500 MB (10 cents a MB) For comparison’s sake, I pay $60 a month for 5GB or 1.2 cents per MB, although the 250MB plan Verizon offered for $40 on contract seems like a loser when compared with getting the same amount for $30 on prepaid. My guess is these things expire. Amid the slew of exciting, new phone announcements (the HTC Hero turned Droid Eris!!!) Verizon Wireless said it would offer prepaid data plans, something we’ve been saying the industry should do for a while. The company is offering folks the chance to pick up data on an as-needed basis, instead of having to buy it as part of a monthly contract. That’s mighty fine of them, and should net the carrier some extra dollars, especially since the convenience charge for the prepaid data is pretty darn high. But if there’s no expiration date on how long people can use the data, even at a huge markup, these plans might help get people hooked on mobile broadband by allowing them to start using data without an expensive monthly commitment. However, folks will need to purchase a $130 USB modem in order to access the cell network. I’m waiting to hear from Verizon to see if the data expires or if the daily, weekly and monthly titles are mere suggestions of how much someone should use in that time period. The plans are as follows: Daily – $15 for 75 MB (20 cents a MB) Weekly – $30 for 250 MB (12 cents a MB) Monthly – $50 for 500 MB (10 cents a MB) For comparison’s sake, I pay $60 a month for 5GB or 1.2 cents per MB, although the 250MB plan Verizon offered for $40 on contract seems like a loser when compared with getting the same amount for $30 on prepaid. My guess is these things expire. tag:odeo.com,2009-11-05,25407384 Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:17:01 -0800 no GigaOM verizon, Mobile, VZ http://odeo.com/episodes/25407388-Google-CEO-More-Wave-Invites-In-Weeks Google is getting ready to make its Wave technology more widely available, CEO Eric Schmidt told a gathering of reporters in its Boston offices. “[The Google's Wave team is] getting ready for a much broader distribution. Ready means very soon. Very soon is like weeks not years,” Schmidt said. “The experiment has yielded a very, very innovative model and a lot of buzz. We want to see if it will scale.” Maybe when more people are using it, there is a good chance someone will figure it out and explain to me how it is supposed to improve my online life. (If you want a good Google Wave Primer, check out this research note over on our subscription research service, GigaOM Pro.) Amongst other things, Schmidt commented on media, news and bloggers, reminding me of what my mother once told me: it is better to keep quiet about things you don’t know much about. Just because they can sell online ads and do search, who do Googlers think they know everything about med... Google is getting ready to make its Wave technology more widely available, CEO Eric Schmidt told a gathering of reporters in its Boston offices. “[The Google's Wave team is] getting ready for a much broader distribution. Ready means very soon. Very soon is like weeks not years,” Schmidt said. “The experiment has yielded a very, very innovative model and a lot of buzz. We want to see if it will scale.” Maybe when more people are using it, there is a good chance someone will figure it out and explain to me how it is supposed to improve my online life. (If you want a good Google Wave Primer, check out this research note over on our subscription research service, GigaOM Pro.) Amongst other things, Schmidt commented on media, news and bloggers, reminding me of what my mother once told me: it is better to keep quiet about things you don’t know much about. Just because they can sell online ads and do search, who do Googlers think they know everything about media and politics? Why do they think they have all the answers, when they can’t get more than half their products right?! Photo courtesy of Charles Haynes via Flickr. Google is getting ready to make its Wave technology more widely available, CEO Eric Schmidt told a gathering of reporters in its Boston offices. “[The Google's Wave team is] getting ready for a much broader distribution. Ready means very soon. Very soon is like weeks not years,” Schmidt said. “The experiment has yielded a very, very innovative model and a lot of buzz. We want to see if it will scale.” Maybe when more people are using it, there is a good chance someone will figure it out and explain to me how it is supposed to improve my online life. (If you want a good Google Wave Primer, check out this research note over on our subscription research service, GigaOM Pro.) Amongst other things, Schmidt commented on media, news and bloggers, reminding me of what my mother once told me: it is better to keep quiet about things you don’t know much about. Just because they can sell online ads and do search, who do Googlers think they know everything about media and politics? Why do they think they have all the answers, when they can’t get more than half their products right?! Photo courtesy of Charles Haynes via Flickr. tag:odeo.com,2009-11-05,25407388 Thu, 05 Nov 2009 07:37:21 -0800 no GigaOM web, google, google wave http://odeo.com/episodes/25407392-Skype-Founders-Fight-Their-Way-Into-the-New-Skype The great Skype legal mess is about to come to an end, thanks to a settlement between  eBay — and private investors led by Silver Lake Partners — and Skype co-founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. As part of the deal, the two Skype founders will get 10 percent of the company in exchange for allowing it to use the Global Index technology from their IP company, JoltID. They have an option to pay $83 million for another 3 percent of the new Skype. They will have two board seats on the 23-person board. These details were reported by Kara Swisher on her blog last night. I reported the news of a settlement this past weekend. Since then, more details have emerged that Index Ventures and Michael Volpi were both out of the deal. The great Skype legal mess is about to come to an end, thanks to a settlement between  eBay — and private investors led by Silver Lake Partners — and Skype co-founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. As part of the deal, the two Skype founders will get 10 percent of the company in exchange for allowing it to use the Global Index technology from their IP company, JoltID. They have an option to pay $83 million for another 3 percent of the new Skype. They will have two board seats on the 23-person board. These details were reported by Kara Swisher on her blog last night. I reported the news of a settlement this past weekend. Since then, more details have emerged that Index Ventures and Michael Volpi were both out of the deal. The great Skype legal mess is about to come to an end, thanks to a settlement between  eBay — and private investors led by Silver Lake Partners — and Skype co-founders Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis. As part of the deal, the two Skype founders will get 10 percent of the company in exchange for allowing it to use the Global Index technology from their IP company, JoltID. They have an option to pay $83 million for another 3 percent of the new Skype. They will have two board seats on the 23-person board. These details were reported by Kara Swisher on her blog last night. I reported the news of a settlement this past weekend. Since then, more details have emerged that Index Ventures and Michael Volpi were both out of the deal. tag:odeo.com,2009-11-05,25407392 Thu, 05 Nov 2009 07:09:57 -0800 no GigaOM skype, eBay, Voice, JoltID, Silver Lake Partners, Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis http://odeo.com/episodes/25407395-Google-Dashboard-Will-You-Need-a-Warrant-for-That Updated: In yet another attempt to help folks feel that Google is a warm and friendly repository for all of their data, the company is offering a chance to see everything it knows about you all in one place called Google Dashboard. Except that much of this was already available before to people who viewed their web history on Google (something I do when trying to grab maps that I look up often). But now the company has put this all in a Dashboard and made it easier for everyone to find it. The resulting dashboard for me wasn’t anything I didn’t already know. What’s scariest about Google isn’t the fact that it has all my email, YouTube, Maps and web searches, but how it can farm that data to discover more about me (and how long it keeps it). People know they have Gmail accounts — what they don’t know is which Google demographics are sold to advertisers based on that history. The other thing that hit me, was now anyone from my husband to a police of... Updated: In yet another attempt to help folks feel that Google is a warm and friendly repository for all of their data, the company is offering a chance to see everything it knows about you all in one place called Google Dashboard. Except that much of this was already available before to people who viewed their web history on Google (something I do when trying to grab maps that I look up often). But now the company has put this all in a Dashboard and made it easier for everyone to find it. The resulting dashboard for me wasn’t anything I didn’t already know. What’s scariest about Google isn’t the fact that it has all my email, YouTube, Maps and web searches, but how it can farm that data to discover more about me (and how long it keeps it). People know they have Gmail accounts — what they don’t know is which Google demographics are sold to advertisers based on that history. The other thing that hit me, was now anyone from my husband to a police officer could easily get through to this (they would need my password, but if I have it set to stay logged in, they don’t even need that) and see a quick history of anything I’ve done on Google, from individual emails to places I’ve mapped. Update: Google emailed me to say that my experience being able to log back in again without a password was misleading. The service actually logs the user out after an unspecified amount of time, which means someone can’t get in after that period of time without re-entering a password. I’m not particularly ashamed by any of my information, but others may not want their digital footprints so easily accessed. It used to take a search warrant and your hard drive, or even a subpoena to an ISP, to get access to damning computer data (unless you bring it in for repairs). Now all it takes is an unguarded laptop and Google Dashboard. I suggest that Google at least force you to log in each and every time you want to access it. That way folks would at least have to ask you before getting your data.   Updated: In yet another attempt to help folks feel that Google is a warm and friendly repository for all of their data, the company is offering a chance to see everything it knows about you all in one place called Google Dashboard. Except that much of this was already available before to people who viewed their web history on Google (something I do when trying to grab maps that I look up often). But now the company has put this all in a Dashboard and made it easier for everyone to find it. The resulting dashboard for me wasn’t anything I didn’t already know. What’s scariest about Google isn’t the fact that it has all my email, YouTube, Maps and web searches, but how it can farm that data to discover more about me (and how long it keeps it). People know they have Gmail accounts — what they don’t know is which Google demographics are sold to advertisers based on that history. The other thing that hit me, was now anyone from my husband to a police officer could easily get through to this (they would need my password, but if I have it set to stay logged in, they don’t even need that) and see a quick history of anything I’ve done on Google, from individual emails to places I’ve mapped. Update: Google emailed me to say that my experience being able to log back in again without a password was misleading. The service actually logs the user out after an unspecified amount of time, which means someone can’t get in after that period of time without re-entering a password. I’m not particularly ashamed by any of my information, but others may not want their digital footprints so easily accessed. It used to take a search warrant and your hard drive, or even a subpoena to an ISP, to get access to damning computer data (unless you bring it in for repairs). Now all it takes is an unguarded laptop and Google Dashboard. I suggest that Google at least force you to log in each and every time you want to access it. That way folks would at least have to ask you before getting your data.   tag:odeo.com,2009-11-05,25407395 Thu, 05 Nov 2009 06:53:00 -0800 no GigaOM web, GOOG, google http://odeo.com/episodes/25405255-SlingMedia-Founder-Invests-In-Clicker-Joins-BOD Ever since Blake Krikorian left Sling Media, the place shifting startup that he sold to Echostar for $380 million in September 2007, he’s been lying low. Instead of trying to build yet another startup, he has been spending time trying to put together a killer home entertainment system that uses HDMI-over-fiber, dozens of iPod touch devices and many Apple displays spread across his home. “It would either be a great thing or my family will hate me,” Krikorian joked when he stopped by in our office last week. This do-it-yourself project is a way for him to think about what he will do next. And as he waits for inspiration to strike, Krikorian is going to join the board of directors of Clicker.com, a Los Angeles-based online-video content discovery company started by Jim Lanzone, the former CEO of Ask.com. He is also going to make an undisclosed amount of money in the company; a news announcement is likely to be made later this week. Clicker is backed by veteran venture... Ever since Blake Krikorian left Sling Media, the place shifting startup that he sold to Echostar for $380 million in September 2007, he’s been lying low. Instead of trying to build yet another startup, he has been spending time trying to put together a killer home entertainment system that uses HDMI-over-fiber, dozens of iPod touch devices and many Apple displays spread across his home. “It would either be a great thing or my family will hate me,” Krikorian joked when he stopped by in our office last week. This do-it-yourself project is a way for him to think about what he will do next. And as he waits for inspiration to strike, Krikorian is going to join the board of directors of Clicker.com, a Los Angeles-based online-video content discovery company started by Jim Lanzone, the former CEO of Ask.com. He is also going to make an undisclosed amount of money in the company; a news announcement is likely to be made later this week. Clicker is backed by veteran venture capitalists Bill Gurley of Benchmark Capital and Geoff Yang of Redpoint Ventures, who have invested close to $8 million in the company. Clicker is going to be unveiling its complete service to the world at our NewTeeVee Live conference, which will be held on Nov. 12 in San Francisco. (To buy tickets for the conference, click here. ) Liz covered the company in The Best Guides to Watching TV Online. “About two months ago, I started talking to Jim about Clicker and fell in love with the service,” Krikorian said. “I had no plans to be on any boards or work with any startups, even though I get asked to often.” Blake said that he became a fanboy and saw the obvious need for a service such as Clicker. In the traditional TV universe, with finite number of distribution channels, TV Guide did quite well, because it laid out available content as a grid, that could easily be thumbed through as a guide. In his research report, The Future of Pay Services, GigaOM Pro analyst Steve Hawley points to several efforts being made to streamline content discovery in the old television space. Online video is even more complex. In the broadband world, where there is one giant distribution channel, the Internet, video discovery becomes a vexing problem. As more and more video becomes available on the web, discoverability of content becomes as important as publishing of video content. That was Lanzone’s basic premise when he described his company to me many months ago. There are quite a few efforts under way to solve this problem, as outlined by Chris in his GigaOM Pro feature (subscription required), but Clicker has proved to be a critical hit among its beta testers. At the same time, Lanzone has to know that he is swimming with the sharks. The cable companies, content owners and TV networks are frenemies — allies at some times and mortal enemies at others. Krikorian has been through these same ups and downs with SlingMedia, and perhaps that is why Lanzone is excited to get him in his corner. Lanzone, of course, doesn’t know what he has signed up for: Krikorian is going to be sending his team bug reports and product suggestions! Photo of Blake Krikorian courtesy of UberGizmo. Ever since Blake Krikorian left Sling Media, the place shifting startup that he sold to Echostar for $380 million in September 2007, he’s been lying low. Instead of trying to build yet another startup, he has been spending time trying to put together a killer home entertainment system that uses HDMI-over-fiber, dozens of iPod touch devices and many Apple displays spread across his home. “It would either be a great thing or my family will hate me,” Krikorian joked when he stopped by in our office last week. This do-it-yourself project is a way for him to think about what he will do next. And as he waits for inspiration to strike, Krikorian is going to join the board of directors of Clicker.com, a Los Angeles-based online-video content discovery company started by Jim Lanzone, the former CEO of Ask.com. He is also going to make an undisclosed amount of money in the company; a news announcement is likely to be made later this week. Clicker is backed by veteran venture capitalists Bill Gurley of Benchmark Capital and Geoff Yang of Redpoint Ventures, who have invested close to $8 million in the company. Clicker is going to be unveiling its complete service to the world at our NewTeeVee Live conference, which will be held on Nov. 12 in San Francisco. (To buy tickets for the conference, click here. ) Liz covered the company in The Best Guides to Watching TV Online. “About two months ago, I started talking to Jim about Clicker and fell in love with the service,” Krikorian said. “I had no plans to be on any boards or work with any startups, even though I get asked to often.” Blake said that he became a fanboy and saw the obvious need for a service such as Clicker. In the traditional TV universe, with finite number of distribution channels, TV Guide did quite well, because it laid out available content as a grid, that could easily be thumbed through as a guide. In his research report, The Future of Pay Services, GigaOM Pro analyst Steve Hawley points to several efforts being made to streamline content discovery in the old television space. Online video is even more complex. In the broadband world, where there is one giant distribution channel, the Internet, video discovery becomes a vexing problem. As more and more video becomes available on the web, discoverability of content becomes as important as publishing of video content. That was Lanzone’s basic premise when he described his company to me many months ago. There are quite a few efforts under way to solve this problem, as outlined by Chris in his GigaOM Pro feature (subscription required), but Clicker has proved to be a critical hit among its beta testers. At the same time, Lanzone has to know that he is swimming with the sharks. The cable companies, content owners and TV networks are frenemies — allies at some times and mortal enemies at others. Krikorian has been through these same ups and downs with SlingMedia, and perhaps that is why Lanzone is excited to get him in his corner. Lanzone, of course, doesn’t know what he has signed up for: Krikorian is going to be sending his team bug reports and product suggestions! Photo of Blake Krikorian courtesy of UberGizmo. tag:odeo.com,2009-11-05,25405255 Thu, 05 Nov 2009 02:00:22 -0800 no GigaOM Media, Startups, Sling Media, clicker, Blake Krikorian, Jim Lanzone http://odeo.com/episodes/25404012-CNN-Explains-the-Cloud-%E2%80%A6-Badly Thanks to the amazing viral powers of Twitter, I found a series that CNN is running on cloud computing, complete with stories (I liked the one on server huggers) and fun video about an oddly named dog. The goal clearly is to explain cloud computing to the masses, but when you show someone hosting a photo at Picasa or Flickr and say, “You’ve just started cloud computing,” you’ve just messed up. Storing data in the cloud is the same as storing it online. In fact, if they remade the video (embedded below) and replaced the word “cloud” with “web” or “online,” it all would still make sense — but that’s not cloud computing. Cloud computing is providing processing power on demand and charging for it on a per instance basis. Yeah, that’s far geekier, but it helps someone sift through all the hype around the cloud and cloud computing, something the CNN video and story doesn’t really do. Not that many of the v... Thanks to the amazing viral powers of Twitter, I found a series that CNN is running on cloud computing, complete with stories (I liked the one on server huggers) and fun video about an oddly named dog. The goal clearly is to explain cloud computing to the masses, but when you show someone hosting a photo at Picasa or Flickr and say, “You’ve just started cloud computing,” you’ve just messed up. Storing data in the cloud is the same as storing it online. In fact, if they remade the video (embedded below) and replaced the word “cloud” with “web” or “online,” it all would still make sense — but that’s not cloud computing. Cloud computing is providing processing power on demand and charging for it on a per instance basis. Yeah, that’s far geekier, but it helps someone sift through all the hype around the cloud and cloud computing, something the CNN video and story doesn’t really do. Not that many of the vendors who provide either web-based services like Google’s Gmail or actual cloud computing like Amazon really helped the poor writer out. Google refused to let him tour their data centers (no surprise) and Amazon’s Adam Selipsky, VP of Amazon Web Services, told him, “From a customer’s perspective, it is a cloud, and it can be magic.” Wow, can we all try a little less hard to make this stuff easy to understand? Thanks to the amazing viral powers of Twitter, I found a series that CNN is running on cloud computing, complete with stories (I liked the one on server huggers) and fun video about an oddly named dog. The goal clearly is to explain cloud computing to the masses, but when you show someone hosting a photo at Picasa or Flickr and say, “You’ve just started cloud computing,” you’ve just messed up. Storing data in the cloud is the same as storing it online. In fact, if they remade the video (embedded below) and replaced the word “cloud” with “web” or “online,” it all would still make sense — but that’s not cloud computing. Cloud computing is providing processing power on demand and charging for it on a per instance basis. Yeah, that’s far geekier, but it helps someone sift through all the hype around the cloud and cloud computing, something the CNN video and story doesn’t really do. Not that many of the vendors who provide either web-based services like Google’s Gmail or actual cloud computing like Amazon really helped the poor writer out. Google refused to let him tour their data centers (no surprise) and Amazon’s Adam Selipsky, VP of Amazon Web Services, told him, “From a customer’s perspective, it is a cloud, and it can be magic.” Wow, can we all try a little less hard to make this stuff easy to understand? tag:odeo.com,2009-11-04,25404012 Wed, 04 Nov 2009 20:00:46 -0800 no GigaOM GOOG, google, Amazon, infrastructure, Cloud Computing http://odeo.com/episodes/25407409-CNN-Explains-the-Cloud%E2%80%A6Badly Thanks to the amazing viral powers of Twitter, I found a series that CNN is running on cloud computing, complete with stories (I liked the one on server huggers) and fun video about an oddly named dog. The goal clearly is to explain cloud computing to the masses, but when you show someone hosting a photo at Picasa or Flickr and say, “You’ve just started cloud computing,” you’ve just messed up. Storing data in the cloud is the same as storing it online. In fact, if they remade the video (embedded below) and replaced the word “cloud” with “web” or “online,” it all would still make sense — but that’s not cloud computing. Cloud computing is providing processing power on demand and charging for it on a per instance basis. Yeah, that’s far geekier, but it helps someone sift through all the hype around the cloud and cloud computing, something the CNN video and story doesn’t really do. Not that many of the v... Thanks to the amazing viral powers of Twitter, I found a series that CNN is running on cloud computing, complete with stories (I liked the one on server huggers) and fun video about an oddly named dog. The goal clearly is to explain cloud computing to the masses, but when you show someone hosting a photo at Picasa or Flickr and say, “You’ve just started cloud computing,” you’ve just messed up. Storing data in the cloud is the same as storing it online. In fact, if they remade the video (embedded below) and replaced the word “cloud” with “web” or “online,” it all would still make sense — but that’s not cloud computing. Cloud computing is providing processing power on demand and charging for it on a per instance basis. Yeah, that’s far geekier, but it helps someone sift through all the hype around the cloud and cloud computing, something the CNN video and story doesn’t really do. Not that many of the vendors who provide either web-based services like Google’s Gmail or actual cloud computing like Amazon really helped the poor writer out. Google refused to let him tour their data centers (no surprise) and Amazon’s Adam Selipsky, VP of Amazon Web Services, told him, “From a customer’s perspective, it is a cloud, and it can be magic.” Wow, can we all try a little less hard to make this stuff easy to understand? Thanks to the amazing viral powers of Twitter, I found a series that CNN is running on cloud computing, complete with stories (I liked the one on server huggers) and fun video about an oddly named dog. The goal clearly is to explain cloud computing to the masses, but when you show someone hosting a photo at Picasa or Flickr and say, “You’ve just started cloud computing,” you’ve just messed up. Storing data in the cloud is the same as storing it online. In fact, if they remade the video (embedded below) and replaced the word “cloud” with “web” or “online,” it all would still make sense — but that’s not cloud computing. Cloud computing is providing processing power on demand and charging for it on a per instance basis. Yeah, that’s far geekier, but it helps someone sift through all the hype around the cloud and cloud computing, something the CNN video and story doesn’t really do. Not that many of the vendors who provide either web-based services like Google’s Gmail or actual cloud computing like Amazon really helped the poor writer out. Google refused to let him tour their data centers (no surprise) and Amazon’s Adam Selipsky, VP of Amazon Web Services, told him, “From a customer’s perspective, it is a cloud, and it can be magic.” Wow, can we all try a little less hard to make this stuff easy to understand? tag:odeo.com,2009-11-04,25407409 Wed, 04 Nov 2009 20:00:46 -0800 no GigaOM GOOG, google, Amazon, infrastructure, Cloud Computing http://odeo.com/episodes/25404013-The-New-New-Carrier-Deck There are no longer any doubts that T-Mobile has hitched its smartphone bandwagon to Google’s Android operating system. The company today said that it will be selling four Android-powered handsets to its (current and potential) customers during the vital holiday season. It is clear they are hoping to sell a lot of smart phones. As part of its push, the company is making some plans regarding applications and application discovery. Here are some excerpts from their email pitch sent earlier today: With the introduction of the T-Mobile myTouch 3G, T-Mobile created T-Mobile AppPack on Android Market, which features select 3rd party and T-Mobile made apps. T-Mobile recently refreshed AppPack with new, suggested applications – 34 apps in all, including a mix of free and paid apps. Later this month, the company will take this a step further by introducing a T-Mobile Channel on Android Market (that will be live by Thanksgiving), and Android Market (including the T-Mobile Channel) will ... There are no longer any doubts that T-Mobile has hitched its smartphone bandwagon to Google’s Android operating system. The company today said that it will be selling four Android-powered handsets to its (current and potential) customers during the vital holiday season. It is clear they are hoping to sell a lot of smart phones. As part of its push, the company is making some plans regarding applications and application discovery. Here are some excerpts from their email pitch sent earlier today: With the introduction of the T-Mobile myTouch 3G, T-Mobile created T-Mobile AppPack on Android Market, which features select 3rd party and T-Mobile made apps. T-Mobile recently refreshed AppPack with new, suggested applications – 34 apps in all, including a mix of free and paid apps. Later this month, the company will take this a step further by introducing a T-Mobile Channel on Android Market (that will be live by Thanksgiving), and Android Market (including the T-Mobile Channel) will soon feature carrier billing making it easier and more streamlined for customers with T-Mobile Android devices to purchase their favorite applications. When I read that pitch, the first thing that came to my mind: hey isn’t that what the carrier decks of the yore really used to be? Carriers playing godfather to the fortunes of small companies in exchange for some baksheesh. Apps placed by them on the deck was how start-ups fortunes were decided. Carrier decks also were a way to sell premium applications and services. So how are T-Mobile channel and T-Mobile App Pack any different than the carrier deck? My inner skeptic says: not much! Any thoughts folks? There are no longer any doubts that T-Mobile has hitched its smartphone bandwagon to Google’s Android operating system. The company today said that it will be selling four Android-powered handsets to its (current and potential) customers during the vital holiday season. It is clear they are hoping to sell a lot of smart phones. As part of its push, the company is making some plans regarding applications and application discovery. Here are some excerpts from their email pitch sent earlier today: With the introduction of the T-Mobile myTouch 3G, T-Mobile created T-Mobile AppPack on Android Market, which features select 3rd party and T-Mobile made apps. T-Mobile recently refreshed AppPack with new, suggested applications – 34 apps in all, including a mix of free and paid apps. Later this month, the company will take this a step further by introducing a T-Mobile Channel on Android Market (that will be live by Thanksgiving), and Android Market (including the T-Mobile Channel) will soon feature carrier billing making it easier and more streamlined for customers with T-Mobile Android devices to purchase their favorite applications. When I read that pitch, the first thing that came to my mind: hey isn’t that what the carrier decks of the yore really used to be? Carriers playing godfather to the fortunes of small companies in exchange for some baksheesh. Apps placed by them on the deck was how start-ups fortunes were decided. Carrier decks also were a way to sell premium applications and services. So how are T-Mobile channel and T-Mobile App Pack any different than the carrier deck? My inner skeptic says: not much! Any thoughts folks? tag:odeo.com,2009-11-04,25404013 Wed, 04 Nov 2009 19:45:15 -0800 no GigaOM android, google, Mobile, mobile phones, T-Mobile USA, App Stores http://odeo.com/episodes/25404014-What-I-Learned-About-Entrepreneurship-From-Watching-the-World-Series-of-Poker I can’t play poker, but I do enjoy watching it on TV. We’re in the middle of the 2009 World Series of Poker, an event that draws thousands of professional and amateur players to Las Vegas every year. The grand finale is the Main Event, a massive Texas Hold ’Em tournament with thousands of players and millions of dollars for the winner. Tournament poker used to be the province of professionals. But starting a few years ago, a huge wave of amateurs has invaded the game. As a result, of the thousands of entrants into the Main Event, only a few hundred are real pros. To my surprise, I’ve actually learned a lot about entrepreneurship from watching the World Series of Poker. But it shouldn’t be too surprising. Both rely on acting strategically under conditions of extreme uncertainty. And, in both, small changes in your odds of winning can have a big impact on the final outcome. In fact, I now routinely use the Main Event to help entrepreneurs cope with a frustrating paradox. Why are some ... I can’t play poker, but I do enjoy watching it on TV. We’re in the middle of the 2009 World Series of Poker, an event that draws thousands of professional and amateur players to Las Vegas every year. The grand finale is the Main Event, a massive Texas Hold ’Em tournament with thousands of players and millions of dollars for the winner. Tournament poker used to be the province of professionals. But starting a few years ago, a huge wave of amateurs has invaded the game. As a result, of the thousands of entrants into the Main Event, only a few hundred are real pros. To my surprise, I’ve actually learned a lot about entrepreneurship from watching the World Series of Poker. But it shouldn’t be too surprising. Both rely on acting strategically under conditions of extreme uncertainty. And, in both, small changes in your odds of winning can have a big impact on the final outcome. In fact, I now routinely use the Main Event to help entrepreneurs cope with a frustrating paradox. Why are some terrible entrepreneurs so successful? Because the structural barriers to creating a high-tech startup have been lowered dramatically in the past few years, we’re experiencing a huge influx of entrepreneurs. This is a great thing. But it’s meant that there are an awful lot of startup stories floating around. When those stories take on the status of myths, they create tremendous confusion. Naturally, we want to emulate those that have been successful. But that’s not always a good idea. In the World Series of Poker, no professional has won the Main Event in seven years. When you think about it, this is very surprising. Professional players are so much better than amateurs that they can make a living – in many cases, becoming very very rich – by exploiting the difference between their level of skill and the level of the people they play with. The best of the best win many tournaments each year. By any objective measure, they are much better players than the amateurs. Yet the Main Event has been won year in and year out by a complete unknown player. Some of those amateurs go on to become semi-pro players. But most have never won another tournament after their big win. Why? The reason is that being a professional player shifts the odds of winning a given poker hand in the professional’s favor, just a little bit. Over the course of a year, a given pro will play thousands of poker hands, and so this shift in probabilities adds up to dramatic winnings. But on any given hand, they still have a significant probability of losing — even if their play is perfect. Similarly, given enough amateurs in the field, the law of large numbers means that at least some of them will get lucky enough times to outperform even the best pros. That’s why I can say with some certainty that an amateur will win the Main Event this year, even though I have absolutely no idea which of the six thousand entrants it will be. Entrepreneurship is similar. So much of what makes a startup successful is totally out of our control: the timing of the market, the behavior of competitors, the IPO or M&A window, underlying technology trends and, of course, the human factors of investors, co-founders and employees. Truly successful startup methodologies like customer development or the lean startup can only hope to increase our odds of success — they can’t guarantee it. The converse is also true: even entrepreneurs who do everything wrong sometimes get lucky and make a lot of money anyway. Some even do it repeatedly. That’s why, for any tactic or strategy — no matter how hare-brained — you can find some “proof” that it works in some company somewhere. That’s what makes processing startup advice so hard. Just because someone has had a success doesn’t necessarily mean they understand why they were successful at all. Which brings me to the second thing I’ve learned from the WSOP. It’s called a disciplined laydown. In poker, winning requires that your hand beats your opponents hand. The problem is that you don’t know what your opponent has. Amateur players often believe that their success depends on the quality of the cards they are dealt. Consequently, they fold their bad cards and wait for that one big hand to get their chips in with. Unfortunately, having a big hand doesn’t mean you’ll win — your opponent could have an even bigger hand. That’s why the most important skill in poker is not bluffing, counting cards, or computing the odds. It’s figuring out when you need to fold a big, big hand. Watching the pros do this on TV is amazing. Over time, they develop an uncanny instinct for knowing when they are beat, and not throwing more money after bad. In fact, once you realize that this is the most important skill in poker, it becomes clear that when professional players bet, they are really probing for information. Everything is calculated to help them figure out if their opponent has one of those big hands that might beat them. Folding in those situations saves chips that can be used more profitably later in the tournament. I think there’s some wisdom here for entrepreneurs, too. We get attached to our big ideas, but it’s those big visions that get us into trouble. Just because we’ve sunk a lot of time and energy into an idea doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good one. In fact, the main reason we need to get out of the building and validate our ideas is so that we can realize we’re beat before it’s too late and pivot. Once you have that insight, you realize that all of the work we’re doing in building an initial idea — from minimum viable product to split-testing to customer validation — is all designed, like the bets of a poker pro, to promote learning about where we stand. And that provides another possibility for dealing with startup advice. Instead of making an exhaustive search for all the smartest, most successful people and copying them — learn to place small bets. Take any advice (including mine), and think it through for yourself. Do you understand the underlying principles? Can you see how it applies to your specific context? Can you tease apart the impact of luck? And, once you think you have some advice you might like to follow, try it out. Find a way to pilot it without betting your whole company. And then be prepared to fold if it’s not working. Each time, make sure you do a root cause analysis, and figure out what you learned. And, if you find advice that seems to work, be ready to go all-in. Eric Ries is a serial entrepreneur and author of the blog Startup Lessons Learned. Image courtesy Flickr user banspy I can’t play poker, but I do enjoy watching it on TV. We’re in the middle of the 2009 World Series of Poker, an event that draws thousands of professional and amateur players to Las Vegas every year. The grand finale is the Main Event, a massive Texas Hold ’Em tournament with thousands of players and millions of dollars for the winner. Tournament poker used to be the province of professionals. But starting a few years ago, a huge wave of amateurs has invaded the game. As a result, of the thousands of entrants into the Main Event, only a few hundred are real pros. To my surprise, I’ve actually learned a lot about entrepreneurship from watching the World Series of Poker. But it shouldn’t be too surprising. Both rely on acting strategically under conditions of extreme uncertainty. And, in both, small changes in your odds of winning can have a big impact on the final outcome. In fact, I now routinely use the Main Event to help entrepreneurs cope with a frustrating paradox. Why are some terrible entrepreneurs so successful? Because the structural barriers to creating a high-tech startup have been lowered dramatically in the past few years, we’re experiencing a huge influx of entrepreneurs. This is a great thing. But it’s meant that there are an awful lot of startup stories floating around. When those stories take on the status of myths, they create tremendous confusion. Naturally, we want to emulate those that have been successful. But that’s not always a good idea. In the World Series of Poker, no professional has won the Main Event in seven years. When you think about it, this is very surprising. Professional players are so much better than amateurs that they can make a living – in many cases, becoming very very rich – by exploiting the difference between their level of skill and the level of the people they play with. The best of the best win many tournaments each year. By any objective measure, they are much better players than the amateurs. Yet the Main Event has been won year in and year out by a complete unknown player. Some of those amateurs go on to become semi-pro players. But most have never won another tournament after their big win. Why? The reason is that being a professional player shifts the odds of winning a given poker hand in the professional’s favor, just a little bit. Over the course of a year, a given pro will play thousands of poker hands, and so this shift in probabilities adds up to dramatic winnings. But on any given hand, they still have a significant probability of losing — even if their play is perfect. Similarly, given enough amateurs in the field, the law of large numbers means that at least some of them will get lucky enough times to outperform even the best pros. That’s why I can say with some certainty that an amateur will win the Main Event this year, even though I have absolutely no idea which of the six thousand entrants it will be. Entrepreneurship is similar. So much of what makes a startup successful is totally out of our control: the timing of the market, the behavior of competitors, the IPO or M&A window, underlying technology trends and, of course, the human factors of investors, co-founders and employees. Truly successful startup methodologies like customer development or the lean startup can only hope to increase our odds of success — they can’t guarantee it. The converse is also true: even entrepreneurs who do everything wrong sometimes get lucky and make a lot of money anyway. Some even do it repeatedly. That’s why, for any tactic or strategy — no matter how hare-brained — you can find some “proof” that it works in some company somewhere. That’s what makes processing startup advice so hard. Just because someone has had a success doesn’t necessarily mean they understand why they were successful at all. Which brings me to the second thing I’ve learned from the WSOP. It’s called a disciplined laydown. In poker, winning requires that your hand beats your opponents hand. The problem is that you don’t know what your opponent has. Amateur players often believe that their success depends on the quality of the cards they are dealt. Consequently, they fold their bad cards and wait for that one big hand to get their chips in with. Unfortunately, having a big hand doesn’t mean you’ll win — your opponent could have an even bigger hand. That’s why the most important skill in poker is not bluffing, counting cards, or computing the odds. It’s figuring out when you need to fold a big, big hand. Watching the pros do this on TV is amazing. Over time, they develop an uncanny instinct for knowing when they are beat, and not throwing more money after bad. In fact, once you realize that this is the most important skill in poker, it becomes clear that when professional players bet, they are really probing for information. Everything is calculated to help them figure out if their opponent has one of those big hands that might beat them. Folding in those situations saves chips that can be used more profitably later in the tournament. I think there’s some wisdom here for entrepreneurs, too. We get attached to our big ideas, but it’s those big visions that get us into trouble. Just because we’ve sunk a lot of time and energy into an idea doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good one. In fact, the main reason we need to get out of the building and validate our ideas is so that we can realize we’re beat before it’s too late and pivot. Once you have that insight, you realize that all of the work we’re doing in building an initial idea — from minimum viable product to split-testing to customer validation — is all designed, like the bets of a poker pro, to promote learning about where we stand. And that provides another possibility for dealing with startup advice. Instead of making an exhaustive search for all the smartest, most successful people and copying them — learn to place small bets. Take any advice (including mine), and think it through for yourself. Do you understand the underlying principles? Can you see how it applies to your specific context? Can you tease apart the impact of luck? And, once you think you have some advice you might like to follow, try it out. Find a way to pilot it without betting your whole company. And then be prepared to fold if it’s not working. Each time, make sure you do a root cause analysis, and figure out what you learned. And, if you find advice that seems to work, be ready to go all-in. Eric Ries is a serial entrepreneur and author of the blog Startup Lessons Learned. Image courtesy Flickr user banspy tag:odeo.com,2009-11-04,25404014 Wed, 04 Nov 2009 17:00:36 -0800 no GigaOM Startups, Entrepreneurship, innovation, World Series of Poker http://odeo.com/episodes/25402135-If-the-Data-Center-Is-the-Computer-the-Fight-Is-on-to-Control-the-Ecosystem Liquid Computing, a startup going head-to-head with giants, today launched its own version of unified computing gear that stands in almost direct contrast to the announcements made yesterday by Cisco, EMC and VMware about Vblocks and the new Acadia services arm. Also today, HP laid out its vision and new software for a converged computing infrastructure, the heir to its adaptive infrastructure products of the last four years. These two announcements are the latest in a web of partnerships that are taking place in the data center infrastructure space as folks try to combine computer, storage and networking into some kind of monolithic compute fabric (GigaOM Pro subscription required). The end result of such efforts will be to make the data center function like a giant computer, and the fight is on to provide the component parts plus the OS. Liquid unveiled its Liquid Elements software that will work with Intel-based servers and NetApp storage gear. The software and Liquid’s swi... Liquid Computing, a startup going head-to-head with giants, today launched its own version of unified computing gear that stands in almost direct contrast to the announcements made yesterday by Cisco, EMC and VMware about Vblocks and the new Acadia services arm. Also today, HP laid out its vision and new software for a converged computing infrastructure, the heir to its adaptive infrastructure products of the last four years. These two announcements are the latest in a web of partnerships that are taking place in the data center infrastructure space as folks try to combine computer, storage and networking into some kind of monolithic compute fabric (GigaOM Pro subscription required). The end result of such efforts will be to make the data center function like a giant computer, and the fight is on to provide the component parts plus the OS. Liquid unveiled its Liquid Elements software that will work with Intel-based servers and NetApp storage gear. The software and Liquid’s switch can be combined to deliver the same sort of unified fabric computing that Cisco has been selling. Liquid differs from the Vblocks on offer through Cisco/EMC/VMware in that the software can run on any Intel-based server, either virtualized or in a bare metal implementation, said Vikram Desai, CEO of Liquid Computing. Cisco’s servers use Intel chips, but they are all about running virtual machines. HP’s announcements focus on its version of the data center OS that it calls the Infrastructure Operating Environment, its FlexFabric Virtual I/O, and what it calls Virtual Resource Pools, which is a not-that-fancy-way of saying virtualized clusters of server and storage hardware based on existing storage gear and operating systems. There’s also a piece that optimizes data center operations. However, on the server side, HP has a big limitation right now in that its Flex Fabric virtual I/O software only works with HP’s blade servers. So to really get the benefits of a converged network fabric, you’re gonna have to have HP blade for now. Doug Oathout, VP of Green IT at HP, says the company plans to make Flex Fabric work on other hardware, but offered no time line. What’s in Store for Storage That’s the server+networking side, so what’s happening in storage? HP’s Virtual resource pools are pretty compelling in that they can work with any hypervisor and can accommodate applications that are running on bare metal servers without virtualization and a variety of storage gear. HP today also announced its HP X9000 boxes which contain software from its IBRIX acquisition. They offer enterprises the ability to create up to 16 petabytes of virtualized storage. It’s like having the ability to open a door in any room in your home and find an empty walk-in closet when needed. On the storage side, Cisco’s servers can see it, but they can’t control or talk to the storage infrastructure. That’s why it needs EMC and VMware working with it to make a truly unified platform. Liquid Element can talk to any Ethernet-based storage gear, although it works best with storage from NetApp. When it comes to services, HP will help you figure out how to build out this converged infrastructure and Liquid will rely on selling though channels. The creation of Acadia may signal that Cisco was having a hard time selling its equipment into organizations through a channel that couldn’t figure out how to make its gear work, Liquid’s Desai pointed out. It also may show how deals whereby large IT vendors have snapped up systems integrators (Dell buying Perot Systems or HP buying EDS) have forced Cisco to offer its own services arm in order to push its gear where those others may not. As cloud computing and delivering IT on demand get taken over by the larger vendors, and are made palatable for enterprise customers, companies from small to large are cobbling together their vision for this highly virtualized data center infrastructure that basically acts and thinks like one big computer. Given how different the products are when it comes to openness and working with other equipment, it looks like we’re heading for a Mac vs. PC fight in the data center. Liquid Computing, a startup going head-to-head with giants, today launched its own version of unified computing gear that stands in almost direct contrast to the announcements made yesterday by Cisco, EMC and VMware about Vblocks and the new Acadia services arm. Also today, HP laid out its vision and new software for a converged computing infrastructure, the heir to its adaptive infrastructure products of the last four years. These two announcements are the latest in a web of partnerships that are taking place in the data center infrastructure space as folks try to combine computer, storage and networking into some kind of monolithic compute fabric (GigaOM Pro subscription required). The end result of such efforts will be to make the data center function like a giant computer, and the fight is on to provide the component parts plus the OS. Liquid unveiled its Liquid Elements software that will work with Intel-based servers and NetApp storage gear. The software and Liquid’s switch can be combined to deliver the same sort of unified fabric computing that Cisco has been selling. Liquid differs from the Vblocks on offer through Cisco/EMC/VMware in that the software can run on any Intel-based server, either virtualized or in a bare metal implementation, said Vikram Desai, CEO of Liquid Computing. Cisco’s servers use Intel chips, but they are all about running virtual machines. HP’s announcements focus on its version of the data center OS that it calls the Infrastructure Operating Environment, its FlexFabric Virtual I/O, and what it calls Virtual Resource Pools, which is a not-that-fancy-way of saying virtualized clusters of server and storage hardware based on existing storage gear and operating systems. There’s also a piece that optimizes data center operations. However, on the server side, HP has a big limitation right now in that its Flex Fabric virtual I/O software only works with HP’s blade servers. So to really get the benefits of a converged network fabric, you’re gonna have to have HP blade for now. Doug Oathout, VP of Green IT at HP, says the company plans to make Flex Fabric work on other hardware, but offered no time line. What’s in Store for Storage That’s the server+networking side, so what’s happening in storage? HP’s Virtual resource pools are pretty compelling in that they can work with any hypervisor and can accommodate applications that are running on bare metal servers without virtualization and a variety of storage gear. HP today also announced its HP X9000 boxes which contain software from its IBRIX acquisition. They offer enterprises the ability to create up to 16 petabytes of virtualized storage. It’s like having the ability to open a door in any room in your home and find an empty walk-in closet when needed. On the storage side, Cisco’s servers can see it, but they can’t control or talk to the storage infrastructure. That’s why it needs EMC and VMware working with it to make a truly unified platform. Liquid Element can talk to any Ethernet-based storage gear, although it works best with storage from NetApp. When it comes to services, HP will help you figure out how to build out this converged infrastructure and Liquid will rely on selling though channels. The creation of Acadia may signal that Cisco was having a hard time selling its equipment into organizations through a channel that couldn’t figure out how to make its gear work, Liquid’s Desai pointed out. It also may show how deals whereby large IT vendors have snapped up systems integrators (Dell buying Perot Systems or HP buying EDS) have forced Cisco to offer its own services arm in order to push its gear where those others may not. As cloud computing and delivering IT on demand get taken over by the larger vendors, and are made palatable for enterprise customers, companies from small to large are cobbling together their vision for this highly virtualized data center infrastructure that basically acts and thinks like one big computer. Given how different the products are when it comes to openness and working with other equipment, it looks like we’re heading for a Mac vs. PC fight in the data center. tag:odeo.com,2009-11-04,25402135 Wed, 04 Nov 2009 15:18:43 -0800 no GigaOM dell, Cisco, vmware, hp, infrastructure, EDS, EMC, Liquid computing http://odeo.com/episodes/25402137-Leaked-Photos-of-Microsoft%E2%80%99s-Courier-Are-Eye-Popping Microsoft’s Courier booklet device looks quite slick indeed in a collection of leaked photos Gizmodo posted today. The images are clearly from a document that explains Courier’s interface. These aren’t the first pictures that have been leaked of the device, but they provide the most complete guide to what it will be capable of. It’s clear from the photos of the Courier that Microsoft intends it to serve multiple purposes, and that the device is not limited to being an e-book reader or standard tablet. If Apple’s rumored tablet comes to fruition, it could also face significant competition from the gadget. Gizmodo supplies some interesting specs for the device: The dual 7-inch (or so) screens are multitouch, and designed for writing, flicking and drawing with a stylus, in addition to fingers. They’re connected by a hinge that holds a single iPhone-esque home button. Statuses, like wireless signal and battery life, are displayed along the rim of one ... Microsoft’s Courier booklet device looks quite slick indeed in a collection of leaked photos Gizmodo posted today. The images are clearly from a document that explains Courier’s interface. These aren’t the first pictures that have been leaked of the device, but they provide the most complete guide to what it will be capable of. It’s clear from the photos of the Courier that Microsoft intends it to serve multiple purposes, and that the device is not limited to being an e-book reader or standard tablet. If Apple’s rumored tablet comes to fruition, it could also face significant competition from the gadget. Gizmodo supplies some interesting specs for the device: The dual 7-inch (or so) screens are multitouch, and designed for writing, flicking and drawing with a stylus, in addition to fingers. They’re connected by a hinge that holds a single iPhone-esque home button. Statuses, like wireless signal and battery life, are displayed along the rim of one of the screens. On the back cover is a camera, and it might charge through an inductive pad, like the Palm Touchstone charging dock for Pre. It’s worth taking a tour of the photo gallery and considering the possibilities that are evident from the user interface. Check the shots out here, and the leaked video here. Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference (PDC) is coming up in mid-November, and there are supposed to be some big announcements. Could Courier be among them? Microsoft’s Courier booklet device looks quite slick indeed in a collection of leaked photos Gizmodo posted today. The images are clearly from a document that explains Courier’s interface. These aren’t the first pictures that have been leaked of the device, but they provide the most complete guide to what it will be capable of. It’s clear from the photos of the Courier that Microsoft intends it to serve multiple purposes, and that the device is not limited to being an e-book reader or standard tablet. If Apple’s rumored tablet comes to fruition, it could also face significant competition from the gadget. Gizmodo supplies some interesting specs for the device: The dual 7-inch (or so) screens are multitouch, and designed for writing, flicking and drawing with a stylus, in addition to fingers. They’re connected by a hinge that holds a single iPhone-esque home button. Statuses, like wireless signal and battery life, are displayed along the rim of one of the screens. On the back cover is a camera, and it might charge through an inductive pad, like the Palm Touchstone charging dock for Pre. It’s worth taking a tour of the photo gallery and considering the possibilities that are evident from the user interface. Check the shots out here, and the leaked video here. Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference (PDC) is coming up in mid-November, and there are supposed to be some big announcements. Could Courier be among them? tag:odeo.com,2009-11-04,25402137 Wed, 04 Nov 2009 14:47:00 -0800 no GigaOM microsoft, photos, hardware, e-book, pdc, tablet, courier