Economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin has filed his $.02 in the FCC’s AT&T/T-Mobile docket.
According to Eakin, who was John McCain’s economic adviser on the campaign trail:
You can read the rest of his letter below.Continue reading
Xydo, the social news web site, opened its beta to the public last week.
I’ve been using this news feed aggregator for the last few months, and if you think it’s easy to keep track of which subscriber likes which particular news nugget, there’s 34 slides to prove you wrong.
Robert Blumen and Nanda Yadav of Xydo gave a presentation at NYC Tech Talks in April on how node.js and Hadoop clusters keep the whole show going:Continue reading
If Virtual Office Solo had been worked out by a few moonlighting developers, and the founder lined up some angel investors and delivered a cool presentation at say New York Tech Meetup, it would be getting a lot more attention from all the usual tech sites.
Solo was instead launched by 8×8, a NASDAQ-traded company that has a long history as a VoIP service provider. Remembered by some (including me) for their residential VoIP service, called Packet8, they’ve since refocused their efforts on the business market.
With Virtual Office Solo, 8×8 now has a simple, ready-to-go browser-based softphone coupled with a virtual phone number that’s designed to appeal to teeny businesses.
I received a demo account from the 8×8 crew yesterday, and have been playing around with this inexpensive ($7.99/ month) service in my spare moments.Continue reading
I just received my beta invite to use Office 365, “the next generation in cloud productivity that brings together Microsoft Office, SharePoint Online, Exchange Online and Lync Online in an always-up-to-date cloud service.”
Imagine: all that Microsoft goodness now available on any browser! Continue reading
Long-time hosted PBX provider 8×8 has some enticing news today. They’re offering a basic cloud-based phone system, Virtual Office Solo, for $7.99 month.
Solo is meant for tiny startups and entrepreneurs who just need a PSTN line to the outside world along with a few call handling tricks.
Their browser-based softphone lets subscribers click through three-way calling, call forwarding, Internet faxing, call recording, and visual voice mail. There’s also call waiting (with music-on-hold) for juggling multiple incoming callers.Continue reading
A year later, I’m still smarting over the loss of UJAM, the software that makes music from off-pitch voices, to Soluto, the (gasp) Windows utility at last year’s TechCrunch Disrupt.
The show is back in town May 23 – May 25 at Pier 94. Startup battlefield, lots of A-list speakers (Armstrong, Crowley, Dixon, Conway), and a hackathon.Continue reading
With an alpha invite in my inbox, and since I haven’t seen enough videos in my lifetime, I tuned into Shelby.tv.
Shelby’s premise, from what I understand, is that you don’t know which videos to watch, but your social network— Twitter and Facebook pals—instead holds the key to your viewing preferences.
Shelby works by pulling in videos that have been posted by cohorts. Unfortunately, my Twitter network, which includes lots of telecom and tech companies, is not a media watching kind of group.
So Shelby could find just two links, and then played the videos over and over and over again.
Apparently someone in my social graph had tweeted a music video link to “I just had sex” by The Lonely Island.
Could it be Twilio—they seem awfully happy lately? Or perhaps this is a bit of clever marketing by BridesView?Continue reading
Stevens Institute held its Research and Entrepreneurship Day conference this past Friday.
It was a chance for this engineering school to give the public a peek at tech projects that have been incubated by professors and students with the goal to commercialize the university’s IP.
Project such as CADEyes (dimensional maps from lasers and cameras), Attila (broadband technology that grabs simultaneous bandwidth from multiple networks), and other efforts were presented during the afternoon’s Venture Forum.
I wasn’t able to make it.
However, one of the spin-off companies, called Instream Media, which developed algorithms to detect deception in text communication, has software that can be tested by anyone.
I decided to give it a try.Continue reading
My world was shaken a little when Amazon’s Elastic Computing Cloud or EC2 collapsed two weeks ago, temporarily closing the doors on such sites as Quora, Reddit, FourSquare, and others.
The trigger appears to have been a mysterious network event that occurred at Amazon’s “USA-EAST-1” availability zone, leading to delays in Amazon’s EBS and eventually bringing the show to a stop.
If you are not familiar with AWS—oh sorry, Amazon Web Services—and its terminology then most of the accounts in the news may have left you more, not less, anxious about the state of cloud computing.
Because I recently completed a DIY project (see reference below) in which I tested a very intriguing open-source SIP comm server called sipXecs (pronounced sipX, the ecs is silent) in Amazon’s EC2, my free-floating cloud concerns now settled on cloud telephony.Continue reading
