@NYC

sitesimon Gets Modest

 

I wasn’t brave enough for sitesimon, the browser add-on that lets you share your click stream with the world.

To accommodate me and the millions of other shy people of the world, the crew at sitesimon updated their model to allow for more selective publishing.

In adopting a traditional following-follower approach, subscribers to this service can choose to reveal their URLs to just their loyal friends and followers.

Or if they prefer to go radio silent for awhile, they can adjust their profile to hide their web activity altogether.Continue reading

@NYC

NYC Startup Weekend Follow-up: BridesView

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I had a brief chat this afternoon with Alex one of the co-founders of BridesView, the wedding site that picked up an honorable mention at NYCSW last month.

Alex told me he will be following through on his vision of a photo-intensive web experience that captures the dreaminess of weddings, along with offering some practical tips on where to find all the wedding accoutrements.

After I got off the phone, I took a quick peek at iVillage, a potential competitor. Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Douglas Holtz-Eakin: AT&T Is Not a Monopoly

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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:

If this merger is approved by the FCC and the Federal Trade Commission, no monopoly will dominate the telecommunications market. T-Mobile was hardly the only competitor and AT&T still must compete with its main national rival, Verizon.

You can read the rest of his letter below.Continue reading

The Rack, Uncategorized

Xydo’s Innards

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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

Archaic Telecom

Virtual Office Solo: Cool Startup Project from 8×8

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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

Archaic Telecom

$7.99/month for Cloud Telephony. Interested?

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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

@NYC

TechCrunch Disprupt Is Back in Town

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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

@NYC

I Just Had Shelby.tv

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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

@NYC

Venture Forum in Hoboken: Stevens’ Research Day

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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

Archaic Telecom

Cloud Telephony: High Availability with sipXecs

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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

Archaic Telecom

So Who Invented the Cell Phone Again?

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CNET has gone on a spelunking expedition into the recent AT&T FCC filing and brought a few things up to the surface. One nugget that caught my attention is from a document written by AT&T’s Chief Technology Officer, John Donovan.

Donovan says AT&T “invented the first mobile phone and the first mobile network”.

Wait, wasn’t there another company involved? It will come back to me.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Group Conferencing Startups: Pay the USF Fees

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It’s a slow afternoon here, so I had a little time  to consider one mind-numbing regulatory aspect of the growing number of group messaging and conferencing startups.

Eventually when these companies (Fast Society, Group.me, et. al) start charging for their services—most of them don’t now—my understanding is that they will be required to file an FCC Form 499.

Ok, so it was a very slow day.

Remember Form 499? That’s where providers of telecommunications for pay—and that includes call conferencing services—tell the FCC about their VoIP revenues apportioned to interstate connections.

And then our regulators calculate how much money is owed to the Universal Service Fund kitty.Continue reading

Social Studies

Radiolab’s "Good" Explains Social Networking

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If you’ve not ever heard of political scientist Robert Axelrod and his computer modeling of altruism in the early 1980s, immediately go and listen to the podcast of a RadioLab show—public radio’s best hour— entitled “Good.”

Do that now.

Skip to around the 41 minute mark, and you’ll hear the start of Jad and Robert chatting with Axelrod. Aside: Often when I read something interesting, I imagine it spoken in a Robert Krulwich voice to decide if it would make a worthy post.

Anyway, “Good” is the best popular introduction I’ve come across as to why we’ve evolved to be civil to others.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Cisco’s ‘Epic’ CRS-3 is One Year Old

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How could I have missed that birthday? I’ll have to send the CRS-3 a belated card.

You may recall that Cisco raised expectations just a little a year ago when it proclaimed that it would reveal a product that would change the Internet forever.

My sources tell me that Internet has said it doesn’t feel too much different.

Continue reading

The Rack

Royal Wedding on YouTube

 

Reuters reports that the Royal Wedding, scheduled for April 29, will be live streamed on YouTube over the The Royal Channel.

Remote commoners will be able to watch and even interact with all the pomp and ceremony.Continue reading

@NYC

NYC Startup Weekend Finale: 2 Hours, 20+ Presentations

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Did I really hear 20 or so presentations in a little over 2 hours at the conclusion of NYC Startup Weekend?

According to my barely legible notes, scribbled while standing up in the very crowded kitchen area in General Assembly’s co-working space, I had a few insightful comments on each one of them.

My quick, emotional assessments differed from the judges: I didn’t quite ‘get’ PlayMob, the first place winner; dismissed too quickly the second place winner, WeTrip.it, the on-line group vacation piggy bank, and perhaps let my group conference calling prejudices get in the way of appreciating third-place Bridg.me.

No matter, I was impressed with many of the pitches, amazed at what Red-Bull fueled developers could accomplish in 48 hours, and learned that even cold NYC falafels still taste really good.Continue reading