@NYC

Tech Meeting Across the River (Hoboken Tech Meetup)

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Hoboken Tech Meetup is a nice counterpoint to the goings on across the Hudson. Though I enjoy the big-city excitement of the NYC version, the Hoboken Meetup I went to last night at Stevens Institute’s Babbio Center also had its share of fun, Jersey style.

I loved when Michael Streko of Knowem (Belmar), social media trademark protection firm, said he sucked at Powerpoints before he launched into his speedy presentation, which had maybe two slides. I get it: we’re not fluff-meisters, we got products that sell and make money.

On this point, Streko stated that his site was profitable within an hour two hours after launch.

Take that NYC startups!Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

FCC Reminds Fox,CableVision of its Obligations

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On Friday, the FCC sent out a letter to Fox and Cablevision requesting both to state how they  are meeting their statutory obligations ( “to negotiate in good faith”) over their current retransmission dispute.  As Yankee fans are painfully aware, Cablevision and Fox had an agreement that expired on October 15 to carry WNYW, WWOR, and WTXF channels. Cablevision pulled its rebroadcasting of local MY 9 and Fox 5 television, which carries the Yankee games in the New York area, in a disagreement over its payments to Fox.

You can read the full letter after the jump.

It is powerful thing to see the public interest that’s written into the telecom laws being asserted with these two combatants. As a  former coworker of mine would sometimes remind us  during contentious meetings: where’s the customer’s voice in all this?Continue reading

@NYC

Bantam Live: A Look at Small Business CRM

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I just finished writing and posting my five favorite small business apps and then some underutilized neurons kicked in with the following thought:“wasn’t there a contact and project management tool that I had seen a few months back that looked promising?”

I searched through The Technoverse Blog’s Up Starts database to jog my memory and came across Bantam Live. It was slowly coming back to me.

I decided to gave this cloud-based social CRM app a closer look. My snap judgment after trialing it for under an hour:Bantam Live is a capable contact relationship management tool with the usual sales gears.

The social part comes about through Bantam’s ability to display a Twitter stream within the app and then allowing its users to import Twitter ids into the contact database. It’s a nice touch, and it will no doubt get used by sales folks scouring Twitter and Facebook for leads.Continue reading

@NYC

Five of Our Favorite Small Business Apps

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It is hard to keep track of all the startups that are emerging daily from apartments, hackathons, and incubators. And from within the ranks of unemployed workers, many are cranking out business plans and working out sales projections at their neighborhood Starbucks.

We are definitely in a new era of entrepreneurship. One factor that makes starting your own less of a dream and more of a practical reality is that the costs of IT infrastructure have dropped significantly in recent years. It’s just cheaper than ever to buy a phone system, establish a web presence, and build out administrative functions for sales and marketing.

I’ve come up with five web-based apps that bring IT for little or no cost to IT-less companies.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Voxeo’s Phono: Instant Softphone Using Javascript

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Yesterday at the jQuery Conference held in Boston, Voxeo announced its new plugin that “turns any web browser into a multi-channel communications platform.” Called Phono (rhymes with Tropo), this is a pure client-side solution that is simple enough to implement: just a few lines of HTML and you have a working softphone embedded in a browser page.

I repeat: this is a client-side solution that, unlike Tropo and Twilio, doesn’t involve any server-side complexities. Voxeo’s cloud does all the communications control!

I suspect at more than a few startups next week, the words “Phono” and “Voxeo” will be found scribbled on whiteboards.

There are other tantalizing things about the announcement. More on page two.Continue reading

The Rack

India to Develop OS

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Infosys’s HQ in Bangalore

The Economic Times reports that India’s Defense Research and Development Organization— is this the equivalent of the US’s DARPA?—has set up software centers in Delhi and Bangalore with a charter to develop a highly-secure operating system. The effort would involve partnerships with software companies in both these cities, as well as Hyderabad.

Dr V K Saraswat, Scientific Adviser to the Defence Minister, said that DRDO’s project has the goal to protect data from cyber attacks, and the only way to do that is with a “home-grown  system, a complete architecture” this is controlled by India.Continue reading

@NYC

Introspectr: Organizing Ambient Infomacy

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I’m in a neologistic, word-coining mood this morning.  Like you, I have one eye on my Tweetdeck, half-consciously absorbing facts, information, memes, and other synaptic nourishment that’s flowing around me. At some point in my day, I’m inevitably walking an idea back to its source, which involves unproductively scrolling through streams of posts.

Tipping my cap to early descriptions of Twitter and microblogging, I’m calling this phenomenon ambient infomacy. Well …  maybe this new word won’t happen, but you get the idea.

This is all to explain why introspectr, which demoed their Twitter and Facebook search tool at New York Tech Meetup on Tuesday, received my complete attention.

Continue reading

@NYC

Open Gov in NYC Gets a Big Boost

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I couldn’t make last night’s New York Tech Meetup in person, so I grabbed my laptop, settled into my sofa chair (after removing the cat), and watched the Livestream broadcast.  Besides liking introspectr (more on them in a later post), for me the most significant part of the evening’s entertainment was the official launch of NYC BigApps 2.0 contest.

As with last year’s first-ever competition, developers work with New York City’s open-gov data sets to create applications. The “most creative, best implemented, and impactful applications”, as judged by a panel of industry experts and leaders, will compete for $20,000  in prizes. The submission period ends January 12.

So what data sets are available to developers?
Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Cisco’s umi: Not for mi

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Cisco’s marketing department has continued their cuddly product naming  with the announcement of umi (pronounced you-me) last week. It’s basically Skype or in Cisco-speak, “telepresense,” for regular folks.

And by regular folks they mean TV-watchers with an Internet connection but without a laptop and video camera.  I’m sure Cisco business development crunched the numbers and decided there’s a ton of money selling  $600 set top boxes with a $24.99 monthly charge to this segment.

The other perpetrators involved in this scheme include BestBuy, which will sell the gear, and Verizon, which plans to resell the service to its Fios customers.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Scientific American: US Broadband is Awful

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Holy Heisenberg! Scientific American, the magazine better known for writing about dark holes and gene splicing, has editorialized earlier this month on the state of US broadband. While SA has in recent years taken on more topical subject matter, there opinionating on broadband was a bit of a surprise to this long-time reader.

Referring to a study from Harvard’s Berkman Center—I believe it’s the “Next-Generation Connectivity” report, which we’ve written about—and no doubt informed by pretty impressive advisers (over 140 Nobel laureates have written for SA), the editors point out the sorry state of US broadband.Continue reading

The Rack

Technoverse Blog to Cruz Reader: Basta!

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Trying to find a WiFi signal

I am back from my Italian adventure, enjoying every minute of walking down narrow Roman alleys, biking past Umbrian fields, and eating and drinking the riches of the campagna. I was undecided about bringing along the 7” Cruz Reader until the very last minute when my instinctual urges to check for emails won out.  I had a fully charged tablet when I left the US.

When I arrived at the hotel in Rome, Velocity Micro’s tablet didn’t have enough oomph to power on.  I began to notice a pattern. I would charge the slab for a few hours, use it for a bit, then go out and have my vacation. The next morning I would discover that the Reader had an uncanny ability to leak its charge overnight.  As they say in Italian: basta! (enough).Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Mapping Fun with FCC Data

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I wanted to get this post out before we close up shop for a small business-related trip. We’re taking off to study social networking issues in a beloved southern European country noted for its incredible contributions to art, culture,  food, and civilization as we know it. We’ll be back on October 10.

To the matter at hand … mapping FCC competitive data. I had been looking for a better way to show and share this regulatory agency’s “477” records on ISP competition. I then discovered the potent Google Maps Data APIs, which let you send and receive geo data as a feed. With access to the feed and using Google mapping software, data can be viewed, analyzed, and even updated by large distributed groups.  It’s really an amazing tool.

So with a little bit of effort I loaded competitive ISP data for suburban NJ into a shared Google Map. I’ve conveniently embedded it into this post.Continue reading

The Rack

Cruz Reader:Tablet Lite

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I was hoping to enter the Android-age this week courtesy of Velocity Micro’s $199 Cruz Reader. The Reader arrived yesterday on my porch sometime during a late afternoon editorial meeting. I excitedly opened up the UPS cardboard to be teased by the words “Unlimited Possibilities” printed on the Cruz’s product packaging.

I haven’t purchased that much gadgetry in recent years, but I do recall that my cell phone  came with a fairly thick operating manual. The Cruz Reader takes a more minimalist approach, providing you with a single-page folded booklet. I couldn’t find much more on-line, so I assumed this is a completely intuitive device that will guide my fingers in doing the work.

After booting up and then adjusting the touch calibration setting, I found that I couldn’t get the Cruz Reader to respond. I thought I had paper-weighted this thing. My fingers told me to reboot this mini-tablet by pressing the silvery on-off button on the side. I learned later that I was actually just putting it into a kind of sleep mode.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Avaya Flare: Can Android Enterprise Tablets Thrive?

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As expected,  Avaya announced yesterday that its “chameleon” video device is in fact … a tablet computer. And not surprisingly it runs  Android OS (2.1 for the record). It is larger than Cisco’s previously announced Cius (11.6″ versus 7″). Both share a 1.6 GHz Intel Atom processors. I can go on, but for a rundown of the specs, see Network World‘s nice comparison table.

The hardware and OS are just the stage and props for the real act: the “Flare Experience,” which is Avaya’s voice, video, and data collaboration extravaganza. And based on the slickly prepared video presentation I saw, it is a nicely designed app that makes unified communications—as it’s called in the enterprise world—a working reality. An “A” to Avaya on this effort.

I didn’t see a live demo of Flare in the hands of a reviewer, so it’s hard to know what this is really like. Keep in mind that Android’s Froyo (their latest release) is, in the words of Google’s director of mobile products Hugo Barra, “not optimized for tablet use.”

Another fact to consider: The Flare is priced— for now anyway—at somewhere between $1500 – $2000. Cisco’s Cius is pegged at around $1000.Continue reading

@NYC

Kodingen: Free, Easy Web Development Environment

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I missed this month’s New York Tech Meetup due to a previous engagement that was scheduled over 5000 years ago. By the way, Matt Merriam has a nice summary of September’s NYTM demos. One of the startups, Kodingen, caught my attention. It is a free web development environment that encourages a community to provide support and cheering. I filed this away.

I was intrigued by the recent release of the FCC’s open APIs for accessing competitive ISP data. I had already hacked out—I am not a developer by any means— tools for graphically displaying the FCC’s “477” data on Google Maps (see references below). Could I somehow combine this all into a single project and perhaps use the amazing Google Maps Data infrastructure for sharing my results?

A tall order.  That’s when I brought Kodingen back to the head of my to-do list, and so I registered on the site to see what I’d be up against.  In fact, this is a delightfully simple open-source environment to work in.

Nothing against my current hosting service, Bluehost, but I was able to start working almost immediately in Kodingen without any of the usual obstacles and annoyances.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

1 Gbps in Chattanooga

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I practically did a spit take while drinking my coffee this morning and reading The New York Times story about a municipal broadband project in Tennessee.  I learned that  Chattanooga’s  community owned power provider, EPB, has plans to offer up to 1 Gigabit per second  to its fiber-to-the-home subscribers by the end of the year. True, that can cost you almost $350 per year (lower if you bundle in voice and video).

I checked some of the pricing of their various service bundles—a classic triple-play of voice, video, and data—on the EPB website, and the packages are quite competitive: 30 Mbps data, enhanced video, and voice for $111.

This is a big win for non-profit fiber projects nationwide. And possibly a leading candidate for winning Google’s Fiber for Communities contest to build and test an  ultra-high speed network.

By the way, it appears that Comcast was at one point the sole  broadband and cable video provider for Chattanooga.Continue reading