Archaic Telecom

Good VoIP Choices from Ars Technica

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Ars Technica, a favorite read of mine, answered a question yesterday from a reader seeking a VoIP solution for a remote office situation.  In the “Ask Ars” column, Jon Stokes provides a few cloud-based telephony providers that should be familiar to readers of this blog.

Stokes approves of Junction Networks’ OnSip, which by the way is the service used by Ars as well as by Technoverse’s editorial offices, and 8×8’s Virtual Office.

He even talks about using SIP softphones with these services,  and there’s a mention of Asterisk, the PBX software project (but nothing on SipXecs)

It’s a good run down and worth a read.Continue reading

@NYC

Brief Interlude at CE Week, NYC

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The Consumer Electronics Association, better known for its giant show in Las Vegas, launched its first CE Week in New York City.

There are events around the city for the next few days, including CEA Research Day at the Time Warner Building (today, actually), Digital Downtown (hey, isn’t that NYTM’s Nate Westheimer on the speaker list?), and the CEA Line Show, where the public gets to peek at the newest multi-media gear and gadgetry.

I was in attendance yesterday and saw booth after booth of electronica and other A/V hardware–speakers, headsets, televisions, tripods, solar powered radios.

One couldn’t help but notice that 3D is a major theme for the television industry.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Download Speed Competition: US Is Definitely Not Number 1

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It’s not news that US broadband speeds ain’t world-class.

For confirmation, check the OECD’s (Organisation for Economic Cooporation and Development) extensive data sets culled from the advertised speeds of ISPs across many countries.

The spreadsheet I looked at, based on data from 2010, shows that US cable broadband performance is somewhere in the middle: ahead of France, Chile, Luxemborg, and Germany, but behind Estonia, Slovak Republic, Portugal and Finland.

Those last two, by the way, have the best speeds in Europe.

And let’s not even get into fiber bit rates.
Continue reading

@NYC

Fun with ThingLink

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Image hotspots have been around for a long time—since at least HTML3—and have allowed developers to add interactivity to graphics.

You know, hover over a state in a map of the US, see the name pop up, and then click to get routed to an informational page.

And of course, Flash and Silverlight have come along to provide ultimate interactivity and media capabilities. But the emphasis has always been on developers, especially with the aforementioned tools.

ThingLink is a San Francisco startup that is bringing hotspots, which they call Rich Media Tags, within reach of HTML- and ActionScript- challenged publishers.

That means bloggers, Tumblrs, etc. can quickly add linkable, position-aware icons to their pics.Continue reading

@NYC

Visiting Wanderfly Land

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Wanderfly, the travel planning site we like, has just signed up a few more media companies as curators.

It’s a mutually beneficial arrangement wherein the likes of Mashable, Jaunted (“celeb-favorite destinations”), Havaianas (“beaches that soothe your sole”), and my favorite, the History Channel, control a piece of Wanderfly’s web real estate.

From there the subject matter experts can make travel suggestions and perhaps History Channel curators can inspire readers to learn what really happened at the Circus Maximus or the Baths of Caracalla.

With this announcement, it seemed like the right time to take a deeper tour of Wanderfly.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Back at the FCC: Community Information Needs and Hurricanes

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The FCC released another paperweight-class report.

Entitled The Information Needs of Communities, this 478 pager (with footnotes) is “an in-depth analysis of the current state of the media landscape along with a broad range of recommendations.”

Produced by journalists, academics, entrepreneurs, and led by Steve Waldman, a former editor and the founder of Beliefnet, the report has the obviousities you would expect, including newspaper revenue has dropped, local TV is a not source of investigative reporting, and the Internet has reduced the cost of gathering and distributing news.Continue reading

Social Studies

Searching Quora with SMS (hat tip Twilio)

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So does Quora, the “continually improving” Q&A site, have a mobile app?

The answer is no: there really isn’t an official app yet.

I know because I searched Quora.

Anne Halsall, a product designer at Quora, said in response to the above question that an iPhone app is in the works, and then suggested a third-party app called Social Questions.

Dave Burkhart, who is a student and non-Quora employee and had provided another A in this thread, is the developer of this unofficial search software, which can be currently found in Apple’s store.

My journey through Quora in search of a Quora search app was started after I read a post in Twilio’s blog.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Avaya Files IPO: S-1 Paints a Bleak Picture

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I just took a peek at Avaya’s S-1 filing with the SEC.

To these admittedly non-financial eyes, this ain’t pretty.

We learn that this legacy PBX vendor, which had pinned its hopes on something called unified communications, ended its 2010 fiscal year last September with a net loss of over $800 million.

And it appears from their income performance for the first six months of 2011 that they are ahead of schedule: dripping red ink at the rate of $600 million.

On the balance sheet, they’ve accumulated around $6 billion in debt, a result of the pricey private equity buyout by Silver Lake and TPG in 2007 and then the purchase of Nortel’s Enterprise Solutions business in 2009.

Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Good Move AT&T: Free WiFi in NYC Parks

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New York City’s Mayor Bloomberg announced today an agreement with AT&T to provide free public WiFi service for the next five years in 20 city parks.

They’ll soon be coverage in parts of Manhattan’s Central Park, in Battery Park, along the trendy High Line, and Tompkins Square Park.

Thank you AT&T and New York City. Now I can realize my dream of checking emails on a non-3G Android tablet while strolling in “The Ramble”.

Brooklyn residents will be able to connect with AT&T’s WiFi in Prospect Park, Brooklyn Bridge Park, and Fort Greene Park.

On a related matter, their WiFi initiative takes some of the sting out of one of Sprint’s criticisms in its lengthy petition to deny the T-Mobile acquisition.Continue reading

Lunch Hour

Hot Afternoon Diversion: Entoforms

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An email from Dutch visual artist Dolf Veenvliet arrived at my inbox just at the right time.

With August weather making an early appearance in June, Veenvliet’s exotic and slightly creepy Entoforms roused me out of my weather-induced torpor.

Entoforms are imaginary life-forms that have been designed using Blender, the open-source 3D software, and have even been a given a kind of DNA by Veenvliet, in his role as creator.

I’m assuming that unlike the story of Genesis, Veenvliet’s work took more than a day. And as far as I know the Old Testament god was not using 3D printers, which is how the Entoforms become physical realizations.Continue reading

The Rack

Cloud Expo: It’s about IT Jobs

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I was at Cloud Expo yesterday in New York City.

I heard the keynote address entitled “Parting of the Clouds” from Dell’s Steve Shuckenbrock.

I sat through half of “Patterns of Cloud Computing” delivered by Microsoft’s Bill Zack.

And finally reached saturation 10 minutes into a breakout session led by Mark Wilkinson from HP.

My synapses were put into a deep freeze by the marketing blather (“flexibility”, “continuum”, “engaged in outcomes”, “end-user benefits” ) and mashed up metaphors (“an exclamation point on our journey”).

And the Javits Center’s generous WiFi terms ($4.95 for one hour) only validated my sense that delighting (to use a marketing-ism) attendees was not a concern of the Cloud Expo conference folks.Continue reading

The Rack

Monday Morning Cloud Computing

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I’ll be attending, on an occasional basis, Cloud Expo this week at the Javits Center in NYC.

Expect sporadic tweets and a few blog posts with accompanying photos.

Having never been to a cloud-centric event, I’m not sure what to make of its intensive agenda of seminars and generals sessions, whose subject matter has been promoted with titles such as “Beyond Storage and Compute”, “Clouds are Built from the Ground Up”, and the enticing “Best Practices for IT Executives”.

In other words, this is an enterprise focused gathering with subject matter meant for technologists and executives in the private sector.Continue reading

@NYC

Wanderfly Makes Time’s Top 10

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Last week at TechCrunch Disrupt, I had a chance to see the revamped Wanderfly.

Christy Liu, Wanderfly’s co-founder and Director of Marketing, put me behind the new dashboard of this visually intensive travel recommendation site as we looked for warmer spots while shivering during an unusual late May cold spell.

The photos I looked at for Italy (Rome, Venice, Sienna) are stunning.  And for my next job, I’d like to be the house photographer for Wanderfly.

I learned from Liu yesterday that Wanderfly made Time Inc.’s list of  “10 NYC Startups to Watch” and Entrepreneur magazine’s “100 Brilliant Companies”.  Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Why Else Would You Go to the Grand Canyon?

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There may be good arguments in support of AT&T’s acquisition of T-Mobile, but improved WiFi access in the Grand Canyon is not one of them.

But that’s the claim that the Grand Canyon Hotel Operators Association makes in its comment to the FCC.

In the words of this trade group: “What our beloved canyon does not have, however, is state of the art wireless broadband service.”

Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Back at the FCC: Sprint Files 377-Page Petition

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I’m going to review this massive petition to denial filing—redacted, though, for public viewing—over this short holiday week. Not surprisingly, Sprint Nextel is not happy with AT&T’s bid to swallow T-Mobile.

With the word duopoloy (according to my PDF search) showing up on 21 pages and anti-competitive on another 23 pages, I think you get an inkling of how this carrier feels.

And here’s a choice nugget from the beginning of this thing:Continue reading

The Rack

Quixey: Applification or Bust

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I like the idea of Quixey.

It has the Google-like cyclops interface —a single search box— but instead of searching the web, it’s looking for apps from the crowded shelves of mobile app stores.

I saw Quixey for the first time at TechCrunch Disrupt last week. I discovered this well funded company—cash from Eric Schmidt’s fund— around the corner from the Startup Alley area, in the more exclusive sponsored neighborhood.

After talking with the Quixey gang, I learned that instead of searching on app descriptions alone, their software culls blogs, forums, and social media to accumulate additional descriptive content.

So how does it do?Continue reading