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
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
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
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
You can read excerpts from AT&T filing to the FCC on their website. AT&T claims with the purchase of T-Mobile there’ll be fewer dropped and …
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.
Last week the FCC made it official: they’ve opened a new docket—that would be 11-65—for the “proposed transfer of control of T-Mobile USA, Inc. and its subsidiaries from Deutsche Telekom AG to AT&T Inc.”
Let the ex-parte comments and presentations flow.Continue reading
I thought I recognized one of the developers at Sunday’s NYC Startup Weekend final presentations. It took an email from Animotion developer Jerry Gabra to …
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
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
They gather at their East Village temple to listen to their leaders chant arcane codes involving greek letters as they attempt to divine the future.
I am of course referring to the NYC Predictive Analytics monthly meetup held at the 6th floor of 770 Broadway, AOL headquarters.
I stopped by last night to see if I could learn how to create my own digital crystal ball. Continue reading
Is it the right time to put together a golden oldies album of our public phone system’s greatest app hits?
I think so. Even the FCC is currently scrutinizing carrier comments on sunsetting the copper wires and rusting switches that gave us five 9’s of dial-tone.Continue reading
I launched my own StartUp Week festivities by attending last night’s Entrepreneur Panel at NYU’s Kaufman Auditorium, a place I’ve become quite familiar with lately.
Having reached saturation on pure software startups, I decided to take in the Biotech-Cleantech-Social panel that was scheduled for the second half.
I wanted to hear, for a change, about entrepreneurs who made or had more intimate connection with actual physical stuff, in this case drug molecules, smart thermostats, and software that maps and helps preserve flora and fauna, the organic stuff of the world.Continue reading
Telecom companies have long held dominance over the way we communicate, specifically by controlling phone calls. The Internet is threatening to change this entirely – …
IP transmission, in itself, is not ‘magic pixie dust’ that somehow creates a regulation-free zone.