The summer of 2008 has been the best of times and worst of times for cloud computing. Many companies –big and small - decided to throw in their lot with cloud computing, betting that it is the future of technology infrastructure. At the same time, cloud computing took its lumps as some of the early large-scale cloud applications hit the skids. Apple’s MobileMe went on a blink for many while the GMail blackout that left millions angry and frustrated. Even Amazon’s seemingly fool pr...

Looking at the proposed joint venture between European wireless chipmaker STMicroelectronics and equipment maker Ericsson this morning, all you need to know is that making wireless chips is no longer enough. The emphasis is shifting beyond the individual radios on a chip, to a platform that contain as much of the silicon-related radios as a phone or laptop needs, packaged neatly for consumption in a handset or on a 3G modem. It’s the difference between buying the individual tomatoes, onio...

A few months ago, Facebook and I called it quits after a lengthy but volatile relationship. After being in lust to the point where I visited Facebook several times a day, the social network service started to lose its appeal. The hype, the invitations to groups that have little purpose, the onslaught of productivity-killing applications, friend requests from total strangers, and the controversy over Beacon all started to be too much. So, we split up. It was over. There was no going back. It was ...

Cloud computing is based on a pay-as-you-go, self-provisioning utility model. Users are billed by the hour. On the other hand, software vendors are accustomed to shrinkwrap licenses, making it hard for cloud users to get the software they want on an on-demand basis. But as CNET reports, Microsoft has relaxed licensing for virtual machines licensing, opening the door for hosting providers to reinvent themselves as true clouds. Until now, Microsoft’s software was tied to a physical server. ...

Next week while I am in Israel, I will be attending a number of events including: August 27th - Breakfast with Jeff Pulver (and friends) in Tel Aviv. August 28th - The Tel Aviv-Yafo Entrepreneur Meetup Group - I’m the guest speaker. Details: http://entrepreneur.meetup.com/1174/. August 31st - amuta2.0 - Social Media for Not-for-Profits (in Jerusalem). I’m speaking at this event and I’m hosting a social media breakfast. For details, please see: http://amuta20.com/events/. When I’m not at the...

Remember not all that long ago when just about every computer notebook manufacturer was having problems with batteries — like catching on fire!  Now we have battery problems with cell phones!   Apple is blaming a problem its problem with overheating iPods in Japan on faulty batteries. In response to reports that Japan is investigating incidents of iPod nanos getting hot enough to scorch paper placed nearby, Apple acknowledged that “in very rare cases” first-gener...

We have received quite a few submissions for the Startup LaunchPad at our Mobilize 08 conference that is scheduled to be held on September 18, 2008 in San Francisco. I wanted to remind everyone that the deadline for applications ends tomorrow, August 20. We will announce a short list of companies on Monday, August 25. As a reminder, I want to stress the fact that you don’t need to be a venture-backed company. If you are a single developer with a great app and are ready to show off, you ar...

Who would have figured that Wal-Mart would have become the exclusive retailer for classic rock bands coming back to life? In the latest news in this area, the king of retailers revealed that the new AC/DC album, Black Ice, will be sold exclusively in Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club stores starting in late October. The deal is part of a wider strategy for the world’s biggest retailer to get exclusive deals to sell CDs. It is the latest album to be sold under such an arrangement, as Wal-Mart g...

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The music has stopped at Muxtape.com, the free, online music site that allows users to create a playlist or mixtape of up to 12 songs and share the list with friends. It was temporarily shutdown as the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) flexed its copyright protecting musclea. The Manhattan-based startup has informed users that it “will be unavailable for a brief period while we sort out a problem with the RIAA.” The RIAA has been cracking down on illegal shari...

If you think solar and wind power are important for decarbonizing the atmosphere and/or for reducing our need for expensive imported energy from dangerous places, then you ought to be in favor of a massive buildout of America’s electric grid. Too often self-styled environmentalists (not genuine environmentalists like you and me), are a significant obstacle to making alternative energy an actual achievable alternative to traditional energy sources. This sad story is told well in a Wall Str...

Got some nice news to share about a former client that hit the wires this morning. Micromethod Technologies is a tiny company most of you have never heard about, and they’ve been quietly doing some leading edge work in the SIP server space. Today, at their big industry event - SpeechTEK - Voxeo announced the acquisition of Micromethod. The news was a key highlight from their event today, and colleague Dan York provided a more detailed take on the Voxeo blog. Last year, Micromethod engaged ...

I must really suck at marketing. Rick Seagal is pondering the effect an Outlook Add-in would have in the conferencing world if it worked seemelessly with Outlook Calendar and simply called everyone at the time of the meeting. Rick has perfectly described the Lypp service and our Outlook Add-in. ...

VoSKY just announced the VoSKY Exchange Pro VISIP-EX, a SIP-to-Skype gateway product that bridges the Skype network with SIP-based IP-PBXs and SIP gateways. The VoSKY Exchange Pro VISIP-EX enables companies with SIP-enabled PBXs to add Skype trunks for inexpensive calling. This isn’t the first SIP-to-Skype gateway, I’ve written about others here, here, here, and here, however, this is the first “Skype-certified”, enterprise-grade PBX-to-Skype gateway for SIP networks. The...

Yesterday, Digium released version 1.2 for the Digium Asterisk Appliance 50 (AA50). It’s been awhile since I’ve heard any news about the AA50, so I’m glad to see Digium is still developing for the AA50 even with their new Switchvox-based AA60 appliance offering and their even newer AA300 & AA350 offerings. Actually, I discussed whether Digium’s AA60, AA300, and AA350 would compete against their original AA50 Asterisk appliance, which might be worth a read. In a nutshe...

Muxtape, a startup that quickly became a favorite of the Tumblr-set, has taken a nose dive, thanks to the machinations at RIAA. There are lot of folks bemoaning the loss of the service. To them, I have one word: 8Tracks. I talked to the New York-based startup’s founder, David Porter, formerly of Live365, a few weeks ago and he walked me through the service. I have been using it sporadically and, well, it works better than Muxtape. (Thrillist thinks so, too — take their word over a W...

Earth2Tech: Bill Clinton: 10 Things the U.S. Government Should Do For Clean Power. NewTeeVee: Ultimate bloke show, Top Gear, has its own YouTube channel. Awesome! jkOnTheRun: Houston, Texas has launched city wide WiFi. NewTeeVee: Vuclip is big on mobiles. Who knew? OStatic: Waiting for a new class of devices: Mozilla, ARM & Others. ...

OK, that is a bit over the top! Nielsen Mobile came out with a report that points out that there were 13 million mobile data cards in the U.S. at the end of June 2008. Not a big surprise, since wireless carriers in the U.S. are having a blockbuster year as far as mobile Internet revenues are concerned. The GigaOM Team has about seven of them and uses them for business and filing stuff when on the road. Apparently, so do a lot of people. However, Nielsen points out that there is a change in the ...

When I was growing up, my brother was one of those kids who would get into all kinds of trouble. Unlike the rest of us, however, he would escape the wrath of our parents by smiling or giving my mother a bear-hug. In many ways, Apple reminds me of my brother. No matter how often it drops the ball with a service (MobileMe) or product (3G Apple iPhone) that doesn’t work, batteries (iPod Nano, MacBook) that over-heat or slashing prices only a few months a product has been released (original iP...

I praise TRAI for proposing to open up the Indian market to VoIP. Yesterday in a big win for the VON Coalition and VoIP enthusiasts around the world, the Indian regulator TRAI issued its recommendation on “Issues Related to Internet Telephony.” The VON Coalition filed a comprehensive set of recommendation in June of this year in this proceeding arguing that they should open their market to VoIP and it appears that they have followed the thrust of their recommendations. TRAI is recom...

Who Wins: AT&T U-Verse or Verizon FiOS AT&T U-Verse Verizon FiOS Neither. Cable will still beat them Verizon recently launched its FiOS TV & fiber-based broadband service in New York City, The New York Times is taking stock of the service which seems to be doing well. Verizon’s $23 billion investment into wasn’t viewed kindly and Wall Street viewed AT&T’s cheaper U-Verse plan more practical and affordable. Despite that early s...

John McCain, in interview with Pastor Rick Warren, 8/16/08: ” . . . But the point is we have now had technological advances over the last twenty or thirty years in communications that are remarkable. It’s remarkable ability that our enemies have to communicate so we have to keep up with that capability. I mean there is too many ways — through cyberspace and through other ways — that people are able to communicate with one another so we’re gonna have to step up our c...

Lijit, a two-year-old startup based in Boulder, Colo., recently raised $7.1 million, bringing the total venture capital it has raised so far to a shade above $10 million. Whatever way you look at it, that is a lot of money for a company that on face value is nothing but a widget that allows bloggers to offer search on their blogs and their profiles in other social media sites such as Flickr. Curious as to how it plans to build a business to justify the money it raised from VCs such as Brad Feld...

Are you happy with Apple support? Absolutely! It is allright, nothing to write home about. It is quite terrible. I don’t have Apple Products Earlier this evening, Apple sent out an email to Mobile Me subscribers, giving us free 60-days of service in lieu of outages and poor performance that had plagued the service earlier this summer, leading to a lot of complaints. Earlier, the company had offered a free 30-day extension to MobileMe subscribers. In so...

If you’re a member of the press, an independent designer or an engineer, we want you! (Actually, the International Consumer Electronics Show — CES – wants you. And that is some show! This is one that draws hundreds of thousands of people so that the Las Vegas Convention Center — and some other LV venues — is filled to overflowing.) Here’s what you need to know for now: Are you able to volunteer a little of your time to judge one of the most prestigio...

Image my surprise to receive this email the other day: Dear Amazon.com Customer, Amazon MP3 is offering free songs and albums as low as $5. All songs can be played on MP3 players, including the iPod and iPhone. Enjoy your music wherever and however you like it.  I tried it, and I liked it! (But you will shocked and awed by the number of songs you don’t want for free!) Amazon.com Tags: amazon, iphone, ipod, mp3 Related Entries Hey Why Not? Amazon To Enter Music Download Biz - D...

TV Sales Surge Despite Economy: DisplaySearchBy Amy Gilroy — TWICE, 8/15/2008 10:56:00 AM Austin, Texas — TV shipments for North America hit record growth levels in the second quarter, despite a weaker U.S. economy, said DisplaySearch. TV shipments rose 28 percent compared to the same quarter last year to more than 9.3 million units, according to preliminary DisplaySearch findings, marking the strongest quarterly results since the research firm began tracking TV shipments in 2004, i...

Carl Ford is one of my favorite people in this business, and few people make more of an indelible impression than Carl. He has long been the Mutt half of VON’s Mutt and Jeff combination, and one of the first questions that came to my mind with the demise of VON was what would Carl do? For better or worse, Carl is not shy, and most of us have stayed in touch via his various Facebook pages, and he’s been working his network to keep busy in this brave new world. Like me, he’s got ...

Earlier this month, Silicon Valley Insider took a look at how the cable companies and telecos fared during Q2 in the high-speed Internet business. When it came to growth, the cable companies kicked some serious butt by taking 73% of net subscriber adds. To get an idea of what’s happening north of the border, I did the same exercise. I also collected total telephone growth given bundles are such a key part of the marketing mix these days. In the high-speed market, the cablecos walked away w...

National Science Foundation has put together a really great web site that tells the story of the birth of the Internet, using videos, presentations and documents from its archives. The history is divided into decades, and there is a special section devoted to Mosaic developed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications in the early 1990s. It should be on your things to do today. Awesome! ...

Today, Google is launching a new advocacy campaign, Free The Airwaves, an effort by the company to get some traction around white spaces, the tiny slivers of spectrum that resides in the 700 MHz band vacated by analog television’s switch to digital transmissions. It even launched a lobbying web site, though the “supported by Google” text needs a magnifying glass to be found. Google has been lobbying hard to get this spectrum unlicensed and make it open to all unlicensed device...

A few year ago, a friend told me: “Jeff, sometimes you first need to make a difference before you make money.” Looking back, I know what he said was true. Several times in my life I have experienced a period of time where my passion for a product, technology or a service became a personal obsession which eventually turned into a revenue producing opportunity for myself (and for others.) Usually I discovered this new found passion when I was totally entrenched doing something else. Looking bac...

Since the Web hit the mainstream more than a decade ago, the 404 has been the standard error message when a server request can’t be fulfilled. But as ISPs look for news ways to generate more revenue, the 404 could go extinct. For example, take a look below at what Rogers is doing when you mistype a URL. In this case, I was looking for Craigslist but didn’t include the .com. For Rogers, replacing the 404 lets it present two banner ads (both in-house), some sponsored links, and links ...

We have been following the emergence of 4G technologies pretty closely, including the looming battle between WiMAX and Long Term Evolution (LTE). As part of this continuing coverage, we are going to give you short updates on these technologies and current carrier plans. Stacey outlined the 4G plans of various U.S. carriers last week. This post is small update on the state of LTE market. According to ABI Research, there will be 32 million subscribers on LTE by 2013, though LTE Networks aren̵...

A few days ago, I wrote about blogs needing to be more social and embracing new personal web services and acting as hubs (or aggregation points) for our increasingly digital lives. Of course, for a majority, Facebook would do just fine. Mathew Ingram sums it up succinctly when he writes, “Blogging isn’t for everyone…For those who want more control over their online data and destiny…I think blogs and blog-based tools are the best route.” One of the great things about Fa...

Having followed the optical network business for over a decade, one thing I have learned is that the boom and bust cycles of the business often mask patterns that have long-term implications. The overbuilding of U.S. networks in the 1990s foretold a bust in the telecom industry. The buying up of bankrupt carriers’ assets indicated the rise of new players including Google, which has built a fearsome infrastructure. These days, all the excitement in the optical business is around new undersea c...

This past weekend at Word Camp 2008, we announced GigaOM Daily, a Twitter-style micro-newswire that is going to take editorial inputs from our team and our growing network of blogs. Some might call it the Twitterization of news. If you want to be super-simplistic, then you also can think of it as a constantly updating LiveBlog. Inspired by the thinking behind Dave Winer’s concept of “river of news,” it is a reflection of the changing nature of news in our time-constrained life. Many of ou...

My friend Al is a new blogger. He’s received his first requests for link exchanges and would like to know what I think of this practice. For non-bloggers: a link exchange is an agreement that says I’ll put a link to your blog on my blog if you link to my blog from your blog. The sites which have solicited Al do not particularly impress him; but they do have fairly high link ratings. That means that, if they point to his blog, he will gain Google juice and Technorati rank and possibl...

How would you rate NBC’s coverage of Olympics A… Excellent Work B… Okay, But Not Great C… Crap Olympics? Is it a new Web 2.0 company? Warning: This story is meant for our U.S. readers only. As many of you already know, I am giving Olympics the miss and perhaps that is why I am not familiar with the daily coverage on NBC and its online properties. The Olympics apparently have proved to be a bonanza for the company. The Peacock Network ...

Tags: sunrise, Miami Beach, Jeff Pulver (photo taken on Aug 17, 2008 with a Nikon D300 and a 28-200mm zoom) ...

On Wednesday, August 27th I will be in Tel Aviv and hosting my fourth Breakfast with Jeff Pulver (and Friends) in Tel Aviv from 0900-1100. With more than 180 people already signed up, this looks like it will be my largest breakfast networking event to date. To RSVP, please visit this event on Facebook. Everyone attending this breakfast will receive a “Personal Social Networking Toolkit.” Friends can learn more about my “Personal Social Networking Toolkit” by watching the video...

I’ve yet to get my hands on a Samsung Instinct (I’ll do so soon and provide a review), and it’s unlikely it will dislodge the iPhone as the cool smart phone but you have to admire the Instinct’s pluck and willingness to fight the good fight. For example, I think this billboard is brilliant - smart, attention-grabbing and inspiring. It’s one of those few ads that makes you think “What’s this Samsung Instinct all about?”. As well, it’s done by ...

All too often, technology companies fail to find the right balance within their business executives. When a business exec is too technical, she may not have the aggressiveness or “street smarts” to help a young company succeed. If a business exec isn’t technical enough, he might swim out of his depth and make wrong decisions about key technology or product hires. You may have heard it referred to (unkindly) as the Mechanic Dilemma: Business execs, like car owners, rarely hav...

Tags: sunrise, Miami Beach, Jeff Pulver (photo taken on Aug 16, 2008 with a Nikon D300 and a 28-200mm zoom) ...

If you are active in the world of social media, you owe it to yourself to create and maintain a social identity that you can use across multiple networks and multiple platforms. Whether you choose to use your name, a nickname, or something else, whatever you choose, be consistent. If your name is no longer available then when you use a nickname instead, be sure it is a name that you want to be associated with and a name you wouldn’t mind wearing on a name badge at a future tweetup. The way you ...

If you are active in the world of social media, you owe it to yourself to create and maintain a social identity that you can use across multiple networks and multiple platforms. Whether you choose to use your name, a nickname, or something else, whatever you choose, be consistent. If your name is no longer available then when you use a nickname instead, be sure it is a name that you want to be associated with and a name you wouldn’t mind wearing on a name badge at a future tweetup. The way you ...

I wish we’d see more political ads like this one: Youtube Link Big hat tip! Technorati Tags: Bushco, Hurricane, JohnMcCain, JunkEconomics, Politics, Poverty, privatization, Stupidity, Torture, USLosingLead, War ...

For those of you looking for something to do this weekend, here is something you can do without leaving the privacy of your wifi connectivity…Get to know 5 of your Facebook Friends. The next time you log into Facebook, take a look at your friends list. If there are people on your friends list who you don’t know that well, assuming there was a reason why you said yes to adding them as a friend, now is a great time to make the effort and get to know these people. The 5 Friends Weekend Proje...

Famed game developer and analyst Scott Jennings recently announced on his blog that he’s quit online game publishing giant NCSoft to join John Galt Games. His new home is the small casual game startup developing Web Wars, a sci-fi game played via a browser plug-in, where web sites themselves are territories to fight over. (Sort of RocketOn meets battle cruisers.) The move is a bit like a top Hollywood producer quitting the movie business for an obscure online-video startup; it’s s...

In my favorite movie, Wonder Boys, Prof. Grady Tripp is a writer who hasn’t had a best seller in years. His work in progress is a 1,500 page behemoth. Upon sneaking a peek at the magnum opus, one of Tripp’s most devoted students takes it upon himself to point out to the professor that some of his scenes suffer from overkill — being brought to life in such excruciating detail that they actually diminish the experience for the reader. The student accuses the professor of literary in...