Archive for July 25th, 2008
Meet Moondo, Multiplayer, Multi-game Network
Moondo, a new “cross-gaming universe” from Funtactix, an Israeli game studio that’s backed by $6 million in Series A funding from Benchmark Capital and Jerusalem Venture Partners, has come out of beta. Sort of like Xbox Live for the web, you create your own Moondo characters, which can jump into a variety of 3D action and sports games. All along, points and virtual items are collected and retained across the network, so you can track your accomplishments against friends and c...
Skype Backdoor?
According to The Register, “Off the cuff remarks by Austrian government officials suggest that Skype conversations might be intercepted” via a backdoor or through the encryption keys. The comments were made at a recent meeting on lawful interception between ISPs and Austrian regulators. The off the cuff comment was from an unnamed “high-ranking” official at Austria’s interior ministry who said that listening into a conversation over Skype “presented no particu...
The Economic Gist Via Craigslist
My weekend walks with the dog have turned from quiet reveries into trips through a neighborhood bazaar. Driveway after driveway is packed with garage sales and people selling old DVD players, lamps, old books, anything, everything. Part of this is a natural summer decluttering ritual, but with gas and food prices through the roof, it’s seems like it’s becoming a quick way to make a little extra scratch. My curiosity was piqued by this anecdotal evidence, so I decided to check with t...
Let’s Share a Little
While I’ve been able to find Wi-Fi in Bayfield, Ont. (mystery solved!), a comment that resonated was whether there’s a way to share a little bit of your Internet access with people who want to check e-mail and check out a few sites. Everyone is seemingly terrified about leaving their Wi-Fi networks wide open amid concerns that nefarious people will download copious amounts of music and porn. That’s fair enough but what if you could allocate 100MB to 500MB of your 60GB data pac...
The Case for SIP Trunking - Marc Robins in No Jitter
Colleague and partner Marc Robins has written a nice piece about SIP trunking that ran in No Jitter earlier this week. I just got around to seeing it, and wanted to share it here for a few reasons. First, SIP is a hot topic on many fronts, and Marc’s article does a good job outlining SIP’s ascendancy in the voice space. More importantly, he explains how VoIP and IP PBX solutions cannot reach their full potential running off legacy TDM infrastructure. This brings us to SIP trunking, a...
Economy Ticking Upward, Buy a Gadget This Weekend
With the latest economic news showing a little bit more consumer confidence (how could it get must worse), we can all do our own little bit by buying a gadget this weekend. Perhaps it’s just a cell phone charger for the car (hey, just did that on Wednesday), a new DVD to feed the player (that was a purchase last night — actually two — but I got a good deal!) to a surround sound system to trick out the HDTV in the den. I’ll leave the details up to you. We must all do ou...
Cell-phone Navigation Is Finding an Audience
Garmin and TomTom may need to guard their backs in the portable navigation device market. Americans are increasingly using their cell phones for navigation, according to data from comScore, which says that navigation on the cell phone as of the end of May was up 82 percent over the same period a year ago. That’s a huge rise, but still a relatively small audience of users, which means the 7.6 million-person increase in cell-phone map users had a huge percentage impact. However, more GPS ch...
BlackBerry Bold Video Preview
They don’t call it The Boy Genius Report for nothing! If you can’t get enough data on staying current — actually, out in front — of the latest developments in mobile phone tech, then you must check out the BlackBerry Bold video that the Boy has posted. (Click on the link above the take you there.) Here’s how BlackBerry describes it: No compromises. With email, phone, IM and the Internet, it can connect you. With an integrated organizer, it can help you ...
Verizon to Launch FiOS TV in NYC on Monday
Verizon will start selling FiOS TV in New York City on Monday. The announcement will be made at a glitzy ceremony at the Grand Central Station, and will be webcast as well. NYC had granted Verizon a television franchise in May, and the franchise was confirmed by the New York Public Service Commission on July 16. The company today announced that it was getting into offering web video on its set-top boxes. On the FiOS NYC announcement, this move should turn the heat on Time Warner Cable which is ...
Bomb Blasts Hit India’s IT City Bangalore
Updated at the bottom: Over the past few years, the quaint and sleepy town of Bangalore has been transformed into a highly compressed version of Silicon Valley, only with worse housing and transportation problems. Some of the bigger technology companies — Texas Instruments, Intel and Qualcomm — have offices there, along with home-grown Indian tech giants like Infosys Technologies. This doesn’t even count the dozens of call center operators and outsourcing companies that make ...
UK Bans Adult Video Games from Its Prisons
Life behind bars just got a little tougher — adult prisoners in England and Wales are being banned by the Prison Service from playing computer games rated 18. (This is the UK version of “Adult.”) Good behavior will allow offenders to play other games. However, eligible inmates would have to buy consoles themselves as the new rules ban prisons from buying games or consoles. Last year the government spent $20,000 or so on 80 PlayStations and 15 Xboxes for young offender...
IfByPhone’s Voice Broadcast is now on the iTunes App Store
A couple months ago, when we announced that we were developing an iPhone application, we got a lot of positive press about it. This morning, our application was placed on the IPhone App Store. Before we knew it, people started signing up. What does it do? The Ifbyphone Voice Broadcast iPhone app allows you to broadcast a voice message to a group of people from your iPhone contact list. Purely hypothetical example: you’re a sales manager and maybe you’re leaving town. Yo...
Vonage to replace CEO Jeffrey Citron
The future of Vonage is certainly looking brighter. Vonage recently settled patent disputes, including one with Verizon. This week they secured a $215 million financing deal this week from Silver Point Finance LLC. Now, according to The Wall Street Journal, the company is about to bring in a new CEO to replace founder Jeffrey Citron, though Jeffrey will remain with the company. Has Vonage turned the corner? Hard to say. What I have noticed is a strong up-tick in the number of times I’ve ...
Save our Constitution on August 8
Readers of isen.blog have witnessed my concern about our eroding Constitution, and, specifically, my disappointment at the passage of a FISA bill that lets the telcos off the hook for illegally spying on us and also expands warrantless spying on our networked information. The net effect is that the Internet becomes a less democratic, less innovation-friendly, less people-oriented infrastructure. Glenn Greenwald has done heroic work, explaining the meaning of each event and proposal as the strug...
PE Firm Pushing for Inmarsat/Skyterra Combo
Harbinger Capital today offered satellite service provider MSV/Skyterra $500 million to pay for the company’s launch of its two new satellites. The private equity firm also made clear it’s planning to push for a deal to acquire British satellite company Inmarsat. The acquisition attempt isn’t welcomed by Inmarsat, but Harbinger owns 28.8 percent of its stock, which means Inmarsat will have a tough time keeping Harbinger and the Skyterra deal at bay. We started to anticipate su...
Ballmer: Microsoft to Get More Narrow-minded
Steve Ballmer sent an email to Microsoft employees this week in which he acknowledged the success of Apple — and what the Redmond giant needs to do in order to better compete. “Today, we’re changing the way we work with hardware vendors to ensure that we can provide complete experiences with absolutely no compromises,” he wrote. “We’ll do the same with phones–providing choice as we work to create great end-to-end experiences.” For the full story, head over to jkO...
VCs Have Their Heads in the Clouds
When was the last time you bought software that came in a box, an actual CD that you put into your disc drive in order to load it onto your computer? It’s probably been a while, since most applications are now downloaded straight from the Internet. Today a growing number of companies are buying their computing capabilities that way, too. Instead of buying a rack of servers from IBM, Dell or HP, or a dedicated box hosted in a data center, businesses are buying compute power in the form of ...
VoIP Warehouse - contact us by email - the irony
Check out this snapshot of the contact us page on VoIP Warehouse Australia. Let’s see, you sell VoIP equipment but the FASTEST and most efficient method of reaching you is via email. Oh, the irony… Tags: voip, VoIP Warehouse Australia Related Entries Run VoIP in your House - get arrested - Jul 24, 2008 Vonage UK launches new low cost V-Plan calling plans - Jul 24, 2008 Objectworld Offers Unified Communications for 7 Cents a Day - Jul 22, 2008 ITEXPO 90% Sold Out - IP Communic...
Mobile IM vs. SMS: Who Wins?
Can Mobile IM beat SMS? Yes, that is almost certain No, SMS’ simplicity makes it unbeatable Both will co exist Yesterday, the guys from eBuddy sent me a press release that made me wonder: With the rise of flat-rate data plans for feature-packed mobiles and the high-speed 3G network becoming commonplace, will mobile IM start to eat into the lucrative SMS business? The data from eBuddy would suggest as much. The company claims that 5 million copies of th...
A Time to Make Your MOVE
Thinking about doing something is not the same thing as actually doing it. You will find there is never that “Perfect Time” to make a move that could change your life. Sometimes you just have to “go for it” and see what happens next. I’ve “been there” and done just that a number of times over the years. I’ve learned from my own experiences about what it feels like when I didn’t go for it and regretted it afterwards. Not every move will be a ...
Sneak preview of v7 interface
We are working full steam ahead on version 7 of 3CX Phone System. We’re currently testing our new interface. The screenshot gives you a sneak preview of whats in the works….. ...
Nokia-Qualcomm Truce: Bad News For Motorola
Nokia and Qualcomm buried the hatchet this week, deciding to settle matters out of court and become friends. While the details of the settlement aren’t clear - The Wall Street Journal reports that as a result of this settlement, Nokia will pay less to Qualcomm. The deal ensures that Qualcomm continues to get money in the 4G era regardless of technologies - WiMAX and LTE. The deal also paves way for Nokia to aggressively chase the US CDMA opportunities. The company has been desperately try...
F|R Crib Sheet: A Digital Hack to Trim Your Startup Legal Fees
When I began my career in corporate law 10 years ago, I was floored by the amount of time, money and paper consumed during the closing process of a business transaction. Every deal produces multiple sets of original documents and signature pages, so each party (and sometimes their lawyers, too) can end up with a bound volume containing a full record of everything, just for safe-keeping. I recently worked on a financing for a young tech company that involved parties in Washington, Paris, San Fra...
Cartoon Network Joins MMOG-Via-Web Crowd
Today at Comic-Con, the Cartoon Network announced FusionFall, which it described as “the first AAA, browser-based massively multiplayer online game (MMOG).” (The “AAA” qualification is probably meant to distinguish it from low-budget, web-based MMOGs like Runescape.) Set to be released this fall, the game will incorporate characters from the network’s many shows. Given the Cartoon Network’s enormously popular web presence (5 million monthly uniques in the U....
Facebook Connect for Mobiles to Come This Fall, With iPhone Support
Fresh off their launch of Facebook Connect at their second developer conference, the social networking company is going to launch a mobile version of the Facebook Connect this fall, Jed Stremel, director of mobile for Facebook, said in a chat today. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company is going to release the code of their entire “mobile subsystem” he said. This will allow developers to add Facebook’s social graph into their applications. Stremel said the company was going to r...
Intel Is Branching Out With Embedded SoCs
Intel, the world’s largest chip maker, is spreading its R&D efforts far outside of its server and PC kingdom. The company has just launched a new line of products that will combine four processors onto a single chip, reducing both power consumption and the footprint required by the chips. Intel rightly points out that in a connected world, devices ranging from ATM machines to mobile phones need more speed (but lower power) to offer next-generation use cases for businesses and consumer...
Shocking New Yorker Cover
I am shocked and saddened by the New Yorker cover for its July 28th issue. I can’t tell who’s stereotyped more, the summer vacationers (playing ignorant and innocent, wouldn’t you know!) or the oppressed crustacean-Americans shinnying down the knotted kitchen towel to make their getaway before they’re cruelly boiled alive. (Did you notice that the lobsters are depicted as red even before they’re boiled? Did you see the gauchist guy on the porch drinking red wine in...
Ifbphone’s New Plugins & Press Pages
Ifbyphone has recently added 2 new pages to our website, and we invite you to take a look. A Press Page: Features recent articles, press releases, & blog entries about us. A Plugins Page: Ifbyphone is now displaying our iPhone App, Facebook App, Joomla Module, Yahoo Widget, and several upcoming plugins for everyday business tools on a brand new page. In addition to those two new pages, you may have noticed improved navigation to our services page on our top header, a cleaner left column on...
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News, opinions and announcements about fast changing communication tools and technologies, from various blogs and ezine.