Archive for August 5th, 2008
Cheap Broadband is the Oil of the Modern Economy — Shouldn’t This Have a Greener Hook?
Very interesting post comparing cheap broadband to cheap oil on Mashable. Here’s the lead of the piece: Oil and broadband Internet access are the twin fuels of both brick and mortar businesses and Internet based businesses. When oil prices are low, economies can zoom at light speed. When prices are high, many businesses can barely put one foot in front of another. A look at the history of oil might serve to help us understand the importance of ubiquitous, low cost Internet access, which ...
Marketing 103: Jeff Pulver’s e-mail Marketing Tips
There was a time when e-mail was the primary way for people to market products and services on the Internet. While things have changed, people continue to make mistakes when executing their e-mail marketing strategy. Many new marketing professionals forget they need to extend some respect the person they are targeting. Since 1995 I have been experimenting with and learning about e-mail marketing. The following notes are based on my on-going experience. While your own experience will vary, I hav...
In-Flight Broadband Cheat Sheet
Updated: You just can’t keep the American urge to be productive down. Literally. That’s why in-flight Wi-Fi services get tech journalists and business travelers all excited, even as Congress tries to ban those pesky mobile phone calls on planes. I kind of like being forced to read a book, but the siren song of a blog post will surely lead me to seek out in-flight Wi-Fi on my next trip to San Francisco. Please raise your seats backs to the upright position and check out our list of i...
MobileMe Problems Show Apple Needs an Infrastructure Lesson
Steve Jobs, in an internal email seen by Ars Technica, makes clear that he’s upset about the botched launch of MobileMe, Apple’s new online suite of applications that has been plagued with bugs, including being been flat-out unavailable to some for days at a time. “It was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store,” he says. “We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without conseq...
Rocketboom Alive and Well
Ever since Amanda Congdon’s controversial and dramatic departure from Rocketboom two years ago, it seems like the video news site has disappeared from the spotlight. Perhaps it has to do with the fact Rocketboom and videoblogs are no longer shiny and new. Or maybe Rocketboom simply lost its “je ne sais quoi” after Congdon and Rocketboom co-founder Andrew Baron went through a very public and nasty he-said-she-said break up. In any event, Rocketboom is still rumbling along. In fa...
How much data does fring consume?
Ever wonder how much data fring consumes when making a VoIP call or even when idle? Personally, I really like fring which I like to call “the Swiss army knife of mobile VoIP and IM”, since it works with Skype, SIP, MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, Google Talk, ICQ, and AIM. Well, I found the answer to this question on fring’s blog which was posted today. When idle, fring also consumes an additional 10kb per hour of connectivity to communicate with fring’s servers. This i...
We’re on Facebook!
One of the things we pride ourselves on is responsiveness. We like talking to our customers (we’re a phone company of sorts after all). So to that end, we’re now on Facebook. Head on over and become a fan of IfByPhone. Also, stop by my profile and friend me (Khyle) here. ...
Mo’Minis Looks to Revolutionize the Mobile Games Arena
The mobile games market is a treasure chest, and with 49.9 percent growth in 2007 alone and revenue expected to rise to $6.3 billion in 2011 from $3.9 billion that year, everyone is looking for the map. Like the road to any treasure, however, there are potential pitfalls along the way. And in those pitfalls, Israeli startup Mo’Minis sees an opportunity. It takes very advanced programming skills to develop even a simple mobile game. Moreover, enabling an application to run on the hundreds ...
AT&T’s Cloud Offering Is Foggy
Telecom giant AT&T announced its version of a cloud computing service today, called Synaptic Hosting, but to make things horribly unclear (and perhaps keep enterprise customers happy) it decided it should call the effort everything from utility computing to a hosting solution. I’m not sure if the entire service counts as a cloud, but AT&T does say that it will “support large-scale computing and applications on demand via virtualized servers and deliver services across AT&...
In Praise of Revenue
The most noted Web success stories are of companies which began without a revenue model, grew like topsy, and eventually made very good. ICQ at the beginning of the first Web bubble; Google at the beginning of the latest one; and – on a smaller scale – del.icio.us, flickr, and YouTube in the Web 2.0 boomlet. I’ve advised some young web companies to grow first and worry about revenue later; this post qualifies that advice. Revenue is probably a good strategy for most – but not all –...
Marketing 103: e-mail Marketing Mistakes to Avoid in a Web 2.0 World
There was a time when e-mail was the primary way for people to market products and services on the Internet. While things have changed, people continue to make mistakes when executing their e-mail marketing strategy. Many new marketing professionals forget they need to extend some respect the person they are targeting. Since 1995 I have been experimenting with and learning about e-mail marketing. The following notes are based on my on-going experience. While your own experience will vary, I hav...
Google Translation Center: The World’s Largest Translation Memory
Disclosure: I am the founder of Der Mundo, a multilingual blogging service and translation community that combines human and machine translation (provided in part by Google), and I have researched translation technology for more than 10 years via the Worldwide Lexicon project. Blogoscoped reports that Google is preparing to launch Google Translation Center, a new translation tool for freelance and professional translators. This is an interesting move, and it has broad impl...
My Posts on MobiTV, Network DVR
Chris Albrecht is off for a couple of days, so I am helping Liz out with some stories on NewTeeVee. As it happens, there’s a lot of news around video infrastructure. I ended up writing two long posts for NewTeeVee. If you are up for it, check out my analysis of MobiTV’s growth and the court decision that gives the thumbs up to the networked DVRs. Is Growth Slowing at MobiTV? Goodbye Tivo. Hello Network DVRs. While you are on NewTeeVee, you should check out their guide to watching B...
Elastra Gets $12M — Is It Amazon’s Enterprise Play?
Elastra, the San Francisco-based cloud configuration startup, says it has secured $12 million in Series B financing from investors including Bay Partners and Hummer Winblad — and Amazon. Elastra is the latest investment made by Amazon in the cloud computing sector. Last month, Amazon helped fund Rails cloud Engine Yard to get a foot in the Rails world. Amazon — and Google — are, in many ways, acting like VCs. But unlike traditional investors, these companies are also giants i...
Xbox Prices Going Lower?
Hey hey hey — what’s wrong with lower prices as Microsoft is reportedly considering dropping the price of Xbox to $200 to appeal to the mass gaming market. According to one report on CNET, an Xbox console with no hard drive could retail for $199 as soon as next month. Nintendo’s Wii is currently the lowest-priced console on the market at $249. In related news, Xbox Live avatars are reportedly coming soon to new version of EA Games. The avatars can don f...
Enter the Netbook
Lenovo today announced it is entering the “netbook” PC market with the new IdeaPad S10 netbook PC. Lenovo designed the super-slim, super-small IdeaPad S10 to complement a customer’s primary PC or as a first-time, introductory PC purchase. The IdeaPad S10 allows users to perform simple activities such as surf the Internet, check and write emails, listen to music and run basic applications. Lenovo also plans to introduce netbook models designed specifically for students and ed...
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News, opinions and announcements about fast changing communication tools and technologies, from various blogs and ezine.