VoIP Information

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Comments on this Entry:

(bklansky on
Mar 16, 2010 8:06 AM)

When I was at Covad, we started rolling out Line Powered Voice (with Earthlink). I guess it died with Covad but it was a true independant network with voip powered out of the central office, just like POTS.

By the way, (shameless plug coming so be prepared), this point on power further proves that no mid sized business should buy ANY premised based phone system. Hosted is a clearly superior mouse trap unless you can afford to build the level of redundancy that the Fortune 1000 do, buy hosted. Most mid sized businesses’s phone systme is in the closet, probably next to the mop. Ours is in a data center with multiple weeks of diesel generated power in the even of a powerfailure in the area.

dz3rq9

Would you put your website in the kitchen?

Brian Klansky
Vice President of Sales
M5 Networks

(Rich Tehrani on
Mar 16, 2010 10:33 AM)

Brian, great point about hosted — at least the system works and can respond with a greeting and take a message while the company scrambles to find power. I do remember Covad having the solution you mention with power. I heard about it once and never again. A real shame.

Facebook Passes Google in US Traffic

Chart courtesy of DigitalBeat and Hitwise US

It was bound to happen and many predicted this year would be the one where we see social media – especially Facebook take away the most popular site crown from Google. The social networking site did beat out Google by a miniscule percentage – 7.07% to 7.03% in the US according to Hitwise. It is worth pointing out that social gaming seems to be the reason for the rapid rise of Facebook traffic. Moreover, Comscore and Alexa still rank Google as a traffic leader. Still the trend above has got to worry people at Google, Yahoo! and many media sites.

Tags: alexa, comscore<, facebook, farmville, google, hitwise, social networking

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(Proactol on
Mar 16, 2010 2:52 AM)

I don’t know if there is much more to read into this than “Google is always popular. Facebook is getting more popular.” Posting minutiae of your life to facebook and searching the internet are non-overlapping activities.

(Andrew Sansone on
Mar 16, 2010 2:55 PM)

I wonder how Google will step up efforts to attract users for Google Buzz. So far I’m not impressed with GBuzz. Let the games begin! This story was trending on Twitter today. I covered it on my show http://bit.ly/btr1CS

Cancelled Amazon Order Scam

Example of frequent spam/malicious email we get frequently at TMC. Click on image to enlarge.

For the last few weeks a number of my fellow team members here at TMC have been receiving confirmed and cancelled orders from most likely a malicious source – obviously one which is not Amazon but pretending to be so. With Amazon’s massive and continuing success I hope consumers are smart enough to be able to differentiate between the real Amazon emails and those which come from probable thieves linking to the URL highlighted above. I don’t want to even reference this URL in writing as it could increase their search engine rank. Anyway, watch for such scams and be sure to let others know to mouse over links to see where they are coming from before clicking. Happy and safe surfing.

Tags: amazon, email, hacker, malware, scam, security, spam, trojan

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Sytel Limited Expands to US

Sytel Limited. A company with a strong dialer and scripting engine is expanding into customer service, media blending and more recently, the US. As more customers look for SMS support, Sytel allows these short messages to be integrated into the contact center seamlessly with email and calls. With open APIs, Sytel touts openness as an area where it excels.

The UK-based company says its service and support is a true differentiator and as an employee-owned organization, they expect to continue their growth in the US through partnerships and organic customer acquisition. Oh and there is a TMC scoop here – there is no IPO planned for a long while.

To learn more check out this video interview between TMC’s Erik Linask and Sytel’s Mike McGowan, VP of Sales Americas for Sytel.

Tags: call center, compliance, contact center, customer service, eril linask, hosted, hosting, incontact, ipo, media blending, mike mcgowan, predictive dialing, saas, sms, systems integrator, sytel, sytel limited, var

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Apple iPhone Developer Agreement Made Public

Dear developers, you have no power, no recourse beyond $50 and are at our complete mercy.

NASA has an iPhone app and the mere fact that this government agency chose to develop one means that the EFF was able to use the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the Apple iPhone developer agreement – the closely guarded document which gives Apple the power to pull applications at will and be the final arbiter of what apps make it into the iTunes App Store.

As pointed out by ZDnet’s Jason O’Grady and the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Fred von Lohman, here are some of the important items contained in this 33 page document:

A ban on public statements, forbidding developers to speak about the agreement.
Apps made with the iPhone software development kit can only be distributed through the App Store, meaning rejected apps can’t be served through the underground app store Cydia, for instance.
Apple indemnifies itself against developer liability surpassing $50, meaning if developers get sued, Apple will be liable for no more than $50 in damages.
No reverse engineering or enabling others to reverse-engineer, the iPhone SDK.
No messing with Apple products. That means no apps that enable modifying or hacking Apple products are allowed.
Apple can “revoke digital certification of any of Your Applications at any time.” No surprise there: Your app can be pulled even if it’s already been approved, which we’ve already seen happen a number of times.

In addition, here are some points which I thought were worth highlighting:

You must adhere to all privacy laws.
You must let users know that GPS could be inaccurate at times.
You can’t disable Apple warnings and other systems.
You must adhere to Apple user interface guidelines.
Your programs can’t contain malware, viruses, etc.
If your app uses the cellular network it must not in Apple’s reasonable judgment excessively use or unduly burden network capacity or bandwidth.

The agreement is surprisingly easy to read and devoid of legalize – it may be one of the smoothest long contracts I have read in fact and it shows Apple believes in simplicity even when dealing with a complex issue such as this. In general the agreement really limits the rights of developers but on balance there seems to be nothing earth shattering in it. What it reinforces to me of course is that Apple can kick you out of the app store at any time it chooses and for any reason it likes. We know Apple likes to control the user experience but it seems these terms are not consistent with the free markets we have come to love about the US and computing in general. I am not saying Apple is exerting too much power but then again if you had to summarize the document in a few words it would read: Dear developers, you have no power, no recourse beyond $50 and are at our complete mercy.

It is worth sharing von Lohman’s thoughts in conclusion:

If Apple’s mobile devices are the future of computing, you can expect that future to be one with more limits on innovation and competition (or “generativity,” in the words of Prof. Jonathan Zittrain) than the PC era that came before. It’s frustrating to see Apple, the original pioneer in generative computing, putting shackles on the market it (for now) leads. If Apple wants to be a real leader, it should be fostering innovation and competition, rather than acting as a jealous and arbitrary feudal lord. Developers should demand better terms and customers who love their iPhones should back them.

Here is the full iPhone developer agreement.

Tags: app store, apple, apple sdk, eff, electronic frontier foundation, fred von lohman, freedom of information act, ipad, iphone, ipod, itunes, jason o’grady, jonathan zittrain, licencing, software, steve jobs, zdnet

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BP Oil Spill Symbolizes Dissatisfaction with Government

Watching the Congress grill Tony Hayward kept me from peak productivity today as my frustration with the government boiled over. After listening to the back-and-forth it became more apparent than ever why the approval rating for Congress is so abysmal as it quickly became clear that the banter had more to do with having sound bites for reelection commercials than for any other reason.

Many of the questions in the hearing had to do with why BP hasn’t fixed its problems with safety and it was pointed out repeatedly by government officials that BP has been plagued with such challenges for many years. But Dear Congress, my readers and I pay your salaries and are wondering – If you knew this company had such a bad safety record, why did you allow them to drill in some of the most deep and difficult waters on the earth? Or here is a better question, did anyone in our government exchange something of value giving BP access to lucrative government oil drilling contracts?

This is a question we need an answer to and now.

More questions I couldn’t help thinking about are what happens if this crisis bankrupts BP as I am almost certain it will. If oil keeps gushing from US waters, does it not eventually end up on the shores of other nations as well? If this happens does it not mean that the US will be liable as the oil comes from US waters? Does this not mean that the US taxpayers will subsequently be responsible for what happens to the beaches of the world?

Then my thoughts went to corruption and disgust. The US government is massive with hundreds of thousands of regulators in banking, insurance, oil drilling and other industries. This crack team of workers missed the housing/banking bubble – they somehow thought that housing prices had to appreciate forever. They didn’t do their jobs which had to do with reducing risk and preparing for worst-case scenarios.

I try to steer away from politics – I really do but when regulators make decisions based on the interests of the large corporations at the expense of the little innovative entrepreneur it really upsets me because I have a responsibility to my readers to ensure they have choice. This means choice in telecom, technology and everywhere else. I have seen regulators favor big telcos over and over because of cozy financial relationships between industry and regulators.

One would imagine it is a conflict for regulators to take a job in the industry they regulate but this is not the case. Think about this for a moment. In any other industry this behavior could send a person to jail.

The worst part about this situation is that the government knows this is the case but they continue to grow its size with more departments and czars which means more places for corporations to throw money making it more difficult to rein in the system.

Didn’t the country vote for change?

Isn’t change we need reducing the size of government so it doesn’t trip over itself every time it tries to solve a simple problem like effectively regulating a variety of industries it is supposed to effectively manage? Here is some great change… How about an end to lobbyists? How about an end to growing the government needlessly or change we can believe in like introducing government accountability similar to what takes place in virtually every business in the world?

Moreover, the massive size of this bloated bureaucracy is partially responsible for problems the nation is dealing with. Low interest rates set by the US Federal Reserve inflated the dotcom bubble making it much worse than it would have otherwise been. These same low rates coupled with the desire of democrats to have housing for all (people who could not afford homes) drove prices to the point that the very people who could not afford houses in the first place ended up buying a home at an inflated price point. This in turn fueled the market for exotic mortgages and Wall Street constructed financing which led to the eventual housing bust.

Oh and to keep this from being too partisan, Bush actually bragged about record levels of homeownership under his watch but the reality is many of these homes were eventually lost.

Next, we have the oil spill. Let’s see – you are an oil regulator and it never occurs to you that oil could leak or a drilling rig can sink? Are US regulators so fat and lazy that what seems like common sense to a child doesn’t occur to them? Rest assured that with a fraction of oil company profits, we could have technology which would currently be protecting the pristine beaches and waters of the Gulf.

When Obama was elected he told us the earth would heal – he really did – even if he didn’t use his Blackberry to send an email telling the nation’s workers that it was time to start covering the globe in Band-Aids shouldn’t the regulators have raised a flag somewhere along the line?

You know I am not an oil expert or regulator but then again I don’t create trillions of dollars in deficits… If I did, I would also find a way to use all this cash to plug the damn hole.

But somehow with a government record of decades of incompetence in so many areas from budget management to crisis management (think Katrina) the Obama administration has decided that more workers and subsequently increased red tape in the government will make things better. President Obama, do you really think a ton of manure will smell better than just a few pounds?

Please don’t get me wrong – I am not trying to bash the man, it seems the whole country is ganging up on him – but he is for big – no make that huge government and I have something to tell him. Government workers are not very competent. And I really have nothing against government workers – they would become competent in most companies because they would get fired otherwise.

In other words the government is inefficient because it can be. It is a lesson in how not to manage because when it fails it can print money and/or borrow money and/or raise taxes. In the government failure generally has no consequence.

If my company could print money I would write a blog entry a year or maybe not even that often. Incentive is the fuel of any efficient organization and once removed even the most competent group becomes like the Soviet Union – bloated, lazy, incompetent and inept.

Companies are far from perfect and BP is certainly today’s poster child. But at this point it is apparent to most of the country that probably any successful entrepreneur would have the sense to put down the golf clubs, roll up their sleeves and get down to the gulf, assemble a team and solve this problem. This is what leaders do.

To Americans we see the country on fire and we want to see the President and Congress evacuating the building not talking endlessly. The oil is still gushing and no one should be sleeping in Washington until they stop it. If my office building was on fire I would evacuate it first to make sure everyone was safe and make sure the fire was out. Only then would I send an email about not leaving electric heaters on and assign blame. Until this hole is plugged all we want to hear about is how little federal workers aren’t sleeping because they are brainstorming about ways to solve this problem.

We want to hear about submarines with special fittings designed to plug oil leaks. We want to hear about one mile siphons which can such up oil like a vacuum cleaner.

The typical American was already fed up with the way the system works. They are in a recessionary environment where their job is on the line and they routinely drive by groups of state or federal workers talking while one holds a shovel and half-heartedly pretends to dig.

Moreover there is a massive disconnect between how the government works and how many information workers do. I have seen the tech industry go through absolute hell these past ten years. There have been so many catastrophes it is tough to recall them all. Bubble bursts, 911, Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia, housing and credit bubbles – it is insane. Yet those in the tech and other spaces keep working harder and harder – I can send an email to any exec at virtually any hour all week long and get an immediate response. The competition in this space is massive – the need to stay on the cutting edge is constant. But the government seems to be going in the opposite direction – what competition or bubble bursts do they have to motivate them?

It is no secret that Obama is at war with capitalism but worse is the fact that pure capitalism really doesn’t exist when large companies can hire lobbyists and influence elections on a grand scale. We should be doing business with a new breed of competent small banks but instead are faced with the bailed out incompetents. Moreover Obama is feeding the working class the poison of entitlements which are fueled by diminished opportunity resulting from greater taxation on the job creating class. The unemployment numbers continuously show the US that the failed policies of Greece and Spain won’t work any better when covered with stars and stripes.

We are at a crossroads – our president is leading a war against capitalism while regulators and even he secretly sleeps with the enemy and nothing is what it seems. The system is too big to manage and the managers have no management experience. As a result the American taxpayer is feeling frustration and realizes the system is broken and needs to be fixed. People voted for change but they hoped it would be for the better.

Tags: bp, bush, congress, government, obama, oil, oil spill, regulation, regulators, taxes, tmcnet, tony hayward

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Comments on this Entry:

(Rochelle Ferris on
Jun 18, 2010 12:57 AM)

Sorry, I stopped reading when I got to “the most treacherous waters on earth”.

Inaccurate. Sensationalist.

(Rich Tehrani on
Jun 18, 2010 7:22 AM)

You are right, my point was the depth of the drilling makes it so challenging (virtually impossible even) to fix any problems . I will reword.

(Linda Taylor on
Jun 18, 2010 6:54 PM)

Thank you, at last some one who is saying what I have been thinking! The American Goverment are as culpable as BP and using BP as a scapegoat rather than man up to their responsibilities is sad and very disappointing.

(lessir on
Jun 19, 2010 5:30 AM)

To Clean up the Gulf Oil or not; that is the question

It is hard to believe that on suspicion of not having fire extinguishers on board the Coast Guard shut down the Oil Barges. What prevented them from boarding and performing a visual inspection? They have the power and the law on their side and make such a blatant error in judgement??????

Microsoft to Help OEMs with Windows Phone 7 Development

It is no secret that apps are the key to platforms and anyone who lived through the eighties remembers the massive advantage Apple computers had over PCs in the graphic design world because of programs like PageMaker and Quark Express. In those early days, if you wanted to be a desktop publisher using the PC you were forced to use Ventura Publisher from Xerox and while the program excelled at book design, it stunk at magazine layout.

Apple is obviously winning the app war in the smartphone and now tablet market and you may be wondering how Microsoft will get anyone to develop for its forthcoming Windows Phone 7 OS – especially since Silverlight is not really very popular. It seems the company will hire its own developer(s) to assist OEMs in developing apps to get things started. Engadget has the details but it seems to me this is the smartest approach and it is no surprise Google too is developing lots of apps for Android to stay as competitive as they can with Apple.

Laura Foy at Microsoft’s Channel 9 network does an interactive video interview with a Windows Phone 7 device

Still, the chicken and egg problem here is apparent to all – you need outside developers to make new and exciting apps and you need tens of millions of devices on the market to make it worthwhile for them to do so.

It is worth noting that other than the smartphone/tablet market, developers are generally moving towards web-based apps – leading me to wonder why there isn’t more of a backlash against app stores from the developer community. Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that the app stores help you sell your apps and deal with distribution, etc. Basically they appeal to the financial needs of the developer community which of course pays the bills.

Tags: android, app store, apple, developer, engadget, google, itunes, laura foy, microosft, oem, silverlight, smartphone

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DashPad App Store Alternative to Get Weather Widget

Recently I wrote about the DashPad environment from PXL Creations which allows iPad users to utilize Safari instead of the App Store to install widgets which multitask and allow you access to a bunch of tools like a calculator, notepad, calendar, searching in Google, the Yellow Pages and more. One request I made in a post on the matter was I hope that a weather widget would come soon. It seems the company will oblige me as I heard word late last night from company president Charles Carver that the weather widget is next to be released – along with performance improvements.

If you are a widget lover and have an iPad, $10 will get you access to a wonderful alternative to the Apple App Store. And yes, I know – I am the same guy who just praised the App Store for all it will do to help the US economy – but no one can accuse me of not providing you all the alternatives.

Tags: app store, apple, dashpad, ipad, itunes, pxl creations, steve jobs, widget

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Apple App Store the OPEC of the West

I try to always look out for my readers and as such I have been one of the harshest critics of closed app stores and how they could change the computing paradigm via censorship which is not good for users. But for the US there may be very important reasons to embrace this new transformation – especially as it pertains to the Apple and iTunes App Store. To set this article up let’s explore the extent of global software piracy – currently the total amount of pirated software stands at $53B according to a study by the BSA and IDC.

According to the report:

Central and Eastern Europe represented the regions with the highest piracy rate (67%), followed by Latin America (65%). Georgia had the highest piracy rate at nearly 95% followed by Armenia, Bangladesh and Zimbabwe.

The United States has the lowest PC software piracy rate in the world, 20%, but because it is the world’s largest software market, it has the largest dollar losses from piracy, $9.1 billion. Japan, New Zealand and Luxembourg also have low software piracy rates, near 20%.

But with app stores and especially the one required to run apps on iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch devices, developers have no choice but to ensure they are paid the full price they set if they want to have their products distributed by Apple. Moreover, Apple gets 30% of the revenue associated with all the software sold in the store meaning this US company sees a rather large percentage of software sales regardless of where developers or users are located. As Apple continues to take the world by storm – and seeing how the company received over 600,000 iPhone 4 pre-orders in one day, enough to crash their systems – there seems to be no shrinking desire to use the company’s products. Things are so good for Apple right now; some are asking if the company and AT&T can even handle all the orders for the highly-anticipated new device.

One threat to Cupertino comes from cloud-based software from Google, Microsoft and others which is essentially free and potentially ad-supported. Still, using apps can be a much better experience than using the web – depending on how well developers utilize the particular environment their programs exist in. And with the generally low-cost associated with many of the apps in the App Store, Apple and the developer community seem to have hit upon a formula where users are comfortable shelling out money for their apps.

According to GigaOM referencing a survey about six months old, the average App Store user spends $4.47 on apps every month. I expect this number to increase as the number of apps increase in the store and it is worth noting there are almost double the number of apps in the store today as there were at the end of last year! Assuming 100 million App Store users this translates into $53.64 per year per user or $5.3B in total. At this amount, apple’s take would be $1.6B!

Another threat to Apple is jailbreaking – the act of bypassing the company’s control over the OS and subsequently opening yourself up to a world of free apps and multitasking. In my experience, the many people I know who do jailbreak still pay for apps and those who don’t are generally students who couldn’t afford to pay for apps anyway. People who are super-technical seem to be the primary “jailbreakers” and Apple’s products are so easy to use; the threat of having to deal with an OS which may crash or have problems has kept many who would jailbreak from taking the plunge. That and the fact that jailbreaking voids the Apple warranty.

Still, estimates regarding jailbreaking by Jay Freeman, founder of Cydia, one of the leading “jailbroken” app stores put the number of these devices at around 8.5% of iPhones and iPod Touch devices.

Another reasons many customers jailbreak has to do with the ability to categorize apps and this feature as well as multitasking should be coming to Apple’s devices soon and this may decrease the temptation to skirt the official App Store.

How a categorized jailbroken iPhone screen might look

There is obviously a transformation taking place in computing and while Apple continues to increase share it will do so while changing the software purchasing model most consumers and businesses are used to. With a commanding number of mobile devices on the market, developers have an incentive to charge prices which are considered reasonable while making it up on volume.

We are hit with negative news reports everyday which remind us that US jobs are being shipped overseas and the US federal government is so big and bloated that their best solution for plugging massive oil spills is to talk them to death. Moreover as the government keeps the US mint printing presses running 24×7 and creates the most anti-business environment seen in my lifetime, most sane citizens are investing in gold and other commodities because they are absolutely petrified by where the country is headed.

While I share many of these concerns I have to smile when I realize that the creative genius of at least one US company will force the rest of the world to depend on the US as much if not more than the US has to depend on OPEC.

Honorable mentions go to Cisco, HP, Dell, Facebook, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Intel and the many other companies which keep the US and international tech space humming.

Tags: app store, apple, att, bp, bsa, china, cisco, cydia, dell, facebook, gigaom, google, hp, idc, intel, ipad, iphone, ipod, itunes, jailbreak, jay freeman, microsoft, obama, oil, om malik, opec, oracle, piracy, steve jobs, twitter

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How You Know Amazon has Made it

Amazon doesn’t need me to tell them they have “made it” and with a market cap of $56B they are obviously doing a lot of things right. Still, this morning I saw my house absolutely littered with new boxes from the company and realized I didn’t know what most of the items in the boxes were. Seems to me that a company becomes indispensable when they start to deliver products in virtually all the categories of your shopping list from clothes to toiletries.

Tags: amazon, ecommerce, shopping

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