July 2006

Gizmo "Friends and Family"

July 20, 2006

The details of Gizmo Project’s new All Calls Free program are out this morning, whereas last night when Andy Abramson posted his piece, they were offline.  This is MCI’s Friends and Family plan in the age of VoIP calling. Essentially, when you call someone else who is an active Gizmo user on any number that that [...]

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Free Gizmo?

July 19, 2006

Andy Abramson has learned that Gizmo project is about to make all calls free, in 60 odd countries globally.  This is an intriguing development, which I’ve been predicting for a long long time.  However, I wouldn’t have guessed it would be Michael Robertson and Gizmo to do it.  Aside from Michael’s penchant for grand gestures [...]

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The Nortel / Microsoft Alliance: A Savvy Move

July 19, 2006

“ with this alliance agreement … I think you can clearly say that Microsoft with Nortel is in the business not just of unified communications, but in the business of VOIP” Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer I must have had a half dozen people (including my Mum!) draw my attention to the Microsoft (MSFT) / Nortel (NT) [...]

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Pawn to Queen 4

July 18, 2006

The chess pieces have been moving around the VoIP board for the last couple of hours.  I’ve recently gotten mail on: The Comcast Cablevision announcement that it has passed 1,000,000 VoIP subscribers.  Om Malik observes that this is putting pressure on the incumbent carriers, but also makes life much more difficult for Vonage.  Indeed, Cablevision [...]

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Vonage Advertising: Spyware

July 18, 2006

Ben Edelman’s revelation that Vonage customer acquisition is built around spyware advertising leaves a bad taste in the mouth.  Before the IPO it might have been explainable as the actions of a few overzealous affiliates, but in the post IPO era, the recipients of those ad dollars are available for anyone to see. One wonders [...]

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Asterisk is Popping Up Everywhere

July 18, 2006

I am continually amazed by the ubiquity of Asterisk.  Asterisk based carrier class systems are popping up like mushrooms.  Why? The expense of deploying one of these systems is truly disruptive.  Built on commodity hardware, they can be deployed for amounts less than $0.50 per subscriber, and scaled for even less.  Compared to traditional TDM [...]

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Not Being A Dot Bomb 2.0

July 18, 2006

11 Suggestions for Not Being a Dot Bomb 2.0 has a lot of useful stuff for entrepreneurs and those who aspire to entrepreneurship.  Particularly important was point #2: be a complete business, not just a feature.  What’s the service or product you offer to your customers?  If you can’t define this without another party’s offering [...]

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Abramson is Back

July 17, 2006

After a sleepy hiatus, my buddy Andy Abramson appears to be back blogging with a vengeance.  Arriving home from my wine tasting trip last night, I was confronted with 8 new stories on his blog.  Check it out!  Two stories I’ve been following — the Yahoo / MSN Federation, and Skype code being cracked — [...]

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A Whistle Stop Tour of Prince Edward County

July 17, 2006

The kids are away at camp, so Janice and I took an opportunity this weekend to visit Prince Edward County, a new wine growing region in Ontario.  It’s a couple of hours drive from our house, on the north side of Lake Ontario, and is known primarily for cool climate reds like pinot noir, and [...]

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Somebody Get Me a Statistician, Please.

July 15, 2006

As traffic has been increasing on this blog, I’ve been looking for ways to monetize it effectively.  One of the biggest hassles has been that huge discrepancies exist between the various website tracking engines out there, and much of the information is just plain wrong. For advertising networks that depend on these engines, and for individual site owners [...]

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