August 2006

Heading to College or University? Skip the Landline!

August 28, 2006

It’s a pretty exciting time around here.  My oldest is heading off to University in a few days time.  We’ve been working on planning and budgeting. Over the weekend we did some digging into the cost of communications. We compared a Bell Canada land line, a Bell Student Cellular plan, and  Rogers “Campus Calling” Student Cellular plan.  Our [...]

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Cornell Researcher Studies Skype Usage

August 28, 2006

This is an interesting academic study of how the Skype network operates.  Some of the findings: Skype usage peaks during normal working hours.  Usage is significantly reduced during the evening — by 40 to 50%.  20% fewer users are online during the weekend as well. Calls on Skype are longer than PSTN calls.  The average [...]

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Party Like It's 1999?

August 27, 2006

Andy Abramson has taken a swipe at recent tech industry parties, including the Hullo event I attended the other night.  He calls it the “return of the dot com party craze”. A really worthwhile read that bears on this topic is Al Ries and Jack Trout’s 1992 Classic 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing.  Ries and Trout [...]

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The Jon and Jim Show

August 25, 2006

Jon Arnold’s ongoing Podcast series on Canadian VoIP Thought Leaders has Jim Van Meggelen this week talking about open source telephony.  Great stuff.  Jim is a true Asterisk believer, and one of the authors of O’Reillys book Asterisk: the Future of Telephony. Great stuff!  (and I’m not just saying that because there’s a nice plug [...]

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Go Big, or Go Home. But Please, Spare Us The Whinging…

August 25, 2006

For some time there have been rumblings of disatisfaction within the Skype ecosystem.  It just seems as if they won’t go away, either.  The latest broadside is Katie Fehrenbacher’s Is Skype Neglecting Its Developers? The grumbling comes from developers who feel that Skype isn’t doing enough for them, or that Skype is stealing their features.  [...]

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Launching Hullo

August 25, 2006

Janice, our friend Sharon, and myself headed out to the Hullo launch party last night at Capital Music Hall in Ottawa’s Byward Market.  The big draw for the night was rapper Kardinal Offishal, with backup bands the HILOTRONS and Donkey Punch.  We walked through the door at about 9:30 pm, scooped up some free shooter [...]

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It's About Hate, Not Neutrality

August 24, 2006

Yesterday, Canadian telecom consultant Mark Goldberg filed an application with the CRTC to have a specific American web site blocked for Canadian viewers.  The reason for the application was that the site was promoting genocide against Canadian jews, and the murder of one specific human rights lawyer living here in Ottawa.  The site has since [...]

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Hello hullo!

August 22, 2006

Over the last few weeks I’ve been playing with the beta of a promising new free service called hullo. Now you can try it too. hullo bills itself as a personal call manager.  The promise is that it will help you stay in touch better than ever before.  It incorporates a buddy-list style softphone with some very slick advanced [...]

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Beaches

August 21, 2006

Flying out of San Diego this morning (yes, my vacation is over), I’ve been thinking about the beaches we visited last week.  Mid-week, we took a break from the desert, and headed to the coast to the shi-shi town of Laguna Beach.  At the end of the week, on our way into San Diego to [...]

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Wind, Water, and Business: Joshua Tree National Park

August 18, 2006

Joshua Tree National Park is an amazing place.  It sits at the confluence of the Colorado Desert ecosystem, and the Mojave Desert ecosystem.  From the high Mojave you descend thousands of feet to the Colorado.  And in between, there are a thousand changes. The wonderful thing about these deserts, and this park, is the ways [...]

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