Tuesday, January 29, 2008

Squawk Box Jan 29

by alec on January 29, 2008

Discussed on this morning's call…

Nokia has agreed to acquire Trolltech for about $150 milion.   Trolltech makes cross platform tools for developing graphical applications.  It's flagship product Qt allows you to develop software for Windows, Java, and Linux.  QTopia is a graphical platform for Linux. Companies like Skype, Adobe and Google uses these technologies today.  Nokia competitor Motorola uses QTopia in many of it's smartphone handsets as well.   According to the Q&A that accompanied the release, the key driver for the acquisition is Nokia's desire for cross platform development.  Nokia said "Trolltech’s technology will enable Nokia and third parties to develop software across platforms easier and more cost effectively; this speeds up innovation and brings new experiences to Nokia's device portfolio and onto PCs."  

TweetMeme. This is the service that launched yesterday which aggregates trends across "Twitter Space".  

Ribbit's Amphibian project.  Amphibian is a consumer telephony application the marries the web and the handset.  It sports features like visual voice mail, drag and drop call routing, and something they've called Caller ID 2.0, which fetches information about callers from the social network, as the call is coming in.  It's also extensible by third parties.  From where I sit, this is a tremendously ambitious project.  We talk about what it will take for it to succeed.

Blu-Ray vs HD-DVD.  At CES it looked like HD-DVD was going the way of the DoDo.  Just yesterday, though, news broke that the HD-DVD vendors will have huge ads at the superbowl, and Blu-Ray won't. They've also got aggressive pricing on players, and the price of the movies have dropped recently.  Dead man walking?  Or will this Zombie accomplish the miraculous and rise from the dead? 

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News bits: mig33, Jajah, and Tweetmeme

by alec on January 29, 2008

Several interesting stories worth following yesterday:

  • mig33 announced a $13.5 million B round.  These folks are certainly on a roll, adding subscribers and raising money at a mad rate.
  • Jajah joined the Microsoft Startup Accelerator program.   I guess we'll be seeing more integration with Jajah and Microsoft handsets. Perhaps the Jajah folks can also leverage this into a corporate sales strategy with Microsoft's help as well.
  • TweetMeme launched a service to expose the significant topics of the day being discussed on Twitter.  It's a pretty interesting idea, and one that illustrates how quickly Twitter has evolved from mere status updates to a kind of nerve center information distribution.  

 

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Invitation to the Pulver un-Conference agenda bash

January 29, 2008

Interested in un-conferences? Telephony?  At Spring VON we'll be doing another of these events.  Tomorrow at 10 AM, Pulvermedia is hosting an "Agenda Bash" with Tom Howe, myself, Carl Ford and Brough Turner.  If you'd like to participate, then please visit this webinar page to join us! And if you don't know what an un-conference [...]

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iotum’s biggest release yet!

January 29, 2008

It's been a crazy couple of weeks, as we've been jamming new features into the iotum FREE Conference Call application for Facebook.  We've reached an inflection point where usage is really starting to ramp, and feature requests are beginning to pour in.  That's meant lots of work, especially in support of teleseminars, where a number [...]

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