May 2008

Squawk Box May 27 – Truphone Anywhere

May 27, 2008

Truphone Anywhere wasn’t supposed to announce this morning, but gosh… it did! While we were on the line chatting with Truphone’s James Body and Tom Carter, the team at Truphone HQ was madly reconfiguring their web site and getting the latest version of the Truphone client online.

So what’s special about it? Truphone Anywhere. Truphone Anywhere is a tool that lets Truphone users access Truphone’s famous low rates … via a local dial-in, and not just WiFi. Here in Canada, I will dedicate one of the MyFive numbers on my Rogers account to Truphone, which theoretically means I should be able to trim a substantial amount off my monthly bill.

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Illumio 3.0: your personal newspaper

May 27, 2008

Illumio, my mainstay when it comes to keeping on RSS, just got way better. WAY better. If you haven’t seen illumio before, it’s a tool for filtering content feeds, according to your interests, and then sharing those feeds with others. It quite literally indexes every piece of information in your world (by grovelling your hard [...]

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Access Truphone Anywhere

May 27, 2008

According to the UK site Techworld, Truphone is set to announce Truphone Anywhere, a service that lets you acccess the Truphone network from any mobile, whether on WiFi or not. Truphone Anywhere dials a gateway on a local number, which then connects through to the destination number, saving money if it is an international call. [...]

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Squawk Box May 26

May 26, 2008

A light Memorial Day crowd turned out to be more than enough to sustain a good conversation about Facebook Platform’s first birthday. We also talked about Omnitele’s latest white paper on the topic of mobile broadband business models, and were luck enough to have Omnitele’s Pal Zarandy join us between flights in Copenhage International airport.

Unfortunately the recording bug which has been plaguing us since last week reared it’s ugly head again. We continue to work through this issue with our partner ThinkEngine, and hope to have a solution this week. However, I was only able to capture the first 12 minutes of the call.

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DemoCamp Ottawa 9

May 24, 2008

The last Ottawa DemoCamp before summer will be taking place on Monday May 26 at the Velvet Room down in the market.  I’ll be there, not as a demo candidate or participant this time, but as MC!  The organizations demoing on Monday night include: Stockify – Investing Software SIMtone – Virtual PC, http://www.simtonecdu.com picsphere – [...]

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Squawk Box May 23

May 23, 2008

Yesterday’s big story — Ariel Waldman’s harrassment allegations on Twitter. We touch on her allegations and Twitter’s response. We compare Twitter’s response Facebook’s choice to censor user messages in the name of Spam Prevention; and Google’s apparent refusal to remove Al Qaeda videos from Youtube.

Where are the lines? Who’s right? Who’s wrong.

And since it’s Friday we also a couple of other quick wrap stories:

Lee Dryburgh’s proposal to host a 1 day mini-eComm in the fall. Good idea, bad idea, and would you attend?

Gamestop’s decision to dump the Zune. They used some waffley words about how it didn’t fit their retail mix to justify this. Isn’t this just more symptomatic of the fact that Microsoft is getting smoked in the music player market by Apple.

Microsoft Live search cashback. Now that the story is out, there has been some pretty interesting commentary.

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Squawk Box May 22

May 22, 2008

We started out with a great set of topics for the Squawk Box this morning and then… disaster struck. The recording stopped. Currently we at iotum are working with our hardware partner ThinkEngine to find a resolution to this problem, but occasionally it strikes. Anyway, the result? Although we had a great conversation about four topics, you get to listen to the first two only.

Enjoy the call. We discussed the use of Twitter as a communications bus on the internet, and also Microsoft’s decision to adopt ODF, PDF, and the XML paper document formats.

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#Mesh08: Ethan Kaplan and Mathew Ingram

May 22, 2008

One of the best sessions at Mesh ’08, Mathew Ingram sat down and interviewed Ethan Kaplan, Time Warner’s VP of Technology. Ingram began with a softball question on whether it was a good time to be an artist, which Kaplan answered with assertion that there wasn’t a better time to be an artist — that artists were no longer defined by their medium, but rather were practictioners in many media.

I jumped up with Nokia N95, and captured 25 minutes or so of the talk. Enjoy!

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#mesh08: Private vs. Public

May 22, 2008

I sat through a late day session at Mesh ’08 yesterday titled Private vs. Public. Chaired by Rachel Sklar, it featured Nancy Baym, Mark Kingwell, and Ken Anderson. The promise? Are society’s notions about privacy changing? Does anyone even care about privacy any more? Once you provide your information, does it belong to you or [...]

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mDialog: I'll pass.

May 22, 2008

I’ve been giving the mDialog application a whirl here at Mesh 08.  The promise of mDialog is that you will be able to easily share video, via the mDialog site, with your friends on iPod and via QuickTime.  So I uploaded the video of Ethan Kaplan and Mathew Ingram to the site to check it [...]

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