by alec on August 21, 2008
DiamondWare’s Keith Weiner just pinged me to let me know that his company had been acquired by Nortel.
For those not familiar with DiamondWare, they build stereo, spatially aware audio conferencing systems. An accomplished group of audio engineers, the DiamondWare team has solved the problem of how to represent people in 3 audible dimensions. Their software is in use by the US military, gaming companies, and an increasing array of carriers. And now, as part of Nortel, they’ll be integrated in the telecom giant’s virtual world project called web.alive.
The DiamondWare team has been a fixture of the VoIP world ever since I started in this industry. The technology has always been cool, but just a little outside the mainstream. In my short conversation with Keith he was excited and ready to “stay on for the long haul and scale this thing up”. It seems as if the dream he and his team have been working toward for so long has just been given the backing it needs to become reality.
Congratulations to the DiamondWare team!
More from Rich Tehrani, and Jon Arnold.
by alec on August 21, 2008
On the SquawkBox conference call this morning we discussed the rumours of an iTunes unlimited offering. The folks over at The Unofficial Apple Weblog published a piece this morning suggesting that Apple might offer (for perhaps $130 year) a subscription “all-you-can-eat” iphone music service, with the option to buy tracks you’d really like to keep. It’s an intriguing idea, especially in the context of the conversation we had yesterday around piracy. At the same time, it seems like there might be some overlap with Satellite Radio, for example.
Consensus on the call: some form of cloud based music subscription / storage makes a ton of sense. Whether it’s Apple’s route, or a service like Pandora, it seems to be the future.
And second, there are a ton of blog postings hitting this morning about Blackberry Bold. The launch is imminent. We’ve got a number of Blackberry users as regulars. So we had a discussion about Citigroup’s report that Bold is strong but not a game changer, the 3G issues being reported and RIM‘s development platforms.
Most tellingly, it was difficult to keep the conversation focused on Blackberry. Our callers are clearly more excited about iPhone.
The most quotable quote of the call came from Bill Volk in relation to Sun Microsystems stewardship of the J2ME platform: “Sun has done the worst possible technical job possible with J2ME”.
On the conference call this morning: Dan Rockwell, Thomas Purves, Dan York, Adam Somer, Ian Hood, Bill Volk, Todd Spraggins, Sheryl Breuker, Frank Abrams.
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