Seesmic’s decision reflects on their business, not Blackberry

June 21, 2011
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Yesterday the Seesmic team blindsided RIM with news that they would no longer develop Seesmic for Blackberry.  They were very public about it, and the only explanation offered was they would “discontinue support for Blackberry in order to focus development efforts on our most popular mobile platforms: Android, iOS, and Windows 7.”  The press seized [...]

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Bre.ad: half baked, and maybe already toast.

June 19, 2011
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Bre.ad, the new link shortener promoted used by Lady Gaga, is a bad idea.  If you haven’t seen it yet, the quick recap of bre.ad is as follows: Shorten links by simply navigating to http://bre.ad/{your URL}.  It’s a little easier and simpler than visiting the bit.ly or ow.ly site. When visitors click on your bre.ad link, [...]

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Living with Playbook, two months later

June 15, 2011
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When RIM launched the BlackBerry Playbook in mid-April, I grabbed one and started using it.  You might have noticed that I didn’t write about it the time.  The same as other writers, my initial take on the Playbook was that it had a lot of promise but wasn’t ready for prime-time.  Some websites didn’t work, [...]

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Bria iPad Edition 1.0 a winner!

June 8, 2011
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I hadn’t really looked at CounterPath’s softphone offerings in some time, so when the Bria team asked me to take a peek at their latest offering, Bria iPad Edition 1.0, I jumped at the chance.  And boy, was I glad I did! Bria iPad Edition releases today.  It’s free $14.99, and it brings standards based [...]

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Prediction: Windows 8 will RTM June 2012

June 2, 2011
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It was just before midnight last night that I caught up on the news that Microsoft had demonstrated the new Windows 8 UI at the D9 conference (liveblog and video here). The demo’s were slick, and Microsoft’s Steven Sinofsky did a great job under pressure, handling Walt Mossberg’s pointed questions with aplomb.  I sent him [...]

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RIM: Re-imagining “Phone” again

May 30, 2011
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The knives are out for RIM’s top management, but the financial press is missing the boat as they focus on short-term results. In 2002, the company remade the fledgling smartphone industry by releasing the first devices – Blackberry 5800 series – with integrated enterprise class email.  The arms race was on, as Microsoft and Palm [...]

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Skype for Asterisk termination is just business

May 25, 2011
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A lot of die-hard Skype fans worry that Microsoft’s acquisition of the company is going to change it, and not for the better.  Yesterday’s news that Skype For Asterisk will be discontinued didn’t help, generating speculation that this action is a result of their impending acquisition. Before we rush to declare the “Micro-Skype ApocalypseTM”, let’s consider [...]

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The UN gets a country (code)

May 24, 2011
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When Voxbone CEO Rodrigue Ullens saw that the ITU had assigned the UN a country code, he thought “They could use our help.”  Inbound international calling, after all, is Voxbone’s core business.   Tomorrow, Voxbone will announce an agreement with the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs to implement country code +888 on [...]

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Three reasons bringing the Qualcomm AR toolkit to non-Qualcomm platforms makes sense.

May 20, 2011
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I like Qualcomm’s latest move, bringing their augmented reality developers toolkit to iPhone, even though the iPhone doesn’t use any Qualcomm chips.  It’s smart business, for three reasons: Qualcomm understands that software tools and platforms that work with a single hardware platform have a limited market.  On Windows, would you write for the Direct X API [...]

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Telecom futurists to converge on the Bay Area in late June. Plan for it!

May 20, 2011

Interested in the communications business, especially the future of the communications business?  Two must-attend events that are coming soon are eComm America 2011, and the Future of Voice MasterClass.  These are both happening in the San Francisco Bay area at about the same time.  eComm runs June 27 to 29 at the San Francisco Airport [...]

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