AOL

VoIP Silo’s Suck

January 8, 2006

During CES, Om Malik hammered out a fabulous rant on VoIP silos.  He talked about how the choices VoIP providers are making which tie specific pieces of hardware to their services only are limiting choices for consumers.  Pulver followed this up with a specific dissection of how Skype is limiting choice by not investing enough in [...]

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Panel Questions

January 2, 2006

Here are the questions I’ve gathered up for my panel on Mobility and Instant Messaging at CES on Wednesday.  If you’ve got suggestions for other questions, please drop me an email, or post them in the comments section of this message.  We’ll have representatives from AOL, MSN, Earthlink and Yahoo on hand to answer them.  [...]

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Dumping IM

November 14, 2005

In Giving up on Instant Messaging, long time Instant Messaging user Luis Suarez notices that his IM usage has shifted from AOL, Yahoo, MSN to Skype, Google Talk, and Damaka.   I’ve noticed the same.  I rarely message people on MSN Messenger anymore, but choose Skype or Gizmo Project instead. 

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Voice 2.0: A Manifesto for the Future

October 21, 2005

Two days ago I spent the day travelling to Toronto and back on the Via Rail.  It turned into a rather long day, because just outside Brockville a train ahead of us on the track had a partial derailment.  The tracks were damaged, the train was damaged, and sometime just after midnight (after leaving us [...]

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MSN / Yahoo

October 12, 2005

I just tuned into the conference call on the MSN / Yahoo Interop Agreement that was announced this morning.  The salient details?  In six to nine months users of both networks will have text, voice, emoticon and presence interoperability, creating a community of 250 million users globally. Jeff Pulver asks does it mean anything?  Only [...]

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MSN / Yahoo Alliance

October 11, 2005

Andy Abramson, CNET, the Seattle PI, and the Wall Street Journal report that MSN and Yahoo will announce an alliance allowing IM users to communicate between networks.  From the WSJ Story: In a competitive realignment of the heated Internet industry, Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. are expected to announce Wednesday that consumers using their free communications [...]

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A little catch-up

September 22, 2005

It’s 6:35 in the morning here in Boston, and I’m doing a little catch-up on the last couple of days of stuff accumulating in RSS feed. First, Richard Stastny published an excellent summary of some of the Day 2 talks.  I read his material on Brad Garlinghouse’s speech with particular interest because I got caught [...]

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AOL & MSN in Talks

September 15, 2005

The New York Post reported this morning that Time Warner and Microsoft are in talks to sell a stake in AOL to Microsoft.  Citing two unnamed sources familiar with the matter, the Post said the talks concern Microsoft acquiring an AOL stake and then combining it with Microsoft’s Web unit MSN. Microsoft would pay some [...]

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Andy on Skype / EBay

September 12, 2005

Andy Abramson has similar analysis as my last posting (plus a big Neener-neener!!!! to Om Malik ) here. 

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Mark Evans on EBay / Skype

September 12, 2005

Mark Evans writes: Here’s my initial take on why eBay made the deal. Part of it has to be defensive. It has become increasingly obvious the Web will be dominated by a handful of large companies (eBay, Google, Amazon, AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo and News Corp. if it keeps making acquisitions). The key consideration is [...]

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