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 out by the change in schedule caused by the failure of Niklas Zennstrom’s satellite link.
The AOL TotalTalk announcement seems to have garnered very little comment. Tom Keating published a long piece mostly covering the feature set. It’s a good summary. One wonders why AOL is pursuing this strategy now. The strategy was conceived of, and launched, in Canada 12 months ago. However, since that time, cable players have emerged as very strong competitors imitating the old world PSTN, and Skype has turned the world on it’s head with a new model. Imitating the PSTN business model, however nicely integrated with their online service, seems a short term tactical move, rather than a long term strategy.
There has been a lot of traffic on Google’s WiFi service. Om Malik, and James Enck have rather extensive coverage. My question is really, why? The only value I see is in filtering packets, or routing around other’s packet filters. Is Google, as Richard Stasny is suggesting, developing a service to break through blocked networks? Or is this part of their strategy to unify the Google login?
Skype held a developers night a couple of days ago, which several people I know attended. From all accounts, despite the addition of Lenn Pryor to the Skype team, it wasn’t anything like a real developer event. Nevertheless, Phil Wolff managed to snap some photos of the roadmap, so for the first time that I am aware of, there seems to be a comprehensive, publicly available feature roadmap. Speaking as a software developer, what would be most useful to us is a platform and API roadmap.
Ted Shelton, the Author of IP Inferno (who I just met at the show as well), was disparaging of Bill Smith, Bell South CTO’s claim that VoIP wouldn’t have done a better job in New Orleans. Hard to disagree. Very hard. Either Smith was telling a bald-faced lie, or he doesn’t know what IP is capable of doing. Neither bodes well for Bell South.
