Tello

Tello's Stealthy Announcements

by alec on July 25, 2006

The Tello team today announced that they have secured $10 million in series B funding, led by Canadian VC BCE Capital.  Previous investors Evercore, Rho, Eagle River, and Intel also participated in the round.

I spoke with Tello CEO Doug Renert a couple of weeks ago.  He explained their vision as providing unified communications services for small and medium businesses. Just prior to our conversation, Microsoft unveiled it’s unified communications strategy, and shortly after,  the Microsoft / Nortel pact was announced.  Tello is smart to focus on the small business segment, outside of the focus of these two giants.

If you’re interested in trying Tello, the company has a beta up and running which runs on PCs and Blackberry handhelds.  They also have a trial program for Asterisk PBX users, which enables shared presence information between Tello subscribers, and routing between Asterisk PBX’s directly, without traversing the PSTN — ENUM on steroids.

Unusually, neither of these announcements — the funding, nor the Asterisk program — have attracted attention.  I don’t understand why.

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Pawn to Queen 4

by alec on July 18, 2006

The chess pieces have been moving around the VoIP board for the last couple of hours.  I’ve recently gotten mail on:

  • The Comcast Cablevision announcement that it has passed 1,000,000 VoIP subscribers.  Om Malik observes that this is putting pressure on the incumbent carriers, but also makes life much more difficult for Vonage.  Indeed, Cablevision operates in just a few states as compared with Vonage which is an international carrier.  Vonage stock is down again, now below $7.
  • The Nortel / Microsoft announcement of a new research partnership, which, according to Microsoft VP Jeff Raikes, will ultimately result in the sale of new products and services through a joint channel.  Because it’s a research partnership, this will be a longer term play. However, public cloud presence plays, like Tello, are going to come under pressure as a result.  For now, the alliance’s focus on enterprise and carrier means that there is plenty of room to innovate, even though the stakes have just become higher.

 We live in interesting times.

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Tail End of ETel

January 28, 2006

I’m back home, and am just now collecting my thoughts on the end of ETel.  It’s a real testament to Surj Patel and the folks at O’Reilly that this conference went off so well in it’s first year. At the end of the day Thursday I delivered my presentation.  I had wanted to speak a [...]

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Sympathy for Arrington

January 25, 2006

I have a lot of sympathy for Michael Arrington.  Yesterday he posted a relatively minor criticism of Tello’s launch. Tello didn’t court the blogosphere.  Personally, I agree with his critique.  Working with bloggers has been one of the most successful and lowest cost strategies which iotum has executed to date.  The resulting conversation enhances our product, and [...]

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