A couple of conference calls helping friends either acquire or be acquired. A product management lunch with a wall street type.
Is my future as a match maker?
Everyone loves my rollodex (what a quaint term)
But does my rollodex want me to introduce everyone. Getting my friends on the same page is excruciating and I think a direct sales job would be a lot easier.
Anyway. These friends are near and dear to me so I want to help.
In the past as a pulverite the offer to help was associated with helping to build the VON.
Now I am working on expanding the network. A lot of people see me as a business developer. I think I have to go with the flow at this point.
I am not sure I am happy to have a hurry up and wait mentality about this
I could really use a good pr contact at Amazon, but I am just a fan. However, here is the story.
My Kindle has been a very interesting purchase and could be a much better device for networking. Improving the keyboard alone would make the social aspect stronger. Also the ability to use it as a day planner would be enhanced. I can buy lots of daily reading strategies, why cant the kindle support that? No reason. Just not there yet.
So the $300 dollar kindle is on the way and hopefully it will include these improvements. For those of us with the existing model, I am looking forward to some network based backward connectivity.
If you want to join me using the kindle now, here you go.
I want to take a moment to remember the days when Pingtel was the hope for IP phones that were standard compliant.
Jay Batson, Jim Hourihan, Steve Guthrie, Dan Petrie and the rest of the team represented some of the most clear thinking about where we were heading.
But executing on a vision is hard and delivering before the market is ready can be crushing. In the end the products deserved better.
Then came the idea that open source would be a good strategy and the sip foundry was formed and many looked to prove interoperability by using pingtel’s base as a tool.
Once again long vision and a market in line.
Then came the roll up into Bluesocket and an FMC strategy. Still a vision without a market to share.
Now comes Nortel. This is going to seem cruel, but I want to be clear. Nortel has alot of interesting things going on and with all its turbulent past and still has the heart of many of my carrier friends.
But one thing Nortel does not have is a history of Interoperability. It usually can find a way to make a standard something requiring private certification. This is a company that flourished with the concept of a proprietary phone sets (a.k.a. p-sets). So the acquistion of pingtel should be looked on as the death of a dream.
If not for SIP interoperability, at least for a vision of an all SIP world.
On my other blog, I just posted a podcast with Doug Pasko of Verizon, who is also the co-chair of the P4P working group at DCIA. You can listed to Doug by going here
As usual I had to edit my hums and haws to make the podcast useful to others, and as a result I have heard it now about 5 times. And I can’t find a reason not to like the technology.
That made me wonder what would be the push back from some of my friends in the P2P space so I asked them.
After going a few rounds with a friend, I came away with mild annoyance. As Om Malik and his team have pointed out in the past the infrastructure of the future is not going to wait for the PSTN Legacy operators to catch up.
Fundamentally the push back is one of concern for implementation. Some of these concerns are based on strategies that are perhaps ill advised.
The Distributed Computing Industry Association is a who’s who of P2P operators and its good to see a forum being used that is part of the overall industry as opposed to the fragmentation that so often occurs.
imho, When a forum works within to bridge the gap between two competing views, room has to be made for synergy to occur.
Last Night, I was tech support for my daughters’ iPhone and had a friend over who is a device geek and iPhone, iTouch owner.
The issue was she was not able to connect to the WiFi and EDGE in my house is limited. My device geek friend had the same problem with his iPhone at my house which eventually in the course of 2 hours we solved by some magical tweeking of my DNS entries. (don’t understand why but it worked).
So the friend loves to show me the “Apps” 90% of which were self contained game or tool software where the value of the Internet was in the download distribution. Network Services were sans SIP.
So what kind of services are we trying to enable? My belief has always been that the Network transference of state had advantages and that was about it.
Sitting with Henning Schulzrinne on Monday, I came to understand that asynchronous communication was proving that real time communication was not as critical as I previously thought. With that understanding I am finding the network less relevant. Even for my Bell Head.
However, the application asylum is full of bad ideas and it maybe that the dumb pipe has some Integration value after all.
While on the phone with Apple my Device Geek sought advice on some regressions on apple software he wanted to do.
This also said, I will put my bell head and tell you that some of the lowest downloads are the dual mode phone strategies for the iPhone.
Previously, When taking my daughter to the ATT store the manager of the place showed he had downloaded truphone. I offered to make a call with him and he told me he didn’t really use it. So the obscurity of softclients in wireless continues.
If voice is the killer app its lost in the iPhone. A year of iPhone fanaticism and I have still had a single person give me an iPhone demo vertically!
The samething on Facebook for that matter. The term messaging is applied to such things as email a cake to a friend on Facebook and other Hallmark favorites. Less than 10% of the messaging apps have a voice model in mind.
In the end voice maybe assimilated into this mess of asynch messaging.
We may have been participants in the buggy Whip redesign of Voice Communication.
If so I vote we go work on text to speech and speech to text soft clients.
For the folks like me who will not be able to type as fast as the async text coming at me.
I have been working on strategies to maintain my community development role.
I am very excited to share with you a simple web portal that I think you will find useful.
I have been surfing the web and looking for relevant blogs and news feeds in our space. I have posted this list of subject matter experts visually at The VoIP SME . This portal has an extra feature in that all the sites I have gathered are searchable with a Google gadget.
I think the improved results are striking and I hope you take advantage of the site as a location to find information.
Please browse the site and if I should be adding blogs or other search resources let me know.
Okay, I admit it. I was playing a game of scrabble with some friends on Facebook, and now I am not.
The Scrabble game has not been operational for a little over 24 hours that i can tell. I had a notice once they were trying to fix the problem.
As the NY Time reports Hasbro has won in its battle with Scrabulous and that game is banned in North America.
I think Hasbro may being hoisted on its own craziness. The game checks my IP address. Why?
Not sure but it seems to be the place where some mischief is being done. If they dont want Scrabulous played in North America shouldn’t that app be the one looking at my IP Address.
The Feedback look for Scrabble on Facebook is almost all negative and its clear some PR work is going to be the story for near future.
The biggest issue i have with all this is the continued balkanization of the Internet.
Andy Abramson has started a new blog that is a great read for the road warrior and the connected traveler. Having run conferences around the world its always interesting to see how connectivity works. It’s a lot like the issue of personal communication because the issue is matching your profile to the culture you visit. Given Andy’s normal connectivity I interviewed him to see where his personal edge was in the way of connectivity.
Here is what Andy had to say.
CF: Based on your blog post it looks like your phone is still a dominating driver in your communication? Is that accurate? What are you using?
Andy: No.. voice is. The device is simply the mode of conveyance. I use softphones (EyeBeam, Truphone, Skype) all of which allow for PSTN termination so saying the “phone” is an over simplification. I also am making tons of use of SightSpeed and some Skype for Video face-to-face talks…
CF: How are you connecting to the Internet abroad? Any difficulties.
Andy: NONE. First I carry a travel router and make my hotel rooms wireless. Second I use an unlocked 3G card (the subject of an upcoming post) and then go Pay As You Go Data in the UK and Spain (it’s also available in France as well as elsewhere, even in the USA on AT&T if one takes the time to find it on their GoPhone plan.) Third, between T-Mobile and Boingo, I pretty much have the world covered for WiFi. Oh, and as far as FON goes…the access points are about as plentiful as phone booths with working phones in Manhattan … not at all around anymore…all hype. Also, in the UK my SkypePhone from 3 is a blessing.
CF: You have not mentioned twitter are you posting status, or are you on holiday from that?
Andy: Twitter is a side channel…I tend to prefer IM and SMS or even Blackberry Messenger as my community can be found best those ways.
CF: What aspect of cultural communication in has been the most interesting to you in your travels?
Andy : People…I find that Technology helps break down the language barriers. Also, face to face interactions….
Which is a great lead in to continue reading…his blog posts
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When I realized this was going to occur, I began the quest of making this easy, fun and in many ways work related and decided that my experiences would take the shape of Working Anywhere, to be come a real subject matter expert on the art of working truly anywhere and still running a business.
I am working on getting the keynotes for http://www.venturesforward.com
Ventures Forward is an event I am building based on the future of the mobile Internet.
While many of my friends are convinced that the story is in the cell phone, I think we can get a lot more.
Take a look at Samsung. They build the Ultra Premium and the Instinct. we have a about a difference of about a pound and a halve between the devices. So what drives the decision?
It strikes me the story should be what really gives me the Internet vs what makes the Internet is easier to navigate.
Note: I am working on getting all the blogs about our space on one page which i will post soon. If you have a favortie send me a note to carl@crossfireconsulting.com
So I decided to make my point about the iPhone being an indicator by showing all the competitive phones out there and gaining some perspective.
This review from PhoneDog.com is about the LG Dare. But they have a good handle on how to do these kind of reviews.
My biggest point is that the iPhones buzz will attract a change overall and not just to the iPhone.
A lot of our friends are building the be the blob on the right bottom corner of the phone. 10M apps can’t all gain that spot.
Ultimately we should be talking about the Web, imho!
