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Skype-And The Winner Is—Microsoft

Image via CrunchBase So give props to pal Om Malik for breaking the story. Skype is going to Microsoft. It's a big win for a lot of people, most of all the original founders and it's a fit. As I wrote over the weekend there was little chance Google would really buy Skype. Too many … Read more

Why Buy Skype and Why It’s For Sale

Om reports on the steady stream of rumors that Skype is likely to be bought by now either Facebook, Google or Microsoft. Here's why I think the company may be bought.. 1. Facebook-they need a realtime comms platform to put themselves inside. Skype's new Web OS effortes being led by Jonathan Rosenberg and Jason Fischl … Read more

Verizon LTE XOOM Upgrade

According to tech support agent Sky at Verizon Wireless the LTE upgrade for the Motorola Xoom is now slated for the start of summer not the original 90 days after launch that was reported as "official." Techie Buzz, says it's because Verizon wants to beef up it's network…Well, if there are the 250K Xoom's out … Read more

Skype’s IPO Tender Was Really a Route to Another Sale

Wired, Reuters and others are reporting that Skype is in talks at preliminary stages for various types of tie ups with FaceBook and Google. No surprise. In the past Google took a good hard look at Skype and bought Gizmo instead, but that doesn't keep the corporate development teams from kicking the tires. Ever since … Read more

Happy Days In Los Angeles-Boingo IPO Raises $77 Million

In the world of startups, you hope one day for an exit. In the case of many at Boingo it’s been a long time coming. Pal Christian Gunning has been there since the beginning, from it’s days inside an incubator called eCompanies Wireless, the Sky Dayton/Jake Winebaum progeny that was a JV with SprintĀ in Passadena … Read more

Verizon’s Clouded Thinking: Social Media is Not Customer or Media Relations

  Image via Wikipedia Verizon's Wireless needs a dose of reality. Using Twitter to tell the public that they are aware of the LTE outage this past week, is neither media relations nor public relations. It's hiding in plain sight. It's like a public company putting out news on a Friday afternoon, after the market … Read more

Free SIP Accounts, Again

Years ago, voice on the net visionary, Jeff Pulver created FreeWorldDialup, a service that gave users "free" SIP account to make calls on net to other SIP users. It helped spawn a very active community, simplified how people could get online, and in many ways paved the way for what is now Skype-minus SIP. Now, … Read more

The Sunday Morning Post-Is It Time To Back Up Your Back Up?

Image via CrunchBase Last week the world saw that Amazon Web Services EC2 went down, wrecking havoc with many so called Cloud based startups. Later in the week I fell victim to the JungleDisk DNS outage, and while Rackspace which manages JungleDisk, even though my data sits on Amazon,was able to maintain data integrity, the … Read more

VoxOx Launches Something Borrowed, Something New

Image via Wikipedia Pal Bruce Bigelow of XConomy has a solid recap of VoxOx's VoxOx Call launch that happened yesterday. VoxOx, which was funded by my neighbor-for the sake of transparency, is part of Telcentris, a San Diego based CLEC with a focus on international calling and are hoping to cut into that pie, the … Read more