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Citron In Engadget

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In what we in the PR biz call, spin control, Citron is out there spinning a tale and telling it over and over again. There is also some damage control in the wake of the E911 decision last week, as well as added speculation about how much Vonage is really worth these days. As much … Read more

VON Media Attendence Expected to Rise

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It seems over the past week there has been a flurry of media heading to EuroVON. Their fine PR team has done a great job as press attendance is actually up 47% from the ’04 show (65 and counting up from 44). Jeff also reports on how far and wide the attendees are coming from. … Read more

Now This Is Cool

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With SK-Earthlink my bet to be the most disruptive wireless player in the USA, far surpassing what Virgin or ESPN are planning, and much more forward thinking than the proposed and top secret HispanicMobile effort that CaCingular are expected to roll out, I see devices like this one found by those guys at Gizmodo to … Read more

Money For Nothing, VoIP’s Not Free

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Paul Kapustka thinks Vonage may be the winner, in a weird sort of way from the FCC’s decision to implement E-911.

Industry insiders estimate Vonage will have to spend $60 million just to get E-911 up and running and about two million a month to keep E-911 working for their customers.

While Paul thinks this is a victory of sorts and that Vonage will be the winner over the other VoIP providers in the USA.
I politely disagree as the cost and added burn rate to Vonage is a burden they and the other early stage companies all have, which companies like AT&T, Verizon and the cable operators don’t have. If Vonage and the other newcomers have not factored te expenses into their budgets, then their previous multi-billion dollar range valuation are likely to flatten faster than the dot.com bubble.
As a matter of fact all of this and what follows speaks directly to the valuation of VONAGE and other VoIP players who have to either buy or build E-911 capability into their system.

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Skype Share Is Cool

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I love it. I’m listed right below Skype Journal along with the giants like Jeff, Om, Joi Ito (who I knew back in the 80s on line and face to face) and uber a lister Robert Scoble as blogs they read. Check out Skype Share !!! But what’s really cool is how Skype has embraced … Read more

When Redundancy Isn’t Enough for Packet 8

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Even with redundant servers in their network architecture Packet 8 seems over the last few days to have a problem keeping it up, as yesterday alone the Santa Clara company had two outages of the thirty minute variety, on top of an outage outage last week.

Like Vonage has claimed in the past, it was due to a "server" malfunction related to an upgrade. Packet 8 in an email reply to my questions said "upon further investigation, I (we-sic) learned that the recent Packet8 service outages were caused by a server malfunction brought on by a software glitch associated with the feature upgrade we are currently implementing. This problem has been resolved and we are adding new servers to the network tomorrow while also telling me they have redundancy in their network.

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Time To Sell VoIP Companies or How To Spell Consolidation

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Today’s ruling by the FCC about E-911 may spur consolidation within the growing next generation VoIP industry here in the USA for one big reason. Development cost. Solving E-911’s issues aren’t cheap, which is why the cellular industry has danced around it for years. In a blog post, Russell Shaw quotes a former FCC Wireless … Read more