Back in the 60's when I was in elementary school we had Mr. Petro. Mr. Petro was the school's "maintanence man." His job, dirty, smelly, trashy and all was to keep the then 40 something year old brick and masonary school up and running. He fixed toilets, changed lightbulbs, moved desks, arranged for new chairs, … Read more
Okay, so I get to work from some of the most interesting places in the world. As long as I can connect to the 'Net I'm usually good to go and last night over dinner in Perpignan France I just had to dial into a client conference call with Shango, a very cool company you'll … Read more
It wasn't too many years ago when many of us in the blogosphere descended on Barcelona and found we loved a carrier called Yoigo. It offered pre-paid SIM's, cheap daily usage rates for data and worked well with services like Truphone and Mobivox to keep costs down. Over time the iPhone arrived, SIM's got smaller, … Read more
Yesterday at Google I/O a lot of new devices and concepts came forward from Google and GigaOm carried it blow by blow. In thinking overnight about what Google is doing, it became obvious to me that unlike Microsoft and Apple, they're no friend to the cable guys, the hardware manufacturers or the telcos/mobile operators. Why? It's … Read more
I'm going to out on a limb and say that hotels, over time simply can't give away Wi-Fi, unless the raise room rates. I say this because as USA Today points out, there's an "insatiable" demand for connectivity while traveling, and hotels can't keep treating it like air. I say this because the cost of … Read more
Recently I took a flight on US Air that was supposed to have Wi-Fi. It didn’t. For me, and my team member who also was on the same flight, that meant a cross country trip during the day, a short connection, and very little time to get things done before an early dinner with a … Read more
Over the next few years I think we'll begin to see the following: 1. Brand erosion in VoIP-Less brands selling to business, consumers 2. Greater consolidation-It's already started with Smoothstone and M5 getting purchased 3. More services from bigger suppliers-Companies like SalesForce, CA, SAP, Oracle will begin pushing out more services that support VoIP providers, … Read more
Microsoft is letting internal politics get in the way of satisfying the Office using public whom own iPads. Today's story in the New York Times about Google buying QuickOffice and the efforts from Google to bolster their GoogleApps integration is key to the aquisition. For every Office using worker or company that samples Google Apps, … Read more
In a story clearly orchestrated by Microsoft and Skype PR, and what has really is the first deep dive look at Skype by a major publication since their offical takeover last October by Microsoft, the New York Times' Nick Wingfield examines what's up with the market leading online real-time communications service. Wingfield did a very good job, … Read more
Today the very influential conferencing industry analyst report, Electronic Telespan which is written and edited by Elliot Gold lobbed a bomb and a hand grenade in the direction of Polycom in the subsription only newsletter. First off Elliot who uses the numbers to guide his business analysis points out the problems at Polycom-basically saying the … Read more
