While the winter months mean dormant vineyards, this time of the year is the key selling season for winemakers, as they get to show off wines both in bottle and barrel. No event is bigger for a wine region than Decouvertes du Rhone, the every other year Rhone Valley four day extravaganza that takes place … Read more
Long suspected and not at all far fetched since Skype was acquired by Microsoft was the marriage of Lync and Skype. The reason for the purchase was the foresight of Lync lead Dr. Joe Williams who saw how the two could work together and at the same time, the looming threat Skype posed if independent … Read more
I arrived in Milan at the Malpensa Airport planning on buying a local SIM to trial against my Truphone SIM. Sadly, finding anything other than a full size or Micro SIM was not in the cards this Sunday morning. Fortunately, I already had a TIM SIM that still had about 11 Euros of credit that … Read more
Image via CrunchBase I read today on Pocket-Lint how Skype is slowly rolling out video messaging. WOW. What a non-starter. Back in the mid 2000's when we worked with SightSpeed that was one of the standard features in what has to be now viewed as one of the original cloud or hosted video communications platforms. … Read more
Image via CrunchBase In a prior era Skype was trying hard to get close to mobile operators. They had established deals with Three and Verizon Wireless and a few others around the globe. That all seemed to go on hold when Microsoft acquired the company and the focus became more surrounding integration with the rest … Read more
Acme Packet (AKPT) makers of session border controllers and related real time communications technology has been acquired by Oracle, reports the New York Times this morning and others including Reuters. This is an interesting grab by one of the tech world's true giants because it sqaurely puts Oracle into a game where they begin to compete … Read more
Image via CrunchBase Tomorrow I say "cheerio" to London for the second time this year. And for the second time this year I'm not leaving London for home, but for an industry conference. In my mind the new year hasn't really started as I've only been home for five nights in my own bed before … Read more
Yahoo! Messenger Icon (Photo credit: Wikipedia) Just learned that Yahoo Voice is shutting down at the end of January. Yahoo! will no longer offer Phone In and Phone Out services to our users, although free Messenger-to-Messenger calls will still be available through your Yahoo! Messenger service. Interestingly, the news came to me from … Read more
So Facebook is again trying to become a bigger part of people's lives with free member to member calling in the USA. That means they're still not doing what Skype does, but this is today. What Facebook is doing is pretty much ICQ era presence and ICQ era voice calling. See the person online, connect and talk. … Read more
Like many of you, I live on conference calls. Meet me on the bridge is a standard part of our vocabularly, with calls on the calendar to avoid a call you're expecting being missed by a call you didn't expect. Yesterday on a conference call using Citrix's GoToMeeting with James Tagg, CTO and Founder of … Read more
