Back in the early days of VoIP, there was a horrific incident involving a death, a baby and Vonage. This led to regulatory oversight of VoIP by the FCC. This was something that then fellow VoIPWatcher, Om Malik, had pretty much predicted while my archives show that there were efforts being taken earlier by Vonage and others. So … Read more
The Wall Street Journal has a great story about the decline or if you believer, the continuation of the use of the deskphone. As someone who has not had a home or office phone for so many years the story is mostly old hat. Given how voice over IP use and acceptance has steadily grown, … Read more
For many years I've used the rule of 3x to stop buying wines that have just gotten too pricey. A great example these days are Chateauneuf du Papes which are now at that point. Given I was buying them at under $20.00 and now many of those are now over $60.00 I'm back looking for … Read more
In what has to be more about intellectual property and gap filling, and a bit of an acquihire in nature, 8×8 has acquired Jitsi from Atlassian. You'll recall how HipChat was sold off to Slack a few months ago, so this seems to be the next step in trimming non-core assets by the Australian company … Read more
This is belated news and still sad. I just learned via the Kevin Tofel and Matt Miller's podcast that James Kendrick passed away. I will admit that after James departure from GigaOm that my interaction with James had been reduced. While we periodically exchanged some messages in social media, James and I hadn't really spoken in … Read more
In what has been a long time coming, Uber, the world's largest ride sharing service, has added VoIP to their mobile apps reports Engadget and RedmondPie. There's a couple of benefits that come to mind almost immediately. First is the fact that those of us who have multiple phones and phone numbers will be more … Read more
I have for years loved spending time in Lyon. The city is walkable. Has a great transit system and without question some of the best dining of any major city in the world. In many ways as much as I enjoy Paris, I find Lyon much more to my liking as the old school meets … Read more
Given the meteoric rise of Twilio stock and all the noise they have been making I was looking forward to groundbreaking news out of their Signal conference in San Francisco this week. I didn't hear it or see it. Instead what I saw was largely the ongoing management of the message, via the media, in … Read more
Years back I had the ability to memorize just about anyone's phone number. Part of the skill was pure memory tricks. Associating the person to an area code reduced the need to memorize 10 digits. Then there was repetition. The more you called someone, the easier it was to remember their number. Next was we … Read more
So late yesterday the news out of Twilio's Signal conference broke that Twilio was acquiring SendGrid. Most of the coverage is straight out of the news release, with very little critical analysis. From my perspective $2 billion for SendGrid, a company with a perceived market value of $1.4 billion is a nice premium, and a … Read more
