Google Voice Offline
Evidently at least one of the engineers at Google Voice woke up and came up with a new feature…Offline Texting. It was announced with the following blog post: Sometimes the times that we’re offline can be our most productive times. However, whe…
Is the Stylus Retro?
The Samsung Note is a smartphone tablet thing. It is either the largest smartphone or smallest tablet depending on your point of view. I saw it at CES, and it was advertised on national television during the Superbowl. The ad poked fun at the hipsters …
Big Blue’s Sphere
LotusSphere is an odd name for an event about non-Lotus software. That was just one of the themes from IBM’s (presumably last) LotuSphere 2012, that it is killing the Lotus brand. Not that the show is dying – it’s a huge show. IBM has slowly been distancing itself from the name/brand Lotus – and replacing [...]
StartupCamp5
StartupCamp5 will be taking place at ITExpo Feb 1-3 at the Miami Beach Convention Center. I’ve attended the past four ITExpo’s and StartupCamps, but won’t be at this one. Feeling a bit wistful as so many people I know are heading that way. ITExpo is a good show – particularly strong for hosted service providers [...]
Contempt for Customers
Thinly disguised contempt for the customer is an easy trap to fall into, after-all, without customers our jobs would be a lot easier. There is just one problem with this line of thinking… The first time I heard the term Thinly Disguised Contempt for the Customer was from the book In Search of Excellence. The example provided [...]
10 Reasons Why RIM Won’t Die
It has been fun to kick RIM. Text book example of why incumbents get disrupted – they owned/invented email on a mobile phone. They invented the smartphone. We used to call their addicts ’”Crackberries.” But they (along with everyone else) underestimated Apple. Blackberry had a huge market share – relationships with every major cellular carrier, a [...]
The Unspoken Question
What exactly should the mute button do? Daniel J. Wakin, reporting for the NYT: The unmistakably jarring sound of an iPhone marimba ring interrupted the soft and spiritual final measures of Mahler’s Symphony No. 9 at the New York Philharmonic on Tuesday night. The conductor, Alan Gilbert, did something almost unheard-of in a concert hall: He [...]
CES 2012
What a ridiculous show. The show is just too big. They say only Vegas can handle a show this big, but it can’t. Vegas has the capacity in conference and hotel space, but once the show expands into multiple locations the weak link becomes apparent: transportation. They were running large buses full time between The [...]
Facebook and T-Mobile Launch Bobsled. With Huge Privacy Glitch. Or is it By Design? Skype, Google Voice and Telcos Beware, Anyway…
Out of left field, T-Mobile and Facebook launched Bobsled, a VOIP service that allows voice calls to anyone on your Facebook list for free. At this moment the entire blogging world is busy writing about it, so I skip the basics… and just run to some funny experience while testing it. First, here’s how you [...]
Why Verizon’s Acquisition Of Terremark Is Not Exciting
Yesterday, Verizon announced that they are acquiring the cloud provider Terremark for $1.4 Billion According to Datacenter Knowledge, Verizon will acquire colocation and cloud hosting provider Terremark for $1.4 billion in a deal that will accelerate the telecom provider’s push into cloud computing. Verizon will pay $19.00 in cash for each share of Terremark, about [...]
AT&T’s Tiered Plans: Killing Of Mobile Innovation Or Opportunity For Others
Image by Getty Images via @daylife AT&T shocked the iPad users this week with an announcement that it will eliminate the unlimited data plan they offer now. In fact, this unlimited, no contract plan was one of the reasons many people, including me, bought iPad 3G in the first place. Even though many will not [...]
Telecoms unite against Apple
Apple faces the combined ire of 24 of the worlds telecom companies who want to start their own application store so that people that download applications to their phones and make more money off the applications that they are currently trying to support. Apple should buy T-Mobile or some other telecom, much like Google is [...]
T-Shirt Friday #18 – TelecomONE
Everyone knows that professional conference goers like myself attend events not to listen to presentations, not to network but to collect schwag. Over the past couple of years I’ve done fairly well collecting tech t-shirts and I decided to create a weekly series critiquing tech companies t-shirt offerings in the expectation that a company with [...]
