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Verizon 3Mbps Goes Live

I’m a loyal cable guy for now, but this probably is good news to many people… the price is actually quite competitive, though I am capable of getting up to 6MB down…

Though Verizon has yet to issue a press release or official announcement, our users are now ordering and receiving 3Mbps/768kbps DSL service. Only customers in former Bell Atlantic territory are seeing the upgrades, while Verizon West or Ex-GTE customers are still waiting. Users report it’s not available for those served via a remote terminal, or to those further than 11,000 feet from their CO. The tier costs $39.95 bundled, or $45 stand alone; the upstream speeds making it particularly attractive to many cable users (if they qualify). [broadband reports]

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Nintendo DS does VOIP

In its Electronic Entertainment Industry Update released today, TNI Securities reports that the recently revealed headset port on the Nintendo DS will be used in conjunction with the built-in wireless 802.11b networking capabilities to offer voice-over-IP chat–in effect, allowing gamers to use the DS to make free phone calls at wireless network hotspots. [Gamespot via Gizmodo]

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Pocket PC as a WiFiphone

The Vonage Softphone forums have a few posts on this and while it’s not supported, it definitely works. I don’t have and probably won’t be getting a PPC device, but for those of you with WIFI PPC’s and a Vonage account, you might be quite happy reading this… The Softphone service is pretty cool and if you add it on to your Vonage account, you get 500 minutes unlimited local and LD, which is a pretty good amount of talking (not power business use, but average). If you have a softphone account now, this is just another way to make use of it instead of lugging a laptop around…

This week’s How-To is a handy one for the folks out there who use the Vonage Voice Over IP (VOIP) service and happen to have a Pocket PC device with WiFi. We%u2019re going to show you how to turn just about any Pocket PC PDA device in to a real telephone with a working telephone number. At the end of this, we’re also going to post our phone number so you can test it out (it might be a long distance call for you). [Engadget]

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iMac G5

The new Apple iMac will definitley be finding a place in our home at some point… wow! I love the design and the specs are fantastic.

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Call Looping

As I mentioned in the previous post I am using the Vonage softphone to handle my calls while I am out of range for T-Mobile this week. I just did an interesting trick I thought I’d share for the other person who might find this interesting. my T-Mobile mobile is forwading to my main Vonage line which is forwarding to my Vonage Softphone. Basically all calls are being routed to my softphone which is very cool – at least to me.

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Vonage to the Rescue

I am currently in Vermont with my family getting away from the hubbub in NYC this week. I had no idea my mobile was going to be out of service here and was stressing a bit about how I would stay connected for work purposes … until I recalled that nice feature of Vonage, the softphone. The hotel we are staying in offers free wifi in all the rooms and across the entire property from what I’ve been told though I’ve only tested in two rooms (we’ve moved once, long story and perhaps another post)…

The Vonage softphone is a $9.95/mo add-on that gives you 500 minutes talk time unlimited local and long distance calling. It’s a software application that creates a SIP phone (Session Initiation Protocol) connection to any other phone of your choosing. The call quality is pretty good, not great — had a few drop outs which don’t seem to plague Skype on this PC, but may be more connection speed related than anything else.

All in all it’s a great work-around for my situation and something I am glad to have. There’s no way I could afford to be disconnected at the moment given work-load… I just wish Vonage gave this away as part of package allowing me to use my existing number with them rather than having to add another number and charge… maybe as competition cooks a bit more they’ll reconsider.

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Why (Not) to Switch From Email to RSS

I disagree with this post of Rick Bruner’s, but I am too tired to really rant. At the moment, Rick’s key argument against the use of RSS in business is that such a small percentage of people are using it. It’s hard to argue on numbers alone… RSS is still in it’s infancy.

As tools develop and people realize that they can be in control of their own information choices, it will grow. It may take a Microsoft OS implementation, but I doubt people will wait that long. Microsoft doesn’t even get it right most of the time on the first try…

The push (pun intended) is going to come through a development from someone like Apple or a very savvy developer who gets that the tech needs to be hidden. Information is the hero in reading feeds… the tech is way to much for most people to really even care about.

Keep in mind that MP3’s and digital music existed long before Apple (and broadband) came along and proved it was easy to manage on the consumer end, as well as sell to them. There are a great deal of people today buying and selling music and more services (Yahoo and Microsoft come to mind) on the way. I realize RSS, Feeds and the tools are still in the hands of early adopters, but they will mature (sooner than later) and this will grow. Understanding RSS today is a good move for your business, not a foolish one or a waste of time.

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Who really owns your phone number?

This site was just linked in my comments on the previous post and shows who really owns your number… pretty interesting to decode the players based on your phone numbers. Looks like Vonage is buying from quite a few players and Verizon, not surprisingly is a primary seller. It’s also interesting to note that even though my number was ported from Nextel to T-Mobile, Nextel actually owns it.

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AT&T Uses Its Long Past to Promote Its Near Future

And yet another article covering the VOIP market… The NYT takes on AT&T CallVantage. The more I’ve thought about it since my last post on the topic, the more it seems like AT&T is really pushing this harder than Vonage. I realize Vonage has yet to really launch a consumer campaign, but do they ever have their work cut out for them.

AT&T spent $25 Million just during the Olympics… I received another DM piece today as well — I believe that makes 4 so far this summer. A little birdy told me that later in the year AT&T is set to shake it up a bit with some enhanced product offerings for CallVantage…Game on!

CallVantage, which connects calls over broadband lines and also avoids some taxes imposed on phone companies, is 20 to 30 percent cheaper than ordinary phone service.

AT&T hopes the lower price will help it draw customers who would have abandoned the company for the Baby Bells, which now offer a full range of telephone services. In the coming months, AT&T also plans to introduce a wireless plan that, in theory, could be packaged with its Internet phone service at a discount.

But it is far from certain whether AT&T has the muscle to win control of the emerging Internet phone market from start-ups like Vonage, which already has 250,000 subscribers, or its more powerful rivals among the regional Bell companies.

Nor is it clear that its favored mass-market approach – which typically involves spending tens of millions of dollars on advertising and promotions – is the best way to invigorate its consumer business. [New York Times]

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Getting the News Delivered

While I’ve been using Blogstreet’s Info Aggregator to send RSS feeds to an IMAP email box I’ve looked into additional methods as well to see if I might find an even better way to do things.

To quickly sum up what you might have missed on Info Aggregator — The service is free and you get an IMAP email box which automatically gets the RSS feeds you select delivered. You can check this in your email client of choice including any mobile device or use the webmail interface which is also provided. My only real complaint is the delay in delivery.

The Blogstreet network carefully polls things based on popularity and that determines the delivery frequency of each item. Some sites deliver once a day, which makes this less useful, if you tend to read at your desk in addition to on the go. I’ve found that messages received are often things I’ve seen at my desktop, but that might really vary for you if you are on the go more than I’ve been recently.

The additional services I’ve found that seem to offer similar benefits are News inMotion, IzyNews and RSS2email. I’d be open to learning about additional methods for getting RSS into an email box if you know of them, but really the only other way I’ve found was through Newsgator Online Services which unfortunately only supports POP3 and requires a payment beyond the demo period. IMAP is essential in this process for me so I can clean up things I know I’ve seen while at the desk and leave others so when I return I can either blog them or simply make a note to myself. (POP3 is an all or nothing method.. there is no memory of what’s been read or even deleted in each location you might do your reading.)

News inMotion

I just started News inMotion and it’s nice way to have daily or twice daily emails sent from up to 5 sources. Right away this seems to only make sense for a supplemental flow based on the limits (more on the number of feeds than the level of delivery, though it would be nice to see more frequency as well.) Since I am heading towards complete information overload with the RSS feeds I have coming in through all my channesl, I thought I would keep to some more major news sources as (believe it or not) they are the ones I tend to skip in my daily collection. Here’s my current subscription list…

  • New York Times – Business
  • New York Times – Technology
  • Reuters – Top News
  • StartupSkills.com – Resources for technology entrepreneur
  • Washington Post – Technology News

I did throw in that StartupSkills since I had not heard of it and thought it might be interesting to read. The others are covering the bases for me given the amount of similar information I regularly track. News inMotion provides a good list to start from the usual suspects and allows you to easily add your own feed URI to the list as well.

IzyNews

IzyNews is a very interesting player in the space. First there was IzyMail which enables all your webmail accounts like Hotmail and Yahoo mail to get delivered in a mail client. IzyNews is a pretty cool yet complex way to deal with news feeds. You set up a separate account in your mail client and IzyNews automatically manages your subscriptions into folders so it’s pretty easy to see what’s going on. This is a very nice feature considering the work that many people would have to go through filtering messages appropriately from a variety of sources. Personally I like filtering mail by subject or source, Izy does this out of the gate, so I like it. I’d love to see more providers offer this server side filtering for mail as well as news since it’s such a time saver and since it (in theory) simplifies your view of information.

Here’s what the default set looks like in Thunderbird:

default set in IzyNews

After I uploaded my (593 feed) subscription OPML file from Bloglines things changed pretty drastically. A new Folder was added called Subscriptions and each item from my file was added below. The folder (or outline) structure I have on Bloglines was mostly preserved which is helpful, but man is this a serious list of stuff.

For whatever reason, it’s easier to deal with this load in Bloglines, probably because the sub-folders themselves actually contain content but in mail you have to go through each and every item. I chose not to share the image of this relative chaos as this blog was getting long enough.

If you are considering reading RSS in your mail client to keep it simple for you rather than relying on separate apps or your web browser, IzyNews is pretty nice, though I’d suggest a different manner of organization than I have curently and possibly subscribing to fewer sources. My taste does not like the manner in which feeds are summarized for each source… IzyNews creates a paper for each feed you read giving you a quick extract and a link to continue reading. I personally like the full thing whenever possible…

RSS2email

RSS2email is a server based method you control. You’ll need your own server or connected machine in order t o do the processing and sending to your inbox. It’s not that hard to configure, and seems to work quite well. Of the services I’ve tried it’s my favorite. Aaron Swartz is a great contributor to the information community and has written some great tools like co-authoring RSS 1.0 and enabling a linkable URI scheme for referencing the NYT.

Meanwhile back to RSS2email… Following the directions posted on Aaron’s site was easy to do and I was able to get things running on my server. After adding a few feeds, I checked to see what they looked like and was really quite happy. If you’ve seen Tidbits, the format is similar. Each link in an entry is tagged with a number and at the bottom of each article is a list of links. I chose to limit my view to text only, though you can get HTML messages as well, which I presume would include the images rather than link to them as the text based option does. You can also set a variety of options in the main file (rss2email.py) which lets you control how the from looks, the time of the post (when it was posted vs. when it was sent) and a variety of other details.

The only trick to the whole thing is finding a machine that supports what you need to do. Fortunately my host is running linux and python was installed, because that’s how it works. I am not a programmer or a developer, I just went through the steps and it works. I know enough to find my way through the file to tweak some settings, but that’s beacause I know how to read ;). I’ve scheduled a cron job on my host to run hourly which then pumps all the new information to the email address of my choosing.

I’d like to also add that in the course of testing I ran into a few hiccups and emailed things to Aaron who promptly replied and fixed things so it would not effect anyone else. Thanks again, Aaron. You can easily keep track of fixes and additions to the RSS2email service by (what else) subscribing to the feed.

Usage Notes and Taking it With You

How you deal with, and even the amount of information you choose to manage (or not) is very personal. There is no correct way, it’s much more a matter of what works for you. I like Info Aggregator, but have found RSS2email to be more relavant for my needs since it can deliver news more timely. IzyMail is an interesting way to do things, but in the end is just not for me. Based on the imposed limitations of News inMotion makes it much more of a side player since it can’t handle the level of flow I want.

One of the key factors in my world at the moment is being able to take all this information with me on my mobile device. They can all accommodate this in different ways. Again, based on how you use your tools… Since everything is being delivered to an IMAP account on Palm that leaves a few options (Chatter Email, Snappermail, Mailwave and AgendusMail) which I’ve covered previously. Snapper and Agendus must connect upfront and you’ll have to choose which folders (keep in mind how rough this will be with something like IzyNews and it’s folder overload) to keep in sync. With Chatter and Mailwave you can set up an additional account to receive news messages and sync it how you see fit either always connected or synced over time intervals.

My preference is to use Chatter Email and sync my News account every half hour. This is efficient for me and keeps things simple as well. Chatter only works with IMAP accounts that support the IDLE command in order to push messages out to you. IzyMail does not and most likely will not support this. I did not have a chance to test this on Mailwave (I mean how many mail clients can one man actively run!), but it may work well there. Your own mileage may vary…

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Microsoft to Gut Longhorn to Make 2006 Delivery Date

Assuming this is the reality, it’s quite disappointing to hear. Though I am primarily a Mac user I was really interested in seeing Redmond push the limits. If anything this is a fantastic opportunity for Apple to really hit a homer with Tiger. It will give them an enormous technology lead and given the hits Windows has taken over security, reliability and cost…

According to developer sources, Microsoft is cutting back Longhorn client’s planned feature set so as to be able to make its current delivery targets: Beta 1 by next year and final release some time in 2006.

Microsoft is expected to announce officially later on Friday its future roadmap for the desktop version of Longhorn. And while developers and customers who expected they’d be required to rewrite their applications to take advantage of Longhorn may be happy with Microsoft’s roadmap changes, others who were banking on promised Longhorn features, such as the next-gen Windows File System, will be far less so.

The end result? Longhorn is going to be a lot more of an evolutionary than a revolutionary Windows release.

[Microsoft Watch]

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Virex 7.5

.Mac members are now entitled to a new version of Virex .. version 7.5 which has a completely new control center and is able to work nicely in the background checking email and files for baddies. Another nice bonus is that it is finally able to update the virus definitions automatically as well. I’ve been using it this week on my powerbook as well as the iMac at home and so far I am very pleased.

While the vast majority of viruses and worms don’t have any impact on Mac users it is still nice to know you’ve got protection. Every so often since it’s been running I’ve seen an alert from Virex informing me that a .pif was spotted or that a particular worm was included in a piece of spam. Virex is then able to clean (though not those things) or delete the file automatically. You can easily set the preference to handle this stuff automatically.

I’d recommend the update for all .Mac users — just login to the site and download your free software.

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Next Generation Treo revealed…

I walk away for a few minutes and discover that a whole host of new pictures were posted and discussed at TreoCentral, leading to even more at Engadget and of course Treonauts…

Whether you call it the Ace or not is up to you, but the official name seems to be the Treo 650. Seems like a logical progression to me. The specs are solid…

  • Faster CPU – 312MHz
  • Bluetooth
  • High Res – 320×320 screen
  • Keyboard Backlighting System and what looks like a new keyshape. The ALT key now actually says ALT, and was moved to the lower row and there is an additional shift key ala the Apple on Apple Keyboards.
  • Video Recording Capability
  • 1.3 MP Camera — the camera has a mirror, Sony Ericsson style for the ever important self-portrait
  • Separate buttons above the main set and just off center of the 5-way for dedicated phone pick up, hang up as well as serving as the launcher Home as well.
  • Removeable Battery — data and talk hounds rejoice!

The bottom connector is entirely new, so any major accessories that you used are history which means larger keyboards and sync or charge cables. You are probably OK with your headset, though I can’t find any mention of whether it uses a more standard jack or whether it’s the same. You can clearly ditch it in favor of a bluetooth headset anyway.

Some key missing details… no word on whether the WiFi SD Card will work… No real info yet on data speeds either so for now we have to assume it’s still GPRS / 1XRTT rather than allowing for EDGE / EV-DO.

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David Dorman discusses VOIP with ZDNet

In an exclusive Face to Face interview, AT&T CEO David Dorman tells ZDNet’s editor in chief, Dan Farber, that he’s going after an untapped market — VoIP. Dorman sizes up the competition, discusses claims that his company is undervalued, and defends AT&T’s declining top line. [ZDNet]

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SnapperMail 2.0 released

I’ve been a beta tester on SnappperMail 2.0 for a long time. I honestly can’t even tell you when it started it’s been quite a while and I’ve been generally pleased with the product. SnapperMail is much like a traditional email client. It offers multiple POP3 accounts, can send through different accounts than which you may have received messages and offers robust attachment support. I’ve used both the POP3 and IMAP access to both send and receive attachments and have to say it’s great – just like you would expect it to be on any email client.

IMAP support is offered only in the Enterprise level of the product which in my opinion comes at a very steep cost at $59.95. The upgrade price is like buying it again, which for me would be $29.98.

In my testing IMAP works reliably as does POP3, but POP3 is infinitely faster. If you leave your Palm in your pocket checking mail on a set schedule (say every 30 min), you might not notice, but watching and waiting for the job to get done is totally brutal. There is initial time to connect, delivery time and then clean up time which can actually take a few minutes per mailbox you are keeping in sync! Watching this over a few minutes is incredibly frustrating.

This difference is something I can’t live with easily as a solution and since I rely on IMAP for email management it becomes challenging to be satisfied when I know there are other options that very quickly (seemingly instantly) deliver mail to you.

That said, SnapperMail is an excellent, richly featured mail client with a great user interface that is very 5-way navigator friendly for Treo and Tungsten users. Full screen, HI-Res support is enabled for T3 users as well. Like most things, email software is very personal. There are choices to be made and options to be weighed. If you are only using POP3 access, I think you’ll be quite satisfied with SnapperMail.

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MailWave another PUSH e-mail Option for Palm

While Mailwave actually came out before Chatter Email, it was not quite as ready for primetime until now….

Push and background capabilities within email applications is becoming a must-have feature and I’d expect customers to be demanding it soon enough from SnapperMail, AgendusMail and others. For me, it’s a personal choice… I like Chatter.

Mailwave does support POP3 accounts, calendar events (depends on your server … ala Exchange) and attachments which are still pending for Chatter at the moment. Mailwave does however, require either a subscription to the Mailwave service (a very reasonable $7/mo) or a hosted solution which they are selling for corporations.

MailWave for is intended for Palm OS 3.5 and higher. Although many handhelds carry the same OS, the features vary. MailWave is designed to take advantage of certain features when possible. For example, the TREO 600 series smartphones allow for screen object focusing. This feature allows for the user to perform everyday tasks without ever needing to use the stylus. MailWave also supports devices such as the TapWave Zodiac which has landscape and portrait viewing modes. [MailWave]

There’s a helpful testing page to see if your accounts are compatible with the service which certainly helps save the time of installing and tapping in your account info.

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Thoughts for Vonage… Or ATT

It’s clear to me that Vonage is in deep now since ATT CallVantage has really been pushing their service out on a very mass, very aggressive level. As I evaluated VOIP services I considered both but felt I should go with Vonage since I had read so many favorable things about the service and how many bloggers and tech leaders had been digging it.

It struck me today how of course I felt that way based on my media consumption — primarily aggregated feed reading of blogs and news services. The ATT people have skipped that early-adopter market since they’ve already been reached instead going straight to the meaty part of the curve, suggesting a revolution in phone service for consumers. If you watch the commercials, you’ll see that they are bright and upbeat and focus on cool features that enhance and benefit life. That might be a stretch, it is after-all just phone service but they really are aspirational… the employees featured are Inventors, which seems cool. Their marketing and site is much more consumer facing that that of Vonage which feels techie.

Vonage and others (I have no experience or interest sorry in Packet8) fall into an easy trap in marketing their service… They focus on the fact that it’s a tech product. Sure you hook it up to your router and it uses your broadband connection, but that should be secondary to what can be done with the service. I just did a quick comparison with ATT and realized that while it may cost $5 more per month, it’s actually a more feature rich service and in thinking about it, I want those things… or I’d like to see Vonage counter with some additional options.

Let’s break down some of the cool benefits which clearly need to be communicated sooner rather than later since it’s already starting to get pretty noisy out there.

  • Price — It’s such a clear and simple one, but it will also not matter soon enough since it seems everyone will be pretty close to the same. Vonage is $29.99 and ATT is $34.99 (not including their current offer of $19.99/mo for 6 months) for similar service. Vonage does offer lower monthly rates with minute based packages, but let’s focus on the unlimited ones which most parallel the current crazily overpriced stuff we are getting from Verizon and others.
  • Call Forwarding — When I first realized what it was exactly with the Vonage service I was amazed! I can have my phone ring at the same time as another line, or have it ring the second line after a certain amount of time. This is great in my home office for when I need to step out or when travelling…Calls automatically reach me on my mobile. One number and it’s easy to have calls reach me. Tonight I realized that ATT kills this with the addition of 4 more lines for a total or 5 lines. They call it Locate Me and shoot down Call Forwarding with it since it’s much more robust. If I was Vonage, I’d be looking to add more lines to the Call Forward service to be operating on the same level.
  • Voicemail — Yes they both have it (of course) and both offer email notifications which is a slick service and you can get the voicemail as an email attachment if you like to listen right on your computer. ATT understands this more as a customer benefit though and pushes the fact that you can pass the Voicemail as an email to your friends and family. There is no magic here except for the packaging.
  • Do Not Disturb — Only ATT has it and it’s totally cool. With a baby at home, we turn the ringer off in the room she sleeps. We could manage this though with a few clicks instead and keep the ringer on for other times.
  • Softphone — Only Vonage has it and I think they should be giving it away rather than charging $9.99/ mo for 500 minutes. This is a very slick advantage (for now) that could really be pushed for those traveling who want to use their computers to receive and make calls. I would use this for sure if I did not have to pay so much extra each month. Since the forwarding feature is already simultaneously capable of ringing a second line and in my world it would do more, why not push the softphone as a way to handle calls. I don’t really want a second number for my computer, I just want the ability to be reached and I like the idea of using the laptop. There are plenty of times when cellular is limited in hotels or it’s too expensive when abroad and the computer would be a terrific way to handle this. (I know international calling rates are different, but I also know people who take their ATA box around with them and make calls as if locally from where ever.)
  • Personal Conferencing — Only ATT has it and it’s definitely missing from Vonage. The ads make it seem extremely powerful using 10 lines in the example. It’s 3-Way calling plus, but Vonage does not yet even offer this basic land-line level of conferencing.

That’s pretty much it for the current major features. Vonage does offer additional virtual lines and toll-free service which can all ring on the same original line you subscribed with.

Even though Vonage established the market here, they are clearly in serious risk of being forced into being a marginal player based on ATT’s fast product development and superior marketing clout – both in dollars and in presence. I can’t speak with any technical understanding, but on the surface the products are essentially the same. It’s only a matter of time for the hardware to be compatible (as I am sure it is now actually but not allowed easily for quality of service issues I presume) across service and people will be able to switch just as easily as they did back in the Phone Wars of the 80s and 90s. ATT is pretty comfortable in this space since that is how they were birthed… Vonage could be left standing as another tech company that innovated, but could not get out of their own way.