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Xten eyebeam released

SIPthat notes that Xten has launched a new video over IP SIP softphone… eyebeam. This is the same, though now enhanced application Vonage uses for softphone. The trick to this like all video phone / conferencing applications is getting someone on the other side. You can buy this for PC today at $60… OS X is coming soon.

I wonder whether the X-PRO software currently available is worth the $50 price. Is there quality that you don’t get in the Free or bundled service? Anyone? I actually find some limitations with the current app – like the address book sucks. I’m pretty content with Skype at the moment, though to be able to receive calls (yes I know I am saying it again) would be even better.

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Vonage Account in Review

Courtesy of Mediapost…

There are five agencies still competing for Vonage’s estimated $50 million account. They are: Arnold Worldwide; Carat; Mullen; Lowe, teamed up with Avenue A/Razorfish; and Starcom MediaVest and SMG Direct.

If I had to pick, I’d probably lean towards Mullen since they’ve got previous experience with Nextel which is also a complex, yet easy to use telecom service. Should be interesting to watch from the sideline…

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Skype for Mac OS X 0.9.0.1

Skype released a revised Mac OS X client today…

From the Skype Release Notes:

  • feature: you can set your birthday in your profile
  • change: enabled red close button in main window
  • change: Skype recognizes SkypeOut numbers in different formats a la (+44-55-66-77)
  • bugfix: auto-login should be much more stable now
  • bugfix: “Text” was displayed on My Skype tab, when user logged in
  • bugfix: proper handling of simultaneous calls (you are calling to the person who calls you)
  • bugfix: drawer refreshed properly in case of multiple calls
  • bugfix: contact view icon updated after blocking an user
  • bugfix: after changing your password, it will be updated in keychain as well
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    Skype for Palm OS — Coming Soon!

    Skype Rocks — This is still a pseudo rumor, but we’ll know soon enough. Skype is VERY quickly pushing itself across most if not all connected platforms. You gotta love it. No word just yet on what type of connection will be required to do voice, but at the very minimum, it seems you’ll be able to have a single IM client across all platforms which is certainly handy. I hope GPRS is able to handle it, though it will most likely require WiFi at a minimum.

    According to the ABC news website tonight Skype will introduce a Palm client next month – “A name on many lips was Skype Technologies S.A., the rave of the Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) revolution. Luxembourg-based Skype displayed its software for Pocket PC-based handheld computers that lets anyone in a Wi-Fi cloud make a free Internet voice call to other Skype users. Company founder Niklas Zennstrom called from Europe and the audio quality was at least as clear as any landline phone service. A Palm OS version is promised for next month.” [Palm Addict]

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    HTC ‘begins Treo 650 volume shipments’ to PalmOne

    This puts the Treo 650 in our hands even sooner… the last report was for a November release, but this would enable October for a release date.

    PalmOne’s eagerly anticipated Treo 650 smart phone, successor to the current Treo 600, is set to go on sale in October following the commencement of volume shipments from contract manufacturer HTC this month. [The Register]

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    VoIP Watch Runs The Players

    Andy at VOIP Watch runs through a call test using quite a few players through soft and hard phone… Callvantage gets the confirmed flag with the best call clarity, followed by Vonage Voice Pulse and SkypeOut. I thought it was pretty interesting from his conversation, that Skype to Skype had a better sound quality to it than a SkypeOut call which used at least one landline, though he did not mention on which of the many VOIP services he received the call. I have a feeling it was Callvantage, and would bet there was no standard / traditional phone involved.

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    Fortune on Vonage

    Fortune has a nice piece on Vonage and CEO and founder Jeffery Citron. While Citron has a somewhat spotted past (a slight SEC issue) you can’t question the man’s prior success with Island and Datek which lend some good credibility to his ability to lead a company. The trick though is that the game of telecom has ruthlessly locked out newcomers though Citron is pushing to bust through and might just do that if he can move fast enough.

    As has been widely discussed, Vonage chose the fast track to get service to market instead of taking a somewhat more conservative track lining up service level agreements with providers like Level 3. Vonage instead choose Global Crossing which works, though has issues at times (have you heard the flicker?) where apparently competitors like A&TT and Packet 8 amongst others do not.

    Now in some seriously competitive waters, I hope that in addition to the marketing budget they consider some service upgrades as well so that does not become an issue of comparison by which others like ATT might judge. Phone wars are notoriously nasty and it’s only a matter of time until Vonage gets put down for a lesser service and no matter how many wifi capable phones they offer, people are going to want reliability when they opt to leave the old way behind. It’s not going to hurt to take a serious look at how they are spending to acquire customers as well.

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    Vonage arrives

    Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Jupiter, finally checked Vonage out and has officially caught the bug like the rest of us using VOIP….

    The features are amazing. I get caller ID, Call Waiting and Simultaneous Ring (so my cell phone rings along with the Vonage phone and I can direct calls to either voice mail). Best of all, I can control everything from a slick web interface. I know these features have been around for years, but my local telco would charge me more for those services alone than I would pay Vonage for everything. I’ll be running in test mode for a few weeks but if the service quality stays constant, I’m going to sign up. The best compliment I can give Vonage is that it just worked. Simply and effectively, like my plain old telephone service, only without the higher costs. [Michael Gartenberg]

    He notes the same issues I’ve picked up on, though he’s having difficulty with audio echo, based on (my guess) that he’s using the mic and speaker on his computer without headphones or a headset. This definitely causes a looping sound since things are so close together… get a headset or headphones, Michael – I think you’ll appreciate a serious difference.

    I’m not sure how many more people will say that Vonage has to offer the softphone as part of the deal, but it’s clear that many people love the idea of a completely portable number. With the additional clients, you can have a phone on ANY capable device – the trick is getting it to be the same number which is more of a limit Vonage sets for now than anything else. You could have the same number across computers, PDAs etc… Skype gives you this today, but without incoming it’s limiting it’s potential. In time I hope…

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    Whither Windows?

    From Steve Jurvetson…

    From the local demos of Longhorn, it seems to me that OS X is the Longhorn preview. As far as I can tell, Microsoft is hoping to do a subset of OS X and bundle applications like iPhoto. Am I missing something?

    It seems that the need to use a Microsoft operating system will decline with the improvement in open source device drivers and web services for applications. [The J Curve]

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    Attention to detail

    Maybe it’s just me, but I always notice small details that are out of place in ads… like the Mac browser window on the PC, which was left in by the creative department, or take the new print campaign for Verizon Wireless’ VZEmail with Wireless Sync which features a man sitting in his car clearly looking at the calendar on his Treo!

    The frigging headline says, “VZEmail with Wireless Sync is always on for automatic email delivery and instant productivity.” I don’t think they were referring to the productivity you get from your calendar…

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    Gripes on Skype

    Om points to an piece at The Unofficial Apple Weblog which gripes about Skype. I don’t really agree with much Greg Scher had to say so here’s what I started to post as a comment until I realized I was writing more than enough for a real post…

    Greg –

    I think you are a tad harsh on Skype for a few reasons… First, they’ve designed it purely as a softphone. Vonage makes you pay extra for the privledge of a softphone and it’s not even an extension of the same number, to add a new line. There may be hardward options beyond headsets later, but most likely will not be part of the free computer based service.

    • Call quality is excellent. It all does depend on the quality of your connection, but over the exact same connection, I’ve had better success with Skype than Vonage at times.
    • It’s free baby. If you don’t like it don’t use it. I’ve been promoting it to friends since the more people who use it enable more free calls…Skype to Skype will apparently always be free.
    • You also say that Wifi is not available enough? Wifi is hardly a requirement though it certainly makes things simpler. I don’t think anyone is looking to necessarily replace their mobile though you can get extremely competitive rates when you might get nailed with roaming charges, particularly internationally. You don’t need Wifi either… it works just the same or even better when you are connected through a cable.

    I think some of the other things you mention are legit…

    • You should be able to send your contacts between machines without having to re-authorize people, but at least we all get it for now. You can be connected and live on multiple machines which makes it easy enough to pass along the info.
    • 911 is not really a priority for me since I am far from ready to use Skype as my primary line for anything…

    When premium services come it should be very interesting to watch. Voicemail, Video Phone and most likely SkypeIn are all enroute. It’s going to get better not worse.

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    Jeremy Allaire: The Big Picture, Literally

    Nice quick thought piece from Jeremy Allaire over at PaidContent…

    Jeremy believes and I agree that soon we will see new models for content distribution based on models and systems being developed now through blogs, aggregators and subscription services. It’s already becomhg very easy to subscribe to audio content through things like iPodder, which download the enclosures through RSS 2.0. Once the tech can be fully hidden from the user, this becomes easier to market and sell to people who get the benefit of more media to enjoy.

    Now that video can be produced cheaply and with reasonable production values, and now that it can be affordably distributed and perhaps even easily monetized, will we see an emerging new class of “video site producers” rather than classic textual content. In 1994 when the Web really emerged, it helped bring forth an explosion in the amount and richness of text that was produced and available globally. I believe we’re at the front-end of a very similar curve in video, and this world / opportunity is not going to look very much like how we as consumers find, acquire and view video today. [paidContent.org’s ContentNext Series]

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    Why a Netflix-TiVo deal is irrelevant

    Herb Greenberg over at CBS MarketWatch, doesn’t think too much of the Netflix / TiVO partnership and has a fair bit of information that seems to sour the deal rather than make it seem as sweet as you might have thought.

    In the hoopla over a possible linkup between Netflix and TiVO, something appears to have been lost on investors: Even if the two strike some kind of deal allowing Netflix (NFLX: news, chart, profile) subscribers to access movies by downloading them onto a TiVo for a monthly subscription price or on a pay-per-view basis, it’s unlikely the library of titles will be anywhere near the 25,000 Netflix now claims — at least not any time soon. Ditto Netflix’s plans to offer download services, which the company has suggested will happen next year.

    Blame that on a complex web of film rights and so-called use windows granted by movie studios, which are different for “hard goods,” such as retail or DVD-by-mail, and “electronic,” which can include the Internet or TV. “The big ah-ha for a lot of companies is that the availability [of] these movies is gone because of the rights that have already been sold,” says Bob Greene, senior vice president of advance services for the StarzEncore Group.

    It’s likely that the vast majority of Netflix movies will have to be streamed rather than downloadable give the way rights are handled for digital vs hard goods. That makes receiving a reduced streaming quality version that much less attractive to me… I was already thinking it would be very difficult to beat the quality and potentially the depth of catalog from the cable players. My current list of movies on demand from Time Warner is quite good, feeling much like a trip to blockbuster used to. Factor on top of that the addition of the video on demand services from all the major premium stations (HBO, MAX, SHO, STRZ) and I’ve got a very nice package of movies, shows and specials that I can watch at anytime at the same (non-HD) quality level I am accustomed to today on my cable system.

    Greenberg, goes even further thinking that the TiVO deal is further away than the Newsweek article alluded and that means more pressure on Netflix from Blockbuster with their recently launched subscription service…

    As I mentioned the other day in Herb Greenberg’s RealityCheck, the company was making it harder to cancel — making anybody who wants to cancel call in rather than quit online. That meant being put on hold for what can be more than a few minutes. (Interestingly enough, the company switched back to the old way as quietly as it switched away from it.) Then there was the conveniently leaked story to Newsweek about a supposedly imminent TiVo (TIVO: news, chart, profile) deal, which Netflix now says is not on any rollout timetable.

    And this just in: Further signs that Blockbuster must be taking a toll on Netflix come from my assistant, Samantha Soga, who received an e-mail Wednesday from Netflix offering a 30-day free trial to “friends and family” of existing subscribers. That’s double the usual free-trial period.

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    Skype expands their reach

    Andy at VOIP Watch notes that Skype has now expanded their offering to officially support the Pocket PC over Wifi and that SkypeOut is fully supported as well so you can make calls to other Skype users just as easily as you can to mobile or landlines.

    Andy is actually fortunate to be learning of all this at DEMO Mobile and heard from Niklas Zennström, Skype CEO and co-founder who called in via wifi and even did a conference call demo.

    I’d love to see support for Skype on Palm via Wifi… I knwo the Treo can’t possibly handle it over GPRS or even 1XRTT data though perhaps someday the network will be capable. It would be cool to make VOIP calls using an unlimited data connection at no additional cost.

    Skype on!

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    Warm and Mozzy

    Last night I decided to tempt the fates and update both my email client and browser to the latest nightly builds… For whatever reason every so often I just get the urge to push things and this time I was very happy to find that both nightlies for Thunderbird and Firefox were nicely enhanced.

    Junk messages now block images much more effectively than my previous runs. Thunderbird also gives a bit extra control to the number of connections happening within the advanced setting within an IMAP account. This is good to see since occasionally you might move faster than the computer is capable of keeping track of and you get a server disconnect error. Moving the default from 5 to 4 connections (I had subscribed to the bug in bugzilla and saw that was the suggested tweak) does change the frequency, but it still happens. This doesn’t change my view of Thunderbird… I really like using it a lot. My main gripe is the spam filter. I wish it had a much better method for learning. I’d also like better support for new message notification, which frankly has never worked for me – now on two machines. Works great on Windows but not Mac.

    Firefox seems to have some nice UI enhancements in the latest builds. First, instead of getting a small and easy to miss icon in the bottom left of the browser window when a pop-up has been blocked, you now get a message in the window just above the page content. I have a feeling quite a few people are not going to like this change, but I believe it makes the browser more user friendly for more people. There is also a very cool new RSS orange icon in the bottom right of the window which notifies the user of an auto-detected feed. You can easily bookmark any of the feeds (my own site lists 3 versions) and after you save the bookmark, Firefox neatly creates a folder of the more recent posts. This folder maintains a current list, so people can easily stay on top of sites of interest right within the browser. (I personally have been using this feature to call attention to feeds I might not have added to bloglines)

    A bonus of both apps is that on launch, any extensions loaded previously were detected and newer versions if available were downloaded. Moz made this very easy to do, I just clicked next and things worked.

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    Hollywood is Trying to Kill Betamax

    It’s not what you might think from the title of this post… the format has been long gone for consumers. This is about the INDUCE act which seeks to block things like TiVO, your iPod and many other technological advances in how we choose to consume media.

    The Betamax ruling is the only thing that protects your right to own a VCR, tape recorder, CD-burner, DVD-burner, iPod, or TiVo. It’s that important. But new legislation that’s being pushed through the Senate by lobbyists for the music and movie industries would override the Betamax decision and create a huge liability for any business that makes products which can copy sound or video. This legislation (formerly known as the INDUCE Act) would essentially give Hollywood veto power over a huge range of new technologies. And if they get this power, they’ll definitely use it: just as they tried to stomp out the VCR in the 70’s and 80’s, the music and movie industries want to force all content to go through their own restricted channels. [Save Betamax]

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    Safety First

    I was just sent a link to Pentagon Strike which is both disturbing and angering… We are coming up on the 3rd anniversary of 9/11 and there are still entirely too many questions to be answered.

    Keep in mind our current administration is way too busy with distraction and scare tactics to really give us the answers we want and the security we deserve:

    DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) – Vice President Dick Cheney on Tuesday warned Americans about voting for Democratic Sen. John Kerry, saying that if the nation makes the wrong choice on Election Day it faces the threat of another terrorist attack. [AP News]

    After watching the video linked above, I can’t help but wonder who’s doing the attacking?

    Your vote counts… use it wisely.

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    Helpful tips for Chatter Email

    First of all, if you have not read the manual, I would strongly suggest you do so in order to take advantage of the application to it’s fullest. Marc Blank, the developer, has written a very user friendly piece and it’s included with every download — unless you’ve just been downloading the updated .prc files.

    When I first read it I saw that there were some secret codes you could type into the console – Menu / Pref / Console (/W) like Turbo and Log. Turbo enables a much more rapid loading of messages as it allows for larger groups of them to come through at once. Log is something really only to be used if you are having a problem and need to submit a report…

    This week, in addition to adding attachment support, Marc has posted a list of codes you might use in the console and I thought it would be helpful to re-print them here…

    You’ll need to be running at least 1.0b10.3… though as of this post, the latest is 1.0b10.4.

    • chatterclassic – enables IM support; account required
    • chatteremail – disables IM support; the default
    • indicator , color = green, red, or orange. Sets LED msg indicator.
    • log – toggles logging
    • memo – annotates a log
    • note – same as memo
    • profile – SMTP profile debug info
    • register , code = assigned registration code. Registers ChatterEmail. Confirmation is done when the next email arrives.
    • reload – Deletes all messages in the current mailbox from the treo and starts the reloading process.
    • turbo – Toggles “Turbo Load” which loads messges in groups of 2-15 at a time (depending on load size)
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    BlackBerry phonerings all the right notes

    I might not be a Blackberry user and I don’t think this charmer will get me to switch, but it sure gets enough right that Palm and others will need to seriously pay attention. The form factor is excellent, the predictive typing works and of course they’ve mastered behind the firewall email and calendar delivery.

    In the beginning, there was BlackBerry. A delicious fruit, yes, but also a clever way to get your e-mail on a pager-like device. Then there was BlackBerry: a clever way to get your e-mail plus an awkward phone in a much larger pager-like device. And beginning today, there is BlackBerry: a great cellular phone that also includes that clever way to get your e-mail. [MSNBC]

    Walt Mossberg also gave the new Blackberry a go … Here’s the verdict: a very good device, but not as good or as easy to use as the current Treo. I hope the Treo 650 is capable of going even further …

    The new BlackBerry is a good phone, a very good e-mail device, and the first serious competitor to the Treo as a combination of the two.

    I’m not ready to give up my Treo for the new BlackBerry, mostly because I find the BlackBerry’s user interface slower and more complicated than the Treo’s. Also, the Treo has a better keyboard, is a better organizer, and is much more versatile and expandable. And, with the Treo, you’re not locked into T-Mobile. Every major U.S. cellphone carrier sells the Treo. [WSJ]

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    Yahoo! Travel Search Beta

    Here’s what I think… Search has to work on more than a single platform.

    As you may have heard, earlier this summer Yahoo! acquired FareChase, a travel search company. FareChase’s technology enables people to perform real-time searches against more than fifty travel sites.

    Tonight we began testing this new travel search engine. It’s still in beta but we’re hoping you all can bang around on it and let us know what you think. [Yahoo! Search Blog]