a multi-tasked stream of consciousness or perhaps just emails to myself
Andy at VoIP Watch has been traveling a fair bit lately and as expected, been doing a lot of calling over VOIP. As he’s moved along, all the calling has been over softphone since they make it easier to route around hotel port blocking as well as basic configuration issues.
I totally agree with his perspective that the US carriers need to focus in on this as a real product and as I’ve noted before, NOT charge extra for it. Vonage charges extra for the privledge while AT&T does not even offer it.
The VoIP Weblog notes the launch of Time Warner Cable’s VOIP service in NYC. The pricing is out of whack for VOIP, but certainly less than you are probably paying Verizon for unlimited calling. Seems they’ve chosen to target pricing against Cablevision which makes no sense, since you can’t pick what cable company you buy service from anyway.
Andy does not think this is even VOIP…
I’m not so sure it matters to the consumer. They’ll perceive it as such since phone service is coming from a different place than normal. In Marketing, perception can become reality.
I’d consider this a test… have to wait to see if people care for this over text before they roll into other areas like the US — though the US is much more voice oriented than Europe which has been quite comfortable with text.
T-Mobile is to become the latest European mobile operator to launch Push-to-Talk services. The Deutsche Telekom-owned wireless giant said this morning that it will launch the new “walkie-talkie” style services in Germany by the end of this year. The first handset available to offer the service will be the Nokia 5140, said the company. [3GNewsroom]
Stamps.com said this week that the U.S. Postal Service has refused to extend its customized photo-stamp service. [News.com]
AT&T Callvantage dropped their price today by $5 (to 30) which was quickly countered by Vonage bringing their price to $25/mo. This is an unlimited local and LD package with enhanced features – a great deal at either price.
Vonage has too be pissed though… They are the small guy here and it’s clear the deep pockets at AT&T could push them down until they no longer make any money on current customers…assuming of course this has been profitable to begin with. As the review goes on for the marketing of their business, we may learn a bit more about their current customer acquisition costs, which I figure are higher than desired given the (perceived) wasted reach they run to try and keep pace ATT. To me that’s a losing battle and they should instead focus on reaching the right kinds of people with the right less techie message. AT&T is doing a great job educating people through mass media and now Verizon Voicewing is getting in the game as well. Vonage needs to be smarter.
Om covers this bit as does Andy and thevoipweblog. By all counts this hurts. The SIPphone lawsuit against their current in-store marketing can’t feel too good either. Michael Disruption Robertson stirring it up again…
Just caught this story at eWeek via Bloglines on how NewGator is cutting a similar API deal with FeedDemon which should make windows users reading via Outlook locally quite happy – now there’s a choice (when released) for how you sync your feeds.
NewsGator also did a deal with SixApart to comarket each others products… seems like a good deal since they offer the other side of each other’s equations – that being publish and subscribe.
Pretty amazing week for RSS syndication and synchronization via web services…
I’ll have to stop by and see how this gets positioned with Vonage on the shelf. When I picked up my Vonage box at Circuit City, it was totally self-service with no marketing. Now that there’s a choice, one would think there’s going to be some end capping or shelf-talking going on…
Beginning Friday, consumer electronics retailer Circuit City will sell AT&T CallVantage Net phone services in many of its outlets and through its Web site, the two companies said on Wednesday. [News.com]
Yesterday I posted I was looking for an RSS sync capability to enable desktop readers and web based services to link … well it looks like that day will come very soon. This is very cool news… (Thanks JP!)
Three leading desktop news feed and blog aggregators announced today that they have implemented new open application programming interfaces (API) and Web Services from Bloglines (www.bloglines.com) that connect their applications to Bloglines’ free online service for searching, subscribing, publishing and sharing news feeds, blogs and rich web content. FeedDemon (www.bradsoft.com), NetNewsWire (www.ranchero.com), and Blogbot (www.blogbot.com) are the first desktop software applications to use the open Bloglines Web Services.
Bloglines Web Services address a key issue facing the growing RSS market by reducing the bandwidth demands on sites serving syndicated news feeds. Now, instead of thousands of individual desktop PCs independently scanning news sources, blogs and web sites for updated feeds, Bloglines will make low-bandwidth requests to each site on behalf of the universe of subscribers and cache any updates to its master web database. Bloglines will then redistribute the latest content to all the individuals subscribed to those feeds via the linked desktop applications — FeedDemon, NetNewsWire or Blogbot — or via Bloglines’ free web service. [Bloglines]
If you read or try to track a great deal of feeds, you’ll want to have access to this information in as many places as you can. I’ve found it pretty hard to manage personally though I’ve been using quite a few tricks to keep tabs on things. First, I use Bloglines as my primary aggregator these days which I’ve blogged about previously and think is really an excellent choice. It allows a logged session to track what you’ve read, saved and subscribed to seemlessless carry across any platform — multiple machines or even wireless.
NetNewsWire 2.0 now supports sync which is a great thing if you use more than one mac or and now FeedDemon is getting into the mix as well according to this post I just read from Steve Rubel…
FeedDemon is working on a new feature that will enable users to synchronize posts they read somewhere online with the ones they read in the application, according to a forum post by Nick Bradbury. Looking forward to seeing it. [Micro Persuasion]
This sounds like a cool addition for local and and more local usage. After reading the forum post, it seems like the model will be similar to the way in which NNW does it which is between 2 copies of the app on 2 machines.
In my ideal world, you’d be able to read locally or off the net and seemlessly manage subscriptions and read status like an IMAP email account. I’d like to be able to use NNW on my mac and either Bloglines or FeedDemon on the PC I use for some work. I’ve actually thought about this stuff before… just did a quick search here and found this post mirroring this basic thought from December 2003.
It really pisses me off to get a communication from a company as a customer when they clearly don’t know that. Here’s an example from an email I received a few minutes ago from T-Mobile:
Upgrade to an Annual or Month-to-Month rate plan and get 30 days of free T-Mobile HotSpot Wi-Fi Internet service.
You’ve experienced the freedom and convenience of T-Mobile HotSpot. You know how wireless broadband service makes it easy to stay connected when you’re on the go. Now you can sign up for a T-Mobile HotSpot subscription plan and get 30 days of Wi-Fi Internet service-absolutely free!
They’ve clearly created a catch-all for anyone who has signed up, rather than focus on some basics here. I AM a monthly subscriber and have been for about 6 months. It’s unlikely that their customer file is that old, though certainly possible.
They might think it’s OK to send this kind of stuff out since they used both annual as well as monthly, but it would have been much more compelling to try and sell me on the benefits of switching to annual (I assume based on price) instead. Instead of responding I’m ranting, so mission failed. I’ve made sure to tell at least 10 of my friends…
So nice to see keep as new… I am often cruising through a bunch of stuff and want to recall one for later – this makes it quite easy to do without having to leave a bunch of tabs open in Firefox.
We pushed out a couple of cool new features last night on Bloglines. First is ‘Keep New’, which lets you mark individual blog entries as unread. The second is ‘Related Feeds’, which are a list of feeds that are similar to the feed you’re reading. This compliments the Bloglines Recommendations, which are personalized for each user. [wingedpig.com]
AT&T secures it’s place in VOIP… not that I was concerned or anything. This puts them in the driver’s seat for taking things to the next level – mainly enabling mass adoption.
Consumer electronics, chip and software makers will use specifications developed by AT&T to create telephone adapters, Wi-Fi phones, game consoles, set-top boxes and telephone networking equipment, the carrier announced Tuesday. The products developed in the VoIP Innovation and Interoperability Program will work with AT&T’s Internet calling services, the company said. [CNET News.com]
I’ve learned that TMO is having some service issues due to equipment in the East, they say from the weather… Calls from the east are having trouble making it through to the west where I am currently located. I received 50 extra minutes for my call to customer service… you might want to do the same if you become aware of an issue.
Andy cites a Kinetic Research report on Cable VOIP and notes:
What’s interesting is they also report that the home grown VoIP from Charter and Comcast is over a year away. Seems amongst the giants that only Cablevision saw the future of VoIP and moved quickly to roll out their own service. [VoIP Watch]
Cablevision has actually been running quite a few ads lately in the NY market (though interesting on Time Warner – heh). I’ve noticed they are really pushing the triple-play and have focused on same bill rates for each service – $29.95/mo.
The WSJ has a good piece on how SBC just sold a huge “internet telephony” contract to Ford to go live within the next 3 years. Not sure why they did not reference VOIP at all, but surely seems to be the topic.
SBC Communications Inc. is rolling out Internet phone service to 50,000 Ford Motor Co. employees in 110 locations, marking one of the largest such deployments yet as traditional phone companies enter the Internet-calling fray. [WSJ – link should work for a few days]
One of the clear benefits to large organizations is managing a single network for voice, video and data… sounds good to me. I like it from one place as well and I’m just one guy.
This makes a lot of sense and certainly allows existing subscribers greater access (though additional cost) to their subscription. I am not personally sold on whether people will pay a monthly fee yet for radio online. I guess I’ll reserve judgement until it launches and we can see how it actually works. Can you play in your media player of choice? Is it PC only etc… New Dell purchasers will receive a 30 day free subscription as part of the launch – guess Dell = Music these days on the PC side of the world.
XM Radio Online, will launch sometime in early October and operate commercial-free, just as its satellite programming does. XM will charge $7.99 per month for unlimited listening and offer a discount rate of $3.99 to subscribers of its existing radio services. [News.com]
No one can escape it, we’re all slaves to it.
Covad has created a fake movie site that looks kind of like what you might expect from CSI The Movie. It’s definitely high quality and well executed (but slow loading) in my opinion. I’d love to see the rest of this campaign to see how it was promoted beyond movie trailers…
The target must be CIO / CTO at Fortune level organizations since the product they show is a dashboard for your company’s telephony. I’d imagine there’s a pretty intense lead generation campaign going to work off the budget it must have cost to produce the site. I would imagine the close time on a lead in this space is many months so there’s probably quite a few moving parts. I don’t know that I would have been duped into checking this out, but am glad I did.
I have become quite interested in VOIP tech as of late (had you not been paying attention) and think things are only going to get hotter in the category. Unlike Andy, I don’t have any clients in the arena just yet…
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…
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.
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…