Subscribe to RSSvoipnow.org was kind enough to include our humble little Mr Blog blog on their Top 100+ Telecom Industry Blogs. One hundred is a lot of blogs, so I can’t brag too much, but it is a good list for sure, and includes some very good blogs on VoIP, mobile, and telecom at large (far too many for anyone to actually follow them all).
Vote for Aswath
I second Andy’s sentiments with regard to Aswath’s submission of EnThinnai for the LaunchPad competition.
The “autonomous communications” platform has been a passion and work of love by our very intelligent pal for a few years now, and if for no reason beyond sheer friendship, I want to see this get its opportunity to be discovered. Aswath has a very solid idea EnThinnai, so while it is in its formative stages it’s goal of making communications between peers easier certainly is timely.
So there you go. Now, go do it - VOTE FOR ASWATH.
Armchair quarterbacks gloat in VoIP startup’s trouble
I guess we should not be surprised that those so self-absorbed as to live by their blog would be taking malicious delight in the troubles of others for their own self-gratification.
Perhaps Ooma brought it on themselves with their attitude and “Hollywood” style when rumors of their troubles surfaced last month and brought a satisfying chuckle to many bloggers and analysts. Now, with the news yesterday of Jangl’s woes and Om’s report today adding Talkplus to the list of struggling Voice 2.0 companies, we’re seeing another wave of “I told you so” from around the net.
Sometimes the net can be like a second grader, very hurtful, and not very thoughtful.
It’s easy to slam someone else’s ideas, efforts, blood, and sweat with none of your own on the line. Putting forward an idea is hard - it takes a kind of bravery most people don’t have - it will be peer reviewed, scrutinized to the N-th degree, because everything is out there in public these days and everybody is an “analyst” (at least in their own minds). Attempting to build a strategy and execute around that idea is even harder - a lot harder. Even fewer people ever try that. If you really think it’s that easy, why don’t you try it yourself once.
It doesn’t take a genius to come up with an “explanation” for the failure of a startup after the fact. Usually such explanations are inconsistent with the practical realities of the situation, if not inane. It is much harder to come up with what will work, as opposed to what won’t work - bloggers and other analysts provide us with an abundance of the latter and little to none of the former.
Startups fail - at an alarming rate. The likelihood of a startup failing is much greater than the chance that it will turn out to be “a hit” - this is the game of startups. Anybody starting a startup (or investing in one) knows these odds. Startups are fragile - it doesn’t take much of a bump in the road to end the journey. Venture investors are also finicky and somewhat flaky - they do not share the passion of the founders. And the VC’s pretty much hold all the cards of a venture-backed startup, so what they say pretty much goes.
All I ask is that before you wax triumphant about your incredible prescience with regard to some startup’s failings, bear in mind that no matter how ridiculous the idea may appear to you, there are human beings involved here and many factors that are not apparent to those outside the walls - and the founders and others involved have feelings and likely poured significant quantities of blood, sweat, and especially tears into their bold efforts to pursue a dream.
Are telcos working together to make their own Skype?
The blogs are all abuzz in response to Om’s reporting of a theory by ThinkEquity analyst Anton Wahlman.
AT&T, in conjunction with some 10-15 incumbent telecom carriers — British Telecom, Deutsche Telecom and NTT among them — is plotting to launch a Skype competitor
…
Big shifts in the telecom landscape are forcing the carriers to think along these lines, Wahlman said
Om himself adds:
If voice is a losing business, why shouldn’t the carriers cannibalize it themselves, then sell other services, including video?
This is fun stuff to kick around (for a little while), but even if telcos are thinking about such a move, there is a big gap between thinking about and executing, especially when it comes to the world’s largest incumbent telecom carriers.
There is one thing that Om says which I disagree with: “Realistically speaking, there’s a slim chance of anyone catching up with Skype.” I think that is a very naive perspective. I’ve said it here many times: Skype is is not “sticky” - it has a very weak and tenuous hold on its customers. The recent efforts toward monthly and annual service plans are an attempt to improve this, but the Skype user-base remains a finicky bunch, with little or no loyalty. They can be moved without that much trouble - in fact, most of them are early adopters aleady concurrently using other services in addition to Skype. I think of Mosaic, Netsape, IE, and Firefox as perfect examples of how quickly an apparently “locked-in” user-base can completely forget the old “hot thing when the new “hot thing” comes along. While a collaboration of telcos are the least likely to do it, somebody can (and certainly will) steal Skype’s user-base, and, once it starts, it will probably happen much faster than anybody expects.
Experts slam VoIP 911, but gloss over mobile 911 problems
Tom Keenan, a professor in the University of Calgary’s department of computer science, in an interview with CBC news says “land line telephones are more reliable than internet services for 911 calls.” Keenan, and other experts, have been quick to condemn VoIP in the wake of the tragedy in Calgary last week.
One thing that’s annoying about all these reports is they fail to note the fact that cell phone 911 is just as bad, if not worse. They also fail to take any responsibility for not speaking about the 911 issues BEFORE the tragedy. Where were the warnings and pubic service announcements about VoIP 911 BEFORE this incident? And where are the warnings NOW about cell phone 911, which is just as dangerous.
Look, I’m not trying to be alarmist here. Not everybody needs 911. But it is important to know what you have and make an informed decision about whether the 911 you’re getting (or not getting) is going to work for you. If you have kids, for my money, real landline 911 is the only way to go - it is well worth the $10-$20 per month - and trust me, I am not a shill for the telcos 
The same thing probably applies if you have an elderly person living in the household or anybody else that may have difficulty providing accurate information in an emergency.
But it’s not just VoIP you need to think about. Something a lot of people don’t realize is that their cell phone 911 may be useless in an emergency too. This is not reported on enough by the press or by public safety officials (I wonder why - $$$) I strongly encourage everyone to put the local direct-dial number for their police department into their cell phone. Calling that number is almost always going to provide faster response than dialing 911 on your cell phone. All the limitations you see various “exports” attributing to VoIP, apply equally to your cell phone. In fact, if your VoIP 911 info is up to date, and if your provider supports E-911, dialing 911 on your VoIP phone will be more effective than 911 on your cell phone. In some larger general emergencies, officials will actually SHUT OFF cell phones. They don’t want a terrorist to use them and they want the airwaves cleared. You may wait on hold for a long time with cell phone 911 (and they are not dispatching anything in that time). In all cases, your call will be put in a low priority queue due to the massive quantity of false alarms received by cell phone 911. Again, try the local police number before wasting your time with cell phone 911. The police can transfer you to ambulance or fire faster than 911 can in most cases and if they don’t answer right away, you haven’t lost much and you can still dial 911. In fact, if your phone has call waiting, you can dial the direct local police number while you’re waiting on hold for someone at 911 to answer - emergency services may be on the scene by the time anyone at 911 answers (not a joke - actually happened in my case).
Carolyn Schuk nails VoIP Industry with a Reality Check
Carolyn (aka the “VoIP Princess”) writes ostensibly about Yahoo/Jajah and the AOL/AIM Open Voice project. But really, it’s something for the VoIP Industry at large to take note of:
…take a walk with me down memory lane: Yahoo! buys Dialpad. AOL announces VoIP rollout. eBay buys Skype. Google buys GrandCentral.
As Carolyn notes, all of these were supposed to change the world trigger some kid of major disruption.
And the industry-disrupting results were…?
I’m waiting.
A good friend recently told me that it’s time for someone to write the postmortem for VoIP 2.0 - I suggested he should do it - I’m not sure I have the stomach for it and nobody would want to hear my version of it anyway.
AOL “Open Voice Program” works with PhoneGnome
Dan York gets it right when he says:
Does accepting SIP connections at your SIP proxy constitute an “API”? Does providing SIP termination services to the PSTN constitute an “API”?
AOL calls it their “Open Voice Program” but it’s really just a way to use your “AIM Call Out” account for placing calls to the PSTN using SIP. The rates are competitive for a retail service (e.g. 1.7 cents per minute to the US).
Is this an “API”? Hardly. It’s a SIP to PSTN termination service - there are hundreds of those out there already (albeit none with such a recognizable brand). As someone else said “Not only is it not a developer story, it’s not even a good SIP termination story.”
However, it is significant for SIP - we now have a household brand not referring just to “VoIP” but referring to “SIP” - the standards-based protocol for VoIP, something neither Skype nor Vonage has done. SIP means interoperability and that’s a good thing for users and the VoIP ecosystem at large. A brand as big as AOL providing awareness for SIP and promoting interoperability is terrific - nobody else is doing it.
To illustrate what I’m talking about, we tested it with PhoneGnome and it works fine (good call quality on test calls we made so far). It really is SIP and it really is interoperable. Simply go to your My PhoneGnome page and add a new ITSP under Features / Low Cost Internet Calling / Edit / [Add Internet Calling Service] / Manual SIP Settings and on that page use settings as shown below:
It’s important to note that we have never been able to do this so with Skype, even though the service has been out for four years or more - they could have offered this years ago. We have our GnomeLink for Skype Plug-in, but the AOL service is much easier to setup and use - we had the service working in just a few minutes, seamlessly from our home phone - no computer needed to make calls and no separate “bat phone”.
One downside of the AIM Call Out service is that the people you call get a weird AOL number as the caller ID (the same thing happens with SkypeOut). I have a support request in to AOL to ask if there is a way to have it deliver my phone number as the caller-ID so people will actually know it’s me calling (whether that means they are more, or less, likely to answer the phone is another matter).
Yahoo selects Jajah as PSTN termination provider
There’s something about this that I’m not getting. Others have hailed this as some kind “next big thing” - Jon Arnold said:
it’s one of the best examples I’ve seen about bringing telephony and the web together.
I don’t see it that way. Yahoo! selected Jajah as their PSTN termination provider. Unlike whoever they were using before, this time they announced publicly who the underlying wholesaler is. Skype uses some number of providers, and it’s not big news when they get a new one or drop one.
I realize there is a difference with this Yahoo! model, in that Jajah is performing the billing and “minute accounting”, rather than the usual wholesale models, such a say Level3, where Level3 provides their reseller with one giant bill for all minutes, and it’s up to the reseller (e.g. Skype or whoever) to track and bill the minutes to the right customers. Sure, that’s different, and, sure, it potentially puts Jajah on the map, but I don’t see how that makes this deal “the next big 2.0″
btw one of my ventures voovox (gratuitous plug) offers the same thing for any sized company (the tracking of minutes, selling at a markup, etc).
When nerds become terrorists
One of the IPs of a server I manage in a data center has been caught up in an Outblaze /24 RBL. Outblaze admits that the spam is really from a different IP range than ours:
That’s a spammer to whom your provider has given multiple (several dozen) /27 and /26 sized blocks spread across their IP space
Our IP addresses are not in these spammer ranges, but Outblaze threw our (innocent of spamming) IPs into their block anyway. This is a typical supposed good-guy anti-spammer tactic; it is effectively a form of terrorism. They want us to do their bidding for them. They have unilaterally declared some IP as a spammer and now they want us (without any direct evidence that they are spammers - only the hearsay evidence from Outblaze) to report them to our data center provider, which we of course have to do. Outblaze wants us to take their word for it that these are bad guys, the same way the COPS TV show does.
Please ask [data center provider] to kick this spammer off their networks, and I will lift the block on this (and other) /24s that high spam volumes from the above spammer have caused.
All these RBL sites are bogus - I’m against spam, but these sites do more harm than good. They are vigilante organizations run by fascists - it’s their way or the highway - and they are practicing a form of restraint of trade. These are kids that got beat up on the playground and now they are getting back. It’s kind of silly. If a spamming sites gets on the RBL, no big deal — it’s in their operating plan - they just move on. But if a good guy gets on their RBL, they are screwed - there is no third party checking these guys and no court of appeal.
Boxbe - will they ever learn?
Alec Saunders, Markus Göbel, and have all reported about problems with the so-called “anti-spam” service Boxbe:
Alec Saunders: “Boxbe’s spam. A fatal mistake for them and me”.
My email box is jammed with people saying “can you make this thing stop”, “you gotta make this stop”, “I’m really pissed”. Twitter is burning up with Boxbe messages. And those are the people that care enough. I don’t know how many people have just added me to their spam list.
The worst part? There’s no way to opt-out of the service once you’ve signed up. I can’t tell it to stop. I can’t tell it to cancel my account.
Markus “Boxbe anti spam filter – a cure worse than the plague”
After I signed up to Boxbe, more than 500 of my email contacts received annoying invitations, saying “I’m using Boxbe to screen my email and I’ve added you to my approved Guest List. Can you take a minute to make sure your contacts can reach me?”. Many people have received this message already six times. Now I get emails back from buddies saying “could you please stop spamming me and my girlfriend? Boxbe sucks!”.
This sounds like what happened five years ago with Spam Arrest (see “SpamArrest Is A Spammer!SpamArrest Is A Spammer!”)
Beware Spam Arrest Users, Spam Arrest is spamming your contacts! If you are a Spam Arrest user, did you know that the company that is helping you receive less spam is actually contributing to the spam problem by spamming the very people you communicate with?
To add insult to injury, sending to abuse@spamarrest.com results in a sender verification request email, asking you to go through the Spam Arrest verification process, which will put you on the Spam Arrest Spam Mailing List to receive future spams!
It was a disaster then - I wonder what made Boxbe think it would not be a disaster now?
Here’s an example of the reception this idea got back in 2003 when Spam Arrest tried it:
- Steve Atkins: http://static.samspade.org/spamarrest.html also titled Spam Arrest is a Spammer. He claims the above spam sent out by Spam Arrest is a violation of California state law (click to read about the laws and decide for yourself)
- Declan McCullagh’s Politech: http://www.politechbot.com/cgi-bin/politech.cgi?name=spamarrest.
- Carl Bussjaeger: Spam Arrest: Busted
- Broadband Reports: When Anti-Spammers Spam
- AVN Online: Is the Spam Fighter a spammer itself?
I’ve already added Boxbe to my spam filtering, so I’ll never see anything they send me.
To learn more about my views on the spam problem, you may want to check out my Spam Rants.
