Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Via Jeff Pulver: Tim McElligott’s The Tao of VoIP.  Short, but inciteful…

to be anything more than a cheap, commoditized blending of voice and data into a stew of packetized content, large service providers need to utilize platforms that can spit out targeted application for very specific customer needs like watermelon seeds.

Wow.  That’s the only appropriate response.  The Sens put on an amazing display, with shot after shot on the Toronto net, but Belfour was impenetrable.  That was a heartbreaker. 

Sneaky Microsoft has done it again.  I just installed Office 2003 Professional Edition.  It has a slick, beautifully crafted user interface.  Typical of the Office team’s attention to detail, it has ironed out all kinds of problems with the old product.  Word now has a viewer mode that brings up documents in beautiful cleartype text.  Outlook has a side-by-side preview window which uses the viewer.  And it makes extensive use of semi-transparent windows for new message notifications and so on.

There was a little ditty in the box called Business Contact Manager which bills itself as an add-in to Outlook. Having just struck out on my own, I thought that a contact manager, a la Act, or Goldmine, might be helpful to me.  So I installed it. 

It didn’t seem to do much.  I dragged a few contacts into the Business Contacts Window, and didn’t think much of it.  Except that it was darned annoying now because for some reason I couldn’t resolve addresses against my old contact database.

A little while later, trying to shut down some other errant process on my PC, I brought up the task mangler and had a look through the process list.  WTF? SQL Server?

And then I had a look at one of my contacts.  Every last activity — email, note, appointment, etc made for any contact is being recorded in a SQL server database by Business Contacts Manager.  No more filing emails…

What a Godsend!  A database behind Outlook!

From Light Reading: Cable Cadre Talks VOIP (Light Reading).

This, of course, is massive news.  Cable networks, coast to coast, in a cooperative VoIP network.  It’s the moral, if not technical, equivalent of the old regional bells model, with Neustar in the role that AT&T held.

Plus ça change, plus cest la mème.

From Om Malik — Vonage goes to Canada. Of course, you read it here almost two weeks ago ;).

Om writes:

Vonage announced that it is going to offer its service to Canadians and will charge them pretty much the same price as what it is charging in the US. It is going to put a lot of pressure on the incumbents to offer similar services and force them to match Vonages price. The broadband penetration is much higher in Canada and that is what makes it an interesting and perhaps one of the more lucrative VoIP market.

I’m not so sure he’s right on this one.  Much of the savings of VoIP in the US comes from avoiding the myriad state-to-state taxes.  If you can trim a penny or two per minute off the cost of a call, then you have a compelling value proposition.  We have a flat per call regulatory tax in this country.  The opportunity to avoid the tax isn’t available.