Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Joe Clarke

What is Joe Clarke hoping to accomplish with his latest broadside against the new Conservative Party?  Is his destiny to be the gadfly at the fringe, forever a critic?  Surely he realizes that as an outsider his influence is limited.  Clarke’s principles have betrayed him in the past, most notably during his first brief stint as Prime Minister when principles caused his government to fall. 

There are many in the new party that are not fans of Stephen Harper’s past. However, everyone realizes that the only route back from the wilderness of opposition is to put those differences aside.

The convention is over Joe.

Design for the edge

Interesting thread going on here between Gartenberg and Scoble.  You can see the latest posting here and track it back.

The Edge vs Average design problem is a constant in technology marketing.  You can generalize it very simply to a cost benefit analysis.  5 years ago, who would have considered putting 1/4 of a terabyte of media in a PC?  A few intrepid pioneers (like Rich Tong) were digitizing their entire CD collections, and running them off NT servers at home, but the rest of us considered the storage too expensive, and the benefit minimal.  Today, according to Michael Gartenberg’s posting, the average customer has less than 1,000 songs in a collection, and that makes tiny players viable.  Today, everybody digitizes music.  And the audiophiles amongst us are ripping them at 320Kb/s, requiring even more storage than before.

So, would:

• home networks exist if NICs still cost $250 per machine? if wireless was still $1000 per node?
• there be 300 million cell phones in use in North America if they still cost $1000 for a basic handset?
• the internet be pervasive if high speed meant a single T1 interface costing $20,000 per month?

The edge is where innovation happens.   It’s where the VC money flows, and it’s where the greatest potential and greatest risk lie.  The bet you’re making is that the edge case will become the general case.

Stealth Communications ENUM Registry

Stealth unveiled their ENUM registry today. 

ENUM Registry Launches (Light Reading). NEW YORK — Stealth Communications, Inc., which owns and operates the Voice Peering Fabric, the World’s first and only VoIP minutes exchange to provide complete transparency between buyers and sellers of VoIP routes, today announces the official launch of the VPF ENUM Registry.

According to Stealth, multiple terminals can be targeted with their ENUM registry, which implies 1 number, and all kinds of other services.  Packet8, my VoIP provider, is one of their partners.  What will this do for me?

Congratulations to Werbach

Kevin Werbach is hosting the new VOIP Central, a news and commentary site on all things Voice Over IP that launches today.  It looks really good.  It needs an RSS feed, though, so I don’t have to subscribe to all of Tech Central.

LitFiber

This has been quite entertaining over the last few weeks. Here’s what it looks like:

• A little known company, LitFiber, announced February 26th that they had restructured, and begun trading on the Nasdaq pink sheets using the symbol LTBI. The magic words P2P and VoIP in the press release drive the stock price to the $7 range, albeit on very thin trading.
• The stock falls to the $3.50 range within a week. 
• March 16th, LitFiber announces the upcoming beta of their new P2P VoIP service, iTalk2U.  Volumes increase, but the stock continues to trade around $4. 
• That week, I speak to LitFiber Chairman John Jarvis, jr.  Mr. Jarvis is a promoter, in the classic sense of the word. John sees his biggest competitor as Skype.  He opines that Skype will never be able to target the US military establishment, but that he can. I dare to contradict him during our conversation (”actually John, the quality of Skype is pretty good”).  We agree to talk again later, but after several unreturned calls to him, I give up in frustration.
• April 1, LitFiber’s iTalk2U has still not gone to beta.  Another press release is duly crafted and put on the wire.  Volumes continue high, but the stock price is still declining. 
• April 5, the iTalk2U software goes into limited beta with little fanfare.   By April 13th, the company admits they’re having trouble punching through firewalls, and the beta doesn’t appear to be going well.  The stock price, which has been steadily eroding, drops below $1, amidst frenetic trading.
• April 19th, Litfiber announces the acquisition of Email2Phone. April 22nd, they announce that they’re in talks with Guardian Technology. They also put out a press telling the world that there will be more acquisitions! And today, this…  Litfiber Announces $35 Million First Year Revenue Estimate; Management Details 2004 Outlook, a completely vaporous press releasing announcing plans to do $35 million in revenue next year.  The stock pops 30%, and closes at $1.08.

I’d love to be wrong, but it sure looks like the bubble is back.