Alec Saunders SquawkBox

According to the latest Forrester Research from analyst Marybel Lopez, 70% of consumers have no interest in switching to a VoIP service.  "Providers still haven’t made a compelling case for their services".  Ouch!

"Offerings focus on price, not compelling applications," Lopez writes. "Today, providers lead with cheap unlimited calling packages that mirror circuit-switch offerings. Consumers aren’t going to switch providers just to get free ‘repeat dialing’ and ‘click to call.’ At this point, the only reason for consumers to switch would be to save $15 to $25 off their monthly bill."

The real promise of VoIP, according to Lopez, is the way that it liberates voice from the telephone, and from the telephone network. VoIP will go mainstream when providers and equipment vendors begin to think outside of the box and begin to integrate voice functions in consumer electronics, Web applications and mobile communications. Providers will have to embrace these trends to remain competitive.

Hallelujah!  That’s music to my ears.  Lopez’ prediction will also be compelling for forward thinking providers like British Telecom and Bell Canada, and to cable companies,  who have diverse offerings beyond just the core legacy voice assets. 

Another little noticed piece of news today was that Microsoft released Presence Controls for Microsoft Communicator.  These are programmers widgets that can be used to embed presence awareness into any application.  They allow other applications to get presence information from Communicator using Communicator’s scripting interface.  The example cited was being able to see the availability of all team members working on a particular trouble ticket, from within a trouble ticket application.

As I pointed out in March of this year, the softphone is evolving into a desktop integration platform for VoIP.  Expect to see presence become a widely used feature in all sorts of line-of-business applications.  And, because presence doesn’t (yet) include the idea of relevance, expect to see many abuses of the technology as well.  As Mike Gotta of the Burton Group said in the news piece: "Some people may not want to be pinged by someone they don’t know. There are some etiquette and user interface and communications techniques that developers have to define for the presence enablement of applications."

Hot Stuff, originally uploaded by Alec Saunders.

This year we tried an experiment — growing hot peppers. Jalapeno, serrano, and poblano peppers will all grow in Ontario.

We had massive success. Here are a few of the peppers we canned to eat later.

With all the noise about Google and Skype yesterday, the 10th anniversary of the Windows 95 launch passed un-noticed.  Not even Microsoft remembered it!  Windows 95 popularized so many of the things we take for granted today — ubiquitous networking, the web, media, and the start button UI to name a few.  Effective distribution leads to ubiquity.