Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Interesting stuff.  James Seng has sniffed the Google Talk packet stream.  It’s vanilla XMPP (the Jabber Protocol).  One neat innovation is that each Google Talk client is a STUN server, thus replicating Skype’s ability to traverse firewalls, in a standard way.  How long before we see this in SIP clients?

For $15 per month, businesses with three lines can now have a virtual auto-attendant from Packet8. 

The "bionic-bitch" is so prevalent in business today that it’s a real shock to actually have a human being answer the phone.  The head-scratcher in this announcement is that the most successful small businesses get that way by high quality customer interaction, and human touch.  It makes you wonder whether the marketing folks at Packet8 really understand their customer. 

There’s a nice article here in Dow Jones Online contrasting the cable and phone company customer acquisition strategies.  Cable outnumbers DSL, with a superior product, according to the article.  That’s the reason you see SBC jumping in with discounted $15/month broadband.