Alec Saunders SquawkBox

This arrived in my inbox a few minutes ago:

Attached is a copy of our press release this morning announcing an injection of $10M US into Versatel Networks. The timing is quite good for this as I’m sure you will have seen the most recent activity in VoIP – Skype and Ebay, Microsoft and Telio.

This space is heating up with a new drive of commercial activity largely due to strong business reasons and not just technology. In fact some of you likely have used this type of service and can expect to have much more in the form of new applications over the coming months. The advent of Vonage and Instant Messaging support calling is making this platform become a lot more mainstream and as a result service providers must take a new look at how they will make money from a voice based service. The price of calling is constantly dropping in price and the industry is moving from a per minute based model to a bundled and application model. These changes create opportunities and Versatel is well positioned to take advantage of this.

We’ll be at Voice on the Net 2005 next week in Boston demonstrating some of the new services we will be coming out with. Expect to see a number of announcements from us over the next 90 days specifically around new product and new customers.

These are exciting times and I’m happy to say we’re in a good position to take advantage of it.

Regards
Bob Mimeault

You can read the press release here.  Congratulations to Bob and the Versatel Team! 

Privacy advocate Michael Geist has nothing good to say about Bill C-37, Canada’s Do Not Call legislation.  He believes the bill has been so watered down that it will be ineffectual. 

The US Federal Do Not Call List now has more than 90 million subscribers.  Despite the public’s enthusiasm for it, I haven’t seen any hard data yet on how effective it’s been.  Historically, research has shown that do not call lists tend not to be effective.  For instance, the AARP, who have been tracking this issue for some time, have shown that as many as 60% of those who signed up for state level do not call lists still continued to receive unwanted solicitations. 

An army of investigators, and bureaucrats in Washington is not an effective way to handle complaints arising from the 19.2 BILLION telemarketer calls made every month in the US.  Is there any reason to believe that the situation in Canada would be different?

What’s needed is a technology solution — the equivalent of a spam filter for your telephone. Stay tuned…

The New York Post reported this morning that Time Warner and Microsoft are in talks to sell a stake in AOL to Microsoft. 

Citing two unnamed sources familiar with the matter, the Post said the talks concern Microsoft acquiring an AOL stake and then combining it with Microsoft’s Web unit MSN.

Microsoft would pay some money to Time Warner for the AOL stake, leaving the two companies approximately equal partners in the venture, the Post said.

It’s an interesting development, that’s for sure.  It smacks of the MSNBC joint venture between Microsoft and NBC.  However, at the time, MSN and NBC weren’t competitors. 

Comparing the companies, AOL has much higher revenues, and a much larger paid install base.  AOL has the better brand as well, and the better media properties (courtesy of Time Warner).   Microsoft, however, has the better technology, and is perhaps better equipped to take advantage of Web 2.0.  And, of course, Microsoft doesn’t have Carl ICahn demanding that they shed business units. 

I recreated a couple of my Pub/Sub searches yesterday on Google Blogsearch.  This morning I deleted the Pub/Sub feeds from my RSS reader.  Google’s ability to find relevant material is light years ahead of what I was getting from Pub/Sub.