Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Two friends of mine had their pictures in both the Toronto Globe and Mail, and the Ottawa Citizen this morning.  Stephen Burns, and Tina Romeo-Salem are among the 30 graduates of Queen’s University’s Executive MBA in Ottawa program.  Fifteens months of toil are done, and I’m sure it feels great!  Congratulations.

My friend Mike Zintel, at Microsoft, dropped this to me in email over the weekend.  Congratulations Mike!

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The product I’ve been working on for 3 years is released.

http://blogs.msdn.com/mikezintel/archive/2005/10/29/486731.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/mikezintel/archive/2005/09/29/475506.aspx

What is it? It’s a .NET language runtime, …, er developer productivity, er …

I am not a nerd. I’m not a nerd. I am not a nerd.

Oh hell.

Think of it as fuel injection for programmers. It makes the job of writing programs easier, faster, cheaper, and hopefully enables more interesting and reliable programs.

Mike.

Kevin Werbach posted a chunk of SBC CEO Ed Whitacres recent interview with BusinessWeek.  Read the whole interview — it’s very revealing.  The portion Kevin reacted to was the statement that "there’s going to have to be a mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they’re using".

The incumbents have been sounding alarm bells about this for a while, and the message seems to be taking.  A few days earlier, at ISP-CON, Neustar’s Chris Celeberti told ISP’s "I do not believe we can sustain free peering". 

The assumption these guys are making is that best efforts networks are insufficient to carry voice. Their message is:  "Our data networks suck for voice.  Therefore you need to use our voice networks." Yet every day that capability is improving.  Between the improvements in networks, and the improvements in end point technologies, real progress is being made very quickly. Twelve months ago it was a struggle to use XTEN and Vonage for real business calls.  Skype came along, and that changed.  But still, Skype wasn’t perfect — it has dropouts, and quality is quite low when making calls to the PSTN. DiamondWare’s WiFone improves on Skype. SipPhone’s Gizmo Project is another step forward.  Today, most of my business calls are made using Gizmo Project.  And for home use, since my wife and kids don’t want to strap on a headset to make telephone calls, I’ve installed PhoneGnome.  PhoneGnome’s sound quality is virtually indistinguishable from the PSTN.

So, yeah, Ed, you need a business model that will help you monetize your assets.  It’s not going to be based on discriminating between voice traffic and other kinds of traffic.  That’s too easy to circumvent.  Your business model is going to be based on access and peering.  You need to get used to the idea that in a Voice 2.0 world, the value is in the applications that run on your network, and not the network itself. 

Paul Martin has kicked off a weekly radio address to the nation.  It’s being cast in the mold of the US Presidential "Fireside Chats".  However, the networks are treating it as advertising, and requiring the Liberal Party to pay for the spots.  To make up for the fact that it’s only running on a few networks, the Liberals are hosting the piece at the Party site as well.

You can read the text, or listen to the address here.  It’s all of two minutes long.  Political theatre.  He says that American’s have been wrongly taxing our lumber exports, and that he’s going to do something about it.  We’re not quite sure what, at the end of this little soliloquy, but we do know he’s going to do something.  There’s that earnest Mr. Dithers again…

It’s like a japanese meal — beautiful to look at, but insubstantial.  Mr. Martin’s blog was the same way.

My advice to the prime minister? Forget about the "Fireside Chat" model.  Do a weekly podcast with an RSS feed, and a discussion forum so people can ask questions, and discuss the topic, following the speechlet.  Make it really interactive.  That’s the model of the web.  That’s media today — not the same as the radio broadcasts of Churchill and Roosevelt.

Otherwise you’re just another talking head in a suit.

Oh, and by the way, Stephen Harper and Jack Layton, you should do the same.

I’m a little late to the party, and there are already many many great blogs nominated in the Canadian blog awards.  My two additions:

• Best Business Blog: Jon Arnold.  Jon’s a relatively new blogger, but he always has timely insights on the voice over IP industry.
• Best Sports Blog: Randy Morin’s Game Certainty.  Randy religiously tracks the hockey scores during the season, picks stars, and has great commentary.