Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Gomery’s findings in a nutshell:

Chretien and Pelletier: Ultimately responsible for the whole darn mess, since the usual control mechanisms were circumvented, and the programs administered out of the PMO.  Unlikely to have personally profited.  Guilty of naivete, and stupidity.

Galliano: Picked up Pelletiers program, and enlarged it.  Guilty of influence peddling.

The ad guys (Corriveau, Brault etc): They lined their own pockets with money from the public purse, and kicked back dollars to the party that kept the money machine printing cash.  Guilty of theft, and bribery.

The Liberal Party of Canada, Quebec: They participated in the kickback scheme, took illegal donations from suspect sources, and insisted that paid "volunteers" be employed in the agencies that were recipients of their largesse.  Sounds like racketeering to me. 

Martin: exonerated.  Say what?  This comment on Daimnation really says it all for me: 

Am I to understand that the Prime Minister of Canada’s defense to charges of corruption, dating to when he was Finance Minister, is that he’s a fool not a knave?

Martin’s response:  promise to pay back the stolen money, and ban 10 individuals, including the former prime minister, from ever holding membership in the Liberal Party again. 

It’s not enough. 

How about banning the Liberal Party of Canada, Quebec wing, for a start.  It’s not like they can win in the next election anyway – they’re going to get trounced by the Bloc.  Make them sit this one out.  And what about a penalty for their behaviour?  How about treble damages for every dollar stolen from the public purse?  How about taking back Jean Chretien’s fat government pension, since taxpayers money was used to keep him in power illegally?  While they’re at it, take the pensions away from Jean Pelletier, Chuck Guite, and Alfonso Galliano too.  And what about jail time for the thieves who happily bilked Canadian tax payers out of $100 million?

Silly me. I forgot.  Paul Martin’s a fool, not a knave.

I’ll be writing a little later today about two big, but unrelated, news items. Microsoft is expected to announce further expansions of it’s Web Services offerings in San Francisco.  And, here in Canada, the preliminary findings of the Gomery Inquiry are to be made public. The Globe and Mail has already leaked some of this information.  Our government could fall within the week. 

A couple of days ago, I was given the opportunity to preview the SoftGnome beta which is being launched today.  SoftGnome is a softphone service for PhoneGnome.  PhoneGnome is providing a branded version of the NCH Express Talk phone,  but you can use any SIP phone (plastic or softphone).  The SoftGnome service simply uses PhoneGnome as the media gateway.  What that means is that it’s the worlds first service to allow you to attach a softphone to your home PSTN number.  More on that in a minute… 

SoftGnome is easy to set up.  If you’re a PhoneGnome user, just log into my.phonegnome.com and go to the features tab.  Select activate for SoftGnome.  It will then prompt you to say whether you want to have SoftGnome ring simultaneously with your pots phones when someone calls PhoneGnome. Once you’ve answered that question, then you simply have to wait a short while for the instructions on how to download and configure the default SoftGnome softphone are emailed to you.

In use, SoftGnome works as advertised.  I had calls out from my PC with no problem.  Calls were routed as expected — to either the PSTN, my ITSP, or other PhoneGnome users, and the sound quality was high, although it varied depending on the ITSP chosen. 

One quirk took some getting used to — when one person is using the SoftGnome to call, then another person picking  up the telephone in the house simply hears a dial-tone, and expects to dial.  However, the outbound SoftGnome port is already in use, which means that the second persons call ends in a dial-tone.  The Team at TelEvolution needs to come up with a way to indicate the line is already in use. 

So, back to the point about SoftGnome being the worlds first softphone service attached to your PSTN number.  Because it’s so intimately attached to your home phoneline it does some things differently from other softphone systems.  For instance:

1. From anywhere, you can make calls using your home phoneline.  If you’re in London, and need to make a call to your local cleaner in Ottawa, you can do it. 
2. From anywhere, you can pick up local calls from your home phoneline.  And you don’t have to drag around an ATA to do it.  Nor do you have to use a solution like Vonage’s brain damaged softphone offering which requires you to have a separate DID.  People just call you as they always have.

The implications of this are subtle but profound.  Consider this:  PhoneGnome, although superficially an ATA, is a programmable platform for hosting applications.  Those applications are client / server applications, to be sure, but that doesn’t matter.  PhoneGnome can also behave like a symmetric media gateway — passing traffic under program control from one network to another.  It’s a programmable micro-switch, that lives at the edge of the nework.   That’s how SoftGnome can do its magic. 

Ponder that for a bit. 

To me, it smells a lot like the introduction of the PC vs the mainframe.  The PC replaced the mainframe with commodity programmable hardware which anyone could afford.  What if we replaced the big iron in the telephone network with user provisioned "small iron", like PhoneGnome?  Voice 2.0, here we come. 

SoftGnome is free to try for 30 days, and after that, it’s $4.95 per month. If you’re a PhoneGnome user who travels, have a family member that lives away (say a college student) and wants to make calls to local people, or a person who needs to make long distance calls while at work, and doesn’t want to do so on the company tab, SoftGnome is a great addition to PhoneGnome.  Recommended!

Jeff Pulver weighs in this morning with his take on Voice 2.0: Jeff says It’s Purple!  Purple Minutes is a term coined by Jeff in 2000 to describe minutes of voice traffic associated with enhanced telephony applications.   In other words — application driven, premium value minutes.  Absolutely!

Voice 2.0 is Purple+.  It adds these two elements to the idea of Purple Minutes:

1. XML Web Services for application to application interop.  Open services, and open applications on the network are the ideas that enable the Web/Voice mashups that the manifesto talks about.
2. A business model which presumes that customers will pay for applications rather than metered access.  This implies models that include per month access fees, purchased products, ad-supported products, and many other models.

The big driver for Voice 2.0 is the phenomenon that Jeff pointed in the Purple Minutes talk five years ago.  Minutes are dying.  There simply isn’t any need or justification for meters.  For example, yesterday I flipped open the Windows task manager while using Project Gizmo to talk with my business partner Howard.  Total CPU load for the application was about 10%.  Total load on my network was just .08% of capacity.  Network capacity is no longer a scarce resource, and there’s no need to meter it.  The value is being created in the applications which live at the edge of the network, where people are simply not going to pay for metered access.

Kudos to Jeff for his leadership, and vision. 

Kevin Werbach wrote another great piece yesterday on the inversion of business models.  It’s about the way in which some businesses are providing the core service for free and charging for add-on’s.  "But what if the connectivity were free, the applications were free, and users paid only for the add-ons? Could that ever work?", he asks, and then cites Skype. 

As a thought experiment, this is a great read.  Connectivity isn’t free, with Skype, however.  And, the complexity associated with building a value chain based model around monetizing Skype add-ons, and paying the owners of the pipes from the revenues associated with the add-on’s is difficult to comprehend.