Alec Saunders SquawkBox

There’s an excellent article on Smarthome Australia’s website about using UPnP to connect digital entertainment devices to your home network.  Windows Media Connect, Twonkyvision, TVersity, and Allegro are all mentioned as media servers.  As I’ve blogged previously, here at the Saunders home we use Twonkyvision, with Netgear MP101’s for distributed music.  Twonkyvision is a little quirky, but it’s rock solid.   I recently upgraded to Twonky’s latest build, and spent the princely sum of 15 euro’s to get their full featured packaged.  Well worth the money. 

UPnP is on the right curve.  When we launched it in 1999, we thought it would take eight years (as USB had) to gain widespread adoption.  So, here we are in year six, and UPnP is becoming more and more ubiquitous everyday.

I don’t think I have a category for super-cool mashups.  If I did, Kayak Buzz would be on it.  It’s a mashup of Google Maps, and an air travel reservation system, which lets you find the cheapest destinations from any airport in the world.  Thanks Jim!

Some very good commentary on the newly released Google Analytics, and Google’s Privacy Policy for the same on Bogle’s Blog. 

In Giving up on Instant Messaging, long time Instant Messaging user Luis Suarez notices that his IM usage has shifted from AOL, Yahoo, MSN to Skype, Google Talk, and Damaka.   I’ve noticed the same.  I rarely message people on MSN Messenger anymore, but choose Skype or Gizmo Project instead. 

On the wire this morning, a confusing press release from Linksys about Linksys One.  Linksys One is an end-to-end small business hosted PBX offering.  If you are:

• A CLEC, ITSP, or some other kind of service provider, Linksys offers hosted voice, voice mail, email, conferencing, and a variety of other services that you can sell to your customer.
• A VAR, Linksys offers new services and hardware that you can install at your customers site, in conjunction with a service provider partner.
• A small business, Linksys offers inexpensive but full featured plug and play voice grade routers, hand sets, and VoIP gateways and a suite of compelling services.

This is a pretty dramatic step up.  It will put immense pressure on Natural Convergence (a direct competitor), and Tekelec (acquirers of VocalData, another direct competitor).  Neither of these have CPE businesses of their own, and must partner for these elements. Does the Linksys offering compete with Cisco Call Manager also?  What about Microsoft Small Business Server, and hosted versions of Exchange and / or LCS?  

It will also place pressure on the new generation of small business PBX / router products that are starting to emerge, from companies like Epygi and Talkswitch.  These solutions will be less expensive than a hosted solution from Cisco and an ITSP, but they will be forced to compete with the Cisco channel, and the revenue share that a hosted solution will kick back to that channel.

For more information, Tom Keating has blogged an excellent interview with Linksys VP Marthin De Beer with a lot of depth.