Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Vijay Anand is a young Indian entrepreneur who I’ve been corresponding with about Voice 2.0, recently.  He’s put up a blog of his own called Technological Musings, and recently written an article in which he asks whether the current crop of VoIP entrepreneurs are barking up the wrong tree. He writes:

VoIP has no future unless it makes the leap into the next phase of voice communications, which many have termed as Voice 2.0

Maybe its time to look at this whole system in a new way. I sometimes wonder if technologists give the masses way less merit than they deserve. If the end-user was able to adapt to giving out email addresses and their IM details on their business card, and the even more current blogging address as well, it shows they are more than capable of adopting a new standard and method of being in touch. The rest will eventually catch up.

Of course scraping the whole system and designing a new one is a long process and what is happening right now will probably be the best route to take - make a transitional medium before switching completely to voice networks. But the point is the reminder that what we are getting to, is just a transitional network. I really hope the industry players, the entrepreneurs and the investors will remember that.

Here here!

The Sens redeemed themselves tonight.  It was an away game in Carolina, and although they came close to disaster several times, they pulled it off.  The final goal, in the last 0.9 seconds of the game, was an empty netter by Peter Schaefer.  Victory was all the more poignant because of Chris Neil’s absence.  He learned that his mother had been killed in a car accident this morning, and flew home from Carolina to be with family.

Randy has been prodding me to go to TorCamp this weekend for a month or so.  Looks interesting.  I’ll blog what I can of it. 

The secondary organizational impacts of EBay’s acquisition of Skype are about to be felt, I’ve heard.  Following Rajiv Dutta’s appointment as President, three new senior VP level people will be coming into the organization:  Finance, US Operations, and API/Commerce solutions.  It seems that Skype’s culture is undergoing a swift change from being disruptive punks to a business oriented "show me the money" culture.  Unsurprising, since the earnout requires more than a billion dollars in revenue from Skype by 2008. 

The coming Skype Reorg: you read it here first.

Yesterday’s announcement by Microsoft of the Simple Sharing Extensions (SSE) to RSS made a lot of news.  Bloggers chimed in everywhere too, which means I am late for the party. I had a quick read of the draft spec last night, and read Ray Ozzie’s blog posting on the topic. 

The problem SSE is solving has been around for ever.  In the mid-1990’s Suze Woolf’s team at the Microsoft Home was building scenarios with multiple calendars and contact lists, anticipating that today’s world of hyper-connected individuals and families would arrive. Microsoft was thinking about synchronizing one user’s devices to a central store at the time, but there was no technology solution available to enable the vision of synchronizing a mesh of multiple users as Suze’s team wanted to do.

Fast forward to today, and the problem of synchronization has multiplied exponentially.  Not only do we have the need to synchronize users to devices, and users to other users, but also databases to databases. And how about synchronization as a mechanism for keeping software up to date? 

SSE has the potential to democratize synchronization, and unleash a whole new wave of applications, the same RSS democratized syndication.  How much easier would it have been to build Plaxo, for instance, if this technology were available? At iotum, this would have helped us a lot.  iotum’s Relevance Engine relies on being able to obtain synchronized calendar and contact information in order to be able to contextually screen user phone calls.  We looked at multiple solutions to this problem, including buying commercial software.  The better commercial solutions started at price points in the $60,000 range, plus a per-source connector fee.  Not the kind of dollars that a startup can drop on an SDK.  So we built a very simple solution of our own to do one-way push, which is all we need at the moment.  A standardized solution for building and consuming synchronization feeds would have made a dramatic difference to our development plans.

I’m very excited by the potential here.