Alec Saunders SquawkBox

We had the opportunity today to meet Scoble.  He’s as charming in person as he is on his blog.

I believe in desgning for edge-case scenarios.  Our developers hate me, because I do things like trying to load my obscenely large address book into our system.  Scoble’s the poster-child for what we’re doing. He needs relevance enabled communications technology.  We showed him some of the stuff we’re working on, and had a great conversation about what Relevance enabled communications would mean to a guy who handles hundreds of email and IM requests a day. 

We arrived yesterday in Seattle and spent most of the afternoon shopping for 8 cell phones and some data cards.  The nature of iotum’s product is that we need lots of end points to terminate calls, and Howard and I are starting to spend a lot of time in different places doing demos.  So, we needed the ability to do more than one demo.  We also have found that not every place we go to demonstrate the software has open network access, so we needed some data cards.

It was a long process.  In the end we bought four phones from Verizon, and four from Cingular.  We also bought two Kyocera data cards from Verizon, and put data plans on two of the Cingular sims. If we need GSM data, we’ll throw one of the data cards into my Nokia N90 which has a UMTS modem in it.

The Verizon data service is, frankly, unbelievable.  For $80/month you get all you can eat data anywhere within Verizon’s network.  Where there’s 1XRT service, that’s broadband speed!