Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Here’s a fairly detailed review of a VoIP client for Microsoft Smartphone devices.  It looks very cool, especially since it combines WiFi and Cellular on a single device.

I’m going to have to grab a copy of the latest Time Magazine.  The Seattle PI had an opinion piece from David Horsey which widely quoted it, including these two paragraphs:

Computers, cell phones, BlackBerrys, e-mail, text messaging, the Internet — all these techno toys and new ways to connect are supposed to be making us more productive worker bees, but sometimes it seems as if we’re just buzzing frantically from flower to flower without picking up much nectar.

Time claims that the interruptions and distractions caused by these new communication methods cost the U.S. economy $588 billion annually. In addition, the temptation to multitask — talking on the cell phone while responding to e-mail, opening a FedEx package and eating lunch at your desk — is causing too many people to look awfully busy while not doing anything very well (Time has a word for this, too — "frazzing").

I can certainly identify with this problem, and I’m sure I’m not alone.

A reference to the Dormer Room showed up in my inbox this morning.  It’s a satirical website taking on the Canadian Election.  The interview with Brian Mulroney is a hoot. 

Earlier this week we had a coffee with GoogleTalk product manager, Mike Jazayeri.  Mike mentioned that this announcement (Google Opens IM and Talk) was going to hit the next day.  Google has allowed anyone using XMPP to send traffic openly to and from their cloud.  This is in sharp contrast with the federation agreement announced between Yahoo and Microsoft.  Mike later wrote about this announcement on the Google Blog, and one of the supporters of this announcement, Michael Robertson, also blogged it.  

Google is probably going to get lots of pats on the back for this. And, deservedly so.  What they’re doing is breaking down the walls between the walled gardens of todays providers.  But it’s also smart business strategy.  When you’re coming from behind (far behind, in Google’s case), one of the best strategies to thwart a competitor with a proprietary technology is to cloak yourself in open technology.  And that’s what they’re doing. They’re not being evil, but they’re also note operating out of pure unselfish interest.

XO announced today that they carried over 2 billion minutes of VoIP traffic in Q4 of 2005, which was an increase of 22% over previous quarter.

YAWN!

Frankly, who cares how much network utilization XO has?  The metric is all wrong.  XO investors should care about the number of subscribers, and the dollars earned per subscriber.  Per minute revenues are trending to zero.  Announcing that the number of minutes carried has increased is like a cable company announcing that the number of bits carried has increased.  What cable investors really want to know is revenue per subscriber.