Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Developers in need of a set of quality, french language, prompts for Asterisk need look no further.  Montreal’s Claude Patry has released french language prompts recorded by June Wallack, licensed under the GPL.

Skype has just acquired Norwegian Company Sonorit AB and its US subsidiary Camino Networks for $27M in a moved designed, or so it seems, to make them less dependent on GIPS, and more competitive with MSN, and Yahoo. It’s a speedy exit for Sonorit, which was founded by ex-GIPS employees in June of 2005, and shipped their first product in Q4 of the same year. Unless GIPS suit against Sonorit has been resolved, though, Skype and GIPS destinies will be intertwined for some time. 

Peter St. Andre’s short but incite-rich piece titled Going Mobile contains this paragraph:

Another challenging idea: the average time to pay off investments in the older generation of switching equipment was 30 years (according to one speaker at the conference I attended). The time to payoff is now 3 to 5 years but technology generations (read: software-driven innovation) is on the order of 18 months and accelerating. So anyone who is deploying expensive infrastructure and expecting to reap the profits from their investments is deluded. What happens when technology generations occur every 6 months or less (yes, the time is coming)? Only small, decentralized technologies will thrive, forget about all that centralized telco stuff.

Some telco’s are already retiring equipment purchased just two years ago.  3 to 5 years between technology iterations sounds about right. But let’s think about how the Web 2.0 / Voice 2.0 model will impact this world.  It’s a commonly cited statistic that many of today’s Web 2.0 companies have releases as frequently as weeks apart.   Now imagine a hosted communications service, centralized to just a few data centers globally.  That’s a Web 2.0 application, but it’s providing voice.  It can be updated, easily, every few weeks as required.

That, by the way, is what iotum has done consistently since January.  The most brittle linkage in our system is the link to the network element that performs switching on our behalf.  It’s at that point where the service becomes unevenly distributed.  Practically, what this means is that some of our customers have implemented the new conference calling feature we announced in February, and some still have it on their roadmaps for future implementations.

Kind of blows up the old CAPEX model, doesn’t it?

Big fish Comverse gobbled up Netcentrex yesterday for $164 million in cash.  Comverse does a little over $1 billion annually in sales, the bulk of which come from its multimedia billing, content and messaging solutions. A tasty bite for Comverse, Netcentrex is a top application provider in the converged services market.   Company executives cited Netcentrex’s VoIP and FMC expertise as the reason for the acquisition.  Netcentrex web site also describes them as a leader in residential VoIP services, citing customers like AOL Germany, amongst others.

Customers, technology, management.  Netcentrex has all three, which is why this is such a good deal for both parties.