Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Andy Abramson reported a rumor yesterday that Yahoo, as part of its reorg, would kill the voice business, apparently to appease SBC.

If true, that’s a terrible idea.  Presence and voice are now inextricably linked.  A choice to kill the voice business at this stage would signal an abdication of Yahoo’s position in the next generation of communications.  The future of communications is multi-modal.  Customers will take calls on landlines, mobiles, and PCs, interchangeably, and presence will be the key to unlocking that market.  The sooner old-line telco’s become accustomed to this, the better.

Yahoo’s presence cloud can be an enabler of that future. If it’s walled into an IM-only strategy, however, it becomes irrelevant.

Like Tom Keating, last week I had it pointed out to me that the domain http://www.asteriskathome.com/ was pointing to the new Digium AsteriskNow! site.  I did the same bit of sleuthing that Tom did, uncovering the fact that Mitchel Constantin was the registered owner, and concluded that either (a) Mitchel was a huge fan of Asterisk, and did this all by himself, or (b) it was further evidence that Digium is taking steps to protect the Asterisk brand. Digium marketing folks I met at Astricon had previously confirmed that the company was moving to standardize use of the Asterisk brand and logo.

It turns out that the latter case is true. While Mitchel didn’t respond to an email I sent him, Digium Sales and Marketing VP Bill Miller confirmed that Digium has bought the domain as part of their effort to exert greater control over the Asterisk trademark.  They’re not saying Asterisk community members can’t use the name Asterisk in their products, but they are trying to shape how the Asterisk name is used.  Acceptable uses of the Asterisk trademark are detailed on the page titled Digium’s Trademark Policy on the Digium website.  It is acceptable, for instance, to name a product ” [foo] for Asterisk”, where [foo] is the name of your product.

Digium’s moves to protect the Asterisk trademark are exactly what you would expect the company to do.  Without these kinds of steps, the mark can be easily diluted by misuse, eventually becoming valueless.    Moreover, the approach they’ve chosen is a rational way to allow others to use their trademarks. By letting people know up front what the rules are, they can allow others to use the trademark without entering into a negotiated licensing agreement with every vendor building a product for Asterisk. 

One could debate the wisdom of pointing asteriskathome.com at a Digium site.  That move is bound to pique Trixbox fans, and arguably violates Digium’s own acceptable use policy.  Having acquired the domain, it might have been better to simply retire it.

Ken Camp has posted a round-up of his favorite categories and companies in the Unified Communications space over 2006.  Many thanks for the iotum mention Ken!

Of challenges for 2007, he writes:

For the future, the big issue I see is how our personal information about presence, relevance and context must become part of our digital online identity. Identity management has been a very hot, and to me stalled and boring, topic for quite some time. The carriers, wireline and wireless alike, want to “own” our presence information. I think that’s a problem. I own the information about me and I’ll decide who can or cannot see it. I think in 2007 the industry will grapple with this. The key, as with digitial identity, lies in giving control to users, not to vendors and service providers.

Let’s be clear.  The maintainers and aggregators of personal information including but not limited digital identities, whether they’re presence clouds or providers of a service like Plaxo, do so on behalf of the individuals who own that personal information. Like Ken, I see this as an important issue in 2007