Alec Saunders SquawkBox

I had a quick chat with Russ Shaw this afternoon.  In addition to his VoIP duties, Russ runs the BBHub blog, a site for all things Blackberry.  I asked him if he could help recruit some folks to play with iotum Talk-Now, the Blackberry application we’ve been building.  He’s posted a message to the world inviting early adopters to play with what we think is a revolutionary “New Presence” application.  Only available on Blackberry 8700 and Pearl.  To sign up, visit http://www.iotum.com/blackberry.

There’s a goofy debate going on in the Asterisk community which ZDNet’s Dana Blankenhorn has written about.  On the one hand, open source advocates say that Asterisk really is open source.  After all, you can download the source code, and, well… change it, say…

Then there are a bunch of people who are saying — “hey, it’s not open enough unless the protocols are open”.  Michael Slavitch goes further saying “Asterisk isn’t even an open SIP switch, it is a VOIP PBX that must translate SIP into its own media format, and is highly biased towards the use of proprietary hardware from Digium.”

Now, I know Slavitch a little, and as one of ObjectWorld’s leading strategists, I know that he knows that SIP is a signalling protocol, and not a media protocol.  The statement attributed to him is clearly nonsensical. 

Let’s suppose, though, that Asterisk did translate an open protocol into some internal format.  Who would care?  Moreover, if you really did find it objectionable, it’s open source.  You can just… change it.

Arguing over the degree of openness of Asterisk is like arguing over whether sugar cones are better with sprinkles or without. The raison d’etre of a sugar cone is the ice cream, n’est ce pas?

Do you remember the party purges of the old Soviet Union?  Take a big centralized bureaucracy, remove the leader (death, or whatever), and once the posturing, positioning and re-positioning was done, you’d get a new guy at the top, and a bunch of the old guys underlings were out of a job. 

Smells a lot like what’s going on a Bell South today.  Om Malik has the scoop on a whole mess of Bell South execs who are out of a job, now that the merger has gone through. Looks like Mark Feidler, and a bunch of his loyalists are no longer part of Ed Whitacre’s “ruling politburo”. 

Hey!  It looks like congratulations are in order for the Bubbleshare team.  Jeneane Sessum says that the news is out that Web 2.0 photo-sharing startup Bubbleshare been acquired by Kaboose (TSX: KAB) for $2.25 million plus an additional $750K possible earnout.  It’s a great match.  The Bubbleshare feature set makes photos easy to share, and also makes it super easy to create albums and add fun stuff like comment bubbles.  In fact, it’s an awful lot like a family photo album, and families are the Kaboose target.

Kaboose got a great deal, both in acquiring Bubbleshare’s technology, and in the Bubbleshare team.

Update:  I just had a quick chat with Albert.  It was an ear-to-ear grin over the phone.  Mark Evans also has posted a short interview with Kaboose CEO Jason DezWirek. Mathew Ingram speculates that Kaboose may venture into social networkng with this acquisition.

There are a couple of really interesting posts about OpenID online, as of yesterday.

1. Richard McManus at Read/WriteWeb has published a short video of setting up an OpenID.  It’s trivial to do.
2. Sam Ruby’s Open ID for non-SuperUsers walks you through the basics of setting up an OpenID, and then redirecting it to the web page of your choice (say, a blog). 

I claimed my openID using ClaimID, and then used it to log-in, and publish a comment on this posting, which is about a WordPress OpenID plug-in.  It works as advertised.  With OpenID I now have a transportable identity, which I can use anywhere.  Wow!  My next steps will be to populate the identity with more information, and then take some of Sam Ruby’s steps to redirect it to http://saunderslog.com so that I can use my blog as my ID.

Another piece of the Voice 2.0 vision seems to be coming to life.  Moreover, with support from Verisign and a host of others, it seems that OpenID might have some legs too.