Alec Saunders SquawkBox

How do you know when someone enjoys their job?  You can usually see it on their face.  Check out this little photo essay by (Ambassador) Rich Tehrani as he tours around the latest ITEXPO chatting with various industry people.

I had to miss this afternoon’s press conference with Mark Spencer and new Digium CEO Danny Windham.  Pauline at MRB (Digium’s PR company) called as I was heading into the security checkpoint for my flight home.  Tom Keating, however, recorded the entirety of the call.  Others have commented on what this means, and generally speaking I agree with the view expressed by commenters like Garrett Smith and Owen Linderholm.  Digium has taken a giant step forward with this move.  Already profitable, they’ve now brought in talent to grow their channels to market, and the ecosystem of third parties building products that work with Asterisk.  It’s just what the doctor ordered. 

Since the summer when Digium took a venture investment from Matrix, various commenters have wondered publicly and privately how long Mark Spencer would stay as CEO.  It wasn’t unexpected that Mark would eventually end up in a new role.  Venture capitalists, after all, have a nasty habit of replacing founding CEOs. Sometimes it’s a happy ending, and sometimes not.  What was clear on this call, however, was the easy relationship between Mark and incoming CEO Danny Windham.  Windham has been a Digium board member for the last seven years, and it shows.  From the very beginning of the call, you get the sense that this was Mark’s choice.  It appears that not only is he comfortable with the decision, he’s eager to get to work in his new role.

Well done. 

When Yahoo! bought Flickr, they kept the old Flickr with the old accounts that the initial supporters of Flickr had purchased intact.  Your account name was your email address, and that was that.  Anybody who had a Yahoo ID was just another account name, but you could still be a Flickr member as before.

Today this arrived in my Flickr inbox:

Now, I have already got a couple of Yahoo IDs.  Every time they come out with a service I want to try, I end up getting a new Yahoo ID, because I can’t remember the old one.  Fact is, the email address I used when I joined Flickr is the most consistent identifier I have, and the most consistent way to reach me.

I don’t really want a Yahoo ID, and every time Yahoo (or AOL, or… whoever!!!) forces me to get one it drives me crazy. But now that Yahoo has my photos hostage (and this blog, by the way, since there would be a ton of broken links if I were to drop my Flickr account), I’ll be forced to use one.

Frankly, it sucks.  I shouldn’t have to get new credentials every time someone launches a new web service.  I shouldn’t be forced to participate in every BigCo’s proprietary identity scheme just to use their services, either.

BusinessWeek reports that NEC has been raising the alarm on spam over VoIP, otherwise known as SPIT (spam on Internet Telephony).  Some estimates place the potential volume of SPIT as high as 40% to 70% of all calls. 

iotum, of course, was engineered with this in mind. A trivial use case for the iotum Relevance Engine is to compare the incoming callers identity to a list of known callers, and simply block callers which are unknown. We have experienced a new kind of SPIT attack recently, however, which spoofs the caller ID with the users own extension number.  Someone has been leaving two and four minute long jokes in our voicemail boxes…   

SPIT levels may not reach the 70% levels that NEC is predicting, but those who claim that it isn’t an issue are deluding themselves.  It’s out there. 

Nuvoiz caught my eye as they announced at DEMO today.  Positioning themselves against Skype, they are a standards based softphone (XMPP and SIP) with enterprise features like call hold / transfer, and the usual assortment of voice and IM.  Accompanying the softphone, the enterprise would also buy the Nuvoiz Network Controller, which handles NAT traversal. 

The UI shots are very pretty, and the feature set rich.  One can’t help but wonder, though, whether the world needs another softphone.  Nuvoiz will have to deftly navigate the a path between Skype’s enterprise ambitions, and Microsoft’s Office Communications Server / Office Communicator suite.