Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Via Businessweek, IDC reports that Nokia is the undisputed champ in the smartphone market.  Responsible for 48% of the 80 million smartphones shipped last year, they dwarf every other competitors in the category.  The next closest competitor, RIM, claimed 7.5% of the market.  With overall market growth of 42%, the smartphone market is alive and healthy.

BusinessWeek's audience is the investor, so naturally they break out these statistics by vendor.  Even more useful to software developers like us would have been a breakout by platform.  Which OS was the dominant OS? RIM, Microsoft or Symbian?

Congratulations are due to the team at Sangoma Technologies.  They had an excellent quarter, reporting a 200% increase in EPS, and sales which increased 95% from the previous year. 

With rare exceptions, I don't write about corporate financial performance. So, why highlight Sangoma?

1. They are a very rare publicly traded member of the Asterisk ecosystem.  Potentially they are a bellweather for the health of that marketplace overall.  After all, they sell one of the most basic building blocks that everyone in that sector depends on — line cards.
2. There has been much speculation about the health of Asterisk creator Digium.  Digium makes most of their money from selling the same types of products that Sangoma sells.  If Sangoma is healthy, it's likely that Digium may be too.

Nice job, Mr. Mandelstam.

Stowe's talk is great.  The first part is a dissection of Continuous Partial Attention.  I happen to be in the camp that says that CPA is a disease, but Stowe argues persuasively that it's the new model for communications and business.

In the second half he begins by saying that the buddy list is the center of the new universe.  Social networks are key — the individual is the new group, and the value is not in the number of people in the network, but rather the number of connections.  Bingo!  It's the same logic Google uses to rank web pages.  More links equate to more authority.

We are at tthe Dawn of the Social Age. CPA is a built in aspect.  Ignore it at your peril.

The web is the new "Third Place", replacing the pub, the coffee shop, and the cracker barrel.  Tools that help us to master and exploit the social connectedness of the web are critical.  In fact, the web is taking us back to the social connectedness of yesteryear, and away from the mass television culture which dominated society for the latter part of the twentieth century.

Traffic and flow are the future of applications.  Social applications enable communications, and the various bits that we throw into the ether will be picked up by other apps and aggregated into a single time-stamped thread.  "This lines up with the social adaptions we're making". 

Conversation flows through networks — it equals traffic.  Media is just the pieces of the conversation, but not the sense.  To understand the conversation, you have to be in the flow.

Stowe argues that flow is the means for deciding what is important.  RSS readers should expose what others think is important too.  Yes, and no.  It's valuable to know what others are reading, but if that happens at the expense of not being exposed to new ideas… well… that's a large sacrifice in my opinion. 

Flow strategies:

• Time is a shared space.
• Productivity is second to Connection:  network productivity trumps personal productivity.
• Everything important will find its way to you many, many times: don't worry if you miss it.
• Remain in your flow: be wrapped up in the thing that has captured your attention.

Delete the email you haven't read.  If it's important, people will send it again

Great stuff.

I chose the Sheraton Gateway rather than stay at the Etel conference hotel, which is the Marriott.  The Sheraton is 2.4 miles away, connected most of the way by a path along the seashore.  It's a fabulous walk.

This photo was shot on my BlackBerry Pearl.

…but I've now arrived at Etel.  Travel, followed by a stream of meetings at the Marriott yesterday, meant no blogging, and an early night to bed.  Judging by the stream of "telephony geeks" walking through the doors yesterday afternoon, however, the show promises to be well worth it.

One of the themes that's been emerging in my conversations with people is what I will call the "what is a phone" discussion.  Smart guy Brad Templeton carries a very basic cellular phone — no cameras, media players, and so on.  I like a phone with bells and whistles, hence my fondness for BlackBerry and also the Nokia N-Series phones.  My dinner companions last night, Ken Camp and John Todd, exhibited a similar dichotomy.  Ken's a gadget-hound like me.  John asks "what is it supposed to be — a phone or a camera?". 

For what it's worth, this photo of Ken and John was taken with a camera… not a phone.