Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Superior Iowa (pop 142) is a tiny place.  You can imagine the reaction at Superior Telecom Coop to AT&T’s lawsuit.  Tiny rural telecom company…. huge nationwide carrier…. small pockets…. deep pockets….

I imagine they got some legal advice, concluded that AT&T might be able to win the suit, and shut down all of their upstart free calling services.  It must not be open and shut, however, since Irish entrepreneur Pat Phelan says AllFreeCalls will be up and running again on Monday.

Wow!  AOL has just experimentally implemented OpenID for all their members.  First Microsoft, now AOL… Google next?

The implications of this are staggering.  Identity based services will be able to be built across networks without requiring multiple accounts, or competing identity schemes. 

I had the opportunity to chat with Clarity Communications Systems Inc VP of Business Development Tom Carter earlier this week.   Clarity is a wireless company focused on location based services and push to talk. They differentiate from competitors like Kodiak in two ways: market focus, and technology.  Kodiak is targeting the tier 1 player with a circuit switch solution. 

Clarity’s technology provides their services over 1x CDMA networks.  All IP, it can bridge connections from any number, IP address, or URI to any other.  The implications are that Clarity’s future is in far more than push-to-talk — push data, video, clips, real time sessions are all possible.  Combined with location based services, it means new scenarios like “push to call at a particular location”, geo-fencing, or push advertising delivery.

Clarity is staking out a position in the market providing hosted push to talk services to tier 2 and 3 carriers. These are the carriers providing services in the places that Sprint/Nextel doesn’t touch, and potentially very lucrative accounts.  Their hosted model allows the carrier to be up and running with push to talk services in a matter of weeks.  So far, they’ve been experiencing some great success to, with four new deals done in the last few months.

Push to talk is a pretty interesting application. It’s instantaneous, like IM, but voice.  By combining push to talk with location, Clarity’s building a full-on New Presence application. 

In Survey: Blackberry owners chained to work, Ars Technica writer Jacqui Cheng reports on SRG’s new Digital Life America study on the ‘Always On’ culture.  A third of the 1600 people surveyed said “Yes” when asked if Blackberry, and devices like it, chain you to work.  A third were neutral, and a further third disagreed.   Interestingly, 46% agreed with the statement that “Technology like email and cellphones give people more time to do the things they like”.

Confusing and inconclusive.

The only really conclusive results from the research was that Blackberry users actually did work more.

Regardless of how users felt, though, survey results showed that those who owned a BlackBerry were, in fact, more likely to work long hours than those who didn’t. 19 percent of BlackBerry-owning survey respondents reportedly worked more than 50 hours a week, compared to only 11 percent of the general population. A higher percentage of BlackBerry owners also felt that they didn’t have enough personal time in their lives—53 percent, compared to the 40 percent average. Finally, the average household income of BlackBerry owners was nearly 50 percent higher than the national average, at about $94,000, indicating that those who own BlackBerry-like devices may share some more overachieving (or is that overworking?) personality traits.

We’re an over achieving bunch, aren’t we?  Now… back to email.

The Wall Street Journal has tapped into the controversy around phone calls and email messages during meetings.  Paul Kedrosky picked up on it with his comment that he thinks it’s OK to do it discretely, once in a while, but the sentiment from his commenters is running against.  Paul Sweeney points out that iotum’s Talk-Now is about solving this problem. 

Exactly!

Checking your email during a meeting is sometimes necessary, especially if your day is back-to-back meetings.  That’s reality.  Discretely doing it, without conveying the message to other participants that the topic of the meeting is not interesting, is the name of the game.