Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Hot on the heals of all the talk over the weekend about how Rational Pricing strategies are keeping cellular costs high in Canada comes this announcement from Verizon — Verizon Wireless Introduces Unlimited Text, Picture, Video And Instant Messaging To Anyone In The U.S. Yup, for a paltry $20 monthly premium, you can send as many pictures to your friends as your heart desires.

Nokia BetaLabs, the new Nokia beta software site, went live this morning.  Says London based Nokia employee Stephen Johnson, "it's further evidence of our gradual move from products ("Here you go, it works ok") to services ("How we can get this to be even better?")".

Cool!

There are four applications up currently including widsets, mobile wellness tracker, sports tracker, and mobile codes (presumably taking advantage of the enigmatic barcode reader application I just found on the N95).

Does anyone remember when it was hard to set up the internet on a PC?  The bad old days of installing a TCP/IP stack, configuring IP addresses for gateways, and DNS servers, and then using gopher to browse to your favorite sites? That's where we are with VoIP.  And Forrester, bless their hearts, have just published a report to tell us that VoIP needs to get easier. 

According to the study, only 8 percent of European Internet users familiar with VoIP actually tried this service. This small percentage is comprised most of highly educated, tech savvy males looking for newest and coolest technology. Of this group, only 4 percent opted to use VoIP for their private calls and 3 percent bailed out.

Celebrate the geeks in your life, friends.  Celebrate the geeks! 

Kudos to my friends at Jajah, Gizmo, Sightspeed and Hullo who all get cited for having recognized that VoIP is hard, and for doing something about it.  I'm surprised that the Forrester team missed Truphone, however. 

It’s April 16th in Ottawa.  The annual Ottawa Tulip Festival begins May 4th, which is just a little over 3 weeks away. You’d never know it this morning.  Here’s the view outside my front door from just a few minutes ago.

The crows have come home to roost for Vonage.  The company has admitted that it has no workaround to navigate past Verizon's patents, and that such a workaround may not even be feasible.  Interim CEO Jeffrey Citron has declared that one of the first belt-tightening moves will be to axe former CEO Mike Snyder's dot-com era marketing programs. Customer acquisition costs have ballooned to $306 per subscriber in the most recent quarter.

Old-style telecom business model + new technology = incremental improvement, not disruption.