Alec Saunders SquawkBox

In what surely must feel like vindication for the iowa LECs, FCC Chairman Kevin Martin is threatening legal action if any more calls are blocked.  And no degrading or otherwise interfering with the service either, he says!  That addresses two of the most disturbing complaints that the iowa's have levied. 

What's left unaddressed is the resolution of the millions of dollars in unpaid bills.

On whether or not the FCC would force AT&T and Qwest to pay disputed access-charge bills, Martin said that was a separate issue, and covered by petitioning processes that might take further time to resolve. “If you have a dispute about the intercarrier compensation rules, you can file petitions, and come to the commission to get redress,” Martin said. “But you can’t just stop letting consumers make those calls.”

You can't just stop letting consumer make those calls.  Exactly!

In the news this morning, RIM has introduced the BlackBerry Curve.  They're definitely stepping up their game.  The Curve is billed as the worlds smallest QWERTY keyboard device, and includes an upgraded camera, plus a suite of multimedia software sourced from Roxio to get media on and off the device.  The Boy Genius Report had this to say:

The press release comes with details on the device, including new additions of a 2 megapixel camera with 5x digital zoom, a currently available and supported A2DP Bluetooth audio profile, a newly designed media player, a revamped desktop media manager, based on the ever-popular Roxio Easy Media Creator, that now provides CD ripping and photo editing functionality. Photos taken from the device can be instantly uploaded to your Flickr account, by way of Yahoo! Go. 

I've held a couple of these in my hands recently as friends in the industry have been testing them for RIM.  Lightweight, small, very media capable, and with the lynch-pin BlackBerry email technology, this device is going to take back some of the market that RIM has been losing to Microsoft recently. 

I held off on buying the BlackBerry 8800 because, unlike the Pearl, the 8800 lacked a camera, which I've come to highly value.  My next BlackBerry will certainly be the Curve.

More from RIM at the official BlackBerry Curve site.

Russell Shaw is an unbelievable patent ferret.  This morning he publishes details of an IP phone for use with internet advertising, Google searches, and other kinds of information.  As I was reading it, I couldn't help but notice this reference:

The latest news and sports scores can also be displayed with information specific to the user, e.g. local news instead of international, results relating to the Ottawa Senators instead of the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Woops?  Who wrote this thing?  A quick scroll back up the page reveals that it is none other than local inventor Rich Loen.  Rich has shown his TelML markup language, the software that powers this device, at Ottawa Barcamps in the past. 

Seth Godin asks for a bluetooth lavaliere microphone. 

May I introduce you to the Sony ECM-HW1, Seth? The silvery grey piece on the left is the microphone, and the grey block on the right is the receiver. It's a little bulky, yes, but can be clipped to your lapel, strapped to an arm band, or hung around your neck with the provided neck strap. In addition, it has a small fuzzy grey cloth casing that it can be wrapped in to reduce wind noise. It runs off two triple A batteries, and has a range of 100 feet. 

WebDialogs popped out a new beta of their Unyte product yesterday. It uses peer-to-peer technology to upgrade the current product, providing a better and faster experience when both parties are Unyte users.  

My personal experience using the current Unyte product (it's how iotum does web conferencing) has been fabulous. 

Webdialogs is looking for testers.  If you use web-conferencing at all, you owe it to yourself to check this product out.  Head to http://beta.unyte.com to download it.