Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Executive appointments aren't usually very newsworthy items.  That's the reason you frequently see them as paid advertising items in the print paper, rather than publised as news items.  Yesterday, however, newly minted Digium CEO Danny Windham rounded out his exec team with a new VP of Engineering, David Deaton. A former Adtran colleague of Windham's, Deaton has the chops and experience to really take Digium to the next level.   Bringing professional engineering management on board is an enormous step in the transformation of Digium, and one which seems to have been welcomed both by Digium founder Mark Spenser, and the larger Asterisk community. 

• Mark Spenser: "With this new leadership team in place, Digium is on its way to making our vision — a world based upon open communications — a reality."
• Jeremy McNamara: "Now that Mark Spencer has surrounded himself with a truly capable executive management team, l am confident that Digium Hardware and Asterisk will continue to make drastic improvements in the coming months."

And if you haven't read it yet, go check out Rich Tehrani's account of his recent visit to Hunstville.  It's a great read with some wonderful pictures. 

Sightspeed is really cooking with gas.  Yesterday, they received Editors Choice from Killer App magazine.  Another step on their march to global domination of the desktop video market!  You could read the article, but perhaps the best way to explain, and to show off their product, is to jump on over to Sightspeed, and get the latest video update from CEO Peter Csathy.

Nice job, guys!

In Mobile social networks, don’t go it alone Katie Fehrenbacher writes:

The web-based social network boom and the rising use of cell phones for non-voice functions, makes the trendy ‘mobile social network’ phenomenon an obvious area for investment. But the reality is that it’s difficult to base a business off of just turning an unknown brand into a single mobile social network.

The rest of the piece goes on to talk about the difficulties of porting the social networking experience (say, for instance, MySpace) to a mobile environment, or creating a new social networking experience in the mobile environment.   Is porting an existing social networking experience a handset the right experience, though?  Handsets are different from PCs, and from the web.  Location, bandwidth, cost, and presence are all different in a handset environment than a PC environment.  Moreover, handsets contain the core asset of the social network, which is the address book.

Perhaps as we think about social networks on mobile devices, the core experience shouldn't be shared content, but rather shared experiences.  Rather than emulate MySpace on a handset, perhaps the right experience is closer to facebook.  Or, dare I say it, for business users… iotum's own Talk-Now.

Food for thought.