Alec Saunders SquawkBox

This morning Techmeme surfaced a news release put out yesterday on Businesswire that came with the following headline: The Number of Customers Actually Purchasing Mobile Video Service Could Climb from Only Five Million at the End of 2006 to Almost 80 Million by the End of 2012. I had to reread the headline twice, just to make sure it wasn't a Dave Berry humor piece. 

Irish analyst firm Research and Markets put the piece out to promote their new report titled New Video Dynamics: Outlook for Mobile Video.  Now, aside from the fact that I remain personally skeptical that people will actually pay for downloaded video clips, one has to wonder what they were thinking when they crafted a headline that conveys that those rare customers who purchase video today might possibly climb from paltry to a reasonably respectable number by 2012.  Aren't analysts supposed to make authoritative statements?

Here's a test for you… see if you can read the headline using the same voice that John Cleese uses in Monty Python's Dead Parrot sketch… and not laugh.

While I've been rebuilding PC's this week, a lot has been going on.  Some of what caught my eye includes: 

The Skype Journal has been at the Skype Ebay Devcon.  Among the more notable items:

• Jim Courtney's discovery of IM+ for Skype.  If you need access to your Skype buddy list, and to be able to make Skype calls from Blackberry, this is the solution for you.  He and I exchanged IM notes, and then the next day I got a call from Dan York made via IM+ for Skype.  Interestingly enough, it appeared to be a conference between Dan York, his mobile, and my PC.  Haven't figured out yet how that works.
• With the launch of the Skype 3.5 beta, you can now transfer calls to the PSTN.  This is a crucial feature which will unlock a range of new applications.  We've been waiting for this for a long time at iotum, but it comes rather late as our development efforts have shifted to presence and mobility.

Meanwhile, Ken Camp has written a couple of lengthy posts (#1 and #2) on the new Jaiku client for series 60.  Suffice it to say, they're worth a read if you're interested in attention economics. 

And lastly, at iotum we slipped our first new Talk-Now release out in several weeks.  More on that in a post later today.  

It's been a whacky hardware week here, and I'm still not done digging out of the mess. 

Sunday my desktop PC at home experienced a catastrophe.  The motherboard or power supply (still don't know which) died. 

Monday night, I installed Safari for Windows on my laptop in the Toronto airport lounge.  It was the last straw for my aging HP TC1100 tablet PC.  Already flaky, the PC folded up and died due to something in the way that Safari uses video.  So, Tuesday I set about rebuilding it.

Tuesday night I had the bright idea of using the PC I keep in my basement as an Asterisk server as a temporary replacement for my desktop PC while having the desktop PC serviced.  Janice has been complaining for a while that her PC needs a rebuild (kids downloading stuff, etc), and the Asterisk box is a nice shiny AMD Sempron 3200.  Maybe I can kill two birds with one stone, I reasoned.  I'll format the Asterisk box to Windows, use it myself until my desktop is fixed, and then pass it on to her, take her old PC (a 1.8 Ghz Athlon) and turn it into the Asterisk box.  Down to the basement I went, and… as hard as this is to fathom… I knocked the Asterisk box on it's side, while it was running (it was stacked on another PC).  I've never heard a sound like that from a hard drive before… 

A replacement 200G SATA hard drive was $99 at Staples. Copies of Windows Vista and Office 2007 were purchased, and installed.  Then I parked the PC at my desk while working on the laptop.   

This morning most of the files are in the right places, and most of the PC's (except for the desktop that kacked on Sunday) are up and running again.  Thanks to Foldershare (Microsoft's file synchronizing solution) I had nearly current backups of everything.  I did end up wasting a good chunk of Wednesday recreating iotum's financial modelling spreadsheet, because it somehow hadn't been synchronized to my backup server, but all in all the data seems to have survived and been moved into the right places.

Now on to the corrupt WordPress installation on my blog.