Alec Saunders SquawkBox

A few minutes ago I sent Ottawa CTV Reporter Paul Brent home empty handed.  Paul and his camera man showed up at my house to do a piece on Facebook, and how it's making the crossover from social to business networking.  We were going to shoot some footage, and he was going to chat with my sons and me about Facebook.  But instead of being able to log in, this is what we got to see:

Back at the CTV studios, apparently they were able to access Facebook. I understand that Scoble and a few others in the valley are back up also.  But here in the Canadian hinterlands of Manotick, Facebook is a definite no-show, and has been for most of the last 14 hours.  Growing pains? Seems doubtful, given how long it has taken them to resolve the issue. 

We might be looking at the first big Facebook outage folks. Today, at various times, the front page of Facebook has displayed:

• Your account is temporarily unavailable (7:00 AM EDT today).
• Facebook is upgrading.
• Facebook is temporarily unavailable.  We're working on it…

And a few minutes ago DNS wouldn't resolve the site name altogether. 

TechCrunch picked up on it at 10 PDT, but perhaps more interesting is this assertion that Facebook may been hacked.  One thing is certain… you don't take your site offline in the middle of the day to do server upgrades.  Whatever the reason — hacked, failed upgrade, dead servers — the tension must be excruciating in downtown Palo Alto at the moment. 

This morning Vringo announced that they've scored $12 million in series B investment from Warburg Pincus.  I've personally been skeptical of video ringtones.  It seemed a bit like screen savers for the PC — popular but easily duplicated.  Clearly Jon Medved and his team are executing, raising money, proving me wrong and that the old saw that traction attracts capital is as true as ever. 

SwitchVox yesterday announced that SwitchVox 3 contains support for leading CRM systems like SugarCRM and Salesforce.com.  On incoming calls, users will see pop-ups with information from these systems, along with information from Google Maps which tells you where the call is coming from.

Although integration with CRM providers is the news piece of this release, the real meat may be in the Switchboard Panels, which allow developers to customize of the system. 

As with other Asterisk based systems, SwitchVox is busily carving out a niche for itself.  It's a smart business strategy, and if they can do a better job of staying current with Asterisk releases than their competitors at Fonality, it will put them in a better competitive position by allowing them to have current Asterisk features with added SwitchVox flavor.

War for the Wireless World is a lengthy article published in yesterdays Financial Post on the impact of Apple and Google's newest wireless plays — Apple with iPhone, and Google with their declaration that they wish to participate in the 700Mhz spectrum auction.  A couple of choice quotes:

With demand for the iPhone bordering on rabid, Apple is daring to call the shots with wireless carriers. Google, meanwhile, has pledged billions of dollars to buy wireless airwaves in the United States in an effort to shake up what it sees as a cozy oligopoly. Apple and Google see the status quo in North America as holding back the spread of mobile Internet usage, and thus their own growth, so both are moving to fundamentally change the business. Given the gargantuan market capitalization and brand power of both companies, industry experts say a wireless future ruled by Apple and Google — not the likes of AT&T Inc. and Rogers — is imminent.

…

"They're looking at the [carriers] and saying they don't really provide any value, so let us go into that business, disintermediate them and get that revenue," says John Ruffolo, national leader of the technology, media and telecommunications practice for Deloitte. "They're looking at classic vertical integration."

The piece ends by optimistically noting that the US and Canadian markets are coordinated, and the impact of the changes south of the border will be felt here as well. It may well be so if Apple and Google can pull this off south of the border, and then partner with the likes of MTS Allstream or Videotron to enter Canada.