Alec Saunders SquawkBox

 Just after midnight last night I received email from Tungle CEO Marc Gingras to say that they had won a DEMOgod award in San Diego.  Congratulations to the team! Well done adding to the roster of great Canadian startups winning at DEMO!

The DEMO conference, by the way, has a new and very easy way to watch videos of the demos online.  Visit www.demo.com to check them out yourself.

Cubic's MaxRoam SIM goes live today.  This is the SIM that lets you roam your phone internationally at local rates.  David Pogue's article in the NY Times is a good and balanced write-up.  As Andy Abramson noted, Pogue must have actually used the product.

I'll be grabbing one of these and sticking it into a spare handset.  I'm sure it will save money.  Last night, for example, I made a couple of calls to India.  Who knows how much they cost me?  And since taking my rarely used North American roaming off my Rogers plan, I'll need something next month at VON.

Oh, and one lucky person who buys a MaxRoam SIM today (September 27) will win an unlocked iPhone. 

With Facebook grabbing the social networking limelight, LinkedIn needed to do something.  Starting Friday, users will be able to add photos to their profiles.  It's a small step.  Here are three things which would help me make more use of LinkedIn.

1. A better way to manage my LinkedIn inbox.  It's inundated with questions, most of which I don't intend to answer.  I need tools more like those provided by a real email program.  In fact, why not provide a POP3 interface, so that I can simply read those messages in my actual email inbox?
2. Synch my contacts with my address book. I use Plaxo to manage my contact database.  Plaxo's LinkedIn synch is not a great experience at this point, unlike every other synchronization that they perform.  LinkedIn could either synch directly with my address book, or help Plaxo to fix their broken experience.
3. Tell us more about that API.  We'd like to add FREE Conference Calls (now only available on Facebook) to LinkedIn as soon as it's available. 

In the news this morning, Digium has acquired SwitchVox, one of the vendors of open source based PBX's based on Asterisk.  In CRN, Digium VP Bill Miller is quoted, saying:

"Switchvox gives us a more complete solution that scales to several hundred users," said Bill Miller, vice president of product management and marketing at Digium, Huntsville, Ala. "It's a turnkey solution that doesn't require as much expertise to install. Many installations are done remotely."

According to CRN:

A key piece of the Switchvox acquisition for Digium is the end-user interface that San Diego-based Switchvox has built for its products. The system integrates with CRM packages from Salesforce.com and SugarCRM, enabling records from those systems to automatically pop up on the Switchvox Switchboard interface. The interface is also tied in with Google Maps to create a Web 2.0 mash-up that show the location of inbound callers.

And in an interview with Tom Keating, Digium founder Mark Spencer revealed plans to open source the Switchvox code, saying:

"the plan is to be able to take technologies that exist today as external things in Switchvox right - so Switchvox much like Fonality was kind of built on the idea of trying to keep ya know, the stuff out of Asterisk and put it somewhere else where it could be retained as a traditional and proprietary product. And our goal is to migrate those technologies from ya know – try to get stuff that’s today ‘proprietary’ outside of Asterisk into technologies that can live within Asterisk and be open source. So yeah, we definitely intend to try to have some strategy for moving some of those technologies from Switchvox into open source Asterisk."

This is a good move on Digium's part.  Competitor Fonality's two major differentiators have been turnkey setup and the Fonality GUI which integrates well with both the PBX and enterprise sales support systems. By open sourcing those differentiators, Digium devalues Fonality's key advantages, while potentially attracting a developer community that will allow the Switchvox code to evolve more quickly.

Separately, Jeremy McNamara noted that this is Digium's second recent acquisition, the first being Astricon.  As Digium buys up smaller players in its ecosystem, it is rapidly evolving into a small business PBX powerhouse.