Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Salon's resident Mac fanboy Farhad Manjoo presents what has to be the weakest argument I've ever seen for buying a Mac.  They retain their value better than a PC.  That's right… According to Manjoo, there's a better aftermarket on eBay for Mac's than PC's. 

Buy a Mac.  Even though you pay a hefty premium for it, there's always going to be another sucker waiting to take your expensive used Mac off your hands for a hefty premium as well.

Yeesh!

The drums continue to beat this morning for lower cost cellular service in Canada. 

• Jim Courtney explains, at length, the impact of Rogers' monopolostic pricing on advanced services like UMA/GANs. 
• Returning from VON, Jon Arnold writes about how wireless service in Canada is no bargain.  Also worth viewing: Jon's interview on BNN where he discusses pricing and competition in Canada. 
• In yesterday's Globe and Mail, Catherine McLean write about the price gap between Canadian and US or European plans.  It's unfortunate that the online edition doesn't show the table that the print edition does.  Net net, Rogers plans are uniformly 2x to 3x plans in the other industrialized nations of the world. UPDATE: Jim Courtney pointed me to the comparison table that the Globe and Mail published.
• Mark Goldberg asks if Apple could bypass Rogers altogether, by simply including a microphone on the iPod Touch and allowing a SIP client to be installed. 

When the Globe and Mail writes that consumers in Canada are being raped by the mobile phone companies the story has finally gone mainstream.  It's not too late for the carriers to pull this one out of the fire, however.  Despite the waves of criticism, only a few early adopters like myself and Jim are making extensive use of WiFi on mobile devices. A price cut, and an iPhone launch (rumours at VON say it will be March of next year) would likely quell that criticism. 

However, by keeping prices high Rogers (and by extension Bell and Telus) are inviting a CRTC-led review of their monopolistic pricing practices in response to mounting consumer criticism.

I had a chance to meet last week with Voxalot honchos Tony Mascarenhas and Martin Burns.  Located in Sydney Australia,  Voxalot is a company with a ton of offerings in the VoIP space.  The basic premise is that they will provide a core suite of telephony services at a reasonable price, without providing PSTN interconnections.  You, as the user, assemble the suite of services you want a la carte, and save tons of money in the process.

Last week they announced the VoxConnect API.  With this API, businesses can connect web sites and other services into a telephony engine that will allow them to create calling applications to power business processes.  With their global interconnection network, Voxalot can now offer these calling services anywhere in the world.

Voxalot also benefits from its sister company SIPBroker, which maintains a database of 2000 SIP interconnection points globally.  Using SIPBroker, you can simply dial into one of the many local access numbers they maintain, dial the network identification code for the SIP network you wish (for instance, SIPPhone is *747) and then dial the number on the target network.

What I like about this model is that it starts with SIP.  The PSTN is an afterthought.

Voxalot isn't a new idea.  Others, like Luca Filigheddu's AbbeyPhone in Italy, have tried this before.  Perhaps, however, the timing is finally right for this kind of radical step.

Facebook's new ad platform launched yesterday.  It was positioned as a couple of different products, but really it's a single platform.  Driven by the social graph, it allows companies to:

• Create advertising that propagates itself virally.  When you interact with the business, or the advertisement itself, others will know.
• Create pages for businesses, brands, or public figures (like artists, musicians and writers).  Now these businesses have a home on Facebook, and individuals who like and use their products have a place to self identify with these businesses.  These pages can interact with their fans via the minifeed, newsfeed, and the profile box. 
• Allow applications outside Facebook to interact with the social graph.  The example given — that of a user adding a movie to their queue at Blockbuster, and having the Facebook circle of friends be informed — is pretty tame.  Potentially users might expose their every purchase, reservation and activity via this mechanism.

It's ambitious.  It's also potentially hugely invasive, as Nick Carr points out with such delicious sarcasm. Corporate minifeed's, pages and profile boxes are simply customer acquisition points the same as any mailing list.  With the power to propagate across the social graph, however, these take the old concept of "word-of-mouth" advertising to a new extreme.  There's a huge risk that Facebook itself could melt down in a wave of spam if these tools aren't used judiciously.