Alec Saunders SquawkBox

In case you’re wondering what a real winter looks like, here are some shots from yesterday and today.  These two were taken about 3 in the afternoon.  I had to go out and pick up a dinner guest in the afternoon.

This was shot through the windshield of the car.  Notice the streamers of snow blowing across the road, and the drifts piling up on either side.

In this photograph, we were stopped at a traffic light. Compared to the previous photo we were in a bit of a snow squall which was causing semi whiteout conditions. Note that the car coming in my direction seems to be in the same lane as me.  That’s because it is!  It was the only lane available to either of us. 

This morning I let the dogs out, and then snapped a quick photo of the snow drift piled up against the back door.  It was quite funny watching our shelties (18 inches at the shoulder) navigating 3 foot snow drifts.

Of course, many of the roads were ploughed over night, as was the parking lot at the iotum offices.  Have a look at the car parked at the end of the lot and the snow piled up behind it by the plough.

People have been pinging me to become part of their Spock network for weeks now.  Spock is a people search engine which gobbles up information about people on the web.  It combines Google-like search characteristics, a social network built around trusted contacts, and a social tagging scheme - think de.licio.us tags applied to people rather than web content.

I have been playing with it a little recently, and haven't yet figured out all you can do with it.  It certainly seems like a terrific tool for a recruiter or anyone else who might be combing a personal network looking for specific skills or knowledge.  LinkedIn has some of these characteristics now, but now all.  However, I wonder if they're simply too late to the party.  As one very close friend wrote me last night when I invited him:

Unless every other way we have to communicate has broken, I am not joining another Social Network. Sorry. All these do is generate more and more email.

Hmmm… perhaps it's time to think about the consolidation of social graphs.

This morning Ribbit launches.  Billing themselves as Silicon Valley's Phone Company, they're about to launch a true Voice 2.0 phone service. 

In a nutshell, they have:

1. Built a carrier grade switching infrastructure for managing voice traffic.
2. Added all of the other communications modalities you might us in your daily life as additional networks — that's IM, VoIM, etc.
3. Built a suite of services that a developer might need in order to take advantage of this platform, including billing, directory, media and call control. 
4. Exposed these services through APIs ranging from web services to flash and SIP.

What can you do with this?  The mind fairly boggles.  For example,  Ribbit makes transcriptions of voice mails as it stores them.  Now you can search your voice mail box using terms like "dinner", or "ACME meeting", and Ribbit will find the voice mails that match.

Ribbit's go to market strategy is smart too. Beginning with the highly popular SalesForce.com, they've built a natural integration of voice with CRM.  But they've also recruited over 600 third party developers to build applications on the Ribbit platform as well in order to allow them to take advantage of the long tail in communications applications. 

The most clever part of Ribbit's model, however, is billing.  By relieving the developer of the need to build and manage billing systems, and by presenting a single unified bill to the user, they have made it easy to build more services for Ribbit, and natural to buy more services from Ribbit.

Smart business model, aggressive and well executed go-to-market strategy, and providing real solutions to developers.  Hmmm…  could Ribbit be the company that finally is the disruptor that shakes up the entire telecom ecosystem - the first true Voice 2.0 carrier? 

Around here, everybody's digging out this morning.  The snow started falling at around 9 AM yesterday, and finally quit over night.  Thankfully I hired a plough service this year.  My driveway was cleaned up in the middle of the night by Pat, a volunteer firefighter with a tractor and the biggest snow blower you've ever seen.

According to some reports, we've just been hit with the "worst storm to hit the region in 60 years".  You can see the weather map for the last 24 hours below.  Smack in the middle of the purple is Ottawa, with volumes ranging from 50 cm to 75 (between 20 and 30 inches) just over the Quebec border (the Gatineau and Laurentian ski resorts!). 

I guess it's all a matter of perspective.  We ski and skate in our family.  This is shaping up to be the best winter I can remember in years.