Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Today's Squawk Box was a little different because it was recorded from a hotel lobby in Toronto which did not prevent us from discussing the tech headlines of the day and the past week-end. Au menu:

• The main topic today was Microsoft unsolicited offer to buy Yahoo for around $44 billion announced on friday. Microsoft is a distant number 3 in the online advertising market to Google and sees the acquisition of Yahoo as a way to scale pretty quickly in a business that is all about scale. Of course rumors have been flying over the week end about different companies that would be willing to make counter-offers and Google finding a way to support Yahoo while calling out Microsoft in the process.Today's participants try to make sense out of all this and discuss the consequences for Internet and users.
• Next topic was about "status update" applications modeled after twitters (Jaikku, Plaxo Pulse, Facebook, or newly released hellotxt…) and where they were taking us… Another set of walled garden services? Jeanette Fisher provided an interesting piece of information telling us twitter status is picked up by Google (intriguing for businesses but questionable for privacy)
• Finally we discussed the announcement made last week by Garmin that their last GPS device will include… A phone. When Motorola is contemplating getting out of this space, we discussed the opportunity for new players to enter it and the opportunities for specialized device like the Garmin GPS.

See you tomorrow at a special time; 2pm standard eastern time.

 

 Squawk Box feb 4 2008 [34:12m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Markus Göbel has gotten to the bottom of the BetaMax fraud accusations I wrote about last week.  According to BetaMax, they aren't the ones stealing money from customers.  Those customers' PayPal accounts were compromised, and real thieves (as opposed to a telephone company) were stealing cash.  PayPal has offered to work with anyone who's account has been compromised.

Reg Developer's sneak preview of Google Android contains some very interesting tidbits, and highlights how PC-like Android will be compared to prior mobile phone operating systems. As I read the article, one thought which struck me was how similar Google's approach is to that taken by Microsoft a decade ago when the first Windows mobile devices started to reach the market.  Microsoft believed that they would have a leg up against competition by making the experience on the phone similar to the familiar PC experience.  Ultimately, however, they were forced to concede that it wasn't, and began shipping more phone-like phones.  Will Google reach the same conclusion, or has the market today changed?

I'll be looking out for any Android devices next week at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

The BBC reports this morning that the internet cutover to IPv6 has started, as the internet's root servers are starting to have IPv6 addresses added to them.  With just 14% of the IPv4 address pool remaining, there is some urgency to getting this started.  The entire pool of addresses is expected to be exhausted by 2011.

The final paragraph of the BBC piece reads:

For a long while, he said, the effects on consumers would be minimal though eventually home routers may have to be upgraded or swapped so they can use the longer addresses.

Indeed.  A whole generation of consumer routers will become obsolete at some point as the requirement to maintain a public WAN address goes away.  In the mid term, however, I expect that consumer routers will speak IPv6 and v4 on the local net as a way to deal with the myriads of IPv4 devices already in existence.  For example, all of the PCs on our home network run Windows Vista, which supports both versions of IP.  However, our phones, networked media players, game consoles, and DVD players are all IPv4 devices.   IPv6 will also be a boon for VoIP, as the thorny issues around NAT will simply… go away.

Count me in!  Does anyone know where I can get an IPv6 capable home router?