Alec Saunders SquawkBox

We start with a follow-on story from yesterday.  Verizon announced their flat rate voice pricing yesterday — $99 per month for unlimited calling in the US.  Not to be outdone, AT&T and T-mobile immediately announced similar plans.  And Helio, of course, has an unlimited voice and data plan in the markets where they operate.  All three took great pains to emphasize that this was for power users only.  Yet, all three also took stock price hits as investors took this as the first sign of what we in the VoIP industry have affectionately dubbed "the race to zero". We discuss the race to zero!

On a little more serious note, Microsoft is apparently gearing up for a proxy fight with Yahoo!’.  Yahoo is vulnerable because they’re electing an entire slate of directors at their upcoming meeting.  If Microsoft can persuade the majority of shareholders to turf Yahoo’s board, then they can win this war for Yahoo without having to get into an expensive bidding war. Yahoo, in turn, has offered employees golden parachutes with up to two years severance pay in the event of a takeover and dismissal.  And so far, nobody has emerged to bid against Microsoft.  It’s been a couple of weeks since the bid was announced. we discuss the developments

The BBC is running a story this morning about so-called techno-addicts. These are folks who can’t bear to be separated from their technology devices. They might keep a BlackBerry by the bed, or get up two or three times in the middle of the night to check email.  Symptoms of technology addiction include relationship problems, stress and so on.  We discuss how real the problem really is, and coping strategies that people have developed.

 

 Squawk Box Feb 20 [29:49m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

In the "what are they thinking" category, Techdirt reports that Olympic athletes will be forbidden to blog at the Summer Olympics… except outside the venue, and… well, the list of restrictions is huge. Apparently the IOC, desparate to make sure that nothing compromises its sponsorship dollars, is cracking down.

Will anyone lose a medal? Who’d have thought… blogging may be the new performance enhancing drug.

On January 30, Facebook implement a feature called "Ignore all requests", which allowed users to wipe out the hundreds of spam requests that were clogging Facebook profiles.  It was a good first start, but I wrote at the time that an even more useful feature would be to be able to easily block an application.  I suggested something like this:

As I returned from Barcelona this weekend, I saw that this suggestion had been implemented.  It doesn’t look quite the same, graphically, but it performs the function I suggested.  Now, when you get a request to join an obnoxious spammy application, you can just press block, and you’ll never see another request again. 

And the result?  I returned from Barcelona to nearly 200 requests in my inbox.  After blocking the worst of the applications — the vampires, werewolves, and so on — I have had just 3 or 4 requests per day since.

Nice work, Facebook!

Stuart Henshall has rediscovered Mobivox.  Or, to be more accurate, he’s rediscovered the value of dial-by-name.  Mobivox is just a particularly good implementation of it, combining dial by name, voice recognition and inexpensive calling.  Plus, if you get yourself a myfive / myfaves style mobile calling plan, and add the mobivox number to it, you could find yourself making most mobile calls for pennies. 

Two thumbs up.

I frequently get asked to review products, which I enjoy doing.  Editorializing non-stop gets old after a while!  Yesterday, however, I was asked to "review" a product on the basis of a press release.  I declined and told the requester that I would be happy to review the product if they wanted to send me a review copy.  After all, what value is a product review if you haven’t actually seen or used the product?

Take this posting in the same vein as "what is a journalist", and "when is a blogger a journalist".