Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Today’s Squawk Box was on the topic of 911 standards.  Guest John Lange is the President of the Canadian Voice over IP Service Providers Association, and an active participant in the CRTC’s process for defining nomadic 911 services in Canada.  He explained the issues, solutions and politics surrounding nomadic 911 service.  An informative guest, we all went away having learned a ton about the in’s and out’s of providing 911 service to VoIP customers.

On the call:  Jim Courtney, James Body, Jonathan Jensen, Ian Hood, Bill Volk, Kyoko Kataoka, John Lange.

Enjoy!

 

 Squawk Box May 9 [47:20m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

At Mobile World Congress back in February I spend a bit of time with Jeb Brilliant, of Brilliant Productions (note to self… ask Jeb if his last name is really Brilliant. After all, he lives in LA.  Could be a stage name!)

Anyway, he’s launched a contest — the Top Mobile 20 — which is all about bringing you the best in smart phone software.  There are twenty software categories:

1. Top all around software
2. Top mobile email application
3. Top IM application
4. Top VOIP application
5. Top SMS Application
6. Top software from outside the US
7. Top navigation (GPS, AGPS, location based services) software
8. Top picture handling software
9. Top video software
10. Top music application
11. Top startup without venture capital
12. Top mobile game
13. Top mobile security software
14. Top content aggregator (RSS)
15. Top mobile backup and or recovery software
16. Top single person company
17. Top money saving application
18. Top security software
19. Top new software (less then 1 year old as of Feb 11, ?08)
20. Top free software

If you’re a mobile software developer, enter your application in the contest.  It doesn’t cost much to make a submission.  And if you’re a smartphone user, check out the web page to see what’s hot in mobile software.

Sometime Wednesday my laptop booted up making a baaaad sound — 1 long beep, followed by 2 short beeps and no video. A failed POST. Not the best thing at any time, but especially not when you’re travelling.

The laptop was bought last September, with a 3 year warranty. Yesterday I dropped by Futureshop, to drop it off and pick up a loaner while they send it out to HP for repair. The Futureshop techs asked me if I wanted them to back up the PC first, and I confidently said “No”.

Now, I’m not a user of Google applications, nor do I store everything I do in the cloud. I find the applications themselves dramatically underpowered, work too often without connectivity, and have hundreds of gigs of data that I’ve accumulated over the years. Maybe if you’re a college student, Google applications would work for you, but for me it would be grossly impractical. What I have done is the following:

1. I use Exchange for email. It allows me to keep local and server based copies of all my email.
2. All of my other data is replicated, using Foldershare, on my home PC as well as my laptop. That gives me two benefits: it makes it really easy to work from my home office, and it makes a constant incremental backup of everything I do. For example, while I was in Toronto the files I created on Wednesday afternoon were real time replicated on my PC at home. When the laptop died, it didn’t matter.
3. All of the data on my home PC gets a daily backup via the Windows Home Server. Sometime in the night, the PCs just wake themselves up and make backups. I never even think about it. That way, in the unlikely event that both of my work PC’s die, I’ve got a copy.

So yesterday when I got the loaner from Futureshop I:

1. Visited the Microsoft Canada Web Site and downloaded the trial version of Office Professional. It’s good for 60 days, so plenty of time for Futureshop to finish my repairs and give me back my own laptop.
2. Once installed, I connected Outlook to my Exchange Server. All of my email was replicated automatically on the new laptop.
3. I installed Foldershare on the new laptop and connected my synched folders back up to the hard disk on the new laptop.

Then I went out to the symphony while the laptop rebuilt my data. A couple of hours later when I returned home, it was all done.

While it’s never pleasant to have a computer go down, it’s at least reasonably painless to get a replacement running if you think through a data backup strategy in advance.

Note to HP: you folks make great PC’s, but I have to say that the experience of getting that new PC was marred by this (click on the image to see it in full size glory):

That’s IE opening with the Yahoo! toolbar, the myAOL home page and great big honking Google Search box. Yuck! Why do you do this to your customers? Nobody uses this crap anyway and it really does take away from the experience for the customer.

This morning’s Squawk Box was ably hosted by Dan York. Sitting in for me (I was on an airplane), he took on the twin topics of the carriers rumored attempts to create a Skype competitor, and the launch of Clearwire as the US Cable companies, Google and Intel step to the plate to try to save WiMAX.

On the call: Dan York, Jim Courtney, Ken Camp, James Body, Mark Hewitt, Dave Brown, Todd Spraggins, Jeanette Fisher, Ragui Kamel, Ian Hood, Bill Volk, and Mike Pruyn.

Thank you, Dan, for hosting it. From the listen I’ve had while editing it sounds as if it was a great session.

 

 Squawk Box May 8 [31:49m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

When Jajah’s dropped me a note last night to say that Michael Cerda and Ben Dean of Jangl were joining the Jajah team, I knew something was up.  The founder CEO of a company doesn’t just quit — either the company is going under or there’s been a massive capital raise and the new investors decide they want their guy running the show. I was at dinner with an investor, but this morning it turns out to have been the former.

If there’s one thing that Cerda has been good at, it’s doing deals.  In his new role at Jajah, as VP of Sales and Business development, he’ll have plenty of opportunity to do just that.

Some have speculated that this portends the collapse of a number of VoIP startups.  Perhaps, but perhaps some of those startups had business models that weren’t tenable to begin with. The voice world is different from the web world in that free telephony has a real margin cost, and consumers have little tolerance for another bill for the telephone.