2008-07-31 11:59 pm | No Comments »
Tags: twitter
Summer is in full swing. News is in short supply, and people are on holiday! Still, with the assistance of James Body, Jeb Brilliant, and Ian Hood, we had a good discussion around a few short stories.
Nokia has announced that there will be no BlackBerry Connect support from Nokia in the future. BlackBerry is a competitor, they say! Why would they do that? Why do they continue to support Microsoft with Exchange? And is this such a good idea when they have such small share in the Enterprise mail market?
Or perhaps RIM had a hand in this decision. Hmmmm…
We also talked about Microsoft’s Mojave Experiment – the blind taste test of Windows Vista. Our conclusion — a publicity stunt.
And Google announced a VC fund. And it feels like 1999 all over again, except for the lack of VC money to back up these corporate funds.
And finally what about Phweet - the service that lets you make Click to Call calls from Twitter! James tried it, and had a problem, but the idea looks promising.
Squawk Box July 31 [20:20m]:
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iotum has another in our series of Calliflower Communiques coming up next week — an Evening with Gabor Mate. The teaser for it reads:
If addiction has touched your life at all you will not want to miss this detailed examination and explanation of addiction. In this teleseminar as in his new book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts bestselling writer and physician Gabor Mate looks at the epidemic of addictions in our society. He explains why we are so prone to them and what is needed to liberate ourselves from their hold on our emotions and behaviors.
When: Wednesday August 6th at 6:30 PM Pacific Time
To Register: visit http://apps.calliflower.com/conf/show/33149.
Gabor Mate, M.D. is the author of four bestselling books including Scattered Minds and When the Body Says No-published in ten languages on five continents-and co-author, with Gordon Neufeld, of Hold On To Your Kids.
A Former medical columnist for the Globe and Mail, where his byline continues to be seen on issues of health and parenting, Dr. Mate has had a family practice, worked as a palliative care physician and, most recently, with the addicted men and women in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver.
If you haven’t participated before, I encourage you to do so. The format is 45 minutes of interview, followed by 45 minutes of Q&A with the audience, which makes for a very interactive session, and the guests we’ve been able to attract have been excellent. Previous guests have included William Shatner and Peter Senge.
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Tags: Calliflower|Gabor Mate|Peter Senge|William Shatner
2008-07-30 11:59 pm | No Comments »
Tags: twitter
The first topic we discussed today was yesterday’s news that Ribbit was acquired by British Telecom for $105 million.
Now, Ribbit is a pretty interesting platform, which many of us have been following for some time. But for anybody who HASN’T followed it, it’s a softswitch in the cloud with integration between IM systems, phone systems, VoIP systems (including Skype) and a nifty API, including flash based client APIs. They’ve got a slick softphone, and a nice deal with SalesForce all of which have been announced since last December when they came out of stealth.
The acquisition sparked some interesting commentary — Om Malik gave it a huge “yawn”, asking why it was significant given how few developers they had. At the other end of the spectrum, Thomas Howe thought it was enormously significant, and particularly meaningful to corporate developers.
We thought Ribbit was mostly for corporations and part of a strategy by BT to embed itself more deeply in the corporation. In our opinion, other views — such as the theory that Ribbit was acquired by BT to compete with Android and Skype — are off the mark.
We also talked about some of the restrictions that are emerging on iPhone. AT&T has said no to peer to peer, but what about Pandora and streaming audio? And how about the fact that there aren’t any VoIP applications allowed, except over WiFi?
Well, Pandora’s gone, but other streaming media and internet radio applications are still there. It seems likely that Pandora is gone for other reasons!
And we also digressed into a discussion of Hasbro’s decision to shut down Scrabulous. Strong feelings were expressed.
On the call: Adam Somer, Frank Abrams, Bill Volk, Jeanette Fisher, Jim Courtney, Ian Hood, Jeb Brilliant, Moshe Maeir
Squawk Box July 30 [33:51m]:
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Tags: Android|British Telecom|Hasbro|IPhone|Pandora|ribbit|Scrabulous|skype|VoIP
