Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Carl Ford and members of the VON coalition engage in a wide ranging discussion of regulatory issues with the Squawk Box regulars.  Part of a regular Thursday series in which Carl Ford discusses regulatory issues related to VoIP.

 

 Squawk Box October 2: Regulatory Thursday [47:51m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Phew.  There was no talk of the markets today.  Heading back to technology, our guest this morning was Mike Bartlett, Skype’s product manager for Windows to discuss Beta 2.0 of the Skype 4.0 product.

Skype 4.0 beta 1 was launched June 18th.  Since then, Skype has seen up to 350,000 simultaneous users of beta 1 online at any particular time.  Building from over 50,000 pieces of feedback, the company made choices about what features to include in the new beta. 

Mike told us about the company’s goals for the first beta, the things they learned, some of the key features that they included in the new beta, and why. He also described how the company makes choices about which platforms to support, and alluded to an upcoming Mac release for our long suffering participants on the call who use Macs. 

To download the latest beta of Skype, click here.

On the Calliflower Conference Call today: Mike Bartlett, Dan York, Yusuf Motiwala, Hudson Barton, Brad Jones, Jim Courtney, Jeanette Fisher, Ian Hood, Bill Volk, James Body, Phil Wolff, Todd, Steve Sokol, Andrew Hansen, and Sergio Meinardi. 

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 Squawk Box October 1 - Skype 4.0 Beta 2 [35:12m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

We continued our discussion of economics today, the day after the single largest drop on North American in history.  The markets are up today, after president bush called on US lawmakers to pass the bailout package, but there is still a lot of speculation about what this will mean for companies and investors.

We started with Eric Schonfeld’s piece on how this will impact Venture funds.  Schonfeld points out that limited partners in a venture fund commit capital and then deliver the money to the venture fund as the VC commits to make investments. He postulates that as investors suffer losses elsewhere they won’t be able to make their commitments to the venture fund. As a result, Silicon Valley investor confidence is at it’s lowest level in 7 years.

We then moved on to Rafe Needleman’s advice to startups for surviving the downturn.  He says, in essence, don’t count on advertising, rotate your business into enterprise, don’t go direct, raise money from angels not VC’s, conserve resources and (paradoxically, spend to plan).  We had a few survivors of the last downturn on the call who added some color and additional viewpoint to Rafe’s advice.

Switching topics, we then discussed the emergence of a series of anti-cloud computing rants.  There was Larry Ellison complaining that he didn’t understand what Cloud Computing was, beyond a marketing term for technology that already existed, and Richard Stallman’s rant against Cloud Computing that appeared yesterday.  We debated the definition of cloud computing, the privacy implications, and more.

On today’s conference call: Dan York, Jim Courtney, Hudson Barton, Brad Dixon, Bill Volk, Sheryl Breuker, Marcus Elford and Sergio Meinardi.

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 Squawk Box September 30 - Credit Crunch and Cloud Computing [35:12m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Today we talked economics.  The credit crunch in the US has lead to talk of depression.  As the banks have failed, we’ve seen folks like Jason Calacanis and Om Malik publishing viewpoints as well.  So, how will that hit technology markets?  That was our topic.

To add a little structure to this discussion we split the discussion into a couple of phases. First we discussed the impact on larger players — the giants like Microsoft, the carriers, the cable companies and so on.  And then we discussed the impact on the startup environment — does it make it harder to raise funds, what about exits, etc.

You will note that I’ve bleeped out the name of a company that was referenced early in the call.  This was at the request of one of the participants.

On today’s Calliflower Conference Call: Brad Jones, Jim Courtney, Bill Volk, James Body, Phil Wolff, Randall Howard, Dan Rockwell, Tom Orr, Sergio Meinardi

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 Squawk Box September 29 - Credit Crunch [29:23m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Yesterday was the announcement of Skype for Asterisk - a channel driver for Asterisk that allows Skype users to call into Asterisk PBX’s, and for employees of those business to use Skype to call their customers. With this move, Skype becomes a powerful addition to the Asterisk VAR’s kitbag.  What does it mean for employees, businesses, Digium and Skype?

All week long Apple has appeared to be stumbling from one blunder to the next with the iPhone SDK. Their draconian tactics aren’t winning them any friends in the court of public opinion, but we discuss whether it makes any difference at all to Apple’s business.

And the Pew Internet Report on Networked Workers was released yesterday.  Connected, Distracted, Ambivalent — that’s how they describe networked workers. We hack away at Pew’s dystopic interpretation of connectivity.

On today’s Calliflower Conference Call: Hudson Barton, Brad Jones, Jim Courtney, Wilhelm Wimmreuter, Jeanette Fisher, William Volk, Phil Wolff, Michael Graves, Randulo, and Sergio Meinardi

 

 Squawk Box Sept 26 [45:58m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download