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

Enjoy!

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.

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.

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.

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.

Ted and Greg walked us through the Ribbit for Salesforce application, as well as the overall Ribbit strategy, and we had some good and very intriguing questions from the likes of Dan York and Martyn Davies.

Enjoy the podcast! Tomorrow I won’t be on the call, because I’ll be on a flight, but Dan York will lead a discussion on 2 recent developments… the recent speculation that carriers may be trying to build a Skype competitor, and the new Wimax investments by McCaw and company.

As Jim Courtney pointed out, many of the predictions of the Voice 2.0 Manifesto are coming true.  The price of minutes is going to zero, everywhere.  Users are choosing to build opt-in directory networks - they’re today’s social networks.  The telecom industry is being neatly carved up into directory, access and applications, just as I predicted it would.

Here’s the rub. Today’s rich user directories are held at companies like Skype, Facebook, LinkedIn,  MySpace and the Internet.  Applications, which are dependent on access to those directories, are being built to be dependent on not a telco network, but Skype, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and the Internet. 

The incumbents are missing the party and the value of their business is being eroded.  In fact, their voice networks are valueless.  I repeat, the voice networks they have built have no value any more.  Five years ago that wasn’t true.  But today, sophisticated software based switching equipment can be run on Amazon’s EC3, requiring no hardware investment from the developer. It’s only a matter of time before telco’s are reduced to fibre backbones taking all their voice traffic to a compute cloud hosted in the Dalles Oregon, or Eastern Washington. 

The biggest asset a telco has today, believe it or not, is their billing system and the billing relationship with their customers.  They have become shop keepers who sell voice services.

Let’s posit for a second that they do plan a Skype competitor.  To be effective they will have to recruit a user base and a developer community in pretty short order.  They’ll have to show developers how they can make money with their platform.  And they’ll have to deliver a platform that provides the quality today that competitors like Skype already do.

If I were in their shoes, I would:

1. Deliver on a standards based solution.  If they fail to do so, developers will be faced with the same balkanized world they face now.  Better to go with the largest market today — Skype — than risk a new platform, will be the developers logic.  On the other hand, writing applications that will run unchanged on 15 networks has undeniable appeal.
2. Provide a way for applications that require centralized network assets to run effectively.  This is Skype’s blind spot, with their focus on P2P. Partner with Microsoft, Google or Amazon on a compute cloud to run massive media servers. 
3. Partner with one or more of the social networks on an open directory solution.  Make the price of the partnership be that principles like DataPortability, and technologies like OpenID be baked into the solution.  That will help them accumulate users quickly and provide undeniable benefit to end users.
4. Use their billing expertise to bake into their model a mechanism whereby developers can monetize the applications they create and provide a reasonable share to the network operator.  Reasonable means that the majority of the money goes to the creator of the application — that’s how retail works.

But what do I know.  I only predicted that all of this would happen 4 years ago.  The chickens are finally coming home to roost.

I am experiencing this right now!  Travelling to Toronto, we’ve stayed at the Travelodge on King Street West, and found that the advertised free internet to be nearly useless.  Luckily there’s a Starbucks a block away for any serious work that needs doing.

Back at the ranch, however, each connection to the web resulted in a 404 page-not-found error. I suspected that not only was their connection slow, but that their DNS server might be overloaded. To correct that I changed DNS service from the hotel provided DNS to the servers provided by http://opendns.com.  Their remarkably fast, reliable and free DNS servers can often improve a “slow” connection by simply reducing DNS response time.

OpenDNS helped.  However, Dan Elwell’s terrific broadband speed test revealed that actual throughput on this network is measured in small kilobits / second, with over 50% packet loss to west coast destinations, and more than 30% to east coast.  Google Canada is tolerably fast, but forget about sites like Techmeme or Facebook.  And most certainly, forget about VPN access to the email system at the office.

Travelodge’s ISP is ValuePoint; a misnomer given that their connection is virtually valueless.

The product looks very good, including the ability to dictate, transcribe and automate various sales processes. For instance, with Ribbit for Salesforce, sales people could dictate meeting notes from the car, making productive use of transit time between meetings. For that reason alone, it deserves a look.

The vision story is a little loftier. Ribbit says they’re creating a new category of applications, called voice automation, with this release. The idea is that mobile voice services will become triggers for business processes, not just in CRM, but in many other kinds of applications .

As part of today’s announcement, Ribbit introduced a new technology — “voice automation” — a new category of services designed to increase productivity by automating and integrating voice into the workflow of mission-critical applications. Ribbit for Salesforce is the first of many innovative services expected in this new category.

I had a chance to speak with Ribbit CEO Ted Griggs, VP Marketing Don Thorson, and Salesforce for Ribbit product manager Greg Goldfarb. Enjoy this short interview, and join us Wednesday at 11 on the SquawkBox for a more in depth discussion of voice automation and Ribbit for Salesforce.

IT budgets are not going to disappear anytime time soon. But the long-term trend towards personalized information technology is making some “IT owned” enterprise applications less relevant every day.

Over the last 20 years, computers have taken a path towards personalization. In the beginning, there was the corporate mainframe. Later, there were divisional mini computers. Remember the DEC in that glass enclosed room or the Wang in the closet. The first PCs on desks within the enterprise were not purchased by IT. In the mid ‘80s, they came in through “the side door” for users of special finance (Lotus 123) or design (Illustrator or Quark) applications.

Today, most corporate employees are force-fed those grey and black IT-approved boxes which are then upgraded on a frustratingly slow three-year cycle. It is true. Many of us have few choices when it comes to the hardware, OS, and office suite we use.

But, we have more freedom when it comes to the applications we download and run. I use Skype for *all* of my telephony that is not mobile. I use Google Reader as an info clipping service. I use Gmail to manage my online subscriptions and travel arrangements. I use Twitter to stay up to date. With the myriad of great choices available, users are finding ways to make “personal technology” work for them. None of these are IT-sanctioned applications, but they are enormously helpful in my work (and personal) life… and I am saving my company real money on telecom and infrastructure costs.

Slowly, this shift is happening at the hardware level too. Our machines are reflections of our personal styles and tastes. At Skype, we are in two camps: the Lenovo loyalist and the Mac fan club. Apple has a reputation for inspiring fanatical loyalty, but ThinkPad users are every bit as rabid as the MacBook fans. They know every model number past and present. They reminisce about great machines they have retired and passionately compare notes about DIMMs, hard drives and battery configurations (I carry a MacBook Air – and thank goodness that Apple makes these decisions for me).

When I go to technology conferences where CTOs and technology architects gather, I am surprised at the proportion of Macs walking around. Apple is making a big comeback and these new Apple purchases are not limited to “consumers.” Still, when you mention the Mac to most IT managers, you will likely get a blank stare back from them. The term “Unsupported Platform” comes to mind. Regardless, many users are choosing Macs for work and they are finding that with a few tweaks they can coexist with the IT infrastructure. This is another sign that the IT applications, once locked into the Windows environment, are becoming more flexible. As more applications move to Web-based implementations, much of this “interoperability” is happening at the browser level – and this is more good news for Apple, Firefox and, ultimately, users.

The long-term effect when users migrate to personal technology is that the IT-approved applications slowly lose traction. I use Safari on my Mac and Firefox when I need to use Windows. I access company email with Safari via Outlook Web Access. I don’t need Vista or Outlook to stay connected. In this mode, Exchange has become less sticky. Every week, I am spending less time on email and more time on Skype. I am having faster, more iterative conversations and getting more done in an increasingly collaborative style. Email seems clunky and unresponsive now. I have also noticed that my Inbox contains more machine-generated content (e.g., SAP updates, access approvals, system notifications, finance reports) and less real human conversations. As an IT driven application, Exchange traffic is getting “dusty.” The real action is happening elsewhere.

Jonathan Christensen has more than 15 years of experience shaping strategy for the growth of IP communications in start-ups and world class organizations such as Skype, Microsoft, and Time Warner.

In 2005, Jonathan co-founded Camino Networks where he was CEO until it was acquired by Skype. He is currently a senior member of the Skype team leading core technology development for audio and video, as well as initiatives for voice quality, network interconnect, and business adoption.