Alec Saunders SquawkBox

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

On a recent SquawkBox Andy Abramson talked about the problems he has been having with public WiFi — the WiFi in hotels, airports and other public spaces.  Backhaul connectivity from many of these hotspots is so poor as to make them nearly useless.

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.

Ribbit for Salesforce debuted today. First demonstrated at the company’s launch last December, Ribbit for Salesforce has been in beta since, at 70 businesses. It’s now available to all US customers of salesforce.com, via the salesforce.com AppExchange. Prices start at $25/month with a 30 day free trial.

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.

 

 Ribbit for Salesforce debuts [19:56m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Are you a developer? Ever been frustrated by the availability of data needed to run your application? Think white pages directories, maps, navigation, or CD song and album art info. This morning we debate the merits of Bret Taylor’s notion that we need a Wikipedia for Data — a commons, equivalent to open source software, but for user contributed data.

Next we dismissed the idea that Apple might be gearing up for a unified communications play, as speculated upon by TG Daily. Sorry guys! We don’t think it’s in the cards.

And finally, Valleywag is spreading a rumour that OOMA is failing. We picked the bones of that corpse, and discussed where they went wrong… starting with a $400 retail ATA. Enjoy!

 

 Squawk Box April 10 [30:57m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

My family is heading to Denmark next summer for a family reunion.  As a consequence, we won't be spending our usual weeks in Mexico during March.  Today I've put our four spectacular time share villas at the Royal Sands in Cancun up for rent. Cancun resort rentals are in high demand, and even more so if you're planning to stay at the Royal Sands, which is one of the top rated time share resorts in the world. You can see the listing and some photographs here,if it interests you.