Alec Saunders SquawkBox

I’ve been sitting in a session at ITEXPO on Applications in the Cloud.  What’s striking to me is the divergence of opinion on what a cloud application is. Opinions range from IfByPhone’s Irv Shapiro talking about IVRs, to Voxeo’s Dan York talking about communications enabled business processes.  Moderator David Yedwab has taken a slightly contentious position asking how this is different from Centrex, and the panelists have immediately jumped on the notion that cloud telephony is instant telephony versus the days, and weeks it takes to deploy Centrex (isn’t this a feature of IP telephony in general), and that cloud telephony is mass customizable.

Mass customization, of course, is the key to understanding the cloud telephony puzzle.  As telephony becomes a web service, the speed at which innovations can be delivered accelerates.  Moreover, the ability to quickly and elastically scale up or down to meet variations in demand is a critical feature of applications in the cloud.

One of the most heartening developments of the last few weeks has been the near standardization of the browser on mobile handsets.  Now that virtually all of the mainstream handsets, except Microsoft, support Webkit based browsers we can expect a massive acceleration of cloud based mobile applications.  The smartphone industry stands to benefit enormously as users begin to see the value and diversity of applications in this environment. 

And what does that portend for the cloud based PBX industry?  For communications enabled business processes? Unfortunately, I didn’t have a chance to ask the question.

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

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First we chatted about Vint Cerf’s proposal that ISPs should guarantee minimum bandwidth to their customers. The engineering problems with guaranteed bandwidth appear to be the achilles heel of Cerf’s proposal.

We also chatted a little about the reports from the Wall Street Journal and others this morning that AT&T is getting into the cloud computing business.

And finally, we talked about Apple’s admission that MobileMe was released too early. Not much controversy there, and we ended up talking mostly about the business prospects for iPhone, and the consumer prospects for BlackBerry.

Today’s show was recorded in the lobby of the Toronto Hilton. Voice was by Blackberry, and I ran Calliflower on iPhone which I had tethered to the 3G connection running on my Nokia E71 using the Joiku mobile hotspot.  It was a fun bit of geekery, and worked remarkably well.

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 Squawk Box August 5 [35:52m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

On today’s show we had special guest Greg Clinton, developer of a new
application called Talk Soup that lets people easily start podcasting.
Available at the URL http://talk.appspot.com/ , the application involves
two people simply calling each other, talking for some period of time and
then at the end of the call both agreeing to share the content on the web.
The MP3 file is then made available on the website and through RSS feeds.

The technical side may be of most interest to many of our listeners because
Greg and his son developed this application using:

• Google App Engine for hosting the web pages and user database
• Amazon EC2 for hosting the streaming audio server that connects the two participants
• Facebook for user authentication, names and pictures/avatars.

Making use of these resources out in the “cloud”, Greg and company were
able to rapidly develop this application without dealing with server
hardware nor getting into authentication issues with usernames and
passwords, etc.

It was an enjoyable conversation and we with Greg, his son and their
colleagues all the best as they continue developing this application.

After Greg left the call we continued for a bit discussing the new service,
identi.ca, which aims to be an open source version of Twitter.  We talked
about what the service might mean in the future and what it means for
developers to have some Twitter-like code they can now play with and hack
away on. (Some of this I discussed in my recent post on Disruptive Conversations.)

On the call: Dan York (host), Greg Clinton (guest), David Brown, Dameon
Welch-Abernathy, Jeanette Fisher, William Volk, Jeb Brilliant and Ian Hood.

Show notes and links (including our identi.ca URLs) can be found at:

http://apps.facebook.com/calliflower/conf/show/34160

 

 Squawk Box - July 3, 2008 [44:35m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

On today’s SquawkBox (June 30), we talked a lot about the changes at Microsoft and what may be next for the company.

With Bill Gates formally departing Microsoft (see his farewell speech), much of the conversation has been about “what comes next” for Microsoft. We talked a small bit about that and particularly Steve Gillmor’s view.

Today was also the day that Microsoft stops selling XP to consumers… and we talked a bit about some perspectives on that:

• Yahoo News
• New York Times
• Mark Minasi

We briefly discussed Google’s recent announcements around helping academia move into cloud computing with the general view that this was just a good thing.

Finally, we spent some time on Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg’s comments over the weekend disparaging the iPhone and Steve Jobs.

On the call: Dan York (host), Brad Jones, Carl Ford, Dameon Welch-Abernathy, Jeb Brilliant, Ian Hood, William Volk and Michael Pruyn.

More information and the chat session during the call can be found on the call’s web page.

See you tomorrow on the Squawk Box!

 

 Squawk Box - June 30, 2008 [38:06m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download