The Future of Home Phone Service - Ari Rabban

For long-time VoIP followers, you'll likely know Ari Rabban. I've known Ari from my earliest days of tracking VoIP at Frost & Sullivan. He was with industry pioneer VocalTec for many years, and most recently is the CEO of startup Phone.com.

The company has an interesting pedigree, and I'll leave that for you to discover. My post is more about shining some light on Ari and what the company is up to. They recently launched a corporate blog, and I want to steer you to Ari's latest post.

In this post, Ari talks about trends he's been seeing to support the notion that landline telephony isn't going away as fast as you may think. Sure, there's a strong trend towards wireless substitution, but his point is that much of the landline loss hitting the incumbents is going to cablecos, not wireless operators. Furthermore, he points out to the launch last week of the @Home landline telephony service from T-Mobile. This made a splash not just because of the low price - only $10/month for qualifying customers - but because it's coming from a mobile operator.

Of course, Ari would be remiss not to also mention his own company Phone.com, and in this case it's quite appropos. I've been trialing their Virtual Office service a bit, and it's a great alternative for small businesses, plus they have Home Phone as a residential offering. By all means, you should explore their offerings - they're a great example of how effectively landline services can be provided via the Web.

So, the main takeaway here is that landline telephony isn't going to disappear, and that when packaged right, VoIP can provide a lot of value. I still think voice is still a race to zero, but we're not there yet. As long as that's the case, I agree with Ari that there will still be a viable market for lower priced alternatives for voice service.

We all know how hard it is for any pureplay VoIP provider to make money, so the challenge is to maintain low operating costs and reasonable customer acquisition costs. In that regard, that's where the Web-based model of Phone.com comes into play, allowing them to be a low cost provider. Once that's in place, it's really a marketing issue, and that's where the Phone.com namesake comes into play. In the world of Web marketing, that's a key part of their brand, and from what I'm hearing, it's working pretty well. This is a different model, for sure, but in a Web 2.0 world, it just might work. I for one sure hope so, and to see for yourself, I'd suggest you RSS their blog.


Technorati tags: Phone.com, Jon Arnold, Ari Rabban, VoIP

Service Provider Views - Microsoft Telco 2.0, Part 2

The second installment of my look at Microsoft's Telco 2.0 has been posted now on TMCnet. It's part of my ongoing Service Provider Views column I write for them, and you can view the article here.

In the first article, I looked at the drivers behind Telco 2.0, and in this piece I provide some examples of how telcos can bundle various Microsoft hosted services to address different audiences within their subscriber bases.

As always, your comments are welcome, along with suggestions for future topics.

Technorati tags: Service Provider Views, Jon Arnold, J Arnold & Associates, Microsoft Telco 2.0

Jazinga Squawk Box Podcast

The other day, I posted about the Squawk Box I was hosting this week in Alec's absence.

My guest was Shidan Gouran, CTO and co-founder of Toronto-based Jazinga. They're a promising startup with an easy-to-use, premises based SMB IP telephony solution. For small businesses looking for PBX-caliber telephony, and an alternative to a hosted offering, Jazinga is what they should be looking at.

We had a strong turnout for yesterday's segment - 22 participants - and lots of good questions and discussion about Jazinga and what they're bringing to market.

Iotum has been running these segments for some time as a Facebook application, and along the way, they've learned enough about doing these to develop their own branded conferencing solution. It's called Calliflower, and was just launched with great fanfare on Tuesday. Our Squawk Box segment yesterday was the second one done using Calliflower, and we had a few glitches, but everything worked out fine in the end. One of these prevented me - as the moderator - from being able to record the session. Carl Ford, who was on the call, came to the rescue and recorded things from his end - so a big thank you to Mr. Ford for saving the day.

So, with a bit of editing, our concall is now ready for listening. Alec got it posted to his blog late last night, and you can get the link here. It runs about 40 minutes, and even if you're just mildly interested in SMB VoIP, it's time well spent.


Technorati tags: Jazinga, Jon Arnold, Iotum, Alec Saunders, Calliflower, SMB VoIP

RIM's Latest Numbers - My Take on BNN TV

Yesterday's earnings from RIM was a big event up here, as well as to anyone following the mobile device market, especially Blackberry and the iPhone.

BNN - Business Network News - is Canada's major financial news television channel, and I was their guest yesterday on After Hours just around closing time on the markets. They kept me on air for a while, and it was very much a real time segment. Before the earnings were announced, the host, Andrew Bell, had me provide an overview of RIM's market environment. Once the news came out we then moved on to talk about what the earnings results might mean. That was fun, as RIM's shares were off 10% in after hours trading, but by the time we were done, it was only off about 7%. So, maybe, just maybe traders were actually paying attention to what we were saying!

The interview runs about 16 minutes, and it's saved in two files. You can view the first segment here, which is the first 5 minutes. The second segment is longer, and the file is too large to upload to this server. I've got a Plan B, though. You can view both files off my website, as I have both segments uploaded there. Hope you like it.


Technorati tags: BNN, Jon Arnold, RIM, BlackBerry, iPhone

Iotum 2.0/Jazinga Squawk Box Update

In yesterday's post, I talked about Thursday's Squawk Box segment that I'm hosting about Jazinga. I also hinted at some changes coming with Iotum, at it's pretty neat.

So, Iotum's new conferencing application is called Calliflower. Love the name. It's really a 2.0 approach to conferencing, and if this is something you do a lot, am sure you'll like it right away. I've just been too busy to get caught up in all the launch buzz, so I'll steer you two items that will fill in the blanks nicely. First, is a writeup by colleague Jim Courtney on Skype Journal. His post yesterday provides a nice summary of what it's all about. Second is yesterday's Squawk Box segment about Calliflower. In this case, Alec and Howard were the guests, being interviewed about Calliflower and how it came into being.

I mentioned Bill Shatner yesterday for good reason. Well, he's going to be the first guest on their public showcase of Calliflower. It takes place this Thursday evening, and you can sign up to participate here. Upcoming speakers include Alan Alda and Peter Senge, so these won't be your average everyday conference calls!

Finally, regarding tomorrow's Squawk Box with Jazinga, you can sign up for Calliflower and register for the call here. We'll be on at 11am EST tomorrow - hope you can make it.

Technorati tags: Jazinga, Jon Arnold, Iotum, Alec Saunders, Calliflower

Thursday Squawk Box - Join Me and Jazinga to Talk About SMB VoIP

Followers of my blog would know about fellow Canadian Alec Saunders and his daily Squawk Box broadcast. It's really a showcase for Iotum's conference calling application running on Facebook. He's been running these for a while, and continues to bring in great guests, and I highly recommend them.

Alec has asked me to fill in for the Thursday segment, so I'm giving you a heads-up now. On this Thursday's Squawk Box, I'll be chatting with Shidan Gouran, CTO of up and coming Toronto company, Jazinga. I've had nothing but good impressions about them, and on Squawk Box we'll talk about the market they're going after - SMB VoIP - and what makes their solution so special. I should know - I'm trialing it right now!

The program is at 11am EST, and should run about 1/2 hour. If you can't make it, as always, the audio will be posted on Alec's blog, and I'll share it here once it's ready.

As soon as Alec posts the Facebook invite for this segment, I'll get that up on my blog. Hope you can make it!

BTW, today is a big day in Iotum-land. They've got an exciting launch happening today, and I'll be posting about it later, once I have more time, and once the news is officially out. All I can say is that if you're a Bill Shatner fan, you'll definitely want to check this out. Actually, you can get a taste of this now on their website.

Technorati tags: Jazinga, Jon Arnold, Iotum, Alec Saunders

Technical Difficulties - Please Stand By

For those of you who know me well, at some point you've heard me talk about how my relationship with technology is not always healthy.

Well, today has probably been the worst example of this ever. If something goofy or never-happened-to-anyone-before can occur with technology, just put it in my hands. I guarantee within 5 minutes, I'll have cracked the silly code that no Engineer could possibly envision.

Ready for this???

As a matter of course, bloggers get their share of trashy comments and trackbacks, and I'm pretty good about cleaning these out a couple of times a day. Well, that's what I set out to do this morning --- and all it took was 3 harmless keystrokes and boom! Just like that, my last 75 blog posts were deleted. Somehow the deletions got done for the blog posts instead of the trackbacks.

Three and a half months of daily blogging flushed away with 3 keystrokes. I'm not going to repeat or elaborate, but let's just say it's thrown off my day a bit.

I've been trying things off and on in between everything else that's been keeping me busy today, but so far, no luck. The posts have disappeared from the server and now from the blog itself, which you are reading now.

So, apologies if it looks like I've taken a long blogging break, or you've been trying to find my recent posts.

Three keystrokes - that's all it took. Can you believe that? For something that could be so monumentally destructive, you'd think Movable Type might have the standard "Are You Sure?" popup to alert you before making that final fateful entry. How about "Are You Freakin' Crazy?" - wouldn't that be a more suitable warning? Whatever.

In the wake of this mini-calamity, though, I'm not about to walk into heavy traffic or anything drastic to end it all in the true romantic style of a doomed writer. There is likely a silver lining that may save the day yet. I've got no online trace of these posts, but I did manage to retrieve them in my cache and make backups as Word documents.

So, with a little help from my friends, I'm hoping to get these posts restored, at least to this blog site ASAP. Until then, please bear with me, and hopefully we'll get things back to where they were soon.

Onwards....