Published by rtehrani@tmcnet.com on December 13 2006 in Uncategorized | Comments Off
I’ve been talking about
voice communities for a while and after reading this article about VoIP-enabled social networking site
Speecho, it seems the trend is continuing. The Speecho.com website is different from other sites as it has a unique set up of a 36-room house, the "Speecho Mansion" with rooms each dedicated to a specific topic and group. The foreign language room, gives people the ability to speak in their native dialects, the library, for sharing research and homework with classmates, or the gym, for sports enthusiast, are just a few examples.
Already realizing the immediate benefits of VoIP, Elliot Kransow, one of the brainchildren of the site, commented in a statement, "I'm already receiving thank you messages from parents, who through Speecho, have found a way to drastically cut down on their kids' telephone bills."
Kransow also commented on the value of VoIP for social networking, "It may not be something one thinks about, but every person belongs to a speech community, a group of people who share the same language." I agree 100%.
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Published by rtehrani@tmcnet.com on December 12 2006 in Uncategorized | Comments Off
That's two bags in about an hour or so. Anyone at American Airlines aware of customer service? Hello?? Thankfully I have a blog and can vent. Other passengers are just cursing the airline. There are no airline representitives in sight.
Hopefuly this is the last entry on the matter.
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Published by rtehrani@tmcnet.com on December 12 2006 in Uncategorized | Comments Off
The new American Airlines terminal at JFK is roomy and all but so far we have waited over 35 minutes with no sign of luggage and no one to speak wth. Perhaps someone at the airline reads my blog and can help. Flight 32 from LA. Help.
Now there is technical problem. They just announced it. Isn't this a new airport?
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Published by rtehrani@tmcnet.com on December 12 2006 in Uncategorized | Comments Off
The new American Airlines terminal at JFK is roomy and all but so far we have waited over 35 minutes with no sign of luggage and no one to speak wth. Perhaps someone at the airline reads my blog and can help. Flight 32 from LA. Help.
Now there is technical problem. They just announced it. Isn't this a new airport?
Blogged via wireless handheld
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Published by rtehrani@tmcnet.com on December 12 2006 in Uncategorized | Comments Off
Tom has gone through enough trouble getting his wedding video back from the land of the lost I thought I would share his
escapades with you. I can't fathom how difficult it must have been for Tom to think he lost the video. I am also blown away at how much work he put into getting the data back. Now I know why he has been in such a bad mood lately
PS: Poor Tom has had some bad luck. It is unusual for a DVD to fail so quickly. I wonder what the problem was. Must have been Evan's toast.
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Published by rtehrani@tmcnet.com on December 12 2006 in Uncategorized | Comments Off
I am atthe LA airport on my way back from the VPF meeting. I was at One Wilshire today the site of one of the most densely packed carrier hotels around. It was an amazing tour. Here is a photo of the building. I hope to get a chance to put some of my notes in writing soon.
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Published by voipinfo on December 12 2006 in Uncategorized | 1 Comment
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
Published by rtehrani@tmcnet.com on December 11 2006 in Uncategorized | Comments Off
If you haven’t heard, Yahoo! is
restructuring. There is something called a
peanut butter manifesto that has been circulating for months saying the company is spread too thin. As you may recall, recently Yahoo! was a big proponent of producing and distributing video content. In fact Media chief Lloyd Braun was hired to launch video content as part of Yahoo! services. This turned out to be a futile effort as evidenced by the fact that both COO Dan Rosenweig and Braun are now leaving the company.
The question worth asking what does this restructuring do for Yahoo!? The company has proven it is a defacto site for so many people who are looking for just about anything from weather to e-mail to stock quotes. It has become synonymous with the Internet. Is having more eyeballs than any other company now a bad thing? After all many people use Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Mail, etc. Would less traffic be better?
The problem for Yahoo! is generating faster revenue growth. Based on Google's success, search is being monetized much more effectively than virtually anything else on the Net. Obviously
Google is in the driver seat when it comes to search.
Yahoo! and MSN continue to improve their search engines but it seems no one cares as Google continues to gain on both companies. Yahoo! will have to develop the best search engine -- or at least a much better engine -- to compete effectively in this most lucrative area of the ad market.
If they fail to do this they are still positioned well as they get more traffic than any other site. The site is viral and sticky. It is however pretty well accepted that Yahoo! needs to do better in the social networking space where MySpace and YouTube play.
But Yahoo! is still strong in this area as their financial forums and other community sites have a tremendous amount of user input. For example the company owns
Flickr and del.icio.us. In the end the problem for Yahoo! is the current advertiser obsession with search-based advertising.
As long as this obsession continues, Yahoo! with an inferior search product is in trouble. The other problem is branding. Google is synonymous with search. Yahoo! is not. Yahoo! with the best search engine in the world could potentially have little impact on Google’s lead. This obviously contrasts with the statement above but Yahoo! really has to have the best search it can to compete going forward.
Of course this assumes Google’s search will stay as good and Google doesn’t lose focus. But with all the money coming in from search ads, I think Google knows better than to take their eye off the ball.
Another point worth making is the critical mass Google has reached with hundreds of thousands of advertisers online. As more searching is done via Google the ad network grows and there becomes less and less reason for advertisers to use alternate search-based services for advertising. Sure companies do use Yahoo! and MSN but by ignoring Google they lose out on much of the total searches taking place online.
In effect this monopoly position Google enjoys allows them to raise prices as their search terms are auctioned and prices go up as more advertisers jump onto the network. Google also determines how much their partners receive as a split in the advertising buy. As Google is in the driver seat most web publishers cannot negotiate their pricing and are happy to get whatever split Google gives them. In addition Google’s terms stipulate you cannot have a competitive ad serving service on your site
So Yahoo! is perfectly positioned as a massive portal of portals but the market at the moment has decided search is more important than run of site advertising.
Yahoo! needs to find a way to attract a larger advertising community and to do that the common wisdom is they need to get more people using their search service. The problem is currently, most Yahoo users leave Yahoo! to do their searches on Google.
If the free market works correctly in the world of ecommerce then Google ads are more efficient than Yahoo! ads which is why the former is growing so quickly. Yahoo! has to hope search ads become less important or their search traffic gains momentum or perhaps the best situation is where Google ads continue to become so expensive that advertisers look to Yahoo! as an alternative.
It is obvious Google is in the driver seat and if Yahoo! really wants to boost revenue they need to focus on social networking and search to boost revenue while not abandoning their video initiatives. It remains to be seen how the company will be able to leverage this restructuring into new revenue that's more than peanuts.
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Published by rtehrani@tmcnet.com on December 11 2006 in Uncategorized | Comments Off
So far the Voice Peering Forum here in LA has been fun. It has been so good that I was only slightly tempted to leave the conference and go down the street to the Los Angeles Convention Center where the
LA Auto Show is breaking down. Perhaps they need someone to drive one of the Ferraris off the show floor and onto a truck I wonder. Did I mention it is literally a 10 minute walk from here? Did I mention how dedicated I am to my profession? Perhaps part of the reason I need to stay in my seat is I am still working on a presentation I need to give in two hours. I go on at 12:30.
At the break a few minutes ago I had a chance at the break to speak with James Rafferty the Senior Product Manager at Cantata. He tells me the outlook for 2007 at Cantata is very strong. The gateway business looks especially good. He says there are new areas of growth for his company such as IP to IP transcoding. I have heard the same from a few other companies in the past year.
I mentioned the recent
fax news from the company and asked him if he had any comments. This is a different division so I was surprised he addressed it. I am happy he did -- as you may recall Brooktrout -- now part of Cantata, invented the fax board and now
boasts staggering market share.
James tells me that many companies are bringing IP fax into their enterprise along with voice -- kind of like a horse and buggy. He says there is a good fit between their gateways and fax. He'll be speaking today and we are likely to hear him talk about ENUM resolution between phone numbers and e-mail addresses.
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