Friday, February 04, 2005

Editors' Newswire for 21 April, 2004. Newswire stories, including: PadML -- Photo Album Description Markup Language. [xmlhack] 4:21:00 PM

This week in telecommunications. With SBC's deal to acquire AT&T and the rise of Skype, the last vestiges of the 20th-century's phone system are fading fast. [CNET News.com] 4:17:02 PM          Google It!

Daily Source Code for February 2nd 2005. Daily Source Code for February 2nd 2005 Today's podcast features some hot girl-on-cello action! mp3 Shownotes in html and opml [Adam Curry's Weblog] 4:03:01 PM          Google It!

Napster Goes Mobile. A new feature lets subscribers fill up their portable music players with as many songs as they want for 15 bucks a month. But will the technology seduce iPod lovers? By Katie Dean. [Wired News] 3:30:01 PM          Google It!

The Register » Mobile » Devices » HP iPaq smart phone pics leaked By Tony Smith Published Friday 4th February 2005 11:35 GMT Fewer than 24 hours have passed since we wrote about HP's iPaq Mobile Messenger smart phone - and already pictures and a tentative model number of the machine have leaked out. Website iPaqAbilities has the shots of the hw6500, along with some further details of the specification. As we reported yesterday, the HP device will feature GSM/GPRS with EDGE mobile phone connectivity, plus Bluetooth and GPS satellite positioning, but not Wi-Fi as we mistakenly assumed. Click for full-size image 3:27:33 PM          Google It!

Sun to allow grid use sales on e-trading market. Sun announced a plan today to allow its grid computing users to buy and sell CPU hours on an electronic trading market, just like any other traded commodity. [Computerworld News] 3:23:21 PM          Google It!

Day Provides Content Repository API for Java Technology to Apache to Promote JSR 170. Day announced that it has made available an implementation of the Content Repository API for Java Technology (JCR) to the Apache Software Foundation in order to further promote industry adoption and collaboration of the JSR 170 standard. Apache has formed a new Incubator project, code-named "Jackrabbit", to accept the donation and guide future development of the software.[Gilbane Report News] [Jeff Potts: Content Management] 3:20:30 PM          Google It!

RSS feeds attract venture dollars. Start-up tries to work Friendster-type magic on blog feeds, with Marc Andreessen and Ron Conway as advisers. Others are emerging, too. [CNET News.com] [Rock Regan's CIO Weblog] 3:18:59 PM          Google It!

T-Mobile's German wing today launched the latest in the company's own-brand MDA handset family, the 3G-enabled MDA IV "mini laptop". With a design that clearly owes much to Motorola's MPx smart phone and Danger's Hiptop communicator - which T-Mobile offers in the US as the Sidekick - the MDA IV sports a QWERTY keyboard located below a 640 x 480 display that not only folds up and away from the keyboard clamshell-style, but also rotates to allow the unit to be used tablet-fashion like a PDA 3:16:16 PM          Google It!

gmail. My experience using GMail for my podcast audio feedback has been so wonderful that I've decided to try GMail out as my main email service and client for a week or two. What I enjoy most is the combo of web based access (and storage!) with the speed and keystroke ease of my Pine, which I grew up using. [Adam Curry's Weblog] 3:08:59 PM

OASIS approves UDDI upgrade. OASIS on Thursday announced that the organization has approved Version 3.0.2 of the UDDI Web services directory specification as an OASIS standard, the highest level of ratification. [InfoWorld: Top News] 3:08:13 PM

Veraz Networks Launches Wireless Network Compression Solution. Veraz, a VoIP solutions provider, just announced a new wireless network compression solution that enables wireless carriers and service providers to use VoIP to lower OPEX, when required to transport calls over leased lines. This requirement is quite common when... [VoIP Blog - VoIP News, Gadgets] 3:05:29 PM

New Line of Chips Aims to Reduce Power Up to 80 Percent in Mobile Devices - The VoIP Weblog - voip.weblogsinc.com. New Line of Chips Aims to Reduce Power Up to 80 Percent in Mobile Devices - The VoIP Weblog - voip.weblogsinc.comWhile this is great news, the key is twofold. First if the carriers continue a walled garden approach, VoIP on... [VoIP Watch] 2:41:34 PM

Software as a Service. David Coursey articulate the reasons: 1. The app provides functionality many businesses need, but isn’t terribly different from one company to the next. 2. The service allows customization, but the SaaS model prevents clients from doing too much reinvention. This saves money and grief. It also encourages best practices. 3. The service brings together information from several sources and presents it to the user in a friendly, web-based interface. 4. Hosted services are easier to get running, partially because of the limited customization potential but also because there’s no hardware to buy and no software to install. 5. There’s also no software to manage, fix, upgrade, etc. All that is the responsibility of the vendor. Customers get a semi-custom application without having to hire developers and people to keep it running. 6. SaaS costs are predictable and typically usage-based. 7. If the vendor doesn’t meet your needs, there usually is no long-term commitment and it’s easy to switch. This keeps SaaS vendors responsive. [E M E R G I C . o r g] 2:37:34 PM

DIY Open-Source-based Telco. Slashdot points to an article by George Ou: "As the commoditization and open sourcing of operating systems and applications continue to disrupt the software companies, telephony vendors have so far enjoyed a relative calm in the closed and proprietary phone systems market with substantial profit margins. That could now all be turned on its head with the proliferation of open source VoIP and PBX software. There are now a handful of these open source telephony platforms such as OpenPBX and Pingtel, but one of the most interesting is Asterisk, which even has its own communication protocol IAX in place of SIP for unified signaling and data transport." [E M E R G I C . o r g] 2:36:05 PM

Micropayments. Forbes writes: Online "micropayments" for items costing between $0.99 and $5 are becoming more common, with research firm Gartner projecting that micro-commerce could be a $60 billion market by 2015. "It's all about expanding the revenue potential of digital content," says FIND/SVP analyst Sab Singh. "There are existing subscription and higher cost pay-per-use models, but we haven't seen much a la carte until recently." New technologies have made smaller transactions more cost effective for content providers and vendors, and as more and more content originates in digital formats, conversion costs are lower too. And, says Singh, "The $0.99 music download is an important part of this market." Mainstream press coverage has boosted consumer awareness: 14 million Americans purchased digital content under $2 in the past year. [E M E R G I C . o r g] 2:35:09 PM

Bellster Battles Brewing. The Jeff Pulver Blog: A day in the Blogsphere… has three colleagues, peers and really all the makings of friendly sparring and verbal jousting taking place.Om weighed in with the costs in one of his recent over the weekend blog posts.... [VoIP Watch] 11:44:25 AM

Global IP Sound Announces Major Upgrade of VoiceEngine to Provide Superior Voice Quality and QoS Monitoring in Enterprise VoIP Products. Global IP Sound Announces Major Upgrade of VoiceEngine to Provide Superior Voice Quality and QoS Monitoring in Enterprise VoIP ProductsThis means better sounding Skype and all others who use the engine.... [VoIP Watch] 11:43:42 AM

EuroTelcoblog Liking Bridgeport Network. EuroTelcoblog continues to be high on Bridgeport Networks as I am. They are the kind of company that doesn't have to be flashy to do what they do. Already their efforts are being seen.... [VoIP Watch] 11:42:23 AM