2. My business took off. 6 employees now. Microsoft partner. Digium partner. The list goes on.  Time commitment issues again.

3. My tweeners became teenagers.  More driving around, more emotional guidance, more interaction with them daily.  They have become awesome musicians!

4. I started a band in Cleveland called pOUT (pronounced “pout”), which has, in the span of about one year, become one of the top 10 club bands in the rock capital.  Time commitment.

5. I realized that, despite my preoccupation with converged business communication, the bulk of my real earning potential was in general I.T. consulting and networking, because I live in Cleveland and not San Jose or Boston.

6. Still getting plenty of VoIP press despite having been relatively disengaged from the VoIP crowd for nearly two years now.  I was the coverboy for ChannelPro SMB last month for their VoIP feature.

7. My vocational obsessions only last a few years, it seems.

Best Technology, my general I.T. consulting firm, now has six employees, and has grown like a weed since late 2008.  In fact, I’m heading down to Miami tomorrow to consider a new business opportunity that represents a strategic significance to Best Technology–virtualization infrastructure and private cloud computing.

I look forward to giving you another update soon, and miss everybody in the blogosphere with whom I’ve lost touch over the last 18 months.

Not surprising. Here are the facts.

 ”…with the iPhone I now have Yahoo video to anyone running Windows XP versions or later of Yahoo Messenger (sorry, no Mac version yet) as Yahoo is taking advantage of the phone number…”

The nugget is in the parentheses.  I wouldn’t be surprised if the feature never translates to OS X because Yahoo has never really cared much about feature parity in Messenger on OS X. My guess is that they just view the market as being too small, too much of a subset of user requirements, that it isn’t worth their development dollars.  But the mobile device market–especially iOS–is  a whole different story. Lots more potential customers there.

Android

MaxMobile Android is supported on the T-Mobile G1 and MyTouch phones; additional models and carriers will be supported in the future. The latest MaxMobile Android version is 6.5.1.401. It’s compatible with all MAXCS servers running 6.0 Update 2 (6.0.2.412) or higher.


iPhone

MaxMobile iPhone is supported on all iPhone models. The latest MaxMobile iPhone version is 6.5.1.404. It’s compatible only with MAXCS servers running 6.5 Update 1 (6.5.1.403) or higher.

Need help integrating this?  Give us a call.

This book is focused on the key elements of telephony and the migration to VOIP – primarily as a cost saving measure. The first 2/3 of the book deal with the VOIP technology – as an adjunct to and eventual replacement for traditional (legacy) telephony. By the 2/3 point, the author is talking about cost analysis, benefits and justification.

I would more likely title this book “VOIP for management”. This is not a put-down or insult, as the book’s primary objective is to educate the mostly non-technical person on what VOIP is, and how it might best fit into an existing picture, and one moving forward.

Being primarily technical myself, this book was good as a preliminary introduction to a subject that I wasn’t familiar with – but I immediately moved on to the O’Reilly books on the subject – “Switching to VOIP” by Ted Wallingford and “Asterisk” (Leif Madsen, et al). Someone who is responsible for managing such a transition would find it much more useful than I did.

Also, Tech PRose was kind enough to add Signal Noise as a favorite telecom blog.

This patent, and several like it, weren’t necessarily held by inventors, as I learned a years back, is not at all uncommon.  Patent investors, who are typically intellectual property attorneys, underwrite the investments in patents like the C2 one, and then derive income from their ownership over the patent certificate, either by licensing technology, by selling the patent, or by suing for damages on infringement of the patent inclusive of the intellectual property.

I know this particular patent and the family of about two dozen dangerously similar patents because I was retained by a San Francisco law firm for about six months trying to help them sort the patents out and translate them into plain-English for some white-haired, Harvard-educated attorney (or judge) to understand.  I still have a copy of the patent sitting in my drawer.

The real problem with this family of patents, which’ve been issued to everybody from C2 to Verizon to Joe Six Pack, is that they all overlap significantly in terms of the processes or inventions they describe.  What’s worse, they all describe the same essential process of packetizing audible information and transmitting over a non-circuit-switched network.  Indeed, these patents aren’t just similar. When you boil them down to their essentials, they’re largely identical.

And this is one problem the Electronic Frontier Foundation is fighting.  If the Patent and Trademark Office is Issuing patents that cover the same process or technology theory to different parties at roughly the same time (all of these patents were either pending or granted from 1988 until roughly 2003), it really makes you wonder if the patent review teams at PTO are operating in independent vacuums, or if the processes described really are too technical for the PTO to comprehend.

The EFF would probably say that the PTO hasn’t been particularly effective since The Flying Nun was popular.  And, to the degree I find it practical, I agree with the EFF.  But I disagree with their operating theory that patent law is more flawed than effective because it stifles innovation.  The GNU/Open Source movement is the shrill cry of software populism, and I appreciate that deeply, even if I don’t believe software “wants to be free”. Haha.

And for all its heroism, Open Source is also the linchpin of poor quality assurance, the opposite thinking of service level agreements, and the lasting symbol of a sort of techno-hippyism that has lost its way while the corporate world, where all this technology is utilized, took GNU’s good ideas and left its mission behind.   That is, for every stifled innovation credited to the PTO, I can name two that occurred because of ownership of intellectual property by motivate, equipped organizations like Microsoft and IBM.   The EFF and the Open Source community are less equipped and less motivated to innovate because their feet aren’t being held to the bottom line fire.

The PTO just needs to get better at understanding inventions.  My idea, put them in the hands of motivated companies that can do something with them, and get the attorneys out of the patent investment business.  If they want to profit from innovation, let them buy stock like the rest of us.

After I got fired from my job as a construction I.T. manager some years ago, I got a publishing contract with O’Reilly, who published two of my books.  This catapulted me into a position I’d never been before: that of a pundit.  Suddenly, my opinion mattered.  It was something I ran with, and for some time, did so profitably.  But it is indeed very difficult to stay ahead of the curve and remain a relavent pundit, especially when you have other concerns–like growing a quote-unquote real business.

That’s not to say I don’t keep up on the musings of thought leader like Andy Abramson, Alec Saunders, Rich Tehrani, Jeff Pulver, Ken Camp, Luca Filigheddu, Dameon Welch-Abernathy, and a slew of other thought leaders who are apparently much better at time management than am I.

Just get me away from my laptop screen, you know?   I mean I love sharing my opinion–that is, I really do like being a pundit–but can I please have a little me time at the end of the workday?  During the first half of the year, writing on subjects about which I care increasingly less (VoIP, for example) subsided because I just had to get something off my plate.

Jacob and Madelyn are in junior high school now, too. I do so much more with them than I used to.  They’re both great musicians and as they grow older, our mutual interests have widened.  We spend a lot more time together.  And Katie’s such an integral part of the family, too.  For better or worse, all of these things take time.

The same is true of Best Technology, which grew in 2009 to three full-time employees and now has clients from Sandusky to Hudson, a swath of northeast Ohio a hundred miles long and encompassing a fleet of over two thousand PCs.  This didn’t just happen.  It also took away from my enjoyable-but-time-consuming pastime of writing. I also joined the Rotary Club of Elyria in 2009, a service organization that has a very rigorous schedule and demands quite a bit.

At the end of the day, there’s very little time left for blogging, thought leadership, or punditry–whatever you’d like to call it. And I’m a little let down when I visit my own blog and don’t see anything fresh.

So–better time management–that’s my New Year’s Resolution. See you after the first.

Now I can’t blame that on Gizmo.  Much of it has to do with the SwitchVox system and iPhone I adopted for business use–those two have been transformational to the way I communicate daily.  But now that Google has lapped up the Project, I’m interested in seeing if the Mac version has lost its self-destructive tendencies. But presto the download links are gone.  Boo.

Well doy, Apple realizes that consumer-empowering voice technology is a competitive advantage.  We VoIP folks have been preaching that gospel for the last ten years.  Comrade Ken Camp wrote with visionary accuracy about the merits of VoIP in his book IP Telephony Demystified, one of the really early books on the subject.  I agreed with him when I wrote Switching to VoIP that VoIP is a leveler of the playing field, a true equalizer and a legitimately revolutionary technology item.

I’ve also viewed carriers like AT&T, at least for the last four or five years, as access providers, not “phone line providers” offering dialtone.  Apple, it seems, has arrived at the same conclusion.

Second, let’s ask the real question: Since we know the decision to allow Google Voice is ultimately up to Apple, and not AT&T, what could Apple’s motivation for this rejection possibly be?  Are we ignoring the simple answer?  Enhancements to the iChat ecosystems, perhaps? The most obvious answer may not satisfy the conspiracy theorists.  But something as easy as Apple is getting ready to release their own Voice-killer makes the most since to me, to heck with AT&T’s bandwidth.

Finally, I’ve almost concluded that AT&T’s days as the exclusive distributor of iPhones in North America are numbered. Apple would have to score a pretty low IQ to permanently marry their network support to a single carrier, with the rise of new wide-area wireless networking standards and mass WiFi addiction marching on with no favoritism towards Bell.  This would seem to indicate, at least out here in the “sensible” midwest, that Apple is not beholden to AT&T, a company short on both sexy intellectual property and an applications-oriented revenue model, for a short-term political favor that screws its relationship with Google, a company who is enriched of both.

The answer to this mystery, I believe, is in Cupertino.

Apple is nearly past that point in their new platform’s life cycle.  If it’s an app platform–let it be.  Palm and Blackberry are still waiting in the wings, and Windows Mobile will be the centerpiece of Microsoft’s revenue strategy in the next ten years.  And, like it or not, whatever else Microsoft did that was crummy and evil, they never told a developer he couldn’t distribute an app.

As our daily experiences fuel the dreams and ideas that give birth to next-generation tech businesses, those of us in the industry are constantly looking for ways to stay ahead of the idea curve.  Often, that means delving into technologies that are new, plentiful, and untested.  Add to that the tidal changes occuring in the telecom industry and—well, it’s nearly overwhelming. There are so many things to keep up with, so many new search tools, social network add-ons, and the like, that it’s impossible to truly stay on top.

Unless you attend eComm. 

The European Emerging Communications conference will take place in Amsterdam this October 28-30.  The reason this conference will help you cut through the noise of all the new launches and idea overload is simple: the ideamakers are always at eComm. Meet them. Talk to them directly. Exchange your own ideas about the future of the social tech stratosphere.  Engage in person.

Consider the changes driving today’s telecommunications industry:

• Telecom is becoming software
• Today’s model of the telephony and SMS cash-cows will significantly dry up long-term
• “Phones” are becoming general purpose always-on computers
• A march is underway to change how spectrum is allocated and utilised
• Applications innovation is being democratised
• The media industry is converging with personal communications
• Internet-style ecosystems are starting to pressurise the traditional value chain
• Search engines and computer manufactures are encroaching into the space
• App downloads; media content and even communication streams are increasingly routing-around operator’s billing systems
• The telecom kingdom is fragmenting daily

This is eComm’s list, of course.  But take a look at that last entry.  It’s kind of the bottom line, isn’t it?  Where do you fit in?  Do you have questions, answers, contributions, or just curiosity? Me, too…

See you there.

Apparently, this Commodore 64 emulator, complete with on-screen game controls and several officially-licensed games, has been denied access to the Apple iPhone appstore because it violates terms of use that ban interpreted code.

Apple, it’s official.  You SUCK.

Just what we need — to pay 5x more for an even scarcer supply of energy because the production is more expensive and the yield is tiny. Hmph.  We talk so much about Green.  Why aren’t we talking about the Green that creates jobs and pays bills?  “Renewable” energy is vastly wasteful of that very Green.

In that sense, network neutrality aims to prevent anticompetitive conduct; a worthy goal.

But while preventing anticompetitive conduct sounds sensible enough, it is also possible for a network neutrality rule to have the intent or effect of “commoditizing” broadband transmission and Internet access services by limiting the ability of broadband service providers to differentiate their service offerings from those of rival firms…

Such rules might also quash the emergence of faster delivery transports, something Internet needs more now than ever.  When Internet last-mile over Ethernet emerged a few years back, you paid a premium for it.  Nothing illegal about the premium, as it was a physically different class of service.  Same thing when DSL showed up, and so on.

But the knuckleheads at the FCC (and, Heaven help us, Congress) probably don’t know the difference between physical classes of service (which vary in speed due to the laws of physics) and arbitrary classes of service (which vary in speed due to a human decision).

So I contend that this notion of regulating network neutrality still seeks to solve a problem we don’t yet have (the “problem” is networking companies busting the content companies without actually competing against them, ie. anticompetitive behavior). That’s strike one against the Netneut idea.  Strike two is the dominion of the FCC, which does not include considerations for illicit trading, racketeering, collusion, or other methods of anti-competition. That’s the dominion of the Federal Trade Commission, not the FCC.  Strike Three. Consumers don’t care–and consumers are the citizens of this great nation. Their voices matter.

So why is Obama’s FCC trying to solve a problem that doesn’t exist in an area where they’ve no business sticking their nose when the population at large could give a crap?

Hit me on Twitter if you can answer that.  @bitterted