And you are here why?

/via http://www.commitstrip.com/en/2012/03/14/whatever-it-takes/ I was supposed to be on vacation. Well, technically I  was on vacation, but the point here is that I should have been doing the stuff one does on vacation, like eating (and drinking!) too much, hiking, waking up late, and so on. Instead of what I actually  was  doing, which was trying to figure out how to bring our servers back up from where I was in the middle of nowhere. Let’s rewind this story a little, and put some context out there. At the time, I was the CTO of a phone company¹. Not just  any  phone company, we were one of the CoolAndInnovative™ ones — so cool that I had been named one of the “Top Influencers in VoIP” (which basically meant that people laughed openly at me, instead of behind my back). Anyhow, we had a bajillion VoIP phones scattered around the country, each of which connected to our data-center over the InterTubes.  Our  data-center mind you, as this was be...

"Practice Management" is a complex business - and I'm not referring to the part where you try to get clients (and their money).  There is an equally tricky bit involving not spending too much of your own money - and not losing your hair in the process - just staying in business. You need Microsoft Office of course, because frankly if you're a lawyer, you're using Word.  For sure. Email - almost certainly Outlook on the desktop, and quite possibly tied into Exchange somehow. Some kind of remote desktop thingy, because you need to get at all those documents that are on the office share. Oh, the 'office share' of course And all this before we even *begin* to get to the fun stuff like time-tracking, document management, legal research, and the like - you know, all the fun stuff that you actually need to do to be in business? Towards this, there seem to broadly be two different approaches being taken towards SaaS-ifying this business (and lets admi...

GigaOm and Verge are running stories on Free.fr - a remarkably disruptive broadband service in France which, for ~$40/month provides a 30MB broadband connection, IPTV (w/ set-top box), wi-fi, and free calling to a passel of countries. ( There is a good description of Free.fr here , for those who care ) Free.fr has been singly responsible for a dramatic reduction in cost ( and improvement in services!) for all triple-play services in France.  Their main competition has been the recent surge in quad -play - mobile, along with the triple-play of broadband, voice and video, and they've just announced their response in this space.  For 19.99 € they will provide, well, Unlimited everything (text, mms, calling, internet, etc.). Their approach is somewhat the same as what T-Mobile, Republic, and others are doing in the U.S., viz. leveraging wi-fi connectivity to route calls/data over the internet whenever possible.  In this vein, one huge advantage they have is th...

There is a small article on GigaOm  about the future of Voice being 'apps'.  It is somewhat content free, but it does, tangentially, make two interesting points A Juniper study that sez. 80% of the VoIP users in 2016 will be doing it through apps on their smartphones These apps are not necessarily specific 'phone' apps  (e.g., softphones) Which pretty much ties in with a  CounterPath blog post  that made the rounds earlier  which pointed out that  Softphones are really passé. They are a thing of the past. It’s all about endpoints that are device shiftable... communications has revolutionized itself through the hands of end users driven by technologies and innovations not in the plans of the legacy care takers of the telecommunications sector Or, to put it differently, the focus is shifting away (at an increasing pace!) from soft-phones, and into various endpoints that happen to incorporate calling. This is - obviously - particular...