The term “voice-over-IP” has long been considered an inside-baseball phrase, with most VoIP providers pitching the service to consumers as “digital voice” or “broadband voice.” But, the ungainly term is apparently more widely known among the general public than you might expect.
Ron Gruia has an item about how the term VoIP emerged as a question on the television quiz show Jeopardy. The contestant was asked to define VoIP. Although his answer was a little short of the mark — he said “voice..Internet…protocol” — host Alex Trebek gave it to him anyway.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 4:29 PM | Print | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Veoh Networks, which calls itself “the first Internet Television Peercasting Network,” announced last Wednesday its VeohNet protocol. The news came a week after the San Diego-based startup announced completion of a Series A round of financing led by Shelter Capital Partners, Veoh Networks. According to the company’s press release:
Veoh Networks was founded in 2004 by Dmitry Shapiro, a technologist best known for creating the world’s leading P2P security software that manages more than one million enterprise users, regulating applications such as BitTorrent and Grokster.
“Our engineers and I have spent the last five years dealing with various P2P networks including BitTorrent, eDonkey and FastTrack, as well as the dozens of applications that support these protocols, including Grokster, KaZaa and Morpheus.” said Dmitry Shapiro, Veoh’s CEO. “We have created a new protocol that sets a new standard in terms of both technology and legitimacy for content owners. In contrast to earlier approaches, from inception, our focus has been respecting the rights of content owners.”…Veoh’s engineering team is led by Dr. Ted Dunning, who was previously the Chief Scientist at Musicmatch (now a division of Yahoo! Music), IDAnalytics and Aptex (an HNC company).
The technical and business challenge of leveraging the power of P2P while also protecting content owners’ rights appears to be a major focus of Veoh’s strategy and positioning. The company’s web site suggests its founders may also harbor an idealistic motive to change the world through a democratization of media:
Veoh Networks will dramatically change the lives of musicians and painters, pilots and boogie boarders, adults and children…It will open the world of media so that every country, established or third political party, foundation, charity, cause, company, and individual has an unrestricted voice, able to reach the farthest reaches of the world, with the capacity to alter human understanding. We will be able to stop wars, expose genocide, enlighten, entertain, educate, bring together, inspire, connect, and help find love of all kinds…We are building the next phase of the Internet, the Self Published Video Web. Think of it as Television 2.0.Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 4:29 PM | Print | Comments (0) | TrackBack
The BBC has released nearly 100 program clips from its video archives to the UK public under the terms of the Creative Archive Licence.
People interested in being creative with BBC material will be free to download and mix that footage and use it as the fuel for their own creative endeavours…Taken from a whole host of BBC programmes the footage includes…material covering natural history, wildlife, science, locations, art…shots of cityscapes, sunsets, seascapes and many other stunning visuals. People within the UK can download this material now from the Radio 1 Superstar VJs site. More clips will be added over the coming months.
Andy Parfitt, Controller Radio 1 said “It’s a great opportunity for Radio 1. We are increasing the visual aspects of Radio 1 and 1Xtra and this is going to be spot on. My experience of the creativity of our audience leaves me in no doubt that together we’ll make some great material.”
Paul Gerhardt, Director of the Creative Archive Licence Group said “We’re delighted to be working first with such an innovative site on bbc.co.uk; one which reaches a young, media aware audience who are naturally tuned in to the idea of content being available when they want it, and who will welcome the right to shape it to meet their needs.”Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 3:39 PM | Print | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Another item from North of the Border: Five days after being locked out of their jobs due to a labor dispute with the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. (CBC), a group of CBC journalists are creating radio news shows via their own podcast site called CBCUnplugged.
CBC Management says it did not take lightly the decision to lock out the journalists and, I love this part for the imagery it raises, they’re all still waiting at a hotel where the union negotiations took place for more meetings. (Thanks to Steve Rubel.)
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 2:51 PM | Print | Comments (0) | TrackBack
Mark Evans, a savvy observer of Canadian telecom matters, has an item on the substantial number of Canadians who still use dial-up Internet access. About one-third of Canadians rely on old-fashioned dial-up service (a ratio that is still smaller than the 40% to 50% of U.S. residents that use dial-up).
Evans points out that most of these slow-poke users are probably in rural areas where broadband choices are few or non-exisent. He points to recent calls for universal broadband access to be a key priority as a three-person federal government panel reviews Canada’s telecommunications policies
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 2:32 PM | Print | Comments (0) | TrackBackA new spate of Google-speculation was triggered late last week after the company said Thursday that it would raise more than $4 billion through a new stock offering. Combined with the roughly $3 billion of cash it currently has on hand, this will give Google a $7 billion war chest.
The company’s SEC filing apparently shed no real light on how the money would be used. A story by John Markoff in the New York Times cited the filing as saying “we may use proceeds of this offering for acquisitions of complementary businesses, technologies or other assets,” but also that “[w]e have no current agreements or commitments with respect to any material acquisitions.”
Earlier this week, [Google] quietly acquired Android Inc., a mobile computing firm based in Palo Alto, Calif., and founded by Andy Rubin, a former Apple Computer engineer who had been a founder of Danger Inc., a maker of a portable wireless data handset. As part of the deal, Mr. Rubin has joined Google.
Google also recently acquired Dodgeball, a social-networking site. In the last year, it purchased Keyhole, which developed a digital satellite imagery program; Picasa, which developed software for editing and sharing digital photos, as well as Applied Semantics, Blogger and Urchin.
A Business Week story focuses on the Android acquisition:
Android (www.android.com) has operated under a cloak of secrecy, so little is known about its work. Rubin & Co. have sparingly described the outfit as making software for mobile phones, providing little more detail than that. One source familiar with the company says Android had at one point been working on a software operating system for cell phones.
Google has been toiling to make its services more appealing to people who access the Net over cell phones and other mobile devices. In April, the company uncorked local-flavored search for mobile users. Also in April, it announced Google Short Message Service (SMS), which sends text-based information to mobile users seeking everything from driving directions to weather forecasts.
Rubin isn’t the only well-known Silicon Valley veteran joining Google via Android. Others coming over include Andy McFadden, who worked with Rubin at WebTV before helping develop the all-in-one set-top box for Moxi Digital; Richard Miner, former vice-president of technology and innovation at telecom outfit Orange before joining Android; and Chris White, who spearheaded the design and interface for WebTV in the late 1990s, before helping to found Android.
As we reported in early July, Google recently made an investment in Broadband over Power Line (BPL). That news was followed in mid-August by an Om Malik piece in Business 2.0 suggesting Google might create an alternative path to broadband users by linking its fiber optic backbone to Wi-Fi access networks.
In April it launched a Google-sponsored Wi-Fi hotspot in San Francisco’s Union Square shopping district, built by a local startup called Feeva. Feeva is reportedly readying more free hotspots in California, Florida, New York, and Washington, and it’s possible that Google may be involved. Feeva CEO Nitin Shah confirms that the company is working with Google but won’t discuss details. Google’s interest in Feeva likely stems from the startup’s proprietary technology, which can determine the location of every Wi-Fi user and would allow Google to serve up advertising and maps based on real-time data.
There’s also speculation that Google might invest some of its cash in China, where it owns a small stake in Baidu, a web service company that recently went public. According to a WSJ story by Kevin Delaney, “Goldman Sachs said in a research note that it expects any deals to be mostly in the range of $1 billion to $2 billion, and pointed to China and Russia as possible areas for acquisitions.”
Banc of America Securities Equity Research called “an acquisition of size” a likely use of the offering proceeds, pointing in a research note to Google’s previously stated intentions to expand aggressively in fast-growing Asian markets. Any such move by Google in Asia would follow Yahoo’s announcement last week that it planned to pay $1 billion in cash and hand over all of its Chinese operations to Alibaba.com Corp. in return for a 40% equity stake in the Chinese e-commerce company.
A mid-June post by Adrevan at Kuro5hin.org, a tech-focused community blog, provides a review of Google’s recent acquisitions up to that point in time, followed by Andrevan’s “picks for the companies Google should, could, will, may, perhaps is considering to, would be cool if they were to, might acquire.”
And how does Google’s war chest measure up to its arch-rivals Microsoft and Yahoo? According to Delaney:
Even after the offering, Google’s augmented cash hoard will be dwarfed by Microsoft’s. The Redmond, Wash., software company had cash and short-term investments valued at $37.8 billion as of June 30. Depending on the final offering details, Google would likely surpass Yahoo’s cash and short-term investment reserves of $4.9 billion as of June 30.Posted by Mitch Shapiro at 2:23 PM | Print | Comments (0) | TrackBack
If Arnold Schwarzenegger can govern California, why not Apple titan Steve Jobs? According to the San Francisco Chronicle, Jobs, a big contributor to the Democratic party, is mentioned by insiders as a good candidate to take on the thankless job of running the state.
As we’ve all seen, anything can happen in California and it’s irrelevant that Jobs has no political experience and may lack the patience to handle the sprawling woes of the state. Another potential candidate floated by party activists: comedian and actor Robin Williams. (Thanks to Peter Rojas at Engagdet.)
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 2:18 PM | Print | Comments (0) | TrackBack
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