Brian Ward at The Deal’s TechEffect blog has ongoing coverage of The Deal’s star-studded Convergence 2.0 conference. One of the more intriguing speakers at the event today was Vonage’s Chairman and Chief Strategist Jeffrey Citron, the first such public appearance for a high-level Vonage executive since the company’s disastrous IPO.
Citron, however, offered little in the way of dishy inside reactions to the PR nightmare that has befallen the newly public VoIP upstart. As Ward points out, Citron was the only honcho to take no questions from the audience.
Instead, he spent most of his time promoting a new widget, the V-Phone. The V-Phone is a USB device embedded with Vonage software that allows users to make calls from any broadband-connected PC using a keychain drive.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 6:48 PM | Print | Comments (1)
The Washington Post’s “K Street Confidential” columnist Jeff Birnbaum devotes his column this week to the net neutrality debate. More specifically, Birnbaum tries to cut through the rhetoric to find out who’s behind all those scary ads lobbed at folks inside the Beltway.
What Birnbaum finds is, of course, a bunch of “astroturf” groups and he’s not cutting either side any slack.
To hear partisans talk, you’d think that nothing short of the future of the Internet, or the future of cable, or even the future of telecommunications, is at stake. Now, I concede that something more than mere pricing may well be on the line here. After all, consumers will be affected — one way or the other.
But the exact impact is near impossible to decipher if you read or watch what the opposing lobbies put out to the public — a situation that I’m sad to say is part of the not-so-great tradition of telecom lobbying.
Start with the name of a group backed by AT&T and BellSouth Corp., among others, that wants to block net neutrality legislation. It’s called Hands Off the Internet. I kid you not.
First, let’s be clear: There is very little that is “neutral” or “hands off” about any side of this argument. These are friendly-sounding terms that have no real meaning in the context of this battle.
Second, no one can determine who is supporting Hands Off the Internet by looking at its ads alone. To find out, one must dig into its Web site ( http://www.handsoff.org/ ).
Birnbaum accuses the Hands-Off folks of “double-speak,” but he gives no gold stars to the pro-net neutrality people either.
The other side of the debate is just as slippery. Take the pro-net-neutrality group called It’s Our Net. Its funding is provided (according to its Web site, http://itsournet.org/ ) by such big online firms as Amazon.com Inc., eBay Inc., Microsoft, Google and Yahoo Inc. And its claims are at times just as vague and misleading as its opponents’.
For a treat, read Birnbaum’s live discussion with Post readers, held this afternoon. While the queue of questioners was clearly populated by suspiciously well-versed pro- and anti-net neutrality readers, Birnbaum is positively, well, neutral when it comes to the theories, arguments and scenarios lobbed at him in the online chat. He did not agree, or disagree or argue with the sophisticated queries and comments that came his way. (In fact, at one point he said “I’m going to say out of this; I don’t want to take sides.”)
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 5:39 PM | Print | Comments (0)
Rafat Ali, the hard-working and savvy blogger who publishes PaidContent.org, among other blogs, is the latest example of a successful blogger. Late last night Rafat told the world that he has lined up venture funding from a blue-chip investor, Greycroft Partners LP headed by tech veteran and New York magazine founder Alan Patricof. (The Wall Street Journal says that the investment is under $1 million.)
Like Om before him (and the two bloggers are friends), Rafat earned his success the hard way — four years of constant vigilant writing, out of his home no less. (In addition to hiring staff, Rafat will use his new-found cash to rent offices.) Paidcontent.org will generate $1 million in revenue this year and is profitable.
So this development answers, in part, the perennial question about whether there is money in blogging. But it’s not an answer that many people want to hear — yes, there is money in blogging, but for most people it takes years and hard work to see the dough. Only a few special people can hang in to earn their rewards and Rafat is one of them.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 10:11 AM | Print | Comments (0)
The New York Times’ Tom Zeller has this sound piece today on the MySpace Madness. He likens all the parental paranoia over predators lurking on the popular teen networking site to the now-hilarious movie “Reefer Madness.” (As an interesting aside, does Zeller’s piece read more like a blog entry than traditional journalism usually does? He even links to blogs that commented on an earlier NYT article — is this a new feature by the NYT to capture what’s going on in the blogosphere?)
Bottom-line: danger lurks everywhere but that’s no reason to go off the rails over MySpace, Facebook and other social networking sites. Zeller says the answer to this problem lies in the original title of “Reefer Madness.” It was “Tell Your Children.”
But suing MySpace for this problem makes about as much sense as suing the park system for setting up playgrounds. As Zeller notes:
“Suing MySpace for a sexual assault perpetrated by a predator on their network is a bit like suing the car company who made the car he picked her up with,” said Anthony Citrano, a co-founder of the technology public relations firm Fama PR in Cambridge, Mass., and a blogger at CosmicTap.com. “Both of these things made the assault possible, but no sane person thinks a car company should accept responsibility for every act a person could commit with it.”Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 9:27 AM | Print | Comments (0)
Along with Friendster, Facebook, Xanga and lesser stars in the social networking constellation, MySpace and its ilk are, by design, fairly unregulated, unconstrained hangouts.
The New York Times’ Ken Belson has this piece today on an ambitious city-backed Wi-Fi project in Taipei, Taiwan. The government there has commissioned an extensive Wi-Fi network called WiFly that has 4,100 hot spots reaching 90% of the population.
But, in perhaps a cautionary tale for U.S. cities in the midst of their own municipal wireless projects, few citizens use the subscription service offered by WiFly. Just 40,000, or 2%, of the city’s 2.6 million residents, purchase the $12.95/month WiFly service; officials say that the network needs 500,000 subscribers to break-even.
Part of the problem in Taipei, and no doubt an issue that U.S. cities following the same model will experience, is that so many people have access to free Wi-Fi alternatives.
Yet as Taipei has found out, just building a citywide network does not guarantee that people will use it. Most people already have plenty of access to the Internet in their offices and at home, while wireless data services let them get online anywhere using phones, laptops and P.D.A.’s.
WiFly is trying to up the value proposition of its network by offering VoIP service, online game access and music downloads. But that’s a lot of work — in essence WiFly has to behave like a traditional communications company. Still, the network also offers a lot of intangible benefits to the city, providing law enforcement communications and other municipal needs.
Posted by Cynthia Brumfield at 8:53 AM | Print | Comments (0)
Blogs We Read
