Address Books for Landlines?

Embarq is adding an address book feature to its home phones, allowing people to look up an entry and dial it by speaking a name into the handset.

Embarq also is testing a text-messaging function for home phones in some markets. When a text message is sent to a land-line number, the home phone rings, converts the message into audio, and plays it back. The land-line phone user can reply with an audio message or press a button to send a standard text response.

You have to admire Embarq's efforts to add features to landlines that are standard for mobiles. You also have to wonder how well address books, which are personal, and text messages, also personal, are going to translate into a "public" setting, which most landline phones represent.

One-person households won't have that problem, of course. "Public" and "personal" are the same, in such cases. But it will be an interesting test.

ISP Subscriber Growth Favors Tier One Providers

Not that anybody should be surprised by the latest ISP subscriber figures, but large tier one telco and cable providers are racking up more market share while independent mass market providers are losing share. The one countervailing trend is that providers focused on the small and mid-sized business, such as Covad, continue to grow.

For those of you familiar with the SME space, it is, always has been and always will be a fertile segment for independent providers of all sorts. The latest ISP figures only confirm that observation, again.