Voice Mail to Text Using Skype

Skype now offers voicemail-to-text conversion for all Skype voicemail users. SpinVox converts voice messages to text in English, Spanish, French and German and the messages are then sent by Skype as an SMS text message directly to a designated mobile phone.

The intended use case for 'visible voicemail' is an on-the-go user away from a PC and using a phone not equipped with a data plan and smart phone to receive those messages directly on the mobile device.

Recipients of converted voice mail messages can listen to the full voice message by either signing into Skype or by calling their "Skype To Go" number. Skype users may choose instead to receive voicemail notification using SMS or for free by email.

"Skype is the first internet communications software provider to deploy SpinVox, further reinforcing our position as the only provider of voice to text messaging services which are used daily by millions of people on five continents," says SpinVox co-founder and CEO, Christina Domecq. "Our user base has grown over twenty-fold in the last 12 months and bringing Skype's voicemail subscribers on board will accelerate this trend."

PC Subsidies Now Joining Phone Subsidies at AT&T

AT&T wants to move beyond subsidizing mobile phones with that strategy to other hardware, led by netbooks, that use the AT&T wireless broadband network. After rebates, consumers can buy netbooks from Acer and Dell for $99 and AT&T says it is in talks with other computer makers as well.

The payback is substantial, as AT&T gains customers paying $60 a month under contract and spends a couple hundred dollars upfront on the subsidies. The move also should help offset weakening sales from enterprise customers.

AT&T says it will expand its subsidy program to cameras, portable video game machines, GPS devices.

Depending on how AT&T decides to price those connections, the firm could undercut some of the demand Clearwire has been talking about stimulating. "Casual use" plans are a prime example.

Where this all culminates, of course, is an omnibus plan that allows users access for a number of devices as part of a single account, much as users now buy "family plans" for multiple mobiles.

Viewers Want Widgets, Parks Associates Says

Video-on-demand libraries and widgets will be the first generation of video services driving adoption of connected television experiences in the U.S., according to Parks Associates.

Some 33 percent of respondents are interested in widgets, and almost 50 percent are interested in premium Web content, including TV shows and movies, through a connected set-top box, says Parks Associates.

Among TV widgets Parks Associates believes have appeal are customized news, weather, sports, or traffic information.

“Broadband households are growing accustomed to viewing video off the Internet,” says Kurt Scherf, Parks Associates VP.

Scherf says consumers are willing to pay – either on the price of a television or as an additional subscription cost – for certain features.

iPhone is Global Mobile Web Leader

Apple's iPhone is now responsible for 66.61 percent of global mobile Web traffic according to a NetApplications.

The Java ME platform follows a distant second at 9.06 percent, trailed by Windows Mobile at 6.91 percent. NetApplications notes that despite the iPhone's commanding lead in mobile browsing share, Android (6.15 percent, tied with Symbian) and BlackBerry (2.24 percent) are rapidly gaining market share, but the report notes that doesn’t mean Apple's lead is shrinking, but that the overall market is growing fast.

Though one must be wary about imputing too much, the current figures indicate that there are clear end user behavioral differences between iPhone and BlackBerry users. That might be caused by user interface barriers or other user preferences, but the differences are striking.

Mobivox Introduces CRM Capabilities

Mobivox has introduced "CRM over Voice," allowing insertion of context-sensitive, unobtrusive messaging into user interactions while they are occurring, Mobivox says. That capability is made possible by two innovations, the ability to integrate and update a unified address book into the voice session, irrespective of what type of voice device or access network is used, and the ability to connect to transaction data bases.

“Mobivox partners can now perform all-important CRM in the course of service delivery, rather than before or after it, by dynamically inserting context-sensitive, unobtrusive messaging into user interactions,” said Diedrich.

Messages about special rewards or promotions based either on past behavior are one example.

“Over time, the platform’s multilingual voice user interface, or VUI, establishes a unique and very cost-effective relationship with the user,” Diedrich said. “Our network-hosted address book and user database allow for insightful user profiling throughout the customer lifecycle. By mashing the VUI with rich and relevant behavioral database information, we have created an unprecedented set of highly contextual CRM processes, executed in real time.”

Thomas Howe to Head Jaduka

Jaduka has promised "big news" at eComm, and one would have to say that some of that news already is leaking out. Consultant Thomas Howe has shut down his consulting business and now is the new Jaduka CEO.

NetworkIP, Jaduka's parent, clearly has decided that it cannot get the traction or valuation it seeks without a recognizable name at the top of its executive ranks.

I believe people refer to this as "street cred."

Social Network Humor

An amusing bit of social networking humor. Click on "related article" at bottom of this post.

It isn't quite the classic that "if operating systems were airlines" (http://ipcarrier.blogspot.com/2007/12/if-operating-systems-were-airlines-part.html) is, but is chuckle-inducing, nevertheless.

Shorter Sales Cycles for Communication Services?

Life always is so much more interesting than one suspects. Consider the conventional wisdom that enterprise buyers are spending more time than they used to making communications decisions.

Arunas Chesonis, PAETEC CEO, says sales cycles now are shorter than they were three to six months ago. "People are being forced to make decisions much faster," he says. A client was looking at buying an MPLS network. The chief information officer said he was going to make a decision in about 10 days. 

"Typically, you'd see something like that goes 60 days before they make a call," says Chesonis. "I can't quantify exactly for you how fast people are making decisions, but the economic pressures are absolutely affecting sales cycles on operating type services, something that would affect operating expense.

"If you're talking CapEx, a lot of these people are just deferring the decision till later this year, early next year, they're trying to conserve cash just like a lot of folks that are out there," he adds.

Lots of executives say sales cycles are stretching out. But Chesonis may be on to something. 

Nokia Mulls Making PCs

Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo has hinted that the Finnish handset giant could soon enter the laptop market, reports Reuters.

IKallasvuo says the firm is "looking very actively" at the opportunity. His comments appear to confirm long-running speculation that the world's largest handset vendor will diversify into laptops. "We don't have to look even for five years from now to see that what we know as a cellphone and what we know as a PC are in many ways converging," Kallasvuo said.

The vendor is rumoured to be developing computers based on ARM's new 'Sparrow' processor for netbooks and Mobile Internet Devices (MIDs) and is reportedly looking at a 2011 launch.

Ethernet Installs: Mostly Follow-Ons?

IU.S. demand for business Ethernet service ports expanded at a rate of 43% during 2008, Vertical Systems says.

Spurred by lower bandwidth costs and higher service availability, enterprises of all sizes purchased carrier-based Ethernet to support their business networking applications, according to Vertical Systems.
 
"Despite a near paralysis of new telecom spending at the end of the year, there were tens of thousands of new Business Ethernet service installs during 2008," said Rick Malone, principal at Vertical Systems Group. "Deployments were most active in the third quarter before many enterprises implemented spending freezes or staff reductions. Customer installations in the fourth quarter consisted primarily of follow-through on in-process network conversions."
 
Based on retail customer port installations, AT&T maintained its U.S. market leadership in 2008, although considerable momentum by Verizon narrowed the gap. Attaining a position on Vertical Systems Group's 2008 Business Ethernet Leaderboard with 5% or more of the market are eight service providers in the following order by share: AT&T, Verizon, tw Telecom, Cox, Qwest, Cogent, Time Warner Cable and Level 3.
 

Will Rural Broadband Create Jobs?

The general notion about broadband spending mandated as part of the national economic “stimulus” plan is that it will create jobs. To be sure, construction of the access networks will drive some direct employment.

Some 128,000 jobs (or 32,000 jobs per year) could be generated from network construction over a four year period, and each job would cost $50,000, according to Dr. Raul Katz, adjunct professor at the Columbia Business School.

Beyond that, such new broadband facilities are supposed to spur economic development as well. But will it?

Unfortunately, says Katz, research on the productivity impact of broadband indicates the potential for capital-labor substitution and consequently, the likelihood of job destruction resulting from broadband deployment, as well as some incremental job creation. So the issue is whether net job creation exceeds net job destruction, and by how much.

You might think bringing broadband access to any community can only be a plus. As it turns, out broadband creates jobs and destroys them as well.

Since broadband tends to enable the outsourcing of jobs, a potential displacement of employment in the service sector from the area targeted for deployment might also occur, says Katz.

Also, some job creation in the targeted areas could be the result of relocation of functions from other areas of the country, and therefore, should not be considered as creating incremental employment, he adds.

Still, Katz says, the study results indicate that some job creation aside from the actual construction jobs is feasible. “Our estimates indicate that over four years the network effects could range from zero to 270,000 jobs over four years (approximately 67,500 jobs per year), although anecdotal evidence would point to the lower end of this range,” says Katz.

Firms Losing 40% of Time Because of Communications Inefficiency?

On average, 70 percent of of small and medium business execitives recently surveyed say they spend 17.5 hours each week addressing the pain points caused by communications barriers and latencies, according to a global study sponsored by Siemens Enterprise Communications and conducted by SIS International Research.

If Siemens results are typical, mid-sized organization personnel might be wasting as much as 40 percent of their available time dealing with communication latencies of one sort or another. Most small businesses probably will not agree, but communications inefficiency obviously scales with organization size.

Tracking Service Provider Capex

People who track telecom service provider capex are going to have to account for some likely shifts in the composition of that capital investment. For telcos providing IPTV, a significant percentage of ongoing capex is related to providing customers with relatively-costly in-home decoders. Comcast, which has built its business on the use of such terminals, is about as efficient as any provider can be, and gets the absolute best volume pricing on its gear. Yet it still devotes at least 18 percent of overall capex to the purchase of such boxes.

Telcos, who likely are not yet getting volume discounts as large as Comcast's may find as much as a fifth of their overall capex now devoted to customer premises equipment. That is going to shift thinking in the direction of variable CPE investment rather than the network transmission categories that traditionally have dominated spending. 

The other change is that IP-based gear in most cases costs less than legacy equivalents, so any given dollar of capex spending buys more capabilities than used to be the case. The clear implication is that less gross capex might be needed for any given unit of derived revenue. 

The other long-term change is that more of the value of capital comes from software investments rather than hardware. So telcos will be spending more capex on software, and less, proportionally, on hardware, or transmission hardware. More of the hardware spend is going to be premises based. 

One probably can see that in the case of Ethernet, DSL, video, telepresence or virtual private network services, for example. 

Where's the Competence?

Financial markets hate uncertainty. Right now, all we've got is massive uncertainty. Where's the governmental competence?

U.S. Tops Global List of Broadband Countries

If one measures the value of broadband not by simply "organizations that can buy broadband" (availability) or "homes buying broadband," (demand), but rather as a the ability a nation has to harness broadband to drive economic growth, the United States ranks first in the world, says Leonard Waverman, Fellow of the London Business School and Dean and Professor at the Haskayne School of Business at the University of Calgary. 

The United States has seen more clear-cut productivity gains than has Europe, and a major source of this U.S. productivity advantage is broadband usage by businesses that are not themselves producers and providers of broadband services, Waverman says. 

The concept of “useful connectivity” is based on the notion that the economic value generated by connectivity depends not just on conventional measures such as broadband lines or computers

connected, but also on who is using those lines—businesses or consumers—and how

well they are able to use the lines, says Waverman. 

"The notion of connectivity should be expanded to include also the complementary assets (software) and skills — embodied in people, governments and businesses — that determine just how productively the hardware and infrastructure are used.

"We use the term 'connectivity' to refer to the totality of interaction between a nation’s telecommunications infrastructure, hardware, software, networks, and users

of these networks, hardware and software," he notes.

Thus broadband lines, PCs, advanced corporate data networks and advanced use of wireless data services are certainly measures of connectivity, but so are human skills relevant to the usage of these

infrastructures, technologies and networks.

Consider the case of Korea, which has a very advanced fiber to the home capability. However, Korea is also a very heavily business-driven economy in that the levels of business investment and intermediate consumption  are very high compared to the level of consumption by the consumer sector.

On measures such as business spending on enterprise telephony and data services, Korea’s performance might be termed “lackluster,” Waverman says. By way of contrast, U.S. businesses are leaders in use of IP telephony and other broadband-based technologies, as well as the more subjective ability to use technologies as sources of business advantage, and drive innovation.

As with all such cross-nation "rankings," there is some element of subjectivity. Still, the point is well taken: broadband economic benefits cannot be measured by simple reliance on penetration or availability data. Human, cultural and institutional capital play a big role.