Research In Motion Ltd. says an outage left users in North America without access to their BlackBerry email service on Monday, beginning about 3:30 p.m. Eastern Standard time and lasting about three hours.
RIM says no messages were lost during the incident, which caused intermittent delivery delays. No explanation for the outage has been given.
Outages of this sort are the reason many of us are giving more thought to backup and redundancy strategies. On a recent business trip, for the first time in my life, I accidentally left my laptop at home, and was going to be gone for 14 days. True, I had the BlackBerry and another mobile as well.
But in my line of work access to the Web is arguably more important than either of those two sorts of devices, as important as they are. Because of Google Documents & Spreadsheets and Google Broswer Sync, I was able to keep working using public terminals and loaned machines, with access to Microsoft Office.
I also learned to live without access to Outlook for a bit. The BlackBerry helped, of course. The lasting change so far is that I have kept using Google Documents more than I have in the past. That's why sampling is so important. Behavior can change.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
Slow Email? BlackBerry Outage
Gary Kim has been a digital infra analyst and journalist for more than 30 years, covering the business impact of technology, pre- and post-internet. He sees a similar evolution coming with AI. General-purpose technologies do not come along very often, but when they do, they change life, economies and industries.
HD DVD War is Over
Consumers baffled by the competing high-definition digital video recorder standards soon will be able to go ahead and buy without concern they have backed the wrong horse in the race. Blu-ray has won.
One more sign: Netflix is going to stop carrying titles in the HD DVD format.
Netflix has stocked both Blu Ray and HD DVD titles since 2006. But all HD DVD discs will be cut from their inventory by the end of the year. Netflix also has stopped adding new HD DVD titles to its inventory.
Blockbuster last summer had made a similar decision.
The format victory is a surprisingly rare event for Sony, which developed and has pushed for Blu-ray. In prior format wars it has lost, fairly consistently. It backed Betamax, but lost to VHS.
So go ahead and buy a Blu-ray HD DVR. It's the winner.
One more sign: Netflix is going to stop carrying titles in the HD DVD format.
Netflix has stocked both Blu Ray and HD DVD titles since 2006. But all HD DVD discs will be cut from their inventory by the end of the year. Netflix also has stopped adding new HD DVD titles to its inventory.
Blockbuster last summer had made a similar decision.
The format victory is a surprisingly rare event for Sony, which developed and has pushed for Blu-ray. In prior format wars it has lost, fairly consistently. It backed Betamax, but lost to VHS.
So go ahead and buy a Blu-ray HD DVR. It's the winner.
Gary Kim has been a digital infra analyst and journalist for more than 30 years, covering the business impact of technology, pre- and post-internet. He sees a similar evolution coming with AI. General-purpose technologies do not come along very often, but when they do, they change life, economies and industries.
Belgian Mobile Operator Wants to Kill Fixed Line
Belgian mobile operator Mobistar is intensifying its efforts to take market share from landline provider Belgacom by aggressively targeting its larger rival's fixed line subscribers. The Mobistar AtHome product allows users 40 hours of mobile calls from the home for 10 Euros a month.
About 35 percent of Belgian households no longer possess a fixed line telephone and another 28 percent are prepared to give theirs up if there is a good alternative, some researchers have found.
About 35 percent of Belgian households no longer possess a fixed line telephone and another 28 percent are prepared to give theirs up if there is a good alternative, some researchers have found.
Gary Kim has been a digital infra analyst and journalist for more than 30 years, covering the business impact of technology, pre- and post-internet. He sees a similar evolution coming with AI. General-purpose technologies do not come along very often, but when they do, they change life, economies and industries.
Monday, February 11, 2008
LA Will Try to Tax VoIP
Los Angeles voters have voted to extend the telephone tax to include VoIP and other Internet IP communications.
The measure was cleverly worded, saying it would lower the telephone tax rate from 10 percent to nine percent, but extend it to "a wider range of telephone-like technology and allows the city to tax the routing of voice, audio, video, data or other communication information transmitted through fiber-optic coaxial cables, power lines, broadband, DSL or wireless systems.”
The city has been taxing local access services since 1967. Further legal challenges are likely.
The measure was cleverly worded, saying it would lower the telephone tax rate from 10 percent to nine percent, but extend it to "a wider range of telephone-like technology and allows the city to tax the routing of voice, audio, video, data or other communication information transmitted through fiber-optic coaxial cables, power lines, broadband, DSL or wireless systems.”
The city has been taxing local access services since 1967. Further legal challenges are likely.
Gary Kim has been a digital infra analyst and journalist for more than 30 years, covering the business impact of technology, pre- and post-internet. He sees a similar evolution coming with AI. General-purpose technologies do not come along very often, but when they do, they change life, economies and industries.
What does "Communications-Enabled Business Transformation" Mean?
A recent survey by analysts at In-Stat finds that 54 percent of U.S. companies that have adopted IP communications have integrated it into their operations in a way that has "changed business procedures and processes."
"Change," in this case, might not be anything like the notion of "transformation." The reason is that adoption still is driven by traditional buying decision triggers, such as equipment end-of-life, lack of capacity, business partnerships, and internal IT initiatives, In-Stat says.
The issue is whether adoption of unified communications necessarily entails "transformation" or whether it merely leads to "change," albeit changes that lead to more efficiency.
And some survey findings suggest there is less transformation going on than one would think, though efficiency arguably is higher. Less than 33 percent of businesses using IP communications currently use unified collaboration and unified messaging applications, In-Stat says.
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"Change," in this case, might not be anything like the notion of "transformation." The reason is that adoption still is driven by traditional buying decision triggers, such as equipment end-of-life, lack of capacity, business partnerships, and internal IT initiatives, In-Stat says.
The issue is whether adoption of unified communications necessarily entails "transformation" or whether it merely leads to "change," albeit changes that lead to more efficiency.
And some survey findings suggest there is less transformation going on than one would think, though efficiency arguably is higher. Less than 33 percent of businesses using IP communications currently use unified collaboration and unified messaging applications, In-Stat says.
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Gary Kim has been a digital infra analyst and journalist for more than 30 years, covering the business impact of technology, pre- and post-internet. He sees a similar evolution coming with AI. General-purpose technologies do not come along very often, but when they do, they change life, economies and industries.
Opera Mini, 35 Million Users
In the two years since its worldwide launch, Opera Mini has achieved more than 35 million cumulative users, with 100,000 downloads a day of the mobile phone browser.
Gary Kim has been a digital infra analyst and journalist for more than 30 years, covering the business impact of technology, pre- and post-internet. He sees a similar evolution coming with AI. General-purpose technologies do not come along very often, but when they do, they change life, economies and industries.
Nokia Unveils N96
As its name implies, the N96 is the successor to the N95, Nokia's former high-end device. The dual slider device comes with 16 gigabytes of internal storage, plus a microSD slot, something the N95 8GB lacks. Like the N95, the N96 retains the
5-megapixel autofocus camera with Carl Zeiss Tessar lens.
But "flash" support is improved by the use of two LEDs to provide lighting. There is an integrated DVB-H mobile TV tuner. As audio support on the N95 was robust, we would expect the same from the N96.
On such a device one would expect Wi-Fi support and global positioning satellite capabilities, and both are included. The N96 is supposed to launch in Europe in the third quarter this year.
Gary Kim has been a digital infra analyst and journalist for more than 30 years, covering the business impact of technology, pre- and post-internet. He sees a similar evolution coming with AI. General-purpose technologies do not come along very often, but when they do, they change life, economies and industries.
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