I got an email last night from Guy Kawasaki, to inform me that I had been hand picked to be syndicated in AllTop.com’s new VoIP news section.

First off, I am a huge Guy Kawasaki fan, so I am honored that he and his team picked my site to be part of their VoIP section, right up there with the “big dogs” like TMCNet and Fierce VoIP. If you don’t know much about AllTop, is it a website, built for the less technologically savvy, that also one explore their passions by collecting stories from “all the top” sites on the web.

You can check out the VoIP section of the site here.

More than six months ago I pronounced that the phone call was dead.

I was wrong; it hasn’t died yet.

Now it seems that others are hopping off the voice 1.0 bandwagon and stating that the phone call’s little brother, voicemail, is dead. I don’t believe this to be true.

Voicemail is alive and doing well, actually quite well.

As of 10:30am this morning I have ten voicemail in my box (all from this morning). None of which I have listened to, nor do I know whom they are from.

The problem with proclamations such as the phone call is dead and that voicemail is dead is that these world views are so small and closed minded. What innovators and early adopters need to realize is that normal, regular, non-technology obsessed people (which makes up the bulk of the world) still think that the phone and voicemail is the coolest thing since sliced bread.

If you ask any VAR selling an IP based phone system what feature customers are most enamored with they will tell you, “voicemail to email.” If voicemail was really dead, this wouldn’t be true. For me personally, I prefer other, less disruptive forms of communication, but that doesn’t mean the masses does and at the end of the day, the masses dictate the vitality/death of a communications vehicle.

Maybe in the valley, or on the west coast voicemail is dead, but up here in the northeast and the other 90% of the world, the phone call is king and the voicemail is queen.

I was reading Ike Elliott’s incomplete, but telling, post about the number of business VoIP subscribers some of the players in the business VoIP space are touting. While the report is very interesting, the results are not that impressive (with the exception of CBeyond and Bandwidth.com’s 110,00 SIP trunks).

According to the 2002 US census, there are  22,974,655 registered businesses in the US. Considering that the providers polled are all US based and that they focus on the US market, they have penetrated a very very small percentage of the marketplace; with the ten business VoIP providers who reported delivering less than 1 million seats.

This tells me two things:

1. The low barriers to entry in becoming a Business VoIP provider has made the market very fragmented.
2. The Business VoIP marketplace has a long way to go before it is a serious threat to traditional telecommunications providers.

A few weeks ago, I was asked by Jon Arnold to write a piece for the IP convergence TV portal that he is the editor of. The portal, if you are not familar with it, is focused on the convergence of IP communications, Fixed Mobile Convergence, and IPTV.

After thinking about what I could write for a few days, I came up with a contribution that in many ways, throws the convergence kool-aide in the face of providers.

Why?

I don’t buy the story and neither do most consumers. Comvergence is confusing and if anything people’s “technology life” is just as divergent today as it was ten years ago.

Take a read…

That’s the sentence the sentence that follows, “if you build it, they will come” that no one ever says.

It seems T-Mobile is once again raising their SMS/MMS rates; from $.15 to $.20. I remember, not too long ago when the cost of a SMS message was $.05 (that makes me feel like an old man). DSL Reports seems to think it is a ploy to get customers over to the bulk rate SMS/MMS plans, but I am not so sure about that.

I think this is simply a case of “if you use it, they will charge you more.” Thanks carriers for turning all of us into SMS/MMS feigns…and for raising rates now that we are addicted. Not that I wouldn’t do the same thing.

Interesting news broke today about a new open source router from Netgear.

The Netgear WGR614L wireless router is a Linux based device touted as “open source” by many in the media.

I think Netgear and the media has missed the point.

Besides being based on Linux and having a community website built for it, what is really open about this router? From the looks of the product and the community, this thing is about as open as the post office on Christmas. One only has to take a look at the product spec’s to know that Netgear is faking it…”works with Vista certified” please. I am not even a purist when it comes to open source and I sort of want to snarl. The point of open source is to be completely “open” and this router is not.

The problem with open source and the large company that wants to invade enter the space is that they don’t go far enough to the edge. The bulk of the open source purveyors are enthusiasts and hobbyists who want full control over everything. Large companies and full user control over everything go together like oil and milk. They have to “play it safe” and produce products and service for the middle, but in doing so it becomes watered down and Netgear’s WGR614L is another watered down attempt from a large company to leverage the buzz of open source (you can’t even easily load Asterisk onto this router because it doesn’t have a USB port).

The folks who really make open source project successful; the enthusiasts, hobbyist and purist, will avoid this because it doesn’t allow full control and there is no modularity to the router, severely limiting it’s true potential. If you looking for true open source networking, try out Vyatta.

The epic fail that has been municipal WiFi is no big secret.

Every week you can read about a project’s trials and tribulations (and them going into the toilet). Take a look at the recent shut-down of Wireless Oakland due to a lack of funds. Obviously, if they ran out of money, there wasn’t enough coming in the door, due to a lack of consumer interest necessary to make it a self-sustaining offering.

What interesting, is no one, not those trying to provide the service to those writing about the promise it holds has said the real reason why Muni-WiFi will never work:

“The Public Isn’t Interested in Muni-WiFi”

I hate to say it, but 90 - 95% of the population are not like people like me (and you). They aren’t always on. They aren’t internet feins. They don’t Facebook, Tweet or check email every thirty seconds. They want to check their personal email, browse porn, pay some bills or browse something.

They prefer “disconnected”. They want to get away from work. They think the computer is still something for geeks.

Muni-WiFi is by geeks, for geeks.

The problem is, there just aren’t enough of us out there.