New Linksys Skype phone

Tom's Networking has the scoop (hat tip: Mark Evans) on a *really cool* looking SKype phone about to be launched by none other than Linksys (owned by Cisco).

This is pretty cool for several reasons:

  • I like Linksys. I've always had a great experience with their products, which tend to be simple, easy to use, and...just work. Even though this product seems to be OEM'ed from another manufacturer, the Linksys brand means this product is likely to meet the standards of quality and usability of other Linksys products.
  • A dedicated Skype phone by Linksys/Cisco is a very powerful endorsement for Skype. Until now, it seems that most of the hardware that's come out for Skype has been from manufacturers that nobody outside of Asia has ever heard of.

A few salient questions on what may unhinge the future success of such a phone, and others like it:

  • This phone is cordless/DECT. Is this better than a Wi-Fi phone? Does it matter?
  • It appears the phone will be Skype-only. Should such hardware also be compatible with the PSTN? Other VoiP solutions? Or does that over-complicate things?
  • The base station is USB, so I'm assuming that the phone power and connectivity comes via the PC. Should it rather be plugged into a router, so the phone would still work and be chargeable even if the PC were switched off? Does this matter much?
  • The handset itself looks almost exactly like a standard cordless or mobile phone. While that's all fine, does this approach somehow miss a more innovative hardware UI enabled by Skype? Isn't something much, much better possible than the same old keypad layout? Or is this too much to ask for?

I wonder how much Skype gets paid for licensing it's name & network access to manufacturers like this. Could this be their real business model, one that would survive and even thrive in an era of deflationary voice minutes?

It's been said that Niklas Zennstrom looks like Bill Gates. Might that similarity not also extend into a Windows OS-like business model? Seen in this light, rather than a reseller of cheap voice minutes, that billion-dollar plus price tag looks somewhat more reasonable, no?

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Flying Spaghetti Monster

With George W. Bush lending support to the teaching in schools of Intelligent Design as an alternative to the theory of evolution, a third theory (or faith?) has emerged that might just sweep aside the other two.

Watch out for the new cult of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. This site is getting 200k visits per day, has its own entry in Wikipedia, and was recently cited in New Scientist. You can even buy a tshirt or a really funny poster.

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Comscore feeling the heat

One of the great things about the Internet and the blogosphere is the increased pressure on businesses to start showing more transparency in what they do.

Part of the theme of having a conversation with your customers rather than the old "shut up, we know what's best for you" model that has been standard everywhere.

Thanks to the internet, cheap communication, and cheap publishing, people can challenge, do their own research, ask questions, and communicate with others.

No longer do people just sit there passively and accept what's written in a newspaper just because they're a newspaper, or what a doctor tells them just because (s)he's a doctor.

And now, Comscore is starting to feel the heat for a study they made of the top blogs by traffic. Turns out the results look very odd; they exclude lots of important blogs; some blogs are blatantly misranked; other blogs are grouped together in strange ways; and surprise!, it turns out the guy who paid for the study has come out with fantastic rankings. Hmm...

Jason Calacinas, the publisher of Weblogs, Inc is very publicly poking holes in this story, and it's a great thing. Now Comscore, do the right thing, and open up completely to discuss what really happened here.

Anything less means your company's credibility vanishes faster than you can say Arthur Andersen.

Link: Comscore: Show us the data or get out of Dodge.

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Google childish or Microsoftish?

So Google *bans* access to itself for a year for all CNet reporters, all because of a story where a News.com story that used Google to unearth details of Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s personal life.

Is Google starting to become evil and act like a bully? To track this potential tendency, check out FuckedGoogle, a blog that is also fairly amusing to read.

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Skype-Hype shifts focus

Anyone else notice how the hype around Skype has shifted from user growth, quality of service, and innovative features...to how much it will be worth in sale or IPO?

Now the whole "Rupert Murdoch offered $3billion for us although it mysteriously fell through but please, someone else, feel free to offer this amount" meme has spread like crazy, first by Robert Cringely here, then across the blogosphere (here, here, here, et. al., then across the MSM here and here, and now BusinessWeek picks up the story here.

Personally, I suspect either a trade sale or IPO would sap the innovative goodness that has been Skype so far. Then again, could the fact that they're shopping around so blatantly mean they themselves realise they've run out of innovative juice? Or is this just pressure from VCs to cash out while the hype is hottest?

I did like this parting quote from the BW article:

So far, Skype has shown a knack for sucking value out of the traditional telecom world. While that may establish it as a disruptive technology, the company will ultimately be valued on the basis of how much value it creates, not what it can destroy.

This is spot on, and kind of implies their job is half done. Great work on being disruptive, now find a way to be really profitable.

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Innovative…watermelons

I’m a very big fan of Seth Godin, the marketing guru. If you’ve read Purple Cow, you’ll know what I mean when I refer to the watermelon story below as a classic example of a purple cow!

From a pretty cool food blog published in Spain, a post about square watermelons being sold in Japan.

So watermelons have always been difficult to store in refrigerators because of their unweildy spherical shape…until a Japanese farmer invented the square watermelon. It has a stable shape, and is much more efficient for storage. This innovation allows these watermelons to be sold for a premium in supermarkets.

Great story, great innovation, great Purple Cow marketing.

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iTunes off to killer start in Japan

So iTunes has had the fastest country launch ever in Japan– selling its first million songs in just four days and already becoming the top online music seller in the country.

Very impressive. Apple’s played it nice with the music labels so far, but as it continues to get stronger distribution power, I wonder at what point the tables turn completely and Apple starts to dictate terms, lower royalties, etc.

I, for one, welcome our Apple overloards.

From Yahoo News, via PaidContent.org

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NTL ups the ante in UK broadband

So the good news is that NTL is to introduce 10 mb/s broadband service to all its customers, making it the fastest broadband alternative in the UK (at least until ADSL2+ comes out).

The (potentially) bad news is that “There will be no price rise, but customers will pay different rates depending on how much is downloaded”, according to the company. Hmm…hope they don’t do something really stupid here.

UPDATE: My sceptical nature got ahead of itself on the potential bad news. Actually, the volume-based pricing that's replacing the speed-based pricing is potentially the start of a very interesting new fork in the road of broadband development.

First, the volume limits are going up for all users. So users currently on a 30 gb/month cap will be bumped up to 75 gb/month. This is a good thing.

Second, and much more importantly, is the fact that *every* customer will be bumbed up to 10 mb/second speed. I believe this makes NTL the very first major broadband player to totally eliminate speed-based pricing and move to a pure utility-like model. Like electricity, gas, or water, all customers get the same level of access; you just pay for the amount you actually use.

I don't know if this model will work out, but I find it curious that it's taken a cable company to move towards true utility (or God forbid...commodity) pricing.

Links: comments from James Enck , ThisIsMoney , and TheRegister 

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Ouch!

“Blogger: Term used to describe anyone with enough time or narcissism to document every tedious bit of minutia filling their uneventful lives. Possibly the most annoying thing about bloggers is the sense of self-importance they get after even the most modest of publicity. Sometimes it takes as little as a referral on a more popular blogger's website to set the lesser blogger's ego into orbit.”

Well, allrighty then….

From a website that’s actually a very good, if cynical laugh: The Best Page In The Universe

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“I am on Google, therefore I am”

I once read someone state that if something isn’t found on Google, then it probably doesn’t exist….so in the interest in confirming my existence, I’ve checked to see where my humble little blog ranks if someone tried to Google me. Here are the results:

  • 1st place for “Yannick Laclau”. Cool!
  • 180th place for “Yannick”. Not great, but there are many other, much more prominent Yannicks out there so this might be a while before it could be improved.
  • 9th place for “Laclau”. Pretty good, considering I compete for positioning with prominent Marxist economist Ernesto Laclau.

On Yahoo:

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