Yesterday was a very good day for my small blog. I got quoted in The Industry Standard, VentureBeat, TMCnet and the Voxeo blog with my findings about Hipsip and the free bridge from Skype to phone.

That feels good.

Labels: Hipsip, Media, Skype, VoIP, Voxeo

                                      

This weekend I will travel to Barcelona to attend the Mobile World Congress, the year's most important trade fair in the wireless industry. I work there as a reporter for Areamobile and member of the Nokia Blogger Relations program.

The schedule is quite packed with interviews to Qik, Nokia, United Mobile and many other companies. Most interested I am in new devices.

However I realize that many of my readers and fellow bloggers will go to Barcelona too. It would be great to meet you face to face. So please drop me a line to set up a meeting!

Labels: Devices, Media, Nokia, United Mobile

                                      

People are, just, well, bored of social networks reports The Register, quoting comScore numbers, processed by Creative Capital.

The average length of time users spend on all of the top three sites is on the slide. Bebo, MySpace and Facebook all took double-digit percentage hits in the last months of 2007. December could perhaps be forgiven as a seasonal blip when people see their real friends and family, but the trend was already south.

The "user engagement" is dropping off, which should be of particular concern for the sales people struggling to turn these free services into profit-making businesses.

This time around, expect spinners to work on massaging the comScore figures, and happy-clappy bloggers to leap to social networking's defence by claiming the falls are sign of the market maturing, and of fierce competition. They could be right, but it still means that the individual business are not the goldmine their greedy backers slavered over.

On Facebook people "join, accumulate dozens of semi-friends, spy on a few exes for a bit, play some Scrabulous, get bored, then get on with your life, occasionally dropping in to respond to a message or see some photos that have been posted".

That's exactly what I did! I am nearly healed from the Facebook virus, just logging in once a week. Facebook is so 2007!

I love The Register for their expertise and vocabulary.

Labels: Facebook, Media, Web_2.0

                                      

One year ago I wrote my First blog post at Markus Göbel's Tech News Comments. I am very happy how it has developed and hope to see you all at The Mobile World Congress, 11 - 14 February in Barcelona. I will be there as a reporter for AreaMobile. Please leave a comment or drop me a line if you want to meet me!

Labels: Media, Mobile, Mobile VoIP

                                      

Dear readers,

I need your help: Until Januar 25, 2008, I have to deliver an article about VoIP security to a big German economy magazine with 770.000 readers. Therefor I am looking for interesting information and interviews. One focus of the article is mobile VoIP security, but not the only one.

The magazine regularily engages me as a freelancing writer for such topics. But this time I want to unleash the power of Web 2.0 by posting this inquiry to my blog.

Do you have interesting material that could be helpful for this article? Maybe I should do an interview to you?

I am looking for speeches, presentations, whitepapers, blog post and similar stuff about VoIP security threats (wiretapping, minute stealing, man in the middle attacks, DoS attacks...) and how to prevent them (encryption, firewalls, ...). So please send me your PDF, URL, Powerpoint or Word document about the topic in the next few days!

I will read the information and then contact you for an interview. These points are interesting to me:

1. What are the most common / most dangerous / latest security threats?
2. Interesting cases of VoIP security breaches and actual hacks?
3. How to protect VoIP / mobile VoIP?

You can find my contact data here or simply post a comment to this blog entry.

Thanks a lot.

Best regards,
Markus Göbel

Labels: Media, Mobile, VoIP, Web_2.0

                                      

"I despise Facebook," writes Tom Hodgkinson today in The Guardian.

Clearly, Facebook is another uber-capitalist experiment: can you make money out of friendship? Can you create communities free of national boundaries - and then sell Coca-Cola to them? Facebook is profoundly uncreative. It makes nothing at all. It simply mediates in relationships that were happening anyway.

Mainly, Hodgkinson has a go at Facebook's backers, Peter Thiel and Jim Breyer. He presents an entire conspiracy theory about how Facebook is funded and aided by the CIA and neocon circles to exploit its users, who create all the content only to see it sold as advertising space which makes a few people even richer. He also writes:

After 9/11, the US intelligence community became so excited by the possibilities of new technology and the innovations being made in the private sector, that in 1999 they set up their own venture capital fund, In-Q-Tel, which "identifies and partners with companies developing cutting-edge technologies to help deliver these solutions to the Central Intelligence Agency and the broader US Intelligence Community (IC) to further their missions".

As far as I remember 9/11 happed in 2001. So if the CIA discovered its interested in internet startups already in 1999, it had nothing to do with the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and the subsequent War on Terrorism. Still the text is interesting to read and could make me shiver if I knew that it's entirely true. But from my desk in Berlin I just can't check the facts, whether in favour or against Facebook. However I can perfectly understand the story of Hodgkinson's friend who spent a Saturday night at home alone on Facebook, drinking at his desk.

What a gloomy image. Far from connecting us, Facebook actually isolates us at our workstations.

At least Facebook always eats up more time than I had planned to spend and it hasn't give me much in return. At least it's free and I can switch off its email notifications.

Labels: Facebook, Media, Web_2.0

                                      

Pat Phelan has a very interesting blog post about "what's the cost of Twitter?". He extrapolates that the worldwide economy will loose $13.5bn in 2008 because people waste time with silly Twitter updates. His thought provoking text caused a big discussion and reminds me of last year's story "Facebook surfers cost their bosses billions". But while Pat seems to agree that Facebook is a terrible time sucker, he still declares Twitter a "tool I couldn't live without". For me they are of the same category.

I like Pat very much. But I don't need a status update every time his airplain is delayed, he buys a CD of Take That or answers a friend's question. That's the kind of information I find in Twitter feeds. For me that's not useful and causes a false sense of intimacy. That's why I don't like Twitter. I am very happy that Pat doesn't publish his "Daily Tweets" so often anymore, blog posts where he just mirrors his Twitter feed. They are mostly noise between his excellent articles. As a technology journalist I have to follow hundreds of blogs and filter out such distracting information.

That's what Twitter costs me, although I don't even use that tool. I whish my browser had some kind of Adblocker for irrelevant Web2.0 crap.

Labels: Facebook, Media, Twitter, Web_2.0

                                      

My hero Om Malik, blogger of GigaOM, had to be hospitalized because of a heart attack. Fortunately he is on the road to a full recovery and promises to stay away now from cigarettes, whisky and fatty foods.

Get well soon, Om! I would miss you terribly.

Labels: Media

                                      

I always wondered about the power of Comunicano. That's the marketing communications company of Andy Abramson, one of the most intesting bloggers in the VoIP industry. From some of his blog posts I already had gotten the vague feeling that he must be some kind of mastermind.

Many of my blog posts lead back to information that Comunicano spread. But I could realize that only recently, because Comunicano's website is nearly empty. No press releases, no list of clients - while Andy, the company's founder and head, is one of the most influential bloggers in the VoIP industry.

Some weeks ago I wrote how I feel about this situation:

Especially the VoIP area, which became a main focus of this blog, is dominated by blogs of entrepreneurs who have an interest in maximizing their profits. Luca, Andy, David, Alec, Pat and others run great websites, but there you will hardly find tipps on how to hack their companies' services for free phone calls. They use their blog as a business tool.

Today I realized that my blog is full of Comunicano's clients: Covad, Entriq, IntelePeer, iotum, Junction Networks, Mobivox, Nokia, PhoneGnome, SightSpeed, TalkPlus, Thomas Howe, Truphone, Voxalot and Vringo. Comunicano has set up a blog with their latest press releases and finally published their list of clients.

Thank you for this disclosure, Andy. I feel better now. It helps me to judge the posts on your blog which often are starting points for my own articles. I would have written these texts anyway because the topics were interesting. But it's always better to know precisely who is feeding you an information.

Also now it's easier to get first hand information about these companies without delay. Kudos to Comunicano for interesting and not annoying press relations so far!

I appreciate openness.

Labels: Comunicano, Covad, Entriq, Intelepeer, iotum, Junction Networks, Media, Mobivox, Nokia, PhoneGnome, Sightspeed, Talkplus, Thomas Howe, Truphone, VoIP, Voxalot, Vringo

                                      

Mr. Blog, PhoneGnome's CEO David Beckemeyer, says he considers to stop writing about VoIP because I called his blog a business tool.

Markus Göbel says this blog is a business tool. That means I have failed. I have let too much from that world creep over to this world.

Sorry everybody. I guess this means I have to blog less about VoIP, or anything related to ventures I'm involved in. Perhaps I shouldn't talk about VoIP here at all.

Please stop him from doing that! Leave a comment on his blog post and tell him that he should go on. I like his VoIP posts in this private blog very much. He makes us think when he says that Jaxtr math doesn't add up or that the Ooma business model could be considered a Toll Fraud. These are brilliant thoughts and he brought them up first. I don't want him to stop that.

Of course he also encouraged his readers to leave PhoneGnome favourable comments under an article from FierceVoIP. That's OK! It was only self defense against the Ooma fanboys who were dissing the PhoneGnome there. In this case he used his private blog as a business tool, something I would never criticize at an entrepreneur.

Labels: Jaxtr, Media, Ooma, PhoneGnome, VoIP