Month of July, 2008

VoX Communications has signed agreements to provide wholesale VoIP digital phone services to the operating companies of Charles Street Partners, a wireless broadband internet and voice provider. They will market under the Clearband brand name in targeted markets throughout the US.

NewTeeVee has been bursting with startup news this week, including news from a bunch of new companies that have barely been mentioned elsewhere, if at all.

Here they are:

• Onecast/1cast
• Zadby
• Anvato
• GoAnimate

Anybody care to venture a guess on what any of these companies actually do?

It was not a good day for convicted counterfeit Cisco swindler - Charles Lacy-Thompson:

Now it looks like Dish Network will be giving us true 1080p HD!

In its press release, the company says that in addition to a host of 17 new national high-definition channels, it will also offer pay-per-view movies in 1080p. The first, available on Friday, is I Am Legend, the Will Smith sci-fi film.

While the satellite company may be the first to sell 1080p content, they're not the first to announce it. Those honors go to DirecTV; on Monday the company said it would launch an additional 30 national HD channels by the middle of August, bringing its high definition total up to 130.

Now you can save on your cell phone or telephone bills. No Contracts or Monthly fees - make calls for as low as 2 cents a minute.

According to RBC Capital Markets, after releasing 2008 2nd Quarter financial results, Motorola plans to announce numerous new models late this year of which half will be UMTS.

Dynolicious utilizes the accelerometer built in to your iPhone or iPod Touch to sense the motion of your vehicle to calculate performance statistics including 0-60 acceleration, 1/4 Mile Elapsed Time, Lateral G's, and Horsepower. Is this not the coolest Apple App ever?

Skype just released a new beta of 4.0.called Skype 4.0.0.155 Beta 1 for Windows. Just remember there are some caveats to using Skype 4.0 beta. Read here for more.

Here's what's new / fixes:

30.07.2008 Skype 4.0.0.155 Beta 1 for Windows

• change: Firefox Skype plugin updated to version 2.2.0.94
• bugfix: Video mood and instant messages did not work when user had Flash Player 10 installed
• Localizations updated

Also, here's what was fixed in the prior version of the Skype beta:

BREAKING!
A source is telling me that Level 3 Communications and Packet 8 are having a system-wide network outage for the last 30 minutes. Level 3 is a huge provider of VoIP termination and I believe Packet8 uses their network for termination. Other VoIP service providers (Vonage?) will also be affected if indeed Level 3 is having an outage. I'm trying to confirm this as I type this.

I'm currently on hold (5min so far) for Packet8's technical support and sent my contacts at 8x8 an email. I'll update this post when I find out more.

Update: Just talked with Packet8 technical support and indeed they are experiencing outages. They also confirmed they use Level 3, so it appears Level 3 is the cause. Contacting Level 3 next. Stay tuned!

Update: 1:13pm

Today, SimpleSignal is announcing that it has successfully married Microsoft Exchange 2007 with its BroadSoft-based Hosted PBX offering to offer a  new solution called SimplyMobile. SimplyMobile offers some really cool features, such as the ability to listen to emails from any phone -- even a mobile device by leveraging TTS (text-to-speech). Also, it features the ability for users to use voice commands to call the people who emailed them.