Rafe's Blog

VOIP as a broadcast platform

Some music junkies have begun using the PC VOIP product, Skype, as a broadcasting platform. It's like podcasting in some ways, so it's being called, "Skypecasting."  Did anybody forsee Skype, a telephony app, being used as a media distribution platform? Not really. But it's a great illustration of what can happen when you release a new platform and don't get in its way. Skype is taking a hands-off approach to the development of apps like this. Good for them.

Update 4/1/05: Per feedback post, Bill Campbell of SkypeJournal claims dibs on the concept, and published instructions for Skypecasting with Stuart Henshall in December of 2004. 

From my "Business Buzz" on CNET.com - work.cnet.com.

Startup like it's 1999

Great leaflet spotted in New York: "Internet Startup Seeking Funding." This would probably have worked six years ago. If it works today, we can proclaim the dot-com bust officially over.

From my "Business Buzz" on CNET.com - work.cnet.com.

Location-independent media

I have been looking for a good way to use my laptop to play the music files and view the photos I store on my desktop machine. I used SoftSqueeze for a while, but the user interface isn't right. Today, I tried Orb, a free (for now) service that works very well. The service is supposed to be able to stream a PC's media to a cellphone, too, although I haven't tried that yet.

I wrote about this company last July. I'm happy to give this progress report: The software really does deliver on what was promised.

Who needs Longhorn?

A funny thing has happened to the upcoming "Longhorn" version of Windows. It's gone from being an eagerly-awaited operating system to a phantom that people care less about every day. Maybe that's because Windows XP is good enough for almost all users and uses. Heresy in some circles, yes, but Microsoft is going to have a hard time convincing people to upgrade when Longhorn finally does ship.

From my "Business Buzz" on CNET.com - work.cnet.com.

It knows what you are thinking

New software aims to improve your typing by predicting what you want to say after the first few letters of a word. Great for hunt-and-peck typers. But, a problem: Moving from a keyboard so equipped to a standard one; I've already become dependent on Microsoft Word to auto-correct my common typos. cAnt live witho utit.

From my "Business Buzz" on CNET.com - work.cnet.com.

Identity theft: It can happen to you

For the second time in 18 months, my credit card has been hacked. The bank that issued it called to check on several large purchases as well as a change of address to New Mexico. (The address change was quickly reversed and the charges refused, thank goodness.) But there's more to this story than my own troubles and ongoing worry: Banks are having to tell consumers about potential data leaks, which is necessary but erodes trust in the banks. Worse (for business), some consumers are simply steering clear of online retail, fearing that the stores to which they give their data may not be protecting it sufficiently. We need a better way to safeguard financial identity.

From my "Business Buzz" on CNET.com - work.cnet.com.

Doctors are the new consumers

News.com's Michael Kanellos reports from PCForum: Doctors are a great new market. They've got rich HMOs and drug companies to pay for new hardware, networks, and applications. We're used by now to the "gatekeeper" model of medicine that HMOs enforce; apparently now the MDs are also applying it to technology adoption. Interesting.

From my "Business Buzz" on CNET.com - work.cnet.com.

Where's your contact list?

The new Skype reads Outlook contacts. The Web conferencing tool Convoq reads your IM buddy lists. So where should a person keep his main contact list? There are a lot of communications tools these days, and it's getting very hard manage multiple contact lists. I'm waiting for some form of master contact utility that will keep everything synchronized. Anyone got one? Let me know.

From my "Business Buzz" on CNET.com - work.cnet.com.

Present and accounted for...

Left to right: Johannes Ernst (NetMesh), Richard
Schwartz (SoloMio), Chuck Digate (Convoq).

I think the panel I did at PC Forum, on "Presence in the Enterprise," was a success.

I thought there'd be two big topics to discuss: Privacy/Intrusion, and Standards (or, silos of presence). We spent more time on privacy than I expected, which was fine with me since it's a more approachable part of the topic.  The fact that we spent more time at this rather basic level illustrates that presence is still a very new concept for businesses. Will it get elevated to the "meme" state that tagging is at today? It could, if enough focused companies (like the ones represented on my panel) start to interoperate.

Speaking of presence:

A database of the people, by the people

At the annual PCForum conference this week, one of the recurring discussion topics was "tags."  This new meme refers not to graffiti, but rather the identifiers that some applications (like the photo sharing site Flickr, which Yahoo just bought, the public bookmark aggregator Del.icio.us, and the weblog search tool Technorati), allow users to create.  The benefit to tags is that they let groups of users create ad-hoc taxonomies (currently being dubbed "folksonomies") which can be used as way to slice any large data set. For example, to quickly find pictures from PC Forum, just look for the photos on Flickr tagged with "PCForum." 

Tagging will become a highly useful tool for teams, since it will enable them to quickly clump together work-related data. Watch this concept. Also, see more from Release 1.0.

From my "Business Buzz" on CNET.com - work.cnet.com.