Markus in The Industry Standard and TMCnet

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.

Meet me at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona!

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!

Facebook is so 2007!

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.

Happy Birthday, Markus Göbel's Tech News Comments!

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!

I am looking for interviews about VoIP security for a big German magazine

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

Interesting article for Facebook haters

"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.

Let's get rid of Twitter and Facebook!

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.

Get well soon, Om Malik!

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.

Andy Abramson the Citizen Kane of VoIP?

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.

PhoneGnome's Mr. Blog doesn't want to write about VoIP anymore

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.

Can the new iPod touch download podcasts over Wifi?

Does anybody know whether you can download podcasts wirelessly from iTunes to the new iPod touch?

I cannot find an answer to that.

I guess this new wireless device could fulfil all my musical needs. But Steve Jobs shouldn't think that I would buy music over Wifi from his iTunes store! That's a new feature of the iPod touch which has been celebrated in all the news.

But the best iTunes feature are the free podcasts, like Dance Department, winner of the category Best Podcast at the 2007 Miami Winter Music Conference. Every week another world famous DJ is on the decks, no annoying advertising or cheap talk. Just one interesting interview, the best dance tracks of the week and a 30 minutes high class DJ set plus one "educating classic".

But I am fed up with downloading podcasts to the laptop and syncing to the iPod. I would like to download them directly over Wifi and delete them when the memory is full.

This leads me to the next question: Does the new iPod generation finally have a delete button?

Finally Google Reader adds search

Techcrunch reports that Google adds search to Google Reader. Now that's a news that I have been waiting for. Far too long! It's so great to finally have it. You can find the official announcement here.

I already had missed this feature so urgently that I had to install a hack which made use of Google's customized search. It searches through the websites whose feeds I am using. This trick I found via this excellent post "Saving Time for Productivity with Google Reader" from Web Worker Daily. But the disadvantage were too many and too old search results.

Instead the new Reader search ransacks only actual blog posts and presents them in chunks of 40 results.

Great VoIP overview in InformationWeek

I found another good article about the potential of VoIP. It deals with "numbers that ring where you are", "free calls . . . to the right people" and "anonymous calling for social networkers".

Review: 6 Skype Alternatives Offer New Services
In an effort to compete with the market leader, these VoIP services have come up with some interesting and useful features that may inspire you to switch.
By David DeJean
InformationWeek
Jul 3, 2007 12:00 AM

The featured companies are GrandCentral, TalkPlus, Jajah, Talkster, Jangl and Jaxtr. A good summary of what's possible today.

Jajah + iPhone = no news

Now it's finally out what Jajah invented in the latest six months for the iPhone. And what is it?

Nothing!

As I guessed already three months ago they only brought their website mobile.jajah.com to the iPhone screen. That's like if every internet company would publish a press release that their website also works on the iPhone.

It's a no news. But still media like ZDNet or TechCrunch are presenting it as a breakthrough.

Jajah deserves an award as "Master of Misleading Public Relations". Yet on april, 6, 2007, I said in my posting "Jajah misleads the media with news on iPhone, LG Prada and Sony PSP":

Jajah is doing nothing for the iPhone, the LG Prada or the Playstation Portable (PSP). They design no extra software and have no exclusive contracts to preinstall Jajah on these devices. At least they don't say so in their press releases. The company is just announcing that their mobile website can be opened on these devices.

That's like if I would announce that the website of Markus Göbel's Tech News Comments is compatible with the iPhone, LG Prada or the Sony PSP. Of course it is. It's a website, stupid! Every device with a browser can open it. mobile.jajah.com is nothing else, but I wouldn't write a press release for every gear that can show my blog.

But still, three months later, there are people buying it as a news. At least GigaOM has already put a ban on Jajah until real news come out.

I wonder how this latest Jajah message will affect the stock price of their investor Qino Flagship, which until now is the only stock trading possibility to participate in Jajah's success. The carpetbaggers are sucking up every Jajah news, no matter how goofy it is. Read their speculations below the latest interview with Jajah's co founder Daniel Mattes!

I got quoted by GigaOM

One day after my blog post about the comeback of Easymobile the story got quoted at GigaOM. That was nice because it brought me some traffic on this website. Thank you, Om Malik!

Now I can invite everyone to Joost

Now that Joost is going out of beta I got the following email. I can invite everyone to Joost. So, as always, leave a nice comment and your email address under this post! I will send you a Joost invitation as soon as I can.

Now you can invite all your friends to Joost

von: Joost Support Details ausblenden 11:30 (3½ Stunden)
an: Markus Göbel <.....@.....>
datum: 09.05.2007 11:30
betreff: Now you can invite all your friends to Joost
gesendet: von bounces.joost.com

Hello Markus,

We hope you're enjoying your Joost experience.

We'd like to share some good news and celebrate the launch of the new Joost beta - Now For Friends. This means you can now invite as many friends as you want to try out Joost.

To access your invites, log onto Joost, go to My Joost and fill in your friends' details in the Invite Friends widget box.
If you're running out of friends, you can make new ones by letting people know you've got invites. To help with this, we've made a few goodies especially for you, which you can find at http://www.joost.com/share/goodies.html.

Last but not least, we invite you to enjoy the variety of new shows we're introducing each week. This week we bring you a host of new channels from Universal Music, great science fiction like Earth Final Conflict, and Creature Comforts from Aardman Animations. We've also got swimsuit models and snowboarders, anime and animals, and much more. But that's just the beginning. Each week we'll launch new channels - making sure you can watch what you want, when you want. So stay tuned...
If you've got any questions, feel free to check out our forum http://www.joost.com/forums, and don't forget to send us feedback on what you like and things we could improve.

Enjoy, and see you on Joost!

The Joost Team

-- You are receiving this email because you are a Joost beta tester (The Venice Project). If you no longer want to be a beta tester, please send an email to support@joost.com with the subject line: "Please Remove"

We take your privacy very seriously. To read our privacy policy and see how we we use the information you give us,visit our website at http://www.joost.com/privacy.html

I got five new Joost invites

The New York Times tells that Joost will officially begin its broadcasts on next tuesday, 1st of may 2007. Maybe that's the reason why I got this email which lets me invite five more persons.

As always the five nices blog comments will get an invitation to Joost from me. Just explain why I should invite especially you!

von: Joost Support Details ausblenden 17:57 (Vor 28 Minuten)
an: Markus Göbel <......@....>
datum: 27.04.2007 17:57
betreff: You got 5 new Joost invites for your friends
gesendet von: bounces.joost.com


Hello Markus,

and thanks for recommending Joost to your friends!

As a little thank-you gift, we've given you 5 more invitations
in your "My Joost" invitation widget for you to share with them.

We also hope you enjoy the new channels. To stay tuned to
what's hot and new on Joost, you can also check out the
notice board, available from the widget menu in "My Joost."

Happy Viewing!

The Joost team

You can unsubscribe from our newsletter list by replying to
this mail with "please unsubscribe" as the subject line.

We take your privacy very seriously. To read our privacy
policy and see how we we use the information you give us,
visit our website at http://www.joost.com/privacy.html

GigaOM needs more stories from Europe, especially Germany

GigaOM, my favourite weblog on new technologies, wants to develop further and asks it's readers:

Folks, I am looking to do deeper technology stories, and cover more “technology” focused start-ups. Any thoughts on categories, topics, company names etc, please leave your comments.

Well, here I am and directly answered with this message:


Hello Om,

I wouldn't like to see stories on biotech, nanotech or greentech here. I come for the electronics, because that is what most interests me as a reader. Also I worked in former days in a magazine which tried to do the splits between electronics and bio. It did not work well because both parts came too short.

What GigaOM is definitely lacking is a more international focus. You are very concentrated on the US and often missing bleeding edge technologies from other parts of the world. I see it especially in the VoIP area, where GigaOM sometimes presents new technologies that make me say "but that's no big deal". I could do most of this already at home, using my Fritz!Box from the German company AVM. So GigaOM should maybe cover more European companies.

I see for instance these stories from Germany I would have liked to read on GigaOM:

1.) Siemens (from Munich) will present on CeBIT their new product HiPath MobileConnect, that let's mobile phones do a seamless handover between Wifi telephony and GSM networks - and back, always choosing the cheapest way to connect, without interrupting the call.

2.) Cellity (from Hamburg) tunnels mobile calls with exquisite voice quality trough fixed lines, bringing down the prices up to 90 per cent.

3.) AVM's new Fritz!Box Fon WLAN 7270 (from Berlin ) is the dream device for VoIP: DECT phone for fixed line phone calls and VoIP, WLAN router, answering machine, USB host, DSL modem and music streamer in just one device. It also works with the new V-DSL for downloads speeds until 100 MBit and includes the new 802.11n standard for super fast Wifi. Any other American product seems more than oldfashioned against this! Also you have to keep in mind that people in Germany get these devices for free from their DSL providers. That's the reason why there are already millions of VoIP users in Germany.

4.) "Most of the Nokia phones will have Wifi soon. For instance in the N-Series Wifi is no exception but a general feature", said Ari Virtanen, Vice President Convergence Products, Multimedia of Nokia two weeks ago in an interview with me. How will this affect the mobile network providers like Vodafone if their clients can now avoid their expensive networks with devices they get for 1 Euro? (Because also the Wifi phones are subsidized in Germany.)

5.) How come that much of the technology of the new OpenMOKO dream device, an all open Linux phone, comes from a Linux / VoIP community project in Germany (Berlin)? What did they have to suffer until they found their device maker from Taiwan and GigaOM covered it two days ago?

These are stories that are very interesting to me. And there is much more to cover, that maybe slips trough your fingers because it is not always announced in English press releases that arrive on your desk. If you want I could be helpful as a correspondent. Just click on my website for more information!

Best regards,
Markus Göbel

Google shouldn't be a media company but a great video search engine

On GigaOm they are discussing whether Google is a Media Company, besides of being a search engine. The questions is if Google will ever earn money with Youtube and why companies like Viacom and NBC recently accused Google in court or declined to strike deals with Youtube.

As we all learned last week, Google’s efforts to strike content deals with the major media companies, on behalf of their YouTube division, seems to have hit a wall. Viacom pulled all their video clips, NBC accused them of “Mafioso” negotiating tactics, CBS backed off at the 11th hour of deal talks, while Fox and NBC continued to push their vision of launching a big media-backed YouTube competitor.

All such setbacks notwithstanding, it’s still pretty safe to predict that it’s just a matter of time before one of the big media brands caves in and strikes a ground-breaking deal with Google. And maybe not too much longer before Google starts buying programming directly itself.

What should Google do?

To me the answer is rather simple: Concentrate on search. Their video search at video.google.com should be like their news search at news.google.com. When I start an investigation about a company I normally type it's name on news.google.com to know what's happened to them in the last time. news.google.com is a central point of news search and I don't have to check anymore news site by news site, like I had to do some years ago.

video.google.com should be the same, and it should be just as great. Google doesn't need to become a content provider. It wasn't even necessary to buy Youtube and it seems stupid to me that on their video search they present only videos from Youtube and video.google.com as search results.

The video content is out there, but we don't know how to find it!

For instance yesterday I found out by chance that you can see entire shows of the Simpsons or Veronica Mars on Veoh. I got to know this only because a hyperlink brought me to this Youtube clone. I would never have landed on this site.

Why did no search engine tell me that the Simpsons are on Veoh?

So Google has to concentrate on video search. When I type "Simpsons" on video.google.com I want to see search results from every possible video website, like they do with normal text websites on their text search.

I know that it is difficult for search engines to index video content. But who, if not Google, could be able to do it?

For photos there are already search engines like Pixsta that reach beyond the current text-based search approach by automatically extracting visual content from images.

Something similar should be possible with videos on Google. Around the search results they can show their advertising as always. Google would then become the universal remote control for an unbounded tv experience on the internet.

UPDATE:

Or maybe Dabble will do this job one day. I learned the following about them:

Dabble gathers video data from hundreds of hosting sites, as well as from tens of thousands of other websites, and then keeps a record of where Web-based videos are located, descriptions about the video, who made it, what it's about, how popular it is, and so on.

Unfortunately Dabble has one basic problem, at least today: It does not work well. I had to wait about five minutes to get my search result after I typed The Simpsons. That's far too much. Also they did not find the complete Simpsons shows from Veoh but only some one minute clippings.

Who wants an invitation to Joost?

Finally Joost let's me invite other people as beta testers for their service. Today I receiced this email:

Hello,

We have added new tokens to your account, so you can invite more people to participate in the Joost beta testing program.

To invite others, please go to https://www.joost.com/betatest/invitations.html and enter their email addresses. They'll be sent an invitation and a password to start participating right away.

Best regards,
The Joost team

When I entered my account I saw that I had two tokens. I directly invited a friend who had asked me before. So only one token was left. But after some time I had two tokens again, maybe because my friend had meanwhile accepted the invitation. It seems that Joost gives always two tokens to its beta testers.

I am going to verify this now by inviting an other person who asked me in the comments section of this blog. My Joost account actually says "Number of invitations you can send: 1". But maybe soon I will have two tokens again?

The person who wants a Joost invitation from me should just ask in the comment section of this blog and tell me why I should choose especially him or her. Let's wait for the best statements! On thursday, 8th of march 2007, I will choose the winner.

:)