Archive for the ‘internet’ Category

3 years, 9 months, 20 days


22 Nov

Posted in Blogging, Me, internet | Comments Off

Many of you may have noticed that I’ve not blogged again for nearly a month, in that time shuttles have launched, OS’s have been released and the Skype feud has come to a resolution, generally geeky things have occurred that would usually take center place on this blog, however they haven’t and this is why;

I have stopped enjoying blogging, recently it has become a chore which is something I never wanted it to be. I have felt pressured to get a “post a day” out and as a result the experience has become a miserable one. I tried to get back into it by not posting daily and just post regularly but that’s not worked, the fun has just vanished. I left it alone, forgot about the blog and decided to see when it felt right, it didn’t.

So after 3 years 9 months and 20 days I am throwing in the towel, calling time, pulling the plug, closing the blog. I am not stopping blogging totally however, I am starting a photo blog on Jan 1st which will be a photo 365 (http://my365.andrewwardlaw.com), but for me this blogs time has come to an end. Thank you to everyone who has visited, subscribed, read my posts and those who have interacted in some way, you’ve all been great.

This is not me signing off the internet either, I will still be on twitter and friendfeed and my website (which currently is broken haha). I have a number of projects I would like to do so you’ve not seen the last of me. I have enjoyed my time but as someone once said “all good things come to an end”.

I have created 2 books of my posts so far and now have 2 more to compile which are available from http://stores.lulu.com/andrewwardlaw they are chronological copies of all my posts, nothing special but available for all those who may want.

I will also leave this site up, I don’t see any point in taking it down really.

Now I will end with something that I used at the beginning of my blog.

Goodbye
Yadalanh
Vidimo se
Baai baai
Adios
Aloha

Skype — Many Changes are afoot


19 Sep

Posted in Business, News, Skype, Technology, internet | Comments Off

Blimey it’s been ages since I posted anything, truth be known I pretty much forgot I had a blog. I have been so stoked with my new job and everything that has been going on that it slipped off my radar, apologies about that.

Things have been pretty hectic to be honest and they are going yo get worse before they get better. I even have 12 days of straight work coming up! WOO…

Anyway while I have been buried under a mountain of work, quite a few things have happened to Skype. I have been a big fan of Skype for a long time and have used their service for many years with both incoming numbers and outgoing calls. When Ebay purchased Skype back to 2005 I was concerned with what would happen to the company. Luckily Ebay decided not to change much with the VoIP firm and let it carry on as was, then came the thunderstorm that was Joltid vs Skype.
When Ebay purchased Skype it failed to acquire the rights to the underlying technology that powers the system. Instead they licensed it, this technology was created by the Founders of Skype Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis and belongs to their company Joltid.
Earlier this year Zennstrom and Friis tried to buy back Skype for much less than it was sold with the help of some private equity groups. This bid was declined by Ebay due to “serious undervaluation” however, Friis and Zennstrom had another card in their hand. When Ebay took over they noticed that changes were made to elements of the program that meant the licensed technology had been modified. This broke the terms and conditions of the licensing agreement and now Joltid are taking Ebay to court to have the license agreement dissolved. If this is successful then Skype as we know it will be rendered useless.

This is not the only issue, with the court date for Ebay Vs Joltid set for June next year it surely would be a bad time for someone to buy Skype from Ebay wouldn’t it? Not according to a collection of investor groups led by Andreessen Horowitz. This collection have reached an agreement to buy a 65% stake in Skype in a deal that values the business at £2.75 billion. Ebay have been clear that they want to offload Skype as they published thier intentions to release an IPO and float the company as it’s own entity next year. Basically it’s a round about way of telling people interested in buying Skype that it is for sale.

For me this is a great opportunity for Skype to excel in what it does, since Ebay bought Skype they have not really done much with the company, very few new services have come from the VoIP firm certainly nothing that shakes up the market at all. Hopefully this acquisition will spur the company to release new services and new features.
In my opinion this needs to be done fast. Google Voice is approaching public release and looks set to be on a collision course with Skype’s business model. The features promised by Google Voice and the facilities that Grand Central (the company Google bought to make Voice a reality) offered, means that it does all that Skype can and more. Google Voice will also offer one number that will ring all your devices simultaneously, something Skype cannot (at the moment do).

The biggest thing Skype has to stave off the Google Voice assimilation attempt is the fact that many users have SkypeIn numbers that they rely on, of course these numbers are Skype’s numbers and cannot be ported out can they….?

Wrong: in Skype’s FAQ’s section it states

In some countries, when you move from one phone company to another, you have the right to take your number with you – it’s called “Number Portability” in the phone world.

If you don’t need your on-line number (SkypeIn) any longer, you can contact your phone company and ask them if they provide this facility.

So if Google Voice brings out a number porting service to allow you to bring a number in then they have a genuine ability to grab the Skype customers. Only time will tell if that’s going to be a possibility.

This is just getting interesting!

A

Capacitive screen with stylus… Tell me more


20 Aug

Posted in HTC, News, Technology, internet | Comments Off

Capacitive screens are deemed as the best solution for touch screen devices (most of the time anyway), but one problem with them is that a stylus cannot be used. This means that our fat little digits have to do all the work when using the device, and if they are anything like mine, accuracy is an issue (one that I have never been able to solve).  However when everyone else is sending the idea of a stylus to davey jone’s locker, HTC are going against the flow and trying to bring it back.

magneticstylus_thumb

They have been issued a patent for a stylus with a magnetically charged tip that will work on a capacitive screen. The best thing about this is, that it will apparently work with a totally unmodified capacitive screen, unlike some devices such as the wacom tablets that use a modified screen and stylus.

The patent was applied for last December and awarded on the 16th, for me it will be a welcomed addition to capacitive screen devices.

A

FriendFeed gets inhaled by Facebook…. who wins?


11 Aug

Posted in Business, Friends, News, Startups, Web, internet | Comments Off

So for me this was not a huge shock (someone was going to buy them sooner or later) but a possible detremental decision for the users of FriendFeed. For Facebook this is a big move and a good one to boot, they have identified the power of realtime search and bought the best company in that particular area. There is nothing close to FriendFeed’s tech for realtime updating or search at the moment. Facebook will definately be able to capitalise on this.

The larger issue that bugs me is what will happen to Friendfeed, in the short term the CEO’s of both companies say that nothing major will change, but that they are working on a roadmap for the future of both services. Paul Buchheit (co founder of FriendFeed) told Robert Scoble in an interview that he and Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, “are on the same wavelength”.

In essence Friendfeed is dead, the dev team will be much more effective on getting realtime search to work for the 300 million users Facebook has, the faster thay do that the better. It may happen a few years down the line from now but in reality Friendfeed will be assimilated like a new borg entity into the collective that is Facebook (sorry that was uber geeky).

Almalgamating the FriendFeed users into Facebook is a big issue that the team will need to overcome. I use FriendFeed for news and info, Facebook is for me about keeping in touch with contacts and friends. I like these two things being seperate and cannot see a seemless way to link them together.

To be honest Facebook gets and epic win on this deal, the guys at FriendFeed do too (they get jobs with Facebook and a load of cash) but the users of FriendFeed lose out big time.

What’s your thoughts

A

Chrome gets themeified


05 Aug

Posted in Google, browsers, internet | Comments Off

So this has been rumoured for the last few days after the latest development release of Chrome offered theme support, however as of today the theme directory has gone live.


Some of the themes I must admit are not my cup of tea, that said I do like a lot of them and to have the ability to theme things is certainly an added bonus for what is already a super browser.

The iGoogle themes took off pretty well and some amazing designs have come from people for that, I assume we can expect much of the same for Chrome themes.

All we now need is plugins and extensions to be added….

A

Skype founder set to bid to Ebay???


14 Apr

Posted in News, Technology, internet, telecoms, voip | Comments Off

Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, the founders of Skype, have approached several private equity firms and are pooling their own substantial resources to make a bid for the Internet calling service, say several people with knowledge of their plans.
NY Times

Ebay bought the company back in 2005 for $2.6 billion which later increased to $3.1bn after some bonus payouts. However since the purchase, Skype has not really done anything major (barring a few releases for previously unsupported platforms (iphone, blackberry)). It certainly has not done anything that would not have been accomplished without Ebay. Also Ebay execs have agreeded that Skype has little ties to it’s core business and apart from adding some call the seller buttons within the site, integration has been pretty lack lustre.

CEO of Skype has also signaled that he would be willing to sell Skype for the right price, a mere $1.7bn according to analysts. There are some issues with selling Skype however, a pending legal action between Ebay and Skype over the intellectual property of the core tech behind the service may well put off other bidders:

In a regulatory filing April 1, eBay disclosed that Joltid, a company founded by Mr. Zennstrom and Mr. Friis, had terminated eBay’s license to Joltid’s peer-to-peer technologies, which are at the heart of Skype’s calling service.
NY Times

There was speculation that Ebay may sell Skype to another large corporation but with Google just releasing Google Voice, people are probably quite reluctant to enter such a market now, and as Google was the losing bidder in the initial sale they most likely wouldn’t be interested. 

If it does go through however then Skype would have a serious uphill struggle to keep it’s growth going,  it needs to move beyond cheap calling and expand it’s services and market. We have already seen signs of Skype’s growth slowing. During the 4th quarter of 2008 Skype:

 

  • had sales of $145 million for the quarter, up 26 percent year-over-year, but only $2 million higher than the prior quarter.
  • added 35 million new users to stand at more than 405 million registered users.
  • saw SkypeOut minutes go to 2.6 billion from 2.2 billion in the third quarter of 2008.
  • saw Skype-to-Skype minutes go to 20.5 billion from 16.5 billion in the third quarter of 2008.
    GIGAOM 

 

To sell an additional 400 million Skype-Out minutes but only have $2 million in actual sales is pretty poor and at the same time used FREE Skype to Skype minutes were increased by 4 billion in 1 quarter. In a year on year performance Skype’s figures equate to “a 47 percent rise in the number of users generated a roughly 47 percent increase in usage of its free service” GigaOM

So as you can see the company may still be growing albeit at a much slower rate, but it’s not making much money for all the growth!

A

UPDATE: To add to all this speculation it was just announced that StumbleUpon who were also bought by Ebay have had the founders buy it back. Even more fuel for the fire that Ebay is looking to sell off it’s baggage to generate cash and focus on it’s core product!!!

The Musings of an Aspiring Geek

Just another WordPress weblog