VOIP heats up

In a previous post I wrote about Skype and their promotional offering of free outgoing calls anywhere in the US and Canada till the end of 2006. Well guess what – Gizmo a VOIP competitor is offering free outgoing calls to 60 countries indefinitely and so is VOIPCheap.com. The catch with the Gizmo offer is that the person who you are calling should also have downloaded Gizmo and added their numbers to their profile.

I don’t know what the business plan is for these companies but this is a classic example of emerging technology changing the rules of business. At this rate telephony does not have very far to go before it becomes like email – free as the air.

Check out the buzz in the blogosphere over this.

Update August 14th 2006:

The rules of the game are changing… With the mobile phone become an increasingly powerful computing platform and wireless Internet blanketing entire cities – the synergy is obvious – VOIP on mobile phones…

This has the potential to become a market disruptor for the mobile phone market. Taking this idea to its logical conclusion, this would lead to a market where the hardware cost is the biggest cost – it would be like buying a computer and then getting the Internet service bundled along with it. The mobile phone is slowly starting to fulfill its destiny – to become the only communications device anyone needs.

Googlenaut — The online blitzkrieg

From a company that basically started out as a by-product of the research in data mining and web search, done by a couple of Stanford students – Google has grown extremely fast. After conquering the web-search arena, it has in quick succession expanded into other major areas of the Internet. With a goal to be the index of the worlds information – Google has expanded into other areas of the on-line world with an almost frightening speed. In my mind it started out with Google News, then Gmail, Google Maps,Froogle, Google Toolbar and Google Desktop. Now the products are coming out furious pace – Google Earth, Google Finance, Google Video, Google Talk, Google Local, Google Calendar, Google Reader, Google Spreadsheets, Google Pack… They have not been shy in acquiring products either – Blogger, Orkut, Picasa to name some…
Despite the seeming explosion of product launches, however, Google always seems to bring something different or better into its products that set it apart. Sometimes they miss -eg Froogle, Google Accelerator – but more often they revolutionize the domain they are in. Gmail with the 1GB mail limit and viral advertising, Google Maps with its AJAX implementation and open API or Google Desktop with its speed in searching users computer hard drives.

They (Google) have created a portal for their products in their home page – You can create a personalised version of the Google home page that includes many of their on-line products… I just realised as I am writing this – Google is the modern, cooler version of Yahoo!!

Hm-mm…. Yahoo has been on a re-designing spree lately – maybe I should check it out… But that’s for another post.

Wikipedia – what the internet was supposed to be

One of the ways that the world wide web (www) is described to anyone is : “It is a vast reference tool for any kind of information”. This is an inaccuracy, in that, while it is a medium through which people can easily share information, it is by no means a reference. The very simplicity and power of the world wide web is also the reason why it cannot be thought of as a reference tool. It is simply too easy to publish information on the Internet and as a result looking for a particular piece of information has become like looking for a needle in the haystack.

That’s why the wikipedia is so remarkable! It has used the very ease of publishing information and the easy access to the vast array of content creators that the Internet provides, as the means to create an on-line editable encyclopedia. The best definition of the wikipedia is given in the wikipedia itself -

Wikipedia (IPA: /ˌwɪkiːˈpiːdi.ə/, /ˌwiki-/ or /ˌwɪkə-/) is an international Web-based free-content encyclopedia. It exists as a wiki, a website that allows visitors to edit its content; the word Wikipedia itself is a portmanteau of wiki and encyclopedia. Wikipedia is written collaboratively by volunteers, allowing articles to be changed by anyone with access to the website.

What sets apart the wikipedia from the other encyclopedias is the vast array of information that is contained on topics that are not necessarily contained in the others. You can find information on literally anything and if you find something for which there is no information, you have the freedom to add the information if you want… It is this spirit of drawing in the user to become an active participant, that allows wikipedia to be such a vast repository of information. It is also how the accuracy of the information is maintained, as the users can edit and correct inaccuracies in articles created by the others. A record is made of every change, so any change can be rolled back. Articles that have contentious or controversial information are marked as such and references are provided as well.

I love to simply browse the wikipedia… One picks up nuggets of information, quaint articles (like this one on the letter Z). There is a featured article section on the main page that I often peruse…