Irwin Lazar's "Real-Time" Blog

How do you reboot a frozen door hinge?

Todd Bishop blogs about the Microsoft Windows Door Hinge patent.

Winding down 2006

Here are some articles that I recently posted on Collaboration Loop:

• Looking Back…Looking Forward - Unified communications in 2006 & 2007
• Wither The Enterprise Wiki - What we're hearing from enterprises about Wiki deployment and usage

And over at Nemertes.com I recently posted a podcast on Lotus Sametime Gateway - A five minute take on the recent announcement of a Sametime to AIM, GTalk/XMPP, and Yahoo Messenger gateway

Happy holidays and happy new year everyone, thanks for visiting this year.

The iPhone is here!!!

But, it's not what you think, and it didn't come from Apple.

Let the lawsuits begin.

Lots of Skype news today

First, Skype 3.0 for Windows now officially launched, I haven't used the beta and haven't installed 3.0 yet, so I can't comment but I'll try to play with it this week.

The other big announcement was the end of free calls within North America, Skype has introduced a plan for unlimited calls for all of 2007for a one time fee of $14.95 (until Jan 31st, after then the fee rises to $29.95). It will be interesting to see if people are willing to pay to use Skype, or if this serves as a boon to alternative systems such as Gizmo.

I don't plan to sign up, I rarely make calls via Skype to the PSTN. And given that I already get unlimited local/long distance calling in North America via my residential VOIP service (Verizon VoiceWing) I just don't see the value in the service.  Now if I spent a great deal of time outside the office making calls from hotel rooms I could possibly make an argument to buy the service...but then again, as Andy Abramson notes, can one really count on hotel Internet services being capable of supporting VOIP?? 

And if I'm in a hotel and want cheap calls, why not just use JahJah to make free calls from my mobile phone (in-bound calls are free on my plan).  For me, the real benefit of using Skype is to communicate with other Skype users, not as a replacement for my other phone services.

iPods in Space

Link: iss014e08795.jpg (JPEG Image, 3032x2064 pixels) - Scaled (39%).

Look at around the 2:00 position, about halfway out from Astronaut Thomas Reiter's nose.

Blog Tag

I’ve Been Tagged!

So...5 things you might not have known about me:

1. My first PC was an Atari 800 (well, I talked about that earlier)
2. My first job out of college was selling Mac's (back when the Quadra was the ultimate PC) - meanwhile my home PC was a Gateway 386SX-16 with a whopping 256k of memory.
3. I've been using VOIP since January of 2000 (via a hosted IP centrex service from the now defunct TalkingNets).
4. I was one of America On-Line's first 6,000 customers (AOL for DOS - circa 1991), paid off the bill around 2000.
5. I created my first web page in 1996 on Geocities.

Now...who to ping...Mike Gotta, Peter O'Kelly, Stowe Boyd, Dan York, James Enck   

I have a dream...

...that in 2007 the majority of vendor briefings I attend will be delivered via rich media communications, including one-way (and maybe even two-way) video, web conferencing tools that enable me to text questions, annotate slides, and easily invite colleagues to join the conference.  I hope that the days of the audio bridge coupled with the PDF or PPT file go the way of the Model T.  This is especially true for vendor briefings that are open to large groups of analysts rather than individual meetings.

I'm A Commodore 64

Another parody of the Mac/PC ads.  I suppose the Timex Sinclair is next, and let us not forget the Atari 400/800 (my first computer was an 800 with TWO count 'em TWO cartridge slots!!).

Vista Is Ready. Are You?

Peter O'Kelly references in his blog: Vista Is Ready. Are You? - New York Times Given desktop and laptop prices today, and the new Vista utilities for migrating apps and files, buying a new PC isgoing to be the sensible option for most people.

So if you have to buy a new computer to run Vista, why not make it a Mac, especially given what's coming inLeopard (Mac OS X 10.5) next year? :-)

 

Catching up again

Some recent published articles of mine:

• Simplifying the branch office infrastructure - Network World
• Don't Forget About Compliance When Developing Collaboration Plans - Collaboration Loop
• Is Skype Becoming An Enterprise Collaboration Platform - Collaboration Loop