Have been trying out the Vonage softphone with some success. My Laptop (IBM T40), like most, has built in speakers and microphone, and I don’t want to have to bother with a headset. The problem is that there doesn’t appear to be any way of controlling the echo that the person I am calling hears when the mic. picks up the sound of their own voice from the laptop speakers feeding back into it. I can’t find any third party, echo cancelling, software to turn the laptop into a decent hands free phone. Another question that springs to mind is why the softphone software is better than the reliability and ease of use of voice conversations via an IM client – why are these so unreliable? In general it seems that IM clients switch to peer-to-peer when dealing with file transfers or voice and this is often screwy, but there…

Salesforce.com files for IPO After ditching its Salesforce.com rival, Sales.com, Siebel is now doing a complete U-turn with its own Salesforce-like ASP tool. Call me old-fashioned but most Enterprise software seems to suck. When will it go the way of mainframe computers? The whole notion of spending millions for software that is ‘bespoke’ tailored to your needs, but requires you to do that tailoring yourself for more millions, based on a Return On Investment that has a minus sign in front of it, seems like, well, old-fashioned. The tool I am using to write this is a more elegant solution to web publishing than the raft of Jurassic CMS systems that are waiting for an enormous meteorite to hit them. ASP software is a car and enterprise software is a steam train. When the .com bubble burst people tried to make steam driven cars out of the remnants and that…

Anniversary of first flight – Dec. 17, 2003 Exactly 100 years ago today: flying made possible. This year, top speed for a commercial airliner: 1350mph Next year, top speed for a commercial airliner: 650mph Computers, the Net, telephones and air travel all make the world a smaller place, but exactly 100 years after the invention of flight that is no longer the case. Moore’s law applied to computing and the spread of the net, arguably shows the world shrinking by half its size every year and a half. For travel, the plane shrank the apparent size of the earth to one tenth over 50 years, it then shrank by half again over the next 20 years; 20 years later it shrank by another half with supersonic passenger travel. This year it didn’t merely stop shrinking, but it doubled in size.

Microsoft’s partnership with Loudeye will allow third parties to develop Apple Music Store style services: “But the Digital Music Store lets any company interested in starting an iTunes-style service do so for a fraction of the cost, said Loudeye President Jeff Cavins”