The Golden Rules of Data Cabling

Listing here the golden rules of data cabling. If your cabling is not designed and installed properly, you will have problems that you can’t even imagine.

1. Networks never get smaller or less complicated.
2. Build one cabling system that will accommodate voice and data.
3. Always install more cabling than you currently require. Those extra outlets will come in handy someday.
4. Use structured-cabling standards when building a new cabling system. Avoid anything proprietary!
5. Quality counts! Use high-quality cabling and cabling components. Cabling is the foundation of your network; if the cabling fails, nothing else will matter. For a given grade or category of cabling, you’ll see a range of pricing, but the highest prices don’t necessarily mean the highest quality. Buy based on the manufacturer’s reputation and proven performance, not the price.
6. Don’t scrimp on installation costs. Even quality components and cable must be installed correctly; poor workmanship has trashed more than one cabling installation.
7. Plan for higher speed technologies than are commonly available today. Just because 1000Base-T Ethernet seems unnecessary today does not mean it won’t be a requirement in five years.
8. Documentation, although dull, is a necessary evil that should be taken care of while you’re setting up the cabling system. If you wait, more pressing concerns may cause you to ignore it.

Five “Gotchas” When Negotiating an Outsourcing Agreement

by David Mitchell, Senior Consultan

While reducing cost is typically the primary benefit of outsourcing, you also want an outsourcing agreement that allows you to realize your immediate and long-term delivery needs, provides contract flexibility and ensures that you receive maximum value for the money you will be spending. To meet those objectives, pay careful attention to the five “gotchas” noted below.

Negotiating a good outsourcing agreement involves much more than just achieving the pricing you desire. As you go through the process, you will go through the normal “give and take” discussions as you work with your potential provider(s). However, it is important that you do not focus solely on pricing. While reducing cost is typically the primary value proposition for outsourcing, you also want an outsourcing agreement that allows you to realize your immediate and long-term delivery needs, provides contract flexibility and ensures that you receive maximum value for the money you will be spending. To meet those objectives, pay careful attention to the five “gotchas” noted below. These areas of the agreement, if not carefully structured, can drain value from your business case and decrease the probability of having a successful and sustainable outsourcing agreement.

1. Statement of Work

A Statement of Work (SOW), when created correctly, describes in great detail (typically 100+ pages for a full information technology outsourcing agreement) the services to be performed by the provider and also clarifies certain client responsibilities. The SOW describes WHAT will be done for the price. A few checkmarks in the wrong responsibility column or a handful of missing tasks can significantly change the amount of service the provider is to deliver and will result in misaligned expectations from the start of the contract. Because the SOW is the “meat” of what the provider will do for you, you need to ensure it fully describes the services you expect from the provider.

2. Service Levels

Service levels work in conjunction with the SOW to scope the services that the provider will deliver. They describe HOW MUCH and TO WHAT EXTENT the services described in the SOW are delivered. Service levels and assumed labor costs are two primary drivers in a provider’s cost model. It is important that the service levels reflect what you need even as you are negotiating price. Importantly, you should realize that the costs go up exponentially as you get closer to a 100% performance target. Outside consultants with market information can help you determine a fair price for the service levels you require. Additionally, there are important service level terms that should be included to allow you the freedom to add and change service levels and to re-allocate service level credits as your business needs change.

3. Termination Language

It can be hard to focus on termination language and termination charges at the beginning of an outsourcing relationship. Termination language is analogous to a prenuptial agreement – it is there “just in case” things do not work out as originally intended. As the final negotiations occur, you may be tempted to give a bit on the termination language in order to get to the price point you want. Depending on your starting point, some “give” might be acceptable but you first need to understand the ramifications if you need or want to get out of the agreement (or pieces of the agreement) in the future. Once the contract is signed, it can be especially difficult and costly to get out of it if the termination language is favorable to the provider.

4. Future Pricing

There are a number of factors to consider regarding future pricing. On the whole, you should expect your IT costs to go down over time due to improvements in hardware and software functionality and pricing, labor arbitrage, automation, and so forth. Because each situation is different, there are no easy “rules of thumb” to apply, but pay close attention to these specific areas:

• Year-over-Year Pricing – You should expect the unit pricing for most towers (possibly excluding applications due to its labor-centric nature) to go down each year, with the provider accepting the risk of continuously improving and streamlining its operations to achieve lower price points each year.
• Cost of Living Allowance (COLA) – From your perspective, it would be ideal to not have a COLA, but the reality is that many providers will require it to give some risk protection in the out years. Any sort of cost of living increases should be tied to a well-known government index. Each tower should have a “COLA index” that indicates the portion of the unit pricing that can be affected by a COLA index. They should be country-specific if you will be receiving labor from an offshore location, and they should be capped to reduce your risk.
• Variance Pricing – Many outsourcing contracts contain variance pricing based on resource usage. An assumed number of resources are built into the annual price, and then adjustments are made up or down based on actual monthly usage. The concept is simple, but you need to watch for how that will work for you based on your future growth assumptions. For example, if a provider expects that your business will grow over time, they may propose a lower base price to meet your initial price point, but then have a relatively high additional resource charge, or ARC rate, for additional volume.

5. Delivery Locations

In return for hitting your price point, a provider may want to include the freedom to deliver from whatever location they see fit. There are many risks associated with movement of work from one team to another, much less from one country to another. Because of the potential impact to your business, you want to make certain that you have some sort of approval authority prior to the movement of support functions. The provider may counter that they are accepting the risk because they are signing up for service levels. However, the potential business impact to you is much greater than their risk of incurring service level credits for missing a couple of metrics.

In summary, these five potential “gotchas” need to be managed closely through the negotiation process. Due to the variations and complexity inherent in each deal you should strongly consider the use of an outside outsourcing advisor to help. Because they understand your perspective as well as the providers’ point of view, they are ideally positioned to help manage through these items (as well as the many other items that will arise) and develop an outsourcing agreement that works well for both you and the provider.

(Sources - http://www.outsourcing-center.com)

Top 5 trends in enterprise IP telephony

by Irwin Lazar

So you’ve completed your enterprise IP telephony implementation, your systems are running without incident, and every person you meet in the hall stops you to shake your hand for all that you have done to improve their lives. It’s time to kick back and relax, right? Not quite. New options and services present challenges and opportunities to improve collaboration and reduce costs. So what comes next after full-scale enterprise IP telephony deployment?

In our research and consulting interviews with IT architects, we see the rise of five distinct trends in enterprise IP telephony shaping communications going forward:

1. Unified communications: While often a confusing term, we define UC as the joining of various real-time communications applications into a suite of integrated collaboration services. For most, this means tying telephony together with instant messaging, conferencing, unified messaging and video—enabling users to see each other’s presence status and initiate any form of communications via a single application. Over 60% of companies have some UC implementation under way, often starting with IM-telephony-presence integration before moving on to additional applications.

3. Video: Is video the next voice? Perhaps. As quality improves, prices fall, and workers are increasingly distributed, we are seeing an increase in video conferencing adoption. Desktop video is now an inherent feature in most UC platforms, while vendors including Avaya, Cisco, Microsoft and Polycom enable integration of UC desktop apps with room and immersive telepresence systems. Video hasn’t quite emerged as a replacement for voice, but we do see desktop video conferencing growing, primarily to enable distributed workers to join room-based meetings.

4. Virtualization: In the last few years, VoIP vendors including Avaya, Cisco, Microsoft, Mitel and Siemens have ported their IP PBX software to virtual appliances or general purpose hypervisors, enabling their customers to take advantage of lower infrastructure and operating costs. Now some of those same vendors are working to support voice and video via virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). VDI raises some particular thorny challenges thanks to the need to localize voice/video encapsulation, but it also offers the potential to reduce capital and operational expenses at the desktop.

5. Mobility: One of the most frequent questions I get is, “can I get rid of my desktop phones?” Companies are actively looking at extending telephony and UC capabilities to mobile users across a range of smartphone and tablet devices. While the ab ility to eliminate the expensive desktop phone (and the required Ethernet infrastructure) is attractive, be aware that mobile voice services require careful attention to wireless LAN (WLAN) architecture. For those on public wireless services, voice quality still lags behind that of a hard phone. Still, we see growing use cases, especially for field workers, where simply provisioning an integrated mobile phone makes a great deal of sense.

Now is not the time to rest on your laurels. While the enterprise IP telephony market is indeed maturing, there are still significant opportunities to reduce costs, improve services and drive innovation in your organization.

(Source : http://searchunifiedcommunications.techtarget.com)

About the author:

Irwin Lazar is the vice president for communications and collaboration research at Nemertes Research, where he develops and manages research projects, develops cost models, conducts strategic seminars and advises clients. Irwin is responsible for benchmarking the adoption and use of emerging technologies in the enterprise in areas including VoIP, unified communications, video conferencing, social computing, collaboration and advanced network services.

China May Buy $1 TRILLION of Gold: Bloomberg

Posted by Adam Sharp - Friday, April 29th, 2011

In an otherwise quiet article about central banks today, Bloomberg quoted an analyst who says China may use up to a third of their $3 trillion in foreign reserves to purchase gold. China has been moving away from the dollar, and into alternative stores of wealth for years now. But $1 trillion into gold? If it happens, such a large move would further threaten the dollar's status as reserve currency. It would also provide further buying pressure in gold for years to come (as the dollar crumples into a pitiful heap on the floor).

Bloomberg:

China’s Gold Reserves

China, which has just 1.6 percent of its reserves in gold, may invest more than $1 trillion in bullion, [Michael Pento of Euro Pacific Capital] said. “China wants to be an international player, and they need to own more gold than they currently have.”

...“China is out to have more gold than America, and Russia is aspiring to the same,” [Robert] McEwen, [the chief executive officer of producer U.S. Gold Corp] said yesterday in an interview in New York. “When you have debt, you don’t have a lot of flexibility. China wants to show its currency has more backing than the U.S.”

...China, with more than $3 trillion in foreign-currency reserves, plans to set up new funds to invest in precious metals, Century Weekly reported this week. Russia purchased 8 tons of gold in the first quarter.

This is a big reason gold and silver are headed higher. Occasional dips are inevitable, of course. When they happen bears will declare the bubble popped (after a one-week correction).

Then the uptrend will continue, intact. And they'll say, "bubble! bubble bubble bubble bubble, bubble!", again.

And gold bugs will be laughing all the way to the vault.

That's how I see it, anyway. Could be wrong, it's happened before. But, I did say the same thing when gold was $1140 in Why I'm Buying the Gold Dips in December 2009:

"The bottom line is that Bernanke and crew actually want inflation. It's easier than the alternatives: raising taxes or slashing spending. And it will help erase debts. It will also wipe out the savers and reward the borrowers — but that seems to be the path we're on, like it or not.

Besides, do you really think they will allow America's debt to be paid off with dollars worth more rather than less?

Of course not. Devaluing our currency and printing money are part of a strategy. A reckless and morally hazardous one, but still a strategy.

So that's why I still am bullish on precious metals. I'm hoping for a nice pullback in gold and silver. It'll be a great buying opportunity. Once everyone realizes that the Fed's printing presses are just getting warmed up, it'll be off to the races again."

The time will eventually (and sadly) come to sell significant amounts of precious metals, but I just don't see us being close to that point yet. Inning 4 or 5, if this were a ballgame, perhaps? "

Lots more printing ahead, though it's hard to say how much. My view has been that we see at least QE5 (possibly under a different name) and $3,500 gold and $150 silver before things top out.

It all depends on how much inflation the public will take before it declares shenanigans; forcing spending cuts and a tightening of monetary policy.

Then - after a (hopefully brief) adjustment period - America and the world will be on a path to sustainable growth. A time to move from being overweight in metals, and shift into stocks and real estate.

Updated 4/30/2011 for clarity.

(Sources - http://www.wealthwire.com)

Microsoft Buys Skype for $8.5Bn…? But Wait, There’s More!

By Russell Bennett May 10, 2011

I admit that I was taken by surprise by this morning’s news that Microsoft had acquired 65% of Skype for $8.5 billion (yes, I wasn’t paying attention on Sunday when GigaOm got the scoop). After the Skype IPO was put on hold there had been lots of rumors of Cisco/Facebook/Google being in discussions to buy Skype but I never heard that Microsoft was interested (and that was part of their plan, since they agreed the purchase price over three weeks ago). However, now that I have woken up to this news, I think I have a perspective that most of the baffled financial/trade press have yet to latch on to.

The more I think about it, the more the voice of the late infomercial king, Billy Mays, keeps ringing in my head: “But wait, there’s more!”

So this deal makes perfect sense to me: let’s see if it makes sense to you. From Microsoft’s perspective, Skype has a number of interesting attributes:

• Brand
• Network - 170m users
• Technology: Voice, video, IM; all running in "the cloud"
• Synergies
• Worldwide PSTN origination and termination deals
• Competitive strategy benefits
• Intellectual Property portfolio
• Luxembourg domicile

Brand and Network

In the modern vernacular, Skype is a verb: that is evidence alone of the value of the brand. (I know that the marketing professionals are divided on whether this is a good thing for the brand or a bad thing for the trademark, but I will let them continue to battle that one out.) Skype also has 170m registered users; although claims of registration for a ‘free’ service don’t directly translate to revenue, this is not a small number. However, if you add in the following statistics you start to get a sense that the service is compelling:

• 40% year on year growth;
• 600k new users per day;
• 207bn minutes in 2010;
• 30m concurrent users;
• 40% of usage is video.

These statistics (which will have been audited by Microsoft, knowing what I do about their "CorpDev" group) mean that the business has face value, but is there hidden value? I think so, and here is why.

Technology

I said in my UC Cloud Implications paper that scale is going to become a problem with UC in the cloud; particularly the issue of latency and local network bandwidth at the data center. Skype’s peer-to-peer technology for voice, video and IM&P neatly addresses this by distributing the load to the clients (even better than SIP does), theoretically making consumer/SMB cloud UC infinitely scalable. If you combine Skype’s emerging SMB product (which was being developed by three former Microsoft executives and Jonathan Rosenberg) with the emerging Microsoft 365 cloud service, then you have a winner with cloud based UC. Since both Skype and Lync use wide-band and internet-glitch-resilient codecs, the call/video quality will be much better than you will be able to get on any other service.

Synergies

There are clearly synergies between the Skype consumer service and existing Microsoft offers: Lync, Outlook, Xbox Live, Windows phone, Windows Live, Bing/search, the list goes on. Lync, which already has multi-modal federation with the Windows Live community will get a massive lift by being able to offer UC connections between its enterprise customers directly with their value chain partners; this is huge in and of itself – I commented on this in my Federation paper last month. Clearly Avaya had this idea first in announcing its partnership with Skype last year while both companies were owned by Silver Lake; since that service has not yet shipped, it will be interesting to see if it will ever ship (see Competitive Strategy below).

A counter-intuitive synergy (for conventional thinkers), is the ability for Skype to ship on non-Microsoft platforms (Mac, Linux, Android, etc. even the ubiquitous home TV!…). In the press conference this morning, Steve Ballmer stated that Skype would continue to support non-Microsoft platforms (they would be silly not to, IMHO) but in the Q&A session he was challenged on this again. The ability for Microsoft to ship UC and other clients on popular platforms has always been a goal for Microsoft, but it was something that it a) wasn’t very good at and b) never got much help on from the platform owners (for obvious reasons). Buying the technology expertise and the business relationships to enable cross-platform support is critical for Microsoft’s future success. Furthermore, Microsoft’s dependence on Windows is something that draws heavy fire from industry analysts; so I am not sure why anyone would be incredulous about this part of the acquisition strategy.

PSTN Termination and Origination

Clearly, Skype has built and extensive list of PSTN origination and termination deals to support their Skype In/Skype Out service. As I said in the Cloud UC and Federation papers, Microsoft is arguably building an alternative (UC) communications network with Lync and Microsoft 365 and needs to build those service provider relationships itself while rapidly being perceived as a competitor by those same service providers. So gaining access to the Skype PSTN connectivity neatly solves both problems for Microsoft and is a major advancement of their cloud UC strategy.

Competitive Strategy

Clearly a big part of this deal for Microsoft was preventing Cisco/IBM/Avaya/Google/Facebook/whoever from acquiring Skype – the classic business school "double whammy." (Not to mention the threat of Skype for Enterprise becoming a UC cloud competitor.) Of these competitors, only Google already has a credible consumer VoIP service; and Facebook now has to spend money and, more importantly, time in building a real-time communications service to support its truly enormous and vibrant social network.

As mentioned above, there is the possibility that this deal will allow Microsoft to kill the Avaya/Skype federation deal that was agreed late last year. I am sure that Avaya had a contract for this and that Skype will be committed to deliver on it. If for no other reason, both Avaya and Skype are owned by Silver Lake and they wouldn’t sell Skype to Microsoft without ensuring that Avaya wasn’t harmed in so doing. Or would they? Maybe this was part of the deal and was reflected into the sale price: only time will tell. Without doubt, Microsoft will ensure that they delineate the Avaya federation to the Skype user community and will not allow Avaya users to federate with Xbox Live users, for example.

There is of course Skype as a stand-alone business and access to its user community is as coveted by other eCommerce ventures as it was by Microsoft; only now even more so. I predict that many online businesses will be doing deals to use the Skype network in future and that the Skype business unit’s stand-alone P&L will start to grow quite handily. Of course, this was the value that eBay saw in Skype in 2005, it’s just that they were not able to realize that value, for whatever reason.

[As a side note, the 35% that eBay retained in 2009 when they sold the majority stake to Silver Lake was then worth $1 billion, it is worth $4.6 billion just 18 months later. Although eBay took a $900 million write down on the Skype acquisition in 2007, that was just financial engineering. eBay’s sale of Skype to Silver Lake in 2009 valued the company at $2.9 billion, which is approximately what they paid for it. So that makes the net profit for eBay on Skype, at today’s price, $3.8 billion ($4.6bn+$1.9bn-$2.7bn), excluding the tax benefit of the write down. Meg Whitman took a lot of flak for the Skype purchase, but she has had the last laugh.]

Intellectual Property

Skype has 32 approved patents and 36 filed patents in the US on all manner of topics related to peer2peer and IP communications. Given, as I said above, that peer2peer communications solves all kinds of UC scaling issues, and given that patent lawsuits against Microsoft are never less than $1 billion in damages, the price tag for this acquisition could be justified on the intellectual property inventory alone.

Luxembourg domicile

It has been commented in the financial press that Microsoft can unfairly use part of its $40 billion overseas cash pile to pay for Skype in Luxembourg while "avoiding" paying US tax. I think that this is a fatuous argument: all corporations use overseas money to pay overseas bills, it is just common sense.

However, the real pearl in the oyster with regard to the Luxembourg domicile is potentially the ability of Microsoft to side-step any future national regulation on IP communications (see my Cloud UC paper on this topic). Clearly I am not professionally qualified to comment on international law or national regulatory jurisdiction, but it seems intuitive that regulation of a communications service that has an overseas corporate domicile (with a profoundly liberal business environment), not to mention a communications technology that doesn’t have any national physical premises, just got a lot more difficult. Having said that, the Chinese government "switched off" Skype in the PRC in January of this year; however, the Chinese are clearly willing to go that extra mile further than many other sovereign governments.

Summary

I think that there is a lot more to this deal than meets the eye and I give credit to the Microsoft leadership for pulling it off. Of course, there is a gap between plan and execution so this deal may not yield all of its intended benefits. With only a few hours’ notice, the pundits can be forgiven for questioning the $8.5 billion price tag just because it represents a 350% profit for Silver Lake (and partners) in just 18 months. However, Microsoft has had many months to consider all the angles and I suspect that they believe that they got a good deal.

According to the Gartner Magic Quadrant for UC for 2010, Microsoft was the leader in UC, followed closely by Cisco and Avaya. The 2011 Magic Quadrant will make very interesting reading.

(Source : http://www.ucstrategies.com)

The 7 rules of successful IT outsourcing

How can CIOs protect themselves from the risks associated with outsourcing

By David Miller, Senior Consultant, ImprovIT | Computerworld UK | Published 16:19, 10 May 11

There is one thing about a honeymoon period that is universally true: it never lasts forever. So it is with IT outsourcing. No matter how promising the vendor relationship, no matter how ideal the solution and no matter how capable your outsourcer seems to be … the chances are better than even that at some point the project will be stopped - either permanently or temporarily.

This is especially the case with complex, enterprise-wide implementations like the electronic patient record (EPR) in the case of healthcare, or Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) in the corporate supply chain. As a rule of thumb, the more ambitious the project, the more room there is for scope creep, budget blowout, integration glitches, software bugs, testing failures and a variety of other downstream nightmares. In the worst cases, the catalogue of problems can be so extensive that multi-million pound projects are just quietly shelved, on the basis that what is required to bring the project into production faces the law of diminishing returns.

So, how can CIOs protect themselves from all this? How can they ensure that the burden of risk is on the oh-so-willing vendor and not on themselves? Well, here at ImprovIT we have put together seven rules of outsourcing which aims to ensure clients have the tools they need to a) negotiate the best price and b) ensure supplier contracts are framed in a way that favours the client - safeguarding them from these unforeseen risks.

1: Where possible enter into collaborative procurements. This is a growing trend in both the commercial and the public sector whereby organisations club together in new infrastructure projects or hardware renewal cycles for volume pricing advantage. Providing their aims are collaborative (which should be ascertained first), this collective bargaining can be very effective.

2: Know you know what you want. It is crucial that you are clear on the needs of your stakeholders and have made sure the vendor fully understands your requirements before work begins. Anything that is vague or relies on ‘figure-it-out-as-you-go’ may seem OK in the feel-good flush of a new relationship but loose ends can come back to haunt you when things get tough.

Unless everything is nailed-down, itemised and agreed upon upfront, it’s often difficult to predict the levels of complexity involved in the project. As implementation progresses, new requirements may be discovered and goal posts may shift. Unless the formal specification documentation is precise and contractual, vendors may be tempted to use any grey areas to either cut corners or add costs which can rapidly mount until they are out of control.

3: Always do your due diligence. You and your project team must be convinced your supplier has the track record to deliver. Since expensive, time-consuming legal redress for below-standard results and broken contracts is not a valid option. Take the time to speak with users and visit reference sites and companies that have been on the receiving end of the vendor's services. It’s odd that many customers will spend vast sums on a software installation but not take the time to see the solution in production.

4: Be proactive on pricing. Whether it’s a solution or service, don’t count on your supplier to point out the most cost-efficient options. By example, IT Service Level Agreements (SLAs) can be notoriously opaque and the terms often tend to favour the service provider. Unless specified, you may find on digging into the contract that you are paying for a premium 24/7 level of support when a 9-5pm/5 day one would be perfectly adequate.

5: Compare before you buy. It’s not always easy to work out if you are paying the fair market price for a service or solution, as it involves comparing different suppliers, each of whom bundles their products differently. This makes it difficult to break offerings down into components so that they can be compared on an apples-to-apples basis. And even if you could do this, market pricing data of this type (involving highly detailed service catalogues) is typically only available to specialist outsourcing consultancies.

6: Insist on phased delivery. Too often the first time a company sets eyes on its new software application is when it takes final delivery. At which point the vendor is paid and moves on, and the IT team is left to iron out the bugs – a process that can take longer than the build itself. Worse still, not infrequently the solution turns out to be something other than what was wanted. A simple way to avoid this is by insisting on a staged/agile delivery (and staged payments) so that each module can be tested and confirmed as fit for purpose.

Another way to avoid problems is to insist the vendor be responsible for all aspects of system implementation including guarantees that it performs as promised, is delivered on schedule and is maintained for its entire lifecycle.

7: Maintain the dialogue. Sometimes customer/outsourcer relationships break down simply due to lack of communication. This is most likely to happen when the service provider has taken over offsite management and maintenance of a company’s whole IT operation. Without clear direction from the client, or with messages left unreturned, drift occurs and a frustrated supplier can end up taking decisions by default, thus taking the client’s IT strategy in unintended directions. Or extra ad-hoc services are ordered by different departments directly with the provider without going through any internal management. Sometimes this activity only comes to light with the annual audit of outsourcing spend, with the CFO wondering why costs have exploded. Remember, to make outsourcing work, responsibility lies with the supplier AND the customer.

There are at least another, equally valid, set of rules for successful outsourcing but if you can tick off all of the above, then you are ahead of the curve in best practice sourcing.

(Source : http://www.computerworlduk.com)

For Microsoft, Skype Opens Vast New Market in Telecom

By STEVE LOHR Published: May 10, 2011

Microsoft has peered into the future, and placed a bet that people the world over want to stay in touch with someone anytime and anywhere — preferably at no cost.

In agreeing Tuesday to pay $8.5 billion to buy Skype, the pioneer in Internet phone calls, Microsoft is embracing a technology that is transforming the way people communicate at home and at work. And by stitching Skype technology into Microsoft products, used by hundreds of millions of people, the software giant could hasten the mainstream adoption of video communications, especially in businesses.

Microsoft, although rich and powerful, lags in new fields like smartphone software. Skype could help it better compete with the new giants of technology, like Google and Apple.

“Skype has been a forerunner, and this deal is Microsoft trying to become relevant in this new age of Internet communications,” said Berge Ayvazian, a telecommunications consultant. “It could really change things for Microsoft and accelerate the spread of this new technology.”

The future of communications, industry analysts and executives say, will be animated by Internet technology and rests increasingly on video calls, as well as voice and text messages. Skype started on personal computers less than a decade ago, but is now beginning to make its way onto smartphones. As it heads for living rooms with applications like at-home videoconferencing on digital televisions, it could change the way people make even the most routine calls.

This next generation of communications is both a threat and an opportunity to telecommunications and technology companies — a focus of energy, investment and anxiety for corporations including AT&T, Verizon, Apple, Google and Facebook.

Microsoft is betting that Skype can help change its fortunes. Skype is a leader in Internet voice and video communications, with 170 million users each month connected for more than 100 minutes on average. In the last year or two, video use has surged, now accounting for 40 percent of Skype’s traffic.

That large and active community of users represents a major asset, said Steven A. Ballmer, Microsoft’s chief executive. “It’s an amazing customer footprint,” Mr. Ballmer said in an interview. “And Skype is a verb, as they say.”

Mr. Ballmer never mentioned Google, Microsoft’s archrival whose name is used as a verb for Internet search. In that market, Microsoft is spending heavily to try to catch Google, and making some progress with its Bing engine, but at great financial cost.

Google, like Skype, has a free Internet phone call and video messaging service. So Microsoft, analysts say, is taking a bold step to grab a leadership position instead of risking falling behind Google in a crucial market and then facing the difficult task of trying to catch up.

“Skype gives Microsoft instant size and scale in this emerging market,” said Howard Anderson, a senior lecturer at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The merger with Skype, if successful, could give Microsoft a leading consumer Internet service — something it has lacked — and help lift its other businesses, like smartphone software, Office productivity programs and Xbox video game consoles, analysts say.

In doing so, Microsoft aims to keep people seamlessly connected at work or at home. “We want to enable communications across people’s lives,” Mr. Ballmer said in a press conference in San Francisco.

Skype, founded in 2003, is a creation of the new technology that is transforming telecommunications. “For some time, it has been clear that telecommunications is going to move to all-digital Internet technology,” said Kevin Werbach, an associate professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and a former official at the Federal Communications Commission. “Skype shows what can be done.”

Skype was founded by two entrepreneurs, one Swedish and one Danish, with software developed by a small team of programmers in Estonia. They deployed a version of peer-to-peer software, initially associated with illegal file-sharing of pirated music and movies. The voice and video travel over the Internet rather than dedicated phone landlines or cell tower networks.

Skype has had a bumpy ride as a business. EBay bought it for $2.6 billion in 2005, and then sold most of it to a private investors’ group in 2009, after eBay could not figure out how to make money on Skype.

Despite changes in ownership and management, Skype was a hit with users, offering mostly free calling between Skype users, while charging for some services to corporate users and for calls to traditional phone numbers. It also now sells advertisements.

Skype, based in Luxembourg, has recently made steady progress as a business. Its revenue rose 20 percent last year, to $860 million, and operating profit climbed to $264 million, though it had a net loss of $7 million after making its debt payments.

Skype also has built a formidable technical prowess. Most of its software programmers are in Tallinn, Estonia. “The secret sauce of Skype is its engineering team,” said Marc Andreessen, a founder of Netscape, which made the first commercial Internet browser, and one of the private investors in Skype. “These are world-class guys, every bit as good as anyone in Silicon Valley.”

Mr. Ballmer emphasized that Microsoft planned to expand Skype’s offerings and increase investment, and not cut back free offerings. Skype technology, he added, will help enhance Microsoft products. Mr. Ballmer said the Xbox Kinect, a game device with gesture-recognition features, could add Skype to become an at-home videoconferencing system. And Skype can also be linked to Microsoft’s business software including Office productivity programs and Lync, multimedia software for workers collaborating on projects.

Microsoft, whose growth has been lagging, could find a lucrative revenue stream in selling the service to companies. It might also benefit from placing advertisements on Skype. “There are a lot of great opportunities to optimize Skype services in Microsoft products,” Mr. Ballmer said.

Skype, analysts say, is evidence of the recent pattern of innovations coming first to the freewheeling consumer market — like instant messaging, social networks and video chat — and then cascading to businesses. “This deal is another sign of the consumerization of information technology,” said Ted Schadler, an analyst at Forrester Research.

The Microsoft-Skype deal, analysts suggest, also points to a rising wave of digital disruption in the telecommunications industry, as low-cost Internet-based communications put pressure on traditional carriers, especially their landline phone service. Says Mark R. Anderson, chief executive of the Strategic News Service, a technology newsletter, “The computer guys are going to teach the telecom carriers about the future of communications.”

(More Refer to : http://www.nytimes.com)

UN: Renewable energies can meet world’s power needs

By David Worthington | May 9, 2011, 5:35 PM PDT

The United Nations has found that renewable energy alone can meet global power needs - countering the burgeoning belief that nuclear power is the only viable solution.

Today, the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation (SRREN). The report painted a rosy future for renewable energy technologies.

IPCC’s working group of 120 researchers determined that nearly 80 percent of electricity could be generated through renewable sources by mid-century, eliminating between 220 to 560 Gigatonnes of carbon dioxide pollution by 2050.

This shift would hold the world’s temperature down two degrees Celsius, which meets the goal of the UN’s Cancun Agreements. The energy mix studied by IPCC includes forms of bioenergy, geothermal energy, hydropower, solar, and wind.

“With consistent climate and energy policy support, renewable energy sources can contribute substantially to human well-being by sustainably supplying energy and stabilizing the climate,” said professor Ottmar Edenhofer, the group’s current co-chair.

The report acknowledged political disagreement among developed economies vis-à-vis developing economies, and seeks to help policy makers understand that there are solutions for a collective way forward.

“What is unique about this assessment is that the IPCC allows us to draw on and bring together a broad spectrum of experts on each of the technologies reviewed in collaboration with scientists studying energy systems as a whole. It represents a systemic, broad, impartial and state of knowledge report on the present and future potential of a low carbon, more resource efficient energy path,” Edenhofer said.

Other key findings were:

• The energy potential of renewable technologies exceeds current global demand.
• Renewable energy capacity grew in 2009 across also categories in spite of the global economic downturn.
• Developing nations account for over 50 percent of the world’s current renewable energy capacity.
• Most reviewed scenarios showed that renewables would exceed the low carbon energy provided by nuclear power or fossil fuel power plants equipped with carbon capture technologies.
• There is no “one size fits all” policy for encouraging renewable power development.
• Some renewable power technologies can stand on their own today.
• Renewable energy solutions are not the only solution to reduce carbon emissions.

The IPCC working group also offered projection for different forms of renewable energy. See here There’s also a brief video overview of the findings.

“What is unique about this assessment is that the IPCC allows us to draw on and bring together a broad spectrum of experts on each of the technologies reviewed in collaboration with scientists studying energy systems as a whole. It represents a systemic, broad, impartial and state of knowledge report on the present and future potential of a low carbon, more resource efficient energy path,” Edenhofer said.

The report stands in contrast to recent comments made by public figures such as Microsoft CEO Bill Gates who endorsed nuclear power at a conference in New York last week. Gates dismissed renewable technologies as “cute,” but unable to meet energy demands.

Gates noted that there is a lot of room for innovation in nuclear reactor designs. “The room to do things differently is quite dramatic,” he said. Gates is not a disinterested party: He has invested in nuclear power company TerraPower.

(Reference - http://www.smartplanet.com

Life and the Cosmos, Word by Painstaking Word

By CLAUDIA DREIFUS

Published: May 9, 2011

TEMPE, Ariz. — Like Einstein, he is as famous for his story as for his science.At the age of 21, the British physicist Stephen Hawking was found to have amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Lou Gehrig’s disease. While A.L.S. is usually fatal within five years, Dr. Hawking lived on and flourished, producing some of the most important cosmological research of his time. 

In the 1960s, with Sir Roger Penrose, he used mathematics to explicate the properties of black holes. In 1973, he applied Einstein’s general theory of relativity to the principles of quantum mechanics. And he showed that black holes were not completely black but could leak radiation and eventually explode and disappear, a finding that is still reverberating through physics and cosmology.

Dr. Hawking, in 1988, tried to explain what he knew about the boundaries of the universe to the lay public in “A Brief History of Time: From Big Bang to Black Holes.” The book sold more than 10 million copies and was on best-seller lists for more than two years.

Today, at 69, Dr. Hawking is one of the longest-living survivors of A.L.S., and perhaps the most inspirational. Mostly paralyzed, he can speak only through a computerized voice simulator.

On a screen attached to his wheelchair, commonly used words flash past him. With a cheek muscle, he signals an electronic sensor in his eyeglasses to transmit instructions to the computer. In this way he slowly builds sentences; the computer transforms them into the metallic, otherworldly voice familiar to Dr. Hawking’s legion of fans.

It’s an exhausting and time-consuming process. Yet this is how he stays connected to the world, directing research at the Center for Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Cambridge, writing prolifically for specialists and generalists alike and lecturing to rapt audiences from France to Fiji.

Dr. Hawking came here last month at the invitation of a friend, the cosmologist Lawrence Krauss , for a science festival sponsored by the Origins Project of Arizona State University. His lecture, “My Brief History,” was not all quarks and black holes. At one point, he spoke of the special joys of scientific discovery.

“I wouldn’t compare it to sex,” he said in his computerized voice, “but it lasts longer.” The audience roared.

The next afternoon, Dr. Hawking sat with me for a rare interview. Well, a kind of interview, actually.

Ten questions were sent to his daughter, Lucy Hawking, 40, a week before the meeting. So as not to exhaust her father, who has grown weaker since a near-fatal illness two years ago, Ms. Hawking read them to him over a period of days.

During our meeting, the physicist played back his answers. Only one exchange, the last, was spontaneous. Yet despite the limitations, it was Dr. Hawking who wanted to do the interview in person rather than by e-mail.

Some background on the second query, the one about extraterrestrials. For the past year, Lucy Hawking was writer in residence at the Origins Project at Arizona State University. As part of her work, she and Paul Davies, a physicist at Arizona State, started a contest, “Dear Aliens,” inviting Phoenix schoolchildren to write essays about what they might say to space beings trying to contact Planet Earth.

Q. Dr. Hawking, thank you so much for taking time to talk to Science Times. I’m wondering, what is a typical day like for you?

A. I get up early every morning and go to my office where I work with my colleagues and students at Cambridge University. Using e-mail, I can communicate with scientists all over the world.

Obviously, because of my disability, I need assistance. But I have always tried to overcome the limitations of my condition and lead as full a life as possible. I have traveled the world, from the Antarctic to zero gravity. (Pause.) Perhaps one day I will go into space.

Q. Speaking of space: Earlier this week, your daughter, Lucy, and Paul Davies, the Arizona State University physicist, sent a message into space from an Arizona schoolchild to potential extraterrestrials out there in the universe. Now, you’ve said elsewhere that you think it’s a bad idea for humans to make contact with other forms of life. Given this, did you suggest to Lucy that she not do it? Hypothetically, let’s say as a fantasy, if you were to send such a message into space, how would it read?

A. Previously I have said it would be a bad idea to contact aliens because they might be so greatly advanced compared to us, that our civilization might not survive the experience. The “Dear Aliens” competition is based on a different premise.

It assumes that an intelligent extraterrestrial life form has already made contact with us and we need to formulate a reply. The competition asks school-age students to think creatively and scientifically in order to find a way to explain human life on this planet to some inquisitive aliens. I have no doubt that if we are ever contacted by such beings, we would want to respond.

I also think it is an interesting question to pose to young people as it requires them to think about the human race and our planet as a whole. It asks students to define who we are and what we have done.

Q. I don’t mean to ask this disrespectfully, but there are some experts on A.L.S. who insist that you can’t possibly suffer from the condition. They say you’ve done far too well, in their opinion. How do you respond to this kind of speculation?

A. Maybe I don’t have the most common kind of motor neuron disease, which usually kills in two or three years. It has certainly helped that I have had a job and that I have been looked after so well.

I don’t have much positive to say about motor neuron disease. But it taught me not to pity myself, because others were worse off and to get on with what I still could do. I’m happier now than before I developed the condition. I am lucky to be working in theoretical physics, one of the few areas in which disability is not a serious handicap.

Q. Given all you’ve experienced, what words would you offer someone who has been diagnosed with a serious illness, perhaps A.L.S.?

A. My advice to other disabled people would be, concentrate on things your disability doesn’t prevent you doing well, and don’t regret the things it interferes with. Don’t be disabled in spirit, as well as physically.

Q. About the Large Hadron Collider, the supercollider in Switzerland, there were such high hopes for it when it was opened. Are you disappointed in it?

A. It is too early to know what the L.H.C. will reveal. It will be two years before it reaches full power. When it does, it will work at energies five times greater than previous particle accelerators.

We can guess at what this will reveal, but our experience has been that when we open up a new range of observations, we often find what we had not expected. That is when physics becomes really exciting, because we are learning something new about the universe.

Q. I’m wondering about your book “A Brief History of Time.” Were you surprised by the enormous success of it? Do you believe that most of your readers understood it? Or is it enough that they were interested and wanted to? Or, in another way: what are the implications of your popular books for science education?

A. I had not expected “A Brief History of Time” to be a best seller. It was my first popular book and aroused a great deal of interest.

Initially, many people found it difficult to understand. I therefore decided to try to write a new version that would be easier to follow. I took the opportunity to add material on new developments since the first book, and I left out some things of a more technical nature. This resulted in a follow-up entitled “A Briefer History of Time,” which is slightly briefer, but its main claim would be to make it more accessible.

Q. Though you avoid stating your own political beliefs too openly, you entered into the health care debate here in the United States last year. Why did you do that?

A. I entered the health care debate in response to a statement in the United States press in summer 2009 which claimed the National Health Service in Great Britain would have killed me off, were I a British citizen. I felt compelled to make a statement to explain the error.

I am British, I live in Cambridge, England, and the National Health Service has taken great care of me for over 40 years. I have received excellent medical attention in Britain, and I felt it was important to set the record straight. I believe in universal health care. And I am not afraid to say so.

Q. Here on Earth, the last few months have just been devastating. What were your feelings as you read of earthquakes, revolutions, counter-revolutions and nuclear meltdowns in Japan? Have you been as personally shaken up as the rest of us?

A. I have visited Japan several times and have always been shown wonderful hospitality. I am deeply saddened for my Japanese colleagues and friends, who have suffered such a catastrophic event. I hope there will be a global effort to help Japan recover. We, as a species, have survived many natural disasters and difficult situations, and I know that the human spirit is capable of enduring terrible hardships.

Q. If it is possible to time-travel, as some physicists claim, at least theoretically, is possible, what is the single moment in your life you would like to return to? This is another way of asking, what has been the most joyful moment you’ve known?

A. I would go back to 1967, and the birth of my first child, Robert. My three children have brought me great joy.

Q. Scientists at Fermilab recently announced something that one of our reporters described as “a suspicious bump in their data that could be evidence of a new elementary particle or even, some say, a new force of nature.” What did you think when you heard about it? A. It is too early to be sure. If it helps us to understand the universe, that will surely be a good thing. But first, the result needs to be confirmed by other particle accelerators.

Q. I don’t want to tire you out, especially if doing answers is so difficult. But I’m wondering: The speech you gave the other night here in Tempe, “My Brief History,” was very personal. Were you trying to make a statement on the record so that people would know who you are?

A. (After five minutes.) I hope my experience will help other people.

(Reference - http://www.nytimes.com)

Contrite Cisco Regroups Before Skeptical Wall Street

By VERNE G. KOPYTOFF

Published: May 8, 2011

SAN FRANCISCO — John T. Chambers, one of the best salesmen in Silicon Valley, has been having trouble selling anyone on his company’s future.

Cisco Systems, where he is chief executive, is in a slump. The management system he put in place slowed decision-making and innovation. The company’s growth has slowed and its profits are falling.

His latest sales pitch is that he can revive Cisco — a technology colossus that makes computer networking equipment — by pruning its sprawling business and refocusing on its strengths.

But investors, Wall Street analysts and customers are a little bit skeptical of Mr. Chambers’s promises. No major improvement in Cisco’s finances is expected when it reports third quarter earnings on Wednesday. Given Cisco’s size, the scope of the overhaul and the increasing competition that is eroding the company’s market share, a turnaround could take time.

Last week, Cisco said it would reduce bureaucracy by eliminating a crazy-quilt management structure that had executives responsible for geographic regions as well as serving on “councils” that were supposed to encourage cooperation between the different groups. Instead, it slowed decision-making.

Last month, Mr. Chambers, who declined to be interviewed for this article, took his first step to fix Cisco by suddenly shutting down its Flip video camera business. Only two years earlier, Cisco had acquired Flip’s parent company for $590 million to expand its nascent consumer products division. The camera was popular and, indeed, the company was days away from release of the latest version of the video camera.

“This isn’t simply a midcourse correction,” said Jeffrey Kvaal, an analyst with Barclays Capital. “They’re facing challenges that are multi-year.”

The doubt in Mr. Chambers’s sales pitch began last year when Cisco’s sales started to show weakness that Mr. Chambers initially attributed to the sour economy. When profits continued to wither quarter after quarter, Mr. Chambers alternately blamed a decline in government spending and a “transition” after the introduction of new switches for computer networks.

In the last 12 months, its shares have fallen 31 percent as the Nasdaq index gained 22 percent. While Cisco’s shares fell, those of its rivals like Juniper Networks rose 35 percent. Alcatel-Lucent’s shares doubled.

In April, in a memo to employees, Mr. Chambers acknowledged systematic problems at Cisco. He blamed slow decision-making and a lack of accountability. “We have disappointed our investors and we have confused our employees,” Mr. Chambers wrote. “Bottom line, we have lost some of the credibility that is foundational to Cisco’s success — and we must earn it back.”

The contrition is unusual for Mr. Chambers, who is known for his unwavering optimism during his 16 years leading Cisco. He has paused his cheerleading only once before — during the dot-com crash more than a decade ago, when Cisco was unprepared for customers sharply cutting back orders. Cisco had been one of the hottest companies of the Internet boom of the 1990s with a high-flying stock to match. Much of the blame for its shortcomings fell on Mr. Chambers, much as it does today.

The last few years should have been golden for Cisco. Telecommunications companies worldwide were rapidly expanding their infrastructure to accommodate growing traffic from online streaming and mobile phones.

But Cisco failed to keep pace with changes in the network switching and routing equipment, which accounts for nearly half its revenue. The industry has shifted from more standardized technology — a landscape in which Cisco thrived — to specialized equipment for various niche markets.

For example, Cisco’s market share in edge routers, used by Internet providers to route traffic near the edges of their networks, dropped 11 percentage points over three years to 42.2 percent in 2010, according to the Dell’Oro Group, a market research firm.

“They’ve been lagging,” said Shin Umeda, an analyst with the Dell’Oro Group. “As a result, the competitors have been able to move in.”

Rivals like Alcatel-Lucent and Juniper Networks grabbed market share from Cisco in edge routers. Meanwhile upstarts like F5, based in Seattle, have chipped away at Cisco in other specialized markets like the equipment for controlling the load on Web servers in data centers.

Analysts said Cisco stumbled because Mr. Chambers distracted the company by trying to push into new businesses like videoconferencing, smart meters for monitoring electricity use, television set-top boxes, video screens for stadiums and even a tablet computer for businesses. These initiatives, called “adjacencies” within the company, were supposed to be the foundation of future growth.

Some of them have gained momentum, like Cisco’s corporate voice-over-Internet telephone systems and WebEx, the business videoconferencing service it acquired four years ago. But others, like the consumer products and digital signs, failed to catch on or are so far afield from the company’s main focus that analysts say Cisco is better off without them.

In addition to cutting Flip, Cisco folded its Umi home videoconferencing into its business-oriented unit. Eos, a service for media and entertainment companies to manage online content, will most likely be discontinued as a stand-alone product or sold. So far, Cisco has cut 550 jobs, but it has also offered voluntary buyouts to some of its employees in the United States and Canada.

Despite Cisco’s troubles, the company remains a powerful force with $40 billion in annual revenue and nearly 73,000 employees.

Still, more reorganization at Cisco is expected. The Linksys unit, which sells routers for home networking, is among the most likely targets because of its lower profit margins, analysts said. Cisco is expected to pay closer attention to its main router and switching businesses.

In his memo, Mr. Chambers largely signaled as much by saying that Cisco will “compete to win in the core.”

He added that the company’s breadth of products gave it a big advantage.

However, achieving the long-term goals of up to 17 percent annual revenue growth is no easy feat for a company so big. Indeed, Mr. Kvaal, the Barclays analyst, said that he would be happy if Cisco simply shored up its business and kept up with the networking industry’s growth.

Sales of switches are expected to be flat this year, but grow 6 percent the following three years, according to the Dell’Oro Group. Router sales are supposed to grow 9 percent annually over that period.

“Cisco doesn’t have to be a market-share gainer, they just have to hold onto the share they have,” Mr. Kvaal said. “They have taken the first step, but it’s not the only step.”

(Reference - http://www.nytimes.com)

Siti Nurhaliza di Malam Gala SimplySiti UiTM Shah Alam

Pada 9hb julai 2011 ini akan berlangsung konsert Datuk Siti Nurhaliza di Dewan Agong Tuanku Canselor, UiTM Shah Alam sempena setahun produk SimplySiti yang diasaskan oleh Dato’ Siti Nurhaliza berada di pasaran, beberapa orang artis ternama akan turut bersama Datuk Siti Nurhaliza menjayakan Malam Gala SimplySiti untuk menghiburkan para hadirin dan pelanggan produk SS pada malam tersebut.

Malam Gala SimplySiti ini menjadi lebih istimewa dengan kerana ia akan turut menyaksikan suatu kolaborasi unik di antara SimplySiti dan sebuah institusi pengajian tinggi yang ulung tanahair kita. Buat julung-julung kalinya.

Tetamu Kehormat :

Y. Bhg. Dato’ Prof Ir Dr Sahol Hamid Abu Bakar, Naib Canselor UITM, Y.Bhg Dato’ Siti Nurhaliza, Presiden SimplySiti dan Y.Bhg Dato’ Sri Khalid Mohamad Jiwa.

Selamat ulangtahun pertama SIMPLYSITI. Tahniah buat semua warga kerja, staff dan juga peminat yang menjayakannya. Tahniah Dato’ Siti Nurhaliza. Semoga SimplySiti terus berkembang maju untuk tahun yang mendatang.

Analysis: Skype, better with Facebook than Google?

By Jennifer Saba

NEW YORK | Fri May 6, 2011 7:33am EDT

(Reuters) - As two Internet powerhouses slug it out to tie the knot with Skype, Facebook looks likely to be a more aggressive suitor than Google, and the world's largest social network may make for a better fit.

Reuters reported Wednesday that Facebook and Google are separately weighing partnerships with Skype, the popular web video telephony service used by millions around the globe for communication.

Talks with Facebook and Google are still preliminary, but any deal could involve an outright takeout or a joint venture partnership, two sources told Reuters.

A deal involving Skype, which is readying for an IPO, could be valued at $3 billion to $4 billion, the first source said. Skype's public offering is expected to raise about $1 billion, several other sources said.

Analysts and technology observers are betting on Facebook, in the belief the two make better companions and that Skype completes Facebook by providing assets it does not have.

"It's not surprising to me that both these companies are interested," said Eric Jackson, founder and manager of the investment firm Ironfire Capital. "It's a much more valuable asset to Facebook than to Google."

Google already has voice chat and video capabilities, though Skype is a more robust product, said Rory Maher, an analyst with Hudson Square Research.

It could incorporate Skype into Google Voice, and even get some social-media credibility after it failed in an attempt to do so with Buzz.

"There are benefits that Google has from combining Skype, but I think it's less clean than it is for Facebook," says Maher.

Conversely, Facebook has that much more incentive to snap up Skype because it would encourage people to spend more time on the site than they already do -- virtually the social network's raison d'etre.

"Communication is core to what Facebook users do," said Mo Koyfman, a principal at the venture capital firm Spark Capital. "Owning that platform would be very interesting."

Google, Facebook and Skype declined to comment.

THE ART OF SKYPE

Skype is still on track for an IPO later in 2011, raising as much as $1 billion by some estimates. That it has become the belle of the ball, attracting the interest of the Internet's two most dominant powers, bodes well for its debut.

Last year, Skype boasted about 124 million connected users every month by the end of June. But just 8.1 million were paying customers, using Skype to make calls to traditional phones at discounted rates.

The company was founded in 2003 and bought by eBay two years later for $3.1 billion. Ebay then sold a majority stake in Skype to an investor group in 2009, while keeping about a third of the company.

Now, both Skype and Facebook could tap new users worldwide while Facebook stands to gain a new revenue stream, Koyfman said.

Facebook had net income of $355 million in the first nine months of 2010 on revenue of $1.2 billion. It is one of a handful of Internet companies including Twitter, Groupon and Zynga that have stoked interest from investors eager to jump on the social media bandwagon.

And it has also put the big Internet guns -- including Google -- on alert.

Indeed, some speculate that Google could be bidding for Skype just to keep it out of the hands of other companies.

"Any deal that takes a great asset away from Facebook is a win for Google," suggested Ironfire Capital's Jackson.

(Reporting by Jennifer Saba; Editing by Edwin Chan and Steve Orlofsky)

(Reference : http://www.reuters.com)

An Open Letter To Dr. Richard Stallman (Free Software Foundation Founder)

Dear Dr. Stallman,

Thank you for coming to Penn and giving a talk on A Free Digital Society; it was an honor meeting you. You mentioned that what you expected of us was to help the Free Software Foundation however we could; I'd like to take you up on that and offer both yourself and the FSF the following advice:

Stop marginalizing yourself

You make a number of very valid points. When a program is distributed without its source code, users don't have as much control as they would otherwise. Internet censorship is on the rise and presents a serious and credible threat to society. DRM is an example of false scarcity and doesn't make sense in the long run. But every time you use the word Big Brother or call the Kindle "Swindle," or make an aside like "even if you believe that the government had nothing to do with the attacks of September 2001," you go from making an interesting argument about freedom to being the crazy guy shouting at cars on the side of the road.

Most FSF marketing materials follow this "you're not listening to us, so we're going to make increasingly outlandish claims" approach. The closest comparison that I can make between the FSF would have to be the Lyndon LaRouche movement.

There are numerous arguments in support of Free Software that I can think of that do not have to involve a conspiratorialist tirade. When you talk about the risk of software as a service, you can mention that the US gov't is attempting to collect identifying user data from the Wikileaks Twitter account, or the recent domain name seizures of PokerStars and other online gambling websites. These are practical consequences of a lack of Free Software and, arguably, places where the government has been overstepping its bounds. These are the arguments I would have loved to hear from you, presented in an even tone and without the usual snark.

Baby steps

In today's world, it's not realistic to ask most users to completely abandon all proprietary software immedialy. Proprietary software is usually better, especially when it comes to UI Design and User Experience. When a student confronted you with this, you responded that if we truly valued freedom we would not mind the inconvenience of (for example) emailing copies of documents around instead of collaborating via Google Docs.

Dr. Stallman, Google Docs is really useful. I imagine you're unlikely to have tried the service yourself, abstaining as you have from proprietary software for the past several decades. It may be worth trying the service out, if only to better relate to your target audience.

Dr. Stallman, you like to use the argument that proprietary software is like a drug, so let me extend that analogy: today's proprietary stuff isn't marijuana; it's heroin, and it's really, really good. You don't get somebody off heroin by lecturing them about how they should value their freedom; you switch them over to methadone for a while and let them slowly detox.

To that end, please stop accusing users unwilling to shift to inferior software as haters of freedom; all you are doing is insulting us and inviting us to ignore you. Instead, consider offering practical alternatives and first steps for products that you would recommend. We live in a world where having the technological edge makes the difference between success and failure; asking us to just give up that edge for a theoretical idea of freedom is not going to work.

Do what you do best

Dr. Stallman, I have a tremendous amount of respect for your contributions to GNU, emacs and gdb amongst others. You are a man of considerable intellect and programming ability. That said, I nor the people that I spoke with about your talk found you to be a particularly charismatic or persuasive speaker. The only people that seemed convinced by your speech were the ones who had already been leaning towards your point of view to start with. Several friends of mine who had not heard of the FSF before left half way through because they were so put off by some of conspiratorial rhetoric above.

I wonder whether the Free Software movement might be better served if you spent more of your time mentoring up-and-coming hackers and writing free software that matches in elegance and quality some of the software that you have written in the past. When we asked, you mentioned that you do not write much code anymore. That's a shame.

(From - http://alexeymk.com/dear-dr-stallman-an-open-letter)

Convergence Enterprise Communications. Information Technology (IT) and The Cloud

Over the last ten years, there has been a rapidly accelerating series of convergences in the communications world. The world of telephony has changed forever, from its roots in traditional Plain Old Telephone (POT) voice through an initial convergence with IP networks.

The TDM PBX was self-contained and comfortable – a separate network, proprietary hardware, proprietary devices, specialist communications personnel. The argument for moving to IP telephony has been focused towards reducing costs and offering new functionality by utilising data networks to carry voice traffic.

While it is true that rationalization of two separate networks into a single infrastructure has simplified the corporate network architecture, the reality has been the replacement of one set of proprietary appliances with another. Maintaining high quality voice calls over a shared data network has also provided an additional challenge. Communications application suites designed to enhance the user experience with IP telephony systems often have been no more sophisticated than similar applications used with TDM systems.

IP telephony has delivered on some of its promises but the overall benefits to the enterprise have been questionable. In many ways the status quo has been preserved, with ownership transferred from telecoms personnel to the data networking groups within the IT department. However it has transported telephony away from its isolated silo and connected it to the IT world, laying the foundation for subsequent rounds of convergence and further potential benefits to the enterprise.

The concept of ‘unified communications’ is compelling, the convergence of all methods of communicating between two or more people, from any application, using any device, at any location, via the most appropriate route, enabling effective collaboration with business-grade security.

But what does it really mean? Over the last few years there has been an avalanche of vendor product announcements, hijacking and redefining the term ‘unified communications’ to reflect the feature sets of their products. To make matters worse, there has been a singular lack of emphasis on the key message – explaining the real benefits of unified communications. Sadly, the concept has been diluted and hugely devalued in the process. Unified communications ‘products’ from different vendors often have little in common with each other, other than some degree of presence management and instant messaging.

As a reaction to this, some vendors are starting to rebrand their products as ‘collaboration’ rather than the somewhat out of favour ‘unified communications’.

At the same time, mobile devices have become smart. We have come a long way from the early mobile phones – dumb handsets with primitive features. Today’s generation of intelligent mobile devices are some of the most sophisticated technology items aimed at the individual and often a fashion accessory at the same time. Little wonder that some of these devices make traditional phones seem antiquated.

But the fixed and mobile worlds are now converging at a phenomenally fast speed, offering advantages to the increasingly flexible and mobile workforce of today. It is now perfectly feasible and becoming more commonplace to use a mobile phone instead of a desk phone. In some cases this is the result of simply replacing the enterprise PBX with mobile phones. However, more sophisticated variants allow seamless handover from mobile carrier networks to enterprise networks, using wireless LAN infrastructure or femtocell technology. These are focused at reducing call costs by moving communications traffic in one of two different directions: towards the enterprise communications system or alternatively towards the carrier network.

More recently, many IT vendors have become aware of the growing opportunity arising from the convergence of the IT and communications worlds. The opportunity is to integrate communications totally within IT systems. This disruptive yet exciting development heralds the dawn of a new age of communications.

The traditional approach from the communication vendor community has been to deploy user-facing applications to control functionality on the communications platform. The approach adopted by the IT community, primarily by software vendors, has been to develop some communications functionality within their applications. Often the two worlds have been connected by gateways or middleware to try and deliver a seamless experience.

As these have been enhanced, we are seeing the emergence of early communications-enabled applications, often the desktop applications commonly used by workers. But the underlying technologies are still not well integrated.

The melting pot of the converging IT and communications worlds is now becoming a noisy place. Unfortunately as the hype increases in volume, it is becoming more confusing for the enterprise to understand the real differences between the various approaches. Significantly, vendors from all sides are struggling to escape from the confines of their traditional products.

‘Communications-enabled business processes’ (CEBP) is being used by some to try and show that they are thinking out of the box. But scratch the surface a little and it becomes very clear that most vendors are unable to explain what this means. Businesses processes have always required communication and collaboration between people. CEBP suggests that this becomes more automated in some way. But where are the examples?

Ignoring the hype, this leaves us with a converged IT and communications zone that is very flat and uninspiring, in many ways two-dimensional.

In order to understand how to move beyond this dead zone, it is fundamentally important to consider communications as a part of the overall IT strategic plan of an organization.

Let’s look at one of the top issues for a CIO – virtualization. What is the primary driver here? In the current economic situation, reducing costs is not optional. It is mandatory. It is not just servers that can be virtualized, but also PCs, storage, applications. Virtualization allows costs to be reduced in many ways, reducing hardware investment, reducing power consumption, reducing management complexity – the list is a long one.

Some communications vendors have jumped on the server virtualization bandwagon but this is not innovative – it is an IT imperative driven by critical business needs. All communications activity needs to be capable of being virtualized, just like any other application. Communications servers and applications need to be virtualized, and capable of being deployed over thin client virtual desktops – the business benefit being not only to reduce costs but also to facilitate new, flexible working models.

Network bandwidth is increasing all the time. What we do today was unthinkable a couple of years ago, from both a technology and commercial perspective. Tomorrow’s networks will be even faster and cheaper.

Virtualization (which implies centralized IT architectures) and high speed networks are two fundamental components that take us to a tipping point in IT architectural terms. The enterprise and the worker become less interested in where their platforms and applications are being hosted. The concept of services from the cloud becomes reality. Centralized systems connected to remote locations using high-speed networks allow cloud services to be provided quickly. Centralization brings cost savings leading to new utility pricing and deployment models.