Source: alanweinkrantz.typepad.com

AT&T has  announced that its AT&T U-verse TV ranks highest in customer satisfaction among residential television customers in all three regions where it was ranked, according to the J.D. Power and Associates 2008 Residential Television Service Provider Satisfaction Study.

In the annual study of television service, customers cited AT&T for exceptional performance and reliability, customer service, cost of service, billing, and offerings and promotions.

While all of these issues are important, I wonder why J.D. Power is not asking more in-depth questions about how and why users are switching to AT&T- and why.

I also think it would behoove J.D. Power to ask if users know and understand what an IP network is, what you can do with an IP network in your home, and how / why IP is a disruptive force.

Anyone out there care to chime in?

Email me: alan at weinkrantz dot com.

Source: alanweinkrantz.typepad.com

AT&T Inc.  has just announced  the launch of "My Communities," a new downloadable gateway that lets users create and manage multiple social networking accounts through a single dashboard view on their mobile phone.

My Communities was developed by Intercasting Corporation, a leading mobile social networking company. The launch coincides with recent data showing that a majority of social networking users maintain multiple accounts and that a growing number are maintaining their social networks primarily by using wireless handsets.

Uh….Where’s FaceBook?

At first glace this looks great, but digging deeper into this, even with MySpace, Xanga, LiveJournal and many more, FaceBook somehow fell off the face of this offering.

A few cool features though:

• Through My Communities, subscribers can register for social sites directly from their phone without ever having to go to the Web, a feature not common with most other social networking applications
• From an easy-to-use dashboard view, My Communities users can upload photos from their phone, view and respond to new messages, approve and deny friend requests and view and post new comments across multiple sites. Users can alternatively click to enter a specific site for a more customized experience. Updates are synched across mobile and online channels in real time.
• Subscribers can also access their phone, camera, media gallery and address book while My Communities is running, which enables them, for example, to upload photos to use on one or more social networks and send site content to phone contacts without closing the application.

If you have an iPhone, you can download most free Social Networking sites and not have to pay for this type of service.

My Communities is available on more than 30 devices for a monthly subscription of $2.99. It can be downloaded from the AT&T MEdia Mall, accessible via AT&T handsets and online at www.att.com/mediamall.

My suggestion:  upgrade to the iPhone and get on any major social network for free.

Source: alanweinkrantz.typepad.com

AT&T is making introducing new social media tools and platforms

JuiceCaster 6.0 and Buzzwire — that keep you connected to your online world. JuiceCaster 6.0 enables you to use your AT&T wireless device to instantly share and post your mobile videos and photos with your favorite online communities — including exclusive mobile video postings to YouTube and Flickr. With Buzzwire, you can access and customize an extensive streaming media library that spans popular video and audio content, as well as live Internet radio, directly from AT&T phones.

JuiceCaster 6.0

This unique application from Juice Wireless lets you share videos and pictures from your wireless device to the Web’s most popular social-networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. AT&T customers also have exclusive access to post directly to YouTube and Flickr as well. Family and friends can instantly view, rate and comment on content directly from their own phones or directly from an online social-networking site.

AT&T customers can use JuiceCaster to:

• Post mobile pictures and video to popular social-networking Web sites and blogs, including Blogger, Facebook, LiveJournal, MySpace, Twitter and Xanga

• Set your status to update automatically on Facebook and Twitter, and receive friends’ status updates on their own phones

• Broadcast existing or new mobile videos and photos to global audiences using YouTube and Flickr, without requiring a computer or Internet connection

• Make content public or create custom groups by adding and connecting with friends directly from AOL, JuiceCaster, Gmail, Hotmail, MS Outlook and Yahoo!

Meet new friends within the JuiceCaster community
JuiceCaster 6.0 is available for $2.99 a month on compatible 2G and 3G AT&T handsets. AT&T customers can simply text Juice to 386 to begin connecting and communicating in a rich social- networking environment that includes profiles, pictures, videos, friend lists, comments, ratings and personal status updates. For more information on JuiceCaster, visit www.att.com/mediamall. 

Source: andyabramson.blogs.com

It looks like Vonage is gearing up for some efforts in the media if I read the tea leaves properly.

They hired a new PR firm and one of the things they plan on doing is deploying a social media strategy focused on blogs.

Personally I love when another company decides to enter the social media game to move their needles. I’ve been in the space since 2004 and know what is right and what is wrong. I’m hoping the revitalized leadership at Vonage gets it right.

Source: andyabramson.blogs.com

I had fun watching Jeff’s most recent video on what you need for personal social networking. Give it a look.

See those of you who are coming to his Monday breakfast there.

Source: andyabramson.blogs.com

iotum’s Alec Saunders loves to blog.

Abbeynet’s Luca Filigheddu loves to blog.

Truphone’s Dean Elwood runs a social community forum called VoIP User.

Together, as a result of the blogosphere, friendship and some wine, as well as a gentle push by moi, along with new opportunity to blend VoIP, alternative access, the hot Facebook platform with some very cool new ways to collaborate has been birthed.

Today, clients iotum, along with Truphone, plus Abbeynet and a French telco have joined up to make iotum’s Free Conference Call solution truly global.

This direct strike is an crystal clear example of what Jeff Pulver calls "Purple Minutes." Those are where applications make the jump between PSTN, Mobile and VOIP, plus what else comes along. In this case, with Truphone we now have a Mobile VoIP/WiFi play which means when a user is in a hotspot, a SIP call goes to iotum, not a PSTN, further reducing the costs of conferencing, but also increasing the quality and the utility.

So where does wine come into all this? At my insistence, Truphone’s Elwood had to skip the 2007 Fall VON Wine Dinner which I hosted to run his VoIP User gathering. Alec, who also loves wine, had to go hang at VoIP User, while Howard Thaw also of iotum, got wined and dined with the likes of GrandCentral’s Craig Walker, Vincent Pacquet, PulverMedia’s Scott Kargman and many others. But Alec and Dean were on a mission. The mission was to find a way to work together. Since both knew each other from their online communications, the prospects were good and the introductions made in advance. Over the next few months all parties worked together and the result is the iotum FaceBook Free Conference Calling service now has more ways to be reached in more places.

Source: www.voip-news.com

What’s the newest in social networking? Social Communicator. This newly launched application from Movial uses VoiceEngine technology from Global IP Solutions (GIPS)  to bring together voice and video calls, social media content (like Flickr and YouTube), unified messaging, online information delivery and video feeds to mobile and PC devices. The result? real-time communication and easy content sharing.

“With GIPS media processing technology Movial is able to provide consistent, high-quality VoIP communication to users,” said Victor Donselaar, president of Movial. “More than 15 operators around the world rely on Movial’s unified communications solutions today. Social Communicator is the bridge that unites mobile operators with Internet companies to encourage more communication, and helps carriers increase average revenues per user.”

The VoiceEngine Mobile technology is said to overcome problems like network degradation and background noise.

“Movial’s Social Communicator delivers a truly new way to unite the carriers’ core business of communication with social communities,” said Steve Rust, vice president of business development at Global IP Solutions. “Movial’s offering provides high-quality mobile VoIP functionality, which can be a boost for carriers worldwide in attracting new subscribers, new communication, content and advertising revenue.”

Source: snapvoip.blogspot.com

Another way to get users to use voice or VoIP. SpinVox has managed to do what other Voice or VoIP providers failed to notice. Get people to blog or twitter over voice. I think I wrote about spinvox technology being used with Skype to blog. Wonder why I did not hear about it much?

WeSeePeople: SpinVox spins Voice into Social Networking and Micro Blogging.

Source: snapvoip.blogspot.com

Centillium Communications (NASDAQ: CTLM) Yesterday released Entropia™ III-C, the newest member of its suite of system-on-chip (SoC) Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) solutions. Aimed at fast-growing multi-service access network (MSAN) applications such as POTS replacement, Entropia III-C scales the market proven features and performance advantages of the company’s flagship system into a smaller-sized, highly integrated chipset with cost structures and channel densities that squarely target the requirements of business communications and subscriber loop infrastructures.

“Our newest chipset marks a significant expansion of our reach in the booming market for voice services over the IP backbone,” said Didier Boivin, vice president of marketing, Centillium. “By extending technologies proven out in demanding, high-volume central office environments, we’ve scaled an innovative, best-in-class platform to bring superior performance, power consumption and service quality to new network access applications as well as legacy telco facilities.”

True Channel Density

Further distancing Entropia III-C from other solutions, the SoC reliably delivers 72 LBR channels of voice independent of the codecs in use. While other solutions achieve up to 72 channels with bandwidth-friendly compressed codecs, their capacity degrades to levels as low as 30 channels per card when bandwidth-intensive uncompressed codecs are processed. In contrast, Entropia III-C offers available support for all wireline and wireless codecs while assuring carriers of the maximum 72-channel capacity regardless of the mix of codecs in routing. As a result, Entropia III-C economizes on costs and physical space requirements by supporting fewer linecards to manage comparable voice traffic.

"Our upcoming annual VoIP market report will forecast steady growth in ‘low-density’ aggregation media gateways, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 62 percent through 2011," said Steve Rago, principal analyst, iSuppli. "This is the market opportunity that versatile, low-density processors like Centillium’s latest Entropia offering seek to capitalize."
The Entropia III-C SoC is available now and includes software, documentation and reference designs for minimized time-to-market. Entropia solutions power voice and media gateways, wireless infrastructure gateways, Class 4 and 5 switches, DLC, voice-enabled IP routers, and IP-PBX systems. Entropia software fully supports IMS architecture, enabling on-demand delivery of rich media services over wireless and wireline networks. For more information, visit http://www.centillium.com/html/products.htm.

Source: voipcentral.org

The advantage of VoIP over WiMAX is enriched connectivity due to limited number of users per WiMAX access point. Therefore, the demand for VoWiMAX will be sky-high in near future.

Keeping pace with the emerging trend in the wireless sector, HelloSoft has launched its VoIP technology for WiMAX System-on-Chip (SoC) designs ensuring WiMAX semiconductor manufacturers to add VoIP to their WiMAX designs.

HelloSoft VoIP products consist of a comprehensive set of media algorithms necessary for voice processing such as high compression Voice Coders, Acoustic Echo Canceller, Telephony components, Jitter Buffering,SIP Signaling Protocol, RTP/RTCP, Call Manager, OS Abstraction and Media and System Frameworks

With this latest announcement, HelloSoft has now created a favorable condition for the mass deployment of VoIP over WiMAX by offering the most optimized VoIP solutions for WiMAX Socs.

Mr. Krishna Yarlagadda, CEO of HelloSoft explains,

The launching of our VoIP for WiMAX SoCs program enables WiMAX semiconductor manufacturers to add VoIP to their WiMAX designs for a complete VoWiMAX product running on a single-chip solution.

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