Consultants to leaders
Archive for December 2008
As engineers we are often prone to frittering away countless hours of time delving into obscure information to no sound purpose, but often stumbling across an interesting tidbit. As was the case recently in our musings in the IEEE space, we came across an interesting scorecard of patents for a variety of industries.
Continue reading ‘Patent Power’ »
About a year and a half ago we switched from our long term carrier to an alternative provider. We did so because we were constantly frustrated by errors on the bills, electronic bills which were routinely late or not available (sorry sir, we’ve had problems with our website,… sorry sir, you will have to call the website technical support…ad nauseum) and finally the frustration of dealing with a call center that did not have a clue about service, but were good at staying on a script.
Seems like these complaints are still about. We just noticed a posting by Dick Waugh over at the Owen Sound Sun Times which is all too familiar to many of us. We feel your pain.
Customer Care—is anybody out there? Does anybody really care? Press 3 to get stuffed!
Dear Palm Treo 680,
It’s over. It’s you not me!
I was a loyal Palm user for over 10 years. I’ve owned the following Palm products;
I was a dyed-in-the-wool user and probably caused dozens of my friends to buy Palms when they were the only real PDA on the block. No, I’ve used other PDAs but really liked the Palm OS and they way they operated seamlessly with my desktop. I also appreciated the flood of third party applications which were well priced and for the most part worked flawlessly. Relationships change, however…
Continue reading ‘Treo—Bye-o’ »
With the economy in the crapper, and new sales a memory of the past, has your boss gone into a blue funk? We have the perfect thing to bring life into that pointy hair.
Mobiado has always been known as a company that pushes luxury mobile phones to the limit. To reinforce that market leadership, this past week, they released the Mobiado Professional 105GMT Gold. It’s a Victorian looking wonder that would be right at home with H.G Well’s time traveller. We love its retro look and analog clocks—able to span three time zones.
This puppy will perform with specs like;
With words like sapphire crystal, ebony, 24 karat gold, and diamond you can rest assured that your boss will never again call you a tightwad. Buy one soon as there are only 50 made.
Finally some good news in the the world of OSS in our home and native land. Seems upstart Conceptwave, who invented the market for order care, has been recognized for their contribution within HP’s portfolio of telecoms products. They were awarded the HP CMS Business Partner of the Year.
We had written about the company before and it’s not surprising to find them getting some well deserved press again. Rich Karpinski over at TelephonyOnline interviewed Chun-Ling Woon is VP of marketing and business development at ConceptWave. They discuss service composition and catalogs. Listen here.
The Shulist Group has worked with Conceptwave in the past.
We have worked with many firms who have incorporated Open Source modules and applications into their commercial products. These have ranged from print drivers to more obscure technical components within security products. All of these uses can be compliant with the Open Source licensing and use standards as long as the using companies comply to the letter of the law with their use.
Continue reading ‘Open Source—Not Open Season’ »
We are always fans of big numbers. Way back in 1995 we heard that Bob Metcalfe (inventor of ethernet networking) predicted that the flood of data on the Internet, at the time, would bring it to its knees in 1996 or he would eat his article. We later read he munched up the article in front of an industry conference in 1997—a man who lives by his word. We’ve always been interested in the growth of internet data, predictions of its demise and the crow-eaters who predict.
Continue reading ‘Ready For The Exabyte Deluge?’ »
Seems that the fashionistas over at Saudi Telecom are hard at work again and just in time for the gifting season. Now you can toss out that old dust encased, octopus plugged, wireless router and replace it with a fashionable new router flower vase. We cannot determine if this is actually a retail product but, if it’s not, then Saudi Telecom - just say no! Chris Davies over at Slashgear provides an overview of its all encompassing beauty.
Microsoft’s Connected Services Framework (CSF) has been declared dead. It seems that Microsoft has found out just how hard it is to standardize a product across the industry. CSF was a move boldy announced in 2005 where Microsoft claimed it would revolutionize Telco 2.0. Carol Wilson over at Telephony Online has scribbled its eulogy.
“If you look across the deployments for service delivery platforms, they have tended to be highly customized, very integration-intensive,” said Terry McGuigan, director of global partners for Microsoft’s Communications Sector. “The degree of customization required has caused us to re-think whether we could use a standard platform.”
While Microsoft did manage to attract about thirty telcos worldwide they seem to have been unable to find common ground which they could move the product forward on. This comes as no surprise to anyone who has ever built a support system for the telecom industry.
So you need a new handset to go with that smartphone? Well have we got one for you. So with the shopping season just approaching check out Mockia handsets. The banaockia will certainly be the hit of the party. Go figure.
