Categories
Business Cloud datacentre

Salesforce.com Cloud Workshop: More from the CIO Council Meeting

In considering moving some of their business operations to the cloud the CIOs round the table at last week’s Salesforce.com cloud computing workshop voiced some interesting issues that they had had to get to grips with. Firstly in running with a cloud based service a business is effectively entrusting key corporate data to a third […]

Categories
Business Cloud internet

Salesforce.com Cloud Workshop: Report from the CIO Council Meeting

You may or may not have known that I am on the CIO Council of Salesforce.com. Salesforce.com is a highly professional organisation that I believe really has its head screwed on. This isn’t a sales pitch for them but I was sufficiently enthused by my Cloud Workshop day, held yesterday in the East Room on […]

Categories
broadband Business

Broadband Types: ADSL versus FTTC versus FTTP

As we begin to discuss the merits of broadband types — Fibre To The Cabinet and Fibre To The Premises compared with ADSL — there are a few points worth noting. First of all there is the speed of the connection. ADSL2+ offers “up to 24Mbps”, FTTC “up to 40Mbps” and FTTP, which has no […]

Categories
broadband Business internet

The European Commission has Issued its Digital Competitiveness Report

The European Commission is claiming the credit for increasing internet usage in Europe.  In its Digital Competitiveness Report, published a few days ago, it said “the number of regular internet users has increased from 43% in 2005 to 56% in 2008”. Apparently it is all down to it’s i2010 Strategy formulated in 2005. Fair play to […]

Categories
End User Regs surveillance & privacy

Big Brother is watching you

Imagine a world where individual sales people could see how many customer contacts they take and make, be it mobile, desk phone or email. Then they compare their performance with their peers and can see how much sales revenue they each generate. An underperforming sales person is going to either buck up their act or […]

Categories
Business internet piracy

Virgin agrees anti-piracy music deal

Virgin has announced a deal with record label Universal that will provide unlimited access to the company’s music catalogue for a fixed monthly fee.  The level of this fee is as yet unnanounced but is reckoned to be the equivalent to the cost of two albums. The service will be available by Christmas 09. The biggest […]

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Business internet media

We7 cracks free online music streaming business model

I have been getting more and more hits on an old post about We7 where I was giving away promo codes for free music downloads. In a dialogue on this subject with We7 CTO Gareth Reakes I was extremely impressed to find that they seem to be on the way to cracking the business model […]

Categories
Business voip hardware

Interview with Dean Elwood of voipuser.org

Dean Elwood runs the industry leading website voipuser.org. Over the 6 years this has been going Dean has come into contact with most of the major thought leaders in the communications space. He has also seen many of the new developments in VoIP play out in the form of discussion and comment on the website’s […]

Categories
datacentre Engineer internet peering

LINX 65 and Telecity

First day of LINX65 produced the usual interesting mix of talks. Today included IPv6 and VoIP QoS. The sponsor’s talk at the end was given by Rob Coupland, COO of datacentre operator, Telecity. In Europe Telecity operates in London, Paris, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Milan and Frankfurt. A good footprint to have. What was interesting was the […]

Categories
Business internet social networking

Speeches 2 b reduced 2 140 chars at nxt election

We all have to suffer over exposure to politics during the run up to an election. It is going to get worse!  The next UK General Election will be played out in minute detail and in glorious Web2.0 technicolour using Twitter. In fact there is now a website dedicated to furthering this cause.  Tweetminster.com is a wonderful resource for […]

Categories
broadband Business

21CN trials successfully completed

Yesterday I signed off our ADSL2+ service for production. As one of a small number of ISPs selected by BT for the trials we have been careful not to rush too quickly into using the 21CN network. As it was new we felt it was important to make sure that the customer experience matched our […]

Categories
Business voip

Newark Telephone Exchange Loss of Service

The Newark telephone exchange suffered an outage today and quite a number of analog lines and ADSLs were down as a result. Fortunately Timico has a network strategy that incorporates multiple types of connectivity specifically to provide resilience when outages like this happen. It did prompt me to check out how often BT has problems […]

Categories
Business internet UC

Project Chainsaw web.alive and Lenovo

In my systematic tour of the UC09 Exhibition yesterday I sat through my first real life Telepresence demo on the Cisco/BT stand. Very impressive technology. It really was just like being in the same room, such was the quality of the video. I then sauntered along to the Nortel stand. Nortel have similar technology but […]

Categories
Business internet

Unified Communications Web2.0 Style

Unified Communications ’09 is on next week at the Olympia Conference Centre in London. I anticipate there will be 70 or so businesses there pitching their wares, including Timico subsidiary KeConnect which has a joint stand with Cisco. UC09 is a business to business show. It is worth reflecting on the fact that in the consumer […]

Categories
Business voip

“Unified Communications” is dead on its feet

As 2009 evolves it is becoming much clearer where the world of Unified Communications is going. UC has always meant different things to different people.  Yesterday I saw it move on with the Twitter coverage of SocComm. What is now becoming obvious that we are moving to a world where everything interoperates with everything else.  A bit of […]

Categories
Business voip

"Unified Communications" is dead on its feet

As 2009 evolves it is becoming much clearer where the world of Unified Communications is going. UC has always meant different things to different people.  Yesterday I saw it move on with the Twitter coverage of SocComm. What is now becoming obvious that we are moving to a world where everything interoperates with everything else.  A bit of […]

Categories
Apps Business mobile connectivity security UC voip

The Channel Wars – Which Channel Will Win The Convergence Battle?

No I’m not talking TV channels here. I’m talking channels to market for converged services. And I’m not talking about which company within a channel will win. I’m talking about which channel will win. Out there in the big wide world there are three basic types of channel that sell communications services: mobile resellers, PBX […]

Categories
End User internet security

Cyber-vigilantes

Circulating on the law inforcement distribution list of the Internet Service Providers’ Association today is information regarding a website called extremeporn.org.uk which appears to have set itself up as a vigilante-type organisation to hunt down downloaders of illegal extreme pornography. According to their website: “At present, our primary activities are categorizing and monitoring torrents. Our system, once […]

Categories
Archived Business

Calling all top IP sales executives – unashamed recruitment pitch

We have an expanding IP sales team at Timico run by Business Development Director Steve Hodges. Steve is looking for new blood to exploit the opportunity for us in the UK market this year. Steve himself is both highly qualified and highly successful at what he does. He is a Fellow of The Institute Of […]

Categories
Business internet

Animoto

Animoto is a company that takes your digital photos and turns them into a slideshow whilst adding music as a backdrop. Their platform employs an algorithm that analyses the content/colours in a photo and applies what it deems to be a suitable soundtrack.  The product looks pretty cool. I understand that their principal claim to fame is that when Animoto was launched […]

Categories
Business fun stuff

A day in the life

Life is rich. If yours isn’t you should seriously think about doing something about it. I was wondering what to write about today out of the many things that are going on. In the end I thought I’d just rattle off a list of things I was involved in during the day because I believe […]

Categories
Business internet

Staggercast

Shakespeare used to introduce a few hundred new words in each of his plays, many of which were never heard of again, odsbodkins! It’s the same these days in the technology business. Staggercast is the means whereby subscribers can preregister their interest in a TV programme. This programme is then downloaded in advance ready for […]

Categories
End User ofcom security

Piracy

Oh oh here come the pirates! What a rogue. It’s a constant battle. Everyone needs a little help. Ofcom to the rescue.  

Categories
End User travel

A4 Pacific

Leading edge technology of its time. Sir Nigel Gresley was the designer of the A4 Pacific Class Locomotive. The A4 Pacific Mallard still holds the world speed record of 125mph created on 3rd July 1938. The A4 Pacifics cut the journey time between London and Newcastle down to 4 hours (from 5 days by horse […]

Categories
broadband Business

Heaviest Virgin Media Downloaders Face New Daytime Go-Slow

This is an article reproduced from The Register. It is basically a perfect advertisment as to why people should use a quality ISP as opposed to a “pile it high sell it cheap” operator. Timico’s policy is that “we don’t throttle….. we just ask users to pay a usage based surcharge if they choose to […]