News Archive - August 2010

Ninety-five percent of companies have deployed VoIP to at least some portion of their users, while another 2% are planning to deploy in 2011, leaving just 2% with no plans for adoption.

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Skype announced the official launch of Skype Connect 1.0 (formerly Skype for SIP). Previously available in beta, Skype Connect delivers a business solution that enables IP-enabled private branch exchange (PBX) or Unified Communications (UC) systems to connect to Skype.

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Cisco has reportedly made an offer to acquire Skype before they complete their IPO process. Skype was expecting to raise $5M, so the bid would have to be hefty. — UPDATE: This rumor appears to be false.

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With the acquisition of TANDBERG by Cisco, we expect to see the current niche videoconferencing market explode into a major business opportunity for all vendors.

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The group that licenses patents for the widely used H.264 video encoding and streaming technology has committed to charge no royalties ever for use by Web sites that use it for freely available video.

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Google reported that in the first 24 hours that it enabled Gmail with the ability to make telephone calls, more than one million phone calls were placed.

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Google launched the ability to make voice calls to any traditional phone number from a Gmail account.

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The number of people who subscribe to LTE next-generation wireless broadband services is expected to reach 300 million by 2015, compared with 500,000 this year.

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Mobile operators expect app downloads to become their biggest source of income in developed markets within three years and want to charge content providers for preferential access to their networks, raising further questions about net neutrality.

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Nimbula, a Menlo Park "cloud computing" startup founded by two former Amazon.com executives, has won $15 million in funding in a round led by Palo Alto venture capital firm Accel Partners.

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University of Washington researchers are testing a tool called MobileASL that uses motion detection to identify American Sign Language and transmit images over U.S. cell networks.

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Dell is set to acquire storage specialist 3Par, which offers highly virtualized storage arrays designed to help businesses treat storage as a utility, for about $1.15 billion to beef up its enterprise cloud offerings.

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Polycom continued to make strategic agreements for its videoconferencing solutions as it announced a partnership with Microsoft to supply standards-based unified communications (UC) solutions covering a wide range of customers, big and small.

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Internet telephony giant Skype is seeking up to $100 million in an initial public offering (IPO) that, it hopes, will lead to a future laced with new features, advertising, and premium services that will stoke its growth engine.

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ITU-T SG16 initiated work on the study of Telepresence systems with the creation of a new experts group (or, “Question”) focused on the topic. For more information, you might wish to subscribe to the itu-sg16 mailing list (see http://lists.packetizer.com/) and review the complete text of the new Question.

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Android is now the leading smartphone operating system in the U.S. in market share.

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Vonage announced the release of a new app for the iPhone and Android mobile operating systems. Users can now make free VoIP calls to Facebook friends who have the app and a Vonage plan.

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Shipments of Android smartphones worldwide jumped 886 percent in the second quarter from a year ago, and if you've ever used one, you'd know why. They're amazing phones with the power of a computer.

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