Everybody talks about Unified Communications. If you once wrote a PBX, now you call it UC. If you developed IP Phones, now you brand them as UC. The only problem I see with all the hype around this is that UC is targeted at the enterprise. It’s not that I don’t like enterprises - I work for one, but I think people are missing the consumers on this one. Presence and the Enterprise About three years ago I talked
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | November 11th, 2008 | Filed under Technology
SMS is king today. At least in the realm of text communications on mobile handsets. I have seen people praise IM as the savior of SMS costs, and others who saw the death of blogs in Twitter’s micro-blogging service. Not going to happen. I’d like to suggest a different way of looking at it: as a set of different services that give different added value for users. And for that, I’ll start by specifying what a service is. How do
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | October 24th, 2008 | Filed under Technology
In a keynote speech at ITExpo, Jonathan Christensen from Skype stated that VoIP is dead. I wasn’t there, but there is a lot of information about it on TMCnet. In essence, the following arguments are given to prove VoIP is dead: There’s a new explicit handshake model before calling that uses presence and instant messaging. There are new wideband audio codecs in use. There are video calls. VoIP is dead? Long live VoIP. IMHO these
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | October 2nd, 2008 | Filed under Technology
I have decided to join a carnival - the Carnival of the Mobilists. What does it mean? The Carnival of the Mobilists is a virtual meeting place where the very best posts written about mobile are exposed each week. Every week, the carnival travels to a different host - a blogger, who picks and chooses the posts he wishes to share with his readers. So what happened this week? This week was the first time I got into the Carnival with my comparison between SMS and Mobile IM. This week’s Carnival was hosted by mobilejones, who also tried for the first time to add Twitter to the carnival. I must say that the collection of posts there is excellent.
By Tsahi Levent-Levi | August 19th, 2008 | Filed under Around the net
Mobile IM is getting some hype, but has a long way before it can take over SMS. The way I see it - SMS is king, and it is here to stay. This is mainly due to the ease of use one enjoys with SMS. Today, at least, IM usually involves a buddy list and presence information. Once you connect to someone (a “buddy”), you will be able to see his presence status and send him an instant message. If
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | August 14th, 2008 | Filed under Clients
Crunch Gear had an interesting post - somehow, they are expecting mobile IM to go mainstream next year. Somehow, this seems a bit farfetched. Mobile IM will take at least 2-3 years or more to become popular. IM vs SMS IM is usually seen as an SMS competitor. Taking this viewpoint, there is only a single reason why IM will become popular, which is also the reason it won’t. The reason is cost. People are used to paying high prices
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By Tsahi Levent-Levi | June 19th, 2008 | Filed under Clients
