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As an online marketing entrepreneur, I'm always looking for cheaper and better communications. Skype's Internet telephony service is one of the hottest things on the Web today, slashing phone bills for more than 75 million users worldwide.
Skype never emerged as the cash cow eBay had hoped for when it paid a jaw-dropping $2.6 billion to acquire the Internet phone startup in 2005. Now eBay's announcement Monday that it will write off $1.4 billion in charges related to Skype has analysts and investors questioning whether the Internet phone business - known as voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) - has any commercial potential at all.
For the second time in two days, Internet phone company Vonage Holdings Corp. was hit with bad legal news Wednesday when a federal appeals court upheld a March jury verdict and injunction against it for patent infringement.
A federal jury on Tuesday ordered Internet telephone company Vonage Holdings to pay $69.5 million in damages for infringing on six telecommunications patents owned by competitor Sprint Nextel.
At first blush, telecom flameouts SunRocket and Amp'd don't have a lot in common. (SunRocket shut down early last week; Amp'd's Web site says the company is "potentially suspending" U.S. operations July 31.) Amp'd is a wireless operator that targets teens and young adults, SunRocket delivered phone calls using Internet Protocol (IP) technology. Its intended audience: Bargain seekers who wanted the cost savings of VOIP service without the perceived complexities of a service such as Skype.
SunRocket Inc., the second-biggest U.S. supplier of Internet phone services, appeared to have shut down its business Monday without notifying its customers, which total more than 200,000.
Finding love in the 21st century - a pursuit these days that involves meeting up via online dating sites and furtive text messages - has come full circle. Thanks to a new service from Internet dating purveyor eHarmony, modern would-be lovers soon could find themselves waiting by the phone once again.
Think Cisco's lawsuit against Apple is just about a name? Think again.
Building the 21st Century Workspace
As an online marketing entrepreneur, I'm always looking for cheaper and better communications. Skype's Internet telephony service is one of the hottest things on the Web today, slashing phone bills...
As an online marketing entrepreneur, I'm always looking for cheaper and better communications. Skype's Internet telephony service is one of the hottest things on the Web today, slashing phone bills for more than 75 million users worldwide.
Skype never emerged as the cash cow eBay had hoped for when it paid a jaw-dropping $2.6 billion to acquire the Internet phone startup in 2005. Now eBay's announcement Monday that it will write off $1.4 billion in charges related to Skype has analysts and investors questioning whether the Internet phone business - known as voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) - has any commercial potential at all.
For the second time in two days, Internet phone company Vonage Holdings Corp. was hit with bad legal news Wednesday when a federal appeals court upheld a March jury verdict and injunction against it for patent infringement.
A federal jury on Tuesday ordered Internet telephone company Vonage Holdings to pay $69.5 million in damages for infringing on six telecommunications patents owned by competitor Sprint Nextel.
At first blush, telecom flameouts SunRocket and Amp'd don't have a lot in common. (SunRocket shut down early last week; Amp'd's Web site says the company is "potentially suspending" U.S. operations July 31.) Amp'd is a wireless operator that targets teens and young adults, SunRocket delivered phone calls using Internet Protocol (IP) technology. Its intended audience: Bargain seekers who wanted the cost savings of VOIP service without the perceived complexities of a service such as Skype.
SunRocket Inc., the second-biggest U.S. supplier of Internet phone services, appeared to have shut down its business Monday without notifying its customers, which total more than 200,000.
Finding love in the 21st century - a pursuit these days that involves meeting up via online dating sites and furtive text messages - has come full circle. Thanks to a new service from Internet dating purveyor eHarmony, modern would-be lovers soon could find themselves waiting by the phone once again.
Think Cisco's lawsuit against Apple is just about a name? Think again.
Building the 21st Century Workspace
As an online marketing entrepreneur, I'm always looking for cheaper and better communications. Skype's Internet telephony service is one of the hottest things on the Web today, slashing phone bills...
The Disruptor: Jajah
Like the pioneering voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) phone service on which it is based, Vonage's new V-Phone is a bit quirky.
The editors have identified the Best business ideas in the world, which will appear here in a series throughout the next month. Check back daily for updates.
In the busy, ever-changing financial district here, stores come and go in the blink of an eye. But Market Street's newest tenant isn't planning to stay long.
Despite Vonage's ignominious IPO and fresh questions about its viability as a stand-alone provider of basic phone services, some smart executives are betting the market - and possibly Wall Street - will embrace another independent provider of phone calls via the Internet.
Jeffrey A. Citron probably was feeling a little ambivalent Wednesday as Vonage, the Internet phone company he founded, struggled in its first day as a public entity.
Vonage hopes to raise as much as $562.5 million when it goes public, but at the rate the company is burning through cash, it may end up leaving a hole in investors' pockets.
Will soccer fans want to follow a ball on a two-inch playing field when the World Cup kicks off in Germany next month? That's what telecom operators are betting on with new services that promise to...
AOL is struggling to break out of a prolonged slump. But will rolling out new-and-improved versions of other companies' innovative ideas be enough?
SAN FRANCISCO (Business 2.0 Magazine) - Apple's new MacBook laptops may come in two colors besides white, AppleInsider reports. It's been almost eight years since Steve Jobs unwrapped the original Bondi blue iMac - and since 2002, all of Apple's computers have been either white or metallic. Apple's color experiments came to an end with the quickly eliminated "Flower Power" and "Blue Dalmatian" models of the iMac. One hitch for Apple: Stocking multiple colors means producing and tracking more models, a logistical feat Apple hasn't grappled with in years. Additionally, some retailers might refuse to stock more than one color, as Best Buy did in 1999, and betting wrong on a color could mean costly inventory pile-ups at Apple's own chain of retail stores.
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) - Woo hoo! Woo hoo hoo!
Like fans of "The Sopranos," Cisco investors have waited a long time for their faith to be rewarded.
A day after AT&T announced a deal to acquire smaller rival BellSouth, many consumer groups are worried that less competition will lead to higher phone bills for consumers. But consumers will still have many choices for phone service, while a deal could boost competition -- and lower costs -- for Internet and other cable services.
Much to the telephone company's chagrin, there are now plenty of ways to get phone service for a fraction of the price you're used to. The cable industry is one new competitor, but the cheapest alt...
For nearly a century, the phone, and voice as we know it, have existed largely in the confines of a thin copper wire. But now service providers can convert voice calls into tiny Internet packets an...
For too long now, Cisco Systems has been the big engine that can't. Its legions of fans, including the sad sacks who've held onto Cisco's stock for longer than they'd care to admit, are hoping an upbeat earnings report Tuesday evening will signal that the once-mighty locomotive is back on track.
If you are a consumer shopping for VOIP, welcome to the land of confusion.
Tech-savvy business travelers are forcing a rethink on how hotels charge for long-distance communications, meaning that exorbitant phone bills on the road could soon be a thing of the past.
For the global road warrior, staying in touch with the office usually means tapping lengthy calling card numbers or typing late-night e-mail exchanges. It would be nice if wireless carriers and Int...
NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Cable companies have been lousy investments lately despite strong demand for high-speed Internet access, digital video recorders and Internet phone services.
Mac Dearman, 43, lives in Rayville, Louisiana and works as a wireless Internet service provider. He has been providing relief, including food, clothing as well as Internet and Internet-based phone access to victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, working entirely with donated labor and equipment.
OneUnited bank is among the nation's largest minority-owned financial institutions. Over the past decade CEO Kevin Cohee has built a small community lender in Boston into a national bank with $25 m...
eBay hopes to dial up a new round of growth but many investors are skeptical.
Skype, a company that makes software allowing users to call each other over the Internet at no charge, features warm and fuzzy language on its Web site about how it just wants to give away software.
ANTONIO MEUCCI invented the telephone around 1860. Terri Pall, a jazz musician, invented the cordless phone in 1965. A whole bunch of nerds invented the Internet in 1969 when everyone else was part...
Call it Skype envy or the inevitable search for the next killer app on the Internet.
NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - It's the end of an era for AT&T.
NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Internet phone technology, or VoIP to the tech savvy, may finally be ready for prime time.
Internet-based phone services could soon have full-feature emergency 911 service now missing, according to a published report.
Price wars. Turf battles. New services. Ever-cooler gadgets. For consumers, what's going on in telecom these days is nothing short of boom times. Baby Bells and upstarts have come in with low-price...
Price wars. Turf battles. New services. Ever-cooler gadgets. For consumers, what's going on in telecom these days is nothing short of boom times.
NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - This should be the year when Internet phone service really takes off.
Before most of his friends were out of college, Jeffrey Citron earned his first $1 million as a trader. At 25, he launched Island ECN, an electronic trading system for brokers that later sold for $...
BETTER, FASTER, smaller, cheaper ... It's the standard progression in the world of personal tech- nology. Many of the new gizmos and gadgets of 2004 were clever and useful, but a few deserve specia...
Upstarts like Vonage and Skype are bringing voice-over-IP to the masses. But a bigger opportunity lurks in the $2 billion corporate phone market. Now, New York-based startup Popular Telephony is of...
Is David Dorman a telecom lifer or a startup survivor? In truth, he's both. He started out working at Sprint, then became CEO of Pacific Bell, where he created the first regional-phone-company Inte...
Swedish software guru Niklas Zennstrom co-founded Skype, a pioneering voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) company. Here he talks to CNN's Charles Hodson about his software, which allows Internet users to make free PC-to-PC phone calls to anyone in the world.
Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology is transforming the telecommunications industry, translating into big savings on phone bills for individuals and companies.
After four years of bankruptcies, accounting scandals, and general investor malaise, telecom is having a strong 2004. As of late September, phone company stocks were up 6% for the year, and shares ...
Net2Phone, based in Newark, N.J., is a voice-over-Internet pure-play that's on track to sell $85 million worth of Internet telephony services by year-end. When the industry bellwether releases four...
Smart technologies make industries more efficient. Truly historic ones shift the balance of power. Case in point: Internet telephony, which blew through the telecom industry this year like a Catego...
SALEM, Ore. (CNN/Money) - When it comes to phone service, I'm cheap.
In the past 18 months streams of moneymen, technology analysts, and journalists have made their way to a drab office building in Edison, N.J. Here a tiny upstart called Vonage is upsetting the tele...
The newest Internet revolution has arrived. You can now make and receive phone calls via a high-speed Internet connection by subscribing to a service known as voice over Internet protocol. VOIP, fo...
Dave Wisland, 53, runs a consultancy from his home in suburban St. Louis. He thought he needed SBC's high-speed Internet connection and two phone lines the way fire needs oxygen. But after his loca...
AT&T, which is moving away from providing traditional phone service to residential customers, is teaming with the nation's largest cable operators to offer phone service over the Internet, according to a published report.
Picking global trends in technology markets can be a hit-and-miss exercise -- often with more misses than hits.
Parade, the happily middlebrow magazine that comes with Sunday newspapers, is hardly the place you'd look for technology that is about to rock a $750-billion-a-year industry. Yet on June 6, sandwic...
AT&T should cut its big, fat, juicy dividend.
Cable TV giant Comcast announced Wednesday that it plans to offer Internet-based phone service to its more than 20 million households by the end of 2005.
Many important stock market trends are hard to fully assess.
It's been a busy few days for Vonage, the voice-over-Internet-protocol company. Last week, the Edison, N.J., outfit announced a big distribution deal with RadioShack that puts its service in approximately 4,000 of the chain's stores in 38 states.
If any company reflects what's up with corporate tech spending, it's Cisco: Nearly 75 percent of the company's sales go to blue-chip customers. When Cisco releases its fiscal third-quarter results ...
If the telecom sector were a patient in a hospital, it seems safe to say that its condition would be critical, but stable.
When Windows or another program crashes, I get a message asking me to send information about the error to Microsoft. Is this safe?
If Jeffrey Citron feels tarnished by his recent legal problems--he did, after all, pay a staggering $22.5 million settlement to the SEC just last year--he isn't letting on. He's brashly holding for...
Entrepreneurs tend to be pretty early adopters," says Michael Ringel, managing director of Let's Talk Business Network. But that alone, he insists, doesn't explain why he decided last year to switc...
Three years ago we predicted the day was near when teens could enter a chat room and be able to verbally ask 'NSync questions. Like you, we're now wondering, 'NWho? And where in the heck are all th...
If you're a tech investor with holdings in telecommunications companies, Internet portal sites, or some infrastructure firms (or if you're just a tech dork like me), you'll want to pay attention to what the Federal Communications Commission has to say tomorrow. It promises -- believe it or not -- to be riveting.
Cable companies and telephone companies are starting to look awfully similar these days...except for their stock performance.
"Voice over Internet protocol" uses the Internet to replace ordinary phone service. Virtually any Net connection--cable modem, DSL, dial-up--can be turned into a phone line. Usage is tiny now, but ...
Now starting his second year on the job, AT&T CEO Dave Dorman has a sense of history, a sense of humor, and, increasingly, a sense of urgency. AT&T's revenues and workforce are shrinking dramatical...
This past summer things looked pretty bleak for 8x8. Quarterly losses at the tiny Santa Clara, Calif., firm were $1.5 million on shrinking revenues of $1.6 million. Meanwhile the stock was stuck at...
The Nasdaq Wednesday stormed to highest close since August 2001, while the Dow and S&P 500 seemed relatively unaffected by heavy movement among telecom and wireless stocks.
It may have been the ultimate corporate wake-up call--and not just because it came from some of the biggest telecom companies in the world. ¶ In April 2001 several top Cisco executives were summone...
As the Internet's head cheerleader during the late 1990s, John Chambers, the CEO of Cisco Systems, was always the kind of guy who saw the glass as half-full, if not perpetually overflowing. But whe...
The great bandwidth investment boom of the late 1990s is finally paying dividends--in the form of less expensive phone calls. VOIP technology transmits voice signals over high-bandwidth networks us...
Dear Dave: Why don't you ask to be assigned a column you like instead of filling your current column with such negativity and complaints??? --Fred
The blessings were bouncing off the walls of New York's Carnegie Hall. It was a late February evening, and the banquet crowd of 350, dressed in everything from jeans to suits, sat silently as six T...
Posted speed limits are not what seem to guide Dick Weiss around the curves on the roads surrounding Santa Barbara, where he and wife Marybeth have a mountaintop avocado ranch.
Yonah Lloyd is itching to hang up on me. I haven't said anything to offend him, but nonetheless Lloyd, vice president of business development at Internet phone company Net2Phone, wants off. He want...
Remember the old-fashioned rotary phone? It was everywhere not so long ago, till the touch-tone phone made it obsolete. Now a technology called voice over IP (VOIP) may help do the same to the old-...
Has your office become noisier lately? If it hasn't, you're not on the cutting edge of technology. A few years ago a PC destined for the office was likely to offer the bare minimum in sound capabil...
ZORAN Chips for a post-VCR world
We're witnessing the Information Age equivalent of pigs being swallowed by snakes: Fat chunks of the conventional telecom business are getting absorbed by the Internet and new digital long-distance...
Except for the urge to throw a shoe at it from time to time, I'm not moved to interact much with a television set. Most people aren't, which is why so many breathless visions of interactive TV over...
hq: beaverton, ore. founded: 1996 sales: $1 million (est.) employees: 69 stock: privately held web address: www.efusion.com
"Hey, Pops, you there?"
As the VP in charge of WorldNet, AT&T's Internet service provider, Tom Evslin kept hearing people rave about Internet telephony. Evslin loved the concept, but the execution--the staticky connection...
Until recently, the business of Internet telephony--using the Net to make phone calls--seemed little more than a cheap hack. The technology first drew attention two years ago, when VocalTec, an Isr...
TEL AVIV Founded 1990 Revenues: $2.5 million employees: 98 Nasdaq: VOCLF www.vocaltec.com
Yeah, right, the convergence of computers and telecommunications, blah, blah, blah. What does that mean for me? How about the cheapest phone calls you've ever made in your life?
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