Avaya put out another PR that I was featured in today. I can’t say more than I love this piece of technology. It fits SMB market better than the Nortel BCM and a lot cheaper than the Cisco solution. It allows our employees to do more without costing us a ton of money.
Avaya Helps Financial Services Firms Use Intelligent Communications to Succeed in a Shifting Marketplace

I was featured in a Press Release for Avaya’s new version of IP Office 3.2. I really enjoy working with the IP Office and think it is a great solution for SMB customers. It offers the flexibility to use Digital phones, IP based phones, or a combination of them. It also has great features like the new Mobile Twinning and the conferencing system. The free sofware updates top it off, although some new features are license-based, but that means you don’t pay for features you don’t use.

Here is a quote from the release: Small and Medium Businesses Worldwide Improve Operations with Intelligent Communications from Avaya

Companies Use IP Office to Improve Operations and Customer Service

For Cascadia Capital, Avaya IP Office is an important tool for keeping the company’s highly skilled investment bankers connected to clients, colleagues and critical company information.

“The new mobile twinning feature of IP Office 3.2 is extremely important to us,” said Christopher Bettin, director of information technology for Cascadia Capital. “That means we can give our clients one number to reach our investment bankers; whether they are in the office or visiting a client. The new management capabilities also allow us to deploy new policies and features to groups of users.”

By integrating IP Office with the company’s Microsoft Exchange email application, investment bankers at Cascadia are able to use their Blackberry handheld wireless devices to access Avaya voicemail from a single, integrated email and voicemail inbox.

Bettin said the built-in conferencing features of Avaya IP Office are also heavily utilized by the Cascadia team.

“Meeting with clients is a huge part of our business,” he said. “IP Office makes it simple for them to quickly establish a meeting and collaborate. In addition, we’ve saved enough money by eliminating outside conferencing services to pay for the Avaya system within 18 months.”

Hooper just left his job with me, and needed a new PDA-type device since he wasn’t going to use his Blackberry. You might remember that he had been using the Nokia 6682 from his article on CityID. It was not really “Outlook compatible” in both of our minds as the sync software was clunky at best, and required a USB cable. He needed a professional device that he could use as a mobile worker, but without the bulk of a blackberry.

Castle and I have the Audiovox SMT5600, but it runs Windows Mobile 2003 SE. While great, it is not top of the line with only offers GPRS data speeds along with a lot of software bugs. Schlosser upgraded from his Motorola MPx200 and picked up the new Cingular branded 2125. Would that be the device for Hooper? (more…)

Microsoft is doing some guerilla marketing of Visual Studio 2005. They look like 16 employee created short clips to highlight a few of the the new 400+ differences they put into the product. This video on coffee is my favorite. Check out Coffee!

A few of the others that made me laugh were:
King of Coding?
Change Request
Project Manager
Whiteboards?

Mortierbrigade, a Belgian ad agency, created a website which allows you to put your own in Materazzi’s mouth. They have a sample on the website, which isn’t half bad. But you can create your own dialog, and share it! Go now…materazzisays.com

Recently, I’ve been borrowing a Nokia 6682 smart phone from my current employer in order to test out some of the new software that has been developed for these high-end handheld computing devices.  This will be the first in a series of posts about these software applications and my thoughts on them.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t tend to pick up a phone call when I have no idea who might be calling me.  Today, the limiting factor is whether or not that number appears in your address book.  As I’m sure has happened to many of you, when I receive a phone call from a number I don’t recognize, the first thing I do is ask the people around me if they happen to know the location of the area code.  Unfortunately, the list of area codes that I have memorized is short and limited to places I have lived, have family, or major US cities. 

As early as six months ago, I started suggesting that this would be a great thing to have on cell phones.  Sure enough, within the last month, a Seattle-based company, Cequint, came out with just such an application. 

First, I would like to caveat my comments by saying that this is an early stage company with the first release of their software, so a few bugs are guaranteed.  With such an application now installed on my borrowed Nokia, you would think my problem would solved, right? Well it is, sort of. 

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Sling Media Launches WM5 Smartphone SlingPlayer App Gallery (MobileBurn)

While the quality of this video is amature in nature, I think this shows the power of the mobile networks that are being deployed.  Also, I think it is a good representation of how all of our entertainment lives are going to eventually converge into an on-demand model.  Slingbox is showing the world how powerful having on-demand access to your entire entertainment library is for a consumer.  Now, with devices like the Motorola Q, the Slingbox mobile application and Verizon’s CDMA 1xEV-DO network, you can get your content anywhere.  Check out the demo below!

This time I found the MakeSomeNoise Podcast. MakeSomeNoise (aka MSN) is a podcast from Andreas Churchill out of London who mixes some new and old mashups. You can get the last 8 podcasts over at makesomenoise.co.uk/podcast. He has track listings, and great links to the creators. Each one is 60 minutes long too! I hope to show some of these off at a BBQ this weekend.

I went on a Beta binge this week and grabbed the new Microsoft Windows Media Player 11. I love it! Super fast, and a nice interface. I’m not ready to give up iTunes yet until this is out of beta, but I like what I see. The only downside currently is that the WMP 11 tray doesn’t function, so you can only run it in a window and not on the taskbar. Grab it from Microsoft.

UPDATE WMP11 Beta doesn’t work with Windows Live Messenger 8 Beta’s “What I’m Listening To”

Everyone was wondering what the Origami device was, why it is special, and if Microsoft was going into the hardware business.  Personally I think it is clear that features and devices they showed in March at CeBIT didn’t live up to the hype.  These Ultra Mobile Portable Computing (UPMC) devices are supposed to fall between Tablet and PDA.

Samsung has the Q1, which is basically a small 7-inch tablet pc with an 900MHz Intel Celeron and 512MB of RAM, and a 30GB hard drive.  The only differences between tablet pcs and this thing are extra controls/buttons, instant-on multimedia player (no XP load to play). Why in the world do I need this thing? It costs close to the same as some tablet PCs at around $1100.  It isn’t going to have a longer battery life, which will be 3 hours to start.

I personally predict this thing will flop.  People have not been flocking to tablet PCs like they have to PDAs and ultra small media players.  I think this market won’t pan out until the battery life is there and the device is thinner and lighter.  The idea is great, but I think there is a disconnect between the current offerings and what would be successful in capturing the consumer market. I could be wrong since pre-orders at Best Buy sold out within 24 hours. Sure that grabs some media attention, but I don’t think the marketing for UMPC was done properly. Next I’ll post on why and how I think Microsoft should change marketing techniques.

Okay so lets take this whole web 2.0 thing to a new level, how about open source business plans? I have created a backpack page for us to work on a brainstorming for healthy business ideas. I propose we focus on two key tasks to start, first what are the principals a “healthy lifestyle” business should abide by? See my initial thoughts and add your own in the main body section.

Second who are possible customers, what are the key segments that we could target with a business?

By combining these two areas I hope that we can combine principals with target customers to find a unique opportunity that will launch a ground breaking business.

Clearly business terms are also needed to govern this space, here is my proposal:

1) All are welcome to use the thinking to establish a business on their own, if you do post ideas to this page they are available for any member of the group to use.

2) Any business’ that do start using these ideas must credit extra8 as an inspiration and must always include extra8 promotion on their site and in any physical location.

3) Revenue and Profits, the real reason to start a business, in my view these are the property of the crediting organization and owners of the business, with risk comes the reward. If we do find some good ideas we may want to create a sub group to actually work on launching the business and then this group would share the revenue in some yet to be determined fashion.

Thoughts? Interested?

Check out Business Plan 2.0