When we looked at the back page of Friday’s Marketplace section of the Wall Street Journal, it looked like the delivery person had perhaps taken offense with the Vonage ad campaign about its patent case with Verizon, with what looked like some black-pen editing, the kind you might see in edited government documents:
A closer look showed that indeed, some text had been blacked out, but why?
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In a rare late-night version of its monthly open meeting, the FCC Wednesday punted on making any first drafts of important rules for the upcoming 700 MHz spectrum auctions, instead pushing back some of the more-controversial elements to allow for more public comment as well as the inevitable behind-the-scenes lobbying and dealmaking.
One partial winner Wednesday was Frontline Wireless, the combination public safety/commercial wireless network plan led by former FCC chairman Reed Hundt. While Frontline’s proposal (which would require a slight tweaking of auction rules) clearly has fans and foes among the five commissioners, by asking for more comments on the proposal the FCC has moved Frontline’s plan from idea to possibility, while all but killing off consideration of a similar but different proposal from the Cyren Call operation.
It’s not officially announced yet but one-number provider Grand Central now has support for mobile devices, allowing Grand Central users to see their in-box, set preferences, etc., as long as your mobile device supports an Internet browser.
With the FCC set to issue the first set of rules for the upcoming 700 MHz spectrum auction, there was plently of interest in today’s open meeting. However, the monthly FCC gathering, scheduled to start at 9:30 a.m. East Coast time, has yet to begin. At 12:30 Calif. time, the live webcast shows a bunch of empty chairs and an FCC spokesperson didn’t offer any details other than they expect to still hold a meeting today. More as we hear more. UPDATE: The FCC just posted a notice saying the meeting will start at 6:45 p.m. From what we hear, negotiations over the 700 MHz rules are to blame for the delay.
With a reprieve from the courts, what’s Vonage’s first public step in its patent battle against Verizon? Hire more lawyers? Partner with other patent holders? Nah — instead, Vonage went and bought some newspaper ads, and built a net-neutrality style “grassroots” website designed to enlist public support for its fight against the big telco. Just imagine, an army of thousands of Vonage customers, circling the court while chanting “woo-hoo, woo-woo-hoo!” That should do the trick.
Scoring an important win in its ongoing patent battle with Verizon, VoIP provider Vonage on Tuesday won a permanent stay of a previous court’s injunction, meaning simply that Vonage is free to conduct business as usual while it pursues an appeal of the original ruling that found it had infringed some of Verizon’s VoIP patents.
The permanent stay was issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington D.C., which had earlier granted Vonage a temporary stay so it could argue its case further. Vonage sought the stay after being hit with an injunction by a U.S. District Court in Virginia, which would have kept Vonage from signing up new customers or using the infringed technologies.
If one disruptive phone service is interesting, what happens when two are combined? Presence provider Iotum and low-cost VoIP service Jajah are hoping for a peanut butter-and-chocolate payoff with Tuesday’s announcement of click-to-call-via-Jajah support for Iotum’s Talk-Now application for Blackberry devices.
Iotum co-founder Alec Saunders, who talked about presence in a previous post, says the companies are already exploring options beyond the simple Talk-Now/Jajah integration, possibly including support for conference calls and address books. “We [Iotum and Jajah] have pretty similar views of what is happening” in the world of new voice apps, Saunders said in a quick phone chat Monday.
In more than one of the discussions we’ve had with folks about the Vonage-Verizon patent fight, there has been out-loud wonderment that some prior art hasn’t yet surfaced to invalidate Verizon’s claims. From VoIP Watch blogger Andy Abramson (and his radio cohort Ken Rutkowski) comes a report from “someone” who claims that a 3Com may be the owner of a patent could help Vonage contest Verizon’s claims. Good reading, and there will be more to follow we are sure!
Are Skype’s plans to push users into higher-revenue calling plans starting to take hold? That might be one explanation for a surge in revenue during the past quarter, from $66 million in Q4 2006 to $79 million in the first quarter of 2007, while total minutes of both Skype-to-Skype and Skype-out usage stayed flat.
Here are some quick numbers from the eBay report today, comparing Q4 2006 to Q1 2007:
Quick quotes from the call, where eBay said Skype just achieved its first quarter of profitability (!): “Skype continues to grow at a rapid pace… Europe continues to drive [business] and we are pleased with our traction in North America… The adoption of paid subscription plans [in North America] is ahead of our expectations.”
The expiration of free promotions in both the U.S. and Asia, eBay execs said, contributed to the flattening of traffic.
Sometime Wednesday afternoon, if all goes as scheduled, representatives and lawyers for a group of Iowa rural telcos and their Internet Free-Calling partners will meet with FCC chairman Kevin Martin, to present their side of an ongoing battle with AT&T and other large telcos.
What do the rural telcos want? Quite simply, they say they want Martin and the FCC to “uphold the law,” and force AT&T, Qwest and other large carriers to stop blocking calls into the free-calling services, and to write some big checks for unpaid bills totaling in the tens of millions of dollars.
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