Marc Andreessen, whose first start-up, Netscape Communications introduce the consumer web to millions, thanks to its Netscape browser, seems to be suitably impressed by Google’s recently released Chrome browser. He waxed eloquent about Chrome during an onstage conversation with Portfolio magazine contributing editor Kevin Maney at The Churchill Club in Palo Alto, Calif. “Any desktop application that has not been implemented in the browser is now going to be implemented in the browser,” Andreessen said. It was an idea he had espoused over a decade ago.

Blown away by the speed of the browser, and its radical & innovative JavaScript engine, Andreessen called the launch of Chrome an “extraordinary event.” He said that is going to make Firefox and Internet Explorer to compete actively with Chrome and that would ultimately boost the browsers as a whole. Mozilla CEO John Lilly had shared similar sentiments in an interview earlier this week.

“Microsoft can build good products when they want to,” he said. The Barons of Redmond released a version of Internet Explorer that was superior to a bloated version of Netscape and gave it away for free and driving a stake through Netscape’s heart. That’s ancient history, anyway. Andreessen thinks that IE and Firefox will have to accelerate their plans and introduce new technologies. He thinks that all this is going to boost the performance of JavaScript. Giving into nostalgia for a minute, he pointed out that it was 10-feet away from his desk at Netscape JavaScript first got going. He said.

More than a decade later it is everywhere. “If JavaScript gets any faster, then developers will question if they should develop in Flash or (Microsoft’s) Silverlight (technologies,)”
“Super interactive browser that sits atop a super fast connection…now Interesting things will happen over next 5-to-10 years,” he said. While he talked at length about Facebook, Twitter, Qik and Ning, it was his comments about the Chrome browser that were quite interesting.

Why – because back in the day he was one of the first few people to talk about browser-as-an-operating-environment. I had bought into the concept then, and I buy into it now. With always-on connections feeding networked devices and mobile phones, browser-as-an-operating-environment is close to becoming a reality.

During the Q&A session, in response to a question, Andreessen said the share of Google’s browser market share depends on company’s ability to fully productize the browser and then distribute it.

PS: I tried to take notes as fast as I could, but since Marc speaks too fast I apologize if some of the quotes might be wee bit mangled.

Enterprise software, which has gone from running on the computer to being hosted in a corporate data center, is now moving out to nebulous pools of servers called clouds. As computing clouds become part of the corporate information technology environment, making sure software hosted in the cloud is delivered as quickly and efficiently as possible will become increasingly important.

Whether it’s an external cloud such as those offered by Amazon.com or an internal cloud operated by a Wall Street investment bank, connecting the applications running on those pools of compute power to the employees using them is going to be an integral part of a company’s wide area network, or WAN. And that has venture firms taking a fresh look at an already mature industry known as WAN optimization.

There’s nothing terribly exciting about making sure the pipeline that delivers applications between various corporate branch offices and data centers keeps moving and the software gets delivered as quickly as possible, but it’s a multibillion-dollar area of spending for corporations intent on squeezing every bit of efficiency from their broadband connections. Players in the WAN optimization market include Riverbed, BlueCoat, and Packeteer, which BlueCoat agreed to buy back in April, as well as Citrix, Cisco and Juniper.

Despite the relative maturity of the market, venture dollars are still coming in, with two fundings in August alone. On Aug. 18, Ipanema Systems, whose tactic of selling to service providers could be used to offer WAN optimization to providers of computing clouds, said it raised $7 million from Noble Ventures. About a week later, Expand Networks said it raised $8.5 million from Intel Capital, one of several rounds of funding the company has raised since its 1998 formation. On Wednesday, Expand purchased software provider NetPriva, a move that will deepen Expand’s visibility into data networks.

Both Expand and Ipanema are smaller players, says Tracy Corbo, an analyst with Gartner. She says these firms have niche products but aren’t likely to take a lot of market share away from the existing vendors. Meanwhile, there is also venture interest in creating and finding startups that might use the building blocks of WAN optimization as a launchpad for better cloud utilization and pricing. As Ryan Floyd, a general partner with Storm Ventures, says, “There are opportunities in this space for connecting two types of compute clouds and using WAN optimization to ensure reliability so outages don’t happen.”

What’s so interesting for venture firms (and eventual corporate customers) is the type of knowledge some WAN optimization startups have on hand. That visibility into a network and the servers running applications make it possible to track the delivery of cloud-based services and offer service-level agreements. Many offer compression that could reduce the costs of delivering data from a cloud. For consumers it means Twitter may become more reliable while for corporate users, it means one less strike against cloud computing. It’s also why Expand bought NetPriva and why David Asprey is starting a new company called Cloud Nines.

Asprey plans to launch within six months and doesn’t yet have venture backers, but as a veteran of Citrix, Akamai and Exodus, he’s familiar with some of the problems facing cloud providers. “The reason people care so much about WAN optimization now is that cloud computing is coming up, and clouds remove the barriers and policies an IT department has in place. So now visibility of the network traffic has become very important,” Asprey says.

Being able to measure the availability and costs associated with delivering every byte of data will benefit corporate users, but it should help the providers of clouds squeeze the lowest costs and most utilization out of their networks as well. Google has talked about such network-aware pricing, as have other service providers. Given that providing the basic pools of servers that comprise a computing cloud is a fairly low-margin business, finding pricing models that can take into account cheaper routes for data is a compelling way to shave costs.

Since you have to be able to see the network — a capability some of these WAN optimization firms have — in order to determine the best way to traverse it, expect older players to try to enhance their visibility across the network and newer players to try to usurp their dominance with a cloud-specific model.

Want to know more about the rapidly changing Cloud Computing landscape? Preview our Cloud Computing Briefing or purchase the full version.

I have been contemplating buying a big screen TV to hook up with my hacked Apple TV that allows me to watch great international movies I download from the Jaman store. My current 32-inch Olevia is about to be retired and replaced by a newer, shiner version.

As part of my research, I have been spending a lot of time at Best Buy and Circuit City, comparing a vast array of TVs. The prices of really good TVs have tumbled. I was surprised how cheap the Sharp LCDs have become.

I shouldn’t be surprised. The sales of these fancy televisions are stagnating, mostly due to the ongoing economic crunch. The housing bubble kept people buying a whole lot of consumer gear to pimp out their pads. However, with money tight, now folks can’t pay for gadgets, much like they can’t afford their cribs. This has to be causing problems throughout the entire consumer products ecosystem, including television makers.

At the end of the food chain is Corning, a company that makes glass that goes towards making the LCDs that are in turn embedded into televisions sold by millions. The Corning, N.Y.-based company today lowered its financial forecast for the coming months. In a press release the company noted:

The company also revised its third-quarter gross margin expectation from at least 50% to about 47%. The guidance reductions are primarily related to lower-than-expected shipments of LCD glass in the company’s wholly owned display business…we now expect third-quarter sequential volume for Corning’s wholly owned display glass business to be down about 5% versus our previous guidance of flat to up 5%

CEO Wendell P. Weeks (one of the nicest guys I have met) noted, “We continue to see evidence of ongoing strength in the retail market for LCD TVs, a key growth area for the LCD glass industry. However, the supply chain correction, as outlined in our second-quarter conference call, is taking longer than we expected.”

I think it might take a lot longer than people think. We did an informal study of Craigslist listings for used LCD TVs in markets such as Phoenix, Sacramento and South Florida, which have been impacted negatively by the the housing crisis. You could pick up brand name LCD TVs between $260 and $1,000 depending on the size and quality of the screen. Now that’s seriously cheap!

I asked the guys from Pricegrabber to take a look at the LCD and Plasma TV pricing trends for this year and the results were pretty shocking: the price of such TVs is down from an average of $1,709 in January 2008 to $1,575 in August 2008. Those are disturbing trends and — like everyone else — Corning is in for a rocky ride.

The good news: I am going to actually get a really get a good bargain if I can postpone my buying decision for another month or so.

Photo courtesy respres via Flickr

With its appeal of an FCC enforcement order, Comcast is showing how a bunch of highly trained lawyers can overturn the spirit of the law with a focus on definitions and legalese. It’s a battle played out in procedural dramas in prime time, but in those shows the spirit of the law generally wins. The outcome of this real-life situation — in which the FCC chastised Comcast for throttling P2P traffic without telling users — is far less certain.

But first, like in any courtroom drama, there are a lot of procedures to get through. First, since other groups are appealing the FCC order in three different circuit courts around the country (mostly for letting Comcast off too lightly), the courts will hold a lottery to determine which circuit court gets to hear a consolidated appeal. Then that court will set up a pleading schedule and the parties will make their arguments. Getting to the arguments could take months.

Judging by its previous filings with the FCC, Comcast will likely argue two main things: One, that the whole process was invalid because the terms of the complaint shifted midway through the proceeding; and two, that if the FCC wants to implement and enforce some sort of “reasonable network management practice,” it needs to do so with a formal rule-making process.

In those earlier filings with the FCC, Comcast argued that the Free Press, which originally filed a complaint against the ISP last fall, asked the commission to investigate Comcast based on a previous FCC policy statement. The FCC started the investigation, but later in the game the Free Press changed its terms, prompting the FCC to investigate Comcast under a section of the Communications Act. The Free Press says it was using shorthand in its first filing, but when it comes to lawyers, shorthand is no excuse. Anyhow, Comcast argues that even if the terms didn’t matter the FCC still overstepped its bounds.

In a later filing, Comcast went to great lengths to explain how the FCC overstepped its bounds. In particular, it said that unless the commission sets up a formal rule-making proceeding (which Comcast is happy to be a part of), the FCC can’t just turn around and admonish Comcast for throttling traffic because at the time, there wasn’t a rule against it.

In the same filing, Comcast belittled the Free Press and anyone silly enough to want some form of FCC rule-making to protect consumers from overzealous network management. Comcast offered a series of slippery slope arguments about how making the FCC judge network management practices would lead to micromanagement by the agency, and fear on the part of ISPs to make investments in their networks if the FCC didn’t like the ISP’s methods. Comcast also argued that, as an Internet provider, it should be free of federal regulation.

As if we’re not already feeling a little sullied by the entire argument — after all, Comcast did throttle P2P traffic while not telling consumers — Comcast thumbed its nose at the proceeding by pointing out that during the two financial quarters that the FCC investigation took place (along with all the negative publicity), Comcast added nearly 1 million high-speed Internet customers. Sometimes the market doesn’t give a damn about the spirit of the law.

On Sunday, I wrote that online back-up services are much in demand from consumers who are worried about their digital data. David Friend, CEO of Carbonite, told us that he wouldn’t be surprised that in a few years “almost every PC is going to ship with online backup built-in.” Seems like he was being super-conservative, and his vision might come to life sooner than we think, thanks to two announcements that hit the wires this week.

Dell today announced a partnership with Box.net, where it is bundling 2 GB of free storage with the newly announced Dell Netbook. Premium services will be available for upgrade at a discount. I think it is $99 a year for 25 GB of space. Earlier this week, Mozy announced a partnership with Lenovo, the Chinese company that makes and sells laptops under the ThinkPad brand. Mozy service will be bundled with the new Lenovo ThinkPad SL series laptops, and people will get 5 GB storage for free for 90 days. The next step, as David said, would be to have seamless back-up without worrying about space and dealing with software installations. That would be pretty cool.

Related posts:

• One Online Storage Startup Backs Up Profits
• How to Stand Out in a Sea of Storage Startups
  

Earlier this week, when I announced the promotion of Paul Walborsky to CEO of Giga Omni Media, the company I started in 2006, it was part of a plan that was hatched long before I returned to work after my health scare. That plan was to make the company less reliant on any one person — notably myself. 

At the same time that I hired Paul to run the business side of things back in the summer of 2007, I also brought on Carolyn Pritchard as managing editor. In that role, she steers the editorial ship, ensuring that we produce high-quality blogging content while always adhering to the best practices of traditional journalism. Her more than 10 years of experience in the field and even hand are what keep things running smoothly, editorially-wise.

The third leg of this plan has been to focus my energies on the most strategic aspects of the company. Now we’re kicking the execution of this plan into high gear, adding more blogs (as evidenced by our recent purchase of jkOnTheRun) and soon, more people, including some seasoned, well-known names. As we grow, we are committed to a level of editorial quality that not only meets but exceeds our readers’ expectations. This makes the job of finding new talent and nurturing our existing stars a critical one — and is a job to which I am going to be dedicating a significant amount of my time going forward. (If you are interested in writing for us, send me an email.)

Does this mean I’m going to stop writing? Hell no. But I am going to limit myself to writing two posts a day — more in-depth pieces, like the kind I used to write for Business 2.0 before I founded GigaOM. (You can follow my posts at http://om.gigaom.com.)

Another thing that I’m going to be focusing on is figuring out how to best use all the tools available to further enhance the blogging experience, to add depth and context to what is our bread and butter: news and analysis.

We’re already trying out some of these tools, such as with GigaOM Daily, our Twitter-inspired news service; map mashups created by the Earth2Tech crew; and NTV Station, our early attempt at an online video guide. (I’m also looking for a senior engineer-type person who has some ideas around new media. Again, if you’re interested, drop me a line.)

These are steps towards building a new kind of media company, one that thrives on the availability of always-on connectivity, which allows for easy distribution — and easier consumption — of information. Just like the cable boom gave birth to media groups befitting the medium, such as CNN and ESPN, broadband is going to play host yet another generation of new media entities. We are trying hard to be one of them, with technology and its infinite niches as our focus. If you look at WebWorkerDaily, NewTeeVee, Earth2Tech and OStatic, you can see that we are well on our way.

In many ways, launching these blogs has been like starting a company long before there is an obvious market, betting that they will meet a need. It is why I am delighted by this next bit of news.

Earlier this summer, the general partners at True Ventures — Jon Callaghan, Phil Black and John Burke — invited me to be a venture partner at their firm. The offer was extremely flattering as True is one of Silicon Valley’s most talented venture teams, one that also includes Tony Conrad, CEO of Sphere (which was recently sold to AOL), and Toni Schneider, CEO of Automattic. After talking it over with my team, my parents and my trusted friends, I went back to the guys who had enough faith in me to back my crazy idea of turning a tiny blog into a big media business — and said yes.

The move will not take any time away from my work at GigaOM. What it will do, however, is give me a chance to closely observe the venture business, which could lead me to one day being a venture capitalist myself. And it is yet another way for me to indulge in my love of startups. Though I am extremely picky as to which startup I write about, I love meeting them all. Why? Because ideas fascinate me. People amaze me. So this is just an extension of the same enthusiasm, but from a different dimension.

So far, I have refrained from writing about companies funded by True Ventures. And when I have, such as in the case of Automattic and Sphere, I have disclosed the relationships. Starting today, even that stops. Any mention of True Ventures-backed companies by our writers is going to have a disclosure statement next to it. You can keep tabs of my disclosures on my profile page. I will continue to disclose any conflicts on individual posts, should such a situation arise. 

I am going back to writing about topics that are nearest and dearest to my heart: big technology trends and policy in general, and of course, broadband and Internet infrastructure in particular.

Wish me luck and good sense.

As we reported on Tuesday, NebuAd has lost its CEO and, after facing Congressional scrutiny over privacy fears, the will to pursue ISP customers with its deep-packet inspection technology. But its UK rival, Phorm, apparently wants investors to believe it’s still in the game. While NebuAd told the Washington Post that it plans to get out of the business of selling its system to ISPs, Phorm is trying to make clear it’s not having any problems with its own plans to roll out advertising based on a consumer’s web surfing habits. A company spokeswoman says the company plans to could use its technology to branch out to track and offer ads on interactive television services as well — a type of offering we’d predicted.

The former adware company said this morning that its deal with BT is going ahead, while its deals with Virgin Media and TalkTalk will proceed later. From its filing with the AIM market on the London Stock Exchange:

Since that time, the Company has been working closely with BT to prepare its network for a trial. Whilst this has taken longer than originally anticipated, significant and accelerating progress has been made. The trial will commence as soon as these preparations are complete.

In addition, Phorm expects that Virgin Media and TalkTalk will commence consumer trials in due course. Following successful completion of these trials and an appropriate planning period, it is currently expected that Phorm’s platform will be rolled out across these networks.

It’s hardly a ringing endorsement of the firm’s success (and looks a lot like NebuAd’s statements when Congress initially started sniffing around its deals), but spokeswoman Stephanie Willerton said Phorm still plans to pursue ISP customers both in the UK and in the U.S. It has a New York office, which it opened earlier this year with an eye to North American expansion plans. Willerton also said the company has adapted its technology to address privacy fears, referring me to the opt-in page on the Phorm web site to learn more.

But the proposed opt-in plan suffers from some of the same problem’s NebuAd’s system did — namely that you opt out once on a machine, that the opt-out is only targeted at the machine, not the person. If I visit other computers that have been opted in, I’m still being tracked. Willerton didn’t dispute this but said that once someone opts out, Phorm doesn’t track anything further.

Despite the British government’s assurances of legality, the European Union hasn’t been as impressed and is asking its own questions as to how legal the Phorm web tracking is. Additionally, since Phorm still plans to market its services in the U.S. (currently is says it has no U.S. customers), Congress may have to be appeased as well. Meanwhile, BT customers should prepare for more scrutiny on their surfing habits, especially once “significant and accelerating progress has been made.”

Updated: Comcast says it has filed an appeal against the Federal Communications Commission’s Memorandum and Order on network management adopted August 1, 2008 and released August 20, 2008, in the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. This appeal is the latest chapter in ongoing traffic management saga that began with shocking revelations that Comcast was slowing down P2P traffic.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. Comcast was going to appeal. Moreover, FCC’s order was legally toothless. Nevertheless, it did get the point across, though it doesn’t chastise other carriers for indulging similar behavior. Comcast has released the following statement attributed to David L. Cohen, Executive Vice President of Comcast Corporation:

Although we are seeking review and reversal of the Commission’s network management order in federal court, we intend to comply fully with the requirements established in that order, which essentially codify the voluntary commitments that we have already announced, and to continue to act in accord with the Commission’s Internet Policy Statement. Thus, we intend to make the required filings and disclosures, and we will follow through on our longstanding commitment to transition to protocol-agnostic network congestion management practices by the end of this year. We also remain committed to bringing our customers a superior Internet experience.

We filed this appeal in order to protect our legal rights and to challenge the basis on which the Commission found that Comcast violated federal policy in the absence of pre-existing legally enforceable standards or rules. We continue to recognize that the Commission has jurisdiction over Internet service providers and may regulate them in appropriate circumstances and in accordance with appropriate procedures. However, we are compelled to appeal because we strongly believe that, in this particular case, the Commission’s action was legally inappropriate and its findings were not justified by the record

Update: Ben Scott, policy director of Free Press, the organization that filed the original complaint against Comcast last fall, calls for Congress to get involved while Comcast’s appeal wends its way through the court system:

“Presented with an open-and-shut case that Comcast was secretly blocking Internet traffic, the FCC took action on behalf of Internet users everywhere. All the FCC required was for Comcast to disclose the details of its secret blocking and tell the FCC how it will end this harmful practice.

“The future of the Internet is too important to let Comcast tie it up in legal limbo. Congress should act now to pass Net Neutrality laws that clear up any uncertainty once and for all.”

You can read the actual filings and related documents by clicking on these links.

Despite Nokia crippling VoIP on its latest N-series handsets, mobile VoIP companies are coming through with updated apps to keep Nokia users yapping away for free. Today fring released its software update for the N96 and N78 that gives users mobile IM and VoIP.

Other providers such as Truphone and Gizmo are expected to follow with their own N-series clients. Before you get too cheerful over the service, it might be worth noting that Om’s most recent post on the topic hinted that mobile VoIP users could be locked into walled gardens by individual services now that Nokia has taken out the native SIP client.

And for the hardcore VoIP users who need to bridge back to the less technically literate, TringMe is offering a worldwide telephone number folks can call that will ring you on your land line, TringMe mobile-VoIP client or GTalk. Connecting to a land line will require actual money (in the form of credits in a TringMe account), but it’s worth checking out.

If this story interests you, check out our upcoming conference:
Mobilize — The Next Generation Mobile Conference

Today Nortel named two of the customers deploying its new 40G optical long-haul network equipment; Bell Canada is widening the lanes of its network between Montreal, Toronto and New York, and Alaska Communications Systems is beefing up the potential bandwidth between Alaska and Oregon.

Once big reason for the upgrades at the core is the increase in fiber and other fat pipes closer to the consumers — in some cases directly to the home. Philippe Morin, president for Metro Ethernet Networks at Nortel, points out that those links are driving innovation and services such as HD video, which are prompting providers to upgrade their core networks.

Bell Canada and Alaska Communications join 21 other carriers that have taken up Nortel’s 40 G equipment since it was launched in April. Nortel competitors Ciena and Cisco are also gaining customers for long-haul equipment, but despite a brighter outlook for such sales, the low margins associated with the products won’t help Nortel’s troubled financials. Wall Street certainly isn’t impressed — Nortel’s stock has been trading below its $3.1 billion in cash (as of the end of June) several times in the last month.

After a few quarters of nonchalant statements that the sub-prime mortgage crisis and rising oil prices weren’t going to affect the tech stocks, the bloom is off the rose. The lowered sales forecasts and lackluster quarters are trickling in, and the trend for wireless companies is clear. This morning, networking equipment maker Ciena said in its earnings release that it expected lowered sales for the coming quarter. Gary Smith, Ciena president and CEO said:

“In addition to existing customer-specific challenges, we have recently begun to experience order delays from many of our Tier One service provider customers, which we attribute to their guarded approach to capital expenditures given the uncertain macroeconomic environment. While we’ve seen no project or order cancellations, sales cycles are lengthening and some deployments are slowing.”

Yesterday Qualcomm sent lower the shares of fellow chip maker Texas Instruments, as well as those of handset maker Nokia, after Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs said the replacement cycle for cell phones in developed countries was lengthening. If phone sales drop, chipmakers, handset makers from Motorola to Samsung, and carriers will lose. Worries from the carriers will also affect Ciena’s competitors, among them Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent and the troubled Nortel, which has been trading below its cash value intermittently throughout the last month.

Preparations for a downturn began earlier this year at Cisco, but it still reported record-breaking sales for its second quarter earlier this month, and CEO John Chambers said any economic downturn would be short lived. However, it did lower its revenue forecasts slightly for the second half of the year. With consumers tightening their belts, an industry that has grown to rely more heavily on the Average Jane and Joe forking over money for the latest gadget might find themselves doing a little belt-tightening of its own.

If this story interests you, check out our upcoming conference:
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Cablevision has done a good job of withstanding the Verizon FiOS assault by rolling out really high speed Internet along with other services to its customer base in the tri-state region of the U.S. In order to keep nearly 2.4 million broadband customers of its Optimum Online service happy, Cablevision is going to offer them free Wi-Fi access starting today.

The Bethpage, N.Y.-based cable company says it has completed the initial phase of its Optimum Online Wi-Fi network that could cost as much as $300 million by the time it is complete. The company claims that it is already one of the largest consumer Wi-Fi networks in the business. That said, the network isn’t terribly fast — speed is going to be up to just 1.5 megabits per second. You may be able to use it for VoIP calls, but given my experience with most open Wi-Fi networks, don’t count on good quality.The service is available exclusively for Optimum customers, and Cablevision has no plans to offer it to non-customers, a spokesperson told us. The Wi-Fi network is now accessible throughout the “commercial and high-traffic areas of Nassau County, in areas of Suffolk County, and on the commuter rail platforms and station parking lots across all of Long Island.”

The company had previously lit-up the network in: Bridgeport-Port Jefferson Ferry Line boats; commercial zones in Sag Harbor, Northport and Huntington on Long Island; Westport and New Canaan in Connecticut; Peekskill, Pleasantville and Pelham in Westchester/Hudson Valley; Denville, Ridgewood and Tenafly in New Jersey; and Parkchester in the Bronx. For all the problems with MuniFi networks, Cablevision has shown gumption going down the Wi-Fi route, and hopefully we will get some interesting usage data from it in coming months.

If this story interests you, check out our upcoming conference:
Mobilize — The Next Generation Mobile Conference

When the times get tough the tough choose cheaper, open-source phone systems. Such seems to be the theme of Fonality CFO Dan Rosenthal’s chat with me about the company’s latest $12 million venture funding led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson Growth Fund with participation from existing investor Intel Capital. And you know, I don’t think he’s wrong. The company is “sometimes profitable,” according to Rosenthal, and has grown rapidly in the last few quarters. Supporting that growth is one of the reasons for the third round of funding.

The Ciscos and Avayas of the world won’t keel over because Fonality’s selling more phone systems and software (while hoping to beef up its retail distribution network at stores such as Best Buy and through Dell), but Fonality has a really good chance to play big, because its open source roots mean its phone systems for smaller offices costs tens of thousands less than similar system over a multi-year time period. For a 70-person office its PBX costs about $23,100 up front compared to more than $30,600 in annual leasing fees for a comparable system from Cisco.

The economic downturn might actually help Fonality find more customers, especially since most entrepreneurs (who would be in the market for cheaper phone systems) tell me recessions are the best time to start a business.

comScore says that the United States has caught up with Western Europe in the adoption of 3G with 28.4 percent of American mobile subscribers having 3G devices versus 28.3% in the largest countries in Europe. That works out to about 64.2 million devices - up 80% from last year. When it comes to 3G penetration are Italy and Spain lead U.S. The growth in 3G penetration comes at a time when the data revenues are growing at a rapid clip for the mobile carriers.

If this story interests you, check out our upcoming conference:
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Hollywood take note: Sony Pictures is the sixth (and final) major movie studio to pull up stakes in South Korea, where blazing fast, ubiquitous broadband has sucker-punched the market for DVD sales and rentals, NewTeeVee reports today. In Korea, where average broadband penetration rate by household hit 90.1 percent last year (and in Seoul reached 107.8 percent), nearly 50 percent of Internet users say they download movies, and the typical users is downloading about a movie a week. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, DVD sales have more than halved between 2008 and 2002, and rental shops feel to a third of their 2001 numbers by the end of 2007.

But here’s the real zinger: In the face of ubiquitous broadband, DVDs won’t be replaced by other physical formats or even VOD services, but by the cloud. At the center of the Korean downloading craze are web-based storage solutions — so-called “webhard” services — originally popularized by LG. Today, there are dozens of vendors, with some offering up to 1 Terabyte of storage space for free. The services are monetized through priority access points that guarantee higher speeds. Rather than fighting the trend, Korean film studios are joining the cloud and starting a webhard-based movie download service by the end of the year.

Get the full story at NewTeeVee

With all the hype and excitement surrounding the release of Google Chrome yesterday, I, like so many, was eager to try the browser out for myself. What I didn’t expect was the overwhelming sense of déjà vu it would trigger in me.

I am a veteran in this industry, one whose first PC was a portable Hyperion I used when managing the sales of some graphics plotters back in the mid-80s. I went on to manage AST Computers’ Canadian operation, and from there went to Quarterdeck Corp., whose primary product was a DOS multitasking environment called DESQview, which was supported by QEMM, the most popular PC utility from about 1990 until the Windows 95 launch in August 1995. QEMM was a memory manager for PCs limited to 640K of primary DOS memory that effectively allowed them to create multiple 640K virtual machines. Simply put, DESQview allowed you to run Lotus 1-2-3, WordPerfect, cc:Mail and Harvard Graphics concurrently, taking advantage of the virtual memory architecture of the 386 and subsequent processors. Both AST memory boards, as well as their later line of computers, took advantage of DESQview and QEMM.

Reading the Google Chrome comic strip made clear the parallel to the emergence of QEMM and DESQview: All today’s browsers are effectively single tasking, in that only one tab can be actively processing, say, a JavaScript application at any given time (”inherently single threaded”), yet the tabs are interactive to the point where the misbehavior of an “application” in one tab can impact — and sometimes crash — the operation of the entire browser. Web 2.0 has brought about an array of browser-based applications and activities that require a more robust, stable, multiprocessing browser with each process assigned to its own memory space and associated data structures — which is basically how DESQview operated. Indeed, when I pointed this out during yesterday’s SquawkBox, someone labeled Google Chrome as “DESQview for the cloud.” Talk about “Back to the Future“!

But then Chrome goes beyond simply providing a true multiprocessing capability for web browsers. It eliminates memory creep/leak issues that I experience with Firefox; it has a “Task Manager” feature that allows you to view all running tasks and shut down any misbehaving tab without having to shut down the entire browser. Its JavaScript virtual machine architecture supposedly introduces speed, robustness and automatic memory management features. Its “Omnibox” feature combines the address bar, desktop/web search bar and browsing history to enhance, yet simplify, both the browsing and search experience. It addresses a range of security issues such as malware and phishing. But the real gem is that the entire development is based on freely accessible and reusable open-source code.

I installed Chrome and ran it on a quad-core desktop PC. Not only is it fast, but introduces an altogether different browsing experience than any I’ve ever had. For example today I had three windows open and when one crashed, sent a report to Microsoft and closed, the other two windows remained open and fully operative. The real test, of course, will come from using it over time, to see if it provides a smoother, more technologically transparent user experience as you add tabs and leave it running for a while.

In summary:

1. Chrome was developed from scratch as Web 2.0 has evolved to include a wide range of browser-based applications, thereby bringing new architectural and user interface demands to the browser experience.
2. But, as Alec Saunders points out, while it allows you to run web-based applications, it’s not an operating system that abstracts the hardware from the software. Leave that part to Microsoft, Apple, RIM, Nokia/Symbian and other platform vendors. Google wants the browser to act as an application platform, independent of operating system.
3. It brings out features that Google encourages other browser developers to incorporate into their respective browsers for a more stable, robust and secure browsing experience.
4. It’s beta, so there will be some bugs; and much like the Skype 4.0 beta, they’re looking for user feedback on the entire experience. The big question, as with some other Google applications, is whether it will ever come out of beta or will the key features first migrate to other browsers?
5. It’s not a threat to Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple or any other browser developer but rather a challenge to them to improve their own browsers such that all Google applications as well as any other browser-based applications can run smoothly and fully transparently to the underlying technology.
6. It has the potential to be an extension of the mobile Google applications I run on my Blackberry and Nokia N-Series phones, yet it can address more generically the issues of running any browser-based application on smartphones and other mobile devices.
7. As it matures, it has the potential to become a seed for developer innovation.

In addition to opportunities for application innovation, of course, fully transparent, smooth user experiences lead to significantly enhanced opportunities for Google ads. Nobody has ever made any significant revenue from a browser itself. Again I am reminded of my Quarterdeck days. We had a browser back in 1995 (including a feature equivalent to “Tabs”), but did not recognize it as simply a critical infrastructure component whose content and applications, not the underlying technology, would be the key to revenue generation. Been there; seen that.

Jim Courtney is an associate editor of Skype Journal.