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This Open Source world for me has been a mixed bath. I have always felt that making money and ethics were not mutually exclusive. In my early 20s I had the “Microsoft is bad and Bill Gates must die” mentality. But, my Orwellian rant faded over time and I began to have a more balanced perspective on the world, and the technology which fuels it. Perhaps this is the pragmatism which piggybacks aging. Perhaps this is a byproduct of having to pay rent. Either way, I slowly came to see a world where proprietary and 100% free software had their place. I found solace in betwixt – the world of “Open Source”.

Most people don’t actually know the roots of “Open Source”. This term was consciously crafted in a hotel room in the 90s by a huddled council of six wise men. They removed the term “free” — an intentional “fork” from the absolute free path of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) — not to make it less free, but rather, to bake in some of the fundamental tenants of capitalism, and to steer clear of the moral bent of the FSF. Call them pragmatic, call them sell-outs. They foresaw a model that could both defend the free and allow for profit. Continue »

Editor’s Note: Chris Lyman is the founder and CEO of the enterprise VoIP service provider, Fonality, in Los Angeles. He’s also one of our favorite bloggers, penning candid and humorous essays on the many challenges he faces at his Janitor’s Blog. See Startup Math: 1 + 1 = 1/2, The Power of “I Don’t Know”, How the ‘CEO-Janitor’ Cleaned Up With DellToday we get another, this time on the dangers of employees trying too hard to please the boss, published originally as Roses Where I Walk.

A fellow blogging friend of mine gave me a hard time tonight about not blogging more. He wrote “I would prefer more than one nugget every five weeks.” So, I decided to put digital ink to ethereal paper and talk about a subject that has been on my mind of late.

This entry is issued as a warning to other employees, managers, CEOs, and janitors alike. I call this corporate disease: “Roses Where I Walk”.

See, I have noticed an insidious little pattern that arises as your company grows. As a CEO, sitting at the top of my firm’s food chain, it affects me every day. But, I imagine that in larger (thousand+ person) companies, it probably creeps all the way down to the VP and Director level. This dastardly practice is born with no ill intention – nay, narry a dash of malice nor a whim of Machiavellian bent. Quite the opposite in fact – this rose is born from the desire to please “the boss”. Continue »

Ribbit, the Mountain View, Calif.-based startup aiming to help developers unite voice with web applications, is scheduled to announce its own voice-web entry Monday, a service called Amphibian that will give users the ability to blend traditional telephony services with a wide range of web-based options.

Due out in the second quarter of 2008, Amphibian is slated to be shown live at the Demo conference Tuesday morning, according to the Ribbit folks who gave us a quick heads-up before preparing for their moment in the startup sun. Amphibian’s promised features — which include the ability to redirect a cell call into Skype, Google Talk, MSN or into a web-based voice mail application — may not seem particularly groundbreaking to anyone familiar with other VoIP-based web services. But viewed as a loss leader for Ribbit’s API, Amphibian might be the first product evangelist who actually made the company some money to boot.

Dell begins bundling Fonality’s open-source software with its enterprise servers today, its latest gambit to compete in the already-crowded VoIP market — this time targeting companies with 125 employees or fewer.

This is fertile ground: Analyst Alan Weckel of research firm Dell ‘Oro Group estimates annual PBX revenues, including those from VoIP phone systems, will exceed $7.5 billion by 2011. Much of this growth could come from small- to medium-sized businesses. Weckel told The Wall Street Journal in August that he thinks 35 million small businesses will adopt IP phone service before 2010 (about 11 million currently use it), a number that’s likely to ramp up if the economic situation worsens.

Chris Lyman, the founder of the VoIP startup, Fonality, blogs under the moniker Janitor— which he prefers to his other title: CEO. Chris has shared some of his management ideas with us here, too including Startup Math: 1 + 1 = 1/2 and The Power of “I Don’t Know.” We also recommend you take a look at his recent treatise on open source.

Today Chris has some big news: his four-year-old company just landed a deal to partner with Dell to hawk its open source VoIP boxes to the PC giant’s 6 million small- and medium-sized businesses. In four years his own 40 salespeople had netted 5,000 customers. Not bad, but not Dell. In an interview for GigaOM, Chris called the deal “a company defining event.” Something every founder dreams of, in fact.

Chris has written a long post about what he learned on the march to closing with Dell:

This would be a big day for any startup anywhere — struggling to establish its credibility in an aggressive tech world full of behemoths… I can clearly remember almost four years ago – to the day – when [the] four of us working at Fonality back then were sitting around a room and hypothesizing about our plan to revolutionize telephony. (Isn’t that what all founders do when they are staring at the back of a napkin?).

How many of you are nodding right now? Chris’s piece is filled lessons, but here are the key takeaways. Continue »

VoIP startup Jaxtr said today that it has attracted 5 million registered members, up from 500,000 users 140 day ago, making the company “the fastest-growing Internet communications service in history — ahead of Skype, Hotmail and ICQ,” according to its press release.

But where is the money?

You might think that scaling to meet the needs of these millions of users represents Jaxtr’s biggest challenge. Indeed, Jaxtr expresses concern in its announcement over its ability to meet user demand. To that end, it recently hired Taneli Otala, former CTO of MySQL, as VP of engineering.

But Jaxtr has bigger problems than scaling and tuning their systems for millions of users. To make Jaxtr a real business, they need to convert sign-ups into satisfied users, and from there, transform those users into customers who pay.

Even then, there are no guarantees Jaxtr will succeed. If the promise is cheap calling, it’s just the same old VoIP thing.

The VoIP community, like so many others, got swept up in the Facebook platform euphoria. Not a day passed without some startup or another unveiling their Facebook application amid much fanfare. Well, the party is over, and it has become clear that VoIP apps have lost their voice on Facebook.

This was first noted by one of my readers on his blog; now Stuart Henshall, Alec Saunders and other VoIP bloggers have joined in pointing out the sorry state of VoIP on Facebook.

“The majority of Facebook users are students — mobile phone users — as well. In fact, 27% of Facebook users are users of Facebook mobile,” writes Saunders.

Given how easy mobile is, he wonders, who is going to take the trouble to fire up a PC and log onto Facebook just to make a call? Let’s extend this argument to all VoIP widget offerings — they don’t offer a vastly improved user experience when compared with the simplicity of the phone. Sure they save pennies per minute on international long distance calls, but even those costs are coming down quite sharply.

Actually the situation for VoIP apps on Facebook is pretty bleak.

Jajah, the VoIP callback service provider that shifted from paid to “free” and was dreaming of an initial public offering in 2007, has pushed back its IPO plans until the second or third quarter of 2008, co-founder Roman Scharf told Reuters. The timing seems about right — the way everyone is going nuts here in the Valley, profitless IPOs could make a solid return by the middle of next year. (Too bad eBay already made its play with Skype.) Scharf said that it would take between $100 million and $200 million to attract 50 to 80 million Jajah users. “When something crashes in the Valley, it crashes really hard,” he said. Yeah, like the dreams of an IPO. Jajah has received funding from Sequoia Capital, Intel Capital and Globespan Partners.