Telecom Tidbits #2429

PRIVACY

First up is Apple versus the FBI over end-to-end encryption on the iPhone. For privacy nerds, Barry Eisler’s new book, God’s Eye View, was a scary realization that the NSA has too much reach — and very little oversight.

Over at AVC, there is a discussion about privacy – or rather whether you think Apple should bother – or if all info will be hacked, why not just let it out to stop terrorists and child porn?? The way I feel: if you make the argument about those 2 extremes, you lose the argument. You don’t do things like give up freedom because of a fraction of the users. 99.97% of iPhone users are not hiding, so why should the 99 be subject?

BTW, Your Toaster May Eventually Spy On You, and Your Camera Could Kill Your Kid

SAAS

5 things about the SaaS industry. (I tend to extrapolate data from SaaS to the UCaaS vertical).

CLEC

Layoffs at EarthLink AND they sold off the IT division. Layoffs at Windstream too. If you are laying people off and cost cutting and you are in the C Suite at a telco, please pink slip yourself too because you are not fixing anything!!!

Running a CLEC is not just about controlling costs. It requires a Strategic Plan that is executed to properly. EarthLink had a couple of plans that just could not get executed. Talent is important but so is Culture and a Vision that the talent (the employees) buy into and want to see succeed. There needs to be a feedback loop.

Tom Peters really needs to keynote a telecom event. Or one of these CLECs should hire him to help you over the hump of failure.

CONFERENCING

The founder of Vidtel, Scott Wharton, is over at Logitech, who just unveiled a Breakthrough Group Video Conferencing Solution, which turns any meeting room into video-enabled collaboration space.

Metaswitch just announced Accession integrates with Zoom Video Conferencing.

After buying video conferencing company, Fuze, ThinkingPhones changed its name to Fuze.

PanTerra Networks Overview in 2 minutes 19 seconds – UC, Storage, Slack, analytics and more.

Communications, Collaboration or Workflow? Forbes article. NoJitter has a similar article about adopting UC for work flow.

Patent troll sues Apple, Verizon and AT&T for $7B in Various Patent Infringements!

Avaya vs Cisco in mid-market <– as if that was the battle! The battle is with Microsoft – and it might be with Slack in 2 years.

WHY TIDBITS???

I write columns for Channel Vision magazine, Internet Telephony and Cloud Computing magazine plus this blog, plus work as an agent and consultant. Not everything that happens is worth 350+ words. Sometimes just listing the stuff that is crossing my desk helps me to tick off the puzzle pieces so that later I can write 700 words about a trend or an idea or whatever. So there have been a lot of tidbits posts especially in the last year, but it is so that you can quickly consume some industry news and I remind myself of stuff happening.

Thanks for reading!

Tags: cisco, clec, collaboration, earthlink, patent, SAAS, saas, UC, video conferencing
Related tags: video conferencing, video, conferencing, privacy, tidbits, should