Hello, Wayward Sparrows

Have you heard of this Twitter thing? I am @ianb if you're the following type. Otherwise, I normally put interesting messages and musings in this space, but not apparently now.

The epic struggle of Big Telco

January 12, 2010

Dear Fred — I think your statement:
“In the early days of the Internet, when dial-up was king, the telco companies were in the driver’s seat. They had the customer relationships. They had the on-ramp to the Internet. But they did not create Google, Skype, Facebook, or even TCP/IP.”
… is misleading.  It assumes that the telcos [...]

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The 10 Most Disappointing Technologies of the 2000s

December 31, 2009

I have just realized that FOIB and ianbell.com passed their 10-year anniversary some time in 2009 without me really marking the event.  During that time I’ve authored thousands of articles, missives, and comments that have been shared from my online pulpit and you, dear reader, have astonishingly tolerated it all with few complaints.  Thanks!
Lately I [...]

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Could SIP Save Skype?

November 2, 2009

The answer, in my article over at GigaOM.com, is resoundingly NO.
But there’s more to it than that.
My argument in this piece was largely an economic one, not as much a dissertation on the independent merits of the protocols in play.  I do think that the issues around SIP remain relevant as they result in far [...]

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On Business Cards

October 20, 2009

I attended the Connect09 event this evening and was pleased to see such an active, engaged turnout and such a well-organized event. Hardly the picture one would paint if they’d already drawn the conclusion that the tech economy in this province was dead.  But I did have one of those ironic interactions last night that [...]

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Why there’s no Kindle for Canada

October 8, 2009

Canadians want their Kindle.  The device, which Forrester predicts Amazon will sell 1.8 Million copies of during 2009, is becoming a force in the publishing industry — and may well be Amazon’s iPod.  As an example of its early impact, fully 5% of the early sales for Dan Brown’s latest book were Kindle-downloaded.  Of course, [...]

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Hey Steve, turn the Apple TV OFF will you?

October 7, 2009

Correct me if I’m wrong, but every Apple product I’ve ever seen can be turned OFF (except for the iPod shuffle).  In the storied annals of consumer electronics, I am betting there’s generally a good reason for this.  In my naive experience, things that are OFF can rarely experience problems when in that mode.
Now, I [...]

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On Microsoft and Schadenfreude

August 12, 2009

The blogosphere is all a-twitter about yesterday’s East Texas court judgment, which previously awarded $290 Million to appropriately-named Canadian patent troll i4i (well, OK, not exactly a troll) and further granted them an injunction preventing Redmond from selling any more copies of Microsoft Word starting in 60 days.  Microsoft, which aggressively patents its own technologies [...]

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Facebook built my Feedreader

July 29, 2009

I have always asserted that Facebook’s most valuable asset was its event stream (which you can see by clicking ‘home’ from within Facebook). It shows you what’s happening in your network. The other day I complained about having to block more than 100 apps within Facebook to keep their spam out of my [...]

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Sarah Palin, as interpreted by William Shatner

July 28, 2009

On “This Week in Sarah Palin”, Sarah Palin’s extremely odd final speech as the governor of Alaska Sunday was interpreted by Master Thespian William Shatner for Conan O’Brien last night.  Genius.  You’re the man, Bill.  With the loss of this kind of leadership in America, no wonder whales are impaling themselves on innocent cruise ships [...]

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The Open Debate on Chinese Internet Proliferation

July 22, 2009

Statistics lauding the growth of the Internet in China have become so commonplace as to inspire yawns, despite breathless press reports of hundreds of millions of Chinese going online and signing up for the ‘net.  With the Chinese Government declaring that their internet population surpassed the US last year, it would seem that the real [...]

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