Kaizen Bits

A former girlfriend told me once that having an Audi TT, you need to get another car to go to normal places. That was the time I was living in Switzerland and I was completely in love with the former version of the Audi TT (make it grey).

A couple of days ago, I went to a K-Tuin shop asking for the update of my Tiger Mac OS X to current Snow Leopard just to find out that I had to buy the Mac Box Set which includes iLife, Leopard together with Snow Leopard and IWork. The slight problem is the price: 169 euros.

Well, in my office computer I am using Windows 7 and it works great, fully licenced by the University. So, given that each time Mac products are more and more exclusive and expensive, I definitely think that my former girlfriend was right and Mac is an Audi TT.

Telefonica (which is being reorganized from a brand viewpoint: it will keep its Movistar brand in Spain and Latin America and O2 for the remainder markets) has bought Jajah, the VoIP service company for 145 Meuros. The article in GigaOm has very valuable insights, as usual.

The company had raised 35 Meuros from Deutsche Telekom, Intel Capital and Sequoia Capital. It has 25 Million subscribers (Skype outnumbers them by half billion) and a native backend network, which can be interesting for Telefonica. The backend network is shown in the following picture:

According to GigaOm some of the reasons for the deal might be:

* Cheap international calling plans are a way to retain/attract new customers. Telefonica has a strong presence in Latin America, and Jajah’s network can be a good way to increase its share of voice minutes.
* Jajah’s VoIP platform can be used to essentially turn O2 into a long-distance voice company.
* Like BT which bought Ribbit, O2 could rethink its approach to the voice business and start focusing on how it can marry voice with web/mobile apps.
* These mobile applications could then leverage not only Jajah’s platform but also O2’s next-generation wireless broadband networks that use Long-Term Evolution (LTE) technology.

I can hardly add anything else. I have also asked myself a couple of times how come there are no MVNO in Latin American in my frequent trips over the continent. Perhaps a good answer is that alterantive operators such as Jajah could be the first step to it.

The last Cisco Annual Security Report points out, according to this press article in Spanish, that most organizations do not fully trust in outsourcing their data and processes to the Cloud. On the other hand, some minor organizations do exactly the other way round and trust too much in a hosting or Cloud services.

To me, this is just the beginning of a technology whose origins are not clear at all and is going mainstream slowly but surely. Cisco is a great company and their equipment is all over the world and same applies to most companies providing Internet infrastructure. They simply know the Cloud is out there and space and resources will be a commodity for a clear cost-reduction reason.

It´s been a while since I have been thinking in writing a long essay (the word “book” makes me shiver, pure fear ) about how most Cloud features have long showed up in many business models we have these days. The book would analyze how new and promising business models are backed on Cloud features.

Geeky but funny

I was warned via email (because I had previously subscribed in Google) but I hope it has been worthwhile. Actually, I have tried Safari, Firefox and also Camino for Mac, but I am always hoping the best from Google because I just simply (and I have no interests or disclaimers or whatsoever to do, since I am purely an academic) think Google has always the best and last word to say!!

Update: Bloody hell!! I can´t install it with my OS version, Tiger 10.4.11

I was reading about fonYou, a new Virtual Mobile Operator (VMO), which is not at all a VMO

Actually, to me, fonYou is not a mobile operator, but a phone company service based on the re-location of the call. That means, you do not even need a SIM card, fonYou assigns a customer a Spanish phone number and then redirects any call to this number to any other number, either a fix line, mobile foreign phone… probably even Skype.

I like the fundamentals, so the question could be: for when the other way round? I mean, having a digital number (or identity) and re-directing to any other number like Google Voice was already doing in the US?

Today I just realized once more that blogging requires quite some time and some I presently can not count on. Disposing some responsabilitites in Janurary might mean that I will finally have the time to work on it, because it is a good and powerful tool and it has always supported me for my courses and conferences.

So far, I will do as much as I can. It is a couple of months I wanna fix the bloody banner from Webstats4U, but I gott hack the code and takes me even longer to switch to Google Analytics.

Meanwhile, let´s have fun with this wonderful Fall time…:-)