• Total communications - from simple voice-over-IP (VoIP) to enhanced multimedia communications.
• One IMS switch can replace multiple TDM switches. Reduce OPEX with fewer offices to manage.
• IMS equipment can scale from a few users to thousands.
• Low energy scalable switches emit less heat, reducing expenses in energy consumption and cooling.

• Every single social network would have to shut down before I'd join a WalMart social network. And then I'd log in with a false name. I've never been in a WalMart.What would it take for you to join a WalMart social network?
• I once spent $30 for a jogging band for my shuffle. Thirty dollars for a rubber band. What's the most you've ever spent for an iPod accessory?
• I love Netflix. I don't know if I'd ever want to download to DVD. The hassle isn't worth it for me, unless they offered something I couldn't get anywhere else, like home movies my grandfather shot.Does the CinemaNow download-to-DVD service look appealing to you?

The developers of Skype and Kazaa are working on a video distribution service. Code named the Venice Project. They’re entering a market where there’s lots of competition—240 video sharing companies at last count including YouTube which boasts “100 million videos served every day.”

This has been simmering for a while, but now it’s official. Microsoft is going to try to take a bite out of Apple's 3/4 share of the portable player market with the release of Zune—a portable media player with Wi-Fi connectivity.

The U.S. Senate approved a bill outlawing “pretexting”, the practice of acquiring phone records of someone without their permission. It’s the very tactic HP used against boardroom members and journalists to determine information leaks from the boardroom.

After an online vote, Merriam-Webster OnLine announced that this year’s Word of the Year is “truthiness.” Coined by Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert, possibly the most influential celebrity for online behavior, truthiness means “truth that comes from the gut, not books.”

Silicon Valleyrumor site ValleyWag has posted its list of the top ten tech words of 2006. Included are Web 3.0, consumer-generated media, and number one, a word that mocks the next wave of Internet hysteria, bubble 2.0.

In very much a sign of the times, P&G, the company that wouldn't step out on a limb even if it had lots of padding and safety ropes has released a series of risqué comedy videos about men having menstrual cramps. They, like many other advertisers are hoping that it will pick up some serious online viral activity. And they realized, the only way you'll get people to pass along is if you take a comedic risk.

And if you want to know what it takes to create a viral video, take a look at iFilm's collection of top 50 viral videos of 2006.

MySpace will begin its flameout. The home of the world's ugliest personal homepages will decrease in functionality and coolness given public pressure to institute more parental protections. Once it looks like AOL, There will be a massive jumping ship as everyone will head towards a competing social network that has yet to be bought out by a public company.

More people will watch comedy online than on any of the major networks. And the networks know this. That's why almost all of them are releasing original online comedy portals that will host the racy humor the FCC won't let them play. For example, it's rumored that Turner Entertainment spent one year and $100 million on the release of its online comedy play, SuperDeluxe. Get ready for the blockbuster release in just a couple of weeks.

Looking for a new job in the space program but you can't get your foot in the door at NASA? There is another option. Jeff Bezos of Amazon is hiring engineers to help develop a space vehicle for his new commercial venture: sub-orbital space limousine service.

A Brazilian court has ordered YouTube to be shut down for not effectively removing a video of a famous Brazilian model having sex with her boyfriend. It appears every time YouTube pulls it down, some eager fan posts it back up again. The couple is demanding $116,000 for every day the video remains on the site.

And lastly, a very cool technology that I saw last year just got a little cooler. Podzinger is a search engine that automatically transcribes audio and allows you to search text spoken in podcasts and vlogs. Well now they’ve announced that you can search anything that’s ever been said on any YouTube video.

I agree with that basic assumption, but in the examples that he gave with The Technology Evangelist, I throw out the comment about finding the signal throughout the noise.

Twice, the Technology Evangelist made videos requesting people to send in videos asking what they'd like to see the Technology Evangelist cover at CES. Here and Here. Each was about two minutes long and they added no "video" value. Meaning why am I watching a video of this rather than just reading it. For two minutes I heard him talk about being at CES, that it was cold, and that you should send him requests. That’s it. He could have accomplished that same feat by typing in a single line of text with a link that said, “Send me a video request of what you’d like to see at CES.” Or he could have produced a two minute video of some value and at the end say, “Send me a video request of what you’d like to see at CES.”

I bring up this comment not to trash the Technology Evangelist but rather to explain an inherent problem with video. It's not easily scannable. And because of that, most of us rely on each other to recommend good video than necessarily trolling it for ourselves like we might scan the headlines of a text based website or a newspaper.

If you’re going to go with “video” as your medium you have to tell a story with pictures. And if that’s going to just be a talking head, then that talking head better be pretty compelling. My advice to all video bloggers is you need to spend some time editing and producing that two minutes of video if you want me to sit and watch.

The problem is with that pointless two minutes of “I’m at CES and send me a video request” the Technology Evangelist has lost me as a viewer. At the time of producing it I'm sure he thought, "Oh, we need to put up some video and we want some people to send it content so let's make a video of that." I'm sure he didn't think anything of it, and that it was an innocuous move. The problem is it was actually dangerous move. When you create crappy boring video you lose people for your future videos. Poor video means a lost audience for future good videos.

I am willing to watch another one of his videos, but I’m not going to do it on my own nor am I going to sign up for his RSS feed. Someone I trust, like Andy Abramson, is going to recommend a video for me. I’m not going to troll for it on my own. Until then, I know that CNET produces tons of videos at the conference and they spend the effort editing them. I’ll probably end up watching those until someone recommends something else for me to watch.

Movie-by-the-mail service Netflix begins Internet delivery this week but it appears only for a select group of customers and I'm not one of them. Over the next six months they'll be rolling the service out to all customers. The additional service is free, there are about 1000 movies currently available, mostly B movies, and depending on how much your monthly subscription is in dollars you'll get to watch that many hours of video a month. For example, an 18 dollar monthly subscription translates into 18 hours a month viewing time.

The supposedly unbreakable new HD-DVD format was just broken. Some hacker just posted the HD-DVD version of the film Serenity on the peer-2-peer file sharing service BitTorrent.

And from the makers of the free phone service Skype, comes Joost, yet another new online video sharing service. Formerly known as the Venice Project, this service claims broadcast quality and get this, an efficient, piracy proof platform. If any of the listeners or readers are already on the Joost beta, please send me an invite. Send the invite to david AT davidspark DOT com. Thanks!

Let's hope MySpace is victorious in it's lawsuit against the spam king, Scott Richter. Richter is one of ten spammers responsible for about 80% of the world's spam traffic. And it appears he's been dropping a heavy dose on MySpace users and even taken control of some of the accounts to do his duty through a process known as phishing. Richter has paid for damages in similar lawsuits, but it's barely put a dent in his activities.

Never pay for directory assistance again. A brand new mobile application will look up 411 information for free. The application, called TellMe, allows you to simply hold the talk button, say the city and state you're searching, and then the business name. Phone and address information comes up which then allows you to either call the business, see a map, or get driving directions.

Stealing some thunder from the conference was the announcement from power bloggers, Jason Calcanis and Michael Arrington, of their conference, Techcrunch20. It will be a direct competitor to DEMO, but it will only showcase 20 companies and none of them will have to pay to participate which is the case with DEMO. Well, that sounds great guys, but you still need to make money from someone. So who are you going to charge? The early announcement sounds great, but when the word comes out on who you ARE gouging (attendees, sponsors, etc.) your free presenting announcement won't be so impressive. And the point of painting DEMO as not being fair because they're forcing start ups to pay money to be seen is ludicrous. All conferences cost money to put on. You'll discover it when you start producing your own.

Although not as impactful, some are comparing this announcement to be a similar play when Steve Jobs overshadowing CES with the announcement of the iPhone. It's definitely not in the same league.

It doesn't matter, the market is plenty big enough to handle two big conferences and in fact I think it will do them both a lot of good to be out there. I just think it's obnoxious to announce a conference by attacking your new competitor. It paints you as a jackass. Just not the tactic I would have used.

Still, there are some cool companies coming out of DEMO. A few highlights include OurStory.com. A site that allows you to capture stories of your family history on a timeline where everyone can comment with pictures and video.

Jaman.com is an online distribution site for viewing a world of independent films. You can watch the film online with commentary from the filmmakers and with viewers like yourself by participating in the Jaman social network.

But hands down the coolest was the demo of Total Immersion's D'FUSION which integrates 3D virtual video live with real video. They refer to it as augmented reality solutions. It's Like making the film "Who Framed Roger Rabbit?" but without the three year production schedule. Animated characters react to real world objects in real time. It's truly amazing and my description will not do this justice. You must see it to believe it.

So while it's a milestone in negotiation for Wal-Mart (not Apple) that they've been able to land deals with six major studios for its online video store (Wal-Mart's got 40% of the DVD sales market), it will not be a breakthrough in user adoption. Because what gets lost in all of the deals with the bigwigs is they think just by making content available, consumers will come running. That would be true if the user experience was equal to that of renting from your local video store, subscribing to Netflix, or simply purchasing a DVD. But it isn't. It costs about the same, you have limited viewing, and you can't transport the content by burning to a DVD. If there's an alternative that's easier from a cost and convenience aspect, consumers will always choose it.

While Wal-Mart sees this as a first step, the public will simply get turned off because the user experience is poor. Wal-Mart's online video store only works on Windows PCs through Internet Explorer and Microsoft Windows Media-powered portable media players.

Users see through this behavior as protecting assets rather than delivering a great customer experience. And they will develop an opinion of Wal-Mart's online store now even if they are able to some day achieve a quality customer experience. When Apple launched its online store it was focused on customer experience, not DRM. That's why users have a personal warm feeling towards Apple. Many users don't even know that iTunes has DRM built-in. It's well hidden that you wouldn't know or care if you're a casual user. If you're a thief making millions of copies, you'll soon find out.

Jobs argues that DRM hasn't worked and it probably won't work because it's so easy to break and impossible to stop once it's broken. He willingly says that if the music industry abolishes DRM, Apple will eagerly comply and make iTunes DRM free.

I brought this issue up with the launch of Wal-Mart's new online video site. As predicted, it's gone over very poorly, because the DRM for online movies heavily restricts where you can watch movies that you purchased. It defeats the purpose of easily transferable digital content. Why buy online with tons of restrictions when you can simply buy a physical DVD with no restrictions.

Device-specific DRM makes no sense. Content almost consistently outlives the devices we play it on. Music you purchased twenty years ago is still not playing on the same stereo you owned twenty years ago. With DRM, content you purchase today can only be played on a specific device today requiring you to be locked into that manufacturer's devices in the future. How absurd would it be had you purchased an album that could only be played on a Kenwood stereo.

It is for this reason people aren't really jumping on the digital download bandwagon when a purchase comes with all these restrictions. Because of music industry imposed DRM, physical media still outpaces digital media in convenience.

According to Jobs' data from iPod sales and sales on iTunes, only 3% of the music on an iPod has DRM. That means the other 97% doesn't have DRM. What does that tell you? That the public doesn't want limitations on their music even when it has liberal use policies like Apple's FairPlay technology has.

Jobs argues that while people may complain about the iTunes+iPod lock in, usage shows that that is simply not the case. He argues that DRM requires secrets to be passed around. And that these secrets never hold as just a single leak can be spread across the Internet in just a minute.

Anyway, the Web is floating with theories as to why Jobs did this and they're all appearing to be political moves on his part. He's in DRM trouble in Europe, most notably Norway. He's up for contract renewal with the major labels. He's trying to brand himself as the leading voice on the anti-DRM movement which has already been going on for years. I think it's a great move by Jobs. We could all learn from him on how to play the digerati on our side.

I don't normally like doing stories about the latest processor, but Intel has just announced a prototype chip that has reached teraflop speed. That means it can conduct 1 trillion calculations in a second. What's more amazing is it uses as much power as a 60-watt bulb. To put this in context, only ten years ago Sandia National Laboratories had that kind of processing power, but it took 10,000 Pentium Pro processors and 500 kilowatts of electricity.

Barack Obama announced his run for presidency adds social networking to his website. Obama fans can talk about everything Barack. Or Barack fans can talk about everything Obama. Meet other Barack Obama fans and go out on dates with them. Create a clever political handle and post a photo with lots of cleavage at My.BarackObama.com.

This is just like that guy in high school that constantly would tell you that they were a fan of some band when they were underground, but as soon as they signed with a major label and "sold out" they stopped being fans.

Yahoo! seems to be unabashed of the outright theft of concept and design, even referring to "Suggestion Board" as having a Digg-like voting mechanism. It's getting a lot of heat from the Digg users who are all geeks. But it's possible that Yahoo!'s play will speak to a much larger audience and slice and dice the Digg-like tool in more categories than just tech (Yes, Digg has other categories, but tech gets the most traffic).

I believe we're all in agreement that The Daily Show is hysterical. Fox's version is not. First, the style of comedy they're doing is simply Mad-style comedy. MadTV and Mad magazine are aimed at a sub-14 age audience. When I was that age I thought this type of comedy was hysterical, today I don't. Besides that, the hosts of this Fox show are obviously not comedians and they can't read a prompter either. Also, purely conservative comedians are a rare breed. The most famous I would say is Dennis Miller. After that, there's a real severe drop off.

I think the show will be crushed by the endless online mockery. The show is scheduled to air on Sunday, February 18th, but a segment has just been released online, and given all the negative commentary who knows if it'll even air. Set your TiVo's to see if that or Hannity and Colmes is recorded.

Why would a city want to do this. Well, there are a few reasons. Number one is to reduce communications costs for city workers. Turns out Concord was dropping more than $100,000 a month on communications for its city employees. Instead of paying out for multiple carriers for land data, wireless data, and voice, they can save considerably by consolidating with one provider. In addition, since so many city workers are mobile, they can do their job more efficiently, by inputting and looking up data wirelessly from the field. Then there's the use by emergency workers like police and fire.

So once in place there is the added value to local businesses and to residents. And that in turn results in a business and resident attractor and hopefully helps in keeping them.

Concord's Wi-Fi is an example of private enterprise working in a partnership with municipal government. Ownership of the network has been a point of contention. Because what happens is the companies that install the networks retain ownership of the network that's on city property. Many city officials argue they wouldn't let a private company that paves their roads maintain ownership of the roads. But it turns out that if a city does want to maintain ownership of their wireless network, it would simply be cost prohibitive. So in the case of Concord, MetroFi, the company that is installing the network are the ones that own it.

Mayor Mark Peterson says it's a win-win. Everyone benefits. I guess that's for us to all find out when it gets fully rolled out. It looks and sounds great, but when you're going to install a network, you don't know how it's going to be used until it's fully rolled out. So we'll have to wait to truly to see the success of this network from a cost reduction standpoint, and from how the residents in the city use it.

According to MetroFi and the city's IT director, pulling this off successfully requires a roll out and the challenges of how to cover the entire land. It's currently covering a two-mile area in the city centered around Todos Santos Plaza.

Smart enough to write the program. Not smart enough to collect their cash. The two fell for the oldest trick in the book: "Come to LA and we'll give you the money." Unfortunately, Rupert Murdoch nor his cronies were there to make the exchange. Only the Secret Service and district attorney.

Self employed individuals tired of working out of their home and coffee shops will want to read an interesting BusinessWeek article about the rising popularity of co-working facilities for single person businesses. The article profiles one such facility, The Hat Factory, in the Dogpatch district of San Francisco. Try it for one day for just $10.

The long anticipated Linux-enabled desktops from Dell will continue creating anticipation. Dell just announced that they will not be able to fulfill the public's demand for a Dell computer running the open source Linux operating system. The greatest issue being there are a bunch of varieties of Linux which make it very difficult to offer tech support.

CompUSA, the computer superstore, can compete with the Internet. And as a result, they'll using less of the USA closing about half or 126 of its stores across the U.S.

Can't cook? A New Zealand man uses a wok as a satellite transmitter.

Not to worry. Many of the speeches from previous conferences are up online now. And in one week they will begin posting video of the sessions from this year.

And on a completely different note, I've got a couple of great tips on two extremely useful tools. First is a site to send free SMS messages from your Web browser. It's called GizmoSMS. This is just one of many programs that can do this.

But the true Holy Grail tool for geeks is an application that can sync your Outlook Calendar with your Google Calendar. I haven't tested it out yet, but gSyncit is available to do just that and it's all over the Web. People's demand to sync these two calendars is huge.

It looks like Google will be making a serious dip into that $200 million of petty cash they set aside to deal with YouTube's obvious copyright issues.

Today, Viacom sued YouTube and its parent, Google, for "massive intentional copyright infringement" involving more than 160,000 video clips from its properties like MTV and Comedy Central. And if Google wants to make Viacom happy and go away, they'll have to cough up $1 billion.

We all saw this coming and I liken this relationship to the reason why Wal-Mart doesn't purchase an independent heroin distributor. Sure the heroin distributor has lots of loyal customers and they've never been harassed by the authorities, but once a company like Wal-Mart starts selling heroin now the illegality of it is far more visible and there's someone with lots of money you can sue.

Google's response to Viacom's action was we won't let this suit become a distraction to our business. Good luck Google. You need to remember that Viacom owns MTV. And MTV made the show “The Grind” and “MTV Beach House” which was nothing but distractions.

And for those of you obsessed with March Madness, and ready to get the office pool going, check out PicksPal. They have a really cool Web 2.0 interface for creating a March Madness pool going with your friends or office.

While YouTube does have the audience that the networks want, it's easier for the content creators to create or buy a YouTube clone (there are more than 240 of them out there) than it is for Google/YouTube to generate on its own highly sought after content that they're currently hosting illegally.

Success of this new network comes down to how much control they relinquish to the user community. We'll have to wait until summer and see.

And I close with a piece of advice to the listening community. If you're going to buy a domain name through a service like Network Solutions, Register.com, or GoDaddy, don't fall for their obnoxious upselling. The worst offender is GoDaddy. They have incredibly cheap domains, $9.40 for a year, but they hammer you with worthless add-ons like security protection. A friend of mine purchased a bunch of domains online and they called him the next day pushing him really hard to upgrade to the "pro" package. As my friend Bill Biggar said, "With those sales techniques, no wonder they can afford Super Bowl ads."

Ignore the upsell. You just want to own the domain name. Just buy the bare bones version and be done with it.

And the number one mobile conference and trade show, CTIA, began in Orlando today. Sprint showed off the UpStage, a sexy music phone from Samsung that's just quite as sexy as the iPhone. And Sprint has relinquished control of pricing downloadable music to Apple by dropping the cost of a song downloaded over a Sprint phone to just $.99. That's a massive drop from $2.50/a song when Sprint launched music downloading over your phone in 2005.

And you're just going to have to settle with the .com domain for all your pornography. ICANN, the organization responsible for assigning top level domains like .com, .net, and .org rejected a proposal for a .xxx domain. While ICANN's decisions need to be made purely on a technical basis, politics and other countries' concerns creep in as well.

Last night YouTube went offline and got an upgrade. As part of its upgrade it added TestTube-a training ground for new YouTube projects similar to Google Labs. My favorite TestTube creation is Streams which allows you to chat live with people who also happen to be watching the same video you are at any given moment.