11.21.06
Commoditization in voice mail
It used to take $30 a month to get a local voice mailbox that linked with your e-mail account, then the price got slash to around $10 and stayed there for a while,. Last year, eVoice started to provide the local voicemail service for $4.99 per month, now NetZero just pushed out a service called PrivatePhone that provides a Free local phone number and voicemail services. What a deal! A free local number where people can reach you and leave a voicemail that is then delivered to your e-mail quickly as a wave file. I can see many uses for this services such as ebay sellers who don’t want to give out their numbers directly to buyers, people who is looking for online date and don’t want to share their private number initially, or an international busiess that wants to look like a US business. I think technology has really changed the landscape of the traditional telecommunication industry. After Skype, nothings looks the same anymore….
garageguru said,
November 22, 2006 at 4:41 am
Talking about Telecom industry… the other day I was attending a presentation by Dr.Sachio Semmoto ( the Japanese telecom entrepreneur who co-founded DDI, eAccess and more recently eMobile). I was surprised to hear that in Japan, a 50 Mbps connection costs about $25 a month while here in the US , the speeds are no where close to that for the same cost. I also noticed that the broadband penetration in Japan far exceeds that in the US. Impressive indeed… I was wondering with those kind of speeds , one could have a great quality P2P video based social networking site - millions of video feeds streaming simultaneously and connecting people !
Ray Wu said,
November 22, 2006 at 6:43 am
Great observation. In term of connection speed in Asia, South Korea is one of the leaders in broadband usage. In a country of 48 million people, there are 12 million broadband lines that pump data between 20 to 400 times faster than the old trusted 56K dial-up telephone lines. Of the nearly 16 million Korean households, 78 percent now have a broadband connection, which is more than four times the home broadband penetration rate of North America. China also expects 200 million Internet users by 2005, and majority of these people will be on high speed Internet. What this means is that digital entertainment, online gaming, digital TV, voice/video/data integration are all reality in Asia market, but not possible in the US because of current last mile rollout issue. Also, the advancement in wireless technology and functionality of cellphone handset is at least a generation ahead of US.
garageguru said,
November 26, 2006 at 10:05 pm
That is incredible ! That makes South Korea and Japan ideal Beta testing grounds for future internet apps