Tuesday Roundup
I’ve been catching up on my RSS Feeds today and I have a few different things I want to comment on:
SightSpeed goes 5.0 on Wednesday: I am so looking forward to this. As I have raved before (and SightSpeed founder Brad Treat acknolwedged what I said in his blog), SightSpeed’s video quality is by far the best video quality I’ve ever seen.” I was impressed how well it worked even over the lousy hotel broadband I had. The new version will make their new video codec the default–did I mention how impressive it is–as well as incorporate PSTN inbound calling along with PSTN voicemail. For paying customers, video recording will increase to 2 minutes in length (from the current 1-minute length for paid customers). Scott Lomond, President and COO of SightSpeed mentioned to me in our conversation last week they are looking at adding new features geared at bloggers and mobility. In addition, they are looking at addressing by-far the weakest part of the SightSpeed client–their IM functionality.
Skype Mac Goes Video: With the new SightSpeed coming tomorrow, it seems kind of ironic that Skype finally releases a preview of their video-enabled Skype client for the Mac. I tested this between my Mac and one of my PCs and I couldn’t make Skype on the PC use the Logitech camera. SightSpeed worked out of the gate. No contest there.
Google Does Traffic on your Mobile: Om pointed me at an update to the Google Maps application for your mobile phone that incorporates live traffic information in 30 major metro areas. Seattle is one of them, but I live sufficiently outside of the area that I don’t get live traffic information near my area. However, Tacoma and beyond–places I am very likely to encounter traffic–are covered, however. One thing I was impressed with was the speed of screen updates when I scroll on my Nokia E70. Granted I was on my home WiFi connection, but I really love Google Maps on my phone, even moreso with traffic! (Also the article that Gary Price put together on traffic information is pretty good).
How Many People use Google Talk: Om again writes about the reported number of Google Talk users. He rightly discounts the numbers reported by the New York Times, which is 44,000 users. Considering that not everyone uses a Windows-based PC, Google interoperates with any Jabber-compatible client, and Google has gtalk integrated right into Google mail, the comScore number of 976,000 unique users in June seems much more reasonable. It’s still a drop in the bucket comapred to other IM networks out there.
Gizmo Building White Pages?: I like this idea from Andy about what might be behind Michael Robertson’s move to make certain Gizmo to PSTN calls free. I hadn’t thought of that angle, but I have to agree with his logic. The question is: how can the Golden Boy monetize this?
Apple has 12% of the laptop market: With the ability to be bi-computing within a single box (credit goes to World Tech Roundup’s Ken Rutkowski on coming up with the term bi-computing) and damn good hardware design, Apple is selling these things like hotcakes. The MacBook kicks serious butt. I can say I contributed to this number too. 
Possibly more later…
Technorati Tags: sightspeed, skype, google, google maps, google talk, gtalk, gizmo project, apple, andy abramson, om malik
