Skype is easily the most influential consumer offering that the VoIP world has been able to produce in its history of 13 years. It is easier to see things in retrospect. So let me list the reasons why I think Skype was successful where others, who came before Skype, failed. Skype was successful because:

Latin America is emerging as a strong VoIP opportunity. However although there have been some major deployment announcements in Latin America, pure VoIP vendors are still in early stages of VoIP deployments in Latin America. They are still working on which are the right countries to focus on since they all have different requirements. In Argentina, telco cooperatives are all thinking of moving to nextgen switching. In Mexico, where the regulation changed last year, the cable operators are in particular very active in VoIP trials. There are country specific VoIP activities taking place in Latin America. Startup VoIP vendors are finding specific niches only, while the legacy vendors are going after the incumbents. In general Latin America has not been big for pure VoIP vendors for some reason.

Which VoIP services do you offer in Denmark?

On the residential market we are providing basic services, which mean the telephone line and all the residential features such as call forwarding and unified messaging etc. On the SME side we provide hosted PBX solution, hosted in Copenhagen.

Denmark is a very competitive telecom market. What is your strategy to attract customers?

On the enterprise side we have an open architecture that makes it possible for the business manager to develop his own features on his side. On the residential side we try to provide on-screen services such as e banking, travel information, booking information, and all those things. So the strategy there is to provide value added services which are not 100% IP telephony stuff. But we feel we can get more customers if we do that.

Just came across this post on GigaOm about Skype teaming up with SpinVox. I looked at SpinVox when I was trying to find a solution to the following problem: How do you get the thoughts of those people published on the net who talk rather than write? SpinVox has a blogging solution that lets you dial a number and leave your message. The message is then converted by SpinVox solution into text and sent to your blog page.

Using speech recognition to get the talkers to publish their thoughts is definitely one of the cost effective ways to achieve this. But speech recongition cannot transcribe words correctly, certainly not long speeches. I digged a little deeper into possible soltuions for this imminent Internet service, and came very close to submitting a business plan to Sequoia. I will on Saturday share some of the notes I made in the process. I think talkers deserve to be publsihed just as bloggers do.

Out of the expected 30 million units of video surveillance cameras to be shipped in 2007, a very small (but growing) number of 60,000-75,000 among them are expected to be Mega Pixel cameras, according to Pixim. That amounts to about 0.2 -0.25% of the total expected shipments.

Nothing major is expected in this area for at least 3-5 years till IP camera installations get a real kick. I am not actually convinced that IP camera installation and mega pixel camera trend are correlated so much. But that is what some industry players think. However, to make use of the latest applications of video surveillance, such as video analytics, the capturing devices will have be improved.

When we talk of middleware in the IP TV context, we usually mean the server side. In the cable industry, however, most of what is called middleware is pure set top box software client, which is mainly an operating system for the set top box itself. In IP TV space also, most of the set top boxes already come with some kind of a standard software running on it whether it is Linux or other OS. It runs browser and APIs and therefore lot of the times the application itself. For the sake of convention though ... in the cable world the middleware is the full blown software for client side only. The IPTV world middleware on the other hand is mostly server side.

How many customers do you have at present?

We have over 10 deployments worldwide. They are mainly in Europe. We have some in Asia. We have Jazztel in Spain, Latvia Telecom, Georgia Telecom and Blockbuster in Israel as our customers.

In terms of the cumulative shipments, where do you stand at present?

We have shipped capacity of over 500,000 subscribers worldwide.

Who do you typically compete with in the RFPs?

We are mainly shortlisted with Alcatel and Nokia-Siemens.

Your undersatnding of Orca's market share in IP TV middleware?

By subscribers numbers, we are almost third in Europe.

Primus is currently having a run rate of 450 million minutes of VoIP per quarter. Its retail VoIP offering, Lingo, (offered in the US, Canada, Audtralia, UK and Brazil) had over 100k subscribers as of end 2Q07. The company has some aggressive plans for VoIP and broadband in Australia. It has some 180 DSLAMs in Australia and plans to add 100 more, majority new POP location. Together it has over 200k DSL customers in Canada and Australia.

Minutes handled by iBasis in 2Q07 were 3.5 billion. Average revenue per minute was 4.41 cents. iBasis has 636 wholesale customers. Revenue for the second quarter of 2007 was $155.6 million. Wholesale $127.8m. Retail $27.8m. All VoIP obviously. Net income for the second quarter of 2007 was $0.1 million.

In the second quarter the company regained compliance with Nasdaq listing requirements. Merger with KPN Intl is pending for a while.

I just listened to some of the webcasts of latest earnings calls of various chip vendors like Zarlink, Conexant, Xilinx, etc. Whenever a question regarding their main strength or differentiation is put, the reply revolves around being able to offer software for the chip. This is what most chip vendors mention, to the extent that it no longer seems a differentiation.

In fact it is essential for chip vendors to have software facility. Otherwise, how can they add value to a chip? In today's outsourcing scenario, how can one claim that it has something better to offer when the manufacturer for a multiple of them could be the same company in Taiwan or China.

Fabless vendors have nothing tangible to retain their customers with, other than agreements and licenses which have an expiry. So having software becomes a necessity that actually raises the barriers to exit for their customers.

There are well known pull factors shaping the concept of future home gateway. These include the Analog Telephone Adaptor, the IP TV Settop box, the WiFi router, the fixed line broadband modem etc. Where exactly does the Femtocell fit in within this plan? Clearly a customer will prefer only one box at home in the future.

Well, for now Femtocells are definitely going to be standalone products for a lot of reasons. The first reason is the cost. If we are lucky, we are looking at $200 range for a Femtocell and that too by the end 2008. That is just for the 3G radio access component (or even 2G if the Femtocell is designed as such). For the Femtocell market to get started therefore, it will have to be standalone product unless the vendors get the costs down significantly.

... Continued from my blog 'Talk in not really cheap'.....How do you get the thoughts of those people published on the net who talk better than write. Due to some heavy socialising over the weekend, I am unable to put all my thoughts here. So I will revisit this later in the month. However, very briefly, three issues here:

Issue A:
Speech recongnition would not work. There are options here like Casescribe and SpinVox. But speech recongnition will not do justice with those pearls of wisdom. The only option is to transcribe provided you get a good transcription service. And you can bank on India for that. Thank you England for teaching us English.

Issue B:
The other issue is that users should be able to record voice anywhere, and with a click of a button upload the voice file to their blog page. So we are talking about a mobile voice recording

With the softswitch offering, VoIP industry had heavily focused on IP-PSTN call flow. Not many were focused on call management within the IP cloud. NexTone was one of the first companies that looked at this problem. That is one area where NexTone was the innovator and a thought leader. The company pioneered the Session Management terminology in the industry.

Operators used to convert VoIP back to TDM and handoff to another VoIP operator who would then re-convert it back to VoIP. As such back-to-back gateways were being used. NexTone decided to simulate those two back to back gateways in software. So that was the genesis of SBC.

An estimated $1.25 billion worth of semiconductor devices will be used in Video Surveillance and Security market during the year 2007. These devices include chips, sensors and other such devices that go into various components of Video Surveillance solutions including Cameras and DVRs. Cameras will consume an expected $849 million worth of chips while other elements will consume about $401 million worth of chips during the year 2007.

With the theme results I have, it looks that 2010 will be the first year when major shift from analog to IP will happen for cameras in the video surveillance market.

Asia Pacific is the largest chip manufacturing region in the world. With over 80% of manufacturing outsourced to Taiwan, China, Singapore, South Korea, Malaysia and Japan, can India make a share out of pie?

Post globalization China and India have become the hot favorites across industries for outsourcing of non-core activities. Even some of the core activities have been outsourced to these countries and together these two countries have attracted around $100 billion of FDI in the year 2006 with 85% of this taken by China alone.

2Q07 highlights:
• 2Q07 revenues $75.5 million; Net loss of $7.0 million; compared to 1Q07 revenues of $71.1 million and a net loss of $4.0 million.
• One customer accounted for over 10% revenues: AT&T
• Top 5 customers accounted for 64% revenues
• Realized revenue from 70 customers
• International revenues were 25.5%
• Gross margins: 57.9% of revenue
• Headcount: 975, up from 913 at the end of previous quarter
• Paid $9 million for Zynetix acquisition during the quarter
• Total deferred revenue: $86.6m
• Left with $374 million cash at the end of 2Q07

Looks like solid progress in 2Q07 as compared to 1Q07. IP Unity Glenayre has completed most of its merger activities in terms of consolidating the two organizations into a single entity. The company saw a substantial increase in its DSOs shipments and more than doubled its subscriber licenses.

Business was up because the company sees existing customers showing more confidence in the merged entity. As such the orders for expansions on existing systems increased substantially during the quarter.

Kineto Wireless, the UMA evangelist, is out to convert the Femtocells. Although Femtocells do not really exist yet, but this new breed of cpe devices could give FMC the much needed push in the market. Femtocells, as you might know, do not require you to have a dual mode phone in order to use FMC services.

Femtocell market started to come to life 18 months ago. The challenge is how to integrate potentially millions of Femtocells back into the mobile network. The existing standards are not sufficient to do that. The existing protocol called Iu is more like the early version of SIP in that there are various vendor specific flavors. So the service provider could potentially get locked into a particular solution. And that is not what operators want from Femtocell market. It has to be an open standard thing like the WiFi routers.

Qwest has been trialing Motorola FMC solution for a residential offering. What is being trialed is a standard VCC based client, dual mode Motorola handset, and FMC server component made by Motorola.

The interesting bit is that Qwest could be exploring a ‘wholesale FMC’ offering whereby smaller operators use its FMC infrastructure on retail basis … I suppose a bit like private label stuff.

2Q07 VoIP highlights:
• VoIP product revenues $21.4 million, an increase of 87% over 2Q06. Overall net income of $2.1 million.
• In 2Q07, Veraz completed its IPO raising $54.0 million
• Vimplecom, the mobile operator in Russia was the only >10% customer, accounting for 11% revenue
• Top 10 customers accounted for over 64% revenue

• Revenues $27 million, up 41% year-over-year and 8% sequentially. Net income $4.6 million
• Ended the quarter with over $126 million in cash and cash equivalents
• 10% and over customers: Alcatel Lucent and Nokia Siemens Networks who collectively represented 27% of the company’s quarterly total revenue

How did you get started and what made you target hosted VoIP?

In 1998 I came up with this concept of hosted phone system. I would say we are the first to come out with this hosted PBX system. We launched our service offering and at the same time two other players - Gobeam and Telverse - also launched similar offering. Fortunately we grew very fast and raised our second round of money in 2001.

What has been the progress so far in terms of the number of customers?

We serve about 250 enterprise customers.

Are you mostly serving the SMEs or are there any large customers as well for yor hosted offering?

It is mainly the smaller businesses, organization with 100 to 500 employees or at least 100 or more people per site. Although one of our largest clients has around 6000 employees but it is stretched across 600 locations.

I have great respect for TV. It is a source of entertainment as well as education. But I have not had much time for it lately. I would rather be out and about. However I do miss it. One thing that could attract me back to the television is some sort of a bookmarking service for the TV content, something like a Digg or del.icio.us for the TV content.

I watch TV on an average for about 20 minutes a day. Out of those 20 minutes, I spend about 15 just reading the program synopsis of various listed items. There is no service out there that tells me what ordinary people like me think about Soap X, or News Bulletin on Channel Y, or Documentary Z etc.

Can you give us some background information about your company? When did you get started with VoIP?

We are based in Germany. The company was formed in the year 1999 to develop software based IPPBX. We have an installed base in Europe where we deploy and deliver our solutions to the small and medium enterprise markets.

Within the SME segment, what is your focus area?

Our focus is business set ups ranging from 20 users up to 1000 users.

You obviously compete with the likes of Cisco. But what is your perceived position in the SME IP PBX market in Europe?

I believe we are leader in the space in Europe followed by Cisco and Siemens.

Forget about the days when hosted PBX was alien to Europe. The enterprise customers on the continent are reportedly opening up their networks for hosted voice. And it is not because security of VoIP networks has all of a sudden improved, or that the hosted PBX features are swaying the users.

The pull factor is the mobility. To be precise, it is the mobile centrex within the converged enterprise offering that is driving the demand for hosted PBX in Europe. That is what the feature server vendors in Europe tell us.

XO generated $18 million from its business VoIP services during the quarter. That represents 131% increase over same period last year. At the end of 2Q07, XO served more than 12,000 business VoIP customers. Business VoIP now accounts for 5.1% of XO's overall revenue compared to 2.2% for the same period last year.

Carrier VoIP services, which include VoIP origination and VoIP termination, grew 4% to $7.5 million compared to $7.2 million in the same period last year.

• Estimated number of OneFlex VoBB subscribers: 100k to 150k
• VoIP minutes handled during 2Q07: approx 9.5 billion minutes (nearly all internal long distance and carrier wholesale voice traffic). Our estimates are Qwest handled about 29 billion minutes of long distance voice traffic in 2Q07. So migration to VoIP in the national long distance seems about 30% complete

• Conexant Q2’07 revenues were $179.5 million, down by 10.2% compared to Q1'07.
• Imaging and PC Media contributed 40%, Broadband Access 30%, Broadband Media processor 25% and the remaining 5% came from Embedded Wireless Network.
• The primary cause of decrease in revenues was due to some specific and generic changes in Broadband Media Processing segment. There was discontinuation of cable STB product program by a major customer. Besides, there was around 22% decrease in average selling prices and an 8% decrease in unit volume shipments.

• Access line reduction of about 450k during the quarter. More than half VoIP substitution

• AT&T has just about every VoIP offering in the market now

• CallVantage VoBB subscribers: not more than 100k. SBC was previously reselling Deltathree offering, but decided to promote AT&T’s Callvantage after acquisition. Callvantage is based on Sylantro solution. Convedia was also a vendor. We hardly ever heard from either Sylantro or Convedia about the progress. I don’t think the subscriber base is more than 100k lines at present. At&T achieved just 53k VoIP lines in its first year of VoIP launch despite the heavy mass advertising. And don’t forget Sylantro has not been exactly proactive over the last two years now.

• Estimated number of VoiceWing VoBB subscribers: 175k

• Access line lost to VoIP: Wireline revenues during 2Q07 decreased $137 million, compared to the similar period in 2006, driven by line reduction. A 7.8% decline in access lines in service from June 30, 2006. Residential retail access lines declined 9.2% at June 30, 2007 compared to June 30, 2006. At the same time, small business retail access lines declined 3.4% at June 30, 2007 compared to June 30, 2006. Line loss is obviously due to wireless substation as well.

• The overall revenues for 2Q’07 were around $75 million, of which around 100% came from IC sales. Compared to 1Q’07 there was net increase of 2% in the revenues realized.

• Around 90% of the revenues came from non-US customers.

• There was no customer making 10% of sales.

• Around 30 customers contributed half of the revenues.

• Regarding distribution, direct and channels sales contributed equal amount of revenues for this quarter.

Q2’07 group revenues for Infineon were $2.36 billion. Excluding Qimonda, the revenues were $1.36 billion for the quarter. Compared to last quarter the revenues were down 11%. However less Qimonda, there was an increase of 3%. Segment wise, Automotive, Industria and Multimarket brought in $.102 billion, Communication revenues were around $350 million and other Operating Segment revenues were $72.97 million for the quarter. Qimonda had revenue of near a billion at $999.78 million.

Communications chip contributed around 25.73% of Infineon revenues during Q2’07. There was an increase in revenues for this segment by about 10% on quarter basis. These included revenues of around $13.51 million that rose out of sales to Qimonda itself. No single customer contributed to 10% of revenues for the quarter.