Gerry Blackwell

Despite Skype now being well into its second year as a U.S.-based company, it has yet to capture the imagination of American consumers the way it has Europeans and Asians. But the company’s vice president and general manager for North America, Don Albert, says Skype is still very much on a roll. The company is […]

At a gala event introducing Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007 in January, Microsoft called it the most significant product launch in the company’s history ? the first time the company debuted new versions of its two flagship offerings at the same time. Mostly, of course, it was pure hype. Vista has yet to prove […]

At a gala event introducing Windows Vista and Office 2007 in January, Microsoft called it the most significant product launch in the company’s history – the first time it debuted new versions of its two flagship offerings at the same time. Mostly, of course, it was pure hype. Vista has yet to prove it can […]

If you’re sold on using Skype for business, Trendnet‘s ClearSky Bluetooth VoIP Conference Phone Kit ($130 to $145) could be a useful addition to your telecom arsenal. It’s designed like—and works like—a conventional boardroom conferencing unit, with a control pad, small LCD display, speaker, and three hands-free microphones. You place the three-pronged ClearSky unit on […]

After Eric Taylor tried Skype at home for a few months, he decided it was good enough to use at work—and would solve a couple of pressing problems there. Taylor manages an independent branch of Allied Home Mortgage Capital Corp., a residential mortgage brokerage firm, in Warrenton, Virginia. “I was looking for a way to […]

For all the media attention it gets, especially in the business press, e-mail remains a tiny part of the overall mobile messaging market, especially when compared to SMS. In a survey of consumers conducted by JupiterResearch late last year, only 2 percent said they had mobile e-mail capabilities. But as we’ll see in the third […]

Alarm bells should be going off at VoIP providers everywhere after the recent case in which a fraudulent VoIP aggregator routed as many as 10 million minutes of calls through other providers’ networks and pocketed an estimated $1 million in fees from its customers. Two men were arrested last month, one in Miami, one in […]

For mobile carriers, it sounded like a can’t-miss proposition. Flood the market with inexpensive, heavily subsidized camera phones, launch Multimedia Message Service (MMS) and wait for subscribers to start sending pictures over the network with the same abandon they send text messages. Except it didn’t quite work out that way. In this second in our […]

It’s an odd characteristic of the mobile landscape that devices and networks originally designed for voice are increasingly being used not for talking on the phone but for sending messages; either text only, or with pictures, sound or even video. The mobile messaging market has grown by leaps and bounds in the last ten years […]

As much as we might all love a stylish, high-performance notebook with all the bells and whistles, that premium price tag brings most of us down to Earth pretty quickly. Still, you can buy perfectly fine laptops now for well under $1,000 Lenovo, the Chinese company that purchased IBM’s ThinkPad and ThinkCentre lines, entered this […]