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VON Radio - Canadian Podcast on Canadian ILEC scene

As part of Jon Arnold's Canadian IP Thought Leaders series on VON Radio, he invited me to join in a quick discussion on the Canadian ILEC landscape, including BCE's recent divestiture of a large portion of its media holdings.

I know its not like me to post twice in one day to Bitpad.com, with the Microsoft Paid Search post below, but in this case Jon Arnold and the Pulver team did most of the work in getting the Podcast online.

People interested in VoIP should seriously spend some time looking over the recently upgraded VON Radio website that is part of ever growing Pulver portfolio.

As part of his work with the Pulver organization, Jon Arnold of Jon Arnold &  Associates airs a weekly podcast titled "Canadian IP Thought Leaders" and was gracious enough to invite me to join him last week.  It's a quick 15 minute discussion on discussion on BCE-Bell Globemedia divestiture deal, and the ILEC landscape in general in Canada.  You can listen to the Podcast directly at VON Radio or even subscribe to its RSS feed.

In the end, neither Bell or Telus will have it easy going into 2006; and the relatively slow push (not as price competitive as Videotron) by Rogers and Shaw Cable on their VoIP offering may allow the ILECs time to re-think their revenue cannibalism equation as their own VoIP and IPTV offerings come to market.

Jon and I continue to discuss the industry quite frequently, and a more detailed version of the Podcast should lead to a new posting very soon on some of the opportunities and threats that face the entire Canadian Communications landscape (Cable, Wireless, ILEC, VoIP) going into 2006.

Please share your thoughts and any international readers, I'd love to learn parallels of what is taking place in your country. 

Thanks! Ash.

Microsoft to Pay Users to Use Their Search instead of Google

As first suggested here on Bitpad.com on June 22nd, 2005

CNBC this morning reported that Microsoft is to pay end-users a share of the revenues they generate via usage of the Microsoft search engine.  My original suggestion to Microsoft (or Yahoo, etc.) in June was an idea for Microsoft to kill Google's cash cow search business.

The permalink for the June 22nd article can be found at How Microsoft can kill Google.

This was apparently shared by Gates during his recent trip to India.  Until I can gather more facts on how the methodology would work, I suggest readers check-in at John Battelle's Infoworld article at his SearchBlog.

Great to see Microsoft steal an idea, even if it took them six months!