Saw this on the newsstand yesterday. Great article about VoIP industry with an excellent review of Jeff Pulver, Vonage and many others! Phone of the Future indeed. I look forward more frontpage news for VoIP this year!

Speaking of VoIP, sometimes I wish we would use IP Telephony for what’s happening today. There were many long distance players who uses VoIP and they called themselves VoIP player too. The technology might be similar but the features and issues are very different.

Unfortunately, when I mention VoIP, most people would immediately associate it with calling card or cheap IDD calls. I always have to start the discussion by making proper definition.

Was glancing at my and found a site called notmilk which her reader recommended, a site about eating healthy. Well, here is a gem from the site on egg:

When you eat these animal proteins, they create an acid condition in your blood. Imagine the essence of stinky rotten eggs infusing into your bloodstream. We cannot afford to lose bone density, but this is how your body compensates,by leeching calcium from your bones to neutralize the acid. Dr. William Castelli, lead researcher of the Framingham heart study (America’s largest heart study) calls homocysteine the key to all heart disease.

Wow, that sound serious. Eating eggs apparently will eats into your bones! So the article went on to talk about some other stuff which is bad for you and make the following recommendation:

FIRST: Eliminate all milk and dairy
SECOND: Eliminate all poultry and eggs
THIRD: Eliminate all seafood
FOURTH: Eliminate all pork
FIFTH: Eliminate all beef

As a rule, the higher up one goes on the food chain, the more concentrated are the toxins, heavy metals, pesticides, dioxins, and PCBs in their flesh and body fluids.

Duh. So what can you eat?

Top 10 trend in 2005 according to Fortune. No. 1 on the list is blogging :-) Read the excellent article on Fortune which has pretty good summary of what’s happened in the blogosphere last year.

In a related news, Seth discovered the guy behind Think Secret (which is now been sued by Apple) is a 19 years old who started his site when he is 13.

I am off to Bali for a quick trip. The purpose of the trip is to look at the proposed venue for APRICOT 2007 (yes, 2007 ;-).

Speaking of APRICOT, 2005 will be held in Kyoto late next month. I haven’t been back to Kyoto since my honeymoon two years ago and I been looking forward to it, altho looking at my schedule, it is unlikely I have any chances to do sightseeing. Anyway, come join us at APRICOT 2005 if you can. The early bird discount has been extended until end of Jan so do so quickly!

ps: Oh yea, Michael Everson also happened to be in Bali right now. Original plan is to meet up with him in Singapore before he flies China for SC2 meeting but I think we can catch up in Bali instead. :-)

Take a look at GM Fastline Blog, a brand new blog by a senior management of GM, Bob Lutz, and look at the traffic and comments on the site! (via Loic). I glance at it quickly but one comment stands out:

Very impressive Product Strategy !! I think your competetion is not going to like the way you (GM) have changed the playing feild and reaching out to customers thru this media.

Kudo’s to you and your team !!

Seriously, it is time for corporate to start blogging!

Remember my rant about Software Patent few months back?

Dealing with ‘non-bogus’ patent are tough, especially if it is held by non-OSS-friendly company, like Microsoft. (Microsoft have huge patent portfolios btw, but so far, they have not use it aggressive against competition yet). This is where we need a ‘Cold War’ in software patents – Where two or more giants, each with huge patent portfolios, and no one wants to be the first to strike. And Novell vows to defend Linux with its patent portfolio is admirable (They already done so by voicing out in the SCO facade). I hope others like IBM will do so soon.

IBM granted my wish today : IBM Releases 500 Software Patents for Open Source Developers. ;-)

A friend pointed me to the latest Internet Society budget for 2005 :- ISOC is expecting PIR (ie, .ORG) to contribute 3.4M to the society! Wow, thats 2-3x as much as what Internet Society gets from its membership!

I think that’s pretty neat because ISOC has been in the red for many years and could certainly use some help financially. Afterall, it is hosting IETF and also paying for the IANA registry and RFC-Editors, all of which is critical to the Internet standardization process. Best of all, this also means ISOC would have some budget surplus to fund some useful projects :- 1.1M was allocated to that for Education and Policy development, including one doing African IDN :-)

But there is also another side to the story: Given there are approximately 3.3M .ORG names, this works out to be about US$1/name for ISOC. Hmm, didn’t each .ORG cost US$6 to the registrar so where did the rest of the money goes? Well, I suppose some money are needed to keep PIR going but PIR is a pretty thin organization¹ so not much overhead there. Thus, I think the majority of the US$5 goes to Afilias, the registry operator for .ORG but discussion sake, lets just say US$3/name.

Now, back in the days when I was the CTO of i-DNS 3-4yrs ago, I remember doing a spreadsheet calculation on the cost to do full-fledge registry operation. At 100k domain names, it would work out to be about US4-5/name but once it reach 1M domain names, the cost falls to less then US$1/name. And it get sweeter as you gain economy of scale :- at 20M names, it cost US$0.10/name! So with 3+M .ORG names, I don’t think it would cost more then US$1/name for Afilias to run .ORG. That’s means a cool 7M profit to Afilias² which is more then whats was contributed back to ISOC!

Now, I don’t have problem commercial companies making money. I mean, compared to Verisign which makes US$5.95/name for .COM, the profit Afilias makes is relevant little. But I think there is something fundamentally wrong when a commercial company makes money riding on a non-profit society. Shouldn’t more money be given to ISOC, or if ISOC don’t need it, why not lower the cost of .ORG registration and give it back to the Internet community?

This is also one of the reasons I don’t support the proposed .ASIA, with Afilias trying to replicate what the .ORG arrangement.I feel the AP community is been made use of and that feeling isn’t very good.

¹ I only know Edward Viltz, the CEO & President of PIR but I haven’t met anyone else who works in PIR.

² Disclaimer: I don’t have any insider information regarding the deal between Afilias & PIR so I don’t know how much they gets. Neither do I know the exact operational cost for Afilias so the 7M profit is just my intelligent (conservative) estimation.

MacWorld just started and as usual, Steve announced two new product: iPod Shuffle and Mac Mini.

iPod Shuffle, a even smaller version to iPod Mini which comes with 512Mb or 1Gb for your MP3. Sure, there are similar product out there (e.g. Creative MuVo), but hey, it is an Apple, with its ubercool design and best of all, at only US$99 which is incredible affordable. I would seriously consider this if I have got my iPod.

Next is the Mac Mini, a SFF (Small Form Factor) Mac which also have a small price tag, US$499 :-) It is Mac Cube redux, it is Mac version of Shuttlebox (or mini-ITX), and above all, it is Apple answer to all the PC-iPod user: Buy a Mac box which cost only as much as your iPod which can replace your dell machine!

I would like to see a bigger harddisk (80Gb don’t cut it) and perhaps with a TV tuner card so I can run my MythTV PVR on it. But hey, this is good enough for me: It runs silently which means it is a perfect MythTV frontend! (Yes, MythTV runs on MacOSX). It is a super cool box that I can put beside my DVD player and hide my MythTV box in my rack. Heck, forget the DVD player!

So when will we get to see Mac Shuffle? :-)

One of my guys, Arvind, took the 3rd Generation iPod I bought in US yesterday. Today, he return my iPod with a Penguin on it :- Linux on iPod :P

What can it do? Well, other then playing MP3 (which strangely is bit slower), I can play some of the Linux games like tetris, pong, etc. Pretty Cool. Now, I am praying he can revert this back to my normal firmware even tho it is dual boot.

What the heck we doing this? Well, that’s something I cannot say here but hey, it is something fun so why not? Anyway, the reason Arvind asked for my iPod is because after combing the whole Sim Lim & Funan, it seem there are only iPod Photo & mini left in Singapore’s store. Not even 4G (which btw can’t do this) … iPod selling that well huh?

ps: I didn’t have digital camera with me so I stole the iPod picture from here. But that’s how it looks.

Okay, let me be join the echo chamber regarding the problem with Skype voicemail.

I called a colleague using skype, not knowing he was in another skype session. His Skype Answering Machine picked up and I left a message. First the parties on the call with him heard me. Secondly, I heard them. Both calls were clear as a bell to the others.

No doubt it will be fixed soon :-)