The Times: Tech column - VoIP/Online books
By David Rowan
IS BT about to become redundant? If you believe all the hype about the new "free" internet-based phone services, it is only a matter of time before we are all chatting to each other over the web. After all, if we can download movies and listen to the radio on our PCs, why should our voice calls not be sent almost instantly over the network? The technology, based on a standard called voice over internet protocol (VoIP), is well enough established to be saving business customers millions of £on their annual phone bills. Now, with broadband usage rising, the rest of us are being invited to join the party.
This month, a new UK trade association was launched to promote the "revolution" that internet-telephony firms say will lead to "far cheaper prices". The group, the Internet Telephony Service Providers Association, points out that six million people (mainly in Asia and the US) are already making voice calls over the web, and sees the nascent UK market as ready to take off. As if to prove the point, Skype, a London-based start-up that offers free web-based phone and conference calls, has just raised £11 million in second-round funding.
The company, founded by the people behind the Kazaa file-swapping network, promises better sound quality than with ordinary phones through technology that is "super simple" to use. Word is spreading fast: Skype's software has been downloaded 9.5 million times in seven months. When Michael Powell, chairman of the US Federal Communications Commission, tried it some months ago, he declared that he "knew it was over" for the telecoms industry. But even if free phone calls become the norm, we will still have to pay for our broadband connections. That is why upstarts such as Skype and Vonage may actually increase the big telecom companies' profits, rather than obliterate them, as more of us finally switch to broadband. The phone networks will also push us to trade up to their own monthly VoIP tariffs -hardly a huge leap for those of us who pay a fixed monthly rate for most landline calls. BT is testing the market: its Broadband Voice service, targeted at cable firms' broadband customers, starts at £7.50 a month for those wanting the equivalent of an extra phone line.
Old business models may be dying fast, but don't hang up on the phone industry just yet.
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Stephen King nearly turned the publishing industry upside down with his online serialisation of The Plant. It won vast publicity but did not attract enough $1-a-chapter contributions. But now Matthew Reilly, who has sold more than two million copies of books such as Ice Station and Temple, is serialising his next work, Hover Car Racer, on a dedicated website from next Sunday. You will not pay to read the eight instalments, but will have to sit through rather prominent advertisements.
Reilly's publisher, Pan Macmillan, is hyping this as "the future of reading". In fact, if he were really up to speed, Reilly would have packaged the novel for readers of mobile phones. A Japanese author, Yoshi, did that for his romance The Story of Ayu, e-mailing 1,600 characters at a time. It attracted 20 million website hits, went on to sell a million in print and is now being made into a film.
So maybe it is "m-novels" that represent publishing's future.
(The Times, March 30 2004)
IS BT about to become redundant? If you believe all the hype about the new "free" internet-based phone services, it is only a matter of time before we are all chatting to each other over the web. After all, if we can download movies and listen to the radio on our PCs, why should our voice calls not be sent almost instantly over the network? The technology, based on a standard called voice over internet protocol (VoIP), is well enough established to be saving business customers millions of £on their annual phone bills. Now, with broadband usage rising, the rest of us are being invited to join the party.
This month, a new UK trade association was launched to promote the "revolution" that internet-telephony firms say will lead to "far cheaper prices". The group, the Internet Telephony Service Providers Association, points out that six million people (mainly in Asia and the US) are already making voice calls over the web, and sees the nascent UK market as ready to take off. As if to prove the point, Skype, a London-based start-up that offers free web-based phone and conference calls, has just raised £11 million in second-round funding.
The company, founded by the people behind the Kazaa file-swapping network, promises better sound quality than with ordinary phones through technology that is "super simple" to use. Word is spreading fast: Skype's software has been downloaded 9.5 million times in seven months. When Michael Powell, chairman of the US Federal Communications Commission, tried it some months ago, he declared that he "knew it was over" for the telecoms industry. But even if free phone calls become the norm, we will still have to pay for our broadband connections. That is why upstarts such as Skype and Vonage may actually increase the big telecom companies' profits, rather than obliterate them, as more of us finally switch to broadband. The phone networks will also push us to trade up to their own monthly VoIP tariffs -hardly a huge leap for those of us who pay a fixed monthly rate for most landline calls. BT is testing the market: its Broadband Voice service, targeted at cable firms' broadband customers, starts at £7.50 a month for those wanting the equivalent of an extra phone line.
Old business models may be dying fast, but don't hang up on the phone industry just yet.
+++
Stephen King nearly turned the publishing industry upside down with his online serialisation of The Plant. It won vast publicity but did not attract enough $1-a-chapter contributions. But now Matthew Reilly, who has sold more than two million copies of books such as Ice Station and Temple, is serialising his next work, Hover Car Racer, on a dedicated website from next Sunday. You will not pay to read the eight instalments, but will have to sit through rather prominent advertisements.
Reilly's publisher, Pan Macmillan, is hyping this as "the future of reading". In fact, if he were really up to speed, Reilly would have packaged the novel for readers of mobile phones. A Japanese author, Yoshi, did that for his romance The Story of Ayu, e-mailing 1,600 characters at a time. It attracted 20 million website hits, went on to sell a million in print and is now being made into a film.
So maybe it is "m-novels" that represent publishing's future.
(The Times, March 30 2004)
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