Joost it?

Interesting new articles have expanded my views since November. I think commercially, Joost is an extremely viable (cost effective, easy to deploy) product, but (yes there is a but) it has 2 potential problems:

• A telco doesn't like it: to introduce packet loss or filtering is easy these days - get a DPI, tweak parameters in your cache appliance (1, 2) to increase the latency or to never deliver some packets. So unless the telco's become infrastructure (like roads that provide the best QoS to *anyone* wanting to use them), the Joost could be out of these world (like the guy the wrote the article), or it can be Just crap ...
  
• A telco likes it too much: So in this case, the telco allows Joost to work - maybe through syndication -, deploys infrastructure for caching (1, 2) to enhance the user experience. So here the telco would need good BSS/OSS systems to monitor and manage network deployments (one thing is talking about the "consumer experience" in isolation, a different animal is to see how 1 million consumers receive good QoS).
  

After using Skype in and Skype out in 3 different networks in the last 24 hours (home cable at 2 Mbps, hotel shared wLAN at 8 Mbps and office at 100 Mbps), the experience of peer to peer is reasonable - but none of my 8 calls was 100 % satisfactory - people could understand me or i could understand them, but packets were lost, echo introduced, etc. Since the 3 networks are not 'aware' of this particular use, it is a good example of how an un-managed telco environment would operate.

Could anyone with access write more about what is Joost offering to partners, or is it really Joost it ?

Converge !

Uhmmm I was chatting to one of my mates and she told me she spends now lots of time down in Stickam; I had never heard of it (so the word-of-mouth advertising is not working anymore?), but it looks just like a more "converged" version of MySpace ! I do remember the good old days when cuseeme and netmeeting came along to start the "video social networking", now with bandwidth being a commodity, and the web maturing ("2.0"), it is easy to see sites like Stickam "stick" out more (cheesy!) and acquiring more and more subscribers.

Still the problem is how to make the business model ! I find the way google ads are introduced into myspace annoying, sometimes links move around because of the dynamics with the advertising ... not good! (before you go about ... "http://www.myspace.com/joshcruz" is not me ... so no jokes!). For advertising to work out, it has to be less intrusive ... how ? well, that is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, no one is going to publish any ideas anywhere!

I have some other ideas I need to structure, so I will leave them for new posts.