The revelation at the recent eComm2008 (Emerging Communications) Conference in Mountain View, Calif. attracted surprisingly little attention. In a presentation, Voxbone SA co-founder and CEO Rodrigue Ullens described a plan to provide VoIP users with real phone numbers. Calling each others’ numbers would let the users talk to each other for free, no matter what VoIP service they used.Creating A Country Called VoIP – VoIP News

http://www.voip-news.com/feature/inum-effort-032408/

When the UK experienced its largest earthquake in decades, the story was covered first not by the BBC or a traditional wire service, but by a twitter-only news service called BreakingNewsOn. And that service, run by a 20-year old Dutch student named Michael van Poppel, got its leads directly from Twitter users in the UK who were surprised by the quake and made Twitter posts about it.

A good look at what journalism could look like in the future.

There is a tendency within Apple to strive for perfection. Nobody laughs at you if you try to make something flawless. This is different from many other software businesses, and was dramatically different from the few little software-related jobs I’d had before.

This quote from Daniel resonates with me.  I have a similar passion to build beautiful, well-designed software but have yet to be part of an organization that values that beauty in software development.  It is wonderful to know that these type of people and organizations exist.

Having two Hersheys kisses and the big Snickers bar providers more chocolate than three kisses and the small bar — but the impact of “free” got them even more interested.

It is a simple and easy way to build a website where you can share information with your team, including files, calendars and presentations. You can put content from other Google products, including YouTube, Google Calendar and Picasa.

There is debate on how used a user-friendly wiki product will be.  I am firmly in the “If you make it easy, they will come” camp.  Certainly more features, like an embedded site map in the navigation column, will come over time.  This is already useful to me for a non-profit that I have set up on Google Apps Team Edition.  It is interesting that this is the first product from Google that is exclusively available on Google Apps Team Edition.

Unlike the very minor updates in November, this refresh features across the board speed bumps, bigger hard drives, more stock RAM and for the MacBook Pro, a few new features sure to make every Apple fan’s mouth water.

Drool!

Stick to your task ’til it sticks to you;
Beginners are many, but enders are few.
Honor, power, place and praise
Will always come to the one who stays.

Apple (AAPL) missed a huge opportunity with the original iPhone because, at a fundamental level, Steve Jobs doesn’t understand social networks.

An insightful post on how the iPhone could have been, and still could be, the most robust social networking device in existence.

I’ve no idea whether this was intentional design or not, but when the wind hits them just right, I swear the cylindrical holes in the lampposts whistle. In unison.

My friend Jim Long (@newmediajim) is carrying his Nokia N95-3 with him on his trip this week, traveling with President Bush and his entourage around Africa. Earlier today Jim caught up with American Idol winner Jordin Sparks in Ghana and captured what she had to say about helping to stamp out Malaria (“Malaria No More”) and shared his interview live on Qik for the world to see and then instantly available to be shared and available on demand.