Disruptive Telephony

Oh... my. As anyone who knows me can attest, it's extremely hard to render me speechless... but I admit to sitting here this morning staring at the screen with a rather uncomprehending expression on my face and with my mouth hanging open...

Sometime after my friend Alec Saunders joined RIM last year as their VP of Developer Relations, I said to someone that while I admittedly did view his new mission as somewhat akin to tilting at windmills, he was perhaps just the kind of "rock star" that RIM needed. A very passionate and dynamic presenter... a very charismatic leader who could rally people... a creative guy with a theatre background... someone who thinks differently...

... never in my wildest ideas did I expect that we would be seeing Alec AS an actual "rock star" in a music video! But yes indeed, here he is with two other VPs from RIM in a remake of the famous REO Speedwagon song. (Alec is the main singer.)

Unbelievable.

My speechlessness soon gave way to laughter ... and appreciation for them for doing something rather different. If they were looking for a way to be "remarkable" and memorable, they found it.

Now, somewhat predictably, some of the tech press are calling this an act of sheer desperation and I'm seeing comments in social networks calling it "painful" and "cringeworthy."

But that's the point, really... the video is getting people talking about Blackberry!

Even me, who hasn't really written about RIM and Blackberry here since, oh, last year shortly after he joined RIM. :-)

The video is over the top... I did cringe a couple of times as they twisted lyrics to fit the tune. But it made me smile. And laugh. And I'll remember it!

Will it attract new developers to the BB10 platform? Will it keep existing developers staying loyal to the platform?

I don't know. They have a huge uphill battle to fight. But hey, at least this was something fun and different!

Kudos to Alec and all the folks at RIM for what was obviously a great amount of time, energy and talent into doing something definitely unique!

And here's the full video for those who want the experience:

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A truly awesome way to start my Monday... courtesy of RWW, this great cartoon from Rob Cottingham showing the "bright side" of the Blackberry outage:

Of course, we iPhone owners could have a similar discovery... although whether or not our phone connection would actually work is a different question... (but did any of us truly get an iPhone for the phone piece? ;-)

Great comic, Rob!

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Dilbert nails it... (back in August 2011)

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As you would know from watching my Twitter stream or the #enterprisecon hashtag on Twitter, this past week I was in Orlando, FL, speaking at the Enterprise Connect conference and trade show. Of course, that wasn't the only event happening last week... there was this wee little gathering happening in San Francisco to talk about a new bright, shiny object... :-)

So on Wednesday at 1pm Eastern, the attention of many of us at Enterprise Connect was not entirely on the speakers or presentations, but rather also on watching sites like the Engadget Live Blog of the iPad2 event. Analyst/blogger Dave Michels happened upon three of us in the press room who were watching the news... and naturally he had to take a picture (and naturally we had to ham it up a little bit)...

In the picture is InsideCTI author Eugene Liu, myself (Dan York), and Ovum analyst Ian Jacobs:

Thanks, Dave, for taking the fun picture.

P.S. And yes, of course I have a Voxeo sticker on the back of my MacBook Pro... would you expect anything less from me?

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It's Friday, so here's a bit of humor... I admit that I had not really paid attention to how incredibly over-used the "my cellphone has no signal" theme has been in recent movies until I saw this video. Keep watching, though, because after the "no signal" theme, it does go into other amusingly over-used themes like dropping mobile phones in water, ripping them apart, burning them, etc....

Kudos to someone named Rich Juzwiak for apparently editing together pieces of 66 movies!

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Courtesy of Pat Phelan, I learned of this TV commercial from Telstra about the shutdown of their CDMA network tomorrow:

Obviously the intent is to make sure you have moved over to their NextG network. Being no fan of CDMA (and pretty much stuck with it where I live in Vermont), I just had to laugh. Kudos to Telstra for doing something "funny" in the world of telephony!

Technorati Tags: telstra, wireless, humor

Okay, I'm sorry, but I just find this way too funny.  Do I refer to this as "DisruptED Telephony"?

Tip of the hat to Chris Brogan for tweeting it and Doug Haslam for posting it.

Kudos also to Blendtec, maker of mixers, for coming up with this "Will It Blend?" series of videos.  I admit that I did watch some of the others in the "Don't Try This At Home" category. Fans of a certain recent movie release might enjoy what happens to a Transformer... suffice it to say that it... um.. transforms, rather permanently.

Obviously this particular video is probably also doing well for Blendtec... so far since it was posted yesterday there have been almost 241,000 views of the video at the time I am writing this.

So with the release yesterday of RFC4824, The Transmission of IP Datagrams over the Semaphore Flag Signaling System (SFSS), one has to wonder... which of the vendors will be the first to attempt to implement VoIP transmission in this medium?     I think it would make for a rather slower conversation, but it would certainly be intriguing.  Hmmm... I wonder which would be faster - this method?  Or the avian method defined in RFC2549.  Probably this one, methinks. 

Oh, you have to love a standards body with a sense of humor...