I'm not entirely sold on VoIP just yet, especially with stuff like this in the news:

VoIP's got a problem... though, it might not be the problem you thought it had. It's not the fact that three of the biggest VoIP providers all had massive outages in the past four days. [via TechDirt]

From TechWeb News I think:

By 2008, the Framingham, Mass.-based research firm forecasted, worldwide revenues of anti-spam solutions -- software and hosted services -- will run to $1.7 billion. In 2003, the last full year for which hard numbers are available, anti-spam spending was only $300 million.

Well, this certainly should be an eye opener to any spam solutions that delete email.

From ZDNet:

"We were pretty surprised this morning to find that all of the email which arrived overnight had been deleted," wrote Jeremy Whiteley, chief executive officer at Promarketing Gear. "Even more troubling was the fact that, according to GFI's US sales manager, they released this update without testing it! I guess they expect me and my IT staff to play the role of tester, regardless of the cost to my business…We're reconsidering our reliance on GFI going forward."

I think they should just drop GFI altogether and go with SimpleFilter. Disclaimer: I'm a co-founder of SimpleFilter.

From TechWeb:

Spam will cost the world $50 billion in lost productivity and other expenses a research firm said Wednesday, with more than a third of that -- $17 billion -- wasted by U.S. firms.

According to San Francisco-based Ferris Research's newest report, spam's cost is primarily in lost worker time as employees filter spam, deal with false positives, and query corporate help desks for assistance with the plague.

From TechDirt:

This is scary if true, but Slashdot reports that an online marketing firm has paid $164 million for a typo squatting company that owns 100,000 domains chock full of advertising. Not only that, but the vast majority of the deal was in cash. The company in question registers tons of typo domains, generic domains and also snaps up domains that expire in the hopes of catching excess traffic. 1998 must be jealous. This is a bubble era style deal if there ever was one.

I highly doubt that $112,100 is the highest paid for a misspelled domain name. I'm sure there were much larger private deals during the bubble era. And we here at Kosmo should know as we were probably one of the largest recipients of misspelled domain traffic during the rise of the KoZmo. There is a reason www.kosmo.com still caters to people looking for KoZmo many years after their bubble burst.

For those of you that were living under a rock during the boom years and unfamiliar with Kozmo check out:

From Tyler Hamilton:

Rogers Wireless's announcement today that it would roll out Wi-Fi hotspots in Second Cup coffee shops across the country could have been a TSN turning point for the market. Instead, it was a boring replay of past -- and unsuccessful -- announcements by other companies as far as two years back.

This certainly doesn't surprise me.

I've been messing around (and doing a bit of consulting) with the open source PBX Asterisk for a number of months now. Just found a great telemarketer torture script that whirls the telemarketer through a million menu options and sub menu options etc. Just classic stuff. The author doesn't seem to have a link to anything other than the actual sound files but I found the script here.

You bet I'll be implementing this and when I answer a telemarketer call I'll just tell them to hold for a second while I transfer the call over to this!!!

You can hear it by calling 631.903.6963 631.492.3926. I'll likely leave it up for a few weeks unless it starts to cause a burden on the server. If you get some sort of Stanaphone voicemail prompt, hang up and try again as that means its not properly connecting to Asterisk.

Note that some of the recordings are supposed to be garbled and lousy but I'm not sure just yet how much is due to potential bandwidth limitations. I'd actually like the recordings to be clear so that the telemarketer listens intently and keeps pressing menu options all day long.

If you have Stanaphone (even the free version) you should be able to call the above number for free.

Its about time that someone did something to raise the bar with online mapping. No surprise that Google would be the one: http://maps.google.com/

Not only is it another seriously slick web application, it also has my address on it which most if not all of the others do not.

It has been almost 2 years since my initial Google Adsense experiments. Seems people are getting excited about this stuff that Google might be experimenting with.

My experiment went further than this but it probably employs similar features available in Adsense that haven't been revealed yet but are available (or at least used to be).

I hope this isn't true as it will likely mean the end of what is decent about BlogLines which is essentially everything but the search. I've been using BlogLines for a very long time and I've always found the search to be a bit lacking. I doubt that with Ask Jeeve's track record they will be able to help in that department.

I haven't seen an official announcement yet so hopefully this is just false.

Update: I've been meaning to post this update for a while. Here is a response from Mark Fletcher's response so things look promising.