Wrapping up the week

This being the Christmas holiday week, news has really been fairly light. Many companies across all business sectors have been shut down and quietly celebrating family time.

There have been a few stories that caught my eye in between shoveling snow (and yes, it's still snowing in Spokane. We got another 3-4 inches here last night).

Another $100 Million for Palm From Bono & Pals

It must be Christmas, as the guys at Elevation Partners are feeling generous enough to invest another $100 million into beleaguered smartphone maker Palm, which has been slip-sliding away for a very long time. Elevation Partners, a Menlo Park, Calif.-based private equity firm headed by Roger McNamee, previously invested $325 million in Palm (for about 25 percent of the company) and brought in new management -- many of them former Apple executives -- to save what was once an iconic brand and chief instigator of the smartphone revolution.
[Read Om's full post]

Om and I have long been Palm fans and friends, but we swapped a couple of notes about this. While we both think it would be very cool to see Palm remain in the market, this seems. at leastw to me, a foolhardy investment. Palm has demonstrated complete inability to compete over the past 2+ years, and an infusion of cash isn't going to help the weary, tired lack of leadership and innovation.

On a sad note, we've been following this story across a number of sources. Here's Rich Tehrani's post:

A Tale of Bribery, Cockroaches and Raid

One of the most fascinating articles I have read in a long while is about the Siemens global bribery scandal where the company spent $1.4 billion on bribes from 2001 to 2007. Of that, get this - telecom accounted for $800 million or 57%! Consider the company also had divisions in industrial, transportation, control systems, healthcare and other areas and you see just how out of whack the telecom bribery spending was.

This leads one to wonder a few things... What would have happened if $800 million in telecom bribes weren't paid during this time period? Would Nortel, Alcatel-Lucent, Avaya and others have done better? One would imagine they would have.

Would the terms of the Alcatel-Lucent deal have been different? How about Avaya being taken private - would the valuation had been higher if the bribery by Siemens didn't take place?

Then there is product development. Did it suffer over the past decade? Did Siemens need to innovate if it was selling more product than it should have? Is its innovation behind others?

Furthermore, if other companies were selling less, did they in turn have less money to put back into their own R&D?

Did Siemens in fact cause innovation in global telecom to slow?
[Read Rich's full post]

This story saddens me because I've been a strong voice supporting Siemen's leadership. Rich asks the big question - Did Siemens in fact cause innovation in global telecom to slow?. Time will tell, but it's an interesting problem as to whether Siemens action hurt the entire industry. They certainly hurt countless smaller players in the space, but is that simply part of free market competition? Or are there deeper ethical issues, given that in many parts of the world bribery is simply how business gets done?

For an upbeat note, there's a look at 2009 and what's ahead by Emerick Woods, CEO at Global IP Solutions.

Focus is Everything

As 2008 comes to a close and I look forward to 2009, I am reminded of golf pro Harvey Penick. He once said, "Golf tips are like aspirin. One may do you good, but if you swallow the whole bottle you will be lucky to survive." I think the same principle applies to IP communications and business in general. Focus is everything.

Over the past few years, we saw some great technological advances. The iPhone phenomenon, for instance, is an incredibly promising development for advanced mobile communications. The openness of the iPhone platform and the support for seamless multimedia capabilities is driving a host of innovative applications. The past year also represented a big step forward for Unified Communications, as established players like Microsoft, Cisco, and IBM gained significant traction in the enterprise communications space. Buy-in and competition from such heavy hitters can only mean that we can expect to see greater convergence among applications and devices. Finally, 2008 was a year in which video conferencing became legitimate. From full-fledged telepresence, to more flexible and accessible desktop video conferencing applications, vendors have overcome a host of technical and business issues to offer a wide range of video communications solutions.
[Read the full post]

And our good friend Jeff Pulver, posted 12 ways ti use VoIP to improve the holidays, but these are generally great ideas the whole year through.

Top 12 Clever Things Ways to Use VoIP to Improve Your Holidays This Year:

The following list was compiled by Jim Kohlenberger and the VON Coalition