Microsoft had a blogger session today as part of their big Sharepoint launch.   I was invited at the last minute but had a commitment here at Mashup Camp.  Sounds like it didn’t go good.  No on from the Broadband Developments Unified Communications editorial staff made it up to SF for this.

My good friend and VP and GM of Newsgator Jeff Nolan had live notes.

Here is the official Microsoft release on Online Exchange and SharePoint - Exchange Online and SharePoint Online Out of Beta and Ready for Purchase.

Microsoft announces new customers, partners, and online services.

SAN FRANCISCO — Nov. 17, 2008 — Today,…

Ok I am very excited by this move by Obama recent appointment for the FCC transition team. Two good friends of mine who I’ve known for many years were just appointed to the Obama FCC transition team.

Meet the new guard - Kevin Werbach and Susan Crawford. Both are industry experts in the area of policy, technology, and innovation. More importantly they both have a global view. Both Kevin and Susan have long been proponents of ‘broadband everywhere’ and the impact to innovation and global leadership.

I’m excited to see this announcement and throw my hat in as a volunteer to the efforts…

Bruce Morse is giving the keynote at VoiceCon San Francisco. He started with a video about how IBM can do Unified Communications without ripping and replacing all the existing products. I blogged yesterday about the number 1 hallway conversation which is a pending announcement tomorrow with a deal with Microsoft.

The pending deal has to do with an interoperability deal between Microsoft’s Office Communications and Sametime. Word has it that there will be a major customer implementation (one IBM UC large customers and one large Microsoft customers) to showcase this new partnership. Specifically I understand that IBM and Microsoft will federate…

Betsy Frost Webb, General Mgr of the Microsoft Unified Communications group, is giving the keynote here at VoiceCon San Francisco 2008. I am interested in the presentation from Microsoft because there are rumors floating around this morning that later in the week Microsoft will do a “GodFather” deal with IBM to team up on a joint Unified Communications solution. This would be a direct move against Cisco. I’ve also heard rumors that I’ve posted here that Cisco has been in conflict with IBM over their recent moves into the compute sector.

I came in a bit late but she is touting…

I never heard of PeerApp til today but what caught my attention is the investor list.  Stephen Van Beaver an old associate from Massachusetts has a hot hand in picking technology network companies.  So I’m posting this and putting PeerApp on my watch list.

PeerApp a Intelligent Media Caching and bandwidth arbitrage solutions for Internet Service Providers (ISPs), today announced that it has raised US$ 8 Million in Series B funding. The round was led by existing investors Pilot House Ventures, Cedar Fund and Evergreen Venture Partners. The funds will be used to expand sales and marketing operations worldwide to meet…

Jim Burton of UCStrategies.com, the leading consulting firm for Unified Communications, is having an impressive gathering of industry execs the here on the first night of VoiceCon San Francisco 2008. Fellow bloggers Alex Lewis, Blair Pleasant, and I are covering the wine tasting event as part of our normal dedicated commitment to blogging

What’s amazing is the quality of executives attending Jim’s event. We are talking shop with senior execs from IBM, Microsoft, Alcatel-Lucent, Nortel, Cisco, and others. What’s striking is that deals are getting done. I’m writing this now and overhearing conversations of bus dev deals being discussed. ROI…

Gloomy news in a down economy abound. Signs are everywhere in many sectors of the technology spectrum.

The Social Networking site Linkedin is laying off 10% of its workers. Dell has asked personnel to voluntarily take unpaid leave. Apple is supposedly scaling back its Iphone production. John Furrier earlier reported on Cisco’s earnings problems.   Many mid-size companies have discovered placing their infrastructures in managed hosting environments has given them cost advantages.   Other companies are pre-emptively behind-the-scenes cutting back, canceling planned expenses for the quarter, scaling back hiring goals, postponing projects, etc.

Plenty of the problems are based on uncertainty and faith in the economy in…

The Measurement Factory, experts in performance testing and protocol compliance, today announced results from the fourth-annual survey of domain name servers on the public Internet.

Top-line results indicate that despite the fact that most organizations are running recent versions of BIND and no longer using Microsoft DNS Servers for their external DNS servers, many organizations have not taken the necessary precautions to limit access to recursion or secure zone transfers. In addition, many still have not upgraded to the latest DNS software to protect against the…

Excerpted from SYS-CON Media Report by Krishnan Subramanian

The technology blueprint of President-Elect Barack Obama, if implemented as promised, bodes well for the future of cloud computing. His proposals include:

Protecting the openness of the Internet: In other words, supporting net neutrality. This is crucial for innovation in the field of cloud computing and it is also very important for ensuring vendor diversity. In the absence of net neutrality, big vendors can easily crush smaller players and establish monopoly in the cloud computing marketplace including the SaaS marketplace.

Safeguarding our right to privacy: One of the biggest concerns for consumers and businesses when…