Vonage Canada held an analyst meeting last Tuesday to update the community with their product plans. Jon Arnold has a good description of the information from the meeting. By the way, the V-Phone installs easily and works like a charm.

One of Jon’s takeaways was a commentary on the challenges of marketing when you don’t have an existing customer base (such as that enjoyed by the telcos and cablecos):

Contrast Jon’s position with a cheap shot thrown by Networking Pipeline. In an article called “Vonage: The New Spyware King“, we read:

Oh my! I guess the Networking Pipeline people don’t want ads for consumer products to appear with their porn.

Still, it gives a new perspective to Vonage wanting ILECs to provide naked DSL.

Technorati Tags:
Vonage, naked DSL, V-phone, Jon Arnold, Mark Goldberg

In the department of ‘How is that for irony?’, word is that Dexit, the company that promised a cashless society, is continuing to have a tough time managing its own cash.

In a press release on Thursday, Dexit announced it cut its staff from 55 down to 30 and it has scaled back the number of locations that will accept the card. According to John McBride, the company Chairman and interim CEO,

The Company launched the Dexit Service in September 2003 and has now successfully proven the reliability and scalability of the technology.

Huh? I have two Dexit chips that I received as demonstration units and both have all the money still loaded on them. I never found a location that accepted Dexit, so I don’t know how there can be any evidence of scalability. I suspect that Esso, Shell and Mobil have better proof of RFID technology scalability.

Most importantly, almost all of Dexit’s revenues have been derived from an exclusive licensing agreement the company enjoyed with Bell. That agreement expired and it has not yet been renewed. Despite ‘good faith’ efforts to negotiate a new arrangement, Dexit has already indicated that it will get no licensing revenues for the quarter that just ended June 30.

I didn’t see any evidence of success in marketing, success in getting users or vendors to adopt the technology or shift away from reaching into their pockets for change. The company might have been better off with a strategic partnership with a gasoline company to leverage their existing base of RFID users.

I can think of a bunch of relationships that would have been more fruitful.

Update:
The CRTC gave interim approval to the application today./span>

Amnesty International seems to think that individual freedom of expression has no limits and that countries have no right to censor any internet content. It has launched a campaign against internet repression and cites a number of technology companies for their complicity in human rights violations. In a press release, the organization says:

“… the internet’s potential for change is being undermined — by governments unwilling to tolerate this free media outlet, and by companies willing to help them repress free speech.”

Sun Microsystems, Nortel Networks, Cisco Systems, Yahoo! and Google are among those companies implicated in helping governments censor the internet or track down individual users.

The campaign, Irrepressible.info, calls on users to take action, including:

Undermine censorship by publishing irrepressible fragments of censored material on your own site. The more people take part, the more we can defeat unwarranted censorship and create an unstoppable network of protest.

That links to a page that invites users to:

Add irrepressible content to your site

If you have a website or blog, help us spread the word and undermine unwarranted censorship by publishing censored material from our database directly onto your site.

The more people take part the more we show that freedom of expression cannot be repressed.

The site provides html code that allows random snippets of censored material to be posted to a supporter’s website, with the thought that this will make it difficult for countries to detect and respond to the volume of sites with inappropriate content.

It is an interesting approach – in effect adopting hackers’ methodology to try to overwhelm the servers doing the censorship analysis.

Here is the problem. There is another global campaign underway to protect the rights of children being exploited. There are service providers in the UK and elsewhere that block sites with illegal images of child abuse. We strongly support such initiatives.

Amnesty International itself advocates that countries ratify the optional protocol on child pornography, that includes:

its conclusion calling for the worldwide criminalization of the production, distribution, exportation, transmission, importation, intentional possession and advertising of child pornography, and stressing the importance of closer cooperation and partnership between Governments and the Internet industry

So, on one hand, Amnesty International believes that there should be ‘closer cooperation and partnership between Governments and the Internet industry’ and on the other hand, today’s press release coincides with the release of a report about Yahoo!, Microsoft and Google as companies ‘particularly willing to cooperate with the Chinese government’.