This is hot!!! Verizon may soon realize the triple play with Fios!

Now this is hot! The new Verizon Fios video phone. Coupled with incredible Internet speed, on-demand interactive TV and a video phone. Verizon is close to realizing the triple play dream.

The new phone is coming soon and will certainly be at the top of the list for us. The phone integrates news feeds and lots of other information as well as a memo manager and calendar.

Contact lists, call logs and voice mail are all integrated as well.

Hopefully each handset can be individualized for calendar and contact lists. Also an in-house video intercom would be an excellent feature.

How soon before they hook it up to your mobile service so you can finally have one phone number and have an intelligent system that can find you (if you want).

Verizon is starting to get really exciting! Nice job - I have to admit I am becoming more and more impressed with Verizon over the last couple years they are really getting their act together.

What happened with Godaddy today?

GoDaddy experienced a failure today with its' DNS services for websites and email hosting.

Their support site reported for hours that they were experiencing technical difficulties.

Their support call in line had a message stating that if you were having problems with your website and email that GoDaddy knew about it and was working on a solution.

Logging on to account maintenance produced many pages that came back "not found".

Of course Bob Parson's blog was still working and since he moderates his blog posts - don't expect any feedback from unhappy customers. Something about moderated reviewed blog posts just seem to take away from the whole concept!

Now the problem seems to be fixed but they were down for hours today. Was it a Daylight Savings glitch?

I sure hope they come out with a detailed status and do something for their customers.


*** UPDATE ***

Slashdot had this post. DNS is not something that should go down - EVER!

http://slashdot.org/articles/07/03/11/1853216.shtml

GoDaddy affected over 20 of my web resources today.

This is an official response from GoDaddy this evening:

This morning, March 11, some of our Go Daddy services came under significant and sustained distributed denial of service attacks resulting in intermittent disruptions of various services, including shared hosting and email.

Our Internet Security and Network teams immediately invoked counter-measures to respond to these large scale, sophisticated attacks.

After 4-5 hours of intermittent disruptions of various services this morning, including shared hosting and email, the attack was contained.

Our Internet Security and Network teams will continue to analyze and assess the nature of today's attacks and their characteristics to identify additional defense mechanisms that can be used in the ongoing efforts of Internet Security.

Go Daddy has made and will be continuing to make significant investments in our information security infrastructure to protect from these shifting types of attacks.

This in no way related to the switch to Daylight Savings Time, as some have speculated. With regard to DST, Go Daddy has been engaged in preparation and patching and worked closely with our vendors for some time leading up to the DST change. leading up to the DST change.

Neil Warner
Chief Information Security Officer
The Go Daddy Group, Inc.

posted on Slashdot thread reference above.

Guide to Flickr Tools

Digital Trends has compiled a fantastic guide to Flickr. This compilation guides you through add ons available for the Flickr community.

If you are a user of Flickr this is a must read.

Here is a linkback to Joe Duck for focusing my radar on Flickr in the first place. Thanks Joe!

http://joeduck.wordpress.com/2007/01/30/fred-flickrs-frickin-fantastic/

NY Times publisher: Our goal is to manage the transition from print to internet

Very interesting article regarding the struggles the NY Times is facing and the reality of the changing landscape for print newspapers.

They face several uphill battles and this is one to watch to see the transformation and transition. Good to see they are being open about the challenges they are facing.

Lesson for all of us as other traditional businesses are going to face similar changes in the relatively near future.

Good luck to NY Times!

World's Oldest Newspaper Goes Digital

Sweden's Post-och Inrikes Tidningar newspaper has gone digital only as of Jan 1st. They have dropped their print publication. This is the world's oldest newspaper and it seems fitting that one of the (if not the) first newspaper to go digital.

It will be interesting to see how print media evolves from today's standard, next with electronic paper it surely is going to start to change faster.

What will people use for their birds and new puppies? Guess Wal-mart will have to come up with a news paper product to sell for bird cages!

Videotron testing 400% faster internet service

2007 seems to be the year for Internet speed to jump to the next level. Videotron is testing a service in the Montreal area that provides 100 megabits per second - now thats LAN speed on the NET! Of course a lot of us have already moved to duplex gigabit LANs but at least the Internet speed is improving. Now if we could get all the inter-connects up to higher speeds!

I thought my FiOS is nice but 15 Mbps compared to 100 Mbps. The Canadian social health care might be worth putting up with to get 100 Mbps Internet! :)

They are partnered with Cisco and they claim the speeds are possible due to a new technological breakthrough. Hopefully we will see this technology available here in the States and in many other places sooner rather than later.

Rumor has it FiOS can scale to close to 200 Mbps per subscriber. I think this is definitely the beginning of another transformation of the net and will certainly bring serious competition to the existing cable and phone providers.

New molecules for a faster Internet

Chromophores which have been theorized by physicists at Washington State University have been synthesized by chemists in China and tested by chemists in Belgium. Chromophores are a new generation of optical molecules which interact 50% more strongly with light than any other molecules ever test.

End result some day, maybe we will see these molecules used in optical switches and Internet connections resulting in higher throughput.

The article has several links to other background information and scientific data.

It always amazes me how we are often reminded of how little we know about physics, science, our bodies, our world and universe. Sometimes it feels like we are all part of some kid's ant farm!

PARENT ALERT - Using Google to View MySpace or Any Restricted Site

This post is about a loop hole inadvertinely created by Google Translate. The main focus of the article is how this can be used to subvert protections put in place at businesses.

However, I feel this information is very important for parents as their children can use the Google Translate feature to access literally any site they want to.

If you are not monitoring what your children are doing on the net - you need to be.