Emergintex

I took the plunge from migrating from WM6 to iPhone. I think I couldnt resist the clever price drop on the iPhones, and plunged in with a 4GB for $299.

I have had this immense sense of questioning whenever I had decided to buy anything from Apple. Be it a Mac book, or an iPhone. How much I can achieve doing on devices from Apple, coming from Windows background. I have had a WM5 (and recently WM6) device for almost 2 years (moved from Symbian 6.x) and I was completely satisified with the WM device I owned. It gave me a sense of freedom to do what I really want to do, and if something is not possible, write your own solution. 

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Everyone who got off the sinking ship named SunRocket (ok, the doomed rocket), saw ViaTalk as one of the rescue boats to jump onto.

It seems that ViaTalk got the major chunk of ex-SunRocket customers, so much so that to get a ViaTalk package you had to order it online, since the telephone lines were all busy. It seems that to talk to ViaTalk customer service you had to wait a long long time. You would usually be customer number 80 if you called the support line.

Well the above experience was expected and justified by the ViaTalk officials, since they were just flooded with calls from potential new customers.

But, even today, after about 2 months of the SunRocket departure, the support and Customer Service at ViaTalk is ‘busy’. I had filed in 6 support requests (after I became a ViaTalk customer), and none were replied to until yesterday. The Support staff chose to reply to issues which were solved by themselves (due to the timeline), but still I have 2 open issues, which are CRITICAL for me. The staff, when stumbled on these 2, chose to be silent again!

This is ridiculous. I know you guys are busy, or ‘were’ busy, but 2 months? 2 months to get to a couple of issues? That is not customer service.

Problem, I guess is that all the VoIP explosion around had brought down the customer service level. Companies are being formed on the blink of the eye (TeleBlend for example, though I know parent companies of TeleBlend are much much older and veterans). Companies are crashing, and in all this the customer service is really really affected.

At the end of the day, I still have 2 CRITICAL issues opened with ViaTalk for almost 2 months now, which are yet to be acknowledged.

EDIT: It seems that both the remotes shown below are running on the same technology, provided by tvCompass. Acoustic Research has partnered with tvCompass on their remote.

Gone are the days of Universal Commanders, and in comes the Wi-fi remotes.

These new generation remotes, ride on your Wi-Fi to get various external feeds like TV listings, News etc.

We were aware of one such company in Chicago-land area, TVCompass, who were coming out with the Wi-fi smart Remote (shown on the left) but today at CEDIA-2007 Acoustic Research unveiled their Wi-Fi remote (shown on the right), which I must say has a lot of resemblance with the TVCompass remote.

The opportunities in this arena are begining to unfold now. Getting your devices controlled from a single remote is the basic feature, but these remotes can open up areas for other content developers. Getting personalized feeds on your remote, emails clients thrown on the remote etc.

Time to give the remote some respect!

Connected alarm clock, touchscreen photo-frame, Desktop email reader, Desktop RSS Reader…possibilites are limitless with Chumby.

A decent processor packed inside a soft cushioned, good-to-feel casing, 3.5″ LCD color touch screen, wi-fi connectivity promises to take your ‘connected life’ anywhere you can imagine. Think about a Chumby sitting on your side-tables under the nightlamp, tuning in to your fav RSS feeds/emails in the morning, and being a clock in the night.

Take Chumby on the move, wherever you go. Have Wi-Fi, Chumby can get you online. Dont like the widgets available in the community? Write your own widgets. Dont like some feature or miss some feature, Hack the Chumby! Chumby offers full HDK & SDK and is completely open source, so you can hack the guts.

I think the device holds a good potential in becoming a useful consumer tool, for variety of uses. Chumby should be in market by Summer 2007, and will be priced well under $200. Awesome, cant wait to get my hands on one

Update: Official Press release is here

Sunrocket tanked. (This really is not a emerging technology to belong on this blog though!).

Other VoIP providers are all over the lost customer pool, to get them in their customer base. Packet8 is the newest entrant. Not sure if they have anything official to do about this or not. (see Update)

Question here is, how the transition will happen? As evident from teh press release, Packet8 will not honor any charges paid to SunRocket. So does this mean that existing customers will see new charges on their bill once the service is transferred to Packet8?

One GOOD thing is that if you were on a pre-paid yearly plan with Sunrocket, and paid by your CC, you can try calling your CC company and just say Sunrocket

I did so, couple of moments ago, and all she wanted to hear was SunRocket, and she started the dispute process and did a full temporary refund to my account. I get th refund in next billing cycle, and in the meantime the dispute process would run in parallel.

Here I come Packet8, lingo, Vonage ( take me back pls!!), ComCast. Oh, not ComCast.

It is a rare opportunity to see startups coming out of Chicago area, funded and backed by some industry veterans.

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Update: Minimize doesnt work by clickin on the status-bar. You need to minimize using the top left minimize button. Restoring after that doesn’t open in maximized state. (if it was maximized previously).

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Often when I have a toothache (mostly in night, when you lie down) I wish I had immediate access to a Dentist. Alas, none of the dentists work at night (except maybe a ER intern who might give you something to sleep!).

Bringo, though not solving the immediate access in night, helps you atleast notify a dentist close to your location that you are in pain.

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We have covered this one Indian startup the most on emergintex, just because we feel it is driven by people who are passionate about what they are doing. Another reason is that burrp! promises to be one of the first startups which was seeded in the west (US) and executed back in India, by young professionals. It could be a trendsetter for many other young entrepreneurs who will follow burrp!’s lead and get us more, interesting startups in India.

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After a long noise free time on this blog, I will be back soon.