Voce indeed dead, execs let go by phone disconnections
Wednesday, February 6th, 2008Posted Feb 6th 2008 4:48PM by Nilay Patel
Filed under: cellphones
Alright, we’ll definitely cop to having broken off a relationship or two via text message, but we don’t think we’ve ever heard of a high-ranking executive discovering he’d been fired when his phone stopped working — which is exactly what happened to Roy Kosuge, COO of Voce, that “luxury” MVNO. We’d heard rumors of Voce’s demise, but it looks like ol’ Roy wasn’t so plugged in, only finding out that his company was dead when his phone stopped making calls. Of course, when a company’s chief operating officer doesn’t know that you’re about to kill the lights, it’s a safe bet that things a pretty screwed up, so if you were among the few who signed up for Voce’s premium services, we’d recommend calling your credit card company immed — oh, right. Sorry about that.
Music-capable handsets are dime a dozen these days, it makes me wonder when will pure MP3 players be phased out. Intempo has just released its BTA-01 Bluetooth adapter that actually converts virtually any iPod speaker dock with a dock connector into impromptu speakers for Bluetoooth-capable music phones. Retailing for $80 a pop, this device fills up a very select niche of folks who rely on their phone as the primary music device instead of the white colored model from Cupertino.
Kind of makes those New Years resolutions of yours seem a bit silly now, but AT&T has some high hopes for 2008. While it mulls its own 700MHz options and leaves the C block to the likes of Verizon, the company plans to build out its 3G network into 80 more cities, which boosts the number to 350 “leading” markets in the US, a rollout AT&T has been sluggish to compete with Verizon and Sprint on. AT&T also pledges to complete its HSUPA network by the middle of the year for speedier uploads. AT&T’s not giving many specifics on its future network plans, just that existing infrastructure improvements pave the way for HSPA+ and LTE in the “years to come.” Let’s hope those years come fast, these HD downloads we keep hearing about are liable to set a few cell towers on fire by year’s end.
You must have heard how good Gmail’s filtering is by now, right? Personally, I’ve not had a spam message enter my Gmail inbox in some time, now Google is casting for more customers than just its freebie Gmail lovers. Leveraging their Postini purchase, Google wants to bring their ace filtering to big business. Blocking spam, archiving and encrpyting email is just one more way Google is getting into the pockets of big business. 
