Connecting the Dots

Vonage continues to slide...but why?

As a Vonage customer, I had an opportunity to bid on buying shares at the IPO price. Normally I'd leap at the chance, but this time I did not. Why? Why is it continuing to slide (just checked at 2:28pm CDT and it's at $12.10)?

Conventional wisdom dictates that the stock market is a popularity contest. True enough, but optimism about upside potential is why a stock is popular or is not. After my recent adventure analyzing and experiencing Vonage vs. Skype vs. the GizmoProject, my perspective on that upside was perhaps more realistic than most.

Here is Vonage's problem in a nutshell: they're burning cash and what they've built is incredibly vunerable to competition while cost of long distance telephony is falling to zero. Though Vonage has a 20% or so better quality of service -- and doesn't require a PC to use -- Skype is good enough (though the Session Initiation Protocol of Gizmo is inferior to Skype). That good enough capability of Skype coupled with their recent "all calls are free in North America this year" did it for me and for the market. AT&T, the cable companies, Wifi/Wimax deployments (Skype calls can be made via these) and the acceleration of mobile telephony bandwidth are all converging to make Vonage seem pretty unattractive.

It's the first time I've truly followed my gut on a stock pick and let it rule my head. Looks like it was a good call this time.

Top Ten Blogs Informing Steve...

People who think in a different way, have a different perspective, and have a vision on why something is important are those I seek out and aggregate in my news reader. I'm now up to several hundred RSS feeds and scan 700-900 feeds every day (note I said "scan" vs. read in full...people think I'm nuts for even scanning that many!).

Choosing just ten blogs out of the nearly 100 I follow is no small task. Just like the Technorati Top 100, my list changes based on where I am along my path at any given point so I thought I'd put a stake in the ground today and list ten that are affecting me right now and why (in alphabetical order):

• 3PointD: Like many, I happen to believe that we are quickly moving toward virtual environments vs. 2D (two dimensional) web pages and this blog follows what's going on. The resolution of sites like Second Life are amazing right now, and make your own virtual world platforms like Multiverse will continue to accelerate. As bandwidth, CPU power and graphics performance continue to evolve, worlds that resemble the quality of The Incredibles will exist. Next up when that occurs? Amazing replacements for collaborative and community software offerings.

• BoingBoing: Eclectic, liberal, bizarre but always interesting, I just like going here and being surprised, bugged, delighted and intellectually stimulated.

• The Bumble Bee: I've only been reading this blog for a few short weeks, but damn...is this Ken Thompson ever going at collaboration, community and social from an intriguing perspective! He uses natural biological systems -- with examples and an emphasis on bioteams -- to inform his thinking about how all this stuff works.

• GigaOM: Om Malik's blog about what's happenin' in broadband. This writer for Business 2.0 magazine has his finger on the pulse of what's going on. In my view, broadband=use-of-the-internet-and-innovation so I'm always interested in what's going on to accelerate its use.

• Information Aesthetics: If design and clear communication didn't matter -- and especially increasingly complex concepts and ideas -- then blogs like this wouldn't matter either.

• Mashable: Pete Cashmore's site tracking what's going on with "mashups" or Web applications that are combinations of discrete functionality pulled from other apps. This whole category is fun, cool, and pointing the way toward web services in ways that mainstream tech publications never could.

• OpenBusiness: No question in my mind that the fundamental economics driving value globally are shifting but I'm no economist nor am I certain what will replace capitalism, how to value the contributions of those, say, creating open source software, or how value is moving beyond money, barter or other traditional means of exchange. This blog is simply looking at open source business models in new ways that I find incredibly intriguing.

• ThreeMinds@Organic: Looking at "experience" in new ways and what makes things exceptional.  I like reading them and watching-what-they-watch and think about. Again, it's all about viewing through a different lens than mine.

• Treehugger: Regardless of your feelings on sustainability, global warming, or humankinds acceleration of the consumption of natural resources, this site is cool. It makes you think of alternatives, gives a sense of the thoughts of those aware (vs. unconscious) and is just a well done, good read.

• Wired: Had to put them in...not a blog I know. Was at a trade show in the Nineties when someone walked by with their free copy of the premiere issue. I raced to the bin and they were gone...but some guy handed me one of the several he had grabbed (I still have it). Though the magazine and this sister site have waxed-n-waned in relevancy over the years, it still is one of the only places that I actually read in-depth articles about any given topic.

Open Source and The Long Tail

Most of the discussions I've been regarding The Long Tail have used content as the primary example of explaining what the term means. I hear, "The Long Tail means that some obscure physics book from the 1930's -- that only 10 people care about reading again -- is available." or "Some Cajun song recorded in 1925 that only Joe Schmedlap and his wife want to hear is at-their-fingertips." The thought is that *whatever* is of interest will find some kind of audience who will want to read, watch or somehow consume it if it's available in some repository on the internet. It's a powerful concept that is being played out every day that more content and data is being mapped onto the 'net.

I'd like to offer up what I'm experiencing as a potentially more profound example of The Long Tail: the ecosystem delivering plug-ins, add-ons, modules, components, themes and other chunks of functionality that somebody, somewhere wants to use with some open source software project...and they're all free! The better open source software gets, the more functionality it enjoys and the more energy around extending it, I believe the quicker value will be mapped on to the 'net. This, in turn, will incent and facilitate people PLACING Long Tail stuff online so it can be accessed by those interested in it.

I'll admit that it's the primary open source "platforms" or major frameworks right now that are receivers of the energy and effort in building all of this stuff, but nonetheless it's pretty amazing. Be it Drupal, Joomla, Xoops,  phpBB, TikiWiki or hundreds of other projects, even the obscure add-on is either available or underway by some individual or team.

Case in point: Joomla has more than half a dozen RSS add-ons. Though RSS enabled the fast growth in podcasting to emerge, it's still not even understood by all save for a tiny percentage of the tech world. This protocol is also key to reading feeds in a news aggregator or the compiling of blogs and news feeds that then appear on web sites or focused topic blogs. I've been on the hunt myself for an Joomla extension that will display what I want but haven't found it...yet. Hmmm....maybe I'll have it written.

If it were, say, three years ago Joomla would cost roughly $100k just for the software. Today it's free and an amazing amount of energy and effort is invested by the developer ecosystem surrounding it. If Joomla were a commercial software project I'd bet there would be ONE approach to RSS and ONE RSS extension on the product roadmap AND it would hit about 80% of what the market wanted (and cost a bundle). The RSS extensions I've delved into off of the Joomla site each have their own approach to managing RSS (which, by the way, is very refreshing and offers alot of choice!) and many of them cover even obscure requirements.

Chris Anderson (Wired editor who coined the term "The Long Tail") has a book coming out soon and it remains to be seen how far he takes the concept. For me, it sure seems that what is already out there in open-source-land fits The Long Tail concept perfectly.

NOTE: Larry Lessig's blog led me to the Open Source Business model site/blog. It is AWESOME and is looking at and considering some of the non-monetary, non-barter, value-based shifts I'm seeing and experiencing...and know are accelerating. If you are puzzling at all over why all the Web 2.0 companies have a "free" option (or are all free), I'd encourage you to read this post on this site to give you a sense of what's going on with current thinking and how the paradigms are shifting. It also will help you see how The Long Tail goes far beyond the availability of content.

Where is the Open Source cup o' gasoline?

A reader of my blog, Christopher Murray, sparked a thought through his comment in my post about the iJoomla magazine framework (for the Joomla content management system) and how there is a huge gap between lower end, open source CMS'es and enterprise-class ones...which made me think of what the primary catalyst (i.e., the cup o' gasoline) could be on the embers of innovation in open source.

Every week I am stunned and delighted anew with some miscellaneous open source offering that has phenomenal functionality, a strong ecosystem of development surrounding it, and amazing fit-n-finish for free software. If you want to see for yourself, just go to Sourceforge and poke around the nearly 121,000 open source projects that are linked to from there. The power and capability that is yours for free is nothing short of astounding.

This is why, for example, all the VC's that John Furrier interviews for his informative and highly interesting PodTech podcasts seem to share a common thread: if you're a startup and don't have both open source software being leveraged or have an offshore component in your business plan, don't bother knockin' on our door (I'm paraphrasing alot...but you catch the drift). The value that is being created with so many of these projects is so high that there isn't a capitalist in his or her right mind that would want to fund development of what already exists.

Here's a real world example. I'm advising on the buildout of a new Web asset for a client and there are some chinks-in-the-armor of open source that exposes just what Christoper pointed out: there's a big gap between the low-end, easy stuff and the high-end, hard stuff that enterprise commercial software fixes. My client is using Joomla's CMS and are incorporating Wordpress for blogging (via the Joomla Wordpress connector), ecommerce (via OSCommerce connector), and are exploring forums and a learning management system (LMS) (there are forums like phpBB and SMF...as well as incredible LMS'es like Moodle). Making all this stuff work together and take on the same look-n-feel isn't trivial...regardless of how many extensions are available from the Joomla developer ecosystem to kinda, sorta deliver functionality.

This presents me with a dark side to my happy-assed optimism about all these projects: why isn't this stuff plug-n-play...and what would happen if it was?

Connecting the Dots podcast for May 23, 2006

This week's podcast is a bit rambling...but discusses such things as community, net neutrality and the exploding number of Web 2.0 applications. As promised for the show notes, the following links are provided:

• Richard MacManus' post listing Web 2.0 lists

• Steve Forbes, editor-in-chief of Forbes magazine, says 'beware of net neutrality' which I beg to differ with...

Listen to or download this week's show

Qumana...offline blog editor

I'm always on the hunt for tools that either make my life easier...or are ones that do so for others. Qumana appears, at first use, to be just such a tool.

With all the buzz about Web 2.0, one would surmise that browser-based applications are the Holy Grail of online use. They're typically slow, require being tethered to the internet to use, and are often flaky in their use (yes, even AJAX apps). Offline tools can often be far superior *if* they have close ties to the online application.

I recall the incredible objections that were posed by enterprise buyers of Salesforce.com when they initially didn't have an offline tool for salespeople to take the Web hosted customer data along with them into the field. Their offline tool, however, was so robust (you can suck down all relevant customer data, add/subtract from the dataset in the field, then sync up when online again) that it stopped those objections.

I'm going to simply post this to Typepad without a preview to see what happens. If it works...I'll be posting this way most of the time. I like it.

There is a There, There...

The closer I get to connecting the dots -- on the impact of global internet connections, community, affinity, awareness raising, collaboration and all the other perspectives on what is happening to humankind as we all search for a better way -- the further away from connecting them I seem. As a consequence, I double my efforts and connect with people with richer, deeper and more textured experience in order to gain others insights and perspectives. A guy named Griff Wigley is just such a person and we connected today.

He beat-me-to-the-punch and blogged about our meeting today (I *really* enjoyed our meeting, Griff).

I've got alot of questions about what's going on that may encourage, enlighten or inform you if you're also interested in human-to-internetwork connections -- or feel free to point out how far away I am from connecting the dots!

As has probably become clear if you've been reading this blog for any length of time, my focus and energy has increasingly shifted to collaboration, community, affinity and all the other areas where human beings intersect online and virtual communications between us grow exponentially more efficient and rich. My goal is to accelerate my knowledge of as many "dots" that inform this as is possible, connect them, and thus do a better job of building online community.

As my role model for setting goals, Steve Martin, once said, "...the thing you have to learn, in having a goal, is not to set an impossible goal, something too high you can never reach.  You gotta have a series of smaller goals, that you can accomplish and slowly work your way up. And this is what I have done. That's why I'm so happy. My goal?  Right now, I want to be the all-being, Master of Time, Space and Dimension. Then...I wanna go to Europe."

Your Own Magazine Online

How'd you like to have your own, very professionally designed online magazine? What if I told you that one of the hottest open source content management system (CMS) packages, Joomla, had a plug-in component that would give you that capability?

iJoomla is a Joomla component that is a framework for module placement so that laying out a magazine online is a relatively trivial pursuit. I say relatively because truly architecting, installing, developing and deploying a scalable, CMS-driven web site or magazine requires skills the non-technical person doesn't possess. Yes, Joomla can be downloaded and installed in a fairly easy manner. Yes, it's kinda, sorta click-n-configure. But to truly set it up so that it's architected to scale, prepared for adding on other components and modules (like a shopping cart or forum) requires technical savvy or ALOT of time in climbing a learning curve.

Still, from what I know of jobs underway with Joomla an installed and deployed Joomla instance -- with a magazine component like this one installed and running -- would be under $20k (your mileage may vary dramatically depending upon specific effort required). Having been at Vignette for four years during the dotcom heyday, we wouldn't even take a phone call from a prospect if they didn't have $500k to spend on software and services, so this price/performance is pretty amazing.

I know, I know...comparing Joomla to Vignette is like a Honda scooter to an Acura MDX. But still the power and inexpensive nature deploying Joomla let alone it as an online magazine, makes a guys mental wheels turn.

By the way, I continue to be delighted and somewhat taken aback at how virtually the entire Joomla ecosystem simply "gets it" on the importance of design. Even this inexpensive magazine component site is absolutely first-class!

Apple's MacBook in Black

Stopped by the Apple Store at the Mall of America this afternoon to see if they had the new MacBook on display. They had 'em in the back room and one guy said they'd be out in 10 minutes...so I did an errand and came back 15 minutes later. All the black ones were sold! (They only had a handful of them).

The display models had been on the counter for 5 minutes when I walked over and decided to put the black one through its paces. The display was bright, the glossy coating on it really made it pop and the flush keyboard was extremely nice...but one thing troubled me.

Though this may demonstrate how much of a neat freak or anal retentive I am -- often displayed by my frequent cleaning of my aluminum Powerbook case and screen -- but I was stunned to see an explosion of body oil-generated fingerprints all over the outside of the MacBook case as well as from the couple of people's palms that briefly touched the trackpad -- all in only 5 minutes. My concern about filthy laptops comes from years of experiencing presentations made from dust covered, fingerprints-all-over-the-display software sales and technical folks...which always amazed me with their lack of awareness of how gross this was (kind of like handing someone nice color spec sheets in an expensive presentation folder with coffee or food stains on them and expecting them to ignore that and be focused on the content!).

My old Thinkpad was black and a matte finish too, but the case materials didn't seem to absorb body oil in quite the same way (it diffused it somehow and it was less noticeable). To me, the Thinkpad is the gold standard of a rugged, road warrior tool.

Would I buy this new MacBook? A white one for sure. The deal-killer for me buying it vs. the MacBook Pro is graphics performance (the MacBook uses shared memory for video but the MacBook Pro has its own discrete video memory -- which is a big deal for a Photoshop user like me and that my son often uses my laptop for gaming). If rumors of the Leopard version of Mac OS X being able to launch a double-clicked Windows app or game are true, I'll want all the graphics performance I can get as I'll really need it (and RAM too).

My initial impression is that the MacBook will be a resounding success and the improvements are so numerous (and price points stable) that there will undoubtedly be a flurry of upgrading and Windows migrators.

Long Distance Nearing Free?

All the predictions that long distance telephony would eventually be free seem closer to reality than ever before.

First, Vonage announces free overseas long distance is included in my $24.95 per month all-you-can-eat to select countries (and my bride is in London so the timing was unusually perfect) and then today Skype announces free SkypeOut (calling from Skype to landlines) is free in the US and Canada.

I had some serious issues with Vonage in the first few months of this year. Finally I ran some tests on my Roadrunner cable connection and wasn't pleased with the throughput. After talking with tech support, they send out a tech who replaces a filter at the pole and my cable modem, and the connection has been fabulous ever since.

A week ago I was in the Santa Cruz mountains outside San Francisco without cell service. My hosts had a solid internet connection with Wifi so I headed to a quiet corner each day to call my bride via my Skype account. Without it, I would've been reimbursing my hosts for unknown telephony charges. (Amusingly, I used a pair of iPod earbuds and a microphone from my M-Audio Microtrack recorder to make my calls).

With more companies building voice over internet protocol (VoIP) into their applications, demand should continue to increase and the use of landline or mobile telephony carriers reduced. Be interesting to see what happens with packet shaping by internet service providers (to reduce quality of service for competing voice services running on their networks) as well as what might happen to costs on voice transports.

Web 2.0: Connecting people to dots

For the sake of the argument I'm about to make, let's consider Web 2.0 offerings "dots", people as people, and that my focus is on needing a better way to connect the two. Usually the dots are all the things that inform, disrupt, or are delivered into an industry or space, and I try to understand the trends, give guidance and deliver insight from them through connecting the dots. Even though I'm quite clear (and often delighted) about the tremendous value that is daily being delivered through next generation internet Web applications, I'm stunned how many people I talk to daily that *should* know about Web 2.0 applications...but are disturbingly clueless.

One example of an offering that should already be on everyone's radar screen is Foldera. With all the disparate groups I'm working with (most geographically disbursed), having a phenomenally robust shared workspace (that's free, by the way), means I can't wait for this offering to go live so I can evangelize it, use it myself with groups, and help others achieve its benefits. The power and value of Foldera may be obvious to you when you're using it, but I believe the value of this offering goes FAR BEYOND a very nice and strong collaboration tool.

Imagine avian flu hits and becomes a pandemic. A terrorist dirty bomb is detonated or a bacterial agent is released. Gasoline hits $5 a gallon. One or more airlines go out of business putting a material strain on an already overtaxed air transportation system. Risk mitigation and business continuity is vitally important for big enterprise organizations...but even more so for small-to-midsize businesses since these organizations have frighteningly low tolerance for financial disruption. All will need some way to connect with employees staying home, map as many of their business processes to the Web as possible, and leverage virtual spaces to simply continue to do business.

The risk mitigation glass is always half-empty. My glass is 51% full and I'll tell you why...

What informs your life, work, creativity, company and path?

Over the last four months, I've gone from being focused on the "flipper, flappers" and the "dweebezaarb's" with technology to a significantly more holistic view of it and, quite frankly, everything else. The quickening of my recent experiences and research has informed my perspective, my thoughts and my direction with technology, and there might be a nugget or two in this post for you too.

You might be like I was just a short time ago... solely focused on the technology and only somewhat on the human spirit, motivations, and the essence of what an offering would deliver. Like me, you're probably 100% focused on "What's the value proposition?" or "I've got to hone the elevator pitch" thinking that will ensure people will flock to your offering, instead of understanding where the power of what you're delivering lies and what the ultimate essence is of it. My thinking used to be solely focused on determining if my deliverables only had "X" functionality or "Y" user interface elements or "Z" flipper, flappers...then people would come and it would be successful. If it were only so.

What has happened to me since January is being heads-down on a program entitled "A Better Way to Work and Live" with the guys at Entrevis. I've also become a member of Heartland Circle (founded 10 years ago by the former publisher of Utne Reader and his bride) and attended Thought Leader Gatherings and more. Both groups are providing thought leadership, holistic perspectives and worldviews, and what it takes to turn vision into action.

My awareness has been rising exponentially. I've learned more about human motivation, the incredibly powerful "search for meaning" that is occurring right now (especially amongst baby boomers), and the cacophony of conversation that is publically exposed in the blogosphere, in forums, on websites, and connected in ways that we've never seen before in the short history of the internet.

If you read, go to conferences or engage in meaningful dialogues with people more informed in areas you're not, you too will understand that major shifts are occurring worldwide in an dizzying array of areas. Awareness of global warming, avian flu pandemic preparedness, geopolitical struggles, internet making "the world flat" and connecting consciousness in new and profound ways, macroeconomic shifts that is driving a new perception of value (open source software is the most easily recognizable example), and much more will surely drive you to reach many of the same conclusions as I have: it's imperative to understand the whole; how all of this is interconnected and influencing each other; and holistic thinking *must* be a part of your life, career and strategic thinking. It's even imperative it become part of ideation or creation sessions you have with others.

When I think, for example, of delivering a social Web hub to connect people (like so many others have already done), I look to the big thinkers in many of these areas for data that can inform my thoughts and approaches. What I'm open to and thus finding is stunning. If you want to read more and start to get your head around much of this, here are a few to get you started:

• A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink. If you read "The World is Flat" by Thomas Friedman, then read this and understand how higher level, associative and pattern matching thinking skills (connecting the dots) is the next wave of human thinking in the emerging Conceptual Age

• The Divine Right of Capital by Marjorie Kelly. An indictment of our current corporate way of consuming resources at the lowest possible cost and irregardless of the cost to society...in favor of the maximizing of profits.  Not an "oh those companies are evil" type of indictment, but rather a look at the systemic model that encourages this behavior with little or no incentives to behave otherwise

• Presence by Peter Senge, C. Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski, Betty Sue Flowers. This book is a non-New Age view of the importance of holistic thinking. It's really an awareness builder and a challenge to business leaders around the world to shift their thinking from a myopic view of their business, industry or community and toward a holistic view that everything is interconnected and they have to play a role in solving societal and global problems.

Seek. Ask questions. Think about what informs your life, your work, the products or services you design and deliver, the stuff you spread on your lawn or how much gas you use, and your overall impact with everything to which you're connected. At the very least, look at the energy and consciousness raising that is going on around you and understand what those with higher consciousness are buying, doing and consuming. It will help you deliver value in new and potentially more profound ways.

Internet Archive

Was at a meeting yesterday at the Golden Gate Club in the Presidio in San Francisco. When we drove in, I noticed a sign that said, "Internet Archive" by a non-descript, old Presidio base building. It was the HQ of Brewster Kahle's Internet Archive (IA).

I was compelled to pay 'em a visit since I've been enamored with this phenomenal project since its inception, and often use the Wayback Machine, various content, or poke around inside Ourmedia.org (housed and managed by the IA). A guy named Tim and I headed over there right after the meeting. A sign on the door said they were open on Friday 1-4pm for drop-in's (appointments only otherwise) and we turned around to leave. Tim said, "Hey! It's after 1pm and it's Friday" so we went inside.

Since everything is stored as bits on servers housed elsewhere, there isn't much to see. Didn't matter. As a huge fan of the IA for a very long time, it was simply a delight to be there. Bumped into JD Lasica again (heads up Ourmedia, is an author...more here) and we chatted briefly. Our tour guide Paul gave us a nickel tour and we chatted a bit.

If you're not aware of IA...you should be. In the future, cultural anthropologists will praise the foresight and vision of Brewster Kahle. Even I am so delighted by the old training films, World's Fair footage, old auto commercials, and other elements that give even the casual observer a glimpse into culture and times gone by.

Traveling...

Probably won't be posting much until Mon or Tue...

Skype, Gizmo or Vonage?

This past weekend my bride was out of town and I invested oh, say, 15 hours in voice over internet protocol (VoIP) testing. It wasn't pretty and I'd like to share my experience with you in case you're considering Skype or Gizmo for actual telephone usage.

I was a very early adopter of Vonage back in 2001. At that point I liked it and was pretty pleased with the capability (and promise of being able to take my Vonage ATA box with me, connecting it to any high speed connection, and getting my phone calls).

My all-you-can-eat use in North America, for $24.95, is great but it's another $9.95 per month for the "soft phone" (an application to use your Vonage number from a computer, say, a laptop in a Wifi-enabled coffee shop or hotel room). Rather than do that, I thought I'd join the other 100 million users (alleged on the Skype site) and use "SkypeOut" minutes to call landlines or mobile phones.

I also thought I'd try the Gizmo Project. Why? Skype is a proprietary protocol and Gizmo leverages the Session Initiation Protocol (called "SIP") and there is a huge amount of energy around it...though it's not nearly as mature as Skype and is light years away from Vonage. I can still see how SIP is gathering steam and I spent hours on forums, reading about it, looking at equipment at VoIP online stores, and realizing that -- once quality of service issues are worked out -- there's going to be an explosion of SIP products and services.

Purchasing a $10 SkypeOut credit and the same in Gizmo "Call Out" credits, I went to work testing them. Using my high end Logitech headset or my new $179 Jabra Bluetooth headset (when connecting to my laptop) I called friends and family in a wide variety of configuration setups. I even stopped by CompUSA and bought the SkyTone USB phone, thinking I'd plug it in to my laptop and answer calls from it on the road rather than futzing with headsets.

I tried 3 way calling. Conference calling. Dialing out to mobile phones. Setting up simultaneous ringing. All kinds of things. While the quality on Skype or Gizmo was roughly the same (though Gizmo consistently had echo that my other party could hear), it was never good enough for me to consider using it as my primary phone. Skype-to-Skype or Gizmo-to-Gizmo was fine, but most of the use for me would be calling landlines or mobile phones. For that, it sucked.

What about Vonage? Though their customer support is worse than Qwest (the pinnacle of horrible customer service), I consistently found myself hanging up from SkypeOut or Gizmo CallOut and calling back in to the conference call or the other person. I now realize that I'm sticking with Vonage, their quality of service is on-par with traditional, plain old telephone service, and I may even buy some of their stock post-upcoming-IPO.

When I think about how much effort I put into figuring out if either SkypeOut or Gizmo CallOut were ready for prime-time (they're not), I realize how incredibly simple Vonage has made VoIP and this is what I'd recommend to anyone considering going with this method of telephony.