Some People Benefited From the Skype Outage

Alexa stats up to August 17 show a massive rise in traffic to Skype competitor Gizmo Project and a more modest rise for Grand Central at the peak of this weeks 36 hour Skype outage.

The SIPphone owned Gizmo Project offers a nearly identical package to Skype, but with added features including built in recording, and cross platform compatibility. Gizmo’s traffic tripled in the space of three days and rose to a rank of 8,561 in Alexa from a 3 month average of 19,102.

The Google owned Grand Central offers a one number everywhere telephone service. Whilst the service doesn’t compete with Skype in the softphone market, the service does provide functionality that competes with Skype services such as Skype In. According to Alexa, Grand Central hit a 4 week high on Friday with a 33% increase in rank over its 3 month average.

Wow - Clown Co. Got That $1 billion Valuation (still nameless though)

Is ANYONE at NBC or News Corp. embarrassed that they can’t agree on a name, even a working name (or a website), for their new Not-A-YouTube-Killer video joint venture?

It was announced in March to fanfare, and a steady stream of news has been written about it ever since. But no one has a name for it, not even the New York Times which reported today that the joint venture managed to find someone willing to throw $100 million at it for 10% (reports that they were pitching this came out in June). And so we keep referring to it as Clown Co., which is the name Google execs reportedly refer to it as behind closed doors.

But back to the news. Providence Equity Partners, a Rhode Island based private equity firm, put up the $100 million to buy 10% of a company that didn’t exist three months ago. I hope that means a launch is imminent. It would be hard to launch without a name.

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