According to Infonetics Research, service provider spent $1.73-billion on next-generation voice equipment last year. The market is expected to more than triple to $5.8-billion by 2008. Infonetics analyst Kevin Mitchell said the investment is being driven by carriers looking for new services to differentiate themselves from rivals. "Carriers in North America and Asia continue down the modernization path, and Western Europe is awakening," he said. "We expect 2005 to be much like 2004 was for North America: a year when many more major carriers get behind VoIP and begin the long investment cycle and service rollout."

In light of my post on Canada's VOIP landscape, it was pointed out another player is SpectraVoice, which provides service to residential and small business customers. The company's residential plans, available in eight cities in Ontario, Quebec and B.C., cost $14.99 to $39.99 a month.

A survey done by Ipsos-Reid suggests blogs have found an enthusiastic following among those with men (48% vs. 35% for women), household incomes of more than $60,000, younger adults (50% between the ages of 18 to 34), and those with post-secondary educations. You can slice and dice survey results any way you want but the Ipsos-Reid poll seems to suggest blogs are an attractive advertising market given the level of education and disposal income. Of the US$12.7-billion online advertising market this year, it will be interesting to see how much of it that blogs attract and who gets it. As it now stands, there are a small number of blogs getting significant advertising revenue while everyone else is getting pennies a day from Google Adsense, or nothing at all.

The Register has a story that Nokia is not interesting in buying Research in Motion - apparently snuffing out rumors it and Motorola were potential suitors. Mary McDowell, who runs Nokia's enterprise solutions unit, said the Finnish company believes it can create similar services without buying RIM, a move that would cost US$13.5-billion.While RIM may not have to worry about a takeover bid from Nokia, there is no doubt it's going to face more trouble from mobile e-mail rivals - Seven, Good Technology and Visto. Good just signed Sprint as a GoodLink partner. The other way of looking at the mobile e-mail market is there's plenty of growth left so RIM, Seven, Visto, Good, etc. are just attracting more customers as opposed to trying to eat each other's lunch. Still, RIM realizes it needs to stay strategically ahead of the pack, which is why it's trying to sell itself as a wireless applications platform these days.

Boingo is jumping on the Skype bandwagon - or is the other around? - with the launch of a beta service called Skype Zones that will give Skype users Wi-Fi access using Boingo's software and its 18,000 hotspots. The cost? Unlimited Skype-Boingo access for $7.95 a month or $2.95 for a two-hour session. The deal looks like a win-win for both sides. Boingo gets a much-needed shot in the arm to increase hotspot usage and make some money, while Skype boosts its user-friendly factor and makes its service even more mainstream. One of the things that continues to impress me about Skype's strategic evolution is how it has gone from a free rebelous P2P service just a few years ago to being an Internet telephony player with 45 million users, including a growing base of paying customers.
In related news, Samsung and LG both plans to roll out new hybrid wireless phones using technology from Kineto Wireless. The phones willl be able to pass calls from a cellular network to a Wi-Fi network without an interuption in the connection.