Click here for this week's podcast. (the updated and user-friendly version!)

NOTE: The sound quality of this podcast is terrible so we're going to re-do it on Monday. My apologies. If you're still interested in today's podcast, listen at your peril..:)

Another week, another podcast This week, Kevin and I talk about the Vonage IPO (what gives with that?!), the departure of Sun's Scott McNealy, the future of newspapers and the Canadian wireless sector.

So Vonage thinks it's worth $2.6-billion? I wonder what kind of numbers their investment bankers crunched to come up with this pie-in-the-sky number? Vonage is a money-losing business that needs to spend heavily on marketing so it can continue to attract and retain consumers at a time when the cablecos and carriers are start to get more serious about the VoIP market. It strikes me as a desperate attempt by Vonage's investors, who have ponied up more than $400 million in venture capital, to get a decent return on their investment. Now, the $64,000 question is whether this deal will get done. Of course, it will because many institutional investors have no choice but to take a piece of this dodgy deal or risk getting cut out of the more attractive IPOs. I mean, if Corel Corp. - which "competes" against Microsoft in the office productivity market - was able to get its IPO out the door earlier this week, Vonage can do it too. If I was an investor, however, I wouldn't touch the Vonage IPO with a 10 foot pole. Caveat emptor!
Update: IP Democracy has a chart looking at Vonage's top line financials for the past 3+ years. For my post looking at Vonage's S-1 filing, click here.

It seemed like a busy week and there was a bunch of stuff I want to highlight:
- Skype now has more than 100 million registered users  - nearly double since eBay blew its brains out to acquire Skype for US$4.1-billion. It's nice to see the Skype PR machine is alive and well.
- Not sure about the secret sauce behind Memeorandum but the mesh conference spent  seven hours in the top spot yesterday. Hey, looks mesh is getting some more love today.
- a new Canadian-made vertical search engine called Eluta, which helps people find job announcements, will be officially launched next week. Nice, clean look - very Web 2.0-ish.
- Wired reports that researchers at the Carleton University in Ottawa are looking at the idea of a biometric security device that "users a person's thoughts to authenticate her or his identity". No more passcards? Cool.
- With podcasting apparently becoming the New Radio, Frank Barnako suggests that podcasters such as Podtrac, Kiptronic and Rocketboom aren't seeing a lot of love from sponsors. According to Forrester, the mass audience will be there in four years; maybe advertising will follow along cautiously. Business 2.0 has a story that declares video blogs are booming and advertiers are starting to take not.
- My Nortel blog - All Nortel, All the Time - had record traffic yesterday. It could have been a post on Mike Zafirovski and/or a column in the National Post on whether Nortel should merge with Siemens' communications group.
- It's encouraging to see Toronto is awash in Web conferences these days. Aside from mesh, there was iSummit last month and the MSN/Sympatico Digital Ad event yesterday. Meanwhile, Kate Trgovac (a.ka. My Name is Kate)  is busy working on a plan to bring BlogHer to Canada. I should also mention the thriving TorCamp/BarCamp activities.