by Darren Kay,  Enterprise Architect of Dimension Data Australia

In November, Cisco announced the Cisco Intercompany Media Engine. The Intercompany Media Engine gives people business-to-business communications capabilities over any IP network. It’s a brand new product that enables boundary-less communications between organizations, including business partners,  customers, and suppliers. The idea is to make communications between separate companies and organizations as effortless as it is within a single organization.

With the Intercompany Media Engine, your communications travel over an IP network or the Internet, but you use the phones you are already using, the numbers you are already dialing,  and the contact lists you have already entered. It doesn’t even matter whether you’re working within or outside of your company. The ease, efficiency, and overall experience of communicating with each other will be exactly the same.

Working at Cisco, one thing that never ceases to amaze me is the variety of ways in which the company’s technologies are used. As a mom,  I’m very interested in ways children learn and in particular how technology enables learning. The story below is about the incredibly creative ways Earvin “Magic” Johnson is using Cisco technology to help children learn.

In addition to being a Hall of Fame basketball star, Mr. Johnson is a businessman and advocate for both urban growth and economic revitalization through his work with The Magic Johnson Foundation.  The Foundation is working with Cisco, using Cisco WebEx Meeting Center, to help extend distance learning, hold remote seminars and raise funds for Johnson’s 18 Community Empowerment Centers located in urban areas throughout the country.

When you look at how low mobile broadband pricing is getting in the UK with a 2 year agreement, you have to just scratch your heads in the USA and wonder why we are being asked to pay so much, especially when the coverage for 3G is so sparse. It seems the USA based mobile operators bought the spectrum but never really built it out, preferring to make as much as they could on older and slower technology. Now with the pressure on from Clearwire and Sprint, everyone is pushing to get the speeds up, and the networks built out….

Prepaid data for the same price as a contract? Well, that’s nothing to sneeze at. As a matter of fact, the no contract rate with Virgin Mobile now available in the USA mirrors what I see when I travel internationally. The arrival of real true pre-paid data in the USA.

Today, I deleted my foursquare.com account. I did it for one reason, and one reason only. I don’t like “playing games.” Oh, I don’t mean the idea of being a Mayor, or getting badges. Those things I did as a boy. “Playing.” But Andy grew up a long time a go. A very long time ago, and candidly, as much as I like to know what my friends and colleagues are up to, these days everyone you know isn’t really your friend. They just know of you. When it comes to my “friends” I know what they are up to….

Will you get a load of which Silicon Valley giant is behind the AT&T Microcell…It’s Cisco.

By Laurent Philonenko, vice president and general manager, Cisco Unified Communications Business Unit

So here I am traveling in beautiful Ireland – yes, where Cisco develops the most innovative unified communications products on the planet – and enjoying high quality voice over Wi-Fi.

This is a new functionality making its way into smartphones. Cisco released support for it on Nokia E70 series last fall, and it will be available soon on the Apple’s iPhone. Many of us can’t wait for this to be available on RIM’s BlackBerry, not to mention Android or Windows Mobile.

by Murali Sitaram, vice president and general manager, Cisco Enterprise Collaboration Platform

“Next generation workspace”, “desktop of the future”, the employee workbench”. These are the kinds of tems that we’re hearing customers, partners, and analysts talk about, and they all point to the rapid emergence of Enterprise Social Software as the next big collaboration market transition. For most organizations, when it comes to the adoption of ESS, the question isn’t if or when, but rather how. How will ESS integrate with their business processes? How will they get their people to change their behaviors and adopt a new way of getting work done? Above all, how will enterprise social software add value to (not replace) the collaborative tools and technologies in which they’ve already invested?

Word is slowly leaking out that CableVision will play the mobile voice and data game where their footprint stops extending. This is an interesting play, and my guess is the carrier will be T-Mobile or Sprint as they are the least likely to be viewed as competition, and Spint brings with them Clearwire in some ways, and that brings with it some cable partners like Comcast. Here’s why I am betting on T-Mobile and not AT&T in the GSM world or Sprint winning over Verizon in the CDMA world: 1) T-Mobile has no interest in cable TV in the USA,…

Bill Miller, one of the few people from Digium who could ever tell me what they were up to (the other is John Todd) is leaving. I wish him well wherever he is headed. He’s one of the folks who can take geekspeak and make it understandable.