Eric Lundquist

I've blogged before about me being a Skype fan. I was happy when 4.0 came out recently as it was a video-centric rather than audio-centric release.

Now, Skype has come out with a business release which makes it easier to tie Skype into existing (SIP) compliant business phone networks. Although you are still mostly tethered (or Bluetoothed, or maybe Skype enabled Wi-Fied) to your computer, in these tough economic times, you could indeed whittle down some of those telecom costs.

The blades are out in Silicon Valley. In the latest bit of data center combat, Cisco has left the genteel confines of data networks to join the ranks of Dell, Hewlett-Packard and IBM in the great data center blade rumble. Okay, I'll stop all references to West Side Story right here, but if the Cisco press conference that is to be streamed later today is a riff off this press release the company posted this morning, their data center, computing unification event is a big (high powered) computing box wrapped in a wreath of discussion about unified computers/ communications, open standards and data center clouds.

This week is the big mobile communications show in Barcelona. The Mobile World Congress is still the place to be in mobility this year despite the economic downturn. There is lots of good reporting taking place at the event. Here are a couple of observations from someone reading the coverage on the other side (that would be the Boston side) of the Atlantic.

Before I give you my list, here's some coverage for you to get the full news from the show.

Remember Bill Gates? He used to run Microsoft and is now trying to fix the world. He recently took a cue from his bridge partner, Warren Buffett, and wrote an annual Bill Gates letter outlining the achievements and challenges of the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation. It is long at about twenty pages, but worth reading.

The foundation's considerable assets were down about 20 percent last year, which is a good record considering a Wall Street market that was off about forty percent.