Wi-Fi VoIp?

The Wi-Fi Alliance wants to make voice a part of Wi-Fi networks, and has introduced a program to certify products, it announced on Monday.

The Wi-Fi CERTIFIED Voice-Personal stamp of approval means a product is capable of making or handling good-quality voice calls in the home or a small office environment, according to the Wi-Fi Alliance. Access points, wireless routers, handsets (which are growing at a steady rate) and laptops can all be tested and certified.

The push is a way for Wi-Fi Alliance to keep femtocells and upcoming technologies such as WiMax, HSPA (High-Speed Packet Access) and LTE (Long Term Evolution) -- which lately have overshadowed Wi-Fi -- out of the home, according to Richard Webb, directing analyst at Infonetics. Webb thinks Wi-Fi, helped by a low cost and a large installed base, will be able to stay dominant.

"Wi-Fi performance has been continually improved, and this is another step along that road," said Webb.

In a departure from interoperability testing, which has always been Wi-Fi Alliance's bread and butter, it instead looks at performance. To be certified, products have to deliver packet loss of less than 1 percent with no burst losses, as well as latency and maximum jitter of less than 50 milliseconds, according to the Wi-Fi Alliance.

The first round of certified products include Intel's PRO/Wireless 3945ABG Network Connection (an embedded 802.11a, b and g PCIe Mini Card), Cisco Systems' Aironet 1250 and 1200 Series Access Points, and Meru's access point AP200.

Wi-Fi CERTIFIED Voice-Personal is only an option for vendors, so users will need to double check a special Wi-Fi product database to see whether a particular product has passed the testing.

Wi-Fi Alliance also has plans to introduce a program for enterprise environments, called Wi-Fi CERTIFIED Voice-Enterprise, early next year. It will be based on the Voice-Personal Program, and add support for bandwidth management, hand-offs between access points, enterprise-class security, network management and other features that are necessary in larger environments, according to Wi-Fi Alliance.

Enterprise adoption of IP (Internet Protocol) telephony over WLANs is growing, and vendors have put a lot of effort to improve performance, but many companies are still reticent about putting voice on it, according to Webb.

"Certification gives it a stamp of approval," he said.

Improve Business Performance

As a manager, one of your myriad duties is the professional development of your employees. Mentoring your employees helps them perform better, improves morale, and can help your business succeed. Most employees yearn to grow their skills with the aid of a knowledgeable, more senior member of their team. Want to take a more active role in mentoring your staff?

Try these tips:

Buddy up. Consider it a kind of matchmaking — send your staffers and more senior members, or mentors, off to discuss past experiences and future goals over lunch or coffee. Pairing those who have fewer years in the business with those who’ve got a wealth of proven experience is a great way to get a fresh exchange of ideas flowing. These pairings needn’t be exactly in line along the hierarchy; all that’s important is that the two parties can learn something from one another. It's also a good idea to take personalities into account, if possible, in matching employees with mentors.

Listen Openly. For one-on-one conversations between junior and senior staffers, encourage both parties to abandon their preconceptions. Instead of “right” or “wrong” ways of meeting challenges, encourage them to approach problems or projects by finding ways that work to replace ways that don’t. Neutralizing this language promotes an open dialogue in which both parties' ideas are equally valid. This parity will encourage the conversation to move freely and ensure that both the senior and junior staffer emerge with new ideas.

Think Strategically. One of the best by-products of mentoring is the slew of novel approaches it can engender. Once your staffers have met to discuss their professional goals and new methods of achieving them, be open to applying these ideas. They may not always work, but with patience and perseverance on all sides, successes will be achieved and staffers will see that their mentoring conversations produce tangible, actionable results that enhance their performance.

While mentoring may seem at first to be a one-way street, benefiting the recipient of the mentoring, it invigorates everyone involved. Mentors are stimulated by the active need for their skills, while they can learn from the junior employee, who brings a fresh outlook and new ideas to what might feel like old hat for the senior staffer. Mentoring can boost communication, inject new ideas into old formulas, and promote a satisfying, more open work environment — all of which benefits your bottom line.

Quotes to Inspire

I recently read a quote that inspired me and thought, "Why not share it with others?" I've also collected a list of quotes from entrepreneurs and other quotes that are relevant to entrepreneurship. I hope one of these quotes inspires you as well.

• I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work - Thomas Edison, inventor and scientist
• The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary - Vidal Sassoon, entrepreneur
• Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won't, so that you can spend the rest of your life like most people can't. - Anonymous
• The best reason to start an organization is to make meaning - to create a product or service to make the world a better place - Guy Kawasaki, entrepreneur, investor, author
• Every worthwhile accomplishment, big or little, has its stages of drudgery and triumph; a beginning, a struggle and a victory - Mahatma Gandhi, political and spiritual leader
• Failure defeats losers, failure inspires winners - Robert T. Kiyosaki, author, entrepreneur, investor
• Entrepreneurs average 3.8 failures before final success. What sets the successful ones apart is their amazing persistence - Lisa M. Amos
• Once you say you're going to settle for second, that's what happens to you in life - John F. Kennedy, U.S. President
• In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable - Dwight D. Eisenhower, U.S. President
• The greatest reward in becoming a millionaire is not the amount of money that you earn. It is the kind of person that you have to become to become a millionaire in the first place - Jim Rohn
• Some people dream of great accomplishments, while others stay awake and do them - Anonymous
• Experience taught me a few things. One is to listen to your gut, no matter how good something sounds on paper. The second is that you're generally better off sticking with what you know. And the third is that sometimes your best investments are the ones you don't make - Donald Trump, real estate and entertainment mogul
• The entrepreneur in us sees opportunities everywhere we look, but many people see only problems everywhere they look. The entrepreneur in us is more concerned with discriminating between opportunities than he or she is with failing to see the opportunities - Michael Gerber, author, entrepreneur
• An entrepreneur tends to bite off a little more than he can chew hoping he'll quickly learn how to chew it - Roy Ash, co-founder of Litton Industries
• The critical ingredient is getting off your butt and doing something. It's as simple as that. A lot of people have ideas, but there are few who decide to do something about them now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. But today. The true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer - Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese's
• I will tell you how to become rich. Close the doors. Be fearful when others are greedy. Be greedy when others are fearful - Warren Buffet, investor and billionaire
• I never perfected an invention that I did not think about in terms of the service it might give others... I find out what the world needs, then I proceed to invent - Thomas Edison, inventor and scientist
• Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the Trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover - Mark Twain, author
• There is a tide in the affairs of menWhich, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;Omitted, all the voyage of their lifeIs bound in shallows and in miseries.On such a full sea are now afloat;And we must take the current when it serves,Or lose the ventures before us - William Shakespeare, author
• Genius is 1% inspiration, and 99% perspiration - Thomas Edison, inventor and scientist

The MPAA and RIAA are still not smart. - Big suprise huh?

The MPAA and RIAA will leave no stone unturned in their quest to eradicate piracy from the Internet. Their latest target: Evil laser printers, which are surely harboring bootleg copies of "Iron Man" and "My Humps."

Laser printers of course are innocent of the crimes of which they are accused. But two professors and a student at the University of Washington are using printers (which have indeed received takedown letters in recent months) as an example of how poor a job the MPAA and RIAA are doing at finding copyright infringement online.

Using a number of BitTorrent-connected file sharing computers but not uploading or downloading any files, the researchers received over 400 takedown notices during trials in August 2007 and May 2008. All of the notices were directed at spoofed IP addresses which weren't engaging in any infringing activity: In fact, many of the addresses weren't even computers. But in addition to serving printers with legal notices, at least one wireless access point (which has no storage capabilities at all) was threatened with a lawsuit.

The full research report is available online (PDF link). The conclusions find that not only are false positives a real problem because the systems scanning for illegal activity are doing only cursory examinations of the behaviors going on at those addresses, but those addresses are easy to conceal and fake. The result: Mass hysteria in the world of copyright infringement. On the other hand, the study noted that the door swings both ways: IP blacklists, long a standard method of avoiding detection by P2P users, are "wholly ineffective" as a means of avoiding monitoring.

Workers paying for their own work laptops, gadgets

If you've been buying your own gadgets to increase your productivity on the road, you're not alone. A recent study by In-Stat discovered that nearly 40 percent of the professionals surveyed admitted to buying their own work laptop, and it's likely that countless others have used their personal PDAs, GPS, cameras, and even cell phones for work-related projects because most companies aren't willing to buy them one.

Apparently, some employers feel electronics are too expensive and aren't convinced that gadgets boost productivity. However, one In-Stat tech analyst says these companies are being "penny wise but pound foolish" because electronics do add value and cost less than an employee's time.

I'm going to have to agree with In-Stat here. Some of these companies should get with the times and realize that we are a fast-paced society that depends on technology to get our work done. Ok, so maybe we dont' all need a GPS or digital camera for work, but those that could actually get a significant productivity boost should get one.

In this day and age, all companies should at least issue a laptop and a smartphone to mobile workers. And if they're not willing to pay the cell phone bill, the least they can do is offer to split the bill. These are hard times folks, and the last thing workers need to worry about is not having the right tools to get the job done.