Seth Godin points out that the typical family in the US spends $2000 a year on telecommunications. While long distance costs keep dropping, people are paying for landline, cellphone, dsl, etc., etc.

Skype has announced free calls to all landlines and mobile phones within the US and Canada, at least through the end of the year. Skype has been growing much more quickly outside of the US (100 million users total, 6 million in the US) and it clearly wants to boost its US/Canada share of the market. We've been using Skype and Vonage a lot at N-TEN, and

I was just at the Connecting Up Conference in Adelaide, Australia. It has been fascinating to see the nonprofit ICT perspective here.

Australia has a huge NFP sector for its population of 21 million: the most often-cited figure is 700,000 organizations, but most are staffed purely by volunteers. [The numbers drop dramatically when you limit things to organizations that employ staff (380,000) or that have deductible status (20,000)].

Broadband Internet access is surprisingly low here. Overall, Internet access is at 68%, close to the US, but only about 28% of Internet users have broadband access. The cost of access is high compared to the US, and most