Is Skype Taking Over VoIP In North America??Written by Michael Lemm
If news from broadband management company Sandvine is any indication...the answer is yes. At least for residential anyway. Calls using Skype account for nearly half of VOIP minutes used (46.2%) and about 40% of VOIP bandwidth used in North America, according to an analysis done by Sandvine. That puts Skype usage ahead of Vonage, Cablevision, and other popular branded residential VOIP offerings. In fact, Sandvine says Skype users account for 35.8% of individual VOIP callers on North American networks.Now again....look deeper. That's residential users......not business. Skype can't deliver capability, capacity, and reliability businesses require. Plus residential Skype users are tied to a PC and headset arrangement. Businesses balk at that restriction. So Skype is still a nice alternative for regular Joe....for now.
| | Giclee printing advantagesWritten by Fabio Bragha
Giclee printing advantages:Additional revenue for artist beside original when marketing giclees. Setup is much cheaper for giclee than producing offset for litho printing (no plates need to be generated). Quality is better than press both in resolution and color range. Did you know giclee printing offers a much wider color gamut than traditional presses? Much more variety of papers such as canvas and watercolor than press as giclee printing is not as fussy with substrates. Different sizes can be printed on demand to accommodate market. While latest Giclee printers use 6 or more colors, traditional printing is 4 colors: a lot of pigments artists choose simply cannot be reproduced. The gamut (Range of colors reproduced) is higher with giclees. Manufacturers added extra pigments such as light cyan, light magenta, to increase chromatic rendition. Regarding pigments, make sure that your giclee provider uses pigments and not dyes for printing. This is an essential component to insure lasting reproductions. Every printer has different characteristics: A measure of DPI (dots per inch) is often overrated as to only measure of quality. There are 300 DPI professional machines capable of rendering artwork of a much higher quality than a consumer level printer rated at 720 or 1,440 DPI. Ultimately, even with all math and gamut graphs available, true test is to observe a giclee next to original. Use a lupe if one is available to discern any dot pattern.
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