Kara Swisher

Recent Posts by Kara Swisher

Aliph in Collaboration Deal With Cisco–Jawbones in the Workplace?

Today at a partner event, Cisco will unveil a wide-ranging collaboration with Aliph–a San Francisco start-up that is famous for its noise-cancelling Jawbone Bluetooth mobile headset–to deploy its software and device in its IP phones in the enterprise.

It is a big win for Aliph, since the networking giant is a dominant player in the arena to provide telephony solutions to businesses, part of its Voice and Unified Communications division.

The idea, said sources, is to use the Jawbone device and the software that manages it to allow workers to move around an office and have the call move with them, echoing increasingly mobile consumer behavior.

BoomTown had heard rumors of intense interest in Aliph by Cisco (CSCO) months ago and assumed a purchase to add to its growing consumer portfolio, such as its recent acquisition of Pure Digital’s Flip camera line.

But that did not turn out to be the case–instead it is more a partnership, said sources, to use Aliph’s technology.

The company was formally launched in 2006–in fact, at the D: All Things Digital conference–by Alexander Asseily and Hosain Rahman, who met as Stanford University undergraduates. It is funded by Khosla Ventures and Sequoia Capital.

With the stylish and innovative Jawbone–the most recent of which is reviewed here by The Mossberg Solution’s Katherine Boehret–Aliph turned a lot of heads in the wireless headset space, aimed directly at high-end consumers.

Now, it is apparently pivoting into the workplace.

While Rahman confirmed the collaboration, he did not give a lot of details, although he did agree to sit down with me last night to broadly sketch out the new relationship.

Here’s the video of the interview:

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik