I was glad to see the San Francisco Chronicle recently run a story about vishing, a subject I have been pushing our nation's banks to become more aware of.

Late last year I contacted representatives of American Express, Citibank, Wells Fargo and one other bank to ask what they were doing to prevent vishing and to educate their customer base about the threat it poses and how to combat it.

Only American Express' Privacy Officer acknowledged knowing what it was and was appreciative of my insight as to how it could affect the card member-based financial services company. Both Wells Fargo and Citibank representatives expressed total ignorance about the subject and promised to get back to me after talking to their technical folks. Neither did.

Bottom line: If someone calls you asking for details about your financial information, simply offer to call them back via the number you normally contact them by. In cases of where you have a local bank to walk into, simply discuss it there with a banker. It's the safest way to stop it and to combat it until the banks and regulators come up with a better solution.

For more from Andy Abramson's VoIPWatch, please click here.

Andy Abramson is the founder of Comunicano Inc., a boutique asymmetrical communications consultancy geared to providing senior advising, marketing and corporate communications and marketer-in-residence services to start-ups, companies in transition and established brands. Andy has more than 34 years’ experience in all facets of media, marketing, public relations and corporate communications

GigaOm’s Om Malik has a post about the overwhelming success of the Apple App Store and how it has fostered a look a like "me too, me also"approach by many of the other handset developers like RIM, Nokia, Android who have use the app store model as a way of working with developers.

For developers the App Store is the equivalent of a branded gasoline station. It is not yet Wal-Mart or Amazon, the two brands that best come to mind as supermarkets or hypermarche, as the French say. That means you’re selling to a very niche audience, a specific product for a specific device or platform.

None of the app stores yet have an open API (that I know of) that lets you "stock" a virtual shelf and provide an all in one location for mobile apps the way a Handango can offer downloadable apps that can be installed onto devices, but not as easily as the app stores allow for with their download marketplace model.

I have to believe that Amazon and Wal-Mart would both relish the opportunity to become the cross platform app store retailer so people (or families) with different device platforms could all run compatible software, purchased in one place. But alas, I also fear that co-mingling of the apps would be a challenge for the current platform providers, as they want to own the experience end-to-end. That said, history has shown that we can go from direct selling to the middleman approach quite easily so this also is really more of a "when" than a "would they ever" in my mind, especially with Amazon and Wal-Mart already selling mobile phones and MP3 players and iPods.

Now, back to the Om post. The reason Apple has won the early rounds of the app store wars is simple. No company understands consumer behavior better in technology. Period. While others may study it as closely, Apple lives by a philosophy of KISS (keep it simple, stupid) and does not release something that isn't easy to use. They hide the hard stuff and make it easy for the user. Ergo, they have a Genius Bar at Apple Stores. There the things the average user cannot do, get done. Can your above average user with the right tools and information do what's done at a Genius Bar? Yes, as the really hard work gets done in the back room or is shipped out to a repair depot. There again, Apple understands consumer products better than the rest. (Have you ever seen an on-site repair done on a PC at a Dell sales location?)

Next is the whole process. Apple not only released an app store, they created a whole cottage community of developers, gave them an event (The Apple World Wide Developers Conference) and made the developers stars in their own world. Again, no one else has taken the approach of end-to-end, cradle to grave, like Apple.

For more from Andy Abramson's VoIPWatch, please click here.

Andy Abramson is the founder of Comunicano Inc., a boutique asymmetrical communications consultancy geared to providing senior advising, marketing and corporate communications and marketer-in-residence services to start-ups, companies in transition and established brands. Andy has more than 34 years’ experience in all facets of media, marketing, public relations and corporate communications

A lot has been said during the past few days about the Telegeography report listing Skype as the biggest long distance provider in the world. I'm not at all surprised — in fact, I would have been shocked if it had been any other way. Here's why:

1. People who never talked before by phone have started to talk now by Skype for voice.
2. The Internet and VoIP have pulled a lot of that traffic off the long lines business side of the telcos in general, so in a declining market, a new player offering you the same thing you paid for before for free or at a lower price is going to gain traction fast.
3. Skype is not a high wire act like Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas (where CTIA is next week); they have become a very well grounded and focused company the last year, selling minutes to people who need them, with huge quality. In essence they have become what Vonage wanted to be to the IP connected world, but beyond the United States.
4. The bulk of Skype's user base is international, not domestic U.S., so the audience is worldwide. Callers in the United States are likely the biggest single domestic market per capita for calling, but nowadays almost every call in the U.S. can be a local, bundled or flat rate call anyway, so take those minutes away from the grand total, as we're not a factor in the aggregate number.

Bottom line: Skype has become the world’s first global telco and they did it over every other telco's own network at some point in time — and while they were watching.

For more from Andy Abramson's VoIPWatch, please click here.

Andy Abramson is the founder of Comunicano Inc., a boutique asymmetrical communications consultancy geared to providing senior advising, marketing and corporate communications and marketer-in-residence services to startups, companies in transition and established brands. Andy has more than 34 years’ experience in all facets of media, marketing, public relations and corporate communications