The latest device to try and improve the in-car telephone experience is this Bluetooth Headrest Snake from Iqua. The serpentine device which resembles those handy flexible flashlights has a built-in microphone and speaker and connects to any bluetooth-enabled cell phone to offer handsfree operation. Installation couldn’t be simpler, just wrap it around the base of your driver’s seat headrest and start hissing away.

The Washington Post just ran a good article on the CALEA wire-tapping act and the implications for extending it to the VoIP industry. Brad Templeton, the head of the EFF, spoke on this issue at ETel and is quoted extensively in the article. Brad points out that requiring regulatory approval for new Internet-based communications products will stifle innovation, and the CALEA mandate of installing a backdoor for government wire-tapping to all new products will also greatly increase security risks for these products. The Post also notes that among the politicians opposing the FCC’s Internet wiretap plan is Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, who was the chief sponsor of the original CALEA legislation. Leahy claims that extending CALEA to the Internet of today is counter to what Congress intended.

The EFF, in conjunction with EPIC, the COMPTEL association of communications service providers, and the ACLU, have filed a brief this week with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, attempting to stop the proposed extension of CALEA to Internet communications providers.

Voxeo gave us a sneak preview of their new, very affordable IVR platform at ETel, and today the Prophecy product has been officially announced. There was quite a stir in the hallways at ETel about Prophecy, which allows small companies and developers to get their hands on high-quality voice response technology for far less than was previously possible. In fact, a two-port system is free! An upgrade to the four-port version costs $249, and additional ports are $549. Prophecy runs on Windows 2000, 2003, and XP, and Linux and Mac OS systems will be available later this year.

Prophecy is more than just a standard IVR though, it’s being promoted as a complete telephony platform with features like call conferencing, call recording, SIP-based VoIP telephony support, a built-in soft-phone, an SQLite database engine, and a web server supporting PHP 5.1 and Java/JSP.

Voxeo has spent the past 4 years developing their own high-quality speech recognition and speech synthesis technology, which eliminated the need to incorporate the licensing fees for these kind of speech components that previous systems required, and allowed them to release this very low-cost IVR solution. If the talk around the hallways at ETel is any indication, this product release will really shake up the IVR landscape (and likely has some of the bigger IVR vendors sweating). If you’ve been wanting to get your hands on an affordable IVR platform to incorporate into your business or product, you should definitely check Prophecy out.

Related link: http://www.millenniastudio.com/MacBerry7100.html

Since RIM released some details on creating your own BlackBerry theme, we’ve seen several themes popping up in various places. Some are certainly better than others. Here’s one that caught my eye and I thought was worth a mention.

It’s called MacBerry and (as the name implies) it’s based on Mac OSX. It looks pretty sharp! This one’s only available for the 7100 series devices. The creator of the theme, Millinea Studio, has some other themes for the 7100 series and the 8700 devices.

Here’s the OTA install for the MacBerry theme.

Any other themes worth mentioning?

Jack Herrington interviews Brad Templeton of the EFF about the CALEA wire-tapping act and the ramifications of the proposed extension to the VoIP industry, on O’Reilly’s Distributing the Future weekly podcast. Brad reccomends using Skype for now if you’re concerned about the privacy of your VoIP calls, “Skype got their encryption right.” Brad spoke about this at ETel and presented a very convincing argument that including VoIP networks and devices in CALEA is a recipe for stifling innovation.

Related link: http://www.billglover.com/blog/archives/000157.html

Himanshu and I will be speaking and signing books at the RFID World V.I.P. event February 27th in Dallas (for reasonably fuzzy values of Dallas), Texas. We will also be attending the rest of RFID World over the following three days, and may be speaking or standing on a stage watching someone else flip sides or doing other things similarly embarassing and necessary. Please walk up and ask us real questions, so we won’t feel like total fools. If you bring a book, we will be happy to sign them there as well, but probably won’t setup a table.If you haven’t already signed up for the event it’s worth your effort if you plan to do anything in RFID soon. The vendor floor alone is full of neat gadgets and real advice from people who have already made your next three mistakes and learned their lesson.

Will you be at RFID World? What are you hoping to find there?

It was defintely a lively and amusing morning here at ETel, with many of the speakers successfully using humor to make their points and inspire the crowd. Between Brad Templeton’s “evil twin speaking to the ILECs” routine, David Isenberg’s Seuss-inspired rhyming for Net Neutrality, and Mark Spencer’s story about a surprise and unintended telephone call-based DDoS Digium experienced because of a humorous IVR prompt they had put onto a test system, there was a whole lot of laughing go on. Speaking to attendees in the hallway afterwards, there seemed to be univeral appreciation for the humorous approach, it livens up the content and the audience and everyone had a big smiles on their faces as they headed for lunch.

Since just about every single person here raised their hand when Mark Spencer asked who had heard of Asterisk, he opted to tell us a humorous story of how his company Digium came to use VoIP for it’s incoming toll-free service, rather than describing the open source PBX platform. (Mark is the original programmer and creator of Asterisk in case you’ve been living in a cave somewhere).

A funny IVR test prompt was created for internal use at Digium, where the recorded voice started out speaking the kind of message we’ve all heard before, “Please hold, your call will be answered soon..” but then veered off into telling the caller there was so many calls ahead of their call that they probably wouldn’t be answered today and advised them to go out and live life a bit. The test message was accessible from the outside world at an extension hanging off of their incoming 800 number, and suddenly it was discovered and the number and extension were passed around the Intenet in that kind of viral, forwarding way that can very quickly build up a huge amount of attention.

The sudden spike in voice traffic was overwhelming their incoming service and something needed to happen to alleviate the situation. Since the phone number being passed around was Digium’s main incoming toll-free number, they couldn’t just turn it off, but they worked with their provider to switch the incoming 800 number service to VoIP, and by routing the calls over the bigger IP pipe, the problem was fixed.

The moral of the story was they were so happy with the performance of the incoming service using VoIP that they’ve kept it in place.

David Isenberg is a rock star.

Called on at the last second to present here at ETel in place of a speaker who had immigration problems, David brought down the house with his impassioned plea to fight for Net Neutrality, all done in Dr. Seuss-like rhyme. A longtime observer of the telecom industry and fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, his insightful and witty commentary are familiar to many here in the audience, and his message couldn’t have been more well-received.

I wish I could point to the text of his speech, but it’s not online right now. David is putting together a conference event in Washington D.C. this April to further this cause, called Freedom to Connect. For more info check out http://freedom-to-connect.net/.

Update: David has now posted his poetic talk, I reccomend you go check it out!

Brad Templeton, the head of the EFF, had the audience here at ETel in stitches as he used humor and sarcasm to make his case against the impending application of the CALEA wiretapping law to VoIP providers. For over half of his talk he pretended to be the “evil twin Brad” speaking to an ILEC conference, explaining why they needed to support CALEA for VoIP to stifle the innovation of all these garage innovators that are threatening their business (like those clever Estonian hackers..)

Brad’s message resonated with the many hackers and innovators here, and I don’t think there’s many who aren’t sympathetic and in agreement with his argument that it’s a very bad idea to make CALEA apply to VoIP providers and manufacturers, and that the FCC is overstepping their jurisdiction in this case. There was a large round of applause when he mentioned that the EFF, the ACLU, and others are joining together to file suit next week challenging the FCC’s application of CALEA to the VoIP industry.

His main arguments were that it’s a bad idea because it will seriously stifle innovation, it’s not needed based on the small amount of wiretaps that were issued last year (and the even smaller amount of those that would likely apply to VoIP users), and that the FCC doesn’t have the legal authority to make this move. He pointed out that any system that requires developers to ask permission from some government agency always stifles innovation, and he used DVD players and the crypto exporting law as examples. Brad noted that there were only 1633 authorized, non-FISA wiretaps issued last year (most for drug crimes), and it seems crazy to spend billions re-engineering VoIP networks and products based on those kind of numbers. Jokes about non-authorized wiretaps followed, naturally. And last, the CALEA law specifically excludes information services and private networks.

UPDATE: Jeff Pulver has posted the joint brief that was filed with the DC Circuit last night challenging the FCC’s Order CALEA.

Dr. Norman Lewis, the director of research for France Telecom, gave a rousing keynote about the problems the telcos are facing today. Lewis may work for a big operator, but he clearly sees the writing on the wall for the telcos and gave a frank appraisal of what some of the problems have been and how serious they are.

Lewis gets very heated when he describes the way the telcos have stifled innovation, “Voice innovation has been bloody awful!” He claimed that for the last 100 years the telcos have effectively stifled innovation around voice, and it’s the Internet telephony revolution that is pressuring them to change.

He noted that traditionally everytime the telco world has done soemthing new, the customer wants and does something else and the telcos end up following their customers. He gave the example of WAP, which was strongly hyped by carriers, but the customer experience was awful and no one used it. But customers took to SMS like crazy, which wasn’t something the carriers were even envisioning as an important service.

He spoke to the massive and ridiculous investments in 3G spectrum that the carriers made over the past decade, noting that this has saddled the large telcos with huge debts that they will be paying on for a very long time. Lewis mentioned that to some extent the financial markets helped drive this insanity, as there was a pervasive sense that if you were a telco not investing in 3G you weren’t forward-thinking and would be left out of the future. As it turns out though, those ill-advised investments may be what dooms the future of some of the telcos.

He’s excited about the future though, and feels liberated by the things he sees going on today. “We can now begin to do things we’ve never done before,” Lewis stated, and he looks forward to what he sees as a huge opportunity for immense innovation as voice becomes an adjunct to many different services.

Lewis ended by trying to convince the audience that France Telecom is going to be one of the innovators in the telco world, and they really “get” these new technologies and models. France Telecom are the biggest providers of VoIP in France and the UK today. They’re also working on social networking, and on a product called Octave, a personalization platform. Lewis promised that APIs would be made available to the developers, which is a whole new way of doing things for telcos.

At last night’s ETel fair I was intrigued by the model being deployed by Spark Parking, a start-up that wants to bring high tech to your favorite urban parking lot. They have developed ruggedly-encased sensors that get placed on the ground of each parking spot and transmit information over wi-fi to a server that you can interact with via your cell phone. You drive in, call a number and enter the parking space number and your credit card number (if it’s not already in the system), and then go off on your way. No need for tickets, attendants, or standing in line to access those funky parking lot payment machines. Pretty nifty idea.

Erik van Eykelen of Voipster showed off their OpenZoep client-side VoIP communications engine today at ETel, and announced that the code is going to be open sourced under the GPL. Erik also announced the availabilty (Windows only for now) of a Zoep Firefox plug-in. OpenZoep (pronounced like “open soup”) supports free pc-to-pc VoIP calls, instant messaging and outbound PSTN and SIP calls to free and premium SIP providers. OpenZoep is a browser-embeddable VoIP and IM application with an XMPP-based API which can be used to add VoIP functionality to games and all kinds of applications.

Alec Saunders showed me iotum, his company’s “relevance engine” here at ETel, and I was pretty impressed. An attempt to reverse the trend of growing complexity in our communications environments, iotum queries apps like your calendar and IM client to help determine how specific calls should be handled, and makes filtering decisions based on who’s calling, time of day, what’s on your calendar, etc. It does most of its decision making automatically in the background, with only a minimal amount of initial set-up required. By paying attention to your calling habits, IM presence, schedule, and location information if available, iotum can go a long way towards smoothing out the flow of your daily communications. It can do things like notice on your calendar when you’re out of the office, and route important calls that come in there to your cell phone. Or if it sees a series of back and forth calls with an important client that may mean a negotiation is taking place, decide that if another call comes in from that client after your work hours you probably still want to get it.

I was particularly impressed with the part of the demo where the user placed himself in busy mode on his IM client, which normally conveys to iotum not to let calls directly through, but when it noticed a call coming in from a client who the user had a scheduled meeting with later that afternoon, it decided that call was important enough to put through (with the idea being the client is most likely calling to postpone, change, or reschedule the upcoming appointment and it’s probably a call you’ll want to take).

Peter Cochrane gave us a glimpse of an exciting future during his ETel keynote, and he’s well-positioned to speak to such things. Formerly the CTO of British Telecom’s prestigious reseach lab, the UK’s first professor for Public Understanding of Science & Technology at Bristol, and a prolific author, Cochrane has been a key figure watching, studying, and participating in the march of technology throughout his life. He got a chuckle by mentioning that he’s lately been donating some of his early gear to a technology museum, and it was a little unsettling how excited they were about it.

Cochrane believes the next 20 years will see more change than we’ve seen in the previous 200, and the next decades will see revolutionary changes in communications technology. He’s now working with children who have been online their whole life but they have never had to plug in a network cable. “Their idea of a network is very different from mine,” observed Cochrane.

For some more historical perspective Cochrane showed a couple of slides of video conferencing prototypes developed in the past. One from the 1960s showed video conferencing not much different than we have today, except it envisioned transmitting documents via a polaroid-style system where the recipient held up special paper to a monitor. The next prototype showed full-figured holographic representations of the remote attendees, which he noted was a far superior solution that would solve the “teleconferences are crap” problem that everyone experiences. This is because the most important bits in communication are the emotional bits, being able to make eye contact, see expressions and body language, and hear inflcetions of voice are what makes or breaks a video conference experience. He noted that one of the things people are experienceing as they start using VoIP telephony systems that transmit a higher audio quality than traditional telephone systems is an increased level of emotional communication.

Some of Cochrane’s predictions are that in the coming years positioning systems will become bigger than communications systems, sensor nets will exceed the size of all the currently existing networks, podcasting will displace tv and radio, and there will soon be more robots than people. He expects RFID to revolutionize every aspect of the supply chain. Cochrane also predicted that by 2015 we’ll see an iPod-like device that can hold every music track ever recorded, and 10 years after that we’ll see those devices capable of holding every movie ever recorded.

Cochrane pointed out that in Japan next year every cell phone will be required by law to include GPS, and this will have a lot of implications for tracking and positioning technologies. Besides being bullish on trackers, sensors, and positioning tech, Cochrane was excited by recent advances in nano-gyro tech and its inclusion in cell phones. He described a combined GPS and nano-gyro inertial navigation system for phones that would allow someone walking in an unfamiliar neighborhood to flick their cell phone in the direction of a building and have it retrieve information about what that building is.

Cochrane pointed to the digitization of everything and ubiquitous connectivity as the disruptive forces that will bring on many of these changes. He also spoke to the telco fears that broadband and VoIP will kill traditional telephony (he agrees), and notes that as bandwidth is becoming a commodity, the glory days for the telcos are over.

Cochrane claimed that all the talk of convergence is really a myth, and it’s connectivity that is much more responsible for spurring future technological developments. He also assailed the commonly-believed myth that spectrum is in short supply, with the reality being that most of the time most of the spectrum is not in use.

For more information about Peter Cochrane’s views and writings check out http://www.cochrane.org.uk/.

This week at Etel, I’ll be demoing a new conferencing and telecasting platform built from the ground up around open standards telephony. Among other things, we’ll be hosting a live feed of the plenary sessions that will be accessible via a local phone call in over 30 countries, and worldwide via Gizmo.

Radio Handi enables people to create voice communities around any subject, place of interest or peer group, and to telecast live audio from MP3 feeds or conference phones. You can create a message board and party line for your club, for people who share an interest, or for your friends. With it, you can create an open party line that people can dial into from all over the world (30+ countries and 1 VoIP network to start with, much more to come). This is our first public demo of the platform.

It’s also a great platform for ad hoc broadcasting. Just hook a microphone up to a Mac running Gizmo, and you can beam a live audio feed into a conference room that people can then dial into from all over the world (watch for a series of how-tos on ad hoc telecasting and other topics later this week).

Couldn’t make it to ETel? We’ll have an open feed running Wednesday and Thursday so people can dial in to eavesdrop on the conference proceedings, and also chat with attendees. We’ll be hosting message boards and party lines for BOF sessions and informal groups, and may also have a mobile MP3 feed running as well. This is a demo with limited call capacity, so you may get a busy signal or choppy audio. We’ll be telecasting sessions Wednesday and Thursday, and will post details here soon.

UPDATE: live audio from the main stage is available at 415-376-1644 (see www.radiohandi.com for a list of international access numbers, just pick an access number and then join channel 0028, or call “radiohandi” on Gizmo and dial channel 0028).

Jim Van Meggelen (author of Asterisk: The Future of Telephony) just hosted a session that featured some cool VoIP-related hackers. Speakers showed off things like setting up auto-provisioning phones in an enterprise environment, hacking up a click-to-call service, and even playing adventure games over your PBX. There’s a lot of neat stuff being shown off here, and one thing that’s becoming very clear is that by using Asterisk and VoIP the barrier to entry for developing new voice applications has gotten a whole lot lower.

Kind of like peanut butter and chocolate…RoR and Asterisk seem to go together very nicely, if you’re looking for rapid deployment of voice/web applications. Joe Heitzeberg just gave a very hands-on presentation on RAGI, an open-source framework for bridging the Ruby on Rails web application server environment and Asterisk. With the use of a screencast, Joe walked the audience through creating a simple app that queried a web page for package tracking info and offered that information up via a dial-up telephone interface using Asterisk. It took all of about 30 minutes, and half of that was explaining the steps. If you want to experiment with tying voice to web apps or need a rapid voice development platform, you should definitely check out RAGI.

After posting a silly little IM interview last week with the character posing as Dr. Myra Vanderhood, the supposed scientist behind Pherotones, savvy readers of this blog and Makezine.com sleuthed the orgin of this marketing campaign by tracing IP numbers and registration information of the related sites and disputed Wikipedia entry back to the advertising firm McKinney Silver. Shortly after these comments showed up, a new line was added to the Pherotones FAQ:

Q: Is this site part of a marketing campaign?

A: Yes it is. Thanks for your interest. Please check back to see further developments about Pherotones!!

The whole thing sparked quite a commotion out there among people who pay attention to advertising and marketing, and there was widespread slamming of McKinney for this “creative” campaign that was attempting to present fake science as something real. I’m not sure how I feel about these kind of immersive, viral marketing campaigns that McKinney is known for (they are the agency behind Audi’s recent “THE ART OF THE H3IST”), but I definitely agree with most critics that they went too far when they tried to pollute the Wikipedia with a bogus pherotone entry. C’mon guys, the Wikipedia is having enough trouble with mainstream public perception lately, it really doesn’t need ad folks trying to manipulate entries too. (I suppose another way of looking at it is that incidents like this help demonstrate the power of Wikipedia’s self-healing nature — that pherotone entry may very well be history by the time you’re reading this).

Well, the “IM the DR.” link was still up, and I couldn’t resist trying to get a little more info from the folks behind pherotones, or at least to add a little humor to my afternoon…

DrPherotone: Hi. How are you today?

bruceETel: doing well, thanks! What’s going on with the wikipedia entry for pherotones, do you know? did you write that entry?

DrPherotone: Well, when you consider the groupthink that rules mainstream “acceptable” science, it’s surprising they let it stay up for even one minute.

DrPherotone: No, but it is based on a lot of my work.

bruceETel: Are you going to try and fight to keep it up?

DrPherotone: You can’t fight city hall. The only way to keep it up there is to prove once and for all the existence and potency of Pherotones. That’s the only fight I am interested in.

bruceETel: Are you working for McKinney Silver?

DrPherotone: No, they work for me. I’m doing a blog post about this.

bruceETel: Oh, great, that might help with the confusuon. when will that be up?

DrPherotone: As soon as I write it. I do the research here, the business stuff is not in my purview, but I know we needed help with our site.

bruceETel: And you hired McKinney to help you build a site to do that?

DrPherotone: Actually, the board hired someone who hired someone…all I know is that there were a bunch of scruffy looking kids sitting in the conference room last month, wearing torn jeans and $200 shirts and Italian designer converse sneakers…the websters we call them.

bruceETel: Do you work for a phone carrier comapny?

DrPherotone: We are seeking partners, negotiating…I personally am independently wealthy, and I am an awesome grant proposal writer, so the research takes care of itself. We need pherotones out in the marketplace so that we can study it better.

bruceETel: The consensus of folks I’ve talked to seems to be that this is a marketing campaign of some sort, not for pherotones themselves, but for some other kind of company. If that’s not the case, where are some technical references to the work you’ve done that others can review?

DrPherotone: Do you mean peer reviewed journals?

bruceETel: i mean anything at all

DrPherotone: It’s kind of sore spot with me. because of my views, I’ve been drummed out of the academy, not by my choosing…So a lot of my best work has been expunged from the scientific literature. Part of my quest is to establish the truth, and reclaim my reputation.

bruceETel: Do you have any response to those who say this is a viral marketing campaign?

DrPherotone: I don’t know what viral means, but like I said before, it is obviously a marketing campaign, for us, for pherotones. How could it be anything else?

bruceETel: I’d be very interested in knowing who is funding this effort.

DrPherotone: You can email me with your credentials, and I might allow you to speak with one of our spokesmen, could you do that, email me your contact info. I need to make sure you are legit, who you say you are.

bruceETel: OK, that would be great. Shall I send you an email with my details and you could set that up?

DrPherotone: Yes, and I can forward it onto Mckinney.

Clearly I wasn’t going to get anywhere by chatting with the “Dr.” I sent off my details in email and was ready to forget about the whole thing when last night I got one more hilarious response in my inbox. The “Dr.” emailed me to see if anyone had gotten back to me (of course they hadn’t.) She promised she’d make it happen soon, and although she claimed we had developed a special relationship, and we had this nice source-journalist thing going on (”You are like Judy Miller to my Scooter Libby”), further prodding hasn’t generated anything of substance, and I do think it’s time to call this a wrap.

The only question I still have is who was the client here? If you have any knowledge or hunches, please drop in with a comment. Speculation has run from Qwest, McKinney’s big telecom customer, to this somehow being tied to Stephen King’s new novel, which we know already has a ringtone marketing program in place. But despite all the promises from the good doctor, I don’t think I’m going to be hearing from anyone at McKinney anytime soon. Oh well, on to more serious matters. I hope it was as good for you Dr, as it was for me.

Flat rate “unlimited” pricing is now a standard offering among VoIP providers. However, in most cases, “unlimited” really means “unlimited, except when we say it isn’t”. It is common practice for VoIP providers to kneecap customers for going over unpublished limits. For example, my Broadvoice account was recently suspended after I racked up about 1200 minutes, including a lot of international calls. My account was “rerated” and they attempted to upsell me to a “business class” unlimited package. They backed off after I pointed out that “unlimited” means just that.

I sympathize with service providers, because they are catering to two very different customers, and have no way of telling them apart at the time of sale. One type of account is a personal use account, where one person is accessing the service via one terminal device. The other type of account is a group use account, where multiple users share a VoIP line. Small businesses do this all the time by wiring a VoIP terminal adapter up to their intercom system and using that line for long distance calls. Many people share the line, and not surprising, consume much more airtime. If they don’t tell the service provider what they are doing, they don’t have an easy way to find out, except to look for “heavy” use and kneecap offending accounts.

Consumers seem to care more about flat rate pricing, so they know what their monthly outlay is going to be, regardless of how they use the service. Nobody watches TV by the minute, and the days of metered telephone service, even cellular, are clearly nearing an end. What customers want is a fair deal, which means knowing up front what you will get for a given price.

That’s the problem with the “unlimited” plans on the market. Service providers bury fine print in their terms of service that gives them the right to redefine accounts at a whim, and to penalize customers for going over some unspecified threshold on a supposedly unlimited plan.

The service providers have to do this. Most of them pay metered rates on outbound traffic, albeit at perhaps a fraction of a cent per minute. But when you’re talking about millions of minutes, half cents add up. They take a calculated risk that if you spend $20/month for unlimited service, you probably won’t use more than 2,000 minutes. Averaged across a large user population, they assume most people will consume less than they think they do (when they could actually save money by going with a standard pay by the minute plan). This would alll work out fine, were it not for freeloaders who share a VoIP line with multiple users, typically by putting the VoIP adapter in front of an intercom or PBX system. A user like this can easily consume 5,000 to 10,000 minutes per line if it is in heavy use, in a call center for example. So to prevent freeloaders from helping themselves at the trough, they have to impose some sort of limit, which leads to disgruntled customers.

I am floating the idea of a fairer pricing scheme that protects consumers and service providers by combining flat rate pricing with a faily usage cap. A provider might offer a set of packages like:

– $9.95 flat rate calling, up to 90 minutes of weekday calling per day, unlimited evenings and weekends
– $19.95 flat rate callling, up to 180 minutes of weekday calling per day, unlimited evenings and weekends
– $49.95 flat rate, unlimited calling, no strings attached

This approach allows consumers and service providers to meet half way. Consumers get a fair deal, and if they consume more than their daily quota, they get a busy message, and can either delay calls until tomorrow, or upgrade to a higher limit plan. Service providers can offer even more attractively priced deals to consumers who do not live on their telephones, without exposing themselves to losses due to freeloaders. The people whose intent is to hook a VoIP line up to a PBX for 24×7 use will have to pay the actual cost of a leased line, where consumers are, in actuality, sharing a leased line for all practical purposes.

Now some people will complain that $19.95/month for flat-rate pricing with a 3 hour per weekday cap is miserly, but let’s do some quick math to put this in perspective. That works out to 60 hours of weekday use per month. Let’s assume the user wants to place all calls during the capped weekday period. That’s still up to 3600 minutes per month, or about 0.5 cents per minute, about 50 times cheaper than long distance calls were about ten years ago, and 100 to 200 times cheaper than most international calls once were.

Of course, this is not really a new idea, since many providers are, in effect, already doing this, except they are doing it in a very ham-handed way, by suspending or terminating accounts and forcing customers to complain, rather than by telling customers up front that if they go over their limit, they’ll get a busy signal for a few hours. If they know to expect this, they’ll pay attention to their usage, or pay a little bit extra.

The cellular companies sort of do this by selling bundles of minutes, except they hit you with a userous overage charge when you exceed your allotment, and do not do you the courtesy of telling you when you’ve done so. They assume you’ll be too lazy to check, as most people are, and then stick you with a bill twice as large as you expected.

Since VoIP providers base their service on a low fixed price, standardizing around this pricing model will be an easy way for them to cater to both casual users and businesses without penalizing their own customers. We’ll see if this idea sticks. They are phone companies, after all, and even among most VoIP providers, my experience has been that while prices are lower, the attitude toward customer service is not much better. In other words, meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

The VoIP blogs are buzzing this morning about today’s public launch of Tello, the latest communications company founded by Jeff Pulver. Jeff didn’t go at this one alone, and with high-profile partners John Sculley, Craig McCaw and Michael Price, there’s a lot of people betting favorably on this new presence-related venture.

It’s not just the bloggers who are paying attention either, there are also reports this morning in BusinessWeek and the Wall St. Journal covering the Tello launch. The basic idea behind Tello is to provide accurate and useful presence information to business users that can potentially dramatically improve the flow of communications. Tello uses a web service that allows people to instantly detect the presence of people on a variety of platforms, once they’ve registered with the service. Tello will extend the presence concept that is currently only available within certain closed systems (AIM, Skype) to a broader, more useful level, where you will be able to see if a contact is available via landline, cell phone, IM, etc.

if you want to learn more now, Om has a great post about it or you can sign up for a demo account starting today.

There’s a couple of creepy posts posts on Engadget today if you value your privacy. World Tracker is a UK-based service that will supposedly track and report location for any GSM cell phone accurately between 50m to 500m based on cell tower data. The service works with O2, Vodafone, Orange and T-Mobile, and provides the location information integrated right into Google maps. And Verizon will be launching a child-tracking service called Chaperone in May that will take advantage of the GPS chip that’s built-in to their kid-oriented Migo cell phones. The service even includes a “geo-fencing” feature where parents will be able to receive a text message if the child leaves a designated area.

Based on his work developing a stable wireless mesh platform that allows true peer-to-peer multi-hop network connectivity, Chris Ngan discusses some proof-of-concept applications that demonstrate the power of this network infrastructure and the ease with which text/chat, voice, and video applications can be made location-aware. Chris will discussing these concepts in more detail at the upcoming O’Reilly Emerging Telephony conference.

Google announced this week that they have opened up their IM and VoIP platform using the open XMPP protocol that was recently developed in conjunction with the Jabber Foundation. This is great news for users and for companies who want to create products that will interoperate with Google Talk. With this move will Google help usher in an era of openly federated IM and VoIP, where connecting to users on other systems will work as seemlessly as email does today? Let’s hope so. Reportedly AOL has agreed to interoperate with Google Talk as part of Google’s recent billion-dollar investment in the leading IM provider, but will Yahoo and Microsoft follow? Both companies have said they’ll open up their IM and VoIP networks later this year, but we’ve heard those kind of promises before.

If you’re interested in working with XMPP, don’t miss the Cutting-edge Unified Communications with XMPP BOF session at next week’s Emerging Telephony conference. And if you’re planning on attending but haven’t registered yet, don’t forget that readers of this site can qualify for a 40% discount by registering with the discount code etel06v40!

Related link: http://www.maphacks.net

Maphacks.net has just been secured as a resource for Google, Yahoo!, MSN map hackers & mashers! Because we recognize the signifigance and importance of maphacks and mashups in developing material at GISuser.com this resource will serve to help locate the accumulating wealth of news, leads, article, tools, and other useful tidbits to mashers and would-be hackers. Programmers, and those interested in maphacks can locate news, information, tools, and resources of interest. Topics of focus are Google Maps API, Google Earth, Yahoo! Maps, and MSN Windows Local Live. Still in its infancy, look for some changes and be sure to contribute your suggestions as well. Resources currently available include several months of news releases from comanies developing maphacks, educationsal articles, pointers to a number of code tips and developer tools, maphack map gallery and photoblog (flickr), and each week a maphack is featured in the site’s newsletter.

Related link: http://bbs.keyhole.com

A cool opportunity for UK-based google Earth mashers has been pointed out by Ogle Earth (http://www.ogleearth.com/) citing this thread on the Keyhole BBS (http://bbs.keyhole.com/ubb/showflat.php?Number=279442). Seems that a major film studio is looking for a programmer to help create some google earth apps etc.. to aid in the promotion of the flick.. a cool opportunity.. note the need for someone UK-based. A eminder also, those looking to hire GIS/Geospatial programmers and map hackers might wish to list their ad (for free) at the GISuser career center.

Related link: http://www.fsf.org

The Free Software Foundation (http://www.fsf.org/) has released a draft version of GNU General Public License v3. Of note, Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it is not allowed. See http://gplv3.fsf.org/draft. A bit of background, “In fifteen years of use, version 2 of the GNU General Public License has succeeded beyond our expectations. It has nurtured a spirit of cooperation and trust that has enabled a worldwide community of user/developers to release an extraordinary range of free software.” An extensive rationale behind the proposed changes has also been offered. Note: Free software is a matter of the users’ freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. For more see also http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl.html

XO is proudly trumpeting their latest quarter’s VoIP usage stats, claiming to have processed over 2.2 billion VoIP minutes, a 22% increase over the previous quarter. While that surely is a sign of continued VoIP uptake, not everyone is impressed. Alec Saunders points out that the more important metrics are number of subscribers, and the dollars earned per subscriber. With the cost of voice minutes continuing to plummet, he’s certainly right that just bragging about the number of minutes you’ve got rings a little hollow. And Ted Wallingford wants to know how this compares to Vonage or Packet8, and doesn’t think it’s worth getting that excited about.

Related link: http://www.geoweb.org

Looks like the 2006 GeoWeb conference (recall GML dev days) now has a date set… mark your calendar.. July 24-28, 2006, Vancouver, BC. Topics will include Geography Markup Language (GML), KML, MapPoint, LandXML and OGC Web Services for GIS - See http://www.geoweb.org

Infonetics Research has released a study predicting there will be 24 million North American VoIP subscribers by 2008, with cable companies being responsible for a growing percentage of VoIP users. According to the study, Cablevision and Time Warner Cable each have double-digit share and combined have over 40% of all North American residential VoIP subscribers, while the incumbent telcos have an insubstantial (but growing) subscriber share. The report is very bullish on VoIP uptake in general:

“VoIP subscriber growth is skyrocketing right along with revenue growth: we’re forecasting triple-digit growth from 2005 to 2006, with 6 million new subscribers a year every year from 2006 to 2008, when there will be over 24 million,” said Kevin Mitchell, principal analyst of Infonetics Research and author of the report.

Right after Jeff Pulver suggested to Google that they stand up to the likes of BellSouth and Verizon with their plans to create a tiered Internet, Networking Pipeline is reporting that Google has no intention of paying these “tolls”. In an email to Networking Pipeline’s Paul Kapustka, Google’s Barry Schnitt said:

Google is not discussing sharing of the costs of broadband networks with any carrier. We believe consumers are already paying to support broadband access to the Internet through subscription fees and, as a result, consumers should have the freedom to use this connection without limitations.”

UK supermarket giant Tesco has entered the VoIP business according to CNET today, and will soon be offering its customers a Tesco-branded VoIP service bundle in over 350 of its stores. Rates for PSTN calls from Tesco’s service will start out well above Skype and other VoIP carriers, but apparently Tesco doesn’t see any problem with that:

“Our focus isn’t to compete with Skype,” said Alex Freudmann, commercial manager for Tesco Telecoms. “We’re launching the service because our customers expressed a need. Our customers wanted a simple pricing structure. Our VoIP pricing is in whole pennies–the halfpenny doesn’t exist any more–and there’s one call rate at all times.”

I wonder who they do think they’re competing against?

Related link: http://www.gisuser.com/component/option,com_remository/Itemid,105/

With the growing interest and heightened demand for podcasts and vodcasts, I thought it was appropriate to add a category in our tools section at GISuser devoted to these cool learning aids. So, if you jump to the “Free Tools” category at GISuser - http://www.gisuser.com/component/option,com_remository/Itemid,105/ and browse all the way to the bottom you’ll find the latest addition to this valuable resource. The selection of podcasts is a bit skinny right now but we hope for some suggestions real soon so please feel free to send us details of videos to be included. FYI, if you’re looking for some amusing videos or want to upload some of your own, be sure to check google’s video gallery at video.google.com… there’s quite a bit of crap there but there’s also some great opportunities here for exposure so I wouldn’t hesitate to upload a learning video or product demo here.

Related link: http://www.mapserverfoundation.org

Recent information supplied by Autodesk has informed us that the company has changed the name of MapServer Enterprise (Previously code named “Tux”)… enter MapGuide Open Source: Open source version. New names of various flavors are to include:
new names are of the various versions of it are as follows:
Autodesk MapGuide® Enterprise 2007: Commercial version (available later this year)
Autodesk MapGuide® Studio 2007: Commercial authoring tool (available later this year)

According to the company there were two reasons for the decision. The existing open source web mapping community voiced concern about confusion over the existing MapServer project and Autodesk’s web mapping product. Also, the current MapGuide customers and partners communicated they would prefer a name and a brand that they know well and identify with. Online discussions (See the mapserver discussion list )are underway to find a new name for the MapServer Foundation, which is now seeking other open source geospatial projects to join the effort. Reminder - the MapServer Foundation and members of the open source geospatial community are scheduled to meet February 4th in Chicago. See also http://www.mapserverfoundation.org & http://lists.mapserverfoundation.org/pipermail/discuss/

See also An Open Letter to the MapServer Open Source Web Mapping Community & Autodesk Contributes Web Mapping Software to Open Source

About a year ago, I meant to come up with a list of predictions for 2005. Thankfully, I never published the result (more than half of what I scribbled down would have been wrong). This year, I’ve decided to take a stab at it, and see if I can do any better. So, here’s my list of predictions for the coming year (well, next eleven and a half months, anyway) in wireless LANs.

1. The first one is easy. Municipal networks were a huge story in 2005, and will continue to be deployed in 2006. The difference is that it will be much messier in 2006. As with any emerging technology, the early deployments received a great deal of help from the vendors. (If you buy early, you can always count on the vendor to make you successful–that’s the biggest reason to buy from a start-up.) With many cities in the country trying to build these networks, the industry will struggle to codify the knowledge that they have gained up until this point. Who will be building these networks, and how will they learn? How do you run a mesh network that automatically tunes itself and readjusts packet routing? What sort of node density do you need?

   1. A related personal prediction: I will still have my DSL line at home in San Francisco. Despite all the ink about the city’s municipal wireless network and RFP, I doubt the network will get built fast. There’s already concern about the mayor cutting back-room deals. Even if the city picks a winner, the result will be litigation, not building a network.

2. After building a municipal wireless network, what can be done with it? Sure, there’s the standard answer of providing access to the Internet, and possibly services from the city government. Both those answers are essentially an arbitrage, moving bits off existing wires to offer better versions of the existing services. Useful, but not revolutionary. What sorts of services can be offered over a municipal network that are hard to offer over the alternatives? The biggest advantage that a municipal network has over wires and cables is that it knows the general where stations are. (If receivers start to have GPS, you could get excellent location information outdoors, too.) Expect a great deal of talk about how to build a location framework on a metro-scale basis. Once you know location, you can get targeted advertising for the neighborhood (hello, Google!), or build directions from a current location.

   1. A related prediction: I’ve written about the NextBus service before. They use GPS to find the location of transit vehicles and predict arrivals at stops. Right now, the service reports the vehicle location and sends predictions to signs through CDPD, an old (and expensive) packet data system for cellular networks. Reporting information over a municipal network would be much cheaper, since LANs don’t charge by the bit.

   2. Google is building municipal networks to develop services for them. They already have Google Local. Expect to see Google You-Are-Here, at least for any cities that they support the network in.

   3. Location is an interesting avenue to offer potential services (see MIT’s iSpots), but there are big engineering challenges. Any “interesting” location applications will be based on fairly coarse (say, 10 meter or greater) resolution.

3. Shifting slightly to security:
   Many municipal networks are being built without any security. In 1999-2000, most corporate 802.11 networks were built without any security. As the awareness of the issues came to the fore, security became one of the dominant themes of wireless LANs. Municipal networks won’t suffer the same fate because they can borrow all the security mechanisms that have been worked out by corporate wireless networks over the past few years. Issues like authentication, traffic encryption, account provisioning, and separation of network privileges may rear their heads, but the basic technology is pretty well understood.

   1. As municipal networks adopt security protocols, 802.1X will become more commonplace. Given that the most scalable user account systems are based on reusable passwords, I expect that TTLS will emerge as a formidable authentication method for wireless LANs. (This flexibility has been obvious since 2002, when I fist wrote a comparison of TTLS and PEAP.

4. WPA Security: I was surprised that easy-to-use automatic attack tools for WPA’s pre-shared key mode didn’t hit the mainstream consciousness in 2005. Pre-shared key authentication is nowhere near as secure as authentication against a RADIUS database. Although I hope that 2006 brings a realization that pre-shared keys should be replaced with built-in small-scale RADIUS servers, I wouldn’t bet on it unless an automatic easy-to-use pre-shared key cracker is released and covered widely in the press.

5. 802.11 on public transit will grow, but it will not affect me. Many of the earliest adopters have a large number of high-tech commuters that are equipped to take advantage of it. The emergence of cellular-based data services provides another alternative, and according to BART’s current wireless plans, my commute will be completely covered by wireless data.

6. 2005 saw the adoption of voice on 802.11 get underway. Everything that’s currently on the market either uses the “ostrich approach” to prioritizing voice (there isn’t any contention for network capacity, so we don’t need to worry about it) or some proprietary implementation. Now that 802.11e has been ratified, there are protocol features that should help enable smoother coordination between transmissions. Expect to see some handsets that use 802.11e’s Automatic Power Save Delivery (APSD) sometime this year.

7. In other standards activity, there will be increasing standards activity around fast roaming. 802.11r went to its first letter ballot in November. I don’t expect it will be approved in 2006, but watch for it to be talked about a lot more. Also, expect to hear more about 802.21, the inter-network handoff.

Make of it what you will, but a new site has popped up devoted to the promotion of Pherotones, which are presented as a sort of oddball, audible cousin of pheromones, which naturally you’ll be able to use as ring tones on your cell phone. The site lures us in with the convincing tagline “You’ve heard of Pheromones, now try Pherotones!” and gripping personal testimonials like this one from Derrick of NYC,

I wasn’t much of a ladies’ man before Pherotones. Now they call me ‘Mr. Lady.’

OK, I’m in. I wouldn’t want to disparage Dr. Myra Vanderhood of the Auditory Institute, RTP, a “world-traveled intimacy expert”, heck she even maintains a blog chronicling her new Pherotone project and offers up an “IM the Dr.” link on the site. There’s also a (disputed) pherotone Wikipedia entry. Of course, this is too hot for mainstream science!

But since I knew our intrepid readers would want the latest scoop on this exciting new discovery, I couldn’t resist having a quick chat with the good Dr. this morning. Probably not surprisingly, she appears to be taking this all very seriously:

bruceETel: can i ask you a couple of questons?
DrPherotone: Shoot! Fire away.
bruceETel: what are pherotones and how do they work?
DrPherotone: That’s an excellent question. How they work remains to be seen, and although I am convinced of their existence, many people in the scientific community are not.
DrPherotone: Essentially, think of pherotones not a s sounds, but inaudilbe sounds within sounds. You can hear them, but they are there.
bruceETel: Can inaudible sounds really stimulate someone’s erotic nature?
DrPherotone: Now, my hypothesis is that specific sequences of these iinaudible tones can trigger a response in the human brain via the sacculus, in the inner ear.
DrPherotone: I believe they can. I have some…uh, um..some let’s say personal anecdotal experieince with their power.
bruceETel: what exactly goes on at the Auditory Institute, RTP anyway?
DrPherotone: Right now, a lot of work! Our website just went live yesterday, I’m up to my ears in emails and IM’s…it’s crazy here today.
DrPherotone: But in general, we gather, study and craft pherotones, and experiement with their effects in volunteers we get from the local universities.
bruceETel: why do you think pherotones too controversial for mainstream science?
DrPherotone: Because sex and attraction are involved, research money is hard to come by. Luckily I am an awesome fundraiser and grant writer! But anything unproven, that involves human sexuality is controversial in science. You get accused of grandstanding, of going for the headlines instead of the truth…It’s how it has always been. Look at what they did to Kinsey.

My biggest question remains if one ringtone can make me irresistable why on Earth can’t I buy one from this site?? I asked her that too, and while she can’t really talk about it and she’s “not in it for the money,” plans are definitely in the works. I think an opportunity is being missed here, it won’t be long before these pherotone ringtones are all over the P2P networks. Don’t tease me like that.

In what is rapidly becoming the most important story in telecom this year, BellSouth fired the latest salvo against Net Neutrality when Market Watch confirmed Monday that the Internet Access Provider is “pursuing discussions with Internet content companies to levy charges to reliably and speedily deliver their content and services.” And the VoIP bloggers let out an almost instant and audible group moan.

Jeff Pulver has been predicting this battle for some time, and he’s not going to take it sitting down (or wait for the politicos in Washington to notice and act). Jeff wants the big content providers to not give in to these demands, and he pleas to Google to fight back against the telcos desire to create a two-tiered Internet in Jeff Pulver to Eric Schmidt: Turn the Tide – Turn off BellSouth!. Then Jeff takes Mark Cuban to task for his recent blog post endorsing the idea of multiple levels of service.

Ted Wallingford over on the VoIP Weblog piles on in disagreement with Cuban, noting that we already have a second tier of service that has built-in QoS at a premium price — the PSTN. Ted also tries to explain to BellSouth why In the End, Net Neutrality Will Win.

You can’t charge a premium for a commodity. Bandwidth is a commodity, and this doesn’t change. The market dictates the price of the commodity, not one particular player in the market.

Networking Pipeline, the PhoneBoy blog and many others were quick to jump on this latest development in what is shaking out to be a serious and rapidly escalating battle. As Jeff Pulver eloquently summarizes:

As the battle between the Internet Access Providers and Internet Application Providers rages on, it is the customers who will be hurt more than any of the underlying companies selling access or offering applications. Welcome to the game of Internet Chicken and the race to mutually assured destruction. Who will flinch first before it is too late?

Not only is PocketMac for BlackBerry going to be available for free starting in February, but there will be some highly sought after features in the next release of the product.

I just confirmed with Tim Goggin of PocketMac that the next version of PocketMac will have an Application Loader and email synchronization.

The App Loader is huge - certain applications can’t be installed over the air and you had to have a Windows machine to install them through Desktop Manager. This feature has been requested countless times since the initial release of PocketMac.

Mac users rejoice!

Computer Geeks is currently running a rebate deal on a USB VoIP handset that will get you the phone for free! It’s not the most feature-rich VoIP phone out there, but if you’ve been wanting a USB handset but not wanting to let go of any of your hard-earned cash, this could be the deal for you. The generic brand AU-100 Voice Over IP USB Phone connects via USB 2.0 and features full duplex communication, noise reduction and echo cancellation. It sells for $39.99, but with the $39.99 mail-in rebate (valid until 1/31/06) that’s a wash.

Related link: http://www.gisuser.com/content/view/7790/

MapTools.org, a resource for users and developers in the open source mapping community, and a home to numerous open source projects. Open Source developers and GIS enthusiasts involved with projects like the Mapserver Foundation are no doubt familiar with this project… those interested in the Open Source movement will find maptools to be a valuable resource.

The projects that are hosted on maptools.org offer essential services including: latest downloads, CVS repositories for source code, bug lists, community mailing lists, and project documentation. Some of the links provided at maptools.org are to selected open source projects hosted elsewhere that are related to the projects hosted on MapTools.org.

Maptools provides users with information and links to valuable developer resources like:

FreeGIS.org
RemoteSensing.org
OpenSourceGIS.org
Developers can stay informed of developments and news affecting other open source projects. News briefs and reent updates inlude information about the Mapserver Foundation project, MApbender, CartoWeb, and FWTools initiative.

Finally, users will find comprehensive information, resources, and downloads for a number of open source toolsets, open source libraries, utilities, and code-sets including:

FGS Linux Installer
FWTools
MS4W
GRASS
OpenEV
Quantum GIS
uDig

See http://www.maptools.org/

Related link: http://www.gisuser.com/content/view/7843/

Ever wanted to create your own mashup? Now you can using Yahoo! maps and the developer tools they provide. Check out this live Earthquake Map of USGS M>2.5 Rasmus Lerdorf, the developer, made a live Map of earthquakes with magnitude greater than 2.5 and gives a step by step tutorial detailing how he did it. On the topic of MAshups… check out this implementation of AJAX with the Yahoo! Maps API… pretty slick navigation!

The mashup is relatively simple in concept, showing all recent magnitude 2.5+ earthquakes. Each quake epicenter is shown with a small icon displaying the magnitude. Expanding the information reveals the time and direct link to the USGS data on that particularl quake - provided by the earthquake hazards program. Looking deeper at the application though, a useful tutorial is provided… this is the cool stuff! (Note: the developer is an employee of Yahoo!)

The tutorial takes you through:

The raw geocoding API
Writing your first application
Adding a map
Making the map prettier
why Flash?

The tutorial leads to valuable learning tools, like this discussion about using the Map Image in Yahoo! maps… The Yahoo! Maps Map Image API allows you to get a URL pointing to a graphic of a map generated according to the parameters you specify. See Here

See Quake Map Here http://lerdorf.com/php/ymap/yquakes.php

Andy Oram examines the new concept of a “webcaster’s right” that major Web portals are trying to introduce through a World Intellectual Property Organization treaty. The treaty would allow Web sites to control the dissemination of content they put up. Using the failed database protection laws as an example, and in the context of the carrier’s desire to create a tiered Internet, Andy analyzes this new threat to the public domain.

What would a webcasters right mean? It would mean you couldn’t retransmit content put up by someone else on the web without permission. The proposal tries to indicate that the restriction covers only images and sound, but it’s not clear that a line can be drawn between such content and other things, including text. At any rate, the idea of extending the broadcasters right to the Web is bizarre and fundamentally out of sync with how the Web works. The whole basis of the Web is making links; people don’t normally copy and retransmit material.

As usual, Andy’s perspective is insightful and inspiring. He’s included the full text of a letter he wrote to the U.S. delegates to WIPO on the webcasters right. Make sure and educate yourself on this important and little-known issue. Andy’s article is a great place to start.

CNET just published an article that makes the excellent point that our whole 911 emergency system would benefit greatly from being converted to an IP-based system. Rather than devote a lot of energy to making VoIP carriers work with the current outdated 911 technology, let’s instead make the 911 system work over IP, and glean all the advantages of the more flexible nature of VoIP. Citing the widespread problems that were experienced in the 911 system during Hurricane Katrina, a spokesman for the nonprofit National Emergency Number Association urges that we look into a complete IP-based overhaul of the system.

“Lots of things went wrong during the natural disasters of 2005,” said Rick Jones, operations issues director for the nonprofit group NENA. “It was a wake-up call for the whole country that we aren’t diverse enough in our emergency communications system.”

An IP-based 911 system would obviously ease the burden of E911 compliance that the VoIP industry is currently struggling with, but as the article rightly points out this is a huge proposed project that would take a lot of time and money to implement, and right now it’s just in the earliest investigative phase. Where the money would come from for such a large upgrade is a big question (typically, emergency communications networks are controlled and funded by local governments), but there are currently studies underway by some local emergency agencies to look into moving to IP-based systems. So while U.S. VoIP providers aren’t likely to see any relief from the latest E911 requirements in the current FCC climate (no matter how hard they correctly argue that the cellular providers have been given much more leniency), at least the possibilty of an IP-based 911 system is being studied.

The Federal Communications Commission has mandated that companies offering VoIP service that replaces regular phone service retrofit their technology to make sure customers can access enhanced 911 services.

The National Emergency Number Association, or NENA, the nonprofit organization representing local 911 providers, says this is a temporary solution. Though the group is actively helping VoIP providers meet the FCC requirements to work with the old system, it says a better solution would be for the emergency networks to start using IP. NENA is already developing new standards and best practices for building these IP-based networks.

“The consensus is that IP enabled networks is where the future is going,” said Robert Martin, executive director of NENA. “But we can’t just turn on a new network and expect that everyone will be on the same page. The old infrastructure is going to be around for some time.”

The IP technology needed to transform old 911 networks into next-generation networks is already available. But politics and squabbling over how to fund such a project will likely delay any wide-scale deployments, say the experts.

Reuters is reporting that another slice of spectrum is on the auction block, this time it’s to be used for airline in-flight services. “Please turn off all electronic devices” may soon be an announcement of the past for frequent flyers. While the FCC isn’t quite ready to sanction cell phone use in the friendly skies (I expect that will change in the near future as the airlines continue to test and beef up their equipment against possible interference issues), they’re opening up this spectrum for communications services like high-speed Internet to U.S. air travelers.

And we all know that voice services now come along with that deal, so expect to hear your more of your fellow travelers Skype-ing from 30,000 feet real soon now.

Here’s one of the most heart-warming applications of VoIP I’ve heard about. CNET is reporting that Wiriadi Sutrisno, a physiotherapist in California, and Rita Sri Mutiara Dewi, from the Indonesian city of Bandung, just exchanged wedding vows via VoIP!

They met through the Internet. Sutrisno proposed that way, and they finally exchanged wedding vows in a ceremony using voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) technology. A Muslim religious official supervised their exchange of vows, the Jakarta Post reported Friday.

“We’ve exchanged photos, chat almost daily and often call each other, but we’ve never met,” Dewi was quoted as saying.

She was introduced to Sutrisno by a friend. After he proposed late last year, Dewi wondered how they would exchange vows. In stepped Indonesian telecommunications giant PT Telekomunikasi Indonesia, which arranged video screens, speaker phones and a Webcam.

VoIP-News just interviewed Surj Patel and Nat Torkington, the program chairs of our upcoming Emerging Telephony Conference (January 24-26 in San Francisco). They talk about where they think the industry is now, where it’s headed, and some of the regulatory challenges it will face.

VoIP-News: Now let’s talk about where the market is headed right now. What do you see as the transformative developments that are taking place right now – that have happened in the past couple of months and that you anticipate in the next year?

Nat Torkington: I point to the Internet portals and say that when they have open standards for interconnectivity, so I can write an app that I can deliver through Yahoo! Messenger with Voice, then we have some serious deployment action. They have 19M IM users and it may soon be trivial to offer voice services to them. What does it look like when you make calls without a telco, when the whole Internet can become your office PBX?

Surj Patel: Think about the average business person with a handset – with storage the way it is now, you can compress and store and index a years worth of calls on a handset – then think about how you can do it on the network and come back and find it – just google it and index it and see what people actually said, follow up again with them, check the details, etc.

VoIP-News has also just launched a VoIP Information wiki, and they are running a contest to give away free passes to ETel for the four best additions made to the wiki before January 19.

(Remember, you can save 40% when you register for ETel by using code etel06v40!)

Related link: http://www.ccnmatthews.com/news/releases/show.jsp?action=showRelease&searchText=…

This is great news for Mac users - PocketMac for BlackBerry will soon be a free download from RIM’s web site! The announcement says it will be available starting in February.

This is a great first step for BlackBerry to start truly supporting Mac users. Hopefully, this is a sign of things to come. Perhaps next we’ll see a full blown Desktop Manager client for the Mac that will allow you to load applications, edit your filters, etc.

Woohoo!

Emerging Telephony conference co-chair Surj Patel was interviewed on Daniel Steinberg’s latest Distributing the Future podcast. Surj talks about some of the cool and innovative new telephony applications we’re seeing, and how VoIP is enabling a whole new world of voice applications. He also highlights some of the topics and speakers that we’ll see at the upcoming Emerging Telephony conference in San Francisco, this January 24-26. Remember, readers of this site qualify for a 40% discount when you register, just use the code etel06v40.

And if you haven’t yet discovered Daniel’s Distributing the Future weekly technology podcast, you’re going to thank me for this pointer. His podcasts are the ones I most look forward to, he covers a wide range of technologies and issues in an insightful and interesting way, with polish and panache.

One of our O’Reilly Network affilate sites, OSDir.com, has just posted an interview with Digium’s Mark Spencer. As you probably know, Mark is the man behind the wildly successful Asterisk open source PBX project.

OSDir.com: What are some trends in the PBX market that you’ve been noticing? What kind of technologies are in demand and expected?

Spencer: Most of our existing Asterisk base is fairly technically savvy people. Obviously,if you’re going to run Asterisk at the command line, and edit the config files, you need to know your way around Linux.

What we’re seeing now is what sort of happened in the router market as it went from being something very specialized to being something you just go buy at Best Buy. The idea that someone [who] didn’t really know a whole lot could buy a router and install it has changed the way people look at phone systems now. So we’re seeing companies building more targeted products, like a SoHo PBX or a Voice-over-IP gateway, and then building graphical interfaces and other components to make the whole thing a big seamless solution built around open-source software. Asterisk is the key telephony component and other components, like MySQL or Zimbra, [work] around it to provide other features.

Related link: http://www.ccnmatthews.com/news/releases/show.jsp?action=showRelease&searchStrin…

According to Mark Guibert, a vice president at RIM, a version of Google Talk is in the works and will be available this Spring.

Here’s my favorite part:

The service is integrated with BlackBerry to allow for home screen notifications of new messages, integration of Google Talk instant messages in the BlackBerry Email(TM) inbox and quick access to the BlackBerry Calendar(TM) from Google Talk for meeting scheduling.

Now that will be pretty cool. It would be really great if you have the options for custom alerting that you do with the email, phone calls, and calendar reminders now on the BlackBerry.

Related link: http://www.russellbeattie.com/notebook/1008744.html

Russell Beatie points to a Nokia presentation [pdf] on data usage on mobile phones. The results show that mobile browsing is on the rise and that (surprise, surprise) high-speed (EV-DO, Edge) users browse far more than their lower-speed counterparts.

Robert Scoble recently got a new mobile phone and he’s been shouting from the mountain tops ever since about how web developers need to get their act together and make mobile browsing a breeze.

Scoble’s got the bug that many BlackBerry users have had for some time - there is a useful, mobile web out there. Once you start using it, you’ll depend on it more and more. It will make you all the more disgusted with sites that don’t make it easy on mobile users.

So pick up your BlackBerry and start browsing. Check out Bloglines Mobile for starters.

O’Reilly has just released a new entry in the Hacks series that will help you tweak, configure, and experiment with all kinds of VoIP systems, services and devices: VoIP Hacks by Ted Wallingford. I’ve been eagerly awaiting this one, it’s going right to the top of my reading pile. Ted knows what he’s talking about and I always enjoy his writing. He’s also written Switching to VoIP, some great articles for us on Migrating to Enterprise VoIP and What Is VoIP?, as well as being the primary blogger over on the VoIP Weblog. Quite a prolific guy!

In VoIP Hacks you’ll learn how to do things like create a software PBX with Asterisk, gauge VoIP readiness on an enterprise network, tricks for using IP hardphones, analog telephone adapters, and softphones, and setting up voice mail and recording conversations. Ted also covers using SIP, H.323, and other signaling specifications, and low-layer security in a VoIP environment These sample hacks are available for free online (PDF):

Hack 3: Wire Your House Phones for VoIP
Hack 11: Sound Like Darth Vader While You VoIP
Hack 40: Skype with Your Home Phone
Hack 55: Link Two Asterisk Servers with PSTN
Hack 96: Build a Standalone Voicemail Server in Less Than a Half-Hour

Phillip Torrone, associate editor for MAKE magazine, is the picture of emerging telephony, emerging technology, and anything else “emerging” you can think of. Don’t miss his stellar coverage of this year’s Macworld show, done in typical Phillip fashion with live podcasts from the show floor and live photos snapped with his Kodak WiFi camera, which are automatically uploaded to flickr via his roaming EVDO WiFi network. That’s what I call conference coverage!

With 2005 behind us, I wanted to take a minute to step back and reflect on the major wireless LAN stories from the past year. In my unscientific opinion based on what I remember, here are the top stories:

1. The biggest story in 2005 was the emergence of municipal wireless LANs. I started the year as a skeptic because of the inherent problems in building a reliable service on unlicensed spectrum. What I didn’t realize is that much of the communications equipment these networks are replacing are based on horribly slow networks. 802.11 may not be as reliable as a licensed network that operates without interference, but you can retransmit several times at 1 Mbps and still beat an ultra-reliable network that operates at kilobit per second speeds. There are a number of engineering challenges in building a large-scale 802.11 blanket, but cities have started to realize that their ownership of some public infrastructure (say, the poles for traffic lights) gives them a valuable asset in building these networks.

   The battle is over, folks. Most people agree that it’s a good idea to be building these networks. The question that remains is how. The engineering is in its infancy, and a lot of people are going to have to learn a lot about how to do it very fast if growth will keep up.

2. The flexibility of wireless networks continued to be on display. Before the emergence of municipal networks, Main Street isn’t someplace that you’d expect to have a high-speed Internet blanket. Neither is public transit. In the past couple of years, however, a good number of transit systems are providing 802.11 access. (In addition to Connexion, see the Bainbridge Ferry, the Altamont Commuter Express (ACE) train, and my own sighting on the Tokyo Metro.) The use of 802.11 for the last hop obscures the hard part, which is that you need to somehow collect the bits from the 802.11 network and send them off to the Internet. Large-scale wireless area blankets are useful for this, whether satellite (as in Connexion) or some other vehicle-to-Internet technology (such as, say, a pre-WiMax mesh connecting a commuter train). Sadly, this trend does not yet include any of the transit systems I use, so I am still stuck with a relatively slow connection on most of my train trips.

3. Unlicensed spectrum is important precisely because there is no control over how it’s used. That didn’t stop Massport, the operator of Boston’s Logan Airport, from trying to use its powers to prevent Continental from setting up free service in their elite lounges. The freedom to set up a service using unlicensed service is black-letter regulation. In 2004, the FCC asserted that it has the sole authority to resolve interference in the unlicensed band. The FCC is studying the scuffle at Logan Airport, and I hope that they uphold their previous rulings. Massport has been using spurious arguments about interference and the need to control the network for optimum performance due to the critical applications they are using. That may be true, but in that case, they should be using the 4.9 GHz band, which is licensed solely for public safety usage, and therefore more appropriate for key card access and police communications.

4. 802.11 is unquestionably the last-hop technology for most users. It’s spread well beyond laptops and PDAs to include VoIP telephones and even consumer devices such as streaming media servers and digital cameras. It’s too bad that most of the consumer devices don’t yet implement real security protocols and stick you with antiquated security based on manual WEP keys. As 802.11 chips get cheaper, it will become a more common transport medium for home devices.

5. The task group working towards an 802.11n standard has yet to take the first key step. As the year opened, there were two draft proposals, WWiSE and TGnSync. We end the year without having selected one, but at least there were some interesting meetings along the way, and the emergence of the proposal from the Enhanced Wireless Consortium. A year ago, I was putting the finishing touches on the second edition of 802.11:TDG, and wondering how long the information would be current. Given that we still don’t have a draft proposal, I guess I can feel pretty good.

6. After task group approval in July, 802.11e was finally ratified in September. It started out life as both QoS and security, but the security components were split off into 802.11i. (That security was considered “easier” should tell you how difficult QoS was.) I have always been a bit of a quality-of-service skeptic, in part because QoS through over-provisioning has almost always worked on the LAN. Wireless LANs have much more limited bandwidth, and the use of the less power-hungry 802.11b further restricts capacity. In the case of 802.11, I expect that 802.11e will be a good start, but there is room for further QoS enhancements for extremely dense deployments.

7. The final item is not so much a news story as the lack of a story. 2005 was a quiet year on the security front. There were no major new stories about flaws in the protocols, and standards development has slowed down considerably since the ratification of 802.11i in 2004; what remains now is to make all the implementations play nicely together, and get them widely deployed.

2005 will be remembered as the year that VoIP really (finally) took off. The combination of better VoIP software, simpler configuration procedures and a bewildering array of VoIP ready devices made VoIP a mass market service.

The problem with VoIP is that most networks are closed systems. If you’re a Skype user, you can call other Skype users for free, but if you want to call people on other VoIP networks or the PSTN, you have to pay. True, you pay much less than you would for a conventional PSTN call, but if you spend several thousand minutes per month on your phone (if you run a business, you probably do), you can still rack up some pretty big bills, even at a few cents per minute.

The solution to this problem is VoIP peering. The idea behind VoIP peering is to map calls to and from “area codes” that belong to a particular service provider. SipPhone is doing this in the Gizmo Project. So let’s say you want to call someone on Iaxtel. You just dial 1-700-xxx-xxxx. If you want to call someone on Blueface in Ireland, you just dial *353-xxxxxx. So calling people on other VoIP networks is as simple as making a phone call. This is one reason I predict that open systems like Gizmo will win in the long term.

As a user, I shouldn’t have to care which network someone is using. I don’t have to worry about it when I call a public telephone number. The person I am calling could be on a GSM cell phone, a PBX connected to a T1 line, or a old analog rotary phone. The type of connection doesn’t matter. The public telephone network is built upon the concept of peering, and wouldn’t exist in its present form without it.

VoIP peering is easy to implement with services that support SIP or IAX2 protocols. These peering arrangements are currently managed on an ad hoc basis between service providers. There are efforts underway to create a centrally managed numbering plan (such as E164.info), similar to the North American numbering plan, that will make this process easier to manage. For now, peering arrangements are done informally, with providers on each end routing calls for each other using a mutually agreed upon area or country code. The economics of VoIP peering are compelling. Routing calls from end to end entirely via TCP/IP reduces the need for expensive public telephone network interconnections, and enables completely toll-free calling between endpoints. Watch for peering between VoIP services to take off in 2006. Gizmo is especially well-positioned to benefit from this trend.

VoIP peering will also work the other way. Once there is a uniform numbering plan (area codes for VoIP service providers), conventional fixed-line and mobile operators will be able to route calls from the PSTN to these networks. Want to call an IAXtel user on your cell phone? Just dial +1-700-nnn-nnnn and the cellular network would take care of routing the call via VoIP once it hits the terrestrial network.

Fixed line companies, already hurting from losses to cellular and VoIP providers, will probably shun such relationships. Mobile operators could make a ton of money by embracing VoIP peering. Cellular carriers make money selling airtime, which retails for roughly ten times the per-minute cost of calls placed over fixed-line networks. It will cost them virtually nothing to route calls to VoIP networks. They make their money on the short hop from the handset to antenna. A cellular operator that provides direct calling to VoIP networks will be very popular indeed.

Mobile to Voip (M2V) peering will be a great deal for consumers, and a huge market for carriers that will otherwise lose traffic to end-to-end VoIP calls. It will also make VoIP accessible to any mobile phone, not just high end devices that are capable of running a SIP client. As far as the phone knows, it’s just dialing an ordinary telephone number, as the call rides on the voice side of the network from the handset to the base station.

Will customers pay for the convenience? This, I think, is a no-brainer. People already are paying several times more to place mobile calls instead of via cheap fixed line phones. They value convenience more than absolute cost. If they can call friends in far flung places for the cost of a local mobile call, they’ll make calls via cellular that they’d otherwise make from another phone. I don’t expect Verizon to start offering this service any time soon. VoIP companies will be way ahead of the curve in embracing peering, but sooner or later the telcos will pay attention, and the smart ones will be laughing all the way to the bank.

While we’re on the subject of podcasts, I’ve just recently discovered an excellent VoIP-related weekly podcast put together by Dan York and Jonathan Zar: the BlueBox VoIP Security Podcast. If you’re interested in the many security issues surrounding VoIP, I guarantee this will become a must-listen show for you. This week’s episode includes some interesting tidbits about Shawn Merdinger’s latest efforts in testing for security holes in the new crop of WiFi VoIP phones, and the lack of responsiveness he’s getting from vendors as he trys to bring the sometimes glaring problems to their attention.

I just listened to the latest IT Conversations podcast with Skype’s VP of Marketing Saul Klein. He was interivewed by Larry Magid in the Larry’s World series, and as usual it was an excellent listen. They covered a lot of ground, from the growing penetration Skype is continuing to experience (180,000 new users per day!), to using Skype as a broadcast/podcast tool, to how Skype and other VoIP services are exerting pressure on closed environments that have traditionally enjoyed profiting from high-margin telecom charges (colleges, hotels, airplanes), to the new video chat capabilities of Skype 2.0. Saul mentioned the new Logitech Quickcam Fusion, a high-end web cam that even employs face-tracking technology which allows the adding of avatars to your video calling experience. I’m going to have to get my hands on one of those and play around.

I’ve long been a fan of Doug Kaye’s IT Conversations site, and I also want to put in a plug for the newly launched Conversations Network. Doug has plans to greatly increase the amount of valuable spoken-word audio that will be preserved and made available there (under a Creative Commons license) from all kinds of conferences and events all over the world. His goals are noble, and his model is much like the public radio system we enjoy in the U.S. If you want to support these efforts you can sign up to be a paid member of Conversations Network (I just did), but all the content produced there will continue to be freely available to non-members forever. Good luck with this endeavor Doug!

After a whirlwind tour of the CES show floor, here are some impressions of what was new and interesting in the VoIP area. Sorry I wasn’t able to blog these from Vegas over the weekend - a combination of the obscene wireless connection scheme at the show and network problems at my hotel kept me offline for my brief jaunt to CES this year.

• Skype announced a whole mess of new gear.
• Vonage kept its marketing machine in high gear. With kiosks scattered around the show for free Vonage calls, and enticing hardware deals for new customers, I never saw their booth without a long line of new of new customers signing up.
• WiFi VoIP phones have definitely arrived (though most seemed ugly and poorly designed)
• Many vendors are showing off new VoIP phones, including consumer giants Panasonic and Phillips (not ugly)
• Taiwanese audio company Kinyo was showing off “VoIP Speakers”, which auto-pause when any SIP call comes in
• Commoca demonstrated its openTouch device, a SIP VoIP/analog touch screen phone with online information access.

And on the non-VoIP tip, I can tell you that all things video were big at CES this year, big TVs were REALLY big, and there was general agreement that Google’s announced moves into online video will help usher in the era of watching TV over the net — IPTV here we come! I have to confess that I’m a little less pessimistic than I was previously about Jeff Pulver’s prediction that 2006 is the year that video producers will start looking to the net first as delivery medium. There’s a lot of growing energy in that space.

Related link: http://www.symbianone.com/content/view/2705/

Paying by the KB for data services will restrict the uptake of some amazing applications and services, additionally, smartphone features will go un-used and powerful, new devices will sit on the shelves until a suitable option like “All you can eat GPRS” or perhaps a 100MB monthly data plan (sub $30 please!) comes to the market.

$241.10… that’s the number I read in bold on a recent Rogers Wireless bill, this for having the privilege of using my smart phone. No doubt you’ve been there before - You spend a few days in another country, make a couple of calls, moblog a few pictures from your phone and voila… prepare yourself for a shock when the bill arrives. I should know better, however, something inside me keeps saying, ”maybe it won’t happen again this month”… forget about that! So I have to ask, with all the great devices on the market and all the fantastic applications available to users, how is one supposed to use these mobile services and applications without getting hit so hard in the wallet?

For more including a UK comparisson and some advice see http://www.symbianone.com/content/view/2705//

Do you have any tricks for keeping your GPRS data charges to a minimum?

Practically buried among the slew of Skype-related announcements this week is the posting of new versions of Skype for both PCs and Macs. The 2.0 PC version has gone gold, with video calling as the major new feature. Mac users get a new 1.4 version, which includes drag and drop contacts, notifications, call forwarding, and call auto-answer and pause (including handy built-in iTunes auto-pause functionality).

There’s been speculation for some time that a WiFi-based triangulation scheme could be the solution to the VoIP E911 quagmire, but O’Reilly author and fellow VoIP blogger Ted Wallingford isn’t buying it. He outlines a pretty convincing five-point argument as to why WiFi triangulation isn’t going to be the E911 savior some are hoping for.

The problem is, WiFiTri, while possibly helpful and certainly scientifically valid, can never be reliable enough, inexpensive enough, or accurate enough to be considered a pragmatic idea.

OK, hot in the running for the silliest new VoIP gadget to be announced at CES this year is Sony’s combo mouse/VoIP phone. I guess an argument could be made that this mouse-phone could let road warriors reduce the number of devices in their carry-on bags, but as Engadget points out, good luck if you want to talk and click at the same time.

Ed Stephenson recently spoke to ETel co-chair Surj Patel about why we think Internet Telehphony is important and what to expect at the upcoming O’Reilly Emerging Telephony conference, this January 24-26 in San Francisco. Developers now have the right tools and the right motivation to build a wide range of new desktop applications, telephone services, and corporate phone systems that integrate voice with the Web, IM, WiFi, and more.

It’s now as easy to create a voice application as it is to create a web application, and many of the same technologies are used in both areas. This creates tremendous opportunities for developers, enterprise users, and even the telcos — telephone companies — though most of them are loathe to believe it at the moment.

ETel will both showcase and examine the spirit of innovation behind VoIP communications. If you haven’t signed up yet, you just have until Monday 1/9 to take advantage of the Early Registration discount. And don’t forget, readers of this site can qualify for an additional 40% off that price by using the promo code etel06v40!

My O’Reilly friends over on Makezine and Radar have both noticed the presentation slides on VoIPhreaking - An Introduction to SIP Hacking that are now online from the 22nd Chaos Communication Congress. There’s no doubt that as VoIP systems contiune to proliferate, so will the efforts to hack them.

Within the last year VoIP devices and applications flooded the market. SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) became the industry standard although it’s still under constant development. VoIP networks converge with the PSTN and thus offer ways and means for new (and old) attacks. The talk gives a brief introduction on how various components in the VoIP universe interact.

Nikolaj Nyholm notes that this may get especially interesting as voice apps get more linked with payment systems, as is expected with the eBay/Skype deal:

The phone phreakers of 80s galore are back. In the context of ETel, it will be interesting to follow how this ultimately impacts the next stack of applications building upon VOIP, including the expected merger of voice and payments (Skype/PayPal)….

Om Malik has posted an insightful semi-rant about how VoIP vendors are continuing to go down the road of locking in customers with proprietary devices and silo’d services, and how this can’t be good for the consumer or the VoIP industry as a whole. I agree with him, and it will be interesting to see how this plays out as consumers have pretty clearly indicated they don’t appreciate this kind of lock-in. Om notes how the cellular providers have had to subsidize their locked-in hardware to get users to sign up, but at least in that model they can recoup much of those costs on the service end. VoiP providers are starting to do the same, as Vonage just announced $100 hardware rebates for new customers, but with the low to non-existent service costs of VoIP this model doesn’t make nearly as much sense.

Techdirt also just made note of VoIP’s March Towards Divergence, specifically with regards to the new Skype/Netgear WiFi phones:

People don’t like that they have to buy a separate phone if they want to switch providers — and having a phone that only works using Skype and only when connected to a WiFi router is even less exciting because you’re quite limited in where you can actually use it.

All the warrantless wiretapping we’ve recently heard about required help from the telephone companies and Internet service providers. These companies knew they were not only aiding the government in breaking the law, but were themselves violating terms of service for their customers–and in the case of telephone companies, also breaking the law. One law mentioned at the public form (and submitted years ago by the forum’s moderator, Congressman Ed Markey) forbids cell phone companies from revealing the location of cell phone users–except with a court warrant.

In fact, the NSA wiretapping scandal represents one of the largest conspiracies in recent years: a conspiracy between telephone companies and the government to defraud Americans out of our Fourth Amendment rights.

Pertaining to this is the issue of industry concentration–the death of small phone companies and the mergers of larger ones into behemoths–which was also one of the goals of the Bush administration, pursued with determination by Michael Powell as FCC chair. Provisions for competition set up in the Telecom Act of 1996, and enforced by relatively even-handed regulations passed by earlier FCCs, were systematically weakened and discarded under Bush. (For some history, see an earlier blog of mine.)

Admittedly, it’s hard for any company to buck a demand from law enforcement. The PATRIOT Act’s secrecy provisions (when the FBI approaches you, you can’t even publicize the very fact that they have done so) leaves the impression that you’ll be prosecuted for going public with government misbehavior, and thus contributes to the growing unaccountability of government. A few Internet service providers have done challenged illegal wiretaps, but not enough to establish the pattern we now see in the wiretap scandal. Overwhelmingly, the phone companies and ISPs just went along.

One might argue that the pressure would have been even stronger if ISPs and phone companies were smaller, but size obviously hasn’t helped them put up any resistance. Believe me, if we had an industry of scrappy Mom-and-Pop providers like in the 80s and 90s, word about this civil liberties horror would have come out sooner.

If you’re thinking about attending the O’Reilly Emerging Telephony conference later this month in San Francisco, your best deal can be had by signing up before the early registration deadline ends on Monday 1/9. Remember, right now readers of this site can still take 40% off the Early Reg price, by using the code etel06v40!

Don’t miss this chance to find out about the best of what’s happening at the cutting edge of the entire IP telephony spectrum and how new technology is being deployed by forward-thinking pioneers. With speakers like Mark Spencer of Digium, Norman Lewis of France Telecom, and Jeff Bonforte of Yahoo!, this is bound to be a fascinating and important conference. I hope to see you there.

I hope everyone had a safe and enjoyable holiday. We’re still digging out from some pretty big storms and flooding here in northern California, but the tech world is gearing up for a week of major announcements coming out of the venerable CES show in Las Vegas. If you’re a gadget lover CES is definitely the place to be this week, and we can expect plenty of telecom-related announcements too. I’ll be down at the show later this week and will report on the most interesting of these, but here’s a teaser of a few things that are coming out in the new year.

• Samsung demonstrates 3.6 Mbps cell phone based on new High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) technology.
• Skype is announcing a bunch of new prodcuts and parnterships, like the IPEVO USB cordless phones and a voice-enabled photo sharing service with Kodak.
• MatrixStream will be showing off their H.264 Video on Demand and IPTV Set Top Box (STB). (Expect a lot of action around IPTV coming this year).

Check back often, as we’ll do our best to wade through the flood of tech announcements coming out of Vegas this week and let you know about the key products and moves that will impact the world of telephony this year.

Related link: http://www.onpointradio.org/shows/2006/01/20060103_b_main.asp

WBUR Boston Radio has posted an interesting podcast which discusses the topic of the geospatial web… The convergence of the physical world and geospatial world… the geospatial Web combining the web and geospatial elements. Titled “The New Sense of Place” the discussion delves into the possibilities and probability of geospatially tagging pretty much everything and making the information available via any web-enabled device.
Hear the podcast at http://www.onpointradio.org/shows/2006/01/20060103_b_main.asp

From the website… Just a decade after it became ubiquitous, the World Wide Web has made us blase about information. We assume we can learn almost everything about almost anything at the touch of a PC keyboard. But the digital revolution is hardly over. Now, the digital realm is exploding into the physical world. They call it the “geo-spatial web.” Already it means online maps loaded with information about the physical world, and someday soon, that physical world itself will be tagged and teeming with data for the asking: What is that building? Where is my dog? Who is that man? The implications are huge, exciting, and scary and the result will be a world alive with information.

Peter Morville, author of “Ambient Findability” takes part in the discussion and interestingly, he’ll be a keynote presenter at this year’s Geotec event in Ottawa, Canada. See http:// www.geoplace.com/gt

About Morville (source: Geotec conference program) … Peter Morville is widely recognized as a founding father of information architecture. He co-authored the best-selling book, Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, and has consulted with such organizations as Harvard IBM, Microsoft, Yahoo! and the National Cancer Institute. Morville is president of Semantic Studios, co-founder of the Information Architecture Institute, and a faculty member at the University of Michigan. His work has been featured in many publications including Business Week, The Economist, Fortune, and The Wall Street Journal. Morville’s latest book, Ambient Findability, was published in 2005 by O’Reilly Media. He blogs at findability.org.

Comments? Please feel free to also comment on this in the GISuser.com discussion forum.. cheers and happy new year all!