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