Today, the NYT is running an good overview of number privacy and temporary numbers - Here’s My Number (for Today).

In an age of information oversharing, the mobile-phone number is one of the few pieces of personal information that people still choose to guard. Unwanted incoming calls are intrusive and time-consuming and can suck precious daytime cell-plan minutes. And the decision to give out a cell number can haunt you for years, as people now hold on to the numbers longer than their land-line numbers.

The article namechecks a few services, such as Jangl, but the underlying ethnographics, notably changes in how relationships are formed and maintained, are of much more interest.

I’d be fascinated to learn how these behaviours are varying across cultures. in Pakistan, I know people carry handsets for different relationships - friends, family, spouses…. a telco’s wet dream ;)

For those of you interested in attending our upcoming Emerging Telephony conference, I just got some good news. Readers of this site can now save an additional 10% off of the conference fees by registering with the code etel07blogd.

If you missed the last ETel conference, I’d highly recommend trying to fit this one into your schedule. You can expect a dynamic line-up of speakers and sessions covering the latest developments and forward-looking trends in telecommunications. Here’s a taste of what will take place, from the ETel conference page:

ETel compares and contrasts web telephony technology, business, and culture, articulating how they conspire and inform consumers, creators, and purveyors. ETel gets rid of the hype and “conventional wisdom” of the past, presenting a whole new way of looking at the industry for newcomers and established players alike. Explore strategies for taming disruption and exploiting opportunities being created by web telephony innovations in a spirited, collaborative atmosphere at ETel 2007.

This is not a conference where you’ll see the same old companies execs promoting the same old products and services. O’Reilly brings in people working in the trenches, the hackers, and the alpha geeks so you can get a taste of what the future holds.

Sign up now and you can take advantage of both the early registration and ETel reader discounts!

I split my time between the Bay Area and Argentina, and so to cut down on my telecom costs, I use VoIP (Gizmo in particular) quite heavily. In this short how-to, I share a trick you can use to get local DIDs (direct dial numbers) in some 50 countries worldwide.

The mobile phone market doesn’t need yet another innovative device design. We’re well-served by RAZRs and Treos and Dash’s (oh my!). But it desperately needs innovation in the smartphone OS area.

Cross-listed from the OnJava blog, go to the original post.

I’ve been using VoIP hardware and software since the mid-1990s. It’d be an understatement to say that I’ve grown cynical about the claims of telecom equipment vendors and service providers, but every now and then a product comes along that lives up to its hype. The Nokia N80i phone belongs in that categorgy. I’ve been putting it through its paces for about two months now, and indeed, using it as my primary phone. It’s an impressive product, and goes on sale in the US and Europe this month.

UPDATE: to avoid confusion, this review covers a not-for-sale prototype of the Nokia N80i, which is just starting to ship this week in the US and Europe, and not the N80, which has been available for a while (but does not support VoIP). If you are shopping for this phone, double check with merchants due to the similarity in model numbers and outward appearance. Link to Nokia announcement.

Buried in David Isenberg’s superb post on Breaching the Cellcos’ Garden Wall is a PDF link to a Sean Moss-Pultz overview of the OpenMoko cellphone platform. Apologies if ETel readers have seen this before, but it’s so good I had to post it again :)

Also, I have to point out my good friend Ian Hay’s posts on the Ten Things I Want From You (the telco) and the amazing responses, particularly from our fellow writers over at O’Reilly Radar…

- Ten Things I Want From You
- Ten Things I Want From My Phone
- Ten Things Follow Up

Finally, the upcoming issue of Wired is profiling the Tuxphone, from our very own conference chair, Surj Patel.

Yesterday evening I heard a talk from Amazon about their new web services — well, new to me, at least, since I hadn’t been paying attention. I think “web services” is a minomer; what they’re actually providing is a group of web components that you can use to create your own web services.

Amazon provides a set of crucial services that let an aspiring designer create services with no upfront hardware cost. Need storage space online? $0.10/GB per month, $0.20/GB to transfer. Need a stack of CPUs? You can get a virtual Linux box from Amazon for $0.10/hour.

I’ve already dreamed up with a couple of telephony-based applications based on Amazon’s services. When storage is innfinitely deep and fast it becomes far easier to create recordings of telephone conferences. When I can create viritual servers on demand, I can have a hundred Asterisk servers running for an hour — total cost $10 — to blast out a few hundred thousand calls.

I have to give Amazon a lot of credit. They’ve disaggregated their business, separating out their knowledge of server and Web design from the rest of their corporate expertise, to create an entirely new business. And they’ve created disaggregated components that have already spawned dozens of new businesses.

Saddam sentenced to death! Rumsfeld resigns! The GOP loses both Houses of Congress! UK mobile carrier surrenders to internet industry with launch of Three’s X-Series, signalling the combustion of a thousand mobile operator business plans.

Three is offering Nokia N73s and Sony Ericsson W950i’s preloaded with Skype (yes, Skype!), Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo! Go, eBay, Orb and Google services alongside support for Slingbox devices. Does this presage the surrender of mobile voice and messaging to the internet industry’s VoIP and IM giants? WIll this bootstrap the mobile internet? Will I still have a job? Are MNO’s the Internet’s bitch?

Here’s a roundup of stories analysing the X-Series announcement…
- Through the (walled) garden gate…
- Is today the start of the Mobile Web
- Battle opens for control of mobile internet
- Mobile operator bringing Slingbox to your phone

Why do they call them Walled Gardens anyway, that implies a pleasant environment. How about Shitty Prison?

This morning Google announced click to call integration on their Maps. On the Google Maps Help page it is described as a “fast and easy way to speak directly with businesses found on our maps”. You can try it out.

Over at TechCrunch Marshall Kirkpatrick is saying this is supposedly powered by an earlier Skype announcement.

In another interesting connection, Google Pack now bundles Skype as an option. Perhaps I just noticed that though.

Many bloggers are speculating today that the rumored iPhone from Apple will be unlocked and take SIM cards. I pretty much assumed this since hearing about the device. Here’s why:

First, any carrier relationship deals would most certainly require a revenue share cutting into sales of Apple iTunes store content. It’s hard to imagine Apple being ok sharing unnecessary additional revenue after investing in developing a new platform that they obviously hope will sell more media content for them. Also, I don’t seem them being open to paying carriers a royalty no matter how you slice it. And, if they do I trust they will try to do it on their terms only when necessary.

Second, carriers like to control everything on their devices and they make a lot of money from selling places on the deck. Wouldn’t Apple want to control the entire experience like they do everywhere else?

Finally, branching off on the second point I’ve assumed that Dashcode will help make it possible to develop simple Widgets that will ultimately be able to run on iPods and iPhone’s (in addition to the OS X desktop). This is totally speculation on my part but it makes sense to me that they would pursue distribution models that gives them the control they are used to.

Simply put, a carrier partnership is probably more painful to Apple’s standard way of operating. I wouldn’t be suprised to see Google take a similar approach.

In Subspace Networks: Hiding Circuit Switched Networks in a Packet Switched Network, Brian McConnell offers up another one of his thought-provoking ETel articles. Brian describes a trick that he calls “subspace networking”, which can be used to embed circuit switched networking within packet switched LAN hardware, while applications are unaware that this is going on behind the scenes.

Phil Wolff has a very interesting post today, along with video evidence, of TalkPlus CEO Jeff Black making a call to a Skype test user on a standard cell phone with only the TalkPlus Java program loaded.

According to Phil, this demo shows that TalkPlus users will be able to dial any Skype user by just using their Skype name, bypassing the need for a SkypeIn number.

It also shows that TalkPlus has engineered a server without Skype components that talks to the Skype network as if it were a Skype client using Skype’s own language. It will scale to thousands of simultaneous sessions. TalkPlus has no plans to license this technology or turn it into a product. They built it to solve their customers’ need to talk with millions of Skype users.

As Alec and Jon point out, if this gets traction it could put a serious crimp in Skype’s business model. I was already interested in what TalkPlus is offering, before seeing Phil’s video. Now, I’m positively intrigued.

My toothbrush is one of the most “identity-locked” objects I own — no one uses my toothbrush except me. You can borrow my sweater, my car, or the shirt off my back, but not my toothbrush.

While disposable to a great degree, mobile phones have a similar aura of personal identity about them. Like many people I carry my cell phone at all times, an indispensable bit of personal property, almost more crucial than my wallet. Many people personalize their phones with special covers, carrying cases, and with ringtones. Ringtones, amazingly, have come an expression of your personality; you not only play them for yourself but for everyone around you, and a ringtone is part of your public persona just like your clothing and hairstyle.

I just saw a mention in a colleague’s blog about a scheme by AT&T to modify ringtones — to put advertising in ringtones. No comment necessary about that idea…

Cross-posted from The Pebble and the Avalanche

A couple days ago, Steve Ballmer announced that Microsoft would stripe voice capability across its operating systems, desktop applications, servers and services such as Windows Live (news here and here). Also, yesterday, Niklas Zennström spoke of the imminent release of ‘Skypecasts for blogs‘.

Both of these developments underline the future of ‘voice as a feature’; standalone voice services being displaced and commoditised by wider applications that embed voice capabilities.

Microsoft is in an interesting position here - with Live Messenger enabled phones, Xbox Live Vision and Xbox Live Messaging, the company can already project its voice capabilities across numerous platforms and devices.

Where Skype currently dominates with sheer numbers and an emerging handset ecosphere, Microsoft is in a position to embed voice across the full spectrum of computing experiences - scared yet?

There are counterposing forces of course, as a paper from researchers at the University of Melbourne illustrates, embedding voice everywhere doesn’t always make for great user experiences. Social Translucence of the Xbox Live Voice Channel studies user’s reaction to and use of voice in the Xbox Live service and concludes that there’s a dissonance between perception and practice as user’s are often disspointed with poor usability and sociability.

Voice outside the telephone is relatively new and demands a new set of conventions for best practice - can the ETel community help shape this future?

While in Tokyo at a Microsoft partner conference CEO Steve Ballmer claimed, “we are going to enter the voice over IP market (in) the beginning of next year.”

Based on additional statements from Ballmer one can assume the Vista OS will attempt to unify chat, email, IM, VoIP, and video. Ballmer also indicated there will be server VoIP integration too.

I want one. Gizmodo and Slashgear are reporting the launch of another Linux handset today, the FIC-GTA001. A little sexier than Trolltech’s Greenphone, the FIC handset has some very interesting features, including GPS, multi-touchscreen gestures (like a MacBook touchpad) and most significantly a Linux SDK.

WIth Trolltech, FIC, Tuxphone and ROAD, it seems the open-source handset movement is finally gathering pace…perhaps enough to start scaring a few carriers into opening up? The future’s bright :)

The latest development coming out of Om Malik’s group looks like a good one - a new blog focusing on IP Networking headed up by seasoned VoIP blogger Russell Shaw. IP Networked is going to cover the telecom carriers, cable companies, Internet service providers, Web hosting services, and the data centers — the infrastructure developments that matter so much in this industry. Russell is off and running with the blog, he’s posting this week from ISPCON in Santa Clara, with his usual frankness and insight.

I’ve been really impressed with what’s been happening over on GigaOm since Om ventured out on his own. They’re publishing an awful lot of timely scoops and deep analysis from a growing group of excellent writers. I’m definitely adding this one to my RSS reader.

Enormous distribution plays have been at the heart of at least two big announcements in the last few days.

Sun Microsystems and Laszlo Systems announced they will be enabling OpenLaszlo applications to run on devices supporting Java Micro Edition. This has a huge potential audience:

Java™ Platform, Micro Edition (Java ME) is the most ubiquitous application platform for embedded devices in the world, with more than 3.8 billion Java devices including 1.2 billion Java technology-powered phones.

In another move Adobe is providing Mozilla with a gift of code:

Adobe will provide the same software, called the ActionScript Virtual Machine, which it uses to run script code in the Adobe Flash Player 9.

Big distribution deals everywhere. Hopefully, Adobe is finally merging ActionScript and Javascript in this move. ;)

This is cute. Like Fastap, Neokeys is another keypad innovation that could have interesting implications for telephony. The technology was debuted at last month’s MIT Emerging Technology Conference.

We’re all familiar with concept handset designs such as the BenQ Black Box; handsets whose entire surface is a touch screen, giving an infintely reconfigurable interface. A great idea, but maybe a ways off in terms of display technology, battery power and price.

Neokeys have taken a more pragmatic approach by using small monochromatic LCD displays to display key legends - like a lo-fi version of the Optimus keyboard. This allows every key to be a soft-key and theoretically, an infinite number of keypads…perhaps one for every application or user context?

Yuvee, the company behind Neokeys hasn’t announced any partnerships yet and they’re also working on a Universal Joystick for mobile devices. Perhaps, working with open handset developers is a viable route to market for Yuvee.

We’re hoping to get them to present at ETel - I’ll keep you all posted :)

A few weeks ago, I met with Mark Simpson of DigitWireless. Mark talked me through DigitWireless’ innovative Fastap keypad design, their business model and a number of conceptual and working handsets.

Interestingly, the founder David Levy, is an Apple alumni, responsible for the design of the Powerbook. Levy’s Fastap keypad is presented as more an enabling technology, rather than simply a keypad layout; it’s intended to help carriers and handset manufacturers remove UI barriers and likely increase usage of mobile services.

Fastap uses a combination of raised and lowered keys, and depending where keys are pressed, a patented algorithm determines which character the user intended to select. Raised keys are largely used for alphabetic characters, whereas lower keys are used for diacritic, numbers and shortcut keys.

Playing about with the demonstration handsets, now shipping with Telus I believe, provides a fun, intuitive user experience…for Latin-based alphabets, every character has its own key, so users need no instruction on how to use a Fastap-enabled handset.

Like Tegic, the creators of T9, DigitWireless’ business model is essentially to license Fastap to OEMs, carriers and handset manufacturers. DigitWireless’ will be determined by its route to market…a tortuous one in the mobile sector!

Personally, I loved the demo handsets and I believe the technology has immense potential for telephony - the same way the mouse helped along GUIs, I think Fastap can further the mobile and handheld era…perhaps even for non-telephony, handheld devices such as TV remotes - tap out the show you’re searching for.

My fantasy phone? Trolltech’s Greenphone, enabled with Fastap and powered by a vibrant developer community. Yum.

Wouldn’t it be great to get David Levy to talk about his experiences with Apple and DigitWireless at ETech? Fingers Crossed :)

Last month Wired ran a humourously observed and thought provoking article on the frustrations of user’s cellphone experience - Cell Phones? Hell Phones!

Our cellphones carry our schedules, social networks and locations yet make no intelligent assertions or useful analysis of such immensely valuable information. The writer’s litany of irritations is actually a great basis to begin speculating about handsets that are much more subtle, intuitive extensions of their owner’s context.

How about…

• Constantly cross-referencing call history with your schedule and contacts to remind you that you haven’t been in touch with your family, closest friends or checked in with your boss in the last few days…a little like a textual version of Steven Blyth’s Social Fabric…my phone should text me with reminders of people I should talk to.
• Attentuating your attention by displacing chirupping ringtones and jarring vibrations with tactile, haptic surfaces that subtely alert you to various developments. ‘Touchtones’, along the lines of Oren Horav’s Shapeshifters could playfully tickle you from inside your pocket…a gentle stroke from a potential nearby date and an angry pinch from the wife!
• Scanning your immediate location for events, people and places that might be of interest. Kinda like Victor Szilagyi’s HereScan…but driven by the data on your handset as much as nearby locative data. ‘Imran, y’know there’s someone on this bus who’s also a BSG fan! Wanna text em?’. Now isn’t that a great way to introduce yourself? ‘Hey, my phone told me I should talk to you!’
• Moving from modes to moods - simple, subltle and maybe playful indicators of what you need. Rather than Flight, Meeting or Silent, how about Hooking Up, Stealthy , Shopping or In Prayer (for Muslims like myself!). In the same way that people buy customs covers and ringtones, there may be a market for installable moods - essentially groups of phone settings, created by similar users. IM status could be a useful analogy in designing appropriate ‘moods’ and status settings.
• Health warnings from my handset - ‘hey imran, u knw uv been on da fone 8 hrs this week, time to stop frazzlin dat brain?’. Mobile Clickstop Computing :)
• Fluid schedules that suit people’s continuous partial organisation habits (thanks Rael!). A bunch of friends may have pencilled in next Tuesday evening to meet for a meal…the closer the event gets, our phones should encourage us to organise times, locations and preferences for the evening. I think the Fluidtime project attempted to tackle this kind of usage.

Wired’s original article and the ideas above all underline the shift in value for telephony from connectivity to signalling. Our mobiles are increasingly used as social signalling tools, yet they’re still primarily designed and marketed for connectivity (talktime, tariffs etc.) forcing the user to adapt their usage to autistic user experiences.

Sadly, the closed ecospheres of mobile carriers and handset manufacturers means that we don’t see much experimentation in this area. It may be left to the emerging open source telephony community to open up innovation and experiment with creating the ‘Wellphone’.

–

Incidentally, Fluidtime, Herescan, Shapeshifters and Social Fabric are all projects of the sublimely wonderful Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Milan.

The more I think about it, the more frustrated I find it that our mobile, telecom, and data networks just can’t seem to integrate with each other. On the one hand I understand that the incumbents don’t want to upset the status quo, but is this really the best we can do?

I find myself spending more and more time using a headset on my computer for voice communications, and I’m growing tired of the poor audio quality I’m getting with the standard fare of headsets on the market. I’ve been through a few popular models in the $30 - $60 range, and they all seem to sound and transmit audio at about the same lousy level of quality. I do realize that with many things in life you get what you pay for, and I suspect that it’s my price range that needs to change here before I’ll find a computer headset that works for me. I’m ready to pay more in this area for better quality, but before I drop some more serious coin on a new headset I’d like to hear what’s been working well for others.

Any recommendations? I know some of our ETel readers are power users of softphone and VoIP applications and I’m sure some of you have grappled with this same question. Please leave a comment below if you have any suggestions, and I’ll report back here on what I find.

I’m happy to announce that the registration for the 2007 O’Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference is now open. Surj Patel and Brady Forrest are co-chairing this year’s conference and they’ve put together a fantastic line-up of speakers and sessions. ETel ‘07 will be examining the effects that VOIP, mobility, VOIM, and SMS are having on business and culture. As Brady writes over on the O’Reilly Radar:

We will be asking what happens when all voice traffic is just another data stream, every home has it’s own PBX, and when you no longer need a phone number. Startups, hackers and established players will all have the opportunity to speak.

Some of the speakers I’ll be personally looking forward to hearing are Jeff Bonforte from Yahoo!, Alec Saunders from iotum, Peter Csathy from SightSpeed, Martin Geddes from Telepocalypse and Om Malik from GigaOm. ETel ‘07 will take place February 27 - March 1 in San Francisco. Sign up now to take advantage of the early registration discount!

I hate unsolicited pre-recorded telephone calls. I’ve filed complaints with the FCC against callers, I’ve started an open-source project called Stop Rude Calls to screen out automated calls, and I’ve even been known to threaten callers with a few thousand return calls from my own equipment if they didn’t stop bugging me.

On the other hand, I also make pre-recorded outbound calls — to opt-in subscribers who thank me for the service. Every year, for fifty days after the beginning of Passover, subscribers around the world receive calls from me every evening (it’s a Jewish thing, ok?). This year I hope to charge subscribers a nominal fee as part of a charity campaign drive, or perhaps provide the service for free but tack on a solicitation for charity at the end of the call.

But a new US Federal Trade Commission rule may put the kibosh on my service and on many other related services. The FTC just proposed a new rule that severly restricts pre-recorded calls. Even if there’s a pre-existing business relationship, the FTC rule virtually eliminates pre-recorded calls that include a soliciation.

Well, my first reaction was “Bravo!” I hate calls, pre-recorded or live, from businesses with whom I have a “pre-existing relationship” that consists of filling out a registration card or purchasing a hard drive; it’s gotten so bad that I’ve started the Disposable Phone Number project so I can give businesses a number but then toss the numbers away. But after my friends and business colleagues at Voxeo chimed in I had second thoughts. Voxeo sounded the alarm with this analysis, and after a conversation with their in-house lawyer (a very sharp cookie) and a personal letter from the company CEO addressing some of my questions, I’m convinced they have some very legitimate concerns: The proposed FTC rule could kill many promising Phone 2.0 services, including my very own outbound calling service.

Follow link below to rest of article…

Yesterday, I checked my mail to discover that I had gotten dinged with a $400 overage charge by T-Mobile, which up until that moment and a subsequent ‘customer care’ experience, had been my favorite carrier. What was a simple, easily avoided, and easily fixed situation turned into one of those experiences that turns a loyal customer into someone who will switch providers at the first opportunity.

Wired is reporting on an interesting new phone coming soon in Japan with advanced security features including the ability to recognize its owner, monitor the owner’s location and automatically lock when that person gets too far away, and a satellite-based phone tracking location system. NTT DoCoMo’s 903i handset works with a movie-ticket sized card called an ANSHIN-KEY that the phone owner keeps with them to wirelessly track how far they are from the cell phone. Once the distance exceeds a user-specified range the phone will automatically lock. The 903i is being made by the Matsushita Electric Industrial Company, and also includes mobile commerce capabilities, a facial identification lock, and GPS satellite navigation that will allow a user to locate a lost phone using a Web browser.

Overall those are some pretty cool features. I’m not so sure about the facial recognition lock, I regularly change the length and style of my facial hair and would hate to find that I couldn’t make a call on my phone because I’d just aggressively trimmed my beard. But I’d definitely pay for the ability to look up on a Web site just where the heck it was that I lost my phone. The 903i is expected to hit the Japanese market in a couple of months.