So my company (DiamondWare) has developed high-definition 3D proximity-based voice technology. It is now available in Second Life (on the beta grid at the moment). It lets you walk up to people, have a conversation, and then walk away when you’re done. Each voice sounds like it’s coming from the respective avatar. The sound is clear.

For those of you who haven’t been in Second Life yet, it is a 3D virtual world. People make their avatars look the way they want, face, hair, clothing, etc. Some of them even look like people! They also make other objects, like buildings, trees, lampposts, and hookahs. Yes, those large pots for burning plant material. They have multiple hoses so that a group can all smoke at once.

I was completely blown away on the first day of the open beta.

I heard voices down by the beach and walked over there. I found a group of young adults who were talking and joking and smoking. It was like any gathering you might find on a beach or in a city park somewhere. There was even a guy playing guitar. They were having a grand old time. I spent about 15 minutes there before I realized how unique this experience was.

File this under the because-it-was-there section. Of all the Apple TV hacks that have emerged in the last week, the AwkwardTV project is featuring one that will have special appeal to ETel readers - getting Asterisk up and running on an Apple TV box. I’m still trying to figure out some interesting things you could do by running Asterisk on Apple TV. Got any ideas?

If you’ve been snapping up every news item you can find on the Verizon/Vonage patent fight, as I have, and you’ve been wondering why nobody actually talks about the patents themselves, telephony tech expert Fred Goldstein may have an explanation in this posting. The validty of the patents weren’t an issue in the recent case, but they will become an issue on appeal. From Fred’s posting you can see what he thinks of them.

I’ve just gotten five phone calls, one after another, in Spanish. No, wait, it’s ringing again — phone call number six. They’re a few minutes apart.

They’re from AT&T, as far as I can tell, and I haven’t got the foggiest notion of what they’re about or how to make them stop.

Someone is going to pay for this…

I’ve got my Nokia E61, and after a lot of fiddling with it I’ve decided to keep it. I think I can make it work, but the darn thing still feels like a beta release to me. I thought Microsoft was the King of the “let’s release this beta to the customers and see what happens” school of product development; but Nokia certainly knows how to take the shine off a new toy.

Here’s a list of gripes. I would definitely love to see some suggested solutions, by the way, so feel free to chime in with comments.

• Wireless access. The E61 has a wireless network — but not all applications they’ve shipped have a clue on how to access it. The built-in web browser, for example, doesn’t seem to be smart enough to use the phones “access point groups,” the set of pre-defined wireless access points that I know about and have passwords for. In other words, even though I’ve entered this info, the web browser doesn’t bother to use it. Other applications seem to have the same issue.
  
  
  Oh, and wireless access seems to come with some undocumented feature called “Easy WLAN,” which I may have accidentally turned off and can no longer find. Never could figure out how it worked, as it was always asking me the same questions over and again.
• Speaking of questions over and again, each time I accessed my email through TLS and the email client hit my non-standard TLS ceritificate, it asked me again if it were acceptable. No memory, and no option to save the certificate as trusted.
• And speaking of non-standard, there’s a so-called “IM” client that uses SMS to send and receive “chat” messages. In other words, nothing to use WiFi networking for IM, and nothing that does Jabber protocol. Very mysterious — one of the biggest reasons to get WiFi is free chat, and no free chat client is included.
• Speaking of mysterious, I can’t get my VoIP service to register from the phone. I use ViaTalk. I can get Gizmo to register; I can get pbxes.com to register ViaTalk, and I can register my phone as a pbxes.com extension and make calls outbound from ViaTalk (although dropping the European-style “+” from my phone numbers is a bit tricky), and my local softphone doesn’t have problems registering itself as a ViaTalk phone. ViaTalk won’t register from the E61, and I can’t find any way to get any information out of the phone as to why it won’t register.
  
  
  Admittedly, with pbxes.com working, it’s hardly necessary to have a dual-use system where I use the E61 or the ATA/deskphone combination alternatively — but I’m still somewhat attached to my desk phone, for sentimental reasons. And besides, darn it, the E61 should register. (And ViaTalk’s just isn’t interested, and sent me off to Nokia.)
  
  Registration troubles took quite a lot of time to sort out.
• Speaking of registration troubles, if I want to use this phone to talk to a service that doesn’t need to register — e.g., to my Prophecy VoiceXML/CCXML/SIP server — I can’t do it. The E61 insists that you register. There’s no way I can find that lets me use the phone without registering; e.g., enter in the phone’s SIP ID as “moshe@${LOCALHOST}” as my current name for the purposes of VoIP telephony and let the system sort out what my current IP address is. If I’m not registered I can’t call out. Huh? Behind the firewall, I often make calls without any proxies or registration.

So, to summarize, this phone has some interesting potential. I can sort of get it to work; I managed to figure out how to turn on SMS with T-Mobile; I deleted T-Mobile’s annoying t-zones service that attempts to hijack my connections. But the most important thing, the ability to connect to ViaTalk via WiFi, isn’t happening, and other things that do happen, happen in a half-baked way.

Well, I’m running version 3.x of the software. Maybe next year they’ll get it right. In the meantime I’ll probably keep the phone… if I can persuade it to talk to my Prophecy server.

We Make Money Not Art are running an article, Pay phone murder mystery, on playful and novel uses for now defunct payphones.

Sadly, they didn’t suggest ratifying the role of Britain’s iconic K6 as general purpose public toilets…despite their urine-soaked, puke-encrusted history ;)

We’ve just published Peter Drescher’s Singing With Your Thumbs: How To Make User Interfaces Musical over on our Digital Media site. This article is a lightly edited version of Peter’s presentation at the 2006 Austin Game Audio Conference, “Audio UI as Interactive Music.” Peter is the Sound Designer at Danger, Inc., makers of the Hiptop mobile internet device. Lots of good stuff here for those who are thinking about interface design and mobile devices. Don’t forget about the audio interface!

Pockets of lousy cell phone reception are a fixture of modern life–reflected in thousands of television commercials telling you that phone companies have solved the problem. Ortiva Wireless recently announced a content shaping system they claim dramatically improves the user experience with audio, video, and high-bandwidth web sites.

According to Ted Wallingford, the city of Emeryville, CA has chosen to work with Spark Parking to build automated public parking solutions. You may remember the upstart Spark Parking from last year’s ETel conference, where they were demonstrating their wi-fi-enabled parking lot technology, which used Asterisk on the back end to process the parking data. It’s an innovative idea and I think it’s interesting to see this kind of technology applied to one of the often overlooked and more mundane aspects of our lives. Parking efficiency is probably something most of us don’t think too much about, but if you’re involved in running the facilities of a large retail or campus operation or a municipality, you know all too well the headaches that poorly planned parking can cause. Spark Parking is currently running one of their high-tech lots in Portland, Oregon, and is working hard to become the leader in monitoring and managing parking with wireless communication technology.

GrandCentral continues to get lots of positive press and was clearly one of the crowd favorites at last month’s ETel conference. The latest accolades come from none other than Tim O’Reilly and David Pogue, who both are now paying attention to Craig Walker’s new venture and helping spread the word about GrandCentral.

David Pogue wrote a great review of GrandCentral in the New York Times, accompanied by a video demonstration as only David can do. He calls GrandCentral a “rather brilliant melding of cellphone and the Internet,” and clearly gets the benefits of the service:

No longer will anyone have to track you down by dialing each of your numbers in turn. No longer does it matter if you’re home, at work or on the road. Your new GrandCentral phone number will find you.

As a bonus, all messages now land in a single voice mail box. You can listen to them in any of three ways. First, you can dial in from any phone (a text message arrives on your cellphone to let you know when you have voice mail). If you call in from your cellphone, you don’t even have to enter your password first.

This kind of mainstream coverage has got to have the people behind GrandCentral grinning from ear to ear. Getting David Pogue to sing the praises of your new service in the NYT, in text and video no less, is a home run in anyone’s book.

And Tim O’Reilly has taken notice too. In his recent Radar post,
The Web 2.0 Address Book May Have Arrived, Tim writes that GrandCentral “appears to be a textbook Web 2.0 application, building a network-effects business that gets better the more people use it.” Tim continues:

Perhaps most importantly, if this service takes off, it’s almost a perfect “Data is the Intel Inside” play, far greater than any email address-book based attempt like Plaxo. It will be the first service outside the phone companies themselves that could build that next generation Web 2.0 address book I’ve been writing about.

…

In short, I expect GrandCentral to become one of the premier Web 2.0 and social networking platforms overnight, and it’s squarely aimed at the heart of the communications device used by more people than any PC application will ever touch.

With this kind of praise coming from heavy-hitters like Tim and David, GrandCentral has got to be thrilled, and I bet their sign-ups are really ramping up.

Cnet has a nice article today summarizing Make Magazine senior editor Phil Torrone and hardware hacker Limor Fried’s SXSW keynote. As regular ETel readers know, we pay close attention to whatever Phil is up to over on Makezine.com, as he often delves into interesting telecom hacking projects. At their keynote, Phil and Limor demonstrated a quasi-legal homemade cell phone jammer (Limor said said the federal government allows people to show others how to make and use such devices but that it is against the law to actually use them.)

Phil also gave props to the great student projects coming out of NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), which many of us got a chance to see first hand at last month’s ETel conference. One thing the Cnet article got wrong though, the botanicalls student project that has wired up house plants to an Asterisk server doesn’t just send a voice mail when the plant is thirsty, it actually instigates a call with the plant. I know, I’ve talked to them. And they have different voices. Hopefully, we’ll have more on that cool project for you here on ETel soon. (Hint, hint, Kate and Kati ;-)

A handful of companies own virtual fiefdoms: by government fiat, they control the radio frequencies used in cellular telephone calls. In the US they play this advantage to the absolute maximum. They dictate what services appear on the networks, they provide deliberately-lobotomized cellular phones, they charge outrageous prices that their oligarchy easily sustains. We’re all cellular serfs, dancing to the tune of the spectral aristocracy.

But a revolt is brewing. Skype filed a petition with the US FCC to require that cellular companies disaggregate the sale of airtime from the sale of handsets, and allow the bandwidth to be used in any manner — even to carry Skype VoIP calls.

A few pressure groups (to use the British term) have gotten behind this effort. Zack Exley wants to start OpenPhoneProject.org (which is not yet operational) to collect 100,000 requests for service via an “open” phone. If all carriers refuse to provide this service, he could present that refusal to the FCC as evidence of un-met consumer demand and complain that the existing carriers are not serving the public interest.

I admit that I’m skeptical. Without a firm commitment to purchase, this is a chimera; and 100,000 customers dispersed across the US is hardly a worthwhile market for a nationwide carrier. Perhaps 100,000 in a single city would catch the eye of a cellular provider, but I doubt it.

But the most basic flaw in the plan is that it ignores the economics of of the cellular phone market. The cellular companies sell you a handset; they charge you the cost of service and the handset; the handset is paid off after two years; they continue to charge you the full price, and that’s all found money to them. Additionally, the cost of the handset hangs over your head during the duration of the contract, which binds you to them as a customer and prevents your defection to a company with lower prices or better service.

So will this effort succeed? I think not. Is it worthwhile? Well, perhaps; it’s certainly a low-cost effort — nothing ventured, nothing gained. But the only true solution is wireless VoIP, and that solution depends on reclaiming the airwaves from our current lords and masters.

Embrace! Extend! Exterminate! Skype continues to delight with its de-pantsing of traditional telco business models…in this round, the premium-rate call business.

This week saw the beta release of Skype Prime for Windows, enabling Skype users to quickly setup and operate premium-rate voice and video services. So what does this mean…

• The ability for professionals (accountants, lawyers, doctors, nurses etc) to address micro-markets, too small to otherwise bill.
• The potential for eBay reputations to help filter and sort reputable Prime service providers.
• The ability for me to launch a Family CTO hotline, finally monetising my extended family ’s technical support calls!
• An eruption of SoVoIP (Sex-over-VoIP) as the Long Tail of Pornography unfurls? (eugh)…wow, I just put that bullet after one about mothers on maternity (I hope there’s no crossover!)
• Provide professional mothers on maternity leave, the ability to practice their profession in an ad-hoc but perhaps lucrative manner.
• Turn the tables on telesales - I’ll happily give out a premium-rate ‘Junk-Calls’ number to anyone who wants to sell me stuff! Hmm, I wonder if I could put together a mashup of Prime and Summer Bedard’s The Human Race…?

Unfortunately, Skype seems to be taking an extraordinarily large slice (30%!!) of each transaction for simply connecting and billing a call. Clever users could simply make a Paypal transaction and place a regular Skype call, minus the usurious fee!

The competitive impact of Prime is likely to strike dread into the likes of Wengo, Ether and Ingenio. They can likely compete on pricing, but Skype’s superior reach and integration with Paypal (and perhaps eBay?) makes for a compelling proposition. Hoever, with Google Apps gunning for small businesses, I wonder if we’ll see GTalk evolve into this space too?

Nevertheless, Skype Prime’s notion of a ‘global expertise marketplace’ appears to compliment wider eBay and Paypal strategy and at the same time underlining the transformation of premium voice revenues from time+distance to signaling+presence+availability.

More coverage at TechCrunch, Interconnected and our own O’ReillyGMT.

Tellme recently had an internal Film Festival competition, where employees were encouraged to make their own video that creatively promoted the value of Tellme products in everyday life. The winner got $1,000 and the videos have now been posted to YouTube. There are some cute ones (and some duds, of course), but my hat’s off to Tellme for trying to tap their employee’s creativity in this unique way. I’m not sure their next TV commercial is lurking anywhere here, but I enjoyed the Geico spoof…

American Heritage is carrying a very interesting article on the inception of the mobile phone from Motorola’s perspective…

Motorola told its engineers: “We need a hand-held mobile telephone in three months.” Nobody had ever made one before.

Read more here and here…

As Nat and Cory have both already posted about this hilarious Charlie Brooker column in the Guardian today, I’m probably not showing you anything you haven’t already seen. But since it got me literally laughing out loud, and we so regularly talk about how much we hate our current cell phones around here, I just had to pass this link along. Charlie is not at all happy with his latest mobile phone from Orange, the Samsung E900. But you really need to hear it from him.

I sat down with Alec Saunders last week at ETel to hear about the work that iotum has been doing on their new application that extends presence to BlackBerry devices called Talk-Now. As most of you probably know, presence is a very crucial concept for Alec and iotum (check out Alec’s posts on “New Presence” and the Voice 2.0 Manifesto and What is the real impact of New Presence? for some great discussion on the topic). Alec and iotum believe that presence will be the foundation that interesting and successful new communications apps and services will be based on, and Talk-Now is a great example of iotum putting these beliefs to work in a working, real-world application.

The basic idea of Talk-Now is to allow BlackBerry users to extend their presence information to other BlackBerry users in a simple and useful way that will facilitate improved communications. This latest version has some significant improvements, including a new Contacts list that shows every one of your contacts that is also a Talk-Now user, a new presence state that is color-coded yellow for “Busy, but interruptible” (for people you have granted this privilege to), and a re-vamped setup wizard that runs directly on a BlackBerry (removing the need for a PC-based set up). These are some serious improvements, and it’s exciting to see how fast Talk-Now is iterating into what looks like a very useful application for BlackBerry users.

The new version of Talk-Now can be downloaded today at www.iotum.com/blackberry.

I think the ETel 2007 conference generated more post-conference work than any I’ve been at in years. I gave out all my business cards by the end of the conference — I think I had two left by the time I returned to Disaggreate HQ here in Chicago — and I received quite a handful in return.

Unlike other conferences, just about each and every card I received is from someone I’d like to keep in touch with. It’s going to take weeks to sort it all out, get the names into my database, and send out the emails. But then again, it’s wonderful to have that sort of problem.

…some interesting news, on loading a cellphone with a telco’s phone directory, over at the Springwise trend-spotting site…

Austrian Herold, which publishes the country’s white and yellow pages, claims to offer a worldwide first. Customers can purchase Austria’s entire phone directory and plug it into their cellphone. At first glance, this may seem somewhat outmoded. Why use an offline solution when almost every modern phone has internet access?

To paraphrase Apple - ‘Is 4m people in your pocket worth €30′…?

A few months ago I speculated on the integration of voice in Second Life; in a few days time, Linden will begin to ramp up a beta programme for voice features to all SL residents.

Though beta participation will be free, it sounds as though voice may be limited to landowners…strangely inverting the wireless mobility of telephony in First Life! It’s a little disappointing that Linden don’t plan to enable interoperability with the PSTN, Skype or other large voice networks. It seems the proliferation of voice-as-a-feature is deepening ’silos of voice’.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful to call someone in SL from your mobile handset and vice-versa? Perhaps even receiving calls from objects in SL, a la Botanicalls ;)

Our friends at Make recently took a tour of the Museum of Communications (formerly known as the Vintage Telephone Equipment Museum) in Seattle, and got some great pics of all the old telecom gear being lovingly preserved in this unique museum. Bre Pettis has a write-up on his blog of the tour, accompanied by some of his excellent photos, but if you’re into this kind of thing you really need to check out Bre’s entire flickr set.

Tom Keating has an interesting post today documenting his discovery that Microsoft Vista is not currently letting the Alexa toolbar pass through it’s security defenses. Apparently Vista’s Defender program classifies Alexa as a Trojan program and assigns a High risk level to the software. I have to agree with Tom that Alexa seems like an unusual program to treat as malware.

This does bring up a recurring question I have had about Alexa, though. Alexa data is widely cited as one of the more accurate overall traffic measurements available on the net, and I have always been skeptical of that. I don’t run the Alexa toolbar on any of my browsers, nor do I know anyone who does. Am I missing something in how they get their data or why it should be considered as authoritative as it often is? I’m curious, do you use Alexa data or have the toolbar installed, or have any thoughts on how accurate the Alexa traffic data is? If so, please drop a note in the comments section, I’d love to hear from you.

One of the biggest draws for me to attend ETel was the Neo1973 and OpenMoko. My dissatisfaction with Apple for the closed platform on the iPhone means that I’m looking for an alternative.

In addition to the “pure” interest I have in an open, customizable platform, I recently attended the Education Without Borders conference, where I had the opportunity to speak with several student delegates from the developing world. In most of the world, mobile phones take the place of computers; OpenMoko is an alternative way to spread mini-computers throughout the world and bring services to people for the first time.

Earlier this month, the OpenMoko project announced a delay. The delay seems to be due in part to the huge undertaking of the project. Linux could draw on an existing base of freely available source code to bootstrap the project, but the OpenMoko project needed to build a foundation before getting started. They found a nice field, imagined a grand castle, but then needed to start building shovels to dig the foundation. The team has had to write the tool chain almost completely from scratch while ensuring that it’s legally permissible to redistribute everything.

Sean Moss-Pultz brought an early demonstration phone to the conference. It’s a very early developer release. It still takes quite some time to boot, and has not been optimized at all. Even so, I still left drool all over the phone’s case when I got to touch it.

Here’s the phone itself, in my hand:

(I apologize for the bad resolution on these photos. I had to use a camera phone to get them, since my Nikon camera is not working.)

The form factor of the phone itself is comparable to my Nokia 6600. Here’s a photo of the Neo1973 next to a Nintendo DS Lite for scale comparison:

Finally, I met up with a group of folks from the project and the Silicon Valley Mobile Homebrew group. They’re trying to take the OpenMoko project and allow it to be further customized, even to the hardware level. It’s a great idea for people like me, since my idea of a high-end phone is likely to be slightly different from somebody else’s idea.

There whole point of HomeBrew Mobile is to make everything customizable, even down to the case design. Adrian Cockroft, the designer, brought along a 3D printout of the case for people to try out. Another person at the meeting had brought along the system board that’s being used by the project, so here’s what a Neo1973 looks like without the case:

On the hardware itself, there are two noteworthy points. The phone has an external antenna port, which should be beneficial if you live in an area with marginal reception. It also takes a “standard” Nokia battery. The software currently running on the Neo1973 doesn’t have any power-saving optimizations built in to it yet, so battery life was very short. When the phone was passed around the table, the battery died. However, I was able to take my fully-charged Nokia BL-5C and put it into the Neo1973, so we all got a chance to poke at the software. It also means that you’ll be able to use a large network of suppliers for spare batteries from day 1.

Now that I’ve seen the hardware and used the software, the wait hurts even more!

Jim has already beat me to writing about Mark Spencer’s talk on the future of Asterisk. A prior ETel presenter had noted that presentations in Japan begin with an apology. Mark is planning a trip to Japan in May, and began by apologizing for the voicemail system, and the queue/agent architecture. (At one point, he talked about “when queues were developed,” joking that “Note that I say that in the third person, as if I didn’t write it.”)

As Jim points out, Asterisk doesn’t really rate as new technology at ETel. Taken on its own, Asterisk isn’t that exciting today. It’s one of the core pieces of the Voice 2.0 operating system (perhaps I should say “operating environment”?), but operating systems have faded into the background. Asterisk today is in the same place where Linux was a decade ago. It’s a robust base to build on. It’s been widely adopted as the power user standard, but there’s a long haul ahead of the community to get to widespread usage. It’s vitally important to have people maintaining the platform (compare Linux 2.0 to Linux 2.6!), but the platform is just that — the thing people build on. Any sufficiently advanced development platform is “doomed” to fade into the background, yielding a good chunk of the limelight to its coolest applications.

Much of Mark’s talk was about all of the ways that the community is using Asterisk as a foundation to build the new stuff on, and that the community is creating new things, not just making the existing way of doing things cheaper. He spoke about trying to interact better with add-ons like Adhearsion and various other projects that improve the end-user experience through the new GUI framework. As if to emphasize the importance of a reference implementation, he quoted analyst David Yedwab, who says that in five years, our IP telephony choices will be Microsoft and open source. Fortunately, with Mark on the job, we’ve got a good chance as a community of being more than a footnote.

Mark Spencer is having fun again.

Mark started off his presentation by apologizing for some of the older applications in Asterisk that are due for an overhaul. With his newfound freedom to focus on the technical direction of Asterisk, Mark will be able to give more attention to the future direction of these applications. With Mark’s demonstrated ability to create innovative technologies, I am looking forward to the results of his efforts in these areas.

As an example of Mark’s creative approach to demand for new features, the Asterisk GUI Framework is a very important bit of new thinking. While there are no shortage of GUIs available for Asterisk, they all to some degree or another put Asterisk in the background, and limit your flexibility to whatever the GUI supports. In contrast to this, the Asterisk GUI Framework does not provide you with a GUI, but rather it provides the building blocks to allow you to create one (without limiting the power of the underlying platform). This is a very important concept, and as the framework matures we can expect to see some interesting new capabilities from Asterisk in the interface area.

It’s funny to think that at a conference like ETel, where we have our minds five, ten or more years in the future, Asterisk just cannot rate as new technology. At the end of his talk, Mark made time for questions, but there weren’t many. To my mind, this was not because Asterisk is irrelevant, uninteresting or obsolete, but rather that it is an old friend. A familiar, proven technology on which to realize some of our dreams. No questions.

Thanks for Asterisk, Mark. Keep those ideas coming!

While you might be tempted to think that I am going to write more about anger, I think that a more appropriate term would be passion. FreeSwitch was created for the same reasons that so many other open-source projects happen; a passion for a particular problem space that was not going to be addressed any other way.

Part of FreeSwitch’s methodology has been to embrace existing technologies as much as possible. Often, existing libraries are integrated into the product, rather than new modules being written. FreeSwitch can do this because it is written under the Mozilla Public License (MPL), and thus enjoys more freedom than GPL stuff does (with apologies to Richard Stallman ;-)

FreeSwitch is a fairly new open-source telecom application. While this means that it is arguably not as mature as something like Asterisk, it also means that it can incorporate newer ways of thinking about software development, and benefit from lessons learned along the way. Many of the FreeSwitch team earned their stripes with the Asterisk project.

FreeSwitch is something to keep your eyes on.

Jeff Bonforte’s discussion of Anger as a driver of product adoption keeps resonating.

My friend Matthew Gast lives in San Francisco, and it seems that folks in San Francisco have a problem that makes them angry. The problem is that the surface routes (in Matthew’s case, the “M” Streetcar) do not run in conformance to a schedule. In response to this, a community of commuters created NextBus.com. What NextBus does is affix a GPS transceiver to the roof of surface transit vehicles, and allow that data to be retrieved form their website. The theory is that you can look at the route that you are on, and attempt to predict when the next vehicle will arrive at your location. The problem with this, of course, is that people are often not near a PC when they want this information. To address this, Matthew developed an application that allows him to call an Asterisk system at his home, which will pull the information from the NextBus website and relay it to him. The system does not know the schedule, but based on where the vehicles are, it can predict when the next one will arrive. This is a cool application, but why did Matthew create this? Because he was angry.

The reason I found this so interesting is that in Toronto, the route information is presented in very un-cool, boring text files, and there is no publicly available information as to what vehicles are where. The thing is, since the buses and streetcars almost always run on time, there is no anger. Lacking the motivation, there seems little chance of someone creating a website like NextBus for Toronto. No pain; what’s the point?

Anger and innovation.

Summer Bedard of NYU’s ITP program just showed off an Asterisk-driven queue program. Queue managers aren’t really that interesting because most of them operate on a FIFO basis, perhaps with levels of priority for a few different classes of service. In this queue manager, callers compete with each other for places in the queue by answering questions.

The queue asks a series of questions, and depending on your answer, it will move you up and down the queue. For example:

Queue: “Are you decisive?” (yes)
But, if the answer isn’t fast enough, you move down the queue.

The funniest part of the demonstration was the following couplet:
Queue: “Do you procrastinate?” (yes)
(relatively long pause)
“Would you like to answer this question later?”

To try it for yourself, just call the phone number on the web page.

Today, Moshe Yudkowsky talked about revolutions and what causes them. His basic contention was that revolutions result from taking systems apart to separate concepts or structures that were previously bundled. That may be in the area of authority (such as the way that user-generated and selected content led from static web pages to community sites like Digg), mechanics, spacetime, and two other areas that I don’t remember. In Internet telephony, the revolution is largely mechanical, with the separation of the call bandwidth from its routing. The presentation then described how Internet telephony fit into the five classifications, though spacetime was curiously a set of question marks (”????”, plus a statement that people who figure this out will become quite rich).

We are only scratching the surface of VoIP and have yet to see the full implications the revolution, but a common thread to many of the presentations is to provide tools that enrich the context around a call. So many people use caller ID and a mental firewall that well more than half of the calls I make wind up in a voice mail box. In many ways, the separation of transport and routing makes VoIP even worse, since I have no idea where a call may land when I initiate it.

My own personal attempt to build some context into the calls I receive appears in the March 2007 issue of Linux Journal, where I built time zone awareness into the context of a call with Asterisk. Naturally, there are many other ways to build up the context around incoming calls, many of which have been demonstrated or talked about at the conference.

Surj just popped by and told me that Martin Geddes fell ill last evening, and won’t be able to give his talk here at ETel today. While I know myself and many others will be disappointed to miss Martin’s presentation here (it was one of the talks I was most looking forward to, the title “A Wake-Up Call to Telcos” could be the tagline for this entire conference), we all wish him a speedy recovery.

When I think about Voice 2.0 (or 3.0, or whatever point-oh we feel we should be looking towards), the things that I find really give me the most optimism for the future are those things that dare to step way outside the box.

This year at ETel (as was the case last year), students from the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU showcased some of their creativity. Not only were every one of their creations delightful and intelligent, but in every case I was able to conceive of a viable use for each of these concepts in the real world.

Kati London and Kate Hartman demonstrated Botanicalls. This suite of applications was designed to allow you to communicate with your plants, and, perhaps more significantly, allow your plants to communicate with you. Developed by four students (the other two being Rob Faludi and Rebecca Bray), Botanicalls offers an educational component (by allowing you to call a menu system and hear informative information about various plants), but the real power of Botanicalls is the plant monitoring components. By way of a probe inserted into the soil, the moisture can be evaluated. If it gets too dry, your plant can quite literally call for help.

This was hilarious to experience, but there was something serious about this as well. I could not help but think that if my wife were able to install this application whenever she travels, she would not have to worry about her plants dying from my lack of attention to their needs, because they would be able to let her know if they were being taken care of. If we had had Botanicalls at our house, many plants that have died from neglect (and could not cry for help) might still be alive today.

Next up, Anh Nguyen demonstrated SurpriseDialer. This application allows several people to record a message (such as a birthday greeting), and then schedule that message to be delivered at a later date. Nifty.

Summer Bedard created Thanks For Your Patience, which is designed to work in conjunction with a call center by allowing callers on hold to earn (or lose) points by answering questions, which go towards moving you up the queue. Summer and I brainstormed a few other possibilities for this type of technology. Imagine being able to wager your spot in the queue for an opportunity to move up. Make it fun enough, and not only would people no longer mind holding in a queue, but getting through to an agent might actually be an anticlimax. “Puh-lease put me back in the queue quick. I was just about to beat the high score!”

Matthew Chmiel is learning another language. In order to help him practice, he developed Bangla Bollo. This application allows you to simulate a conversation in another language, and it records what you say. Some of the potential uses of this might be to provide a way for language students to provide samples of their speaking abilities, which could be reviewed later by an instructor, even if that person were in another part of the world.

Finally, Jury Hahn and Chris Kairalla showcased their Megaphone 3000, which reminded me so much of video games from the 80s that I almost forgot that we were dealing with technology that we couldn’t have dreamt of back then. What this application does is allow people to use their cell phone as a video game controller. If two people dial into the system, the game is on! (there is a single user mode as well). The main screen is set up in a public space, and thus players can be anyone who can see the screen and has a cell phone. This kind of technology could have huge potential for the advertising industry. One could picture these kinds of things being installed in bars, or train stations, or other public places.

I was very impressed with what I saw. Not only because of the intelligence in the designs, but more importantly because these projects demonstrated the kind of out-of-the-box thinking that is such an important part of what we have been calling Voice 2.0.

Whatever Shawn Van Every and the rest of the folks at NYUs Interactive Telecom Program are doing, I sure hope they keep it up. This kind of innovation is exactly what telecom needs.

I have seen the future, and it is delightful and inspiring. Thanks to all the students for sharing your creations with us.