I’m sorry to report that the 2008 O’Reilly Emerging Telephony conference has been cancelled. From the conference web site:

Due to changed circumstances since ETel 2008 was announced, we have decided not to move forward with the conference this year.

O’Reilly continues to be committed to exploring this space, and we welcome your interest and contributions to the conversation. Share ideas with us by sending a message to etel-idea@oreilly.com.

We will also be winding down publishing on this site. It has been extremely interesting and rewarding for me to be involved with the ETel community these past couple of years, and I really appreciate the opportunity I’ve had to interact with you all. Thanks very much for your participation and support. I’ve learned a great deal and I know that the ideas and topics we’ve covered here will continue to push the communications envelope in many different ways. I’m sorry this site won’t be one of the places where this discussion continues, but I look forward to working with all the people I’ve met from the ETel site and conferences on other projects down the road.

An interesting move by Digium today as they’ve announced the acquisition of Switchvox, a provider of SMB IP PBX systems. Digium has an informative FAQ up on its site about the deal. This move gives Digium a turnkey SMB system, something they really needed, especially as competition for Asterisk-based systems has started to heat up. Switchvox has put a lot of energy into developing friendly and usable systems, something that Asterisk is not known for. Switchvox systems can also integrate with major CRM systems “out of the box”, an important need for many businesses today.

Digium is making a concerted effort to assure the open source telecom community that they are in no way abandoning their ideals of an open Asterisk, and there is a lot of language in that FAQ speaking to that. Most interesting perhaps, is this bit:

Digium’s plan is to take selected elements of the Switchvox solution and contribute them back to the open source community to enhance Asterisk as well as migrate Asterisk features forward into Switchvox.

Dan York has the best write-up on the deal so far, and I think he’s right on the money with this bit:

To me, what is far more compelling is that Digium just bought themselves a whole group of people who “get” the world of “unified communications”, business process integration, Web 2.0 mashups, etc.

Digium has had no story at all around “presence” within its core offerings. Now it does. While Asterisk has always been a platform play where you have the ability to integrate Asterisk with other apps, doing so has not exactly been for the faint-of-heart. Hire yourself some programmers and you can do pretty much anything with Asterisk… but that’s not something that many businesses want to get into. SwitchVox now gives Digium a way to do easy integration with databases and web sites. The integrations to Salesforce.com and SugarCRM are slick. The Google Maps popup is a seriously cool mashup! (And where is that on the roadmap of the mainstream vendors?)

Propel, the company behind the most widely used Internet accelerator by ISPs has just announced an interesting new product for consumers who want to manage their own bandwidth usage. The Propel Personal Bandwidth Manager (PBM) could be especially relevant for people who use Skype or other voip services and have experienced voice quality issues with their existing set up. As David Murray, Propel’s president and CEO notes, there are many apps these days that use your network connection, and they don’t always play nicely together. It’s certainly in a user’s best interest to be able to prioritize things like voice or streaming video above file transfers, bit torrents, and other non-urgent network apps, and it looks like PBM could be a great tool for this.

Propel’s PBM has an automatic mode where it will make it’s own decisions about which apps should get prioity bandwidth and how much in the background, and Murray expects this plug and play mode will satisfy the majority of users. To keep current with the various apps that deserve some level of prioritization, PBM works with a continually updated definition file, much like anti-virus programs. There is also a Traffic Monitor feature that displays your current system network usage in a Task Manager-style window and gives users more information about what exactly is using bandwidth.

It’s amazing to me that this product doesn’t already exist. (I know there are plenty of ways for technical people to monitor their network connection and bandwidth use, but I’m not aware of any simple products for average consumers). Propel’s PBM was shown publicly for the first time this week at the prestigious DEMO conference. It’s still in an invitation-only beta right now, but the Windows version is expected to be released sometime this fall.

Truphone participated in this year’s prestigious DEMO conference and the highlight of their presentation was showing off the running of their voip service on Apple’s iPhone. Andy Abramson has all of the details, as well as a video of the iPhone demonstration.

It will be interesting to see how (and if) Apple responds to Truphone. It looks like Apple has decided to start playing hardball with the hacking community that has so quickly sprung up around the iPhone, and it’s certainly plausible that AT&T is pushing Apple in that direction that as they stand to lose the most with the widespread use of iPhone unlocking software that’s currently under fire. Of course, they also stand to lose money if voip applications become popular on the device. It sure seems like a losing battle though, we’ve seen the first voip app for the iPhone now but it won’t be the last.

A recently published patent is causing significant speculation that Google may be entering the mobile payment space with a simple system that utilizes SMS messages to effectuate mobile payment transactions. Coverage of the patent can be found at SEOptimize, as well as at Ars Technica. The full patent application is here.

Much of the coverage suggests this application might part of the build up to a ‘GPhone’. However, I’m skeptical. With the entry of everyone from Bank of America to Paypal into mobile banking, it seems only logical that someone at Google would seek to establish a presence in this emerging market. The claims in the patent application make little to no reference to an application - refering simply to SMS messaging - suggesting this patent application may be independent of any GPhone that Google may be contemplating.

In either case, Google’s work in the mobile payment space continues to validate the emergence of mobile payments as a potentially mainstream application. While I feel there may yet be identity and other security issues that must be addressed, such a system could significantly lower the overhead small business owners face in processing credit and debit card payments today.

The MVNO market is a tough one, and most companies who have tried to make it work have flamed out. Amp’d was the most recent MVNO to go belly-up, after burning through $360 million. There’s a relatively new entrant in the field that just got some backing called Kajeet, which is targeting the “tweener” market. (For those unfamiliar with the term, “tweener” is the new term for “pre-teen”). Kajeet has just announced that they have received $36.8 million in Series B venture capital funding led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson Growth Fund.

From the press release:

kajeet is the first pay-as-you-go cell phone service made from a kid’s point of view. Unique among pay-as-you-go services, the kajeet Configurator offers numerous ways for tweens, teens and their families to tailor the service to meet their needs. kajeet lets tweens and teens customize their mobile experience in ways that suit their world while offering their parents comfort about the role mobile technology plays in their lives. The kajeet service and phones are available at Best Buy, Limited Too and Longs Drugs Stores and at www.kajeet.com.

I’m curious about this “demanding niche market.” Do others see this as a large untapped demographic for mobile operators? I’m the father of a tweener, and so far we haven’t allowed him to have a cell phone (though he has definitely been asking). I don’t think having the option of a tweener-oriented MVNO and it’s associated feature set will change my opinion about my child’s need for a cell phone, but maybe other parents feel differently? Let us know in the comments.

Dan York broke the news from VoiceCon that IBM has just announced its acquisition of WebDialogs, maker of the popular Unyte web conferencing and collaboration software that works in conjunction with Skype (and other platforms). I think that’s great news for WebDialogs and the Skype ecosystem, and a smart move by IBM. We featured WebDialogs in a recent ETel article, Skype Developer Program: A Tale of Pioneering and Persevering, about their successful partnership with Skype. They clearly see the value in working with developer programs like Skype’s (even when it can be very challenging at times), and I think are now reaping some of the rewards for that kind of forward thinking.

The Call for Participation for our next Emerging Telephony conference is now open. This is my favorite conference of the year, and not just because I work for O’Reilly. ETel has become a showcase for the most interesting and innovative things happening in telecommunications. We welcome plenary submissions for our audience of people who, like you, are pushing through the boundaries of communications into new ways of thinking and doing. Topics will be centered around the innovations and projects occurring at the intersection of voice, instant messaging, the mobile ecosystem, and the Web. ETel will be held March 3-4 in San Diego, California. The deadline to submit a proposal to speak at ETel is September 17, 2007.

The latest news from Skype about their recent major outage is pointing the finger towards the autmatic Windows Update feature. Well, to be fair, they are actually blaming a “a previously unseen software bug within the network resource allocation algorithm which prevented the self-healing function from working quickly.” But the latest post on the Skype blog indicates that the chain reaction was initiated when a large number of Skype clients were rebooted in the same timeframe, due to a routine Windows Update.

While it does seem plausible that a massive concurrent restart of Skype clients could cause some grief for Skype’s network, that doesn’t explain why it took 2 days to restore service. And I’m also left wondering why previous Windows Updates haven’t caused similar problems. What do you think, is there more to this story?

A troika of ETel alumni - Martin Geddes, Dr. Norman Lewis & Keith Wallington - were recently interviewed as part of a panel session at Telecom TV…

…the highlight of the 22-minute show? Norman’s characterisation of the prior ‘Soviet’ model of telephony :)

Tim Panton, Westhawk’s Technical Director and one of this year’s keynoters at ETel, has just informed me of the launch of a closed, thousand user trial for their Phone from HERE service, based on the Corraleta technology demonstrated at ETel.

Registering for the beta, adds a new link to your LinkedIn profile, from which contacts can call you - from directly within your browser.

You can call Tim, using the demo link on his profile - simply click Call Me FREE with Corraleta, ‘trust’ the applet being installed and make sure you have a mic plugged in :)

I called Tim using this link and was surprised at the call quality and user experience - it works and it sounds pretty good! The beta won’t incur any costs or reveal your number but includes 50 minutes of talk time. Sign up at http://www.phonefromhere.com/talk/register1.xsql and let Tim know what you think.

I’d be interested to hear from ETel readers on the applications of this technology, where it might be deployed and most importantly, the user experience. Is voice now just a feature?

Ace! Someone’s fulfilled my wish for a user-generated mobile coverage map!

The newly launched SignalMap (thanks Gizmodo!) allows users in the US to see how Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile subscribers rate their coverage quality, on a Google Map. Of course, you can also add your own reception markers to the maps.

Unfortunately, the service only covers the US and a handful of carriers - but as the creators say ‘beta is an understatement’ ;)

Wired’s cute article on Ten Reasons To Throw Away Your Cellphone is unintentionally funnier each time I visit the page.

Right after reason 10 - It turns you into a public annoyance - there’s a large ad box variously showing O2 and Blackberry banner ads… oops!

The article’s worth a quick scan - if only to help us nod self-righteously in agreement, just before caressing an iPhone ‘Add To Basket’ button ;)

Dailywireless.org just posted a detailed write-up on the just-announced FCC plans for 700MHz. While the FCC set “more open” requirements for the upper block of the 700MHz, they didn’t endorse a requirement for wholesale access, originally proposed by Google. This move forces the carrier to embrace device mobility and access to off-deck content. However, with this rule imposed on only one band of the spectrum, who knows how competitive such a requirement will be. You can find the actual FCC announcement in pdf here.

…a few recently snippets on developments in handset technology:

• Gizmodo featured the launch of the much-anticipated Neo1973, along with a very detailed technical spec…still waitin’ for mine though Sean
• Microsoft recently patented the use of touchpads for mobile handset UIs. A great idea and one I’m glad I had in 2005 when I was designing broadband handsets (see picture below!) for Wanadoo and France Telecom!!
• An ID magazine concept design for a screenless mobile for the blind, incorporating a touch surface keypad for message entry
• Unboxing O2’s lovely Cocoon handset

From October, telcos operating in the UK will need to retain mobile and landline call records for a year (excluding VoIP) to assist criminal investigation and national security agencies. The legislation is part of the British Government’s compliance with the EU’s Data Retention Directive.

So, UK telcos and cellcos will be retaining all that juicy data on my calls for the British authorities can bungle more anti-terror operations in their hunt for global toothpaste terrorists?

Hmph! How about giving the great surveill-ed some APIs and RSS feeds into all the data we’re busy generating on behalf of the telcos? The infrastructure will be there…if the authorities can have access, why can’t I?

Our pals at Makezine point us to this nifty RFID cell phone hack that won the Yahoo Hack Day 2007 in London. The app called Shifd was developed by Nick Bilton and Michael Young, and it allows your computer to sense the presence of your cell phone using RFID and to seamlessly transfer data between the two. Check out their demo video.

I heard about this announcement a few days ago at a presentation by two fantastic OLPC interns to the MIT Entrepreneurs Club, but it’s taken me a while to get around to tracking it down. The story was carried by Reuters on Monday evening: http://www.reuters.com/article/companyNewsAndPR/idUSN2336963020070723

OLPC has decided to release a commercial version, which is fantastic. Contrary to popular belief, these laptops are awesome and definitely something I’d recommend checking out.

The revenue generated from commercial sales of the laptops will likely go to paying for the production of more laptops for the developing world. Essentially, it would be a 1-for-1 program, so you get one and one gets sent to a child in need. I will note that nothing’s set in stone yet, but I can’t wait to see these laptops in the US!

A side-note: the OLPC XO is the first machine to have a draft-S compliant mesh client.

In an article on Silicon Valley’s social scene, the San Jose Mercury News fleetingly mentions ‘a start-up that is planning a November launch of a telephone service offering “virtual conversations,” starting with Santa Claus.’ Aha! Sounds like telephony to me!

The startup in question, Talktiva is intending to launch a ‘ Voice Entertainment Network’ carrying conversations with public figures and celebrities, segmented into faith, sports, entertainment and other channels.

First up, launching on 1st November, will be ‘Santa’ - enabling millions of children to deepen their delusional devotion to the Crimson Gifter as well as contributing to children’s charities.

I’m interested to see how conversational, Talktiva’s voice avatars will and whether the quality of the user experience will open new possibilities and opportunities.

Personally, I would have skipped Santa and launched with Fake Steve Jobs alongside Twitter’s Darth Vader and William Shatner :)

I was happy to see this press release hit my inbox today from the Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights with the news that a federal court has rejected AT&T/Cingular’s move to dismiss the case against them over their practice of providing “rebates” in the form of highly restrictive debit cards. I’ve personally experienced this ploy, and found it extremely annoying and I think it crosses the line of responsible advertising. I remember very well buying that phone from Cingular, and walking out of the store a little shell-shocked over the difference in the advertised price of what I was buying and what ended up getting charged to my credit card, with the promise that the rebate “had to be processed, and would arrive in the mail soon.” I also clearly remember my dismay at getting a VISA debit card as my “rebate” and the many hoops that I had to jump through to use it simply as a credit on my next Cingular bills. I know we could fill pages with the shady marketing practices that the major telco carriers engage in, but this one is a personal pet peeve of mine and I’d love to see it stopped. This is clearly deceptive advertising and I’m glad the federal judge didn’t let them off the hook on this one.

Cell Phone Rebate Lawsuit Against Cingular/AT&T May Proceed, Court Rules;
Firm Advertises Cash “Rebate” But Sends “Reward Card”

Santa Monica, CA — A lawsuit charging that Cingular (now AT&T) engages in false and misleading advertising when offering “rebates” on cell phones may proceed, a federal court has ruled.

The suit, brought under California’s consumer protection laws, states that the cell phone company promised to pay rebates to people who bought cell phones, and advertised discounted prices that reflected the promised rebate. But instead of getting a rebate check, purchasers received a “VISA Reward card” that can only be used under numerous restrictions and for a limited period of time. By the time consumers found out they were not getting a rebate check, it was too late to cancel Cingular’s wireless service without paying an Early Termination Fee of $175.

VoIP provider SunRocket has gone out of business. According to ZDNet, email from the Director of Routing and Carrier Services states that “SunRocket will cease operations at COB today,” and furthermore “today is my last day and everyone else you may have worked with at SunRocket…”

If this is truly the shutdown plan — what I call a lifeboat drill, where everyone puts on a life jacket and lines up in the hallway with a copy of their resume — than the implications for the rest of the industry are staggering. Not only will 200,000 customers be left high and dry without service; that’s a problem in and of itself, but one that can be sorted out. I’m thinking of the telephone numbers, an essential business and personal communications asset. If the phone numbers vanish along with SunRocket, any business that relied on SunRocket has been instantly plunged into a communications crisis; you can build a backup plan for a phone outage, but there’s no backup plan for a telephone number that’s been snatched away. Furthermore, if this is truly how SunRocket ends, then I will at the slightest sign of trouble flee my current VoIP provider, lest a failure of the company take my phone number to oblivion.

Anyone who’s been paying attention to the VoIP space for very long knows who Andy Abramson is, he’s one of the most plugged-in and insightful people in our industry. Andy’s VoIP Watch blog was one of the first sites I started paying attention to when I wanted to educate myself about the emerging telecom business, and its earned a permanent slot in my RSS reader. Andy is also a wine connoisseur (I’ve been lucky enough to attend one of the blogger dinners he puts together at many telecom events and greatly enjoyed the samples from his wine collection), so it’s no big surprise that he chose to tie the knot with his fiance Dr. Helene Malabed at a famous vineyard in Montpeyroux.

Check out Andy’s post for some of the tasty details (they arrived at the ceremony in a helicopter?!). And I for one was glad to read this bit:

Contrary to rumor, Helene and I DID NOT say I do via our Blackberry’s or use a VOIP connection, though as AT&T’s Product Manager Chris Wood commented, cell reception in the vineyard was a full five bars.

A hearty congrats to Andy and Helene from all of us here at ETel!

There’s a big debate in Washington right now over open access rules for wireless. It has started with an elusive interview with Chairman Martin conducted by USA Today on Monday. In addition, Frontline Wireless has been making a big press move against Chairman Martin, asserting that his proposal is part of the agenda of Verizon & AT&T lobbyists.

The story has been covered by (among others):
• InfoWorld
• Wall Street Journal (access controlled :-( )
• LA Times
• RCR Wireless News
• GigaOm

These developments are all playing into the House Telecommunications subcommittee hearing today, which will address wireless and innovation (watch live - left column). It remains to be seen how these developments will play into the upcoming FCC auction of the 700 MHz spectrum, but cross your fingers for some more openness in the new spectrum!

BTW - if you want to share your thoughts with the House, you can use this contact form: http://energycommerce.house.gov/membios/contact_form.shtml.

Here’s the scoop on this weekend’s iPhone development event from Raven Zachary. Note, that Adobe has dropped their requirement for attendees to sign an NDA, so if that was keeping you on the fence there is no longer any need to worry about it.

iPhoneDevCamp is an upcoming gathering, inspired by BarCamp,
SuperHappyDevHouse, and MacHack, to develop web-based applications
and optimize web sites for iPhone. It is a non-commercial event,
organized by volunteers, with attendance free to all. By the
completion of the weekend event, a number of iPhone-ready web
applications and web sites will be launched to the public. The event
will be held at the San Francisco offices of Adobe, and out-of-town
guests are welcome.

Attendees will include web designers, developers, testers, and iPhone
owners, all working together over the weekend to improve the web
experience for iPhone. Development projects will include both solo
and team efforts. While some attendees will wish to work solo during
the event, we encourage attendees to team up, based on expertise, to
work in ad-hoc project development teams. All attendees should be
prepared to work on a development project during the event. You do
not need to own an iPhone to attend (although, a large number of
iPhones at the event will make the development and testing process
much easier).

Attendees will be able to:

• Create new web applications for iPhone.
• Optimize existing web applications for iPhone.
• Migrate Dashboard Widgets to web-based widgets for iPhone.
• Test and optimize web sites for iPhone.

There are more than 30 sponsors for the event including Adobe,
Yahoo!, O’Reilly Media, BMC Software add Laszlo Systems (among
others). iPhoneDevCamp is not affiliated with Apple, Inc.

The event is being held the week following the public release of
iPhone, to allow prospective attendees some time to acquire an
iPhone. This also allows early-acquirers the opportunity to do some
experimentation before attending the event.

Cluecon is now over, and a good time was had by all. Jay Phillips gave an excellent talk about Adhearsion; Truphone spoke about its new cellular clients and hinted at some new developments (just in time for the new Harry Potter movie, it seems that Truphone will have a Rug Rat Army to compete with Dumbledore’s Army). And, showing up only for the last day of the conference, I was pressed into service to give the day’s opening talk with one hour’s notice. (”We all have hangovers, Moshe. We need someone to wake us up.”) The title of my talk was “Who is the Competition?,” in which I raised questions about how voice services can compete against new, very innovative, and compelling interfaces for non-voice services on cellular phones.

In a conversation with Jay after his talk, we discussed the benefits of programmatic interfaces (such as Ruby/Adhearsion) over pure descriptive telephony languages, such as CCXML. In my opinion, both have advantages and both have disadvantages; it’s the usual series of tradeoffs. I am looking forward to using Adhearsion — especially since Jay announced that Adhearsion ported to Freeswitch with generous support from Gaboogie.

Thomas Howe gave an excellent talk about the need for innovation in telephony. By this I mean that he apparently agrees with me on the need for new thinking about VoIP. As he noted, “We’ve re-created the PSTN,” but so far we’ve moved very little beyond that.

OpenMethods announced their open-source VoiceXML interpreter, which works on Asterisk and Freeswitch. More on this later.

And while we’re on the topic of W3 languages for telephony: I will give a three-hour class at SpeechTek University, a CCXML Application Workshop. If you’d like to attend, use discount code D07 for 10% off conference registration.

The good folks behind barcamp are putting on an iPhoneDevCamp on July 6-8 at the Adobe campus in San Francisco. Brady’s got all the details over on Radar. I spoke with Chris Messina over the weekend about the event and he seemed really excited by the response so far and the possibilities for developing some innovative web apps for the iPhone. I’m really looking forward to seeing what comes out of efforts like this.

Over on the Asterisk.org developer blogs, Russell has posted a handy link to the CHANGES file in the Asterisk development tree, which contains details on new features being added in version 1.6.

While the development team is working the hardest on fixing bugs in Asterisk 1.2 and 1.4, we are also adding new features into our development tree that will eventually become Asterisk 1.6. Most of the biggest features that will make it in to this version have not been merged yet. However, I wanted to post a link to where you can go read a list of some of the features that have already been merged.

Looks like a lot of work is being done to voicemail, SIP handling, and queue management, among many other things.

Chris Holland has penned an interesting post over on the Internet Brands Developer Blog, suggesting that Apple may have its sights set on integrating VoIP into the iPhone, making it a truly converged communications device. At first glance, it seems unlikely that Apple would be thinking this away about VoIP (and we KNOW AT&T isn’t thinking this way), but Chris makes some excellent points and his predictions are really some food for thought.

I’ve grumbled about .Mac along with others and don’t think Apple’s online service offers much bang for the buck today, but if it became the integrated SIP provider that Chris envisions that could change everything.

A SIP Address looks just like an E-Mail address. A Person’s SIP Address could easily be stored in the iPhone’s Address Book. Apple could build SIP-capability right into the operating system, pre-configured with a number of existing SIP Providers for one-click setup, while still allowing for custom configuration, following a model very similar to E-Mail.

There are a few SIP Providers out there. But Apple could easily roll out its own SIP infrastructure as part of the .Mac framework, increasing their chances of providing a superior out-of-the-box experience, while promoting the .Mac brand to … competitive usefulness. From here, the sky’s the limit as to what Apple can do, leveraging iPhone’s brand and near ubiquitous and still increasing WiFi penetration. Forget about fighting over 3G vs GSM. WiFi and IP are universal WorldWide.

What do you think? Has Chris been SIPping the VoIP kool-aid, or he is on to something?

A friend just sent me an article from the Boston Globe about AT&T lowering the price of it’s entry-level DSL service (768k/128k ick) to $10. Right now it’s only for current landline subscribers (little help there), but they are supposed to lower the price of their dry loop offering in the near future as well. Both price drops are concessions to the FCC as part of the AT&T/Bell South merger.

The Boston Globe article is here: http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2007/06/18/att_quietly_offers_10_dsl_plan/?p1=MEWell_Pos3

Looks like Nokia’s heeding the research of staffer Jan Chipchase in their design of handsets for emerging markets.

Matt Web noted in his recent keynote at Reboot, that a new range of Nokia phones addresses the social use of handsets in India and China…

They’re for the emerging markets of India and China. There, the context of use of the mobile is the whole village.

• The phone tends to be shared by a family, so each one stores 5 distinct addressbooks
• There’s often one mobile per village, which is rented out. These home can have pre-set call time/cost limits, so make renting out easier. They come with a built in business model
• It turns out that after voice calls and texting, two major uses of a phone are as a clock, and as a torch. So there’s an external screen showing the time, and a torch built-in
• There’s a teaching mode
• And these phones are cheap. Like, 40 euros cheap

I’m impressed to see such a huge corporation building products in such a progressive way.

Well done Nokia :)

After much hand-wringing and whinging about Apple’s apparent stance of “no third party apps on the iPhone”, news is coming out today based on a New York Times article that Apple may release a SDK for the iPhone at this month’s World Wide Developer Conference. Rumors around the iPhone have reached a fever pitch the past few weeks, and even the Times has been known to get things like this wrong before, but this is one rumor I’m really hoping pans out. Say it’s so, Steve!

Over on Hackzine.com, Jason Striegel points us to VoIPong, a VoIP network sniffer that allows you to capture and record any VoIP call that crosses your network.

From the VoIPong home page:

VoIPong is a utility which detects all Voice Over IP calls on a pipeline, and for those which are G711 encoded, dumps actual conversation to seperate wave files. It supports SIP, H323, Cisco’s Skinny Client Protocol, RTP and RTCP.

There’s a server daemon that sets your network adapter to promiscuous mode and watches for VoIP calls. Calls are automatically logged and the G.711 encoded conversations will be named by date and dumped in wav format to an output directory (sox is required to make this work). There’s also a handy monitoring tool that will allow you to see what conversations are currently being monitored.

I tried it out this evening and it really works, recording both ends of the conversation to a WAV file. This could be a really handy tool for recording podcasts from a VoIP client that doesn’t have a recording feature (Netmeeting, for example). You’ll probably need to tweak mic levels on both ends, or one end of the conversation will sound louder than the other.

Jason also provides some OS X-specific installation instructions over on his Hackzine post.

Giles Turnbull has just written an intriguing post over on MacDev Center that may be of interest to ETel readers as well.

Posterino is one of the more interesting new apps I have had cause to write about in recent months. It’s like Pages for your photos, offering pre-packaged templates for turning photos into attractive posters, leaflets, cards and more.

One of the newer features is a built-in postcard sending service, where you design your card in Posterino, then with a simple payment it gets printed and posted for you automatically. No trip to the post office required.

What’s coolest of all is how you pay for this service. You can simply type your cell phone number into a box, to pay via your phone account. A confirmation SMS message will be sent to the phone number you enter (to prevent you entering the numbers of your enemies, obviously) and once replied to, your postcard is on its way. That’s assuming you have a cellphone contract with the right company, in the right country.

Click on through to Giles post for a more detailed discussion of this cell phone payment system.

Richmond, BC based EQO (pronounced “echo”) launched a new version of their mobile VOIP, IM and Messaging platform today. It is available for just about any J2ME phone available today, which is an amazing feat for a startup (most usually launch on one platform and slowly expand). My initial impression is that this app is very good competition for the likes of Truphone who is in the same space.

Getting started was fairly easy, I just signed up and it sent me a text message with a link to download the app to my Nokia N95. After downloading, I logged in and it sucked in my contact list. The app sends a VOIP call over the IP network of the phone at substantially reduced rates. EQO is targeting international calls and text messaging. For instance, a call from the US to a UK land line is billed over the EQO network at 2.3 cents per minute while AT&T charges $1.49 at standard rates and 6 cents on their “World Connect” plan. Text messages are somewhat discounted as well (15 cents on EQO vs. 20 cents on AT&T). A nice touch is that EQO gives you $2.50 on your account to start.

The application’s greatest feature, in my opinion, is the inclusion of a multi-network IM client for free. For far too long mobile providers and software vendors have attempted to bilk mobile users out of extra money for a service that is essentially free. They charge you money to use IM services or they try to charge $30 for some junky software that barely works. This IM client is really good and works very well over both the wifi and EDGE connections off of my phone. Thanks EQO for giving me a great IM client, even if I never use your phone service.

Personally, I usually use Jajah or my regular VOIP line when I need to dial internationally. Jajah has a great user experience, equally good rates and I can use it on any phone I have without installing any software. I also question the quality of VOIP calls over mobile networks. I’ve had mostly poor experiences, and I don’t expect this one will be much different. I’ll let you all know what I think in a follow up post.

I had the opportunity to sit down for a chat with Aaron Kaplan, one of the principals of FunkFeuer, yesterday morning. FunkFeuer, which means “wireless fire” in Austrian, is a particularly interesting case of community networking. It’s always tough for open source community networking groups to split attention between serving customers and developing code, and FunkFeuer is similar in this regard. However, they have a twist: FunkFeuer owns a fiber optic link to one of Vienna’s carrier hotels.

By tying directly into a carrier hotel, FunkFeuer can purchase backhaul bandwidth at next to nothing. In addition, they are able to run an Asterisk server for wireless VoIP calls. This addition is another interesting twist to in the Wi-Fi game as most VoIP systems kill the throughput of Wi-Fi access points. To combat this problem, FunkFeuer has implemented a “Ready to Send” signal that reduces the empty signalling traffic that normally plagues VoIP networks, and Aaron reports that they have little to no throughput degradation on their network.

For more information on FunkFeuer check out: www.funkfeuer.at.

Tom Keating has a juicy post today about the apparently up and down deal between Fonality and former Nortel subsidiary, Blade Network Technolgies: Nortel Strong Arms Open Source Vendor. I was pretty surprised when I read Tom’s earlier post on this deal, where he quoted a Fonality press release that included statements from a Blade executive praising their new Fonality system and the money they were able to save over a Nortel system by going that route. (Not surprised at all that they could see some serious savings by going with Fonality, but surprised that a company recently affiliated with Nortel was going on record about that). Now it’s getting even more interesting, as it sure sounds like Nortel has leaned on Blade to retract their statements and send back the Fonality system. I won’t try and summarize the whole incident here, but if you’re interested you should definitely go read Tom’s post for a very detailed accounting of what has transpired over the past few days, including transcripts of his conversations with Fonality CEO, Chris Lyman and Blade CEO, Vikram Mehta. As Chris points out, this kind of publicity is only good news for Fonality.

It leaves me wondering what exactly the relationship between Blade and Nortel is right now (besides obviously a little strained). Blade is repeatedly referred to as a “former Nortel subsidiary,” but Tom’s latest post points our that Eric Schoch, the Vice President of Business Development for Nortel, currently serves on Blade’s board of directors, and that InternetNews.com reports that Nortel still has a minority interest in Blade. So if that’s the case, wouldn’t you think Blade should have been able to get a pretty good deal on a Nortel system in the first place?

I forget where I found this, but FirstPartner - a marketing and research agency has published a bunch of freely downloadable market maps.

The six maps include overviews of…

• Europeans MVNOs
• UK Mobile Marketing
• VOIP
• The Skype Ecosystem

You’ll need to provide an email address and some company details before you can download.

Spotted this in The Onion this week and got a good laugh. Flappy the Dolphin reviews the latest smartphones.

I just dropped by the project showcase for MIT’s MAS.964 (graduate course for One Laptop Per Child). I was very impressed with the applications the students, professors, and lecturers are developing for the OLPC. In particular, I was struck by the work that’s been done on Mesh Networking as part of the MIT Media Lab’s work with the OLPC project, especially Michail Bletsas and the venerable Walter Bender.

Polychronis Ypodimatopoulos, Pol for short, has developed a “probabilistic presence mechanism” that interacts with the mesh firmware for the OLPC. The presence mechanism uses a very small amount of information from special presence frames exchanged between direct neighbors that contain condensed presence information from their respective neighbors (the ad-hoc meshing firmware in the OLPC relays packets without touching the kernel - a novel development in its own right that reduces the CPU load on the processor to only the packets destined for that machine). The impressive feature of this approach to presence is that the time to detection is a linear function of the distance - a major change from most mesh networks where the routing table is either pre-determined or the time to discovery is a quadratic function (square) of the distance.

Pol’s writeup on his work is here: http://web.media.mit.edu/~ypod/mesh/.

*please note this posting has been corrected based on feedback from Pol Y.

At the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW), somebody just asked what role telcos could and should play with respect to internet identity. Good question. I hope to discuss this and other questions in the coming two days with the telcos present at this event.

This time, IIW seems to have lost its status as “secret” — there are many people here from companies who have never been at an IIW, and are seriously considering deploying the technologies many of us have been working on for a long while. Great!

This week’s big identity news was that Sun Microsystems is adopting OpenID both as feature in certain Sun software, and by giving each Sun employee an OpenID. This is hugely significant for the rise of user-centric, decentralized, URL-based digital identity, as so far, Sun has been known primarily as tireless advocate of the protocols developed by the Liberty Alliance (an organization that Sun had a key hand in putting together). There is even talk that it might come as a standard feature with Java in the future.

This follows other mainstream endorsements of OpenID this year, including from Microsoft, Symantec and AOL. VeriSign did it last year already, and there is also broad support in the startup community. After all, why would you put up N screens in front of your users to sign them up, if one is enough with OpenID?

I’m writing this from the 1st European Identity Conference in München (Munich), Germany, where the mood in the hallways is clearly that OpenID is here to stay, and will continue its explosive adoption this year and next.

Here are some of the relevant links. First the Sun view:
* Press release
* Largely similar article by Linux Magazine
* Commentary by Tim Bray, of Sun (see also some interesting comments there)
* Commentary by Eve Maler, also of Sun
* Commentary by Pat Patterson, also of Sun

Here some comments from OpenID “insiders”:
* Comments by Dick Hardt of Sxip
* Comments by Scott Kveton, previously of Jan Rain
* Comments by David Recordon of VeriSign
* Comments by Johannes Ernst of NetMesh (that would be your’s truly in his private blog …)

Nokia’s Jan Chipchase continues to generate interesting and valuable research on the usage of mobile handsets with her work on how people carry their phones.

A Cross Cultural Study on Phone Carrying and Personalisation (downloads, slides & background here) explores the intersection between where people carry their handsets and how they respond to incoming calls and messages.

The study, conducted in eleven cities with around fifteen hundred participants, reveals some interesting behaviors…

• 60% of men sampled carried their phone in their front-right trouser pockets.
• 61% of women carried their phone in a bag…and are more likely to miss calls and messages as they locate their phone!
• Men migrate from pockets to belt pouches as they age (and presumably gain weight!)
• Hygiene, convenience, physical protection and crime prevention are the major factors in carrying a phone.
• In some cultures, phone straps are a form of social signaling.

I would love to hear how Nokia uses such studies to direct the design of their handsets and perhaps more significantly whether this has any traction with with carriers whom largely dictate the feature set of handsets.

At both editions of the ETel conference, my favourite segments by far were those presented by students of the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at the Tisch School of the Arts; part of New York University.

Tommorow, ITP will be opening its doors to the public, for two days, as it holds its annual Spring Show, where students present their theses to the outside world. Like MIT’s Media Lab and the now defunct Ivrea, ITP is one of the most innovative digital technology schools in the world and I urge you to visit the show, if you’re close by, or to follow the thesis presentations online.

I’ll be exploring the site myself this week to highlight interesting projects for the ETel community; Kate Hartman’s This Device Is For You and Summer Bedard’s Trigr already have my attention…incidentally Summer was behind The Human Race, demonstrated at this year’s ETel conference :)

UPDATE: After spending the day munching through all 147 projects, I’ve listed my favourites over at my personal blog (they’re not all telephony related)…

I spotted the cute VoiceQuilt over at Springwise earlier today…it’s kinda like a Moo for voice.

Users email their loved ones to dial a number, leave a personal message and then have those recordings added to various keepsakes; a ‘musicbox’ or personalised CD recording. A lovely, sentimental, if twee, notion.

However, I’d find it just as useful to simply archive voicemails and text messages from our cells to other formats. I’m sure there are many of us who have precious, intimate or humorous voice messages we’d like to preserve.

Yet MNO’s don’t make this easy, if at all possible. It’s our data, let us at it - we might even pay a little for it :)

The folks who write the Open Source Soft Switching application Freeswitch have ported their software to the Nokia N800 Internet Tablet. For those of you lucky enough to have one of these, grab the code and turn your device into one of the most portable VoIP switches around.

I’ll try to catch up with Brian West (Freeswitch Ring Leader) tomorrow to see what their plans are for this most interesting distribution. I hope to have one of these devices soon and will let you know how well it works then.

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It seems that Google’s mobile initiatives are ramping up quite nicely. According to this article on Telecoms.com, they have begun shipping their software on a new LG device called the KS10. The KS10 is LG’s first handset to run on the S60 platform from Nokia and will feature fully integrated Google Apps preinstalled on the device which is now available in Italy. This is part of the initiative announced in March by Google and LG “to pre-install Google’s services on millions of LG mobile phones”.

This latest announcement corners nicely with the efforts of US MNVO Helio to integrate a GPS-enabled Google Maps into all of their handsets. Additionally, there is still a rumor floating around the blogosphere that Google may introduce a phone of its own in the future, although this has been disputed by many members of Google staff.

Illinois lawmakers are apparently pushing through a new bill to protect consumers who get “lemon” cell phones, modeled after similar automobile lemon laws. RCR Wireless News has all the details.

Under the bill, subscribers whose cellphones must be repaired or replaced as a result of mechanical or manufacturing defects three times or more can cancel their service contracts without having to pay an early termination fees. Such charges range between $150 and $200 per line.

“For many people, a cellphone is their only means of communication,” Mendoza said. “Keeping consumers with faulty equipment locked into a long-term contract is just another example of big businesses trying to take advantage of the little guy.”

The lawmaker’s bill also offers consumers the option of upgrading or downgrading their phone model by paying or being refunded only the difference in cost based on promotional prices—also without incurring penalty charges. An amendment to the bill was approved to strike language that would have required a mobile phone operator to pay a consumer $25 for each day the handset is unavailable to the consumer or each day the consumer does not have full access to all of the contracted services.

I can appreciate wanting to give the carriers stronger incentives to be responsive to customers, but I’ve never heard of anyone having to have their phone repaired three different times, and while I’m sure it happens it’s hard for me to believe that we really need a law for this. As many problems as there are with the cell carriers in the U.S., I’m under the impression that they’re actually pretty good at dealing with faulty equipment (and that the quality of handsets is generally solid).

In the good news, Vonage won a permanent injunction that allows it to sign up new subscribers. Vonage stock rose 29% on the news.

In the bad news, Vonage admitted a while back that they can’t work around Verizon’s patents. I admit that the inventiveness of the Verizon patents — one looks at first glance as if though it’s a simple database lookup — continues to escape me.

But then there’s the fishing in troubled waters, which worries me even more than the patent dispute. My service provider, ViaTalk, sent me email a couple of weeks back; they touted their own service as an alternative to people worried about Vonage’s problems.

Fishing in troubled waters rubs me the wrong way, and it’s scarcely a pro-survival strategy for the industry as a whole. Instead of rallying behind Vonage with a letter campaign to elected officials, ViaTalk chose to poach Vonage’s customers. It was the kind of email that makes you want to wash your hands after touching the keyboard. I’m highly tempted to dump ViaTalk entirely.

The Worldwide Lexicon Project (www.worldwidelexicon.org) is an open source translation project I’ve worked on for many years. We’re pleased to announce that ETel is one of our first testers. WWL is an experiment in collaborative translation. If you speak other languages, you can help make ETel and other sites accessible in your language. Here’s how it works:

WWL watches participating sites for new articles, currently via RSS, other options coming soon
The site directs its own readers, some of whom are bilingual, to WWL to contribute translations
Readers go to WWL to view and edit translations (over 60 languages are currently supported).
The translations are re-published via HTML and RSS (so you can import a translated version of ETel directly into your site.

The demo, currently at demo.worldwidelexicon.org, is pretty basic. To view or contribute translations just scroll down to ETel, and then click on the two letter language code for the language you want to read or translate to. Then you’ll see a list of articles (if the title is blue, nobody has contributed a translation yet). At the bottom of the site’s headlines, you’ll see a RSS feed that contains the translations to that language.

We’re planning lots of additional features (read on to learn more)

SHORTCUT: if you’re going to be contributing translations to ETEL on a regular basis, you can use this shortcut (http://worldwidelexicon.elevatedrails.com/feeds/5/translations/es), just replace ES with the two or three letter language code for your language or dialect. URLs will change, so watch the WWL site for updates.

iLocus has released its 8th annual report on VoIP industry which contains several interesting statistical nuggets. Probably the most impressive is the estimate that 1,079 billion minutes of VoIP traffic were carried by service providers worldwide in 2006. That’s an awful lot of VoIP!

The study also looks at carriers and equipment vendors, and notes that 36.9 million Class 5 softswitch licenses, 34.8 million Class 4 softswitch licenses, and 48.2 million service provider media gateway ports were sold in the markets worldwide last year. Nortel leads the Class 5 softswitch market worldwide, followed by Siemens, and Huawei leads the Class 4 softswitch market. And if there was any doubt, the iLocus study confirms the growing predominance of IP-based PBX products today:

In the enterprise segment, the annual report reveals that in 2006 vendors shipped a total of about 18.3 million IP PBX end user licenses, and an estimated 8.5 million desktop IP phones. Desktop IP phone sales grew 38 percent over the previous year 2005, while the IPPBX market grew an impressive 52 percent year over year.

Thanks, Surj!

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Regular ETel readers know that we’re big on open source telephony around here. We regularly feature technical articles on open source telecom projects like Asterisk, FreeSWITCH, YATE, and OpenZoep, we like to discuss the issues around open source business models in our blogs, and O’Reilly Media has long been a champion and documenter for many of the most important open source projects. So I consider paying attention to open source telephony projects a major part of my “beat” as the editor of ETel, but even I was surprised at the depth represented in VoIP Now’s list of 74 Open Source VoIP Apps & Resources. Broken down by category, Jimmy Atkinson has collected what must be the most exhaustive list of open source telecom projects to date. I’m ashamed to admit there’s quite a few on this list I haven’t heard of. Thanks a lot for this Jimmy, now I’ve got my work cut out for me!

Tim has posted an interesting theory about Google’s recently announced 411 service over on the Radar blog. Is Google using the new service to build its own speech database?

But it also seems to me that there’s a hidden story here about the speech recognition itself. I was talking recently to Eckart Walther of Yahoo!, who used to be at Tellme, and he pointed out that speech recognition took a huge leap in capability when automated speech recognition started being used for directory assistance. All of a sudden, there were millions of voices, millions of accents to train speech recognition systems on, and much less need for the individual user to train the system.

This is reminiscent of a comment that Peter Norvig, Director of Research at Google, made to me last year about automated translation, and why it’s getting better. “We don’t have better algorithms. We just have more data.”

In short, I’m speculating that the 1-800-GOOG-411 service is designed to harvest voice data to build Google’s own speech database, rather than licensing from Nuance or another player.

I don’t have any inside knowledge, but I know just a little about how Google operates and this seem like a plausible theory to me.

With Tellme unveiling it’s free mobile application for local business search today at the Web 2.0 Expo, this space looks like it’s going to heat up in a hurry.

Probably not a huge surprise, but Vonage CEO Michael Snyder has stepped down today along with some other announced layoffs. A little more surprising is the news that Jeffrey Citron will step back in as interim CEO, but Citron’s past problems are likely the least of Vonage’s worries these days.

While most of the VoIP blogs are buzzing with the news of Snyder’s departure this morning and making bets about how much longer Vonage will be in business, Craig Walker of GrandCentral posted a nice message of thanks to the VoIP pioneer.

Thank you Vonage. Although they seem to be on the ropes these days, everybody in the Voice 2.0, VoIP, emerging communications, etc. space, owes a debt of gratitude to Vonage. Vonage, through sheer might and will, made emerging communications companies relevant again. When the bubble burst in 2001 nobody was interested in emerging communications companies or services. David Lazarus of the SF Chronicle wrote an article about Dialpad that ended with the line “Internet telephony? A good idea. While it lasted.” No new companies were emerging. The telcos had won.

Last week, Google Labs announced their new, experimental, free 411 service. To try the Google Voice Local Search Beta call 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411).

Currently, the service will bridge your call, provide results via SMS, or give you more details (such as location and phone number). You can listen to an Odeo recording that Brad Linder made to the service below:

powered by ODEO

Here’s a cool antique phone mod spotted by our friends over at Makezine. technick29 used an old broken computer headset to convert this antique phone toy into a working Skype phone. More pictures and detailed instructions can be found at Instructables.

Well, it’s hard to imagine that today’s injunction that forbids Vonage from taking on any new customers isn’t the death blow for the pure-play VoIP pioneer. Vonage was looking for some leeway on the earlier ruling that placed a permanent injunction against them using any of the infringing technologies that Verizon holds patents for (which would effectively shut down the company), but the results of the appeal can’t be what Vonage was hoping for. Vonage lawyer Roger Warin makes a good analogy: “It’s the difference of cutting off oxygen as opposed to the bullet in the head.” In either case, it appears Vonage is going down for the count.

Update: Perhaps I spoke too soon, as Vonage was just given a reprieve in the form of a a temporary stay from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, DC., allowing them to continue to court new customers during their appeal process. I’d imagine Vonage’s legal problems have been in the news enough to make new customer acquisition a very challenging task for them right now, but at least the life-support system has been left on.

I always enjoy it when Alec Saunders writes one of his longer, deep and meaty posts, and he’s done it again with Aikido, Retreat or War. What’s your Microsoft strategy?. While many may tend to not take Microsoft seriously as a threat in the communications space, Alec has a unique and informed perspective on this issue as he previously worked for Microsoft, where he ran the Windows CE planning group in the late 1990’s, when the first Microsoft smart phones were being designed. If you’re in the telecom business and not thinking about Microsoft, I strongly suggest reading Alec’s latest piece.

I confess to being one of those who hasn’t spent much time thinking about Microsoft in this space, but the recent rash of communications-related news coming out of Redmond and Alec’s sobering essay are changing that.

Three years ago, upon first seeing Live Communications Server and the RTC platform, I called back to friends in Ottawa and told them that I thought Mitel and Nortel’s PBX business would be in trouble. They scoffed. Microsoft would never get voice right, they said. My friends failed to internalize the fact, articulated in the Voice 2.0 Manifesto, that voice is just a big application. Intellectually they understood this fact, but software isn’t in their genes – not the way it is at Microsoft.

In the latest moves concerning the Verizon patent challenges to Vonage, the country’s best known consumer voip provider has cut a deal with VoIP, Inc. to carry it’s traffic in order to get around 2 of the 3 charges from Verizon concerning connecting voip calls to switched public networks. VoIP, Inc. owns its own nation-wide IP network and claims to own the intellectual property around its network and services.

It’s hard to know if this will help Vonage survive this latest challenge, but many analysts think the Verizon suit will be the final straw in breaking the back of the voip carrier. Andy Abramson notes today that Vonage has also delayed their annual report filing to the SEC, and this “can’t be a good sign.”

Last week’s arrest in Hungary of a staffer for Senator Hillary Clinton has exposed severe privacy violations by VoIP provider Skype as well as the US National Security Agency. This according to accusations by the Hungarian police and the European Union.

The suspect, who recently left the US National Security Agency to join Clinton’s Presidential campaign, was arrested on an unrelated charge. An examination of the suspect’s briefcase revealed transcripts of a conversation between Laszlo Bene, the head of the Hungarian police, and Stefan Feller, head of the police in Brussels. According to Hungarian police, the suspect confessed that he had eavesdropped on the conversation — not by using a “bug,” but by turning on a microphone on the desk of Bene’s computer. Hungarian police refused to answer questions about the suspect’s identify or the staffer’s position within the Clinton Presidential campaign. Police in Brussels, sensitive to a series of recent police scandals, issued only a brief statement that they were investigating a possible privacy violation.

Sources in the Hungarian police department revealed that the background traffic associated with running Skype on a personal computer provides an ideal method to hide the transfer of data from an individual’s computer without the owner’s knowledge or consent. Skype can “turn on a computer’s microphone on command,” said a highly-placed source, “and no one will be the wiser.” The data are routed to servers that use speech recognition to look for suspicious phrases. Furthermore, algorithms can use the sound of keyclicks to guess at which keys are being struck, which allows anyone listening to determine now only what is being said but what is being typed.

The European Commission has opened an investigation. “The suspect worked at the US National Security Agency, where he learned of an agreement between Skype and Echelon to enable a ’spy’ mode on all Skype products,” said Alain Brun, head of data protection at the European Commission. “He used that capability to commit a serious crime. Skype is a European company, not an American one, and we intend to investigate their potential culpability in this matter very thoroughly.”

Financial analysts believe that a Skype-NSA could explain Skype’s business model. “Outside payments by government agencies would explain how Skype can hope to make a profit,” said an anonymous source at Dean Witter. “Otherwise the purchase of Skype by eBay still doesn’t make sense.”

Skype could not be reached for comment. The Clinton campaign announced that Senator Clinton would make a statement at a press conference later today.

…Today, my erstwhile colleagues at Orange UK are planning to add to their range of ‘animal tariffs‘ with a new range of ‘all-you-can-eat’ plans…

Following in the footsteps of Dolphin, Canary, Racoon and Panther, are the new appropriate omnivorous/all-you-can-eat Shark, T-Rex, Hog and Nibbler.

Find out more here…

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?

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 ;-)

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…

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.

…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.

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.

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.

My colleague Lee S. Dryburgh is discussing trust and how it works on the Internet; without strong authentication, anyone can claim to be anything. As an example, he showed a fat man drinking a glass of beer who claims, in his online profile, that he doesn’t drink and has a “toned” body.

But I disagree with Lee about the role of telco operators in this ecosystem. First of all, while the telco operators can authenticate the SIM cards, they don’t always authenticate the user. Secondly, I don’t trust the telcos to manage the huge problems associated with lost credentials, name changes, and the like. A SIM card is a low-stakes identity credential — you can get as many of them as you like. But if they become the basis of identity verification, the telcos will no doubt administer these systems with their typical compassion, customer service, and altruistic pricing models.

And, finally, I just can’t see my local telco deciding if I’m allowed to claim that I am “toned.”

The first-ever ETel Launch Pad event was quite a crowd-pleaser. It didn’t hurt that uber-blogger Om Malik was the host of this Demo-style event, and he definitely added a bit of class to the presentation. It also didn’t hurt that the event sponsors hosted a reception afterwards, and the libations were flowing freely. But the highlight of the evening was definitely seeing what the chosen entrepreneurs were up to. ETel is all about celebrating the people and companies who are pushing the boundaries and chipping away at the closed systems and walled gardens that have stifled innovative communications services for so long. It’s an exciting time in telecommunications.

The entrants were: GrandCentral, OpenFire (previously WIldFire) by Jive Software, and Cellcrypt, Peerant, mySay, the Flat Planet Phone Company, and Project Goth’s MIG33,

Craig Walker and Vincent Paquet of GrandCentral demo’d their service, including showing off my favorite feature, the ability to listen in to a voice mail message as it’s being left (and break in if desired).

“Voice is collaboration” is the premise behind Jive’s OpenFire, which is an open protocol real time collaboration tool. OpenFire now supports SIP, Jingle, and XMPP. They believe that the IM client will be the one desktop client that survives the migration to the network, and they base much of their work on the instant messaging model.

Cellcrypt is focused on voice security, and has a voice encryption client for cell phones, the Cellcrypt Communicator, and launched today a secure voice mail product. The idea is to develop voice security that is as easy to use as https is for secure web transactions, simple enough for mom to use. A new release of Cellcrypt Communicator will be announced next week, which will support more handset models.

Peerant is in the peer-to-peer space, leverages existing P2P and VoIP systems, and is built with Ruby. An eBay demo was shown where a remote call center employee gets access to various information from the caller via an intelligent screen pop. The Peerant P2P Web Manager makes setting up and adding agents to such call center campaigns extremely simple.

mySay is a phone service for staying in touch with their friends, a bit like a voice-based twitter I think. People call mySay, listen to the updates from their friends, and add an update to their friends if they like. mySay is an Irish start-up and their beta is launching in April, but they gave a preview to the ETel audience of their service.

Moshe Maeir is the founder and Chief Flattening Officer of the Flat Planet Phone Company, which was created to bring advanced telephony services to small businesses. They have built a system where SMBs that have multiple locations can operate seamlessly with regards to their communications. They also have developed a unique reseller model, where they will handle the hosting, provisioning, and support aspects of a company’s communications
products and services.

Project Goth’s MIG33 tries to address the issue that while PSTN and IP telephony rates have plunged, mobile calling, especially internationally, is still very expensive. MIG33 is attempting to bring together mobile VoIP, messaging, and social networking, and connect any two phones via VoIP. MIG33 is based on an ultra light J2ME client (and an AJAX web site and a VoIP desktop client). While most users sign up for the cheap mobile VoIP calling, they find the social aspects very sticky and compelling.

One unique factor to the ETel Launch Pad was that the audience got to participate in real time by casting votes for their favorite entry, using the Mozes SMS-to-Web service. It was neat to see the tallies for each entrant changing as the audience all started texting their choices. The winner will be announced tomorrow.

Here at ETEL 2007, The VOIPSA folks just presented an excellent discussion on VoIP security issues.

The fact is, we all know that security is going to be a huge issue in VoIP (or is supposed to be already), and despite all the attention, it seems that it doesn’t get the effort it deserves; it’s just not a crisis yet.

Hoping to avert the crisis, the VOIP Security Alliance http://www.voipsa.org fulfills an important role: getting folks talking about security and VoIP, and more importantly, offering solutions.

Check out their excellent website, join the really top-notch mailing list, and get yourself informed. Someday very soon we’ll be glad that these folks have done so much already. When the pain comes, there will be medicine.

It’s ETel time, and it’s clear that Surj Patel has put together another fantastic conference. One way I judge these things is how hard it is to decide which sessions to attend, and I can honestly say that for this one there is not one time slot that I’m not frustrated about something I’ll have to miss. Nice going, Surj.

I started my day going to the OpenMoko workshop, and I came away pretty impressed with this open source phone project. Sean Moss-Pulz is the product manager for OpenMoko, and a passionate speaker on the need for opening up our phone platforms and the benefits of making some real progress towards a ubiquitous computing environment.

On a basic level, the OpenMoko project is about giving people the ability to change the things they hate about their phones (and I agree with Sean that is a near-universal sentiment. I know I despise mine). The vision is for a truly open, carrier-independent mobile phone that runs a free linux-based OS. And they are very close to releasing such a device (dubbed the Neo 1973, for “new 1973″, the year the mobile phone was invented). The OpenMoko roadmap calls for a developer model to be available for purchase next month, and a mass-market version to follow six months later. The phone prototype is a very attractive, touch-screen based device, that vaguely looks like the new iPhone design, and includes strong GPS (but no camera or wi-fi in the first version).

One point that Seam made that seemed to resonate with the audience, was that there is so much more our phones could do and be for us, if we can just break out of the proprietary, carrier-controlled ecosystem that our mobile phones currently exist in. One example he gave was that their lead developer is a guitar player, and thought it would be nifty if his phone could also work as his electronic guitar tuner. So he built that application for the OpenMoko. It wasn’t a complicated coding project, but the concept of being able to turn on a cell phone’s microphone when it’s not participating in a voice call is foreign to other cell phones (as well as scary for security types). Access to the core pieces of the OpenMoko device may enable all sorts of innovative phone uses and applications.

The OpenMoko.org web site was just launched on February 12, and there are all kinds of ways for interested developers to get involved, including the project mailing lists, wiki, IRC channel, bugzilla, planet, etc. The OpenMoko site provides all the hosting and infrastructure needed for app development related to this project. If you’re a developer who cares about opening up the world of mobile phones, I suggest you check it out.

I spent some time this morning at ETel talking to Craig Walker, CEO of GrandCentral, and getting a tour of this exciting new application. I’ve been slow to jump on the GrandCentral bandwagon, and wasn’t initially that interested in a service that seemed to basically offer me yet another new phone number.

Well, I stand corrected, and after seeing all that GrandCentral can do in person, I’m going to start using it in my daily life now. Craig showed me a bunch of cool features that GrandCentral offers, including its well-known “one number for life” that can ring multiple phones, customized voice mail greetings and ringback tones (and playlists!) for specified groups or individual numbers, call recording, voice mail to email, and a nice web management interface.

But I’ll confess the feature that really sucked me in was its ability to send calls that come to my cell phone to voice mail, but with the option to listen in on the message and break in on the call if needed. I admit it, I’m a call screener — I’ve refused to let go of my home answering machine for just this reason. And the ability to extend my screening to all of my calls, especially mobile calls, is something I’ve wanted for a long time.

Craig likes to position GrandCentral as “your own little phone company”, where the control of your telephone features and settings have moved to the edge of the network, and are made much easier for users to access. I think that’s a good selling point for GrandCentral, I know I’d much rather log onto a web page to make some change to my phone settings than try to call my carrier to add, remove, or change a feature.

(Preview hint: GrandCentral was one of the companies selected to participate in tonight’s ETel Launch Pad event, and they will be unveiling a brand new web site with some new and improved features, like better voice mail playback control, to coincide with this. Check back soon for the new site.)

Microsoft has just put out an official list of software applications that are supported on Windows Vista. It’s a long list, but some important and popular programs are missing, including Skype. Slashdot points out that none of Adobe or Symantec’s programs are on the list either, which would seem like some pretty ominous omissions.

It’s not clear to me if this is a beaurecratic/certification issue, or there are genuine issues with running Skype on Vista. If any ETel readers are currently using Skype on Vista, please drop a note in the comment section and tell us how your experience has been so far.

CNet has the scoop on Skype’s recent petition to the FCC asking for the U.S. cellular carriers to open up their networks.

In a document dated February 20, Skype asked the FCC to apply to the wireless industry what is known as the “Carterfone” rules, which would allow consumers to use devices and software of their choice on cell phone networks.

Skype’s motivations are clear. The company has created software that allows people to make free phone calls across the Internet. And now it wants users who access the Internet via a mobile device to be able to use their software and services, too.

“We want to allow our users to use the Skype software where ever they are,” said Christopher Libertelli, senior director of government and regulatory affairs for Skype. “And we want to make sure the policy is set in the right direction so that when Skype users want to use it on mobile devices, they’ll be able to.”

I seriously doubt that anyone at Skype thinks the current FCC will grant this request, but you can’t blame them for asking. This follows a recently-released report by Columbia University Law professor Tim Wu, Wireless Net Neutrality: Cellular Carterfone and Consumer Choice in Mobile Broadband, that also makes the argument that the historic Carterfone decision should be applied to the cellular networks.

It’s hard to imagine how the application of Carterfone to the cellular industry wouldn’t result in a big win for consumers. But that doesn’t mean that Kevin Martin’s telco-friendly FCC will act in the consumer interest.

In another sign that the innovative companies in the telecom space are beginning to work more closely together, Grand Central has announced they have now integrated with Project Gizmo, meaning that you can now get all of your Grand Central calls on your Gizmo number. I haven’t yet played with Grand Central, but this interoperability announcement will likely get me to, as I am a happy Gizmo user.

As several have pointed out, this combination can be especially powerful for the road warriors among us, like Andy Abramson. Andy’s already tried it out, and sees some real savings potential, especially when combined with Nokia’s new series of wi-fi capable phones:

This combination is killer for those of us who travel and have wired broadband in the hotel. Bring along a WiFi travel router, plug that into the hotel’s broadband network ad use a N80-Internet Edition dual mode phone from Nokia and the calls are free as you’ll avoid cellular carrier airtime. Or if you have one, try Gizmo on a Nokia Internet Tablet 770 or Nseries 800.

As Alec Saunders points out, this isn’t really that deep of an integration, and he’d like to see these kind of mashups taken to the next level, beyond just peering arrangements:

What would have been really exciting is to have seen Grand Central integrated with the Gizmo / SipPhone experience, rather than yet another peering agreement. Imagine accessing all of the Grand Central capabilities from within the SIPPhone universe, rather than handing calls from Grand Central off to the SIPPhone network. Imagine a world where callers to my Gizmo identity reached the GC feature set as part of the Gizmo experience.

(Alec also came back with an apology for the rantiness of his post, an unnecessary one in my opinion. Alec’s “rants” make more sense to me than just about anyone else’s analysis in this space. His second post makes some great points about the tradeoffs a small company must make when considering integrating with others services or innovating for a better customer experience.)

We’re beginning to see a lot of interesting possibilities around telephony mashups. Matthew Miller writes about the advantages of combining Grand Central and TalkPlus, Luca points out the possibilities in a Grand Central / Sitofono integration, and Alec describes a presence-driven personal assistant service created by combining Angel.com and iotum’s products.

It should be really interesting to see what comes out of the O’Reilly/StrikeIron ETel Mashup contest. The winner will be selected and will get to present at next week’s Emerging Telephony conference in San Francisco. There’s still time to register, I hope to see you there!

I was playing with the recently re-released Mac build of Joost this evening and noticed the kind of bug that’s sure to infuriate content providers.

Curiously, the BBC are continuing to run some very interesting pieces on mobile usage in the developing world.

Yesterday’s Mobile phone lifeline for world’s poor describes mobile technologies as agents of change in tackling poverty; enabling a generation of micro-entrepreneurs to sell air-time, renting & share handsets and provide banking and money transfer capabilities.

I’m curious to see what the organisations and users behind these services - Grameen, TradeNet, Bharti and others - will make of the OLPC project.

The recent phenomenon of services emanting from the developing world appears largely driven by real need and users themselves. OLPC seems to be a very interesting set of technologies in search of usage, but I’m not sure it will have the desired philanthropic impact. Simply focussing on empowering only children and ignoring adult needs as well as dismissing an ever more ubiquitous mobile infrastructure could render the project obsolete before the first devices even ship.

I heart disruptive services and technologies. Especially the kind that enable something obvious that consumers have been asking for but have been denied.

While this falls under the “few on the internet are likely to care” category the gtalk2voip service has added Yahoo! Messenger support. This (for now) open and free gateway allows Google Talk, MSN/Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger and SIP phone users to call one another for free.

At the moment it appears that 3rd Party Interop is the way forward. For the sake of QoS, etc I really hope the “right” companies will peer their gateways and open up access. From my perspective this is just a hack in the right direction. Albeit, one I intend to start using.

I’ll be posting pictures from 3GSM and Barcelona in general on my Flickr site throughout the week (also be sure to check out the set Mary Mary So Contrary)

(Name Redacted) of (Company Name Redacted) and I are inviting startups at 3GSM to join us at our “penthouse” apartment later this Thursday after the show closes (630 or 7). If you’re a mobile startup or know someone who is, pass the word on. We’re in the middle of the Old City, so bring a bottle and some friends and join us on our terrace. Email brian // mcconnell.net for details. Watch the 3GSM Twitter group for more info.

First, our buddy Surj became a Dad all over again! Surj, congrats to you and your family!

Second, I’m blushing because I was part of the small team at Yahoo! that just helped launch Pipes. I’m hopeful that some will find cool, new ways to power telephony apps using Pipes data. And, perhaps demo them at eTel!

Third, today was the first of a few mobile development classes I put together this month for my fellow employee’s at Yahoo!. I had bloodshot eyes from being up all night with the Pipes team but it paidoff to be back in the office early because we had an awesome turnout. Michael Sharon gave a hour long presentation on the state of mobile followed by a full-day workshop in J2ME development. I have much respect for Michael being able to successfully lead a 8-hour workshop! Not to mention, the company he co-founded, Socialight, is looking better and better.

Thanks for letting me share a great 24 hours, now time for some rest.

A few weeks ago I wrote about Jan Chipchase’s work in investigating mobile usage patterns in the developing world…the Next Billion.. Today, the BBC reported on Indian mobile base stations, powered by biofuels.

Writers often breathlessly speak of the potential of India’s mobile telephony market often overlooking sporadic availability of electricity both for infrastructure and for charging handsets.

The GSMA appear to have recognised this problem and are addressing it using the most plentiful and accessible sources of energy.

I’d like to end this post with a quip about how Indian mobile coverage could quite literally be sh*t. That’d be really funny…but I won’t.

UPDATE: The BBC seem to be running a few stories with these themes recently:

- Mobile phones to send money home

- Mobile networks powered by wind

O’Reilly Media and StrikeIron have joined together to put on the first ever Telephony Mashup Contest at this month’s Emerging Telephony conference. Here’s a chance for creative telecom developers to show their stuff as the finalists will get to present their work at the conference, where the winner will be chosen by the ETel audience. And cash prizes, too. The winner will receive $1,500, with second and third place getting $1,000 and $500.

A telephony mashup is a voice, Web or mobile application (PBX, IVR, VOIP, SMS, Text Messaging, etc.) that combines content from more than one source to create a new user experience. Qualifying entries must demonstrate how an application can use one or more sources of content in an inventive way to benefit users. Any tool or platform that involves content (see StrikeIron or ProgrammableWeb) telephony (ex: VOIP, SMS, Text Messaging, PBX, IVR) can be used to create a mashup. This is uncharted territory, so there is plenty of room to use your imagination!!

The first round of the contest is open to all developers. Mashup submissions must be made by Feb 20th when finalists will be chosen. The contest is timed to conclude on the first day of the O’Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference where finalists will demonstrate their mashup at the conference. The winner will be chosen by conference attendees.

This sounds like it will be a lot of fun, I’m looking forward to seeing what people come up with. There’s still time to register for our Emerging Telephony conference, being held February 27 - March 1, at the San Francisco Airport Marriott. Check out the great line-up of speakers and sessions covering the cutting edge of communications.

Here are a couple of posts over on O’Reilly’s new Hackszine site that may be of interest to ETel readers. Jason Striegel takes a look at some actual costs involved in transferring very large chunks of data (courtesy of Jeff Atwood’s The Econimics of Bandwidth) and comes to the realization that the good old sneakernet can still make economical sense when we’re talking about moving terabytes of data around.

Jeff Atwood posted a great article on the economics of bandwidth the other day. He puts some current cost figures towards Jim Gray’s 2003 ACM interview, in which Jim describes the efficiencies of packing and shipping a whole computer instead of copying a terabyte of data over the net.

According to Jeff’s calculations, the effective sneakernet transfer rate for a terabyte of data is about 9.1 MBps at $0.06/GB. Only an OC-3 would be faster, which costs roughly $0.15/GB for both the sending and receiving end. Want to send 2 terabytes of data? Factoring in the extra time to copy to and from the disk, it works out to about 14.6 MBps at about the same cost per GB. Sneakernet scales.

And Brian Jepson takes a look at his unwired home and decides that thanks to the increased bandwidth requirements that online video will require, it’s time to run some new wired connections.

So over the past week, we’ve been punching holes in the walls, and my 1000ft spool of Cat5 cable arrived over the weekend. I never thought I’d be wiring my house, but here I am, doing just that. Now I understand why the Xbox 360 WiFi adapter is an optional item.

I will be covering 3GSM for ETel this year. My schedule is still fairly open, so if you’d like to meet up, drop me a line (email hint: first name at last name dot net).

Slashdot points today to this collection of gripes about the state of the Symbian smartphone OS from developers and mobile executives, including some very negative comments attributed to higher-ups within Nokia. There’s also an interesting discussion about the Symbian variations being put into play by NTT DoCoMo, Nokia and Sony Ericsson, who are all developing their own proprietary and incompatible middleware packages to run on top of the mobile OS, and one developer makes the point that Symbian is really more like an OS kernel than an OS today, and there isn’t actually a stable Symbian OS that is compatible across the vendor platforms.

One developer writes, “In most regards, Symbian’s reputation as a modern, robust, stable and advanced OS for smartphones is not well deserved. Sure, Symbian works, it has a very long feature list, and it’s probably even the best smartphone OS available today. But it’s mostly because the competition is pathetic than anything else.

This post with all of its colorful reader comments about Symbian is a follow-up to an earlier roughlydrafted.com article on Why the iPhone is ARM, and isn’t Symbian, which is also worth a read.

In what sounds like a bid to work together to continue to keep their network and services closed there are rumors online that many of the major European network operators are planning meetings together next week at the 3GSM conference.

The discussions are supposedly around attempting to collaborate on building a mobile phone search engine. If any of this is true it certainly sounds like another way that network operators are searching, no pun intended, to increase their bottom line through limiting the offerings to consumers, developers and potentially advertisers.

It’s not surprising that the carriers are taking proactive steps to attempt to disallow internet search giants from disrupting potential future revenue. Unfortunately, I’m guessing they will do more harm than good to their own cause. Through fighting off threats by keeping their network closed they will eventually turn off consumers who are expecting more choice, higher quality of service, and decreased costs. Worse, they will continue to thwart innovation while others step up and attempt to fill the niché.

I wish the carriers would just play to their strengths and do what they do best (not get into a new market). Furthter, I wish they would be open to adopting innovation in both technology and business practices. In my opinion, if they stopped fighting the change that’s bound to happen they could embrace and support the coming disruption in their industry and benefit the most from it all.

David Isenberg is again putting on his eclectic Freedom to Connect conference in Washington, D.C. next month, and if you’re interested or involved in the regulatory and political issues surrounding communications policy in this country, this is a “must attend” show. Some of my favorite bloggers have already written eloquent posts about the importance of this event, and I know I can’t say it better than Martin Geddes or Cynthia Brumfield.

Freedom to Connect is unique in that it’s not beholden to anyone’s commercial interest, and comes nearest to being the forum for discussing the public interest.

Telecom’s changing. Danish, Irish, French and Dutch regulators over here are getting out the sharp electric carving knife from on top of the cupboard to hack up more of their infrastructure. The developing world is abuzz with wireless connectivity. Spectrum restrictions that impose a small number of gatekeepers to the form of online speech are being loosened. New “Capitalism 2.0” means of network production are being created.

–Martin Geddes, Telepocalypse

Unlike most DC-based events, F2C aims not to lobby or position or spin or score political brownie points. It aims to illuminate and educate. This year’s line-up of speakers includes some big names who have fundamentally changed the way people think about communications, including the incomparable Bruce Sterling, among whose many achievements is the spawning of cyberpunk science fiction, and Yochai Benkler, whose “Wealth of Networks” is must-reading for anybody serious about understanding the communications industries.
…
I just think that if folks really want to know where broadband policy is headed, they should start with F2C.

–Cynthia Brumfield, IP Democracy

File this one under Exploding Telephony. Spaceflight Now is reporting that a Sea Launch Zenit 3SL rocket disintegrated in a spectacular explosion aboard its launch platform in the Pacific ocean Tuesday, completely destroying its telecommunications satellite payload.

Ruined in the explosion was the NSS 8 spacecraft belonging to operator SES NEW SKIES of The Hague, Netherlands. The 13,050-pound satellite featured 56 C-band and 36 Ku-band transponders for commercial and governmental communications, high-speed Internet services and video broadcasting.

NSS 8 was slated to fly in geostationary orbit 22,300 miles above the Indian Ocean at the 57-degree East longitude slot. The satellite’s coverage zone would have included two-thirds of the world’s population from the vantage point, with reach to Europe, Africa, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent and Asia.

Thankfully none of the people involved in the launch were harmed, as they watched the explosion from a ship three miles away from the launch pad. If you like to see things blow up, you’ll definitely want to watch the video of this on YouTube, it’s a serious explosion.

Bob Stumpel has been compiling a list of Telecom 2.0 projects. While no means comprehensive it’s an interesting place to quickly gauge what various companies are doing in the emerging telephony space.

OpenMoko has been getting some good attention lately, with a recent slashdot post pointing out that the release schedule for the open source, Linux-based Neo1973 smart phone had been posted to the community mailing list. Developers will be able to buy an OpenMoko for $350+ shipping on 2/11, and a mass-market release is planned for six months after that, when presumably we’ll be seeing the fruits of their labors and some pretty sexy little phone apps. Check out Sean Moss-Pultz’s Free Your Phone post to get some background and an overview of this potentially revolutionary project.

Surj Patel, program chair for our upcoming Emerging Telephony conference, has a long history and interest in open source phones, and it’s these kind of open and disruptive technologies that really interest us here at O’Reilly. So of course we’ve invited the OpenMoko project to be a part of ETel. They’ll be leading the first ever developer workshop for the OpenMoko. If you’re a developer with an interest in open telephony, you’ll want to get in on this early.

In his radar post Fancy an open iPhone-like device in the meantime?, Surj points out that the OpenMoko has the potential to be the anti-iPhone, as it’s a truly open phone device with a touch screen, and third-party development is being actively encouraged. In fact, I’d go as far as to say the success or failure of the OpenMoko project will depend largely on how interesting and productive the developer community around it becomes. So for everyone who’s been lamenting the lack of openness of the iPhone, here’s a powerful, touch-screen-based phone that’s practically begging you to get your hands dirty hacking on it. I’m really looking forward to seeing what comes of this one.

If you’ve been waiting for a developer-friendly phone, your wait is about over. Don’t miss checking out OpenMoko, along with some of the other most exciting developments in telecom at next month’s Emerging Telephony conference.

Important Reminder: Early Registration ends January 29, for those looking to cash in on the great early registration discounts. We are also offering a special friends and associates discount. Spread the word, share the love, bring along a colleague and you can each save 40% when you register for ETel by using discount code etel07FNF40. Register today.

Alec has the skinny on Digium’s latest announcements which include a new 8-port TDM card, a software-based echo-canceler, automatic purchasing and provisioning capabilities with Polycom in AsteriskNOW, and some new configuration and training options for the Asterisk Appliance Developer Kit. Alec spoke to Digium VP Bill Miller about the announcements, and his interview provides a little more insight into where Digium is going with these. While none of these announcements are particularly revolutionary, clearly Digium is not standing still and it’s great to see some real action happening in the Asterisk landscape.

On a related note, Paul Kapustka from GigaOM posted an interesting glimpse today into this landscape and the competition brewing between Digium and Fonality. Paul notes that while it’s the enterprise PBX market that everyone expected to get disrupted by Asterisk, it’s really the SMB market where the competitive action is taking place right now. I completely agree with Paul’s point that about the competition being a good thing for the community overall:

For users, it’s all good since the competition spurs development and makes moving to an IP telephony setup easier and easier.

Tellme’s voice response systems power some of the largest information systems out there, like Cingular and Verizon’s 411 services. Now, if you have a Java-enabled cell phone, you can download a beta version of Tellme Mobile and have an enhanced 411 service running directly on your phone. For free.

There’s a semi-public beta going on now for Tellme Mobile, sign up here if you have a qualified phone. Michael Arrington from TechCrunch raves about the service this morning:

If you have a cell phone that supports the new TellMe mobile application, you will never use 411 again to find a business. It launches today at 5 AM PST.

TellMe mobile is a free Java application that you install on your phone. You can then find normal 411 information via a voice activated menu. Just hold the talk button and say the city and state you are searching in. Then say the business name. Phone and address information comes up on the screen. You can then call the business, see a map and/or get driving directions, and send the information to a friend via SMS. I’ve been testing Tell Me for the last two weeks on a Samsung SPH-A900 with Sprint, and I’m hooked. The best part is that the service is completely free.

I couldn’t test the service with my Blackberry, but I look forward to being able to use this. Tellme has always seemed like a very smart company, and this new service looks like a winner.

The folks over at EVDOforums were kind enough to spam me today with details about their new EVDOmaps project. The point of EVDOmaps is to allow wireless broadband users to post quality of service details to an interactive map.

In their own words:

We’re using the latest in “Google Mashup” technology to “geocode” the records onto Google maps, allowing everyone to see where EVDO has been spotted, at what speeds, on what network carrier, and using what devices.

We expect to accomplish a few objectives with the new site:

- a cool and easy way to find out if EVDO is in a specific area.
- a way to get the word out about coverage, before official word is out
- a way to see if an area is ‘oversold’, and suffers from too many users
- a way to see how much benefit there is from antennas and amplifiers

While this feels like a rough pass at creating a useful tool for subscribers to submit, and present, their data I like the idea and hope others will consider to improve on the concept and offer some standard tests. Here’s hoping the carriers don’t use this tool to illegitimately boost their image.

I’m a big fan of Techdirt, and Carlo’s latest post on the ineffectiveness of the FCC and the lack of competition in U.S. telecom markets is well worth a read. As usual, no punches are pulled as he compares the U.S. and Japanese broadband markets. And you have to love the title.

We’ll Trade You Hawaii And A Player To Be Named Later For Your Telecom Regulator And Daisuke Matsuzaka

The FCC’s history of intervening in telecom markets is nothing if not consistent. Sadly, though, they’re consistent at being ineffective and unable to create a truly competitive environment that would benefit consumers and the nation’s economy as a whole. The biggest problem is that it doesn’t really seem to understand that real competition means more than having two actors in a given marketplace — a situation that often leads to the appearance of uncompetitive behavior.

And if you liked that, you won’t want to miss Stephen Colbert on AT&T.

O’Reilly Media is in the process of building the Asterisk Cookbook, and we’d like to invite the Asterisk community to contribute. We’re looking for two kinds of contributions. First,
we’re looking for problems you’d like to see solved in the book. If you need to make Asterisk do something and just can’t figure out how, let us know. We’ll try to solve the problem for you. Second, we’re looking for more advanced Asterisk users to contribute solutions to problems that they’ve faced.

We’ve created a wiki for this project, and we’d like to invite any interested parties from the ETel community to participate. The more feedback, problem requests, and recipes we can provide, the better this book will be. If you’re interested in participating, please see the details at
http://etel.wiki.oreilly.com/.. We will require people to have an account to edit this wiki, but there are no particular hurdles or restrictions in place — just drop me an email at bruce@oreilly.com and I’ll get you set up with edit access. Mainly we want to be able to acknowledge the people who help out.

Almost as soon as last week’s Stevenote was over, the iPhone backlash began - and with full justification. Its becoming ever more apparent that, what was to be the Apple of our ‘i’, is as locked down and closed as any other part of the mobile industry.

(Marc Hedlund, over at O’Reilly Radar, has contextualised many of the negative vibes and there are a couple good analyses by the NYT and Boing Boing.)

Today I was mulling over writing an article comparing the FIC Neo1973 with the iPhone, but someone’s beaten me to it…they square up pretty good, so here’s a challenge for the ETel community:

- Can we clone an open iPhone using something like the Neo1973?
- Can we create a handful of applications and a developer community to compete with iPhone?
- Can we beat Apple and Cingular to market in six months?
- Can such a challenge really demonstrate the strengths of open source telephony?
- Can open source telephony piggyback off the iPhone buzz?

Behold the T-Prize! A race between Apple-Cingular and OpenMoko-ETel, counting down to the biggest mobile event of 2007!

Anyone up for it?

There was a lot of talk when Linksys released some new IP phone models recently with the iPhone name about how this might impact the long-rumored Apple phone. (I reviewed one of the those iPhones last month). When Steve announced the iPhone yesterday, pretty much everyone assumed a deal had been made with Cisco (who owns Linksys) for the name. Then we saw a non-committal press release from Cisco, which made it sound like a deal was in the works but not yet signed, sealed and delivered.

Now news is hitting the wires that Cisco has filed a trademark infringement suit against Apple over the iPhone name. This could get interesting. I suspect the price Apple is surely going to have to pay for those six letters just got a lot higher.

When I reviewed the Linksys iPhone back in December I asked my contact at Cisco about the name and was told that Cisco acquired Infogear Technology Corporation in 2000, and Infogear had trademarked “iPhone” all the way back in 1996. I was also told that the CIT200 was the first Linksys-branded product in the iPhone family, which has been shipping since October of 2005.

Things are really heating up with our ETel conference next month! In addition to an outstanding line-up of keynotes and sessions, next month’s Emerging Telephony conference will also include a new Launch Pad event hosted by Om Malik that will highlight some of the most promising startups in this space.

We started doing this kind of event at the Web 2.0 conference, and it’s been a real crowd-pleaser. It makes perfect sense to extend the idea to ETel, where the startup landscape is rich and varied. They’re still accepting submissions, so if you’d like your company or project to be considered for the Launch Pad, fill out the form here. The deadline is Monday, January 22.

I’m really getting excited about this conference. Register now if you do want to miss the show that everyone will be talking about this year.

As a Muslim, the most sacred days in my calendar are Eid-ul-Adha and Eid-ul-Fitr, but a Macworld Stevenote is right there in bronze position.

So it doesn’t have a matter transportation pad, captive singularity fuel cell or time travel UI, but the mythical iPhone is finally with us…so significant, it gets its own tab on the Apple site.

So what can this baby do?

Looks like DigitWireless’ Fastap-enabled handets (covered here in a prior post) are about to find distribution with US and Mexican carriers.

We’re hoping to hear from DigitWireless’ David Levy at next month’s ETel, but it’ll be interesting to see how well the technology fares with larger deployments in key markets such as the US. Trials to date have resulted in an uptick of mobile services usages, so indications are that it’ll be well recieved.

This just out today from the consumer electronics Assoc. (CEA)… Factory-to-dealer sales of consumer electronics are projected to exceed $155 billion in 2007, or seven percent growth. CEA projects that display technologies will continue to be the star category in the industry and account for $22 billion in revenues for 2007

Apparently we were all thinking about Asterisk around here today. Besides the major AsteriskNOW announcement I covered earlier, Tim O’Reilly wrote an interesting post over on the O’Reilly Radar discussing our own Asterisk implementation, the real benefits we’re seeing from it, and his feelings that Asterisk is an under-appreciated open source success story.

I’ve been puzzled why there isn’t more focus on asterisk in the open source world, as it seems to me to be one of the really big new open source success stories.

It seems a bit like the early days of things like Perl and Linux, when they were happening under the radar, known to all the hands-on practitioners in the industry, but not covered much by the mainstream press.

I’m completely with Tim on this one. Asterisk is disruptive on many levels, not just to the old-school PBX industry. And it’s successes seem to be getting bigger every day. If you read this site regularly you know that.

We’ve done a lot of great Asterisk coverage here on ETel and at our previous ETel conference, and as Tim points out this year’s ETel conference will continue that tradition with Asterisk’s creator Mark Spencer giving one of the keynotes. But you can expect to learn about a lot more than just what Digium is up to at ETel, you’ll see how others are pushing the envelope with Asterisk.

The one thing I can offer up that Tim didn’t is a special discount code for ETel readers. Sign up using the code etel07blogd before January 8 and save an additional 10% off of the Early Registration price.

It’s great to see that Phil Wolff, Jim Courtney and the other good folks at Skype Journal are back online after more than a month-long hiatus. It sounds like it was a combination of holidays, technical, and personal hurdles that took them off the air, and I know I’m not the only one that is glad to see them back in my RSS feed. The blogosphere was worried, which is a real sign that Skype Journal has been publishing important and useful information and commentary. They’re obvioulsy still working on the new site, I notice some of the archive links aren’t working correctly and the layout is pretty minimalist at the moment, but no doubt those things will get ironed out in short order. Phil mentions that 2007 is the year they plan to move Skype Journal from a full-time hobby to a thriving business, and I look forward to seeing how the site and business develop.

Digium has released their AsteriskNOW software appliance today, which promises to drastically reduce the complexities involved in installing and running the popular open source PBX Asterisk. True to their word, Digium has released the entire package, including their new GUI front end to the complex Asterisk application, under the GPL open source license. We’re big believers in open source at O’Reilly, and it’s great to see a company like Digium walking the walk here, as there was some speculation that the GUI front end they have developed would be a proprietary product.

I don’t have any personal experience or feedback on Digium’s new front end to Asterisk yet, but it clearly addresses a large need that many have had with Asterisk, to simplify the installation and set up process. Asterisk is known for being a tricky and finicky beast to install correctly and tame, with set up and administration tasks normally requiring a seasoned Linux command-line guru. It sounds as if Digium has made real strides in this area with this new release.

AsteriskNOW is being labeled as a “software appliance”, meaning that it comes with a version of the underlying OS (Linux) and everything else you should need to run the Asterisk application. Probably one of the biggest advantages in going this route is that Asterisk admins no longer need to worry about things like kernel versions and package dependencies. Digium also makes a point of claiming that unlike other Linux distributions used to deploy Asterisk, there are no unnecessary components that might compromise security or performance included in the AsteriskNOW distribution.

There’s also a newly designed web site to support the AsteriskNOW release, which includes documentation, developer blogs, forums, and other developer resources.

This space is getting very interesting. Clearly there’s some competition brewing between Digium, the creators of Asterisk, and Fonality, who sell a hosted Asterisk-based product for SMBs and recently bought Trixbox (formerly Asterisk@Home) and added a GUI front end to that more user-friendy version of Asterisk. We’ll be evaluating and producing some hands-on comparisons of the various Asterisk distributions and products here on ETel in the coming year, so stay tuned!

BoingBoing found a fun gallery of vintage cell phones today. Do you remember your first cell phone? Mine wasn’t one of these suitcase models, but it was a whole lot bigger and clunkier than today’s offerings.

I just started playing with a new mobile application called Fring that lets you IM and make VoIP calls to Skype and gTalk contacts. For now the software appears to be limited to a few Nokia devices. While I don’t think this is a super new project it’s the first I had heard of it. Here’s hoping 2007 ushers in a range of new mobile voice options. Get Fring here.

This is one of the more interesting Skype add-ons I’ve heard about recently. According to this BBC article, KishKish will be offering lie detector software that works in conjunction with Skype and will analyze the stress levels of the voice on the other end of a Skype call when the software is installed. (The KishKish site is down as I write this, so I don’t have too many details.). While one could imagine objections and privacy concerns about these kind of programs, Skype seems on board with the idea. The BBC article quotes Paul Amery, director of Skype the developer program:

This is a really excellent application, and the kind of thing we want to see more of. Lie Detector is the latest in a variety of product in our premium add-on programme which greatly enhance the Skype communication experience.

The software can reportedly monitor and display visual stress level indications in real time, as well as store calls for later analysis. (Thanks, Brian!)

Skype did always maintain that the free North American calling promotion would go away at the end of this year, and they’ve now made it official. Skype 3.0 for Windows has gone gold today along with the news that starting in January it will cost $29.95/year for outbound (Skype Out) calling to the U.S. and Canada. There is a $14.95/year introductory rate for those who sign up for the plan during the first month.

$30 a year pretty drastically undercuts most other comparable calling plans, but it’s a whole lot more than free and it can be difficult to get people to change their habits and start paying for something they’ve gotten used to getting for no cost. Especially with the inconsistent and sometimes extremely poor quality that many (including myself) experience with Skype Out calls to the PSTN, this may put a dent in their North American usage. The change is being hailed by some as a welcome move towards a business model that might actually generate some real revenue though. IP Democracy points out:

The $29.95/year charge is slightly noteworthy because it reflects the first viable attempt by Skype to start generating serious mass-market revenues since the VoIP pioneer was purchased by eBay in October 2005 for $2.5 billion, a figure scoffed at by some industry experts as exhorbitant. Now, at least, eBay is on the road to getting a reasonable payback from Skype.

The Venice Project has (sort of) launched via an invite only public beta. Until you get an invite from a pal checkout some official screenshots and read the early feedback to peak your curiousity.

Just when you thought it was safe to dorkout the Nerd (aka Ward Mundy) returns with a new tutorial showing how to setup his US Zipcode Weather Station on Asterisk. Major geek props to Ward for documenting some seriously nerdy ways to use a PBX such as how to add an iTunes Telephone Controller. Hats off, my man.

ABC News is reporting a story that claims the FBI can access and control a cellphone that is turned off, activate its microphone and transmit any audio it picks up to a FBI listening post.

Recently, Stewart Butterfield was one of the first to show off the N95.

Today, news is out that Kevin Rose has iPhone details! Currently, Revision Premium Members can watch his video here about it.

Or, just read the same excerpt I read on macnn.com today:

The new unit will ship in 4GB and 8GB storage capacities for $249 and $449…will feature two separate batteries to power the MP3 player portion of the device as well as the telephone aspect of the handset…will feature a slide-out keyboard and a touch-screen face…reportedly works with all major phone providers including T-Mobile, Cingular, and Verizon with support for all major standards including GSM, TDMA, CDMA, and Spring PCS.

Note: I presume that was an error and they meant Sprint PCS. :)

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!

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.

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.

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. ;)

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!

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.

There’s been quite a bit of positive coverage on the launch of the TalkPlus service this week (read Ken Camp’s post for an excellent analysis of the offering and links to many of the other posts about it). I met with TalkPlus at the recent ITExpo and like most others in the VoIP press, I was impressed with their technology and business plans. I agree with Ken and others that their demo was one of the most interesting from that crowded convention center. I also spent some time talking with TalkPlus CEO and founder Jeff Black over a more relaxed dinner (thanks Andy!), and found him to be a smart and fascinating person who has impeccable credentials for creating a successful Voice 2.0 business. Add to that the fact that O’Reilly author and all-around telecom guru John Todd is the CTO, and I think this is one venture that will quickly rise to the top of the crop of the current wave of telecom startups.

At its most basic level, TalkPlus allows you to assign multiple mobile phone numbers to your cell phone. While a simple concept, it turns out to be quite a powerful model for a wide range of applications where you might want specialized phone numbers (dating, ebay, doctors, lawyers, to name just a few). Along with the multiple number capability comes more advanced screening and voice mail management. TalkPlus believes this capability can improve people’s privacy and offer increased control over their mobile life, and I agree. And while it sounds simple, anyone with much knowledge of the current mobile infrastructure in the U.S. will realize it’s far from trivial to implement such a system. TalkPlus has been working on the technical end for over two years and has a slew of patents behind their work. I’m convinced they have a good understanding of the difficult carrier climate they need to work in.

Two other posts I’d recommend for those interested in TalkPlus are from Tom Keating and Jon Arnold. As usual, Tom provides a thorough look at the new company and their service offering. Jon picks up on the carrier perspective, which I agree is important here. As Jon points out, even though we like to decry the walled gardens and difficulties in working with the incumbent carriers, at least here in the U.S., a company like TalkPlus who is offering value for the carriers rather than competing with them for their core business is in a much stronger position. In fact, I think the reason that TalkPlus’ launch is garnering such positive attention is that their service looks promising and offers value from both the end-user and the carrier perspective. You can sign up for the beta service now at the TalkPlus web site.

Last week, Microsoft launched Windows Live Barcode, bringing Denso’s two-dimensional, ‘quick response’ QR Code format to the Windows Mobile platform. The service consists of two elements:

- Online tools to generate contact cards or notebook entries (450 character limit).
- A mobile ’scanning’ application to read QR codes into a Windows Mobile handset (this doesn’t seem to be available from the site).

I’ve long thought the potential of 2D codes, like QR, Semacode and others, was enormous - but very few handsets are equipped, by default, with the capability to scan codes. Consequently, we see very few codes embedded in online services or the physical world. Microsoft’s move could help to kick start code usage…

I have a niggling feeling that there’s a compelling intersection of microformats and 2D codes. I wonder if LinkedIn, Upcoming, Flickr and other personal publishing service began to display their microformatted data as 2D codes, whether we’d see a corresponding uptick in code support on handsets…are 2D codes the enablers for mobile microformats?

Months ago, I was planning to commission Surj to bring his vision of an open source mobile handset to us at Orange. One of the capabilities we thought might yield some interesting applications was a bunch of onboard sensors that could aggregate various metrics for use by service providers. Essentially, transforming each handset into a spime.

Imagine…
- Hyper-accurate, block-by-block weather reports generated by polling temperature, moisture and pressure readings from every mobile device in a given region.
- Public transport services that route buses to locations where multiple passengers need pickups.
- News services that ask users near a newsworthy event to snap cameraphone images.

Last week, TomTom and Vodafone announced a partnership that takes the first steps in using mobile handsets in a distributed sensor network. Initially, TomTom is planning to utilise the locations of Vodafone handsets to feed traffic information to its customer’s GPS units. That’s a great idea, though as The Register points out, ‘Just pray you don’t get caught among motorists on their way to an O2 convention’.

Though the terms of the TomTom-Vodafone deal haven’t bene made public, this kind of ‘Crowdsensing’ could prove to be a lucrative platform business for mobile operators. I’ll watch the TomTom experiment with interest, but it’ll be exciting to hear the opinions of the ETel community on the usefulness and feasibility of such infrastructures as well as their ideas for innovative business models and services.

UPDATE: Wired’s Tagging Phones to Track Traffic covered IntelliOne and AirSage’s mobile traffic sensing services. IntelliOne are using GPS data and, interestingly, selling to media outlets, but profit-sharing with carriers - a potentially lucrative platform business? AirSage, on the other hand, are looking to service government agencies with traffic data.

Word is coming out that Cisco is purchasing the mobile software company Orative for $31 million. Orative’s software allows tighter integration between Cisco’s VoIP business systems and cell phones. Orative’s Enterprise Server sits inside of a customer’s firewall connected to Cisco’s Unified CallManager IP-PBX, and works with Orative’s cell phone client software that can run on Blackbery, BREW, J2ME and Symbian OS devices (with Windows Mobile in the works). Not surprisingly, Ken Camp is already on the story. Seems like a logical move for Cisco that should help extend the range and use of their products.

One of the more interesting bits of news coming out of this week’s Astricon is a new channel partner program being launched by iotum. Iotum CEO and VoIP power blogger Alec Saunders posts some thoughts on the new program here, noting that partner programs don’t mean much without actual partners and that iotum has already signed on several, including Angel.com, Core Telecom Innovations Inc, ESCAUX, The Flat Planet Phone Company, Integrics Limited, and Nufone Incorporated.

Alec also points out that programs like this are a “validation of the use of XML based web services to connect up new communications applications,” which he believes is one of the foundations of the Voice 2.0 platform. That’s something we heartily agree with here at O’Reilly — opening up APIs and using open and standards-based methods of interconnecting systems is a great way to encourage adoption of a company’s new products and services and to help create an active developer ecosystem around a new technology. This is something that iotum clearly understands (and which Alec has written about extensively), as they continue to expand the reach of their products with innovative partnerships and deals. By creating an iotum Asterisk module and interfacing with products like PhoneGnome and participating in developer programs like AOL’s Open AIM Phoneline initiative, iotum is quickly becoming a shining example of the new breed of telecom companies (ok, ok, Voice 2.0 companies ;) that will succeed without having to become entrenched in the slow and restrictive business models of the incumbent telecom carriers. No walled gardens for these guys!

Today EQO Communications announced support for RIM Blackberry and Windows Mobile devices, allowing EQO’s VoIP calling and IM services to be extended to these platforms. EQO supports all of the major IM systems (AIM, ICQ, GoogleTalk, Jabber, MSN, Yahoo! and Skype). While EQO had previously focused on bringing IM and VoIP to more common and inexpensive cellular handsets, this move really makes sense as smartphones with full keyboards, and which are often bundled with wireless data services, are a natural fit for IM. Having just joined the ranks of Blackberry users myself, I’ll definitely be giving the EQO Mobile services a spin on that platform.

One thing’s for sure, Fonality can’t be accused of wasting any time. Not even three weeks after Fonality announced their acquisition of trixbox (formerly Asterisk@Home), comes a major new 2.0 release of the popular Asterisk-based distribution, that includes a powerful new global, web-based GUI package manager, support for Sangoma voice cards, and integration with LumenVox’s Speech Engine.

Fonality CEO Chris Lyman told me that while they have had 4-5 engineers working on the new release for the past 4 months, in many ways they have just been building on all of the excellent work done by trixbox founder Andrew Gillis and the trixbox open source community. Lyman was clearly excited about the new trixbox release and spoke passionately about his belief in the benefits of open source, and the value that Fonality sees in supporting a free and open version of Asterisk alongside their commercial Asterisk-based products. Lyman was particularly happy about the progress that has been made in the trixbox 2.0 release towards a much simpler installation and configuration process, and views the new GUI as “a milestone of maturity for this open source movement.”

Now that all of the applications in the trixbox suite can be installed from one GUI package manager, Lyman points out that it is very easy for users to run as lean or as heavy systems as they want. If you want to go heavy, besides Asterisk, trixbox comes with Linux, SugarCRM, MySQL, FreePBX, FOP, and HUDlite. Lyman likes to use a variation on the LAMP acronym to describe the trixbox platform - LAAMPS, adding an extra A for Asterisk and S for SugarCRM to the Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP/Perl/Python label. And Lyman proudly explains that they are reaching the achievement of being able to set up everything in the trixbox ecosystem without ever touching a command line.

The 2.0 version of Skype for the Mac has finally gone gold. The last time I gave a beta version of 2.0 for the Mac a spin I wasn’t very impressed with the video quality, it seemed not quite as good as iChat and significantly worse than SightSpeed. But now that a final version has been released I’ll give it a fresh chance and report back here soon. (Though if the comments on the Share Skype announcement are any indication, I shouldn’t expect much. It sounds like Skype may have actually sacrificed video quality in order to support older Mac models). On a more positive note, one of my colleagues who had experienced consistent problems using the Mac version of Skype for business conference calls reports that the final release seems to have fixed the troubles he was having.

While I think labeling the iPod Shuffle as a “PBX” in this scenario is a bit misleading, this new iBlue Mac-based IP-PBX product from Berlin-based 4S Newcom is certainly intriguing. It looks like the PBX software gets loaded on an iPod Shuffle, which you can then boot a Mac Mini from to turn it into a mini-phone system running the 4S IP PBX solution.

The iBlue entry level system is expected to start shipping in early November, just in time for VON Europe, and will consist of a Mac mini, the iPod Shuffle with the 4S IP PBX licensed for up to 250 users and 30 parallel calls, and five snom300 VoIP phones.

For the past hour YouTube appears to be completely offline (no 404 notice, etc) and revver has been having its own server issues (mainly 500 errors).

NOTE: Both services appear to be back online and functioning fine.

Scalability, QoS and the five 9’s isn’t just a telco thing anymore. I am starting to wonder if P2P is the only realistic way forward for delivering video content without bringing down an entire network either fiscally or technically.

Microsoft research launched SLAM which stands for “Social Location Annotation Mobile.”

A prototype social software for communicating and sharing with groups of friends and family, primarily on mobile devices. SLAM enables real-time communication, location awareness and photo-sharing.

Requirements include having a Windows Mobile device (and friends who have such devices.) :(

Scenarios for Slam

Real-time Coordination: Out on a Friday night? No need to decide on a place and time to meet in advance, just send a message to your friends when you’re ready to go and see where everybody is. Some people may be at a restaurant, others on the move, but everybody can send messages and coordinate immediately. Imagine coordinating a ski trip this way, too.

Instant Group Photo Sharing: You are always seeing beautiful and interesting things, but it’s too hard to send pictures to people with your cameraphone. Use Slam to take a picture and send it to a group of friends with only a few clicks. Try forming a “celebrity sightings” cameraphone group or share pictures with your family throughout your day.

Broadcast communication: Need a babysitter? Send a message to your “babysitters” group saying “Can someone come over for a few hours right now?” All your potential sitters get the message right when you send it, wherever they are.

While on the topic of Asterisk news LumenVox recently released a integrated speech solution for Asterisk-based applications.

The Speech Starter Kit includes 1-port Speech Engine Lite & the Asterisk Connector Bridge.
It is included for free in Business Edition, $245 for open source.

I’m waiting for my copy to arrive so I can give this a test run, guess who I plan to use as my ivsp?

Instant Solutions recently launched ChanSkype the first Skype channel
driver for Asterisk. One would assume that they leveraged the work done
to reverse engineer the Skype protocol but they actually went a more
legit, albeit, low-tech route to get the job done. Earlier today I
spoke with Paulo Mannheimer, a programmer on the project. He described their
implementation which instantiates a Skype client for each call and,
using proprietary kernel space drivers and X automation, enables
Asterisk to communicate with the Skype network.

Currently, this supports calling Skype users and PSTN numbers (using a
SkypeOut balance), bridging SIP channels, and offers the ability to make
simultaneous calls. They’re about to launch the ability to accept Skype
In calls and will soon be exposing presence information in the dialplan.

Licensing is on a per-channel basis, and they’ve tested it on up to 60
active calls on a Dual Xeon 3.0 GHz machine with 6 Gb of memory with
“no significant performance impact.”

I’ve been wanting to hook Asterisk up to Skype for awhile and can’t wait
to give this a try and report back.

Bryan Martin, the CEO and Chairman of 8×8, started off the TMC Internet Telephony conference in San Diego with a passionate plea for network neutrality. Martin’s conference-opening keynote traced the relatively brief history of VoIP and concluded with a discussion of the rapidly-changing regulatory climate here in the U.S. around IP communications, and the suggestion that the time is now for the industry to get a handle on these issues and speak up to our legislators.

Martin pointed out that while it is widely predicted that a new telecom bill won’t see the light of day this year, it is highly likely that within the next year or two we will see new regulations and laws that may have serious impacts on the IP communications sector. Martin particularly pleaded for adoption of some kind of network neutrality rules, which is not surprising as 8×8’s main Packet8 VoIP offering could be at the mercy of Internet service providers who are increasingly looking to compete with companies like 8×8 with their own VoIP products. Martin advocated making the case for network neutrality by focusing on the impact this issue will have on end users of technology, pointing out that much of the press so far has focused on what the effects will be on service and content providers, but if we start talking about consumers (voters) more, we may have more success influencing career politicians. 8×8 has even produced a white paper (PDF) to help make this case, and I think they did a good job with it.

The crowd here seemed sympathetic to Martin’s perspective, and I get the impression that there aren’t many in the audience who oppose at least the principle of a non-discriminatory network policy. Again, not surprising though at a conference with “Internet Telephony” in its name.

Rich Tehrani has the scoop on Pingtel’s recently announced deal with Amazon.com and rightly declares this a major boost for open source telecommunications and the SIP protocol. Amazon will be replacing a legacy PBX and cutting over some 5,000 stations to Pingtel’s SIPxchange Enterprise Communications Solution platform. As Rich points out, clearly telephone service is mission-critical for Amazon, so they must be convinced that Pingtel’s SIP-based deployment is hardened, stable, and up to the task at hand.
Ted Wallingford is also enthusiastic about the deal and sees it as a real shot across Cisco’s bow.

Another point that Rich makes is that while Asterisk gets the lion’s share of the media attention, this deal proves they’re not the only player in the open source PBX game. And as the jabs that Pingtel takes at Asterisk in the Amazon press release show (as well as the growing success of companies like Fonality), Digium can expect to see increased competition in the open source PBX space.

$1.65 Billion in stock is a lot of money but you gotta admit that an arsenal of YouTube videos would be great content for the rumored gTalk device shipping sometime next year. Not to mention, if you agree with Janus and Niklas isn’t video officially the next thing to tackle? Things are heating up in this space.

Those of us who run Kannel will be excited to learn that the stable branch has been updated for the first time in nearly two years! There are over “200 changesets.” If Open Source SMS Gateways are your thing then head over to kannel.org and get your phreaky text messaging on.

One day I’ll post a “how to” setup Kannel userguide. In the meantime, you can learn a lot from simply R’ingTFM.

Also, I do have some old posts that were really just notes to myself but still possibly useful: passing variables from Asterisk to Kannel. I wanted to simply send, receive, and respond to SMS messages using CallerID info I was getting from Asterisk, etc, etc. Unfortunately, the SMS app in Asterisk is confusing because it only supports landline SMS if I understood it right. Unlimited text messaging plans and cheap phones were never so useful. :)

Also, if Open Source MMS Gateways are what you’re really after head over to Mbuni and get your data phreak on.

Occasionally I come across blog posts that require serious contemplation and can take awhile to digest, and Alec Saunders, co-founder and CEO of iotum and a prolific blogger, has written more than his share of these. I knew I was in for another when Alec dropped me a note the other day about his latest essay, Voice 2.0 A Year Later, which was partly inspired by a wave of recent grumbling by some (myself included) about a couple of the new start-ups in the telecom space. I knew I wasn’t going be skimming this one.

Alec has been a vocal proponent of what many are now calling Voice 2.0, and his company iotum provides a shining example of the kind of exciting applications this future will hold with their relevance engine. Alec penned the widely-cited Voice 2.0: A Manifesto for the Future, you guessed it, about a year ago, and it’s definitely both fascinating and pretty impressive to see how the ideas Alec expressed in his manifesto have fared in the span of just one year.

In Alec’s original essay he coined the term “Voice 2.0″, noting that telephony applications like Skype and PhoneGnome were beginning to take advantage of the Internet and predicting that companies that could capitalize on the combination of telephony and web technology were poised to explode on the scene. Alec saw the merger of “talk” and the web as the foundation of this application-centric communications shift he called Voice 2.0

We’re witnessing the beginnings of a titanic clash between the internet and the telecommunications industry. My hope is that clash will be the, albeit painful, evolution of Voice into a full blow internet application — the birth of Voice 2.0.

Alec’s Voice 2.0 is not something that can be easily explained in a sentence or two, and I won’t try and paraphrase his writing on the topic any more here, if you want to know more you should definitely go read his first essay on the topic. But the Voice 2.0 Manifesto does seem to be foreshadowing events in the telecom space, such as the growing need to separate (and standardize) the presentation layer of an application from the transport layer.

It’s interesting to note the signs of uptake in Alec’s current reflections on the state of Voice 2.0, as he’s seeing that consumers can now buy call originations and terminations, as well as identity services, from a variety of vendors, APIs are becoming common, and a batch of new and different telecom applications are emerging. Alec also points out the wisdom of AOL’s recent moves to open up it’s network to third-party applications and developers (like iotum), noting that in this type of scenario AOL handles all the origination/termination issues and network infrastructure, and telecom developers can (finally) focus their energies on their applications. That’s very Voice 2.0 and I agree with Alec that we’ll be seeing more opening up of networks like this, and it was a savvy move on AOL’s part. (And yes, I didn’t really expect to ever be using the words “savvy” and “AOL” in the same sentence.)

In fact, just today (as Alec is one of the first to point out), Skype is making similar moves by allowing developers to switch off the visible Skype UI within applications.

It’s the first indication that Skype will allow developers to separate the UI from the engine, and deliver what Peeter Mõtsküla referred to last April as Naked Skype.

I confess to bristling at the frequent adding of a “2.0″ suffix to seemingly any technology these days, but I’m slowly coming around on this one and think Alec’s Voice 2.0 vision is insightful and right on. And I’m already looking forward to next year’s essay.

I use the “Centre” spelling in the article title with malice aforthought, since the news item is out of India, discusses an upcoming documentary to be shown on Britain’s Channel 4, and reports the reaction of the Australian public. A article in The Hindu News Update Service states the British documentary will show personal banking information — including account information — bought and sold on the streets of India. According to the report, Australians would prefer to bank at financial institutions that keep their financial data on-shore rather than off-shore.

I have to admit that my first thought after I read this article was “how can VoIP fix this?” Certainly VoIP an/or cheap telephony is part of the problem; that’s likely how the calls went overseas in the first place. Almost inevitably, the data followed, and now bank customers may be paying the price.

But before we panic, I’d like to point out that financial data theft happens here in the US; you can buy and sell ATM card information over the Internet. I suspect the real question is whether similar call center leaks happen here in the US — what’s the baseline? After all, US call centers are an established industry, handle lots of money, and have a transient work force. I imagine that it’s easy enough to steal financial information if you’re a call center employee.

But to return to the original question: Can VoIP help instead of making the problem worse? Or will the contnued use of VoIP to drive business to the lowest-cost location inevitably lead to theft, and an inevitable backlash against outsourcing? Or should the VoIP community wash its hands of these problems and pray that someone else fixes them?

We’re organizing a meetup next Tuesday Oct 10th at The Phone Booth (25th & S Van Ness), a quirky bar with a long history (it was once a favorite watering hole for Pac Bell operators).

This is a potluck phone geek meetup, so bring your own phone (rotary phones especially). We’d like someone to bring a intercom or PBX system to hook all the phones up to create an improvised table-to-table intercom system.

So stop by Tuesday and throw back a pint or two.

In a very interesting Asterisk-related development, news is coming out today that Fonality has purchased Trixbox (formerly Asterisk@Home). Trixbox is a free, popular, and easily-installable GUI version of Asterisk, and Fonality is the company behind the very successful PBXtra Asterisk-based IP PBX. Clearly this move increases Fonality’s presence in this space and it will be interesting to see what they do with Trixbox and how they interact with the open source community. It’s certainly good to hear that Fonality is hiring Trixbox founder Andrew Gillis and that he’ll continue to lead the Trixbox community. The press release also makes it clear that Fonality intends to keep Trixbox free and open source (under the GPL license).

Trixbox will remain an open source project licensed under the general public license (GPL), which encourages innovative software development both within the Asterisk environment and the larger open source community.

“Trixbox is a thriving Asterisk community, unencumbered by licensing complexities. It was free, it is free and we are going to make sure it stays free.” said Chris Lyman, Fonality’s CEO and founder.

Tom Keating was way in front with this story, speculating about it in June and breaking the news and posting an in-depth interview with Fonality CEO Chris Lyman last night. Alec Saunders observes that this move really places Fonality in direct competition with Digium. I’m going to be speaking to Chris myself tomorrow, and I’ll follow up and post some more thoughts on this deal after our conversation.

I very much agree with what TelEvolution founder David Beckemeyer expresses so eloquently in his recent blog post, FCC clearly in bed with traditional telecom. David notes that with recent FCC actions like the VoIP 911 Order, the VoIP CALEA requirements, and now the Universal Service Fund for VoIP Order, there seems to be a real trend at the FCC to create new regulations designed to protect the incumbent telcos. (At the same time I also agree with David that it shouldn’t come as a surprise to companies looking to replace our traditional phone companies that they’re going to be required to fully implement 911 services.)

David plays closer attention to the fine print of these new regulations than most, and he isn’t happy with what he’s been seeing. Noting things like how there’s a buried footnote in the USF for VoIP order specifying that incumbents don’t have to pay into USF for DSL service revenues, and the unequal considerations given to telcos and VoIP providers, it sure does seem clear that the telco lobbyists are earning their money. Or as David wryly puts it, the USF and other VoIP-related orders might as well just be called “The Incumbent Preservation and Consumer Protection from Innovation Act”. I really enjoy David’s writing on Mr. Blog, partly because he’s not afraid to speak his mind:

What better way for the government to spend my tax dollars than to prop up a bloated, ecomonically dysfunctional industry so it can continue to suck the life out of the economy and destroy the competitive position of the United States in the global arena? The new USF FCC Order doesn’t even discuss its impact upon VoIP providers, but, thank God, it finds it will have minimal impact on the incumbents. Whew. That’s a relief. I’ll sleep better tonight knowing that.

Slashdot is running a story about a new line of bluetooth watches that vibrate when a call comes in on your cell phone, display the caller’s number, and allow you to press a button to send the call to voicemail. Now that’s a cool use of Bluetooth! As someone who is often fumbling for my cell phone when it’s ringing, and just about as often finding myself not wanting to take that particular call at that moment - this device would be great. The watches are being made through a partnership of Fossil and Sony Ericsson, will cost between $200 and $250, and should be available by the end of October. That’s a little rich for my blood, but if those come down a bit…

It’s great to see SightSpeed getting such rave reviews and picking up some new and exciting (and high-profile) customers. In the past couple of weeks I’ve read the glowing PC Magazine review that rates SightSpeed at the top of the video calling category, an item on IP Democracy about how John Garamendi (a democrat running for Lieutenant Governor in California) is using SightSpeed to send video email messages to supporters, and Andy Abramson pointing out that MTV is starting to use SightSpeed to incorporate home viewers on a huge video display wall they have on one of their most popular shows. I think MTV must have realized what many of us in the VoIP blogosphere have been saying for some time now — SightSpeed’s video quality rocks! I’m not surprised that PC Magazine rated SightSpeed so highly, that matches my experiences testing the various video calling products.

The MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) business has seen a lot of challengers but no real winners beyond niche markets, at least here in the U.S. And now one of the bigger efforts is giving up on the MVNO model as ESPN Mobile will shut off its services as of the end of the year and is halting all sales immediately.

After one year in business and an extensive marketing campaign, Wireless Week cites rumors that ESPN Mobile had only drummed up a mere 10,000 subscribers. Realizing that the model of running a mobile operator without owning the infrastructure is a tricky one (especially with $500 handsets), ESPN will instead try to license its mobile application and content to other wireless carriers. Which probably would have made a lot more sense for a content provider like ESPN in the first place.

After a quick perusal of my VoIP-related RSS feeds this morning it was clear that something interesting was going on over at Adobe. Om broke the story last night that Adobe is working on adding VoIP functionality to its ubiquitous Flash media player:

And now Adobe Systems wants to replicate its success in video space in the Voice over the Internet (VoIP) arena, making it easy to embed voice into web applications. GigaOM has learnt of a secret start-up project currently being incubated by the $1.9 billion in annual sales software giant. Some members of this startup come from the Macromedia Breeze (now called Acrobat Connect Professional) conferencing group. (Breeze is a Flash based web-conferencing system, much like WebEx.) Though less than a year old, the start-up has started to attract some serious VoIP talent.

…

The charter for the start-up is to enhance “Flash” and add support for various voice-over-IP protocols including SIP. They have to come up with ways to make Flash-based-voice work with some of the commonly used signaling systems. These are huge challenges, but if they can overcome all these issues, they could be onto something big. For starters, they could enable web based calling, and prevent the technical hell that comes with many soft phones of today.

VoIP bloggers rightly jumped on this story, as it could be a very big deal. Om points out that just one of the possible killer apps here is if mobile Flash starts supporting VoIP, this could be an end-run around all the companies working on adding VoIP and wifi capabilities for mobile phone users. Tom Keating whipped out an interview he did with an unnamed developer at Adobe about this project, and looks at the possibilities this could lead to in the social networking space. Alec Saunders thinks it’s a great idea though points out that there are some serious technical hurdles to get over before Adobe could truly create a standardized VoIP platform. Ken Camp sees it as more proof that VoIP is rapidly evolveing into the unified communications tool we often talk about in these circles and that Adobe is showing some real foresight and leadership in this area.

While I may not get up as early as some of my fellow VoIP bloggers, I share their excitement at this development.

O’Reilly’s Linux DevCenter has an interesting post today by Carla Schroder about her experiences putting together homemade wireless access points.

Building your own wireless access point, or router, or firewall using Linux and a single-board computer is fun, with the usual bonus of having complete control over your stuff. There are kazillions of tiny Linuxes- which one should you try?

My latest fun has been replacing those little blue consumer boxes with real homegrown wireless access points and routers. Yes, cheap n quick is nice, but reliability and configurability are even nicer.

If you like to put things like this together or have been wondering abut the trade-off’s of the various “tiny” Linux distos, you should definitely go give Carla’s post a read.

Finally there’s an official beta version of Skype’s 2.0 client software that includes video calling available for Mac users. (There was a “preview” version before and some unauthorized beta versions made their way out into the wild). I’ve just given it a quick spin, and while the interface is clear and friendly and the standard Skype functionality all works as expected, I wasn’t very impressed with the video quality I experienced. It definitely wasn’t as crisp or clear as video calls I’ve made recently using SightSpeed 5.0 on this same platform and connection. There’s been other rumblings recently about Skype service quality issues, I hope this isn’t a sign of things to come for many people’s favorite VoIP service.

Om has pulled out the two most impressive statistics from a recent study by Cable Data News about VoIP adoption: North American cablecos now have almost 4.7 million VoIP customers, and are signing up new ones at the very impressive rate of 11,000 per day. According to the study the cable companies have signed up over a million new VoIP customers in the second quarter alone.

Its long been widely recognized that the cable companies were the best poised to pull off the fabled “triple play” and study after study lately is confirming that they’re making the most headway in getting customers to buy bundles of voice, data, and tv. I know that in my neck of the woods Comcast has started aggressively marketing their VoIP services and triple play bundles. As Om notes, the pressure is really heating up on the telcos. It’s going to be interesting to see if they’re going to survive in this climate and be able to hang on to their telephone customers amidst growing competition and pricing pressure.

In a week sure to be chock full of product announcements coming out of Fall VON, the first one that caught my eye is from the folks at Voxlib who just released a tool for using Skype from any mobile phone.

Vox for Skype is unique among the products vying to get Skype tied into your mobile phone in that it doesn’t require any software to be downloaded or installed onto the mobile handset. You do need to install the Vox for Skype app on your PC, but it interfaces with your mobile phone with SMS and voice prompts via an IVR. Use of Vox for Skype is free for now, but I would expect that to change once they’ve attracted a decent amount of users.

As Voxlib president and CEO Stéphane Marceau explained to me, they decided to go this route so they could make the service work for the largest possible audience. Considering that most mobile users already have some familiarity with IVRs, Vox for Skype is a tool that can practically instantly allow any Skype user to extend their service to their mobile phone. While I would probably prefer a phone-driven application to handle this kind of thing, it’s hard to argue with Voxlib’s plan for launching with the largest audience reach possible.

I’m sorry that I wasn’t able to fit the Fall VON conference into my schedule this year, it’s already sounding like a great show. Om has a nice preview of what to expect, and Alec Saunders already appears to be blogging up a storm from the conference. Even though I can’t be in Boston, I’ll be dressing in solidarity with my VoIP peers tomorrow anyway - I have a closet full of hawaiian shirts.

Luca Filigheddu has just posted Mac and Linux versions of his popular Firefox and Thunderbird VoIP extensions and I’m happy to report that the Mac Firefox version seems to work great on my MacBook Pro running OS X 10.4.7. I’m having some slight issues with it not automatically recognizing U.S.-style phone number formats on random web pages, but I expect that will get ironed out before the final release. The extension allows users to easily click on any number in the browser window and dial it, presents a simple but elegant phone menu in the browser’s chrome, and offers a browser sidebar with address book info — all features that are powerful and simple to use.

Not surprisingly, Ken Camp has the first post with analysis of this that I’ve seen, and I completely agree with Ken’s take:

The larger issue…the really important point…the forward-thinking key here, is that Abbeynet is steadily moving forward with what I believe is the real future of VoIP. Softphones are dead. They don’t add value. Not really. The value, and the evolution to unified communications is toward softphones as plug-ins, widgets and imbedded tools. The next-generation softphone won’t be a client you install at all. It will be a component of the web page, a component of the application. It will be where you need it to be.

Softphones are not nearly as convenient or useful as integrated systems like these AbbeyNet VoIP plugins, which is the direction that I expect VoIP software to continue in. The ability to click on any phone number on any web page to launch a call is a powerful one, and I can understand why AbbeyNet’s initial release of their VoIP Firefox and Thunderbird plug-ins generated so much interest. If, like me, you’re a Mac or Linux user and you’ve been dying to give these plug-ins a try, now’s the time. Click on over to Luca’s blog for the download links.

Ken Camp has the skinny on my friend and colleague Brian McConnell’s latest improvements to his innovative Radio Handi service - the addition of a Stream Code directory service.

Brian and I have talked a bit about this new Stream Codes Directory Service over the past couple of months. Here’s an example of how unifying communications gives more freedom to users. This service can take Internet broadcasting to a new level. And audio streams really provide just an introduction. I expect to see other media streams in the directory in the future.

MP3 players are so common they’re built into our phones today, but other consumer electronics devices can easily support streaming media. We’ve seen talk about place-shifting television with Slingbox and the like. This simple service can take the pain out of listening to podcasts and make it as simple as a radio. And it leads quickly to imbedded Internet radio. Or you can listen via the phone if you like…any phone.

Ken is really out in front with the VoIP news these days, whenever a new interesting announcement is made I can count on Ken having some insightful and practically instant coverage. I hope to get Brian to post more details about the Stream Code directory service and Radio Handi here on ETel in the near future.

Very interesting news coming out of Dulles, VA this morning. AOL has announced a new developer initiative centered on its AIM Phoneline service which includes releasing APIs that will allow developers to personalize AIM Phoneline by adding unique ring and ringback tones, enable a wide variety of USB devices to work with the service, and most importantly build new call management functionality into the service.

AOL has been interesting to watch lately as it struggles with the reality that its old business model is toast, and moves like this to open up its platforms to encourage a stronger and healthier developer eco-system are certainly encouraging. A lot of analysts have noted that AOL has not done much to capitalize on its dominant position in the IM market. Time will tell if positive moves like this are going to help shape a turn-around or are simply too little too late.

One of the things that jumps out from this morning’s press release is that iotum is one of the companies that will be showcased at next week’s VON roll-out of AOL’s new initiative and are already plugged in to what AOL is doing. This isn’t surprising to me, the very smart folks at iotum have been aggressively pursuing various means of getting their intelligent call-filtering technology out there to consumers, and this is a great way to expand their reach and gain exposure for their relevance engine. We’ve written quite a bit about iotum before on ETel and I remain impressed and convinced that they will go far. Deals like this and things like the work they’ve been doing in creating an iotum Asterisk module demonstrate that they “get it”. And iotum co-founder Alec Saunders regularly writes some of the most thoughtful posts on developer programs I’ve seen in the telecom space.

I believe this is not only a coup for iotum, but for AOL as well. They wisely chose a very relevant (sorry!) player in this space to showcase their developer launch. Jeff Pulver and Mark Evans both have some interesting analysis of iotum’s role in the announcement. I’ll definitely be watching closely to see how this one plays out.

Update: Ken Camp just blogged about this also, with some added insight from the players at iotum, MyNuMO and AOL, and now Alec Saunders has weighed in with the iotum perspective.

There’s been quite an uproar in the blogosphere over a recent article on AppleInsider that quotes analysts from American Technology Research saying that the release of the long-rumored Apple-designed cell phone is imminent and that it “is likely to revolutionize the handset industry.”

“Our research indicates that an Apple-designed smart phone has moved from concept to prototype and recently has progressed to near completion as a production unit,” analyst Shaw Wu told clients in a research note on Tuesday. “We believe this smart phone has been in development for over 12 months and has overcome substantial challenges including design, interference, battery life and other technical glitches.”

Now taking into account the fact that Apple has scheduled one of its famous big press conferences for Sept. 12, and has just made a bunch of system upgrade announcements (so Steve clearly won’t be talking about those), lots of people are expecting him to announce the mysterious iPhone next week. If AppleInsider’s right we can expect the Apple phone to have “an iPod nano-like candy bar form factor and come in three colors.”

I have to confess that this is one rumor I hope is true. If anyone can design an exciting handset it’s Apple.

Our friends at Make just found a great detailed description for creating your own custom USB phone using an old Western Electric 2600 headset telephone, by Noelix over on the Instructables site. (If you haven’t visited Instructables yet, prepare to spend some serious time browsing around this fascinating DIY site). Warning, soldering will be required.

The widespread acceptance of mobile phone technology is rapidly obsoleting the once common payphone, on U.S. street corners at least. Even though I live in a location where I can’t receive a cell phone signal, the disappearance of public pay phones is one of the reasons I own a cell phone — it’s not nearly as easy as it once was to find a public phone to use in this country. There’s definitely a certain amount of charm to some of the more creative pay phones and enclosures, and there is a small niche group of collectors who are always on the hunt for them.

Those folks will appreciate the interesting payphone site that BoingBoing pointed to yesterday, the payphone project. The site features “stories, pictures, phone numbers and news from payphones and public telephony.” Don’t miss the gallery of photos of payphones from around the world, there’s some real good ones there.

Susan Crawford has just posted a very scary analysis of the DOJ’s proposed draft amendment to CALEA, highlighting 5 major problems she sees with it and asking that we all start paying closer attention to this legislation and take appropriate action.

We’ve been talking about how the new backdoor access and reporting requirements for VoIP services are sure to stifle innovation for awhile around here (that was the theme of Brad Templeton’s talk at this year’s Emerging Telephony conference in January), but Susan points out some other very big red flags to this legislation.

For instance, I had no idea that the proposed language would force all online services to have a point of presence in the U.S. As Susan points out this has very serious implications:

This is a very big deal. This means that any entity that allows people here in the U.S. to communicate has to have servers here. Remember ICQ? They started in Israel. They didn’t have servers here. This means that no startup in any other country can help us communicate without being subject to the design desires of U.S. law enforcement. What?

This point of presence requirement is now found in China — they, too, want to make it easy for law enforcement to listen in and then arrest people.

It’s a gripping read. Please take the time to at least inform yourself about the possible ramifications of what’s being considered in this new, but definitely not improved, CALEA act. The EFF has posted a PDF of the proposed language.

The fundamental premise behind an ecosystem strategy is that innovations by others make your own innovations more valuable. As the vendor, your goal is to position yourself as the platform of choice for launching new and innovative applications in your market. You want lots of developers supporting your product. Doing so allows you to position your company and product as a platform for innovation, especially amongst the highly influential (and notoriously early adopter) developer community.

Jim Van Meggelen is featured on the latest entry in Jon Arnold’s Canadian Thought Leaders podcast series, speaking about open source telecommunications. Jim is the coauthor of our excellent Asterisk book, Asterisk: The Future of Telephony, one of the founders of the thriving Toronto Asterisk Users Group, and really an expert in this field.

Jim feels that it is time for the PBX to evolve into something more than it has been in the past, and that open source is going to help make that happen. Certainly the widespread success that Asterisk is seeing today and the innovative applications that people are beginning to build with it is one indication that Jim is right on the money.

One point that Jim makes in this podcast that I really agree with is that it’s not necessarily the cost or licensing differences that open source systems offer that is driving this revolution, but more that fact that these new open platforms are much more conducive to supporting a healthy and innovative developer community than the proprietary walled-garden models we’ve traditionally seen in telecommunications. We’re now beginning to see some of the fruits of a more “developer-driven” ecosystem.

Jim and Jon also discuss how telecom hardware is rapidly becoming commoditized and one of the shifts that is happening now is that it’s really becoming “all about the software,” and they also touch on some of the innovative new products and services that are emerging today, like ioutum.

Jon has been posting some very interesting podcasts over on PulverMedia, I recommend checking them out.

Google announced today that the GoogleTalk client just got some new features, including voicemail, file transfer and photo sharing, and an IM presence feature that will display the music you’re currently listening to. Ted Wallingford, who is not “nearly as impressed with GoogleTalk’s new features as its developers seem to be,” rightly points out that these are all features Mac users have had with iChat for quite some time. (It’s great to have Ted back and showing up in my RSS feed again - don’t miss him over on his new online digs, Signal to Noise).

GoogleTalk has received some bashing in the press recently for its extremely low usage numbers, and I’d have to agree with Ted (and Mark Evans and Ben Metcalfe and others) that these additions are nothing to get too excited about. Especially as I can’t even try it out since there still isn’t a Mac version. But TechCrunch does point out one interesting GoogleTalk development buried in the CNET article about this latest upgrade: that Google and AOL will soon have their IM systems talking to each other. With AIM’s massive IM penetration, this can only mean good things for GoogleTalk.

Digium, the company behind the popular Asterisk open source PBX, has just taken $13.8 million in Series A funding from Matrix Partners. As usual, Om has all the details as well as a nice little interview with Mark Spencer, Digium’s founder and the creator of Asterisk. Mark claims he’s a “lazy programmer” and that’s why he’s kept Asterisk so simple. (I know people who would disagree with both parts of that statement.) Preston Gralla thinks this “should be the final nail in the coffin of old-style PBXs” and I have to agree.

Asterisk runs on cheap hardware, and is infinitely customizable. Given all that, why would anyone buy an old-style PBX, or not replace their existing PBX with Asterisk?

In fact, at O’Reilly we’ve done exactly that and have recently replaced the PBX at our Sebastopol, California headquarters with Asterisk. Stay tuned for more information about that in the coming weeks here on ETel. We’re big fans of Asterisk at O’Reilly - we’ve published lots of Asterisk articles and everyone’s favorite Asterisk book (Asterisk: The Future of Telephony), we’ve had Mark and other Asterisk-related speakers at several of our conferences, and now we’re using Asterisk as our main communications platform.

The press release announcing the VC funding states:

With the anticipated growth of IP-based communications and the continued acceptance of open source, Digium has a unique opportunity to become a dominant player in the telecommunications market.

That seems pretty obvious from where I’m sitting, and I have no doubt that Digium will have great success and be an even bigger open source success story in the future than it is today.

It’s been a big news day for Skype, but probably even a bigger one for iSkoot. Skype’s prominent placement in the Sony Mylo announcement has the VoIP blogosphere buzzing, and now comes the news that Skype and iSkoot have come to an agreement to co-market the iSkoot Mobile Solution, a service that allows you to use Skype on your regular cell phone. There’s a handful of companies trying to bring Skype to the cellular world (EQO, IPdrum, Soonr, Epyx), but getting Skype’s backing will surely be a big boost for iSkoot. I haven’t tried the service as it doesn’t work yet on my model of cell phone, but it sounds like the iSkoot service has other advantages over some of the competition like not requiring two handsets or any computer as part of its scheme to bring Skype calling to your cell phone.

It’s been a long time since Sony had a hit with a new product, but the soon-to-be-released Mylo personal communicator looks to me like it could be a homerun. The sleek new device is smaller than a PSP with a 2.4 inch LCD screen and comes with 1 GB of flash memory, a slide out keyboard, and is wi-fi compatible. Short for “My life online”, the Mylo will ship with Skype, Google Talk and Yahoo! Messenger pre-installed, as well as a web browser and the JiWire’s hotspot directory. As Michael Arrington says, “This could be the wifi device for Skype that we’ve all been waiting for.” At least those of us with $350 to spend on a new gadget. While the Mylo doesn’t appear to have a built-in cell-phone, it does have both a speaker and microphone as well as a headset jack to use with Skype voice calling. And of course it plays music and displays photos and videos too.

Ubiquity’s Gary Gray was interviewed by Greg Galitzine recently over on TMC.net and he talks a bit about their newly-launched developer network (UDN).

A large part of the UDN initiative is focused around the identification of developers to bring into the program, and the maturing of their skills on the Ubiquity SIP A/S platform. In line with this strategy, the UDN Web site provides a tremendous resource to developers to become productive in developing new applications. Developers gain access to free software downloads, including Ubiquity’s SIP A/S platform, developer tools, tutorials, white papers, developer forums and blogs — everything they need to become productive with Ubiquity.

If you’re a SIP developer I suggest you check out what Ubiquity is doing. They understand that promoting a healthy developer ecosystem is good for everyone involved, and you’ll find a lot of resources and available help if you’re interested in developing applications for Ubiquity’s SIP application server.

Dan York is at the annual Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas and shares the news that a suite of VoIP security tools has just been released by David Endler and Mark Collier, authors of Hacking Exposed VoIP: Voice Over IP Security Secrets & Solutions. The existence and release of these kind of tools often causes many in the affected community to get all up in arms and make dire and drastic predictions about the potential fall-out from nefarious uses of such programs, but I’m in agreement with Preston Gralla that this is really actually a good thing. Releasing tools like this will place the security issues out in the open and help level the playing field, which can only be good for the industry in the long run. I believe it’s far better for these tools and the vulnerabilities they highlight to be known and addressed then to be hidden away under the sole control of someone who may have illicit intentions.

In the ongoing quest for better battery and charging technology, Japan’s NTT DoCoMo has partnered with AquaFairy to develop a micro fuel cell charger for its 3G handsets. Just add water and the fuel cell charger can reportedly charge a phone in the same amount of time as an AC-based charger. I caught this interesting development on PhoneScoop, which also notes that last year NTT DoCoMo was touting a methanol-based fuel cell charger. This one seems like a big step forward as besides only needing water as the catalyst, the new charger is smaller and more powerful than the methanol device. At this time these fuel cell chargers can only supply “several charges” so these are essentially disposable emergency chargers, but one would hope the advances in technology will lead to future enhancements and more permanent charging devices.

Many of us in the VoIP blogosphere pointed to and agreed with the recent Business Week essay The Phone Companies Still Don’t Get It , but Ken Camp went a step further and recently posted his own analysis of why innovation is broken in the telco world, from the perspective of someone who worked in the telco universe for almost two decades and it’s definitely worth a read.

Ken rightly traces the roots of the problem back to the days of divestiture:

But the truth, the roots of the death of telco innovation go deeper. In 1984 AT&T went through divestiture. On the surface, divestiture was a split of the local and long distance businesses, but there were other factors, other events all going on around the same time. The customer premise equipment business was ripped away from the Bell system (and the independent telcos) and given to the customer. In those days, we didn’t buy phones at the local electronics shop. We didn’t buy routers for premise connections. A CSU/DSU to terminate a circuit was the property of the telco back then. A shift began.

ZDNet’s Russell Shaw attended OSCON last week and has posted a nice write-up on the Asterisk session led by Brian Capouch, with pretty pictures too. Brian is one of the shining lights in the Asterisk community and a real inspiration, and I’m sorry to have missed it. This is the first year I didn’t make it to OSCON in quite some time, but I hear reports that the premier open source conference was bigger and better than ever. If like me you couldn’t attend, Daniel Steinberg has been producing some excellent podcasts from the show and there’s a ton of great coverage of the event on the O’Reilly OSCON Convention News page.

I’ve read (and written) a lot about the ongoing plummeting of telephone rates as VoIP becomes more widespread and voice becomes just another application on the network. Usually we’re talking about in-country calling, or client-to-client VoIP calling, but I’ve noticed a couple of items recently that point to a similar free-fall in calling rates for international calls as well.

First, Russell Shaw had an interesting post the other day noting that Skype had applied for a trademark on the phrase “The Whole World Can Talk For Free.” Now that very well may be just a normal business practice for a tagline they have been using for over a year, but Russell thinks its more than that and predicts Skype will open up global free outbound calling:

I envision a scenario in which Skype provides totally free outbound calling to those users who sign on for the revenue-generating SkypeIn service. Free world calling could, then be an incentive that would drive registration for Skype’s paid services.

Then today I saw the TechCrunch post Rebtel Makes International Calling Cheap and Easy about how Sweden-based Rebtel is using VoIP to offer dirt-cheap international calling.

Sweden-based Rebtel have launched a product that will allow users to dial any international number at the cost of a local call. It works by having the two ends of the call use local connections (over low-cost local calls) to a VoIP point and then bridge the call to the recipient at the other end over the net.

And just take a look at Brian McConnell’s recent post on this site about how easy it was for him to set up a global PBX using Gizmo and Asterisk, and you start getting the sense that international calling is really ripe for disruption.

I’m pretty sure that the high international calling rates we’ve experienced for years have been one of the incumbent carriers’ biggest gravy trains, but I think that train is slowing down fast. Just like local and in-country calling, I expect the cost of international voice calls to rapidly approach zero, forcing the telcos to come up with new business models or die trying.

A shameless plug for Cluecon - if you’re an active programmer / developer on voip systems you need to go to this conference ( And Etel of course! ) . First week of August this year in Chicago and its affordable. It’s organized by open source telephony developers and activists. The Asterisk, Freeswitch, Bayonne, Open H323 crowd will be there. Quite literally that some of the smartest and brightest of the Voip developer world will be there and I can attest they love to share their code and their thoughts. I think roughly 80% of the worlds open source telephony projects will have their core teams all there. Last year was exciting with people from all parts of the world there (New Zealand, Turkey, Korea etc). This year will be better still. Etel and OReily is proud to be a media sponsor for them and support their dedication and passion. We’ll be in attendance and hope to see you there as well.

Don Jackson, Tellme’s VP of Advanced Telephony, wrote in to tell me about a new, free hosting service being offered by Tellme Studio that sounds like a great deal. (Lets face it, it doesn’t get much better than “free”.) Tellme will now support up to four simultaneous free SIP calls to VoiceXML applications that are developed on Tellme Studio. Unlike some other deals like this, it doesn’t sound like its limited to prototype applications — if you have a low-volume app that won’t use more than four simultaneous SIP calls, sign up for the program and the calls are on Tellme.

I’ve heard a lot of good things about Tellme Studio, and if you’ve been wanting to give it a spin this offer makes it especially attractive. Don points out that there is great potential for developers to wire up Asterisk extentions to VoiceXML apps on Tellme Studio.

One of the big news items this week in the VoIP world was the new calling plan that Project Gizmo announced that will allow completely free calls to anyone that is signed up with Gizmo in 60 different countries and on your buddy list, regardless of whether it ends up on the PSTN. Yet another example of the cost of voice calling rapidly approaching zero. The Gizmo “All Calls Free” plan is permanent (unlike the recent Skype free calling plan that has an end date in sight) and is clearly modeled after the old MCI Friends and Family plan. It should help boost the Gizmo user base since your contacts have to sign up for a free Gizmo account to be able to be called as part of the plan.

The news was met with excitement in the blogosphere: Andy Abramson broke the story and thinks it’s a “major move that has proven that the cost of calls has really dropped to zero”, Om agrees that we are “seeing the price of plain vanilla voice collapse to almost zero”, Russell Shaw predicts we’ll soon see “short-term free world calling to any phone (member or not) as a loss-leader sign-up incentive”, Engadget notes how the new Gizmo plan easily trumps Skypes recent temporary free calling within the U.S. and Canada, TechCrunch said Gizmo punches standard VOIP business model, Alec Saunders thinks it’s an interesting chess move, and Jon Arnold notes this is “yet another example of what happens when voice becomes a total commodity, and at this stage of the game isn’t really much different than email.”

I guess AT&T has decided if it can’t beat them, it might as well join them when it comes to the municipal WiFi projects that seem to be rapidly picking up steam all across the country. The scuttlebutt according to Om today (he sure is breaking a lot of stories recently!) is that AT&T will partner with MetroFi to design, build and operate muni WiFi networks, and that they will put in a bid soon for a WiFI network for Riverside, California.

As Om points out, this deal is a big win for both MetroFi and muni WiFi in general. It helps validate the idea of municipal WiFI, which up until this point AT&T and the other telcos have been fighting strongly against (and losing). Andy Abramson has a thoughtful post on the deal and its ramifications, calling it the Mother of All Fixed Mobile Convergence Plays, and pointing out that companies like BridgePort Networks that are building combined mobile/WiFi technology and devices are going to be poised to take advantage of the new services that these municipal WiFi networks are going to spur.

I’m thrilled to announce that the Call For Participation for next year’s O’Reilly Emerging Telephony conference is now open. If you were lucky enough to be at the first ETel conference earlier this year then you know that this is not your typical telecom show, and one not to be missed. Mingle with and learn from leading edge developers, savvy business leaders, hackers, entrepreneurs and the alpha-geeks who are shaping the future of telecommunications.

Technologists, CTOs, chief scientists, researchers, programmers, hackers, business developers, entrepreneurs, and other interested parties are invited to lead conference plenary sessions and workshops at ETel 2007. Topics will be centered around the innovations and projects occurring in open source telephony, wireless mobility, mobile telephony, wi-fi VoIP, telephone networks as platforms, and the intersection of VoIP telephony with web services. Also, left-of-field and disruptive ideas that don’t fit in these categories but are telephony and real time communications related are welcome.

If you’ve got something to share with this audience, now’s the time to get your proposal in. And mark your calendars, ETel 2007 happens February 28 to March 1, 2007 at the San Francisco Airport Marriott in Burlingame, California.

I’m pretty sure this is one instance where the adage “no press is bad press” doesn’t hold. Vonage is now in the news for being tied to multiple spyware campaigns. According to spyware researcher Ben Edelman’s latest paper, How Vonage Funds Spyware, Vonage is a major advertiser on just about every large spyware product. Vonage’s large advertising budget is legendary and the focus of many analyst’s concerns about the company that just can’t seem to get a break. But I don’t think the realization that they’re spending a significant chunk of that advertising money on these unscroupulous spyware scourges is going to do anything but further the negative image Vonage is rapidly achieving, regardless of how effective that kind of advertising is.

Could spyware possibly be an effective advertising channel? It’s hard to imagine that it could be, but with the amount of placements Vonage seems to be buying in these programs one would think they must be seeing some kind of decent return.

A few people have jumped to Vonage’s defense on this latest charge, noting that with affiliate advertising relationships Vonage may not be dealing directly with spyware companies and it’s difficult to control where all your ads end up when you’re spending over $20 million a month on advertising. I’m sure that’s true but I don’t think it gets Vonage off the hook here. If they care about this issue they could do something about it.

This is slightly old news now as I’ve been battling some hardware problems which caused me to get behind in my posting, but as someone who has spent far too much time battling spyware I couldn’t let this one slip by.

This week I am taking the covers off a hobby/side project I’ve been working on. I thought it would be interesting to combine the idea of a traditional phone book or local guide with a wiki. I’ve lived in San Francisco for about 12 years now. It’s an amazing place full of interesting people and history, much of which goes undocumented. Some things even tourists know about. Others are the very definition of ephemeral.

Brian’s Book (formally known as the McConnell Telephone & Telegraph Co. Local Encyclopedia & Social Register), seeks to remedy this situation somewhat by creating a wiki for people to document the places, people and history of greater San Francisco. Think of it as a scrapbook for a metropolis. I decided to put this out there and see if the idea resonates with people. I am doing this as a hobby and have no intention of turning this into a business. So if you like the idea, pass the word along to people who’d enjoy contributing to it, especially people who have some interesting history to share (whether its a dissertation about the history of a structure, or some anecdotes about a band that was once big here).

Microsoft and Nortel held a “virtual press conference” today (didn’t we used to call those conference calls?) to announce a new partnership to develop unified communications systems (read IP PBXs). Both company’s CEOs were on the call, Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer and Nortel’s Mike Zafirovski, to promote their shared vision for future business communications, and they seem to be uninterested in any consumer plays in this space.

Tom Keating has posted a good summary of the call and analysis of the partnership, explaining that they hope to “combine Nortel’s network quality and reliability with Microsoft software’s ease of use and to accelerate the availability of unified communications.” And to make more than a billion in revenue over the next 4 years by doing that.

Katie Fehrenbacher, the excellent new staff writer over on GigaOM, notes that both companies have been struggling lately and could use some good PR from this partnership:

Beleaguered Nortel has far more troubles than even Microsoft and its EU fine-I spoke with Mike Zafirovski earlier this year and he described his mental state as “forceful optimism.” Nortel’s stock is just above $2 today, but rose in recent trading this morning. Nortel will likely benefit from the team, as the company needs more business software deals. But we’ll just have to wait and see how much of an upside Microsoft will get.

Katie also takes a little jab at the ugly PR-speak in the joint press release, which I have to completely agree with. Let’s just start with the headline: “Nortel and Microsoft Form Strategic Alliance to Accelerate Transformation of Business Communications”. Ugh. Wake me when there’s a product.

In yet another blow across Vonage’s bow, SunRocket announced an interesting new global calling plan this week that includes unlimited calls to major cities in 41 countries for about the same amount as Vonage’s standard monthly U.S. calling plan. For a flat fee of $299 a year (just under $25 a month) SunRocket customers can now have unlimited calling within 41 different countries using the new SunSpots calling plan, which includes coverage of most of Europe, and Far East destinations like China, Japan and South Korea.

This lowers the bar even more in the ongoing VoIP price wars and will surely be a big cost-saver for some people who do a lot of international calling to areas covered by the SunSpots plan, though the annual payment scheme will likely not appeal to everyone. Russell Shaw thinks that could be a major stumbling point, and his point that the people that are most concerned with shaving money off of their phone bills are probably much less likely to be able to pay for their phone service in annual chunks is a good one.

I almost felt bad for Senator Stevens as we collectively slammed him in the blogosphere last week over his insipid comments about how the Internet works, but Jon Stewart took the Stevens-smashing to a whole new level with his Daily Show segment on the Senator’s comments. I’m a big fan of the Daily Show and as usual Stewart doesn’t pull any punches. Now I really almost feel bad for him.

It looks like Skype has been successfully reverse-engineered by a group in China according to a blog post by Charlie Paglee. Alec Saunders was the first one to point me to Charlie’s report of a demo (with screenshots) of a non-Skype client using the Skype network.

It was only a matter of a time, and with the cracked Skype software coming out of China there is next to no possibility of stopping it. As Charlie points out:

From a legal standpoint eBay is out of luck. First, Skype itself is not viewed as “legal” in China. Chinese regulatory authorities have even looked into ways to block Skype in various regions of China. The Chinese telecom giants are not at all pleased with Skype ’stealing’ IDD revenue from their pockets. They will enthusiastically support a domestic Chinese company with the engineering talent to reverse engineer Skype. I wouldn’t be surprised if a major Chinese telco ends up licensing this technology to produce a competing Skype client for use in China.

What’s more, there is nothing at all illegal or even morally wrong with what this group of engineers has accomplished, especially from the Chinese perspective. They reverse engineered a protocol that was not protected by patent. They will be seen as heroes in China and it is unlikely the government will ever take action against them.

The software isn’t ready for release yet, but it sounds like it will be available soon and this will pose some very interesting questions for eBay and Skype.Phil Wolff figures Skype’s options are opening, switching, quashing, ignoring, or investing:

Open. They’re already on the path to opening up more of their apps at the API level. Skype could embrace this at the protocol level too. This is the hardest thing to do, but may pay off in the long run. Exposing these protocols is the only way for the Skype network to become an industry standard. And it would put Skype in a position of leadership the way Microsoft is for dot net, Sun is for Java, and Adobe is for Flash.

Switch. Skype could change the protocols, breaking the new software. This is a costly and temporary solution; tricky but doable. Replacing Skype clients for updates is hard enough; getting everyone to migrate could kill the brand love. It won’t be long until the Chinese engineers figure out how to get in again.

Quash. Skype might try to blow out the startup’s fire. eBay has a powerful combination of PR, lobbyists, litigators, and business allies. Even in China. Skype could try to accuse the startup of piracy. My guess is Skype will tread litely. These tactics rarely work in China and often tarnish the reputation of the outsider applying the pressure.

Ignore. Skype has enough to do. Wait and see.

Invest. Buy the team, put them to work.

I’d have to agree with Alec that opening up is really the only good option there for Skype. In fact, I’d highly reccomend Alec’s Detente in IM’s Cold War? post where he analyzes the changes happening in the IM world and makes a darn good argument for Skype to take the open road.

Om has the scoop today on a very interesting twist that will be coming soon to SightSpeed - the ability to use it to place-shift your TV viewing with Slingbox-type functionality. I’ve been very impressed with SightSpeed, it’s the nicest and most robust video conferencing system I’ve tried, and I think this is a fascinating development. The basic idea is that you’ll be able to install SightSpeed on a Media Center PC at your home and then view your media and TV on any other computer via your SightSpeed account. No specifics yet on when this new functionality will be released, but for more details and pretty screenshots check out Om’s SightSpeed Shifting Places.

With the recent decision to require VoIP companies to contribute to the Universal Service Fund, Daniel Berninger has written a scathing letter to the Commerce Committee questioning the basic premises and implementation of the USF today that is well worth a read. If you’ve been wondering what exactly goes on with the USF, Daniel’s letter will not fill you with a warm fuzzy feeling. While I think most would agree that the goal of providing universal telecommunications service is a worthy one, it’s certainly worth investigating how this long-standing funding system is achieving that goal.

The FCC and Universal Service Administration Company (USAC) don’t appear concerned about the lack of results, because they don’t actually track the impact of the fund in terms of universal service metrics. The USF represents a bureaucrat’s dream, because there exists no accountability for results. Success gets judged purely in terms of collecting and spending money. (The USAC’s annual report) does not mention penetration rates or any other metric that might qualify as a measure of universal service (i.e. fund results) rather than money (i.e. fund input.) The fact that the telephone industry insiders dominating the USAC board remain silent about the lack of results further shows the program exists to serve telephone companies not the cause of universal service. The FCC’s 150 page NPRM that accompanied the order assessing VoIP companies does not include a single mention of how or whether the funds contributed to the USF actually further the cause of universal service.

Tracking the number of households participating in the USF’s Low Income Program is as close as the FCC comes to tracking results. The monies collected and distributed by the Low Income Program doubled from $400mn to $800mn since 1997, but the nature of local telephone monopoly keeps people disconnected. The program provides on average $8 per month subsidy for qualifying low income telephone customers, but the subsidy does not solve the affordability problem given an average telephone bill of $50 per month. Even aside from basic rates that increase year after year, setup charges, strict credit terms, and demand for deposits keep as many as 20% of households in low income areas without telephone service. Competition from VoIP companies recently led Verizon to advertise a price reduction of $17 per month (i.e. twice the USF Low Income subsidy) on its unlimited usage plan. VoIP companies serve less than 3% of access lines, so this represents only the beginning of the industry’s competitive potential. Yet, the new USF assessment helps defeat VoIP competition.

The lack of results deserves attention, but the lack of results coupled with rapid growth of the fund represents a crisis. The FCC’s plan to assess VoIP does not come near to solving the funding challenges. The USF grew from $1.5bn in the year before the changes implemented by the Telecom Act of 1996 to $6.5bn in 2005. The fund continues to grow 12% annually in recent years, so at this pace it will double again in the next six years. LD revenues have declined 50% from a peak in 1999, so the FCC mandated revenue assessment grew twice as fast as the fund (from 1.2% in 1997 to 10.7% in 2005.) It does not help matters the Bells find ways to minimize USF contributions even as they increase their share of LD revenues. In 2005, the Bell LD division USF contributions amounted to about 1/3 of those by the former LD pure plays (i.e. AT&T, MCI, and Sprint) even given about equal market share positions. Note that FCC removed USF obligations on Bell company DSL revenues at the same time it asserted them on VoIP companies.

There’s always been the sense here in the U.S. that our lawmakers do not really grasp all the technology that they attempt to regulate, but the latest comments being widely circulated online by Senator Ted Stevens about the Internet and Net Neutrality really hit that point home in an especially scary and depressing way. Keep in mind that Senator Stevens is the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, in other words one of the most important and influential lawmakers when it comes to telecommunications policy. Senator Stevens’ latest remarks to draw the ire of technical folks across the country (and the world) are pretty dumbfounding:

I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why? Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially.

Kind of reminds one of President Bush’s quote about “the internets”. Do these guys have even a basic understanding of what the internet is? Well, in Senator Stevens case, I think not. He went on to say:

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck.

It’s a series of tubes.

And if you don’t understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

and amazingly:

Maybe there is a place for a commercial net but it’s not using what consumers use every day.

Huh?? Please someone tell me that this is just a bad dream and this guy isn’t really one of the most powerful people in charge of telecom policy in this country. Alec Saunders does a good job of discecting Stevens’ “tubes” theory, and Timothy Carr of MediaCitizen asks what seems like a crucial question here:

Are we ready to entrust the future of the Internet to a law written by someone who doesn’t know what the Internet is?

if you have the stomach for it, Senator Stevens’ remarks can be heard in their entirety here.

There seems to be no reconfiguration of forces or new angles on ODF or the process here, but people interested in the Massachusetts process should follow this story.

Jeff Pulver summarizes the seriousness of the recent FCC USF for VoIP order and asks that more people in our community get involved with the legislative and regulatory issues that are being (poorly) decided in the U.S. today. Jeff is one of the most informed and active participants in the U.S. regulatory processes surrounding IP communications and his post today is well worth a read. If you had any doubts that this new FCC order is a Very Bad Thing for VoIP, I think Jeff will quickly convince you otherwise. And he doesn’t pull any punches:

At first review, the Order appears to be a laughable, legally suspect, misapplication of the state of the law and prior rulings and an unsubstantiated gross mischaracterization of the opinions of the VoIP community and VON in particular.

For some particulars, check out this scary summary Jeff has initally pulled out of the 150-page document:

Overall the order:

• Is not limited to calls that touch the PSTN - includes IP to IP calls (pg 20)
• circumvents the Vonage decision to allow state regulation of VoIP, if you report actual revenues (pg 29)
• requires pre-approval of traffic studies - but not for wireless providers because pre-approval would be disruptive to wireless, but not VoIP (pg 30)
• requires double payments of USF fees for 2 quarters - waiving the “carrier’s carrier” rule so that wholesale providers also have to pay USF for the same service (pg 30)
• Includes new VoIP registration requirement with the FCC
• does not include a transition period
• indicates a desire to expand the definition of Interconnected VoIP in the future (pg 20)
• includes international traffic
• ignores Small Business Administration arguments (pg 121)
• Does not discuss this decision’s impact on VoIP providers, but finds it will have minimal impact on LECs (pg 13)
• requires VoIP providers to pay into USF at the highest rate of any service
• buried deep in footnote 209, relieves DSL of USF obligations

But Jeff doesn’t want us to just take his word for it, he suggests that we should all give this important document a thorough read. And I’d also like to echo Jeff’s suggestion that now is the time to get more involved with the legislative processes around VoIP here in the U.S., and supporting the VON Coalition is one good way to do this.

The Share Skype blog has posted some information about the forthcoming Skype for Mac version that will finally include video calling, as well as a warning that there is a leaked version of the software making the rounds that is very buggy and will likely destroy your contact data. From the Skype blog:

Among all the excitement, we recently learned that there is an early development version of Skype for Mac with video floating around some warez sites. What you need to know about this version is that it is an internal unstable development version, and thus it is extremely buggy. It may and will destroy your contacts and other data. It is completely unsupported and if you experience problems due to using this version, you’re on your own.

Jaanus ends his post by whetting the appetites of Mac Skype users like myself with a screenshot of the Skype for Mac with Video client in action. Presumably not the buggy version.

Andy’s finding all the good stuff tonight! Besides his pointer about Cingular warming up to VoIP, he’s also noticed a report on Apple Insider about VoIP capabilities being included in the next version of the Mac OS. The upcoming Mac operating system, codenamed Leopard, is expected to include a new version of Apple’s iChat IM program that will now support VoIP calling. Leopard is planned to be unveiled at the upcoming Apple World Wide Developers Conference this August. Many people have been waiting for and expecting this development, but it’s not really earth-shattering news as this just gets Apple caught up to where Yahoo!, Google, and Microsoft already are with their IM clients.

Andy Abramson points out this interesting tidbit coming out of the Yankee Group’s Wireless Leadership Decision Summit in New York. Cingular’s CTO Kristin Rinne made comments during a keynote that implied they will not try and block their customers from making VoIP calls over their high-speed UMTS/HSDPA wireless data network. Rinne sounds guarded about VoIP over 3G, but he reportedly did say that the carrier doesn’t have a problem with customers using VoIP on its network. Though Rinne added that Cingular would be more comfortable with the technology if it could guarantee quality and figure out a way to bill for these services. That sounds like a bit of double-speak, as obviously Cingular is already getting money from its customers for this kind of high-speed data access.

Andy also points out that these comments come right on the heels of the news that Time Warner Cable and Sprint are getting ready to roll out their own Fixed Mobile Convergence systems, and predicts that we’re not far from “phones that work on both cellular networks and WiFi will have one number and calls will continue as you roam from Cellular to WiFi or in the other direction.” I’m ready.

With all the positive news about how Bill Gates is planning on spending the rest of his life and fortune, Microsoft’s announcements about the upgrade to its communications platforms got a little lost in the mainstream press. But not out here in VoIP-land, where the news coming out of the Microsoft Unified Communications Group Strategy Day was met with plenty of scathing analysis - the overall sentiment seeming to be that this is a prime example of “too little too late”.

Alec Saunders does an excellent job of summarizing the latest MS plans with regards to unified communications and placing them in the context of what else is happening in this area. As an MS alum and co-founder of iotum, a company steeped in unified communications, Alec is emminently qualified to speak to these issues. And he doesn’t hold back many punches:

When the announcement came, it was a damp squib. Microsoft will rename Exchange as Communications Server, and add telephony features to Communicator, and other products. It’s an integration announcement, as opposed to a dramatic new direction — a reprise of the 1993 announcement that created Microsoft Office out of Word, Powerpoint, and Excel. Interestingly, this tactic may backfire for them this time around. Today there’s much more focus on open standards. The idea that you must buy all of your infrastructure from a single vendor just isn’t palatable for many companies today.

Alec doesn’t need to point out that the kind of technology MS is promising to develop is actually already here now, and companies like his iotum are already deeply entrenched in unified communications and are making better use of presence information with products and services that customers can start using today. Many others are doing that for him. And yesterday’s announcement that hosted IP-PBX vendor Versature will include iotum’s relevance engine as a feature for its small and medium business customers was timed perfectly to hit that point home.

Tom Keating also seems underwhelmed with the news around the MS unified communications announcements and like many observers were surprised that the MS efforts seem only focused on the enterprise:

Unfortunately, it appears as though this solution is strictly targetting the enterprise and completely ignoring the consumer market. Although it does support SIP, it will not support all SIP based VoIP networks, but instead only connect to Microsoft’s proprietary (and commercial) Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 platform.

Dustin D. Trammell points out this Wall St. Journal article on the VOIPSEC mailing list about an incident in one of the Greek cell networks during the 2004 Olympics that serves as a scary reminder of what can happen when backdoors are mandated into communications systems. The Vodafone network in Greece was the victim of a sophisticated eavesdropping incident that was focused on bugging high government officials’ cell phones leading up to the 2004 Olympics, which was accomplished by taking advantage of supposedly disabled technology to allow for lawful intercept that was included in Ericsson’s network gear. From the Journal article:

Behind the bugging operation were two pieces of sophisticated software, according to Ericsson. One was Ericsson’s own, some basic elements of which came as a preinstalled feature of the network equipment. When enabled, the feature can be used for lawful interception by government authorities, which has become increasingly common since the Sept. 11 terror attacks. But to use the interception feature, operators like Vodafone would need to pay Ericsson millions of dollars to purchase the additional hardware, software and passwords that are required to activate it. Both companies say Vodafone hadn’t done that in Greece at the time.

The second element was the rogue software that the eavesdroppers implanted in parts of Vodafone’s network to achieve two things: activate the Ericsson-made interception feature and at the same time hide all traces that the feature was in use. Ericsson, which analyzed the software in conjunction with Greece’s independent telecom watchdog, says it didn’t design, develop or install the rogue software.

It’s a worthwhile read full of scandal and intrique, even including the possible murder of a Vodafone network engineer over the incident. I certainly don’t take issue with the need for lawful intercept laws and methods, but it does seem that with the explosive growth we’re seeing in IP-based communications combined with the emergence of more sophisticated and convenient voice encryption technology, there’s going to be bigger challenges and problems ahead for the surveillance agencies.

Yahoo! continues to show signs that it understands the fundamental goodness of open standards, platorms, and APIs as it announced a new 8.0 version of Yahoo! Messenger with Voice that now supports an open plugin architecture. Yahoo! Messenger with Voice 8.0 launched with add-ons for Amazon.com, AmericanGreetings.com, Yahoo! 360, eBay., and more. The SDK is available as a free download. Another nice feature is an upgrade to Messenger’s file tranfer capability to 1GB.

From the Yahoo! Developer network:

The Messenger Plug-in SDK is a JavaScript and C++ API that you use to create add-ons with collaborative features that can run inside Yahoo! Messenger. Plug-ins run in the main Messenger window, or as part of an IM conversation.

The opening up of the Messenger API can only be seen as a positive move and was acknowledged with approval across the blogosphere. Tom Keating likes the new sound effects that can be used with voice conversations and Russell Shaw wondered how Skype felt about the new eBay Messenger plugin. But I have to echo Ted Wallingford’s concern: where’s the Mac version?

Lawrence Lessig has an interesting post about the “dark other side” of the Net Neutrality debate, centering on a suit that Gary Reback has been advocating for to challenge the legality of some of the recent mega telecom mergers. You may remember Reback as one of the antitrust attornies who took on Microsoft, and Lessig notes his respect for Reback and thinks that his odds are good in this case. Reback is alleging that SBC and Verizon forced their deals through the Dept. of Justice when an important appointee for the head of antitrust was on Senatorial hold, and then ignored the amended Tunney Act that prescribed a judicial review.

This is sleazy stuff, and it forms the real basis for being concerned about the games the network owners would play if free to play games. The really striking part of this (to me, a constitutionalist) is how the legislative branch keeps passing laws that the executive branch just ignores. And why ignore the laws? Corporate influence. That’s what this case reeks of.

As Lessig points out, these are exactly the kind of things that are motivating the pro-Network Neutrality movement.

TechDirt also picked up the story and again highlighted their position that the real problem at the root of Net Neutrality issues is the lack of competition at the network provider level, an opinion that TechDirt has been pushing for some time and now seems to be gaining some traction.

Again, it’s a bit early to know whether or not this case is going to get anywhere, but Reback is someone who doesn’t tend to give up easily (even if his detour into the startup world didn’t turn out to be hugely successful) — and the telcos certainly have a history of this type of questionable behavior in making backroom deals with government officials (many of which they never live up to their side on). If, as we’ve been saying, the real problem is the lack of competition in the telco space, finding out that some of that lack of competition came about potentially through illegal means, raises an awful lot of questions.

On a more positive Lessig-related note, I was pleasantly surprised to read today about the Microsoft support of Creative Commons that has emerged as an Office plug-in for easily assigning a CC license to content created in MS Office. That’s a nice move.

PhoneBoy has the scoop on Nokia’s new Podcast application designed for its media-centric N91 model smartphone. This little app allows you to bypass the step of downloading podcasts to your PC in order to transfer them to your Nokia and lets your phone have direct access to the wide world of podcasts out there. PhoneBoy notes that the program will not just work on the N-series Nokias, but should also work on any Series 60 version 3 handset, including Nokia E series phones.

While I’m still not convinced that I want my phone and my portable audio player to converge onto one device, apps like this will surely make the idea of phone-as-MP3 player more palatable to some. As PhoneBoy concludes:

For me, at least, this application makes the whole idea of owning an iPod less desirable and makes it much easier for me to get podcasts to my phone.

In the latest blow to everyone’s favorite VoIP punching bag, Vonage now has to deal with a lawsuit from Verizon that alleges patent infringement. Verizon asserts that Vonage is infringing on at least 7 VoIP-related patents, including some that impact Vonage’s voice mail, WiFi phones, and call forwarding services. There’s a ton of comments and analysis on this lawsuit around the blogosphere and Ars Technica has a good summary of Vonage’s latest woes. It’s hard for me to imagine that Verizon holds enforcable patents on things like VoIP call forwarding and voice mail, but if so it certainly wouldn’t be the strangest thing to come out of our patent system.

In the latest consolidation in the telecom equipment market, Siemens and Nokia have announced their intentions to merge their respective telecom gear businesses into one. As Ken Camp observes, this is definitely big news. In a deal reportedly valued at $31.5 billion, Finnish Nokia and German Siemens will combine their telecom equipment businesses into a new company that will be called Nokia Siemens Networks, and will be located in Finland and headed up by Nokia’s executive Simon Beresford-Wylie. The Wall St. Journal points out that one of the reasons driving these mergers is that European (and U.S.) telecom suppliers are feeling increasing competition from some of the more nimble Asian companies in this space, like Huawei and ZTE.

One question about the deal that seems to be on just about everyone’s mind is what does this mean for Nortel, who has been rumored to be in talks with both Siemens and Nokia for quite some time. For some good analysis on this latest telecom mega-merger, click on over to IP Democracy, Mark Evans, and Om Malik.

David Battino has written up a nice review of the Ecamm Call Recorder which he is now using to record interviews over Skype over on the O’Reilly Digital Media site.

Talk about happy coincidences: About the time my analog desk phone died last month, Skype made computer-to-telephone calling free. (Computer-to-computer Skype calls have always been free.) Because I’d bought the old phone specifically to work with a telephone tap, I started looking into ways to record Skype-based interviews. I found an easy and inexpensive solution called Ecamm Call Recorder.

Radio Handi seems to just keeps getting more interesting by the day. Now in addition to the basic voice communites with multi-modal communications that Radio Handi allows, you can use it to instigate free ad hoc conference calls just by adding an address to the CC list of an email and to create group chats using SMS. I’m continually impressed with the good work that fellow ETel blogger and O’Reilly author Brian McConnell and his small Radio Handi team are producing.

The conference calling feature really strikes me as something that could shake up the voice conferencing industry. It’s surprising in its simplicity - to create a conference call using the new Radio Handi service all you need to do is add “invite@radiohandi.com” to the CC list on an email message, and everyone on that message will get an automated email response from RadioHandi with dial-in instructions and a passcode for joining the free conference call. There isn’t even any need for the recipients to register with Radio Handi. Talk about creating a conference call on the fly, this has to be the best implementation of that idea I’ve seen yet.

You can call in to the conference via their local access numbers in over 30 countries, and worldwide via VoIP, using PhoneGnome, Gizmo Project, SIP Broker, or any SIP compatible program. To support the free service, callers hear a very short ad when they first dial in, which didn’t really feel any more bothersome to me than the typical “Welcome to XYZ conference calling system…” messaging that you’d hear in any conference call setting. I just did a quick test of the system, and it all worked very smoothly and had good audio quality. I know this is one feature I’m going to start using right away.

The Group SMS chat feature is also compelling and simple to use. You activate the service by sending an SMS to 866-687-2373 (short code coming soon) with one of the following commands:
.create groupname (to create a group chat)
.add groupname telephone# telephone# telephone# (to add people to the group chat)
.start groupname (to have the system invite others from the list to join)
.voice groupname (to switch to a voice chat)

The service is integrated with Radio Handi’s list and membership management system so it will remember the groups you have created.

Both services are being offered free of charge by Radio Handi (though of course your own carrier’s SMS charges will still apply when using the group SMS chat feature). Brian and the Radio Handi team seem to really have a keen eye for features and services that will actually be useful to people (or dare I say “handy”?), and for designing simple and accessible interfaces to these features. I expect them to go far.

Like many others I was not particularly impressed with the announcement that came out of the eBay Developers conference this week indicating some partial Skype/eBay integration would now be turned on. Techdirt points out that nine months after eBay purchased Skype, just now adding a Skype Me button to certain select auctions seems like a very small step, and questions whether eBay users really even want this feature in the first place and how it could possibly justify the multi-billion dollar price tag eBay paid for Skype. I know I’m not the only one hoping there’s more to eBay’s plans for Skype that we haven’t seen yet.

I enjoy reading Dan York’s blog and listening to the excellent Blue Box VoIP Security podcast that he does with Jonathan Zar, and Dan recently posted an interesting response to the Business Week article about the Pena/Moore VoIP hacking story that has been getting a ton of attention. Dan agrees with the article’s conclusion that it’s important to consider security when deploying VoIP systems, but takes issue with how it uses a broad brush to paint all things VoIP-related as having the same level of security issues and concerns.

The challenging part about this article - and most others I have seen on the subject in recent days - is that it lumps everything into a broad “VoIP” category while the reality is that there are definite differences between enterprise VoIP systems and the consumer / wholesale VoIP market.

I’m blogging from O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 conference this week and if you’re interested in mapping and location-based services you should click on over to our conference coverage page to read about this lively show. I was happy to see a preview of our upcoming Emerging Telephony conference on the schedule, and ETel conference chairs Surj Patel and Brady Forrest did a great job of summarizing the interesting developments we’ll be examining in the communications space at the next ETel conference. It makes a lot of sense to preview ETel here as there’s a good amount of overlap between the location-based services being discussed here at Where 2.0 and the emerging communications technologies that we cover at our ETel conference and on this site.

Patel explained how we’re tracking things like the growth in open source communications tools and VoIP, and will be featuring presentations that demonstrate the innovations that are happening on the edge of the telecom networks, and not just looking at the industry from a telco perspective. The conference will provide a forum for developers who may feel marginalized by the traditional telco models. ETel will also address issues like security and surveillance topics and the regulatory hurdles that are impacting telecom innovation in the U.S.

Patel noted that the recent decision to apply CALEA to all VoIP providers will likely spur innovation among hackers interested in communication technology along with the potential stifling of innovation that many are predicting. Clearly the ramifications of the new CALEA application will be one topic of interest at the ETel conference.

The Emerging Telephony conference will be held at the San Francisco Airport Marriott on next February 27 - March 1. Mark your calendars now!

In yet another example of how the patent system continues to issue patents that should never have been granted, 8×8 has been awarded a patent for hosted VoIP PBX systems. Interesting, because I remember writing extensively about just this subject (except it was called IP Centrex or Net Centrex) in the 1990s. Virtual PBX, which has been offering hosted PBX services since 1997 and pioneered this space, also comes to mind. AccessLine has also been offering IPBX services for several years, at least. Apparently the US PTO does not subscribe to trade magazines like Computer Telephony (now defunct, but it was the main trade publication for computer telephony and VoIP in the 1990s).

What really bothers me about patents like this is that the patent office continues to offer “[fill in blank] on the Internet” patents. There is nothing special about a hosted PBX that runs over VoIP. Anyone who works in telecom knows that VoIP is just another bearer channel like ISDN, Voice over Frame Relay, etc.

If anybody is interested in challenging this patent, you’ll find plenty of prior art, publications and vendors who’ve been offering similar services for about ten years now.

The folks at Abbeynet Labs are at it again. Hot on the heels of their Firefox VoIP plugin, which is a full featured SIP user agent that allows one-click calling to any number on any web page, they have now announced a Thunderbird VoIP plugin. The Thunderbird extension works much like the Firefox one and you can now take advantage of its integration with the Thunderbird addressbook. From developer Luca Filigheddu’s blog:

As the first extension, even Thunderbird VoIP can work as a stand alone SIP user agent, so you don’t need to download anything other than the extension itself.

You can:

* Call your contacts from the Thunderbird addressbook.
* Send SMS to your contacts very easily.
* One-click call feature to dial any number straight from the mail you are reading.
* You need a valid account at abbeyphone provider. It’s all FREE of charge.
* Internet calls are FREE. PSTN call rates can be found at the Abbeyphone’s website.

When I first saw the Firefox VoIP plugin I asked Luca if we could expect a Mac version anytime soon. He responded that one was definitely in the works, for both the Firefox and Thunderbird clients, and I can’t wait to get my hands on those.

In a surprisingly resounding defeat, Rep. Ed Markey’s Net Neutrality amendment to the new Telecom Act (COPE) was voted down last night in the U.S. House of Representatives, 269 to 152. This is clearly a big defeat for the proponents of a Net Neutrality regulation, who were seeming quite energized and gathering significant popular support in the final weeks before this vote. As usual, IP Democracy has a good report on this latest development, Jeff Pulver has a brief and depressing post that also notes that another amendment did pass which mandates the “misapplication of Access Charges and Universal Service to applications rather than the underlying transmission facilities that benefit from access charges and universal service,” and Declan McCullagh has posted an interesting analysis on CNET, including a discussion of a bizarre twist on the Net Neutrality concept offered up by Rep. Charles Gonzalez.

An article in Fortune this week that’s getting a lot of attention details BT’s plans to embrace IP communications in a big way, starting soon in Cardiff, Wales. According to the article BT is a few months away from shutting down its existing circuit-switched network in Cardiff and replacing it with a pure IP-based network. Besides the improved bandwidth and telephony features residents can expect with this upgrade, BT is touting the flexibility of the IP platform and how it will enable a whole new host of homegrown applications and services.

But what’s really cool about what will happen in Cardiff - and eventually the rest of the U.K. - is that BT is creating an open, standards-based platform for which anyone can develop new applications. In other words, the phone has the potential to become more like the Internet with its proliferation of cool new Web sites, tools and services.

“This whole thing is based on openness and transparency,” says Paul Reynolds, chief executive of BT’s wholesale operations. “We want to allow experimentation by application developers.”

This is no small thing. Right now, for example, most of the mildly interesting stuff consumers can do with their phones - call waiting, caller ID, call forwarding - is programmed right into the big computers that route calls around the network. That makes it virtually impossible for some entrepreneur in a garage or some teenager tinkering at his computer to develop a new phone service.

Actions speak louder than words, but if BT really does encourage this kind of experimentation on an open and transparent telecom network, they are leagues ahead of most other telcos, especially here in the U.S.

Erik van Eykelen of Voipster BV, the creators of OpenZoep, gave a presentation at this year’s Emerging Telephony conference that is currently being featured on Doug Kaye’s excellent IT Conversations site. OpenZoep is an open source client-side VoIP engine embedded in a Firefox extension. We featured an article about OpenZoep back in February in case you missed it, and if you like technical podcasts, click on over to IT Conversations to hear Erik’s ETel presentation.

I was amused to read this article in the Register recently about the big bucks generated in Qatar for an auction of the mobile phone number 666-6666 (over 2.5 million dollars!), and it seems only fitting that on 6/6/06 I share my own experiences with the prefix of the beast…

When I was first getting involved with telecom I worked for a good, upstanding Jesuit university in San Francisco in the early 90s. They were wisely replacing their ancient telephone system, one of the last large rotary dial key systems that was left in the city. Putting in a modern PBX meant new luxuries like direct incoming numbers for staff and faculty, and since the on-campus dorms were getting put on the new system too, a very large block of consecutive DID numbers were requested from the local phone company. There was only one existing prefix in the area with enough capacity, or so we were told. But I know I wasn’t the only one who wondered if someone at Pacific Bell must have been having a good laugh as the Catholic university got assigned numbers in the 666 prefix.

I was just a technician at the time but I recall some of the executives at the university being very unhappy with that arrangement. If memory serves, PacBell would only create a new prefix for the university for some astronomical fee, which the school felt was gouging and wasn’t willing to cough up. (I notice something has given way over the years though, as they do now have a less controversial prefix.)

As we got ready to turn on the new system we noticed that the 6000 number range was one of ours, and my boss, the telecom manager, decided to take the number 666-6666 for his own. I thought that was kind of a neat idea, and went for 666-6667 myself.

As you can likely imagine, there were many jokes and good times to be had with these numbers. And some weird lunatic prank calls, though not a lot. But what drove my boss crazy most of all about having that fateful number was the amazing number of “googoo gaagaa” calls he received. You know, those calls you get when an infant has gotten a phone off the hook and has inadvertently dialed you up and is cooing and babbling into the phone? Well, maybe you don’t, but trust me, if you ever get a phone number with all of the same digits, you will. Apparently pounding repeatedly on the 6 button is a fairly easy thing for a baby to do.

That’s my 666 story. More than anything devilish or scary, that ominous phone number was plagued by baby calls. In retrospect, I’m kind of surprised the university stood for getting that number assignment from the local phone company in the first place. And it sure never occurred to me that we had something on our hands that was potentially worth millions of dollars.

I dedicate this post to my old boss, Hawk, who was a mentor and inspiration to me. Next time I’ll tell you about how the students hacked into the new voice mail system that we had installed and one VERY embarrassed department secretary…

Acme Packet has filed a registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed IPO. Acme Packet is one of the leading makers of Session Border Controllers, and they’ll be looking to raise $85 million with the offering and will be listed on the NASDAQ. Both Jon Arnold and Om Malik have posted good information and some detailed analysis of the move and this segment of the VoIP market.

BoingBoing points us to the latest silly phone fashion item - cell phone thongs! All my attempts at humorous comments here seem unfit to print, so just enjoy the picture. You can get them in a variety of materials and styles (though at this time the black leather models appear to be sold out).

Digium has released a pretty significant upgrade of its Asterisk Business Edition today. The new B1 version improves on security and scalability by integrating Ranch Network’s Asterisk security code, features speech recognition capabilities using the LumenVox Speech Engine, text-to-speech applications using the Cepstral Text-to-Speech System, and comes with a customized Linux distribution to simplify installation. The Asterisk Business Edition B.1 will also improves on interoperability by now offering built-in support for Intel Dialogic Products and Aculab Prosody X cards.

An AppleBerry is exactly what noted analyst Peter Misek has predicted. This story is getting a lot of Buzz because Peter Misek is the same analyst that correctly predicted the RIM move the the Intel processor last year.

Of course there are a slew of reasons you could come up with as evidence against such an agreement, but it’s a lot more fun to think about what might be possible.

RIM would get immediate access to the consumer market which is a market they’ve been trying to crack for a long time with only modest success. Apple would get access to millions of BlackBerry users that already have unlimited data plans to use their BlackBerry. An agreement would immediately give ligitimacy to RIM as a multimedia device maker.

Just imagine the possibilities of an iPod with access to a high speed wireless data network - it would almost surely drive a lot of sales to the iTunes Music Store. The carriers would love the extra data traffic, too.

Think about the possibilities for podcasting - your driving down the road and the latest podcast is automatically downloaded to your AppleBerry and you’re notified with an alert you’ve customized using BlackBerry’s built-in alert profiles. This sounds a little like satellite radio, only with infinite choices.

I almost always enjoy and agree with Susan Crawford’s postings and her latest summary of the issues swirling around the Net Neutrality battle is well worth a read. Susan has distilled down much of the commentary to 5 frequently asked questions, and challenges others to answer each of these questions (as she did) in 150 words or less.

If you’ve been unclear or waffling on this issue, I suggest heading directly over to Susan’s post. It helped clarify some of my thoughts and concerns, and like she often does, gets right to the heart of the matters at hand.

I’m hesitant to quote any of the post here, as I really hope others will go read hers in its entirety, but this passage jumped out at me:

What they mean by ‘the internet of the future’ is a cable system — not the internet. They’ll be using their market power over broadband access to force us all to accept their cable-ized version of ‘the internet’ and to force nascent Googles to pay protection money. Those nascent Googles may never come into being — so net neutrality is a right-to-life movement for new technology.

These incumbents don’t have competition. We have no real information about their costs or how their networks work. We’re having this argument about “need for additional revenue” in the dark. They’ve been promising to build broadband networks for a long time, and we’re falling behind as a country.

We know from Japan that competition for broadband access (lower prices, higher speeds) comes when you force the incumbent to “unbundle” (let competitors use its facilities on nondiscriminatory terms). That’s the real ‘internet of the future.’

And this one too. One thing we’ve seen a lot of at O’Reilly is that Susan is dead-on about innovation often not coming from those with the deepest pockets. The garage innovators and alpha geeks that we try and pay attention to often lead new technologies in interesting and unanticipated ways.

The deepest pockets are not the deepest sources of innovation — to the contrary. The telcos think of the internet as a “broken network.” They only know about networks over which they have perfect control. When was the last time a new telephone service was introduced? Call-waiting?

Jon Arnold has a great post today about Telio and their impending IPO tomorrow. Jon considers Telio the “Vonage of Europe” and makes some illuminating comparisons between the two companies, their business models, and their strategies in going public. Primarily a Norwegian VoIP provider, Telio has avoided the massive marketing spending habits that seems to be getting Vonage into trouble.

Telio has built up a residential VoIP subscriber base of over 90,000, and guess what - they’re profitable, and they have money in the bank. Their future doesn’t ride on an IPO. They can make it without it, and it wasn’t a fallback position because nobody came along to buy them. Compared to Telio, Vonage is very Business 1.0 in the sense that they didn’t fully exploit the power of the Internet. They’ve spent most of their money on traditional advertising to build a business in a traditional - and very American - way. The more you spend, the more subs you get - but that’s a treadmill you can never get off.

Telio - very much like Skype - is Business 2.0 (not really Web 2.0, but that will come). I have learned that 75% of their customers come from referrals and friends - pure organic growth and viral marketing. Not as dramatic as Skype, who has zero marketing spend - but pretty darned close. Not only are their customer acquisition costs much lower than Vonage, but they do a better job of retaining those customers. They won’t reveal their precise churn level, but it’s below 1%, which is terrific. Vonage’s churn is respectable for the market it is in, but it’s quite a bit higher than Telio. These two simple metrics go a long way to explaining why these companies are on divergent paths.

Skype and Vapps have teamed up to offer a service that claims to support up to 500-person conference calling for free to all Skype users. It’s great to see Skype offering more innovative free services, though I’m a little sceptical of how well 500-person Skype conference calls would actually work. If anyone is creating some very large conference calls with this new HighSpeed Conferencing service and wants to invite me in to the call to squash my scepticism, by all means let me know.

Of course, the new Radio Handi service offers similar free conference-calling capabilities to all SIP-based VoIP callers for conferences calls of up to 20 participants.

You’ve probably heard of the term astroturfing being used to describe fake grassroots campaigns that are designed to deceive the public about the extent of support a specific cause actually has. Well, I’m not sure who coined the related term “astrospammers”, but we seem to have this new twist on the phenomenon showing up in blogs discussing net neutrality issues. I first read about these kind of suspicious comments showing up on net neutrality-related blog postings over on IP Inferno, where Ted Shelton noted that after a recent post he wrote about net neutrality three random anonymous strangers went to the trouble of creating brand new blogger accounts in order to post pro-telco comments on the subject.

The Abstract Factory did some sleuthing on one of the new net neutrality commenters called “Net Chick”, and concludes that is likely this persona is a paid spammer supporting an astroturf-like campaign againsty net neutrality:

“Net Chick” is an astroturf comment spammer: an astro-spammer, if you will. Judging by the volume of spam (dozens of sites, rather than hundreds), the degree of comment differentiation, and the variety of comment systems to which the astro-spam was posted, I’m guessing that it’s a human being, rather than a computer program. For this quality of A.I., it’s probably cheaper to pay a human than to hire a computer scientist to write a program. This appears to be retail astro-spam, not wholesale astro-spam, although it’s likely that the same entity’s posting a lot more under other aliases.

The issue is bubbling up in the blogosphere and today there are posts on TechDirt and the Technology Liberation Front about these suspicious comments. I think Cynthia Brumfield accurately summarizes many of our feelings about the situation in her IP Democracy post titled Do Broadband Providers Employ Blog Comment Shills?:

I’m not sure what to make of this. It sure seems like organized blog commenting to me. But is this kind of coordinated commenting wrong?

The answer has to be no, if the coordination is simply like-minded individuals who get roused by the same posts, all know each other and are compulsive writers. On the other hand, if these are paid industry representatives, they have every moral obligation to state that fact when posting comments so that we all at least know which side their bread is buttered on.

It’s fine to hold the opinions that this tag-team obviously does and it’s fine to express those opinions in a coordinated fashion. What I find unseemly is the prospect that these commenters are paid by the cable and phone companies to make these comments and aren’t disclosing it.

Tim Berners-Lee, the one person most credited with inventing the Internet World Wide Web (thanks for the correction, Ali), continues to stand up for the principles espoused by the Net Neutrality crowd. In a BBC article published yesterday, Berners-Lee warns of a possible “dark period on the net” if U.S. network providers succeed in creating a tiered Internet.

“What’s very important from my point of view is that there is one web,” he said. “Anyone that tries to chop it into two will find that their piece looks very boring.”

Berners-Lee has been speaking out for Net Neutrality for awhile now, but I find it very interesting that this latest article seems to be getting a lot of attention, to the point of even being linked to by the Drudge Report. The debate around Net Neutrality is clearly expanding and it will be interesting to watch as the issue continues to garner more mainstream attention.

I wrote about Inveneo back in March, the company that has created solar powered, Asterisk-based VoIP solutions for communities where there is little to no access to electricity and communications infrastructure. I think this is a great idea and that Inveneo is doing some very important and exciting work, so I was thrilled to see Time magazine pick up on the story with a very positive article about Inveneo’s efforts in the village of Nyarukamba in western Uganda. If you’d like to read about some very positive applications of wifi and VoIP, I suggest clicking through to the Time article.

I think it’s safe to say that the VoIP industry is collectively watching the stock market today with an eye on the widely anticipated Vonage IPO. There’s been a lot of analysis and opinion expressed on how this offering will fare in the blogosphere, and I’d especially reccomend recent posts by Jon Arnold, Mark Evans, and Om Malik for those looking for some insider takes on the situation.

I’ve been holding back on posting about the Vonage IPO, but I share many of the same concerns that have been expressed both in the VoIP and financial communities about the viability of Vonage’s business model and the extreme amounts they have needed to spend on marketing to get the user penetration they have achieved. But I’m also a Vonage customer, and a pretty happy one, as I have generally been impressed both with the voice quality of the service and the customer support. Though with the cost of voice traffic continuing to plummet, and players like Skype offering free outbound calling in the U.S. and Canada, and AOL offering free incoming PSTN phone numbers, it’s hard to imagine that Vonage will be able to succeed in the long run by focusing on price as the main driver to their service.

As I write this post, the Vonage share price appears to be dropping from the initial $17 it opened up at (trading under the symbol “VG”). It will be interesting to watch this one unfold during the coming days, some smart people like Mark Evans and Jon Arnold are predicting the stock will go up, but I will be surprised if the stock value ends up at market close today above the $17 mark.

Update: I wrote this post first thing this morning but some server problems kept it from going live then. As of later this morning the Vonage share price has contnued to drop, and is now hovering around $15 (at 11:00 am PDT ).

Update 2: Vonage closed today at $14.85, a 12.65% drop from the target price of $17.

O’Reilly author and fellow VoIP blogger Ted Wallingford will be a guest on NPR’s Talk of the Nation: Science Friday this Friday to discuss VoIP matters. The VoIP show is scheduled to air at 3 p.m. EST this Friday, 5/26. Listener calls will be taken and after Friday the show will be posted as a podcast on the Science Friday site. Ted is the author of VoIP Hacks and Switching to VoIP, as well as a bunch of good O’Reilly Network articles and blog posts. Ted is an insightful guy and always has an interesting take on the latest VoIP news and developments, I’m looking forward to hearing him on NPR.