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.

Here’s some more great news about our upcoming Emerging Telephony conference. I just got the OK to offer readers of this site our 40% Friends and Family discount if you register before January 29. That’s right, 40%! Register today with the code etel07fnf40 to get this great discount. The line-up is looking excellent for this conference, which will be held February 27 to March 1, 2007 in San Francisco, California. Some of the speakers I’m most looking forward to hearing are Om Malik, Alec Saunders, Martin Geddes, Brian Capouch, Lee Dryburgh, David Beckemeyer, Dan York, John Todd, Brian Aker, Mark Spencer…well, as I peruse the conference schedule I’m having a hard time ending this list. Surj and Brady have really lined up an excellent group of presenters for this year’s conference. For another interesting take on the sessions and speakers we have planned, check out Nat Torkington’s latest Radar post From Walled Gardens to Green Fields.

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?

If you can make it to Washington, D.C. in March, check out the Freedom to Connect conference. It was started by David S. Isenberg, most famous for a 1997 paper that many think set the whole environment for understanding developments on the Internet up to and including Web 2.0–David introduced the term “stupid network” into the conversation.

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?