Christopher Herot's Weblog

ETel Launchpad

Om Malik and Surj Patel kicked off the ETel conference with a startup Launchpad, six minute demos of new products from 7 companies:

• GrandCentral - single number reach + unified messaging
• OpenFire (formerly Wildfire) from Jive Software - XMPP Instant Messaging server that does VoIP
• Cellcrypt - client for mobile phones to push encrypted voice mail
• Peerant - Ruby P2P app to connect visitors on web sites to agents
• mySay - phone number to leave and retrieve group voice messages
  
• Flat Planet Phone Company - Platform for SMB voice services - $199/year for reseller partition
• MIG33 from Project Goth Ltd - VoIP over mobile data

The winner is to be decided by sending a text message to Mozes  - at this writing GrandCentral was ahead, followed by MIG33.

Stowe Boyd on Communication Underflow

I'm at O'Reilly's Emerging Telephony Conference this week.  First up was Stowe Boyd, speaking on Communication Underflow.  He argued that Continuous Partial Attention and the continual connectivity inspired by on-line gaming, are a feature and not a bug - a sensible response to the world in which we now live.  While the ethos and practice of multitasking is at odds with most educational and industrial practices, it is a state of consciousness that is well suited to circumstances where situational awareness is key.  He pointed out that learning to juggle is the process of learning not to focus on the individual balls or their movements but instead to look for the ball that's outside of the normal pattern.

The second half of the talk introduced Csíkszentmihályi's concept of Flow - a state of total oneness with the activity at hand and the situation.   Stowe offered some strategies for being productive in the flow-optimized world:

• Productivity is second to Connection: network productivity trumps personal productivity.
• Everything important will find it's way to you many times, don't worry if you miss it the first time.
• Remain in the flow: be wrapped in the thing that has captured your attention.

He ended with a philosophical discourse on the four flavors of time:

• Physics
• Linear - Kant & Leibnitz's notion of time as something we are passing through
• Cyclical - the unending moment that poets write about
• Flow - Piaget's concept of "lived" time

In the future we will be more likely to think of time as the unending moment through which everything else flows and will learn how to spend "more time scanning the horizon and fewer looking down at the piecework in our laps."

Jaduka

Jaduka, an anonymous calling service from Network Enhanced Telecom, LLP, who has been in the prepaid long distance business since 1998, was launched in 2005 as PrivateTel and joined the ranks of Ja* companies when it was rebranded Jaduka in 2006. Jaduka offers two complementary services, MyPrivateLine and Click-and-Connect.  Both provide the usual call-bridging services, the former from an 800 number+extension and the latter from a button which can be embedded in a Web site or email signature.  Both services offer an initial free 60 minutes and then sell buckets of minutes for approximately $0.08/minute. Both services offer rudimentary call screening (the recipient does not get any indication of who is calling but can decide whether to accept a call, send it to voicemail, or (for click-and-connect) reject it. Jaduka's primary innovation is in the variety of web and email buttons it provides (50) and the degree of customization of the widget which pops up when the button is pressed.  Three templates are offered which provide varyng degrees of customization, such as uploading custom images and text and (for email signatures) optionally including information from a previously supplied profile.  The site provides email which can be incorporated in a web page or email signature and includes detailed information, including screen shots, of how to add a signature to Outlook, Outlook Express, and Apple Mail.

Radio Open Source

This evening I went to a reception hosted by Chris Lydon and his crew at Open Source.  I've been a fan of Chris since he hosted The Connection on WBUR, which was probably the most intelligent news call-in show of its time.  Chris and his producer Mary McGrath left the show in 2001 after a much-publicized dispute over ownership, but the two of them are together again at Open Source on WGBH and have again re-invented the format.  They've dispensed with the live callers - the quality of the questions wasn't as good at 7 pm as it was in the morning, and it was easier to syndicate the show when it didn't have to air at exactly the same time in all markets - but instead make extensive use of a network of more than 6,000 people who post on the show's blog.  Their community suggests topics and guests, and provides questions that are used on the air.  Most of the questions are compiled in advance of the show, but people do blog as they are listening and their questions get used in real time on the air.  The topics range from politics to technology to poetry and through it all Chris manages to be one of the few hosts who actually reads the books and asks intelligent questions of the guests.

OLPC

Walter Bender of  One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) was on Chris Lydon's show on WGBH radio last night.  He had some good answers to the usual criticisms about whether the money would be better spent elsewhere, such as pointing out that in most of the world's schools, there aren't many textbooks either, and given how quickly textbooks become obsolete the $100 laptop may be a more effective mechanism for disseminating knowledge.  OLPC is indeed a massive social experiment whose effect won't be known until it is implemented.  My prediction is that putting all this computing power in the hands of people in developing counties will unleash a huge wave of talent and innovation.  If you consider that intelligence (unlike wealth and education) is probably distributed evenly throughout the world's population, then there must be many budding Steve Jobs who are currently herding cattle and carrying water in the developing world.  If even a small percentage of them get access to the knowledge and distribution channels of the larger world there is no telling what they will be able to produce.

Also, I wouldn't bet against OLPC Chairman Nicholas Negroponte's predictions for the future.  [Full disclosure: Nicholas was my thesis advisor.]  Some predictions of his that many originally scoffed at:

• Architects using computers
• Personal/home computers
• The demise of time sharing
• The demise of the (printed) newspaper
• Mainframes morphing into servers
• Raster displays
• Digital TV
• E-commerce
• User-generated content

 

Superior Telephone Coperative vs. AT&T

In a complaint filed in the U.S. District Court - Southern District of New York, Farmers Telephone Company and Superior Telephone Cooperative, two of the defendants in the Iowa free calls lawsuit, accused AT&T of not paying almost $8.9 million in termination charges owed since October, 2006.   They further allege that AT&T is engaging in prohibited "self-help" action by refusing to pay instead of going through the mandated dispute resolution and complaint processes.  According to the complaint, this is not the first time AT&T has engaged in this tactic.

This cut-off in cash flow was most likely the proximate cause of the shuttering of futurephone.com.

WSJ on Apple iPhone

The Wall Street Journal ran a front page article today on the negotiations that led up to the iPhone deal between Cingular and Apple.  While this story has been reported extensively elsewhere, the Journal's reporters uncovered a few new facts:

• Apple's pitch to Cingular was that Apple understood the Internet and Cingular did not.
• Apple did not go the MVNO route since Jobs "viewed the cellphone business as an unforgiving one, where carriers are blamed for network problems and overwhelmed by customer complaints."
• The iPhone team at Apple grew to hundreds of people.
• The design was the responsibility of Jonathan Ive, who also designed th iPod.
• Apple approached Verizon Wireless, but Verizon wouldn't give up on its demand to provide music for the device through its V CAST service and balked at cutting resellers out of the distribution channel.
• The two executives who did the deal were Glenn Lurie, Cingular's president of national distribution, and Eddy Cue, Apple's VP of Applications and Internet Services.

Jaxtr

A recent addition to the anonymous calling service family is Jaxtr.  This service lets you give it up to three real phone numbers and then let people reach you by clicking on a button

or widget

which you can place on you blog, web site, or any of several social networking sites.  A key differentiator is that they have figured out the html to copy and paste into a large number of sites, including:

• MySpace
• LinkedIn
• Blogger
• Hi5
• xanga
• freewebs
• blackplanet

as well as generic web pages and email.

By default, the first call goes to voice mail, but then the recipient can go to a log of all received calls and allow specified callers (determined by CallerID) to get through.

Voice mails can be played from the web site and are alerted via email.

The service lacks the two-way anonymous return path of Jangl but in return is somewhat simpler to use.

I predict there will be a lot more of these services in the future and that we are only at the beginning of what is possible.

Attack of the J-Clones

Is J the new X?  (Or the new i?)  Michael Cerda who founded Jangl has discovered he's getting plenty of company from other firms who have not only start their company name with a J but with a Ja.  At last count:

Jabbin
Jabphone
Jaiku
Jajah
Jangl
Jaxtr

For a compilation of Telecom 2.0 companies, see Bob Stumpel's list.

CDYNE Web Services

CDYNE in Chesapeake, Virginia has a useful set of web services to do things such as:

• make a phone call and play a message
• correct a postal address and return Lat/Long, and congressional district
• map IP addresses to a location
• get stock quotes
• verify phone numbers
• query the Social Security Administration's Death Master File
• find the assessed value of a house
• look up state sales tax

Most of the services cost a few cents per invocation.  There's a wiki that describes each one and points to a test page where you can try them out.

They also have a set of widgets and gadgets you can embed.