Christopher Herot's Weblog

FWD International

I had a chance to catch up with Jeff Pulver last night and hear about his ambitions for FWD International. He has recruited Tom Evslin, Dan Berninger, and Yossi Vardi to join this relaunch of what was Free World Dialup (FWD).  FWD was arguably the original VoIP business.  In twelve years it provisioned 700,000 SIP accounts and provided SIP registration, peering, and PSTN connectivity.  As disruptive to the telcos revenue stream as that was, the services it provided were essentially a re-implementation in IP of the traditional telco model.  In this next iteration of the business, they plan to make a clean break from the past, renounce the POTS legacy, and re-invent real-time and near-real-time communication.

Their first effort is a Facebook application for leaving Voice Mail but they are planning to turn FWD into a platform that will let any developer take advantage of their services.  If through doing this they can further the development of social networks as the basis for communication that will be a good thing.  One way to sum it up:

• Old: I want to call Jeff, so I reach for my phone and dial his number.  I may have a built-in directory so I can dial by name, and I may have shopped around for a cheaper way of calling him if he's in Israel, but it's still a phone call.
• New: I need to communicate with Jeff, e.g. to ask him a question.  I find him in my social network and tell my computing device (desktop, laptop, mobile device, etc.) to contact him through the most convenient means, which is more likely to be a text message but could also be voice (live or stored).  When he replies, it is through the mode that is most convenient for him, which may or may not be the same mode I used initially.

I.E. It's not about a phone call, it's about communicating.

What ever happened to those exciting VoIP applications?

I was catching up on my blog reading and came across a post by Tom Evslin that's especially appropriate on the eve of the VON conference here in Boston.  He recalls that at an earlier VON he opined how VoIP would occur in three stages: (1) Cheap long distance; (2) Converged networks; (3) really cool new services.  The first two came about, but we're pretty much still using the phone the same way we always did.  Sure, we can launch calls from our mobile contact list instead of punching in numbers, but otherwise the need for compatibility with POTS and the need to pay termination charges to POTS carriers has meant change has come at the speed of the slowest component.

Evslin concludes that the next stage will not be incremental improvement over traditional telephony, but wholesale replacement, with live voice and voice mail becoming just two choices in a continuum of communications modes.  I agree with him that these will be based on social networks, which are the phone books of the future.  This approach will allow a more natural form of communication  Instead of starting with a phone number and the hope that the associated device is near the intended recipient, conversations in the future will start from the identity of the recipient and the nature of the task to be performed.  From that point, one can initiate a communication in the mode most suited to the problem at hand and the needs of both parties, whether that be an synchronous email, and almost-synchronous SMS or Instant Message, or a real-time voice or video conversation.

Verizon vs. Vonage - Claim Construction

Thanks to Brough Turner, I have posted the claim construction for the recent patent case between Verizon and Vonage.  As I learned from my experience as an expert witness, claim construction is the painstaking process in which individual words of the claims of the patent are examined in the context of the specification of the patent in order to assign meanings to them, for example in this case deciding if "name" refers to the called party or to the called party's device.  Claim construction is a matter of law and is therefor decided by the a, whose decisions are rendered in the above-referenced document.  All the jury gets to decide is whether the claims (as so understood) are infringed by the defendant.  As Fred Goldstein has pointed out, the jury was not asked to decide if these patents are valid.  Good thing for Verizon, since the claims at issue are for looking up a name and returning an address, something that's been going on in the Internet at least since Paul Mockapetris invented of DNS in 1983.  I expect this will be in the courts for some time to come.

Verizon Services Corp. et al v. Vonage Holdings Corp. et al

Many people have written about the recently decided patent infringement case (1:06-cv-00682-CMH-BRP) Verizon brought against Vonage in the Federal District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia
but no one has posted any details about which patents were infringed.  So here goes...

The jury found that Vonage had infringed on the following Verizon patents.

6,104,711 - claim 20

15. A method comprising:

receiving a name translation request at a server coupled to a public packet data network;

executing a conditional analysis in response to the name translation request;

if the conditional analysis produces a first result, translating a name included in the name translation request into a first destination address;

if the conditional analysis produces a second result, translating the name included in the name translation request into a second destination address; and

transmitting a response message containing the first or the second destination address to a calling device for use in establishing communication at least partially through the public packet data network.

20. A method as in claim 15; wherein:

the first and second destination address includes a numeric Internet Protocol address; and

the second destination address further includes information relating to call routing via a public switched telephone network.

6,282,574 - claim 27

26. A method comprising:

receiving a name translation request at a server coupled to a public packet data network;

translating a name included in the request into a destination telephone number associated with a name included in the request; and

transmitting a reply containing both the destination telephone number and a packet data network address of a telephone gateway coupled between the public packet data network and a telephone network through the public packet data network to a calling device.

27. A method as in claim 26, wherein the address is an Internet Protocol address.

6,359,880 - claims 1, 6, 7, and 8

1. A method comprising: registering a wireless telephone terminal in a localized wireless gateway system;

transmitting registration data identifying the gateway system from the localized  wireless gateway system to a home location register database through a public packet  data communication network;

receiving a request from a calling computer coupled to the public packet data communication network for a call to the wireless telephone terminal;

in response to the request, accessing the home location register database and obtaining a packet data address for the localized wireless gateway system;

using the address to set up a voice communication through the public packet data communication network and the localized wireless gateway system between the calling computer and the wireless telephone terminal.

6. A method as in claim 1, wherein the public packet data communication network is a packet switched network.

7. A method as in claim 6, wherein the packet switched network comprises a system of interlinked data networks using TCP/IP protocol.

8. A method as in claim 7, wherein the system of interlinked data networks comprises  the Internet.

Clint Ricker has a good analysis on his blog.