VoIP Now

VoIP Roundup - Thur Mar 08, 2007

Skype Founder Janus Friis: Mile-High Bad Boy
Valleywag reported a couple of days ago that Janus Friis, one of the founders of Kazaa, Skype and Joost, and a millionaire by all accounts, got drunk and frisky with his girlfriend while on a Virgin Airlines flight. Get this: his girlfriend is the daughter of Roger Moore. As in Bond, James Bond.

Clearwire IPO Snags $600M
Intel may have come up with WiMax but Clearwire is the company building the networks in the United States. Doing that cost them $240M last year, but their IPO today generated $600M.

RIM's Balsillie Steps Down
Sort of. Jim Balsillie of RIM, maker of the BlackBerry line of mobile communications devices, has stepped down as a Chair of the Waterloo, Canada, company. This is due in part to an error in earnings reporting that will cost RIM US$250M. [Source: Kitchener-Waterloo local TV] Maybe Balsillie can spend the extra time finding a hockey team.

VoIPing For Profit - Skype Prime?

Skype once more releases a feature, Skype Prime [via], that's in direction competition with their developer community. While it's a very exciting feature - which allows you to bill for a Skype-to-Skype call - Skype is once more suggesting that you shouldn't even bother developing anything because they'll just take the idea or partner with someone else.

Then again, Jyve, Bitwine and other similar Extras are completely safe because Skype is charging an absurd 30% of whatever you charge your callers. As one commenter at the Skype Share blog says, isn't 30% a bit excessive. Someone charging $100/h would end up paying Skype $30/h for a call that is otherwise free.

Someone from the eBay side of things must have a plan to make Skype a laughingstock. I can't see Friis and Zenstrom's original team behaving like this. Something like 5-10% is reasonable. There's also Ether, by the way, which you can use Skype with.

Who's Got Muni Wi-Fi?

Municipal Wi-Fi networks are popping all over the world, making connectedness easier for lots of people and pushing the possible ubiquity of dual mode cellular/ Wi-Fi phones (i.e., VoWiFi or VoIP over WiFi). Well, DailyWireless has a great list of the 10 most connected cities in the world, and goes in depth about each city. Note that the first 5 cities or so listed are all in Asia. Most of the rest are in Europe. What's up with North America, then?

Most interesting (to me, anyway): Shoreditch TV, which is a network of 100 public cameras in Shoreditch (east London, UK), broadcasting to the Internet. The idea is to dissuade criminals. Little Brother 2.0? Neighborhood Watch takes on a new meaning. Then again, the UK is considered to be one of the most endemic surveillance societies in the world.

Of course, there are loads of municipal Wi-Fi projects going on in the US and Canada, especially a few big ones in Silicon Valley (42 municipalities over 1500 sq mi).

Where in the World Are... You?

GPS capabilities are supposedly one of the current and near-future hot features of cell phones. It's been predicted, probably even before 2001, that all cell phones will have GPS capabilities, which would be particularly useful for tracking people in emergency situations.

However, for tracking bike and pedestrian traffic, PNAs (Personal Navigation Assistants) are supposedly not ready. That's primarily because the necessary cartographic work for bike and foot traffic hasn't been done for most places in the world, so having a nav system for them is pointless. And for safety reasons, you cannot assume either type of traffic can use regular GPS nav maps.

Still, when and if such maps are recorded, smartphones such as the Apple iPhone or some of the Linux keyless handsets might be ideal platforms for PNAs for cyclists and pedestrians. In fact, I'm predicting a general rise in world tourism over the next two decades (pretty easy prediction to make).

So PNAs for this type of traffic could become a burgeoning market. But having worked in GIS and digital mapping for seven years, I know there's a lot of work to be done to satisfy a market that doesn't yet really exist, and may not exist for many years. Not an easy business decision to make. On the other hand, as Clumsy on their feet says at the end of the article, paper maps never run out of batteries.

Interactive Ads On Your Phone?

Where do they get this stuff? Ericsson, the telecom equipment manufacturer wants to push mobile TV while making it worthwhile for carriers. This means running interactive ads on mobile handsets.

Sorry but I don't now or ever want to see advertising on my cell phone, with the possible exception that my carrier not only pays my bandwidth costs but also increase my monthly bandwidth cap for my cellular data plan from 250 Mb to something more reasonable. Otherwise, buzz off already. On the other hand, this Ericsson proposal supposedly will not require extra bandwidth.

Now if that's true, there could be a bit of a mobile TV revolution. If you didn't have to pay to watch mobile TV on your puny handset screen, would you watch the advertising? Fact is, mobile Internet TV still needs some more features/ infrastructure, including larger screens - maybe roll-out style or HUDs (heads-up displays).

Palm In Trouble?

MarketWatch elaborates on a WSJ article that Palm is potentially up for sale, hurt by the competition. Recall that the PalmOS was once the most widely used platform for mobile devices. That's ceased to be true for a few years. I'm not sure, but I think Windows Mobile took over that status. And then there's Apple's imminent iPhone, not to mention a few Linux phones popping up. Symbian still commands a bit of presence in the market. So yeah, competition.

Nokia is being touted as a possible buyer. I have to say I hope it's Nokia; I have a lot of respect for what they are doing and the fact that they haven't ignored VoIP. As a Palm Treo owner who has increasingly grown to dislike my choice, I feel Nokia will treat Palm the best. This purely my own biased opinion.

Cisco Entering Social Networking?

Cisco, as you probably know, has been a leader in computer networking for a long time. Nuno at 21talks writes about an NY Times article about Cisco buying Tribe.net, a social networking site. As the NYT piece says, it's a cuirious pairing. I can't see why they're getting into this market. But then, I can't understand why Microsoft might be coming out with a Zune phone. (Other than that Steve Ballmer hates Steve Jobs.)

But Nuno thinks it's a good idea, and points out that Cisco previously purchased a social network design firm. Didn't know there were such things. Seems kind of redundant, considering that sites like Ning let you design your own social network for free, and within a few minutes. Who knows. All I've learned is that when a large company buys a web services blog, they have some reason for doing so, even if it's obscure.

Let Your Fingers Do The Clicking

Springwise talks about [via Etel] a digital product offered by Austrian company Herold: 4 million Austrian residential and business phone numbers, loadable onto your cell phone. Do you really need or even want such a product? That's a lot of memory, which could be used for other purposes.

Being old enough to have used computers when they had 128 Mb RAM, and having seen them increase, only to witness software companies producing bloatware, I'm really hoping that this doesn't happen to cell phones. With more sophisticated handsets like the Apple iPhone coming out soon, this is a very real danger. Request to mobile application developers: KISS = Keep it simple, stupid. Don't give us mobile bloatware.

New VoIP Soft Client Releases

Where does the time go? SightSpeed just released version 6.0, and Gizmo Project 3.0 is  out.

New SightSpeed features include a new interface, better video quality regardless of connection speed, video mail playback and more.

Gizmo Project is now compatible with Yahoo Messenger and Windows Live Messenger. Calls to these to from Gizmo are free. Other new features include group chat, file sharing, custom avatars, tabbed chat interface for multiple chats, logging, Asterisk PBX support, a SIP number, SIP adapters, "call in" access numbers, and call recording.

No doubt we'll see releases for other softphones soon, and probably whole slew of consumer VoIP hardware. Or maybe collaborations that bring soft clients such as Google Talk to desk phones.