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Content Tagged with Voice + mobile

Crank calls have never been so easy.

As folks on Reddit have pointed out, Disney’s Hannah Montana Wake-Up Call makes getting up to no good a snap. Just enter your friend’s victim’s phone number and the delightful Miley Cyrus’s voice will wake them up or send them a reminder: “Dear [name], don’t forget that today you have [activity].”

Opening a web-to-phone system to the public without authentication or constraints may be fun — but it’s also ripe for abuse. Without authentication of the sender, users are free to enter any source phone number they want, making it look like the calls are coming from someone else. There’s no opt-out mechanism or audit trail. Even attempts to constrain the system can be circumvented: You can change the recipient’s time zone and wake them up in the middle of the night, or back-date the wake-up call to have it placed immediately.

Visitors must be over 18 to use the service — not exactly Cyrus’ fan base. But it probably won’t make the calls any more mature or limit the mischief.

As we integrate Internet, telephony, mobility and video, we can’t forget the lessons learned online. It’s too easy to let features like authentication, transparency, opt-out and masquerading prevention fall by the wayside in a land grab for names and numbers.

After just 10 hours on Reddit people were reporting the service was swamped, yielding messages like, “Sorry, that number’s already been scheduled for five calls.” Page load times were sluggish, and the fun is likely to end soon.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a sister who needs a wake-up call.

Like all the other geeks in attendance, I couldn’t help myself from letting out an audible “whooo” when Google showed off an Android phone demo Wednesday that linked Street View to a compass (see video below). Sure it was just a demo, but watching the virtual-reality performance of photo-maps linked to hand motions shows how cool new applications could be when they start by running on a high-end mobile phone.

Delivering lots of cool new apps is the promise of Android, the open source mobile OS project from Google. With a much-improved iPhone-ish look and feel, the base Android platform seems ready for prime time and on schedule to launch somewhere, sometime, later this year. But I still see three big problems for Android apps that could keep the add-on market small for the foreseeable future.

Specifically the problems are:

– how many carriers are really going to offer Android phones?
– how will users find Android applications?
– how will developers convince users to take a chance and download their app?

Until Google can help answer those questions, Android apps are probably going to lag far behind those provided by big carriers on their captive hardware/software offerings, especially those designed for the already popular iPhone.

With a big crowd overall and packed rooms at Android-specific discussions, the Google I/O conference Wednesday showed there is great interest from the developer community for the idea of an open-source platform for the development of mobile apps. And the list of early winners in Google’s Android app development contest shows a wide range of creative thinking, with developers using the features of mobility and base apps like maps to build new, rich and sometimes quirky programs that would likely never get past the first gatekeeper at AT&T Wireless or Verizon.

But getting back to the problems — without a committed list of service providers, Google doesn’t have much of a market to offer developers yet. Similarly, the company’s silence on any kind of an apps marketplace means developers might be on their own when it comes to marketing their one-off ideas, adding a huge degree of difficulty, especially for smaller shops.

And the lack of an application certification process (Google said Wednesday that users will be asked to certify an app themselves at install) means another big hurdle for developers to cross, namely convincing users to trust that their app is safe, won’t break their phone or transmit personal info to undisclosed locations.

Seems like a lot to ask from users, especially those in the U.S., who historically haven’t been able to do much with their phones other than download new ringtones. Add education to the list of above problems and you see why I think this market is going to stay small for some time.

UPDATE: It looks like the Google folks may have been more forthcoming about an Android Apps store in later panels at the I/O show, according to this post from the Register. (I only sat through the first panel led by developer advocate Jason Chen, who when questioned about such a store agreed that “distribution is hard” and that Google was working on something, but didn’t have anything to announce.) We have a message in to Google PR to clarify, and will update if and when we hear back. UPDATE 2: Here is an official statement from a Google spokesperson:

It would be a great benefit to the Android community to provide a place where people can go to safely and securely download content and where a billing system would allow developers to get paid for their effort. We wouldn’t have done our job if we didn’t provide something that helps developers get distribution. We have nothing to announce at this time.

Paul Kapustka, former managing editor for GigaOM, now has his own blog at Sidecut Reports.

Earlier this morning I met with Sarik Weber, co-founder of Hamburg, Germany-based mobile callback service, Cellity. He brought me up to speed on his company, but he also mentioned that they had launched a Facebook application that allows you to send free SMS messages to anyone worldwide.

I signed up for the app but also looked at the competitive landscape and found that there are around three dozen (free) SMS-related apps, but they have little or no usage. Even the best ones get about 500 users a day, though most have fewer than 50 daily users. (Related story: 5 Ways to SMS for free.)

The state of these SMS apps is no different from many social voice applications (voice widgets). The only difference being that the VoIP widgets have high incidence of installs but comparatively low daily usage.

These two examples make me question the viability of Facebook as a communications hub. Our columnist Daniel Berninger has eloquently made an argument for a social directory that uses Facebook and other social networks to break away from the current paradigm of numeric phone numbers.

He is part of a group that believes social networks could be used to authenticate our “communication” relationships. I don’t necessarily disagree with Daniel, but the usage metrics of SMS and voice apps makes me wonder if Facebookers really want to do anything more than throw Vampire Bites, Scrabble and pretend to have a lot of friends.

Playing with the Instinct, Samsung’s answer to the iPhone, is a fun experience, but not one I could handle on a daily basis. The touch interface is nice, with a satisfying vibration each time the phone registers a touch command, but lacks an accelerometer to register the changes in direction, like the iPhone has.

The Instinct will be available in June, and it appears to have all the features a consumer could dream of wanting. In fact the phone has so many features crammed onto it, and it’s such a small device, that it was hard to do things without accidentally taking a picture or hitting one of the three hard-wired buttons on the bottom. The same thing happens on my BlackBerry Pearl, however, so my fat fingers might be the problem.

The navigation feature, which is powered by TeleNav and incorporates voice-activation technology from Microsoft (acquired through its TellMe acquisition), was my favorite. I could just tell the phone the name of one location and it would bring up a list of others nearby. Click on a car icon and it figures out where you are and then offers turn-by-turn directions to the place of your choosing. The icon will also appear near addresses in emails, eliminating one step in getting directions.

The phone uses a proprietary Samsung- and Sprint-developed operating system. The software-based keyboard can be used in landscape mode or vertically. When web searching, the keyboard contains a handy dedicated “.com” key. Surfing was easy and you could drag your finger across the screen to navigate down the page.

The television service, provided by Mobi, is still under development, so was slow to load and pixelated. Downloading music was easy, although the files downloaded from the Sprint store were a scant 1 MB, which makes me wonder about their quality. Battery life is about 5.5 hours, according to a spokeswoman, which includes a mix of talking and data usage. The phone will also come with a second external battery.

The best part about the phone seems to be that these features will be available under Sprint’s unlimited plan. That includes, texting, talking, navigation and data. But without an idea of what Sprint plans to charge for the phone, it’s hard to say how this stacks up against the competition that is similarly aimed at challenging the iPhone. And although not as intuitive as the iPhone, if the price is reasonable, given how many services Sprint includes in the plan, the Instinct may be a bargain.

Nokia is uncertain about the future of UMA and may not develop any more dual-band handsets for the standard, according to George Fry, director of technology alignment for the Finnish company. “We’re not seeing use diminishing, but we are seeing deployments level off,” Fry said earlier this week at the Personal Computing and Communications Association meeting.

Fry said that in cases in which an operator such as T-Mobile is trying to fill holes in its coverage without spending more to build out the network, UMA makes sense. But he said he wasn’t aware of any new deployments in the last six months or so. Indeed UMA, a standard that allows for secure hand-off between a cellular and fixed network, has proved somewhat polarizing.

Meanwhile Steve Shaw, associate VP of marketing for Kineto Wireless, notes that UMA is also a key component of femtocells, which are currently en vogue in the telco world. Again, there’s no sense of how wide any sort of femtocell deployment might be, but Shaw, whose company bills itself as the UMA company, isn’t counting the standard out.

While admitting that current UMA deployments requiring dual-mode handsets are few, he points out that Orange does have plans to deploy a dual-band network in the UK, Spain and Poland to augment its program started in France. Maybe UMA will become a useful but limited standard, in a manner similar to the way Infiniband was hyped as a replacement for Fibre Channel and Ethernet, but instead was only adopted by the smaller market for high-performance computing.

SIPphone just released Gizmo Project 4.0, a soft client that includes video calling. You can make free video calls, even if only one person has a webcam, and the Meta IM and Tabbed Chat interface make it a worthy IM client for your Windows desktop. Mac people will have to wait, but 4.0 works on Nokia tablets. Now if they would just improve their quality of service…

Mobile VoIP/IP startup Fring has released the fringME! widget, which lets web visitors fring you from anywhere you’ve placed it. Among the cool features on this widget is the real-time ‘find me’ feature, which instantly opens a GoogleMaps window to show the fringster’s physical location via their GPS-equipped handset.

And lastly, my favorite voice-over-Wi-Fi company, Truphone, has released a Facebook app that allows folks to call you directly from the social network, just add the Truphone ‘Call Me’ button. They also have a video explaining how it works.

Tom Keating reports that the owners of Skype Wi-Fi phones and other standalone devices have been experiencing excruciating network problems, and points to the vitriol flowing freely on the Skype forums.

This raises the question: Why are these outages happening? And should Skype (EBAY) start to build its own network of super peers? After all, their big plan is to drive Skype’s non-PC usage, as indicated by their recent expansion into the mobile market. They have also been aggressively pushing the Skype brand, making money by licensing it to hardware makers who build devices like Wi-Fi phones and then sell them at mass-market retailers such as Wal-Mart.

Skype benefits from the increased footprint that comes from expanding into the non-geek markets. The problem is that many of these new buyers are using Skype over Wi-Fi and don’t contribute as much to the overall P2P network placing an extra load on some and letting others leech off the platform.

I think it is time for Skype to start buildinga network of company-owned supernodes to take the load off the consumer network. They have in the past built infrastructure to support expansion into the PSTN-connect business. However, the reason the company resisted expansion into the mobile domain was purely because it didn’t want to build its own supernode infrastructure, instead choosing to partner with startups like iSkoot.

Of course, such infrastructure comes with big bills, and one can understand Skype’s reticence. Some, like our good friend Aswath Rao suggested that the whole Skype economic model will break down if that it wouldn’t cost the company that much to build dedicated supernodes, but it would take away some of the P2P cachet. And while that might be, I think that when you pay for a device, you expect a higher quality of service, unlike us PC-people who settle for poor quality because it doesn’t cost us anything.

Maybe it is time for Skype to pony up!

OK, this has to be the coolest news this morning. SHAPE Services, a Stuttgart, Germany-based company, well-known for making mobile IM clients, has just announced Skype for iPhone, an iPhone-optimized Web site that allows you to access Skype via the browser on the iPhone. You can try out this for free for a limited time.

It took me less than two minutes to get up and running. Sending messages was as simple as typing SMS messages. I am guessing that, since they ask you for your mobile number when you log in, there is some kind of call-back service built into the app. After all, the company says you don’t need WiFi.

IM+ for Skype works with BlackBerry RIM, Windows Mobile Pocket PC, Palm OS, Symbian and J2ME devices. The application works in any network and doesn’t require WiFi, the company says.

By Jesse Kopelman

This year we are seeing widespread US deployment of CDMA EVDO Rev A. The next two years should bring the same for both UMTS HSPA (both uplink and downlink) and WiMAX.

What these technologies have in common, besides a lot of capitalized letters, is vastly improved performance, in terms of latency and data rate, over what has previously been available with wide-area wireless networks. A side effect of this increased performance is that the mobile wireless connection can now support high quality VoIP. It seems a certainty that this capability will change the mobile telephony industry forever.

The $80/month that carriers charge for standalone unlimited data plans sounds pretty good for an industry where many struggle to break an ARPU of $60/month, but it suddenly doesn’t look so good when one considers that high end voice plans can get upwards of $200/month. It would be a huge blow to carrier profitability to have the rate plan ceiling so drastically lowered.

Meanwhile, they are caught between the hammer and anvil, as they can’t raise data prices without hurting uptake there and data use has become a significant revenue source. The situation will get worse over time thanks to two factors: First, over the next two to three years T-Mobile, Clearwire, and Sprint WiMAX will all emerge as players in the nationwide mobile broadband market. Second, improved devices in the PDA and smart phone form-factor will allow for VoIP without compromising the expected phone look and feel.

In the end, traditional mobile carriers are powerless to protect their voice margins from the threat of VoIP. They could try blocking VoIP, but how well will that fly when they’ve got compete with both a T-Mobile eager to gain market share to recoup their 3G spending and WiMAX carriers with no legacy voice revenue to protect?

Also, do Verizon and AT&T really want to fight yet another Net Neutrality battle? Sprint Nextel is an especially interesting case, as the only way for its WiMAX efforts to succeed is at the expense of its legacy operations and vice versa. Another tack would be to market the circuit-switched service as having superior quality to any third party VoIP offering. This could be quite compelling to high end users who are often business people, but is largely undercut by years of scraping b