Archaic Telecom

Voxeo’s Phono: Instant Softphone Using Javascript

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Yesterday at the jQuery Conference held in Boston, Voxeo announced its new plugin that “turns any web browser into a multi-channel communications platform.” Called Phono (rhymes with Tropo), this is a pure client-side solution that is simple enough to implement: just a few lines of HTML and you have a working softphone embedded in a browser page.

I repeat: this is a client-side solution that, unlike Tropo and Twilio, doesn’t involve any server-side complexities. Voxeo’s cloud does all the communications control!

I suspect at more than a few startups next week, the words “Phono” and “Voxeo” will be found scribbled on whiteboards.

There are other tantalizing things about the announcement. More on page two.Continue reading

The Rack

India to Develop OS

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Infosys’s HQ in Bangalore

The Economic Times reports that India’s Defense Research and Development Organization— is this the equivalent of the US’s DARPA?—has set up software centers in Delhi and Bangalore with a charter to develop a highly-secure operating system. The effort would involve partnerships with software companies in both these cities, as well as Hyderabad.

Dr V K Saraswat, Scientific Adviser to the Defence Minister, said that DRDO’s project has the goal to protect data from cyber attacks, and the only way to do that is with a “home-grown  system, a complete architecture” this is controlled by India.Continue reading

@NYC

Introspectr: Organizing Ambient Infomacy

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I’m in a neologistic, word-coining mood this morning.  Like you, I have one eye on my Tweetdeck, half-consciously absorbing facts, information, memes, and other synaptic nourishment that’s flowing around me. At some point in my day, I’m inevitably walking an idea back to its source, which involves unproductively scrolling through streams of posts.

Tipping my cap to early descriptions of Twitter and microblogging, I’m calling this phenomenon ambient infomacy. Well …  maybe this new word won’t happen, but you get the idea.

This is all to explain why introspectr, which demoed their Twitter and Facebook search tool at New York Tech Meetup on Tuesday, received my complete attention.

Continue reading

@NYC

Open Gov in NYC Gets a Big Boost

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I couldn’t make last night’s New York Tech Meetup in person, so I grabbed my laptop, settled into my sofa chair (after removing the cat), and watched the Livestream broadcast.  Besides liking introspectr (more on them in a later post), for me the most significant part of the evening’s entertainment was the official launch of NYC BigApps 2.0 contest.

As with last year’s first-ever competition, developers work with New York City’s open-gov data sets to create applications. The “most creative, best implemented, and impactful applications”, as judged by a panel of industry experts and leaders, will compete for $20,000  in prizes. The submission period ends January 12.

So what data sets are available to developers?
Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Cisco’s umi: Not for mi

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Cisco’s marketing department has continued their cuddly product naming  with the announcement of umi (pronounced you-me) last week. It’s basically Skype or in Cisco-speak, “telepresense,” for regular folks.

And by regular folks they mean TV-watchers with an Internet connection but without a laptop and video camera.  I’m sure Cisco business development crunched the numbers and decided there’s a ton of money selling  $600 set top boxes with a $24.99 monthly charge to this segment.

The other perpetrators involved in this scheme include BestBuy, which will sell the gear, and Verizon, which plans to resell the service to its Fios customers.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Scientific American: US Broadband is Awful

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Holy Heisenberg! Scientific American, the magazine better known for writing about dark holes and gene splicing, has editorialized earlier this month on the state of US broadband. While SA has in recent years taken on more topical subject matter, there opinionating on broadband was a bit of a surprise to this long-time reader.

Referring to a study from Harvard’s Berkman Center—I believe it’s the “Next-Generation Connectivity” report, which we’ve written about—and no doubt informed by pretty impressive advisers (over 140 Nobel laureates have written for SA), the editors point out the sorry state of US broadband.Continue reading

The Rack

Technoverse Blog to Cruz Reader: Basta!

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Trying to find a WiFi signal

I am back from my Italian adventure, enjoying every minute of walking down narrow Roman alleys, biking past Umbrian fields, and eating and drinking the riches of the campagna. I was undecided about bringing along the 7” Cruz Reader until the very last minute when my instinctual urges to check for emails won out.  I had a fully charged tablet when I left the US.

When I arrived at the hotel in Rome, Velocity Micro’s tablet didn’t have enough oomph to power on.  I began to notice a pattern. I would charge the slab for a few hours, use it for a bit, then go out and have my vacation. The next morning I would discover that the Reader had an uncanny ability to leak its charge overnight.  As they say in Italian: basta! (enough).Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Mapping Fun with FCC Data

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I wanted to get this post out before we close up shop for a small business-related trip. We’re taking off to study social networking issues in a beloved southern European country noted for its incredible contributions to art, culture,  food, and civilization as we know it. We’ll be back on October 10.

To the matter at hand … mapping FCC competitive data. I had been looking for a better way to show and share this regulatory agency’s “477” records on ISP competition. I then discovered the potent Google Maps Data APIs, which let you send and receive geo data as a feed. With access to the feed and using Google mapping software, data can be viewed, analyzed, and even updated by large distributed groups.  It’s really an amazing tool.

So with a little bit of effort I loaded competitive ISP data for suburban NJ into a shared Google Map. I’ve conveniently embedded it into this post.Continue reading

The Rack

Cruz Reader:Tablet Lite

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I was hoping to enter the Android-age this week courtesy of Velocity Micro’s $199 Cruz Reader. The Reader arrived yesterday on my porch sometime during a late afternoon editorial meeting. I excitedly opened up the UPS cardboard to be teased by the words “Unlimited Possibilities” printed on the Cruz’s product packaging.

I haven’t purchased that much gadgetry in recent years, but I do recall that my cell phone  came with a fairly thick operating manual. The Cruz Reader takes a more minimalist approach, providing you with a single-page folded booklet. I couldn’t find much more on-line, so I assumed this is a completely intuitive device that will guide my fingers in doing the work.

After booting up and then adjusting the touch calibration setting, I found that I couldn’t get the Cruz Reader to respond. I thought I had paper-weighted this thing. My fingers told me to reboot this mini-tablet by pressing the silvery on-off button on the side. I learned later that I was actually just putting it into a kind of sleep mode.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Avaya Flare: Can Android Enterprise Tablets Thrive?

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As expected,  Avaya announced yesterday that its “chameleon” video device is in fact … a tablet computer. And not surprisingly it runs  Android OS (2.1 for the record). It is larger than Cisco’s previously announced Cius (11.6″ versus 7″). Both share a 1.6 GHz Intel Atom processors. I can go on, but for a rundown of the specs, see Network World‘s nice comparison table.

The hardware and OS are just the stage and props for the real act: the “Flare Experience,” which is Avaya’s voice, video, and data collaboration extravaganza. And based on the slickly prepared video presentation I saw, it is a nicely designed app that makes unified communications—as it’s called in the enterprise world—a working reality. An “A” to Avaya on this effort.

I didn’t see a live demo of Flare in the hands of a reviewer, so it’s hard to know what this is really like. Keep in mind that Android’s Froyo (their latest release) is, in the words of Google’s director of mobile products Hugo Barra, “not optimized for tablet use.”

Another fact to consider: The Flare is priced— for now anyway—at somewhere between $1500 – $2000. Cisco’s Cius is pegged at around $1000.Continue reading

@NYC

Kodingen: Free, Easy Web Development Environment

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I missed this month’s New York Tech Meetup due to a previous engagement that was scheduled over 5000 years ago. By the way, Matt Merriam has a nice summary of September’s NYTM demos. One of the startups, Kodingen, caught my attention. It is a free web development environment that encourages a community to provide support and cheering. I filed this away.

I was intrigued by the recent release of the FCC’s open APIs for accessing competitive ISP data. I had already hacked out—I am not a developer by any means— tools for graphically displaying the FCC’s “477” data on Google Maps (see references below). Could I somehow combine this all into a single project and perhaps use the amazing Google Maps Data infrastructure for sharing my results?

A tall order.  That’s when I brought Kodingen back to the head of my to-do list, and so I registered on the site to see what I’d be up against.  In fact, this is a delightfully simple open-source environment to work in.

Nothing against my current hosting service, Bluehost, but I was able to start working almost immediately in Kodingen without any of the usual obstacles and annoyances.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

1 Gbps in Chattanooga

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I practically did a spit take while drinking my coffee this morning and reading The New York Times story about a municipal broadband project in Tennessee.  I learned that  Chattanooga’s  community owned power provider, EPB, has plans to offer up to 1 Gigabit per second  to its fiber-to-the-home subscribers by the end of the year. True, that can cost you almost $350 per year (lower if you bundle in voice and video).

I checked some of the pricing of their various service bundles—a classic triple-play of voice, video, and data—on the EPB website, and the packages are quite competitive: 30 Mbps data, enhanced video, and voice for $111.

This is a big win for non-profit fiber projects nationwide. And possibly a leading candidate for winning Google’s Fiber for Communities contest to build and test an  ultra-high speed network.

By the way, it appears that Comcast was at one point the sole  broadband and cable video provider for Chattanooga.Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Say It Ain’t So Joe Nocera

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The New York Times’ indispensable business reporter, Joe Nocera, slipped in a story about net neutrality just before the long holiday weekend.  The normally dependable Nocera—he’s been completely vigilant in his reporting on the financial crisis—really lost his way in his “Struggle For What We Already Have.”

Maybe his Labor Day celebration started a little earlier or our unusually cool late summer weather in the NYC-metro area put him into a more generous state of mind.  For whatever reason, his reading of Google’s recent net neutrality proposal as completely benign is not worthy of his reporting.

He got a few things really wrong. One, there was no mention of Google-Verizon’s Advanced Services— the private Internet. Two, the language for non-discrimination in the Voozle contrivance was intentionally weakly worded, and this was not, as he implied, an issue only for the idealistically pure. Three, cable television is not really the model for the Internet, and, um, there actually is non-discrimination language in the relevant Title VI statutes, forced on the cable providers by angry consumers and content providers.

I guess Nocera got me a little upset.  Continue reading

The Rack

Samsung Tab: Good Reviews (with disclosures)

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While you were asleep this morning, Samsung officially launched Tab, its 7″ Android 2.2 tablet at the IFA show in Berlin.  There’s lots of coverage from the likes of Endgadget, PC World, TechCrunch, Huffington Post, etc.  Some are calling it a larger version of the Samsung Galaxy S, which to my mind is a compliment.

Last month, Dr. Smartphone and I went to Samsung’s retail store in New York City to visit with the Galaxy smartphone.  We both came away feeling this was the device to give Apple’s iPhone a smartphone inferiority complex. We were completely blown to pieces by its fluid video playback of Avatar.  It also seems to me that the Tab will  be breathing down iPad’s virtual neck over the next few years—1024×600, 1GHz Cortex A8,  HD replay, and many of the same Hub apps as the Galaxy.  Supporting both  2.5G GSM and 3G HSPA, Tab will be released in Europe first, and then ultimately the United States.

The reviews were very positive, and I think the excitement is entirely warranted.  What struck me was that many of  the reviews disclosed the writer’s travel expenses had been paid for by the show’s organizers or Samsung themselves. This is clearly a consequence of the  FTC’s new guidelines on “material connections.”Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

NSF Funds a NeuroPhone

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Here I’ve been getting excited about  new user interface niceties such as voice rec in Windows Phone 7 and Android, while completely missing the bigger picture. The National Science Foundation has announced it will be funding a NeuroPhone, “the first Brain-Mobile Interface (BMI).”   This “high risk, exploratory research,” to be conducted at Dartmouth College, involves developing a consumer-level wireless EEG (electroencephalography) headset to interface with a mobile device.  From what I can decipher from the proposal abstract, they will study ways to digitize and interpret brain wave activity.

Does this mean in the future I’ll be able to directly think my emails, SMS, and tweets to a super smart phone?  (Hat tip to Nick Carr.)Continue reading

Archaic Telecom

Gmail Voice: Big Deal. No, Really, It Is a Big Deal!

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For Skype customers and just about anyone else who’s every typed phone numbers into a virtual dial pad, Gmail video and voice chat, even with its new ability to make free calls to cell and landlines, may warrant a big whoop. I had the dubious pleasure of retrieving voice mail through my email at some point in the late 1990s, so some of this telephony novelty has worn thin.

The biggest difference between the ancient branches on the email-voice evolutionary tree and the latest VoIP creations from Google, Skype and others is the Web and mobile calling, coupled with improved codecs. In other words, the overall technology has evolved in steps, not with a giant leap forward. It is slowly but surely achieving greatness.

There are already tens of million of existing Gmail users to talk and video chat with in direct computer-to-computer fashion. Google’s announcement last week to unite Google Voice (the service that rings all your phones) with Gmail and to throw in free outbound calls will probably add millions more. Most significantly, this service, is or will soon be available on Android phones as well.

Over the weekend, I tried Gmail’s existing video chat and made a free landline call. Conclusion: the new and improved Gmail service is a big deal for a number of reasons.Continue reading