Ad supported telephony as a concept is not proven yet. But it is the new rage nonetheless. I think it is possible to build sustainable business model just because there are lots of talented people out there working hard to prove the concept. I am a strong believer in creating demand for a product where it may not exist.

One of the tools that could help drive ad supported telephony is a speech-to-text engine that converts the audio contents of a phone conversation into text in realtime, scans that text, picks keywords from the conversation, and requests an appropriate Google ad to be streamed over the phone client (let us say over a VoIP client).

Continue reading "Speech-to-Text engine for ad supported telephony" »

Faisal, our chip man, suggested mobile VoIP as an alternative to expensive in-flight calls. But we struggled to conclude who the right service provider candidate would be. Faisal also argues that in-flight mobile VoIP does not make sense unless you offer it to all mobile phones including the low end devices.

Let us for a minute focus on the handsets that can offer some kind of soft-client based mobile VoIP. Someone like Aircell, the in-flight broadband access provider, could be a possible candidate to offer mobile VoIP on-board the aircrafts. This would add to the service provider topline just a bit. Private label mobile VoIP is not much different from private label PC-to-Phone. It is definitely not rocket science to private label it for an ISP like Aircell. There is one hitch though: who distributes the soft-client on board? You will require cooperation from the airlines.

That then leads me to suggest that the airline carrier itself would be a great candidate. Imagine boarding a British Airways aircraft and being sent a light weight mobile VoIP soft-client via Bluetooth. You have 10 minutes of free calling. Beyond that you pay by credit card. I would definitely want to kill time by calling people whom I have not phoned for long.

What else is in it for someone like British Airways? Well, what more could you want if you have a presence on someone’s mobile phone? You can push any sort of promotional info over the client (whether in-flight or after it). You can convert your customer’s air miles into free mobile VoIP minutes. 33 million passengers flew BA last year. That can’t be a small market in terms of potential. There is also a huge domestic air traffic in countries like USA and India. Mobile VoIP for airlines is, I think, a good opportunity.

Since we increasingly use dial-by-name rather than dial-by-number, the use of phone book (contacts) on your handset is perhaps the most utilized application. And there is plenty of room to enhance it. The phone book could be engineered to be more proactive and be able to make suggestions to the user. For instance it could let me enter 10 most important contacts that I call at least once a week, and then have it send me a reminder in case I forget to call one of those 10 numbers during the week.

There are countless such features that could be engineered into a phone book. You could also let the phone book application automatically monitor the calls received, missed, dialled out, the duration of the calls etc – the entire calling behaviour of the user, and then suggest actions or, eg, alert the caller to any extreme variation. For example if you talk too much, it could alert you something to the effect that your average call duration is 3 times the average in this country … sort it out.

Some of the things that an intelligent phone book could do:

Continue reading "Intelligent phone book" »

Electronic Programming Guides on TV are still living in the 20th century. They are not user friendly at all. Most of them look like interfaces for writing assembly level programming code. I think EPGs should be intelligent enough to suggest to the viewer what to watch based on the viewer’s viewing habits/preferences. If as a first generation proactive EPG, I had an integrated utility that gives me my usage statistics, I could use it for several things:

Continue reading "Utility generating TV usage stats" »

There were nearly 10 million VoIP subscriber licenses sold by Voice-over-Broadband server vendors in 4Q07. There are many countries in the world that would require less than that to serve the entire population. While the broadband telephony marches on there are certainly some limitations.

I have, for example, not received a satisfactory answer to a couple of questions. (1) It is still a best efforts service and therefore how do you make sure that you maintain QoS and call priority across multiple backbones and access networks? (2) How do you make sure that you keep the dialtone going during ultra busy hours or at times of emergencies?

You would get MPLS type answers thrown at you for the first question. But to think that all the carriers involved in transporting your international VoIP call will agree upon the packet priorities is truly impractical. But I will mainly discuss the second issue today. In the PSTN world your local exchange was engineered with a 1:10 ratio i.e. 10 outgoing circuits (from local exchange to regional exchange) for every 100 subscribers. So if there are 10 simultaneous active calls going on and you pick up the phone, you will not get the dialtone. In the broadband telephony world, the service provider typically manages similar ratio so that if the number of simultaneous call sessions exceeds 10 percent of the subscriber base, you will get no dialtone (and if you do, it is likely to be a false dialtone).

Continue reading "10 ways to keep the VoIP dialtone going" »

My motivation for suggesting this is not the Clean Tech thing. You lose VoIP service when there is a power outage. If there is a backup supply of power by way of some solar power panel, you would be able to keep the service running at all times.

We have a genuine problem with our video interviews feature. We cannot travel too much to get hold of people live in person. So there are two broad options to carry our video interviews remotely (given the bandwidth constraints on the Internet): either do a phone interview and ask questions on phone while the other person speaks into a webcam and later sends you link to download the video, OR do a video call over clients like ooVoo, record it and then do the necessary edits. I have been testing ooVoo and it does a good job.

The first option is understandably clumsy. The second option produces sub-standard video quality because of the limited bandwidth on the Internet. You get great video quality of your own side but the other person’s recording is grainy as usual. This is a genuine problem for which I have yet to find an answer. The only possible solution I can think of is an added feature on clients like ooVoo.

Continue reading "Improving quality of video interviews over Internet" »

Transcribed voicemails can be the easiest form of telephony-related user generated content (UGC) if you share such content with your connections. You could specify which group can have access to the transcribed voicemail contents.

But moving a step further, why not transcribe live calls and share the content? You could make it available to business colleagues if these are business calls. Transcriptions of personal calls can be made available to personal contacts. I have certainly been in situations where I have been asked to repeat the contents of the phone conversation to other parties. In fact it probably happens almost everyday. So rather than add some masala when narrating the anecdote, it might be better to share the original stuff.

Continue reading "User generated content meets telephony" »

The car stereos that come with USB ports can take in the wireless Internet USB sticks. In theory you should be able to add a chip inside the stereo that links to online services like iTunes to download music while driving.

A better option would be for car stereo makers to develop an operating system that can incorporate any 'music dialer' that connects to particular music site(s). That could be just the start. On top of this car stereo OS, you could then unleash the developer program and let people develop applications on top of this ‘platform’.

If you think about how much time you spend with the car stereo, the usage time would surely exceed your talk time on your mobile. Surely this ‘platform’ could be better leveraged.

Continue reading "When car stereo opens its APIs" »

If we are to believe in the upcoming applications renaissance, then we have not seen anything yet. New Web 2.0 / Voice 2.0 applications will keep coming every day. And while I have tested over a hundred so far, I am not going to test one every week, let alone one every day. One of the reasons is that for a lot of these services there is a downloadable. As such I have to go through the ritual of downloading and installing and testing and uninstalling (if I decide not to keep the application).

There has got to be a more efficient method of testing these new services. Perhaps a site that hosts a test account where feasible. The developers could work directly with the site owner to arrange a test account (or several such accounts). People like me would certainly want to use such sites rather than download-and-install things all the time.

Continue reading "Hosted test bed for applications involving downloads" »

I think this would be another way to encourage local content. If you help monetize the local video content, you might have a few potential producers out there. Among various forms, local video content could take form of video interviews you do with various members of the community, something like a local community news magazine on TV. In terms of the platform that hosts this content, I think TV stands a much better chance than a website.

Advertising server companies like Packetvision and VoD server vendors like BitBand would need to provide capabilities in their platforms to monetize this video content. I am blogging about the local community content for the second time because I feel there is a genuine demand for such content worldwide. This is an area where Internet has done a very poor job so far. And local video content may not prove to be suitable through an online site since maintenance of the site would require a substantial commitment. Instead if you make such content available over the TV in form of VoD, it might work.

There are two guys here at iLocus that use Jajah for international calls. I have been told that the call set up time is very quick. However we don’t have DIDs so once Jajah sets up the calls for them, the calls come via the PBX. And that is really annoying.

Jajah needs to let the user specify that he is behind a PBX and does not have a DID. Jajah system should then attempt to call the switch board number and, immediately after sensing a response, punch in the extension number provided (Auto-Attendant letting you dial your extension is now a standard feature). There might be certain errors in DTMF relay if that stuff does not interoperate but at least you have a go at the problem.

Right now Jajah type web-initiated calling services are limited to consumers only. The company needs to develop business features to attract small businesses like us.

I am not yet clear if stress leads to a creative outlet or creative exhaustion. For me the months of Jan and Feb are always stressful in terms of workload. And I have noticed that I am not able to generate any micky mouse ideas these days that I could feel excited about. So although I have only one data point here to make an inference, I would say that extra workload is not good for creativity. There is another thing that is not good for creativity. I am officially (and regretfully) a smoker but my average is like 5 cigarettes per month. When I have a smoking streak (like in Jan and Feb), I lose it all. I mean creativity :) The fags just do not work for me. They make me dumb. Not sure how Freud and Einstein managed!

Anyway, I will blog about a few ideas that my smoke infested grey matter came up with. One is a mobile VoIP aggregator. Since you are going to see dozens of mobile VoIP offerings during 2008, why not develop a Least Cost Routing softclient that interfaces with various mobile VoIP offerings out there. Making cheap calls has to be one of the main motivations for using Mobile VoIP. And a single provider can never ensure best rates for all long distance routes. The LCR softclient can also similarly aggregate the mobile callback offerings out there if the APIs are available from companies like mig33 and Jajah. And while you are at it, you can make this a flash phone client so that we do not have to download anything.

I very much fancy the Ribbit idea. Their focus on bringing together Voice 2.0 developers and effectively offering an aggregated new telephony platform sounds exciting. The Flash APIs for developers jazz up the offering a bit more. Ribbit however goes direct to the consumer. And that is probably more practical because telcos are horrendously complacent when it comes to deploying new applications.

I have not come across a vendor that aggregates Voice 2.0 applications and offer an integrated platform that can be licensed out to telcos. There are companies that offer their Voice 2.0 application both to consumers as well as license them out to an operator. However the aggregated platform in the latter category cannot be found so far. Most vendors think that having an underlying Class 5 type feature server (and may be some call control element as well) is a pre-requisite for offering such an aggregated platform. I have to disagree with that.

Continue reading "Ribbit thing but a licensed platform approach" »

We need a web server utility that recognizes the origin of the visitor (like in ad servers) or scans the browser language of the visitor and then automatically displays the content in relevant language. That would be more productive than offering manual selection of alternative languages for your international website audience. I suspect these things might be available out there but my browsing experience has not thrown up such instances.

Extending the idea further, when web based telephony rules, you could be greeted by your local language by the IVR system when you click-and-call an overseas company. “No one speaks English here. Please hang up.” You could probably do that right now even with telephony 0.0 utilizing the Caller ID header.

I have seen many hypotheses surrounding Cisco’s possible use of Tribe.net and Five Across assets. Some see Cisco enabling internal social networks for its corporate customers. Some see Cisco enabling its corporate customers to implement sites that gather customer feedback on their products e.g. a social networking site sponsored by Sony to bring together its customers in order to better organise the feedback and dialog with its end customers. The funniest one I have come across is that acquiring social networking software will drive more traffic to Cisco routers and switches. Cisco's official stance is that it is experimenting with some kind of an entertaiment operating system which it will be selling to media companies rather than telcos.

Anyway, I am going to add another hypothesis today. Cisco will (or should) add social networking software as an application server that inter-works with underlying telco/enterprise call management platform (There you go. We can’t have enough of telephony). Result: its telco customers looking for a more comprehensive Internet services strategy will have an integrated and off-the-shelf solution for offering social networking capability to their customers.

Telcos can potentially offer more meaningful social networking experience. They can optimize the experience around local communities to start with. Majority of Internet users don’t have an international friend circle. More than half of the Internet users worldwide use email addresses provided by their ISP rather than having a yahoo / gmail / hotmail account. What it means is that telcos/ISPs have potential to leverage their relationship with the customers to engage them with telco sponsored social networking sites.

Social networking services could also be places where a telco could offer/test its Voice 2.0 services. That way a telco could start small with a Voice 2.0 application and not require a monster 2 million BHCA Voice 2.0 platform inside its network.

Continue reading "Voice 2.0 strategy for telecom vendors" »

It has become an accepted norm to have multiple remote controllers in your room. One for you TV, one for DVD player, one for set-top box (not all TV functionalities are available on set-top box controller), one for your music system etc. If we turned things like word processor into an application, an alarm into an application, watch into an application etc, surely we can turn these TV remote controllers into software applications that can be downloaded on to mobile phones.

You have infrared in nearly all these devices – DVDs, TVs, music systems, mobiles. I saw one demo made by UTStarcom in China last year that integrated phone with a TV remote. It is part of the IPTV offering so that when you receive a call, there is a caller ID flashing on TV and you can take call using the phone capability integrated into the TV remote controller. Not quite what I am talking about here. I am talking about the reverse engineering. Turn remote control into a software application and put it on mobile.

Continue reading "TV remote control on your mobile phone" »

Dialpad (acquired by Yahoo some time back) did two things that attracted millions to its service. It offered a light Java based client which you did not need to download. It was embedded on their website for you to make phone calls. The second factor, obviously much more significant, was the free PC-to-Phone calls. Dialpad was handling hundreds of millions of minutes per month within no time.

I think there are good chances of a company similar to Dialpad re-emerging. The free calls can be supported through audio advertising model, and the Java based client can give way to Flash Phones.

By doing that you are removing two big obstacles. (1) There is no need to download anything since Flash is embedded in most browsers now. (2) End user does not need to worry about whether he has a paid account with you as a VoIP provider or bother about setting up an account in emergency and exchanging credit card details.

Continue reading "Dialpad 2.0" »

Those among us who use softphones, many have multiple accounts. It is actually quite common because most of us are still experimenting with PC-to-Phone type services. I might have a Skype account but I also use Gizmo, and Google Talk. I would ideally like to have my portal – my webpage – host a plugin that aggregates all my softclient accounts.

Just like embedded flash phones enable you to use any provider’s SIP based VoIP service by saving SIP proxy and username/password in the plugin, you could also have an interface that stores for you account details of multiple VoIP accounts. Something similar to getting emails from all your accounts at one place.

Continue reading "POP-mail-reader equivalent in VoIP" »

In my experience nearly half the mechanical faults developed by our vehicles are easy to fix. We should be getting some basic car fixing engineering training from the authorities: A certificate course that comes bundled with the driving license. Until that becomes a norm, we could try one idea.

The modern day automobile has a microprocessor controlled engine. So we are steering a computer while driving. If my mobile has a software on it that interacts with the microprocessor of the engine - via, say Bluetooth - and that application would tell me roughly what or where the fault is, then may be I could have a go myself. That could save me time waiting for the mobile workshop to come around.

I haven’t seen eFax type services on social networking sites. It would be nice to receive faxes on your personal pages. It sounds like a genuine necessity. Although that pushes social networking towards communications more, but that is going to happen eventually. You are likely to have your mails being ported on these sites through simple popmail readers. In fact I would be surprised if there is no popmail reader available as an application on Facebook etc. And that pops up another idea. Let me post that after this one.

Ever wondered why similar startups surface roughly at the same time? There is a generally-held view that since these startups talk to similar VCs and since VC community is a tightly knit community, the idea spreads around. Since I don’t believe in conspiracy theories, I have to look for a plausible explanation. After all …… assuming for a second that VCs spill beans, why do similar ideas reach VCs at the same time in the first place?

Different forms of an innovative idea evolve or surface at roughly the same time because sustainable innovation stems from necessity. The problems and issues you are facing and thinking about are also faced by and pondered upon by several, among whom some like yourself could be thinking of possible solutions to the issue. This is no multilateral telepathy. It is a simple case of people around the world being limited by common technological contours looking to stretch those contours further out. Among the possible solutions that people think of, there just happen to be a subset of those solutions that have similar specs. And so you have similar startups mushrooming at roughly the same time.

Continue reading "Necessity is still the mother of most innovation" »

Just projecting forward the discussion in Faisal’s post yesterday ….

“ …. Targeted advertising will do wonders if you have local businesses and corner shops being able to advertise on local household TVs. However the telcos and channels do not have the capability to sell ad slots to local small businesses though some have their own Yellow Pages salespeople. Generally speaking the ad agencies only work with major brand advertisers. What is needed for this market to scale and take off is a web-based ad /media-buying agency able to provide self-help ad creation, campaign management and ad slot purchase. There are a number of companies starting to offer these services e.g. Spot Runner in the US and Spotzer from the Netherlands.….”

The problem with Spot Runner type web based business in TV adverting is the lead time. In this particular case the lead time for an advertiser to see his ad run on the TV is 14 days. A clearinghouse that consists of Spot Runner type web interface and an advertising server (or a server that works through APIs with an existing IPTV advertising server) could in theory cut down the lead time to zero. That is if there is demand for such instant gratification from the advertisers’ side. The fact that IPTV uses open source TCP/IP, such a clearinghouse would be easier to set up in an IPTV environment rather than in a legacy cable/satellite headend environment.

And if we are to believe that IMS will soon control IPTV elements as well, then the peering providers could be ideal for starting such IPTV advertising clearinghouse business. Another possible candidate could be sites promoting local communities.

Geography might be history, thanks to the Internet. But I am still interested in the local content and news. By local I mean just the 1km radius area. I had a look at this application called Your Neighbours on Facebook. It is being used by some 800 active users. That is all. There is no concerted effort to engage and network local communities online. The challenge in engaging the local community online stems from our lifestyle. Unlike friends and colleagues you do not know the email address of your neighbour to invite him over to your Facebook network, but you still have some appetite for the local community news.

I think local community networks can be as popular as your existing social networking sites. I once asked a local shopkeeper in my locality to start a weekly newsletter writing about the community issues and news updates. I thought at the time that this would be one of the best ways to get the local content. I still think this is the way you do it. I am thinking local citizen journalism. So if I live in Soura in Srinagar, the writeups or videos I upload on the site should be categorized under Soura category.

Continue reading "Engaging and networking local communities online" »

My father has self-scribbled at least a dozen telephone diaries over the last few years, entering and updating numbers. When he travels he carries with him the necessary diaries. I have not been successful in persuading him to use electronic directories or the available directory application on mobile handsets. He is naturally good at remembering phone numbers. I am on the other hand quite the opposite. I only remember the phone numbers of my office and home. For me, and for several people around the world, an irreversible change has taken place. We click a name. We don’t punch in the numbers.

This is one of the reasons why minutes are increasingly migrating away from landlines to mobiles. This is also one of the reasons why providers of mirror numbers are gaining some traction. Jaxtr just announced that it signed up 5 million subscribers. The fact that people click names rather than remembering numbers means that your contacts could have any phone number. You do not care what phone number sits behind a contact name.

Just like you do not need to know the IP address of iLocus website, you can also make the phone numbers irrelevant by promoting the use of usernames perhaps. The difference however between a domain name and a username is that a domain name can be unique. Usernames are not unique. You could have the same usernames across Google mail and Hotmail for instance. Making phone-mapped (and later just SIP-address-mapped) unique usernames could create lots of new dynamics. Imagine if you could dial from Skype (or from Gizmo or from an IVR assisted VoBB /PSTN phone) the name of a business like iLocus and you get connected to our office phone number (or a number we designate against the username iLocus). Such a set up could be beneficial for businesses. That is just one area of impact.

Continue reading "Dial by username" »

Interaction is important to any content site. Although comments system is an old Internet application, it is still the main way to interact. I however fail to motivate myself to leave a comment on a blog entry as much as I may be inclined to do so. I also think that written comments can be less articulate and unable to convey the intended opinion. Not all are able to write with ease. Speech is far more powerful and articulate.

So let us have some application like Snapvine integrated with Wordpress and Movable Type. All voice comments will of course need moderating but that should not be a problem (if it is part of your work!!!!). Leaving voice comments would be convenient especially for mobile Internet users. It is very difficult to type on mobiles and other handhelds, especially if your fingers cut a bunch-of-bananas figure.

Floppies have almost vanished now and flash drives have become bread and butter. However CDs and DVDs are ubiquitous and cheaper than flash drives. Most of our back up data or music or games and software is on CDs. The ones you burn yourself, you hardly ever bother to label them properly. The best you do is put a black marker over it. And even that is not descriptive enough.

If we could somehow have our mobile phones display title and file names of files saved on CDs that would save people like me from going through the cruel ritual or changing two dozen CDs each time we want to search for some file. I suppose you could use some technology similar to laser pointer inside a mobile phone whereby the laser is shone onto to a CD surface and an application on the mobile screen displays the title and names of files contained on the CD. That is one application of laser pointer technology within mobiles. You could also then use your mobile as a laser pointer in your presentations. I will leave it to you to decide which one is more important.

One thing that will not be integrated into a unified messaging box is the snailmail. As much as I would like my post to appear in my inbox, this is not going to happen ........... unless you read iLocus blogs!!!! If there are secretarial services available whereby I could outsource my postal mail handling, I could achieve many things: I could filter out the junk post; I could get my mail delivered to my email account; I could send out autoresponder to those marketers where I want to be taken off the list; I could send autoresponders in case I move address. I could save some money on repeatedly having to pay for the re-directs if I move more often.

Just like you instruct the postal service to divert your post to a new address when you move, you could instruct the postal service to divert your post to this snailmail outsourcing (SMO) service provider.

Continue reading "Snailmail Autoresponder Gmbh" »