I think you could make a business out of developing a module on top of Asterisk that enables wholesale hosted PBX services. Asterisk is not only being used for retail hosted PBX but also wholesale hosted PBX as well. I think the privately brandable hosted PBX services of Vox Communications use Asterisk as the underlying platform. But I am not 100% sure.

Vox must have developed in-house the software that lets them offer smaller service providers a privately branded hosted PBX services. Imagine if they license that piece of software out to other wholesalers as well. That is the creative idea of the day. Sylantro and Broadsoft have made some dollars selling such software. The fact that the developer starts with an open source feature server gives a significant advantage to a newcomer. Such a software is easily extendable – conceptually – across other areas as well. For instance you could do a module (on top of an open source CRM platform) that enables wholesale hosted call center services as well. The difference of course is that the developer is leveraging open source platforms and has good chances of monetizing the solution.

Talking about creative ideas, here is a third idea of the day: A hardware add-on that can be plugged into an IAD (through an Ethernet port) serving as a base station for a DECT phone. That is what I thought SiTel had announced recently. However SiTel is a chip company and I should have known better. The Netherlands based company announced a DECT chip that can be placed in existing IAD applications with telephone connections.

Modem manufacturers have been shipping IADs and cable modems with DECT base stations for quite some time now. Thomson has shipped more than 1 million DSL+DECT to BT for its residential VoIP offering. Starting later this year, BT will be sourcing its DECT enabled IAD from a Germany based vendor in addition. The Germany based vendor uses SiTel chip. SiTel expects about a million of their DECT VoIP chips to be integrated inside IADs by the end of this year. Majority of these IADs will land inside residential customers in Germany.

Continue reading "DECT could win over WiFi for in-house wireless VoIP" »

The idea of a wiki pluggin for MT turned out to be a self-inspiration. I have not blogged any creative ideas for long. But like the IP traffic, they travel in bursts. Incidentally we had a 2 hour break – first one in the last 4 days – from a curfew that was imposed on us for not eating a balanced diet. So perhaps that little break provided the requisite vent. I promise to move my non-veg political opinions onto my personal blog, away from the politically correct audience here.

So the idea ..…. I have come across simple hardware devices that plug into your TV antenna ports and let the user toggle between two different service providers. I am not sure if you have too. Anyway what we should have is a software interface to such a toggle device whose UI is the first thing that flashes on your TV when you switch it on. The UI should then give you a choice to select the service provider of your choice. For instance you could choose between AT&T U-Verse and Comcast. This software switching can be done using a remote control while as hardware switching is inconvenient.

A longer term developmental roadmap could have a residential gateway (that incorporates hybrid IP/Legacy STB) integrate this toggle and the associated software interface. Or if you have one of those futuristic TVs with STBs inside then that is even better. You could have a separate OS for the TV with desktop like icons having shortcuts of various different TV service providers. You could then choose more freely.

Toggling serves a purpose because IPTV in some countries will be used as a secondary service like in the UK. It is something additional and not a primary TV service.

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" »

Video on the Net is progressing leaps and bounds. Most of it is personal videos. Business videos are not so hip yet. They are confined to Q&A for a while. I think we are unlikely to see business related video documentaries on Internet for a while. And when they arrive they will mostly be in English. I think there is a huge market for dubbing internet videos, especially the business videos.

If there is an online forum or some sort of an exchange where the dubbing professionals and content producers can interact and trade, you could have a business there. Content providers could then offer language preference off their TV client for each video.

The problem with ad supported calls (Jajah, Talkster, and others) is the lack of advertising focus. The advertiser does not have the luxury of choosing a particular demographic profile to target. I interacted with VoodooVox CEO J. Scott Hamilton recently (interview coming up in a week or so … VoodooVox is the Doubleclick of the voice world). They are handling the problem by using an IVR engine to record answers to a couple of questions which they ask upfront at the start of the call. While that could work for enterprise grade scenarios like radio stations and call center, it is unlikely to scale nicely for service providers like Jajah whose customers are large in number and call more often.

I think rather than having someone like VoodoVox do the job for you, a service provider looking to monetize his call volume needs to be proactive in collecting all that information such as the gender, address, profession, what income group your caller/subscriber falls in etc etc.

Anyway, the modest idea of the day is to pay you customers to make a call, and not just stop at offering it for free. In return for the payment you can ask the customers to update their demographic profile on (say) six monthly basis. You further ask them to answer some consumer market research related questions every six months. Add in some network marketing incentives and you have a Data-Bank-Meets-Telephony business.

Continue reading "Pay them to make a call" »

Search engine privacy issues usually surround consumer protection from online ads. I think there are other equally important issues. To start with, as a business user of Internet I don’t want anyone (least my competitors) to know what I have been searching for. If you have a web business idea and you search for the feasibility of the idea, whether there are other companies already working on the idea, whether they have built feature X or not, and so on, ……. you might hesitate putting in that search string because the Big Brother search engine company will get access to your idea and guess the specs for free.

It does not take a PHD to figure out that search engines like Google will have to face some regulatory rulings in this regard some time in the future. Regulators could come up with some encryption algorithm that encodes search strings. These encryption gateways could be installed by the ISPs. Search info collected by Google robots on the other hand will also be encrypted by the same algorithm (with Google or the ISP having no access to the algorithm). With this solution, Google will never come to know what you searched for and yet give you the results of your search. The problem is that we cannot monetize the encryption gateway so much if the algorithm is written by the regulators themselves. But at least we stop the possibility of a Big Brother emerging.

Continue reading "Hosted browser concept can solve search engine privacy issues" »

Voice blogging continues to evolve. Still very early days. I am bullish but I think certain things need to be done in order to get this phenomenon going. First of all, we need a completely different voice blog publishing platform (I will revisit this some time later in the year). Movable Type and Wordpress are optimized for textual stuff. Some of the add on applications that could be added to that voice blog publishing platform could be things like transcription application i.e. when you click on the voice file, embedded in the player will be some transcription buttons (controlled by hot keys or footpedal) that let the listener pause, play, rewind etc while making notes. Manual transcription of premium voice content will be inevitable.

By the way, I have actually not seen a good transcription add-on to Windows Media Player and Real Player. I need to make notes when listening to conference calls. But I can't do it properly. Anyway, the idea I wanted to float today is somewhat different and a simple one. If companies like Snapvine could add on a Karaoke client, let me record my song, and then let me upload my song on my web, that would be great. I mean I really would love to try something like that. There are a number of singing talent shows wherever you switch on the TV these days. US, UK, Europe, India, …., not to mention East Asia where people are absolutely crazy about this stuff. Karaoke blogs could help promote new talent. And participants don’t have to travel to TV studios and auditions. You can do it right from your bedroom. And while you are at it, you could have a separate site that aggregates the Karaoke blogs, kind of Yahoo for online Karaoke.

I have ‘Digged’ a few articles but I do not find the process of ‘Digging’ scalable. I am not going to put in my password/username and do other related routine stuff every time I find something interesting on the web. I would rather have a Digg icon embedded in my browser or some Digg widget on my desktop so that each time I find something interesting, I am easily able to add it to my list of favorites. Towards the end of the day (or at pre-determined intervals) I should be able to post the list on Digg. The bookmarking service should then automatically aggregate references to web pages listed by various contributors. One more thing: The ‘widget’ also stays on my blog or website so that my readers also see what I have been reading.

To this reading list I may also add names of books that I am currently reading. The motivation for me is that this reading list can potentially drive more traffic to my site if I am a trusted observer of some industry segment. The way bookmarking works right now, (1) there is little incentive to contribute to these sites, and (2) the process of bookmarking itself does not scale easily.

Continue reading "New incentive oriented bookmarking" »

Here is my contribution to the field of education: A website that lets students and teachers (belonging to academic institutions ranging from primary schools to universities) upload their assignment work and theses etc. I guess this would mostly be text files. But you could also have audio and video files especially from the likes of Mass Communication students. Multimedia files could also come from other creative arts students pursuing courses related to music, drama etc.

This could be a social/academic networking type of site, marketed by the institutions as well, and should include other relevant Facebook/Orkut bells and whistles. Result: you develop an eco-system of information sharing among students so that the standard of their assignment work improves. If you assign your student to forecast the mobile telephony minutes, as an example, he/she could consult the site and see whether similar kind of work has been carried out by anyone else in some part of the world; and if so what forecasting methodology they used, what variables they examined etc etc. I think that could go a long way in improving educational standards worldwide. The users of this site would really have a strong competitive edge in education.

Continue reading "Janet and Orkut" »

I posted this entry on ENUM for Facebook type sites. So that is one creative idea for the weekend. I will post another one later today.

I would like to have pbx features loaded onto it for intercom. If that could come pre-loaded with some service provider API that would be preferable. When companies like Google host your telephony service under an ASP model in the future, these APIs would be as easy to integrate with your residential gateway as the present day carrier pre-selection.

Anyway, apart from pbx features and pre-integrated service provider APIs, I would also like the gateway to support WiFi so that those family members with WiFi phones can call from their rooms. Or if there is an incoming call, we can transfer calls with simultaneous ring on fixed extention as well as the WiFi phone extention .... and do other 20 odd things with it. If the family members are able to pull up the buddy lists on their WiFi phones and use presence based applications through the residential gateway that would be even better.

Continue reading "What else would you load onto that all encompassing residential gateway?" »

Video communication has been around for decades now. But certain anthropological issues have kept it at bay. Men prefer not to see the other bloke, and women do not want to be seen. Something pre-arranged has a chance here. Even when you do video chat on a client such as Skype you start off with a voice chat and then ask the other person to turn on the webcam. The other factor is that it will not work in mainstream business communication because there is no need and time for visual communication in the business world. So we are left with the residential offering with an emphasis on pre-arranged feature.

There is one additional cultural factor though: we associate video more with TV and not with a communication device such as a phone or a PC. We are used to seeing multiple people participating visually on TV rather than the visual communication being one-to-one. It is a one-to-many, many-to-one, and many-to-many communication. It is not a one-to-one communication.

Continue reading "Anthropology and video communication" »

A web based application that lets one of the buddies within a certain friend circle propose an outing, and then ‘ping’ the other buddies in the group with the proposal. The ping could take form of email(s) or trigger web-to-phone call(s).

Once you enter your thirties and forties, you begin to lose the initiative. You don’t bother proposing an outing to your buddies. If an outing materializes, well and good. You appreciate the effort put in by the one who set the ball rolling. Your buddies would think that you would take the initiative next time. But you don’t. We do that mainly because we cannot be bothered to ring up 5 different people and take a poll, all the while thinking that our proposal has a high probability of being turned down.

Continue reading "Web based outing organizer" »

I am surprised to find out that there are no vendors out there offering an off-the-shelf package for mobile callback. Previously confined to clumsy calling cards, the arbitrage is knocking hard at the doors of mobile telephony. And the form it is taking is mobile VoIP and mobile callback. There is a huge opportunity – even though short term – just like the fixed line resellers and callback operators flourished post deregulation in countries driving international calling rates down.

And among the existing mobile callback providers there are none working on white labeling mobile callback.

Continue reading "White labeling Mobile Callback" »

Some six years back I heard John Chambers of Cisco on CNBC telling a reporter how Internet would change our lives. The first example he gave was how one would be able to listen to his song of choice on his car stereo instantly downloaded from the internet. That got me thinking how awkward it would be to search for a song while driving, then selecting out of the search results, and then some more clicks here and there. I am sure such an application would be banned by the traffic police everywhere.

Continue reading "A search engine for hummingbirds" »

There must be several YouTube equivalents of audio. But they require you to be Internet users. How about those overwhelmingly huge non-Net users who want their views, and content in general, to get across?

There is a simple way to add that dimension to audio citizen journalism. Set up a premium rate phone line number and let people leave their messages. Buy a solution (and there are some readily available such solutions in the market) that convert those messages into computer audio files (WAV and maybe later converted to MP3). Just post them online. You can even have the IVR of the phone line ask the speaker to summarize the post for you.

Continue reading "How to improve audio citizen journalism" »

Voicemail as an application has been mostly passive. I would like to see it becoming an intelligent agent analyzing a customer’s usage patterns, for instance.

For instance, when I call someone and he does not answer, I get anxious as to why the call is not being answered. There are Presence integrated functions that I can implement e.g. you get the message that the person is in a meeting or in some do-not-disturb mode etc. But that is not enough. What if my next door senior citizen neighbor has been lying dead for days and I am thinking the old man is becoming arrogant. If I hear something like ‘…This phone has not been answered for the last 8 days …’ I would want to probe further rather than just ignore it.

Continue reading "Stretching the voicemail a bit more" »

If your memory serves you well, you remember where you left your nail cutter last time you used it. If are not a homely person like me, and you frantically look for things when you need them, and you nearly drop dead looking for it, then I have an idea that we should explore.

People like me demand a software utility (loaded on some device such a mobile) in which we can select the name of a household item (added sometime in the past to the list), click Enter, and get the current location of the item within the house.

Continue reading "A Google for household items" »

We have been looking for ONE BILL for over two decades now, but we still put up with multiple bills. If there really has to be just one bill, why limit it to just telecom services? While we are at it, why not have really one master billing platform that bills for everything from telco services, TV, gas, electricity etc – basically bill for all those things where a centralized billing infrastructure is feasible.

Consumers had to put up with separate billing for shopping. And then credit cards came along and we outsourced the billing part to the banks. I think banks are best equipped to bill for everything. They have historically been the best collectors. If the existing banking software could be extended to interface with the future IMS billing, for instance, the banks would be able to host a billing network for telcos.

Continue reading "Converged billing from your bank" »

You can throw away your bluetooth dongles and data cables connecting mobile with PCs, because I just had a neat idea. We should develop a 'Mobile Phone Anywhere' kind of application that will give access to your mobile phone (and its applications) over any net connected PC (and maybe TV as well, why not?) and let you use those applications. The connection between your cell phone and the PC will be over Internet connection (cell phone connected through GPRS or EDGE or Wifi to the public Internet) to the PC (or indeed to a TV connected to net). This is like PC Anywhere application of early Internet days whereby you accessed your net connected PC over a telnet connection.

Continue reading "Mobile Mobile" »

I have great respect for TV. It is a source of entertainment as well as education. But I have not had much time for it lately. I would rather be out and about. However I do miss it. One thing that could attract me back to the television is some sort of a bookmarking service for the TV content, something like a Digg or del.icio.us for the TV content.

I watch TV on an average for about 20 minutes a day. Out of those 20 minutes, I spend about 15 just reading the program synopsis of various listed items. There is no service out there that tells me what ordinary people like me think about Soap X, or News Bulletin on Channel Y, or Documentary Z etc.

Continue reading "Bookmarking service for IP TV" »

... Continued from my blog 'Talk in not really cheap'.....How do you get the thoughts of those people published on the net who talk better than write. Due to some heavy socialising over the weekend, I am unable to put all my thoughts here. So I will revisit this later in the month. However, very briefly, three issues here:

Issue A:
Speech recongnition would not work. There are options here like Casescribe and SpinVox. But speech recongnition will not do justice with those pearls of wisdom. The only option is to transcribe provided you get a good transcription service. And you can bank on India for that. Thank you England for teaching us English.

Issue B:
The other issue is that users should be able to record voice anywhere, and with a click of a button upload the voice file to their blog page. So we are talking about a mobile voice recording

Continue reading "The wlogger application" »

Just came across this post on GigaOm about Skype teaming up with SpinVox. I looked at SpinVox when I was trying to find a solution to the following problem: How do you get the thoughts of those people published on the net who talk rather than write? SpinVox has a blogging solution that lets you dial a number and leave your message. The message is then converted by SpinVox solution into text and sent to your blog page.

Using speech recognition to get the talkers to publish their thoughts is definitely one of the cost effective ways to achieve this. But speech recongition cannot transcribe words correctly, certainly not long speeches. I digged a little deeper into possible soltuions for this imminent Internet service, and came very close to submitting a business plan to Sequoia. I will on Saturday share some of the notes I made in the process. I think talkers deserve to be publsihed just as bloggers do.

I use one cell account for both business and personal purposes. The bill is almost always paid by myself. I cannot bother to scan through the call list and bill the business calls to iLocus. I guess in Europe you typically have one phone for both work and personal use and you end up either paying the bill yourself or getting it all paid by the company you work for. In the US they typically have two seperate phones. Both methods are inconvenient.

Ideally I would like to have some piece of utility that pops up before connecting a call, that asks me whether to bill this call to iLocus or not. At the end of the month I would then get two seperate call lists (one for business calls and one for personal calls). This sort of stuff would especially be useful when we use FMC services extensively. We could then really be able to use one cellular phone wherever we are.

I have often felt handicapped while researching companies or countries which do not speak English. If only we could do an instant translation of, say, English to Spanish (and vice versa) on a voice client! It sounds doable in principle: use speech to text engine coupled with a language translation engine. So English voice converted to English text converted to Spanish text converted to Spanish voice ..... in realtime ... and vice versa.

I could then ask questions in English and hear answers in English even if the Spanish speaking guy on the end of the phone does not know any English. Obvioulsy the main hitch right now is being able to correctly do the speech recognition. But that is only going to improve over time. In the mean time why not have some kind of a beta. Someone like Skype should have looked at this a long time ago. Or maybe some third party developper for Skype.

I must have signed up with over 50 different web sites - for various different services including VoIP - over the last few years. I suppose I am active on 15 of those sites. For the remaining few which I visit occasionally (and even the ones I visit on a regular basis), I really have a problem remembering the usernames and passwords. Maybe in the future websites will provide some API to a device that takes digital print of your finger or something like that.

Till then could we have a 'Password Manager' of some sort that saves usernames and passwords to various sites/services for you in a single client; the client having some masterkey or a master-username and master-password; the client being accessible from anywhere on web; the client being able to take the user to a specific site and login automatically at the site. If not automatically, you could keep it conditional in a way ... you could still keep those turing numbers, they are not an irritant. Obvioulsy we would need to have some common webware installed on login pages by the websites that let a third party client such as the Password Manager access their sites.

With such a client all I need to remember is one master-username and one master-password.