So the Google Phone is out and the first reactions are not too good. At least at GigaOM there is more criticism than kudos. Nobody wants to hype the new product, nearly everyone is nagging. Since Google's shares are worth more than 700 dollars it's not cool anymore to be a Google fanboy.

I got an invitation to the same press call like Om, but unfortunately it started when my workday ended. May other journalist cover the story. Also it seems that the press call was not very much of a pleasure. "They completely dodged my question about how does it reconcile with other mobile linux efforts which are backed by none other than partners like Motorola", writes Om Malik.

Personally I like very much what he tells about Android, Google's new mobile phone plattform:

What is Android? A fully integrated mobile “software stack” that consists of an operating system, middleware, user-friendly interface and applications. It will be made available under one of the most progressive, developer-friendly open-source licenses, which gives mobile operators and device manufacturers significant freedom and flexibility to design products. Next week, the Alliance will release an early access software development kit to provide developers with the tools necessary to create innovative and compelling applications for the platform.

Does anybody know if this has something to do with OpenMOKO, the other open Linux cell phone platform? Maybe Android is just the same?

How open is Android compared to OpenMOKO?

The latter let's you manipulate everything to the very core of the mobile phone functions. Yet now there are thousands of great free Linux programs running on the OpenMOKO devices. I would love to see this kind of openness backed by heavy weights like Google and the other mentioned companies.

I hope that Android is as open as the Open Handset Alliance's website says:

Android was built from the ground-up to enable developers to create compelling mobile applications that take full advantage of all a handset has to offer. It is built to be truly open. For example, an application could call upon any of the phone's core functionality such as making calls, sending text messages, or using the camera, allowing developers to create richer and more cohesive experiences for users. Android is built on the open Linux Kernel. Furthermore, it utilizes a custom virtual machine that has been designed to optimize memory and hardware resources in a mobile environment. Android will be open source; it can be liberally extended to incorporate new cutting edge technologies as they emerge. The platform will continue to evolve as the developer community works together to build innovative mobile applications.

All applications are created equal

Android does not differentiate between the phone's core applications and third-party applications. They can all be built to have equal access to a phone's capabilities providing users with a broad spectrum of applications and services. With devices built on the Android Platform, users will be able to fully tailor the phone to their interests. They can swap out the phone's homescreen, the style of the dialer, or any of the applications. They can even instruct their phones to use their favorite photo viewing application to handle the viewing of all photos.

I think GigaOM's reader rohit understands it right:

i think this is a much bigger potential play at replacing the whole mobile phone software stack and aimed at making it truly an information appliance. think of it as an IP-services led “phone” design, not a telco-call based device.

It's a Linux for phones! You can do everything with it, if it's really open. I already wonder how it cooperates with Google's Ubiquisys femtocells. It annoys very much that my cell phone is not as open and flexible as my PC. Give me a command line to my cell phone and I will be happy!

Or, as commentator David Jacobs puts it:

Being an open system, hackers will have a field day with this and it could get some serious traction among the geek community who are so frustrated with the iPhone limitations.

Here you can get more quotes from Android's developers:

"Even A teenager in the basement and a senior designer in a big company - they have the same chance", says the film. That would be great because I don’t want just a Google Phone. I want many different of them for different purposes. That’s why I think the OS approach is great. The iPhone just isn’t enough anymore. It’s so 2007.

I got the offer to do interviews to John Wang, Chief Marketing Officer of Google's hardware producer HTC, and Florian Seiche, Vice President Europe of HTC, tomorrow. Let's see if that will answer my open questions.

Labels: Devices, Google, HTC, Mobile, Motorola, Open Handset Alliance, OpenMoko, Software

                                      

Nokia has a serious problem with software piracy, but at least they are trying to solve it. Some days ago the company announced SEEK, a new search function for Nokia's file sharing platform MOSH which had been launched in August. MOSH exists as a small website for mobile phones and in a bigger version for computers. Every subscribed user can upload files and downloads even work without subscription.

Although new users have to give their personal mobile phone numbers to subscribe, MOSH is full of pirated software. For instance the program VirtualRadio for Nokia s60 3rd edition costs US $20.50 when you buy it from the company's website. At MOSH you just have to look up its name in the internal search engine. Within seconds you find the program and then you can send a free SMS on Nokia's cost with a direct download link to your cell phone. After the installation the software works without any restriction, although the MOSH user paid nothing.

Pirated software now much easier to find?

This search for pirated software, and of course also for legal contents, could now become much easier: SEEK allows MOSH users to make requests for content they crave and the community can then respond with suggestions or custom created content. "SEEK allows the rapidly growing, and global, MOSH community to connect with one another and to obtain content not yet available", says the press release. Instead of "content not yet available" they could also have written "in others places only available for cash".

Yet five weeks ago Jan Rezab, CEO of Redboss (one of the top distributors and developers of mobile games in the Czech Republic), told in his blog told that "the only problem is, that people are sharing free, illegal mobile games on the site. Games from EA, THQ, Fishlabs, and many companies are available on MOSH". I tried to verify that and found for instance the VirtualRadio software and many games. Of course Nokia doesn't encourage this kind of use. Instead they imagine that users share self created contents like a personal "video of a specific dive in the Maldives".

"MOSH has a strong focus on responding to the needs of its community of users and feedback from the community is the motivation for SEEK", says Lee Epting, Vice President, Forum Nokia. "We have always focused on MOSH being a service created for, and shaped by, users. Seeing users request content from one another, as well as the desire for community discussion, forms the foundation of SEEK." His words sound a little bit sarcastic to me, taking into account that many users take MOSH as a free one stop shop for pirated software.

Officially launching on December 14, an exclusive demo of SEEK could be seen at CTIA Wireless in San Francisco October 23rd through October 25th. MOSH, short for mobilize and share, has seen more than 6 million downloads since its beta launch on 9th August. Hopefully these weren't all pirated software downloads.

Hunt for piracy with fingerprints

After I wrote a short article about SEEK and the illegal content on MOSH for Areamobile, I soon got a phone call from Finland. On the phone was James Waterworth, Communications Manager Technology at Nokia. He said that the piracy problem is high on MOSH's agenda and should be solved soon.

For copyright protected music and movies they already have an automatic solution: MOSH checks the digital fingerprint of the file and prevents the upload if it's copyright protected. For that Nokia could use existing filter software that already had been used in similar ways at Youtube or Flickr. "Try to upload a song by Madonna!", Waterworth told me. But I didn't do so because I don't want to get in trouble. That's also the reason why I don't post any direct link to illegal MOSH contents in this blog post. Look for yourself, dear reader! Yet I wonder why still I can find Madonna's song "Hung up" at MOSH.

Much more difficult is it for Nokia to filter illegal software. There was no existing solution for cell phone programs, so Nokia now has to develop their own. In some weeks, Waterworth says, pirated software will be detected automatically at MOSH. Nokia will check against a blacklist from software companies which contains every piece of software they don't want to see for a free download at MOSH.

Until then Nokia asks users to report copyright infringements and illegal contents to the moderators who monitor MOSH day and night. They will delete them by hand. The responsible for the illegal upload will be warned and if he does it again his account will be canceled.

Labels: MOSH, Nokia, P2P, Piracy, Software, Web_2.0

                                      

VoIP is so much more than just telephony. Martyn Davies gives a great overview about new services at VoIP User under the headline "Telco 2.0 - New APIs to Start the Revolution". Great to read. Thank you, Martyn, for summing up all the API information snippets of the last months!

Labels: Software, VoIP

                                      

The VoIP company Sipgate, one of the biggest in Germany with also significant business in the UK, offers a special service for developers. "Sipgate API" is a new interface to integrate almost every Sipgate function - VoIP, SMS and large administration tools - in own applications. The Sipgate API enables to use central Sipgate functions within your own software or web projects, so that VoIP tinkerers can set up their own mashup services.

In his latest blog post Thomas Howe, the master of mashup, was so kind to explain again what mashup means:

A mashup is an application that uses
1) modern Web integration technologies
2) to take content or services from two independent sources
3) to solve a unique or niche problem.

The first element of mashups are the integration technologies they use. These integration technologies create a “web as platform” architecture, allowing the mashup developer to integrate his software on top of the world class infrastructures provided by Amazon or AOL, simply, easily and safely. The most common technologies used for mashups include Web services calls, which either come as a SOAP or REST flavors, AJAX, Javascript and Ruby.

The second element of mashups is that they take content or services from more than one independent source. This is where the “mashup” word comes from. Mashups take things that might not go together, and puts them together in a valuable way. The classic mashup is the Chicago Crime Map, that took data from the Chicago Police Department and plotted it on Google Maps, so that you could see where the burglaries happened.

The "Sipgate API" is provided free of charge and can be used for mashups with every Sipgate account. Up to date the fax function of Sipgate can be used only with the German service.

To make integration easy, Sipgate publishes also the source code of the Firefox extension "Sipgate FFX" as well as several Perl examples and a KDE panel application under a GPL 2 license. Further more .NET developers will find with "sipgate API .NET SDK" a comfortable library to use the "Sipgate API" services easily. Over a mailing list developers can also exchange experiences and tips.

You will find all information about the interface and the exemplar applications including detailed documentations under www.sipgate.co.uk/api.

Labels: Mashup, Sipgate, SMS, Software, VoIP, Web_2.0

                                      

Many critics had said that CeBIT is out of date and that it had lost ground to the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas and the 3GSM World Congress in Barcelona, which have been held some weeks before. But Hanover's CeBIT is still the world's largest computer expo. After half of the time CeBIT has ten per cent more visitors than last year and to me it was more interesting to me than ever. Maybe because of the technological promises that at last have been accomplished after years of cheap talk.

It started with Vodafone's and T-Mobile's presentation of Europe's fastest 3G internet access for laptops and mobile phones: The new network combines High-Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) and High Speed Uplink Packet Access Technology (HSUPA). So it can deliver download speeds of up to 7.2 Mbits/s and uploads of up to 1.45 Mbits/s. That's faster than most classic DSL rates. I was impressed to see a 100 Megabyte FTP download to a laptop taking only 2:45 minutes. „The new HSDPA is at least seven times faster than every 3G internet access you get in the US“, said Vodafone spokesman Jens Kürten to me. „We will roll it out in Germany in the next months.“ Vodafone's 3G network covers already over 2,000 cities in Germany with data transmission rates of up to 1.8 Mbits/s. Faster transmission rates of up to 3.6 MBits/s are available in all major cities and 7.2 Mbit/s will follow soon.

But while Kürten sees it more as a replacement for fixed line internet access and Wifi hotspots on laptops Samsung presented already a tiny mobile phone which really can make use of such amazing speeds. The F700 looks from outside very similar to Apple's iPhone and has the size of a normal cell phone. But when you slide it open there is an entire keyboard for writing e-mails and chat messages. Unfortunately the interest in the phone was so big at CeBIT that the F700 had to be held behind glass and I could not check out the download speeds. Hopefully with devices like this the mobile network operators keep in mind what Germany's head of state, chancellor Angela Merkel, told them in their CeBIT opening speach: to bring down their prices. „You get more clients when you make it cheaper“, she said to more than 2000 IT managers. Many cell phone companies still charge more than 9 Euro per Megabyte and wonder why the mobile internet usage isn't higher among their clients.

With HSDPA these prices are just a joke and new Notebooks like Toshiba's „Portégé R400“ already come to the shelfs with built in 3G internet access and bundled with T-Mobile or Vodafone contract. The R400 downloads e-mails and synchronyzes the calendar continuously, even when it's closed or in standby mode. A second display outside the cover keeps you informed about new incoming messages, whithout the need to open the notebook. Although the luxury notebooks weighs only 3.79-pounds it can be already too heavy for today's miniaturization freaks. So Samsung's revealed on CeBIT it's Q1B, the world's lightest Universal Mobile PC (UPMC) which weighs just 1.67 poundsand runs Windows Vista. With 60 Gigabyte Harddisc, 1,0 Ghz Pentium processor and 7 Inch display the Q1B will is in the US stores from now on for 1299 dollars.

But maybe the times of personal computers are now really over and everything switches to the web. At least this idea came to my mind when the German software company Magix presented their online desktop Mygoya that's still in closed beta. The Flash website fullfils all basic needs of a computer user: E-mails, photo collection with optimization, all known messenger services with voice, videos, music, filesharing and office programs are managed in one Mygoya account. The files are saved for free on the 1 GB storage space and can be accessed from every computer or mobile phone with a Flash player. No need for an own harddisc anymore, because there will be more storage space in the paid version. No operating system wars anymore, because flash runs on virtually everyone.

„Soon the Mygoya desktop will also run Skype“, said Magix promotion manager Janek Bennewitz to me. I wonder how they want to do this since Skype is a closed system. But maybe these days are also over: At least the Italian company PCService presented a great way to bridge Skype and normal phones. Their Linux software Skip2PBX serves as an addition to a company's existing PBX. Installed on a Linux machine, which can also be virtual, it controls up to 30 Skype accounts at one time, using different sessions of the Skype program. When a Skype call arrives it's being redirected to a phone. The Users can call their Skype contacts for free by using short numbers on their phone. While the software still works only with ISDN and analogue phone lines the next version, which is due in june, will build the bridge from Skype to SIP.

A nice addition to existing company PBXs and a great example of the new VoIP ideas presented in Hall 13. The companies there showed how they want to beat the incumbents by channeling more and more calls over the internet. This isn't always automatically the cheapest, we learn from recent news about real „minute stealers“ that take away phone minutes by hacking a company's VoIP gateway. „That's possible because you can configure most PBXs with just few clicks in your browser“, explains Jens-Uwe Junghanns, sales manager of the German PBX producer Junghanns.NET Gmbh. „The built in webserver of the PBX can be an open door for hackers.“ So their poison green „Cruise phone“ PBX for VoIP and PSTN telephony can be configured only from one computer which has the right Java applet installed. German security at it's best that nearly got overlooked at CeBIT in Hanover.

Labels: 3G, Devices, HSDPA, Mobile, Software, Vodafone, VoIP

                                      

Now that's a press release I like: 4S newcom, inventor of the blue4S, "the world's slickest PBX", running on a blue Apple Mac mini, do it again: On the on the occasion of the CeBIT, the world's largest computer expo from 15th till 21th of march 2007 in Hannover (Germany), they start to sell the software running on the blue4S on a bigger scale. It can be used for many purposes: to substitute an expensive hardware PBX in a big company, to save on mobile communication costs or to even build up an own VoIP telephony provider.

They let mobile phones make free calls via their PBX, using Wifi to connect them or flat-rate tariffs for dial-in. Especially I like the "intelligent redirect: a user is given a set of local telephone numbers, which are redirected to international destinations of his choice". That's a little big like the free Break In numbers from Tpad, that my Peruvian friends use, but much more nifty.


4S Fixed, Mobile and Converged: 4S FMCd

Berlin-based 4S newcom introduces its new product range for fixed, mobile converged VoIP. The new software suit "4S FMCd" integrates PBX functionality with a carrier-grade prepaid system to offer high-level IP Centrex functionality to mobile users.

In addition to providing a feature-rich hosted class-5 IP PBX to VoIP users, the software provides full functionality and cost savings to mobile handsets as well. Making use of WLAN-enabled handsets or flat-rate tariffs for dial-in, call-through and call-back, users can use their mobile handsets as PBX system phones with almost no costs on the mobile phone’s bill.

"With this suite, 4S newcom offers providers and business users full fixed-mobile convergence as value-added functionality", says Harry Behrens, founder and director of 4S newcom. "We rely on dual-mode mobile handsets as well as flat rate tariffs increasingly offered by mobile operators". By connecting platform users to VoIP trunk circuits and configuring dial plans, optimal, e.g. least cost, routing plans can be configured at very fine granularity.

GSM connectivity is added by connecting 4-channel GSM extension boards by junghanns.NET to the system server’s PCI extension slots.

Two example scenarios are free redirection to mobile phones and international calls from mobile phone at VoIP prices. Redirection of fixed office numbers to mobile phones works by routing an incoming call to an employee’s desk phone to the employee’s mobile phone using the appropriate GSM channel on above mentioned GSM module. The call will then be completed at no cost.

"Another very useful setup is what we call intelligent redirect: a user is given a set of local telephone numbers, which are redirected to international destinations of his choice. For example by calling a Berlin number from my mobile phone (for free) I am connected to my parent’s phone in London and can talk to them using my mobile phone at zero cost to the mobile’s bill and a grand total of less than 1 Euro per hour! Basically we are arbitraging between mobile rates and VoIP rates"

A trial run for a limited number of users will be launched on March 19th 2007 at http://www.4snewcom.de/fmcd/. This trial run will allow registered users full use of the system based on two simple tariffs, one being a flat rate.


About 4S newcom:

4S newcom focuses on delivering carrier-grade software platforms to VoIP providers, ISPs and enterprises. 4S newcom delivers system, components and know-how along the full VoIP value chain: carrier grade class-4 "dial tone systems", on-premise IP PBX, hosted PBX as well as IP Centrex. Its two product lines are the carrier grade 4S ITSP Solution and the 4S IP PBX.
4S newcom last hit the news with its slick Mac mini-based IP PBX blue4S.


Press contact:

Maja Schneider
press@4snewcom.de
Tel: +49-30-79 70 87 71

Labels: 4s newcom, Software, Tpad, VoIP

                                      

Finally Joost let's me invite other people as beta testers for their service. Today I receiced this email:

Hello,

We have added new tokens to your account, so you can invite more people to participate in the Joost beta testing program.

To invite others, please go to https://www.joost.com/betatest/invitations.html and enter their email addresses. They'll be sent an invitation and a password to start participating right away.

Best regards,
The Joost team

When I entered my account I saw that I had two tokens. I directly invited a friend who had asked me before. So only one token was left. But after some time I had two tokens again, maybe because my friend had meanwhile accepted the invitation. It seems that Joost gives always two tokens to its beta testers.

I am going to verify this now by inviting an other person who asked me in the comments section of this blog. My Joost account actually says "Number of invitations you can send: 1". But maybe soon I will have two tokens again?

The person who wants a Joost invitation from me should just ask in the comment section of this blog and tell me why I should choose especially him or her. Let's wait for the best statements! On thursday, 8th of march 2007, I will choose the winner.

:)

Labels: Joost, Media, Software

                                      

OK, it seems that just one week after my blog post "Until now Joost is boring. Isn't it?" the people from Joost are taking my advice into account.

Viacom Inc. said today it has agreed to offer its videos to Joost, the Internet video service created by the founders of Skype. Hundreds of hours of programming from Viacom's MTV Networks, Paramount Pictures movies studio and BET Networks will be available to Joost users for free, says Reuters.

More details gives the official press release:

MTV Networks will provide premier content from several of its brands for launch. MTV will offer popular shows, both past and present, including Laguna Beach, Beavis & Butthead, Real World, Punk'd and My Super Sweet Sixteen, while COMEDY CENTRAL will feature episodes from Stella, CCP's and Freak Show. Nickelodeon, CMT: Country Music Television, MTV2, Logo, Spike TV, mtvU, and Gametrailers.com will also provide content. VH1's offerings will include episodes of Flavor of Love, Surreal Life, and I Love New York. BET's Networks' offerings will include some of its biggest shows, including Beef, DMX: Soul of a Man, Comic View and recent smash hit American Gangster. Also, Paramount Pictures, Paramount Vantage and Paramount Classics will be providing full- length feature films from their catalog of classics and recent releases.

Well, that's still quite a lot of MTV and the like crap. But I am looking forward to Paramount's movies. What I would really appreciate is a deal with Fox Television and ABC so that I could see my favourite shows on Joost: The Simpsons and Lost.

Labels: Joost, Media, Software

                                      

People are still very enthusiastic about Joost, the new P2P television platform of the Skype founders. There is very much of a hype and every new feature is being commented in the news. But maybe that's only because there are so few beta testers. To me it seems that most of the people are hailing Joost but few have really tried it.

So let me tell you a secret: Joost is boring to me.

I am one of the few beta testers. Yesterday I tried Joost again, switched through the channels and nearly nothing has changed since I tried it weeks ago. The channels are presenting only clips that already would have bored me on MTV: fun sports, Paris Hilton, mainstream music and the like.

That's not what I expected from a new form of television, which has the capability to present unlimited tv content so that there also should be something for me. I am quite amazed how smoothly Joost works on a lame DSL internet connection. So the technology behind it must be great. But the content must still be a placeholder. At least I hope so and I imagine why it is like this: They had former MTV people in their team when Joost was still in stealth mode and it's name was the Venice Project.

Nevertheless my friends are very keen on Joost and would like to try it themselves. So they ask me for invites. But sorry, I can't. They just don't let me invite you:

Invitations

We're gradually expanding our network, and we'd like you to invite new people to come and join in.

Every once in a while you will receive tokens, enabling you to send invitations to friends, family or anyone else who you think will enjoy watching internet TV. Each invitation will cost you one token, regardless of whether your invitation has been accepted or refused.

Number of invitations you can send: 0

It seems that I am not the only one who can't invite, since others are also complaining in Joost's beta tester forum. No tokens, no invites.

Labels: Joost, Media, P2P, Software