To all my friends who received annoying marketing email messages from a miserable Silicon Valley internet startup called Boxbe: I beg your pardon.

After I signed up to Boxbe, more than 500 of my email contacts received annoying invitations, saying "I'm using Boxbe to screen my email and I've added you to my approved Guest List. Can you take a minute to make sure your contacts can reach me?". Many people have received this message already six times. Now I get emails back from buddies saying "could you please stop spamming me and my girlfriend? Boxbe sucks!".

All this happens only because I once hit the "invite friends" button at Boxbe. But have hit it only once and it was only by chance.

There is no reason for Boxbe to flood my friends with unsolicitated email messages. Most of them are Germans and don't even understand what Boxbe is. To them a Boxbe invitation is the same as an email from a Viagra pharmacy. My 73 years old aunt Gerda forwards all Boxbe messages to me and prays that I can take away this plague from her. My mum does the same. I then click the link at "If you would prefer not to receive any further invitations from Boxbe members, click here" and hope that helps.

What upsets me most: I was already aware that something like this could happen. The Canadian blogger Alec Saunders had published it under the title "Boxbe’s spam. A fatal mistake for them and me". Therefore I only "approved" my friends' email addresses at Boxbe and never "invited". Unfortunately one time I mixed it up and that's how it all started.

I have contacted now the Boxbe tech support (support@boxbe.com) as well as Boxbe Product Manager Randy Stewart (randy@boxbe-inc.com) to stop these annoying invitations. Boxbe, you can't sell yourself as an anti spam solution by being a spammer yourself!

If it wasn't for these stupid marketing messages, Boxbe would be one of the greatest solutions to keep up with the information overflow. It could keep my inbox clean from emails which are worse than Viagra spam: unsolicitated press releases and stupid advertsising messages. A doorkeeper for emails.

My problem is, that German law requires me to post a working email address in the contact section of my website. Another annoying fact is that PR agencies seem to sell my email address which I use for journalistic work. Therefore I get tons of messages to these addresses. Most of them are filtered as spam by an automatic solution. Only once a week I have to check for false positives, but the anti spam filter nearly never goes wrong.

But then there are marketing messages like the one I got from Dow Chemicals two days ago. Something is wrong with some crop, they said, and only pesticides from Dow can help, supposedly. WTF? Where did Dow get my email address from and why do they send this message? I am no peasant and as a journalist I am only interested in technology stuff, mostly when it's related to VoIP or mobile communications.

Boxbe would have put this message from Dow under a quarantine. Since it didn't come from an authorized contact, it would have had to wait at Boxbe before it could enter my real inbox. Messages from authorized contacts would go straight to my email inbox and are shown on my cell phone. All other messages have to wait in the outer office. Once a day Boxbe sends a summary of all these waiting messages and you can kill or authorize them with one click. Users of Yahoo Mail, Gmail or Outlook can have it even more comfortable.

"With Boxbe, your inbox is no longer a free-for-all", is the company's claim and I like this idea very much. By using the tool wisely and combining Boxbe with other technologies, your inbox would not only be free of spam about Viagra or penis enhancement. But you could also have a great fence against unrelated messages which slip through the spam filter but are unwanted anyway.

If only it wasn't for Boxbe's stupid bulk invitations!

I hope they will stop now. I have the feeling that Boxbe only sends them out when I make a change in my settings. Hopefully that's true! In this case I could give it another try.

In an other blog I found this alleviating comment from Boxbe:

randy@boxbe.com said...

Just a point of clarification here. We're not planning on sending invitations every week to users. Rather, if multiple Boxbe users invite the same person, we'll only send a maximum of two to that person in a given week.

Ideally, if multiple Boxbe users want to invite someone, we need to figure out how to send that person one invite from all those people combined.

We're still pretty new at the invite game, but hopefully we can work all the kinks out sooner rather than later.

Cheers,
Randy Stewart
Boxbe Product Manager

Hope that helps.

Labels: Anti Spam, Boxbe, Boxbe Spam, Spam, Web_2.0

                                      

Qik is the latest favourite gadget of famous video bloggers like Robert Scoble, Jeff Pulver, Steve Garfield, Loren Feldman, Laura Fitton, Cali Lewis and others. They can simply switch on their mobile phone's video camera and yet they are sending live videos onto their viewers' internet browsers.

When I met with Qik's VP Marketing and co-founder Bhaskar Roy, he said that they were planning to bring these videostreams also to mobile phones. "Qik is developing a new live streaming to other mobile handsets", says Bhaskar. "You won't even need a browser to watch a livestream. We send a Realvideo stream directly to your friends' cell phones." The cell phone will not only be a camera for mobile live video streams, but also a tv set to watch them. Everyone is a sender and a receiver, because Qik plans to stream its videos in 3GP format to mobile handsets.

Well, they can stop now their development or should at least consider this blog post (just kidding!): I am already able to stream my Qik live videos as 3GP videos to mobile phones. And I am not even a techie. I just did a mashup with another hot startup in mobile space: dailyme.tv from Berlin, Germany. Here you can see a screenshot, showing a Qik video on a Nokia E61:

Screenshot from a Qik video stream on a mobile phone

Qik offers and RSS feed to every user's account which can be subscribed in dailyme.tv. So the Qik streams don't come as live videos to the phone, but they are fairly often updated. "The more often a video RSS feed is updated, the more often we send it to the phones", explained dailyme.tv CEO Michael Merz when we met this week. His service is basically a content aggregator for mobile phones. They bring tv shows and video podcasts into 3GP format which basically every mobile phone understands. So dailyme.tv is also a good way to watch video podcasts in weird formats which only an iPod can handle. The Symbian Freak wrote a good introduction into the service:

The mobile phone television service, dailyME.tv, started a TV push service just in time for the CeBIT, that automatically brings video files and podcasts to subscribers's mobile phones. DailyME is the simplest way to have mobile access to premium TV content and a wide range of Videocasts. Users have the opportunity to be their own TV manager: register, program your own TV and video channel and have it updated automatically, whenever you are online with your mobile phone (WLAN, UMTS, GPRS, HSDPA).

One can choose from a wide selection of different channels and divisions, offered by the service provider. There is no live streaming and content can be downloaded over an internet connection and currently there is only client for Symbian S60 3rd edition phones. Thanks to the unique transmission technology (patent pending) on the basis of the technologies on-hand today, an individual program can be made available for mobile phone users 24 hours per day.

A fast internet connection over Wifi or 3G is necessary for dailyme.tv. GPRS could also be used, but then you should expect longer loading times. The videos have a resolution of 320 x 240 pixels, and picture quality is reasonable at 350 Kbit with 12.5 pictures per seconds. What I like most about dailyme.tv is that they are able to transcode every video format, even the *.flv Flash videos from Qik. Over Wifi it doesn't even suck much battery. From time to time the handset connects for very short to download the latest videos. A drum sound of the Devicescape software reminds me that dailyme.tv again started a download.

I can watch the videos later in idle times while commuting. "From April on we will start to offer dailyme.tv also for Windows Mobile 5 Phone edition and Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional Edition", says Michael Merz. "Then we will send our videoclips also in WMV format." I think he should also talk to Qik, which has great XML interfaces. They already offer one click integration of their videos into Twitter, Seesmic, Mogulus, Blogger, mobuzz.tv, justin.tv and Youtube. Great names, but none of them has such a cool application for mobile video.

Disclosure: I am not on a dailyme.tv payroll. I just like their service and that it comes from Germany. Qik is also a mostly Russian company, only the head office is in Silicon Valley.

Labels: Blogger, dailyme.tv, justin.tv, Mobile, mobuzz.tv, Mogulus, Qik, Seesmic, Twitter, Web_2.0, Youtube

                                      

I don't like Plaxo Pulse. It feels scary and gives me a sense of lost privacy. For years Plaxo was just an address book service in the internet. I could store my friends' address data and access them from whichever computer. From time to time I sent automatic emails which asked the to update their information.

But all of a sudden I got emails from Plaxo that someone commented on something. On what please? Wasn't Plaxo my private address book, available only for me? How could someone comment on that? Plaxo's weekly update started to tell me that friends had updated their blog or started discussion groups. Again that was information I didn't ask for. Today I received an email which took me to a comment on a Plaxo website. There someone writes about a photo of mine "It's interesting how one's imagination about a person changes when we see a photo. I imagined you very different." Scary, isn't it?

Why does my private address book make me get comments about my appearance from people I interviewed only once, on the phone months ago? I don't like that. I would like to turn all this Pulse crap off at Plaxo. But it seems that in this case I would also loose the address book update functionalities. That's what I have learned from the forum entry "Re: Plaxo Pulse violates privacy policy"

Why must this Web 2.0 crap invade everything? I don't want my address book to autonomously "connect and socialize with one another". That's much more abilities than I ask for! An address book is a very private thing and a social network is something public. I don't want these two worlds to mix. I don't want Plaxo to automatically publish my private connections and exploit them for their company purposes.

Maybe I have to dump Plaxo at all.

Labels: Plaxo, Web_2.0

                                      

Qik is one of the greatest mobile internet applications I know. You just start the software on a Nokia N95, and yet you are broadcasting live video to everyone over the internet. Have a look at my company's Qik stream at Mogulus if you want to see the next transmission.



I immediately thought that this kind of live video broadcast is the last feature that's missing on Nokia's social platform Ovi. There you can already share photos, videos, comments and blog entries in more than 100 file formats. "We support nearly every existing file format”, said Serena Glover, Director Service Operations, Connect New Experiences at Nokia and ex CEO of Twango in an interview with me at the Mobile World Congress 2008 in Barcelona. But Ovi always keeps you waiting for your friends to upload a new video. You can't just tune when it's still being filmed. It feels more like Blockbuster video than real television. Unlike Qik, which lets you broadcast and see events while they are still happening.

"Absolutely! Qik should be a part of Ovi", therefore said Qik's VP Marketing and co-founder Bhaskar Roy when we talked in Barcelona. He also related how venture capitalists are competing to do his company's second round of funding. Our chat was very interesting and insightful. Who had thought that this Silicon Valley company is mostly based in Russia? While India born Bhaskar and his friend Ramu Sunkara run Qik together with some other Stanford graduates from the Californian city of Santa Clara, most of their employees live and work in Moscow. Nilolay Abkairov, who was a former speech codec developer for Skype mobile, and his team are busily porting Qik to all smartphone platforms.

His friend Alexi handles the video streaming issues, which make use of quite nifty technologies: The handset shoots the video as MPEG4 and immediately streams it as H.263 over a 3G or Wifi connection to Qik's server. There it's being transcoded into Flash for Qik's website or into a Realvideo stream for mobile handsets. "Qik is developing a new live streaming to other mobile handsets”, says Bhaskar. "You won't even need a browser to watch a livestream. We send a Realvideo stream directly to your friends' cell phones."

So soon the cell phone will not only be a camera but also a tv set. Everyone is a sender and a receiver at the same time – if he has the right handset. "Qik works on all S60 platforms and a version for UIQ is in development”, says Bhaskar. "A version for Windows Mobile will be launched soon.” Their aim is to make Qik work on every possible camera phone. That's why the team in Santa Clara is also developing a Java client for cheaper handsets. They even tested Qik successfully on phones with just 100 Megahertz CPU and only an EDGE connection to the mobile internet. "Qik consist of a layer that's different for every platform and a platform independent layer”, explains Bhaskar. "That's why it takes only some weeks to port Qik to a new platform."

So while the future looks technologically bright for Qik, I asked Bhaskar how his company wants to earn money. Until now the service is free and Nokia hasn't made an offer yet. "In this year we will only concentrate on consumer acquisition”, is his answer. Advertising on Qik's website would be easy to implement, like Google does it on Youtube. Also companies could sponsor certain channels on the website. "We could also offer value added services for very cheap prices like $1 per month", says Bhaskar. As an example for a premium service he mentions privacy. Until now every video appears directly on Qik's starting page as soon as you activate the camera. Every stranger can see it until you switch off or hit the "0” key.

Labels: Google, Nokia, Qik, Skype, Smartphone, Web_2.0, Youtube

                                      

People are, just, well, bored of social networks reports The Register, quoting comScore numbers, processed by Creative Capital.

The average length of time users spend on all of the top three sites is on the slide. Bebo, MySpace and Facebook all took double-digit percentage hits in the last months of 2007. December could perhaps be forgiven as a seasonal blip when people see their real friends and family, but the trend was already south.

The "user engagement" is dropping off, which should be of particular concern for the sales people struggling to turn these free services into profit-making businesses.

This time around, expect spinners to work on massaging the comScore figures, and happy-clappy bloggers to leap to social networking's defence by claiming the falls are sign of the market maturing, and of fierce competition. They could be right, but it still means that the individual business are not the goldmine their greedy backers slavered over.

On Facebook people "join, accumulate dozens of semi-friends, spy on a few exes for a bit, play some Scrabulous, get bored, then get on with your life, occasionally dropping in to respond to a message or see some photos that have been posted".

That's exactly what I did! I am nearly healed from the Facebook virus, just logging in once a week. Facebook is so 2007!

I love The Register for their expertise and vocabulary.

Labels: Facebook, Media, Web_2.0

                                      

Dear readers,

I need your help: Until Januar 25, 2008, I have to deliver an article about VoIP security to a big German economy magazine with 770.000 readers. Therefor I am looking for interesting information and interviews. One focus of the article is mobile VoIP security, but not the only one.

The magazine regularily engages me as a freelancing writer for such topics. But this time I want to unleash the power of Web 2.0 by posting this inquiry to my blog.

Do you have interesting material that could be helpful for this article? Maybe I should do an interview to you?

I am looking for speeches, presentations, whitepapers, blog post and similar stuff about VoIP security threats (wiretapping, minute stealing, man in the middle attacks, DoS attacks...) and how to prevent them (encryption, firewalls, ...). So please send me your PDF, URL, Powerpoint or Word document about the topic in the next few days!

I will read the information and then contact you for an interview. These points are interesting to me:

1. What are the most common / most dangerous / latest security threats?
2. Interesting cases of VoIP security breaches and actual hacks?
3. How to protect VoIP / mobile VoIP?

You can find my contact data here or simply post a comment to this blog entry.

Thanks a lot.

Best regards,
Markus Göbel

Labels: Media, Mobile, VoIP, Web_2.0

                                      

"I despise Facebook," writes Tom Hodgkinson today in The Guardian.

Clearly, Facebook is another uber-capitalist experiment: can you make money out of friendship? Can you create communities free of national boundaries - and then sell Coca-Cola to them? Facebook is profoundly uncreative. It makes nothing at all. It simply mediates in relationships that were happening anyway.

Mainly, Hodgkinson has a go at Facebook's backers, Peter Thiel and Jim Breyer. He presents an entire conspiracy theory about how Facebook is funded and aided by the CIA and neocon circles to exploit its users, who create all the content only to see it sold as advertising space which makes a few people even richer. He also writes:

After 9/11, the US intelligence community became so excited by the possibilities of new technology and the innovations being made in the private sector, that in 1999 they set up their own venture capital fund, In-Q-Tel, which "identifies and partners with companies developing cutting-edge technologies to help deliver these solutions to the Central Intelligence Agency and the broader US Intelligence Community (IC) to further their missions".

As far as I remember 9/11 happed in 2001. So if the CIA discovered its interested in internet startups already in 1999, it had nothing to do with the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and the subsequent War on Terrorism. Still the text is interesting to read and could make me shiver if I knew that it's entirely true. But from my desk in Berlin I just can't check the facts, whether in favour or against Facebook. However I can perfectly understand the story of Hodgkinson's friend who spent a Saturday night at home alone on Facebook, drinking at his desk.

What a gloomy image. Far from connecting us, Facebook actually isolates us at our workstations.

At least Facebook always eats up more time than I had planned to spend and it hasn't give me much in return. At least it's free and I can switch off its email notifications.

Labels: Facebook, Media, Web_2.0

                                      

Pat Phelan has a very interesting blog post about "what's the cost of Twitter?". He extrapolates that the worldwide economy will loose $13.5bn in 2008 because people waste time with silly Twitter updates. His thought provoking text caused a big discussion and reminds me of last year's story "Facebook surfers cost their bosses billions". But while Pat seems to agree that Facebook is a terrible time sucker, he still declares Twitter a "tool I couldn't live without". For me they are of the same category.

I like Pat very much. But I don't need a status update every time his airplain is delayed, he buys a CD of Take That or answers a friend's question. That's the kind of information I find in Twitter feeds. For me that's not useful and causes a false sense of intimacy. That's why I don't like Twitter. I am very happy that Pat doesn't publish his "Daily Tweets" so often anymore, blog posts where he just mirrors his Twitter feed. They are mostly noise between his excellent articles. As a technology journalist I have to follow hundreds of blogs and filter out such distracting information.

That's what Twitter costs me, although I don't even use that tool. I whish my browser had some kind of Adblocker for irrelevant Web2.0 crap.

Labels: Facebook, Media, Twitter, Web_2.0

                                      

Much has been said about startups like Ribbit, Tringme or Flashphone which use the Flash browser plugin for click to call widgets. Aswath Rao even declares 2008 the Year of Flash based VoIP Clients. I can only say that you don't have to wait till next year to call me for free using Flash. I love my Tringme call widget:

These calls are entirely free to you, because the caller speaks into the Flash widget on my website using a headset or the laptop's built in phone and speaker. On Linux the sound is a little bit weird. The automatic voice, which says "please wait while we connect your call" before every connection, sounds like a 45 rpm record played on 33. The phone call itself sounds like Mickey Mouse, but still the the words are understandable. On Windows everything works just perfect.

Also to me these calls are entirely free. Other than my widgets from Sitňfono and Voxalot where I have to pay to call the person who wants to contact me.

I achieve this by using FWD as SIP provider to power the Tringme widget. The Tringme account website says "Connect my phone and voicemail widget to Phone number or extension". Unfortunately it accepts only numbers and no SIP addresses in this input mask, but as a workaround I have simply put my FWD number there. In the "TringPhone SIP Settings" part of the account configuration I left my FWD login data. Which means that every Tringme call is in fact a free FWD on net call. You can probably do the same with Gizmo Project's SIP account data and phone numbers, as well as with many other VoIP providers.

Also there is another widget for people who don't want to talk to me, but just leave a voicemail.

Only seconds later I get a call and a voice says "You have a Tringme" before it plays the message. The Tringme widgets are much better than Gizmocall which also allows free calls from a website.

You could call me for free by simply typing http://www.gizmocall.com/mgoebel in your browser's address bar. This website also uses Flash, but additionally you have to install a plugin for Windows or Mac. For ten months yet Gizmo owes us a Linux plugin. Although the company's CEO, Michael Robertson, even has his own Linux distribution, Linspire.

But why bother? The Flash browser plugin gets more and more versatile and works on all platforms. It's a new way to disrupt the telco industry, circumventing the PSTN and offering a new option for free phone calls that so many people appreciate.

So, if you want, please give me a Tringme call!

And, before you ask: No, I couldn't get Truphone's Facebook application running, which should basically do the same like Tringme, only that it uses Java. After one week of tinkering I gave up. But congratulations for winning the "Red Herring 100 Global" Award.

Labels: Flashphone, free phone calls, FWD, Gizmo Project, Gizmocall, Linux, PSTN, Ribbit, Sitňfono, Tringme, Truphone, VoIP, Voxalot, Web_2.0