<incom> Emerging Telephony (day 3)

[Steve Cisler]

Emerging Telephony Conference. 

San Francisco Airport Marriott. March 1 (Day 3)
http://conferences.oreillynet.com/etel2007/

I arrived at noon, in time to hear Mike Liebhold of
the Institute For The Future <iftf.org> present a
somewhat hopeful look at the possibilities of the
major mobile carriers opening up their systems to
rapid innovation with a much lower entrance cost. He
compared the vitality of the Web 2.0 applications and
said that kind of user generation of content did not
exist in the current networks.

At lunch I spoke with Brian Topping of codehaus. He
has been a web developer and is doing some work with
mobile applications. He said there is a very informal
way of getting help with development since there are
not design and programming classes as there are with
almost any topic in computer/Web development. He would
find a programmer inside a company who would recommend
the right tools to use and then be a sort of mentor,
answering perhaps one question a week.

Most phones can send geographic coordinates to some
parties (the company, law enforcement, three letter
agencies, and for a fee parents who want to track a
child) but not to the owner of the phone. At a
conference he asked a Sprint rep about this, and the
guy said to ask Nextel (also owned by Sprint). Nextel
had specifically negotiated that spec when they
established their network with Motorola.  There has
been discussion about the way phone companies cripple
existing phones and take OUT features that might work
in Japan, for instance.

GeoVector <http://www.geovector.com/> showed some
slides and a movie of a pointing phone using their
software to give information about an object when the
user points the phone at a historic place, a
restaurant and gets a review from a friend, or a group
of places along the path she is walking along. It is
working in Japan where they have mapped and described
700,000 objects on the KDDI network.  One nice user
interface was directions for walking in a city. Just
follow a large arrow, not a verbal or cartographic
reprentation of the destination.

Several speakers could not be present, and others
filled in including two students from NYU. Summer
Bedard showed The Human Race
<http://www.thanksforyourpatience.com/> where you
called a number and were put on hold along with
others. By answering questions (some humorous and some
invasive) you decreased or increased the wait time.  

Botanicalls  <http://botanicalls.com>  assigned plants
phone numbers. Each plant had a sensor that measured
moisture level, and when it dropped it activated a
controller with small xb radios that talked to a
computer and this called the owner who heard, "Hi,
this is the ivy. I'm desperately in need of a drink.
Could you water me?"  After doing so, the plant would
call again: "Thanks, that felt like a fresh spring
rain."  And you could call the plant and hear it
describe itself.  212 202 8348.


Mozes.com CEO Dorrian Porter showed the multiple ways
SMS messages are being used around the world. One
trillion were sent in 2006. He reported how the
Finnish prime minister broke up with his partner using
SMS:  "It's over!"  and the Finns have written a novel
using SMS. In talking about developing countries 85%
of the new phones are going there. Troops in the Congo
have used SMS to coordinate attacks on villages. The
British have used it to send messages to all their
solders, and they are jamming some systems and
blasting propaganda to hostile parties. He said that
you can get a divorce by SMS in Malaysia, as long as
it's final.  

Phil Zimmermann discussed his new project on VoIP
encryption which is one of the proposals before the
Internet Engineering Task Force to become a standard.
Zfone <http://www.philzimmermann.com/zfone/index.html>
is aimed at making communications safer, and he
invoked all the bad things that could happen and are
happening on the Net. He hopes the USG will use this
eventually..

Quentin Stafford-Fraser, ED of Ndiyo, talked about
affordable access to ICT and displayed the first and
second generation of small controllers that allow
multiple users have individual screens and keyboards
using one LInux box. It has been tested in Soweto,
South Africa and Bangladesh. He showed how the main
computer was hooked into the MTN high speed mobile
network in South Africa, thus avoiding vsat or
landline connections. Here is an older presentation
about the project
<http://www.ndiyo.org/files/sustainable-networking-presentation.pdf>

Again, thanks to the guys--Evan Henshaw-Plath and ?-
who organized the Free-Tel sub-conference and to
OReilly for allowing us into the main conference. The
fast pace and informality were refreshing.

http://place.typepad.com/digitalcommons has this
report and an image of the new generation of the
controller being used by Ndiyo in its South African
project





 
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