*michael parekh on IT*

ON USING U.S. iPHONES IN BRAZIL

COMMUNICATION GAPS

We're planning to travel to Brazil the day after Christmas, and spend New Year's in Rio with some friends.  My wife in particular is looking forward to her first visit to the country. 

Being a gadget junkie and internet addict, I of course spent some time trying to figure out which of my phones will work in Rio, and what it'll cost.

In particular, we were hoping to use our AT&T iPhones for both voice and data services.

Just got off the phone with the AT&T international customer service department, and they informed me that using the iPhone in Rio will cost $2.29/minute without an international contract, and $1.99/minute with a contract.  And it applies to both incoming and outgoing calls.

The contract of course will cost $5.99/month extra and we can discontinue it after we return.  He made the point though that we need to be on the contract through the billing cycle, which means staying on the plan for a couple of months, even though we're only going to be in country for a week and a half.

Data service on the iPhone in Brazil will cost $25 for 20 MB and $59.99 for 50 MB, paid per month of course.  No help of course in figuring out how to identify 20 and 50MB of usage.  I mean, who really knows how much MBs are consumed surfing the web on an iPhone?  How do we figure that out?  Where is the MB usage meter, while you're using it?*

I know we can buy local SIM cards to use in an unlocked phone, or buy a prepaid, inexpensive local cell phone.  But haven't researched that option fully yet.

That option also means having another number to pass around to friends and family.  And of course, it rules out mobile internet surfing.

We're also going to need to look into forwarding our to our U.S. Verizon cellphones, to our AT&T iPhones or local cell phones, and what the charges for that might look like.

Of course we'll both have our laptops, so Skype will always be the default phone application whenever we're online.

But it doesn't help obviously in a mobile context.

If anyone has specific suggestions/recommendations, they'd of course be appreciated.

Some of you may be thinking that I may be missing the whole point of a vacation, which for many is to get away from cell phones and mobile surfing.  But they're a bit of a necessity for both of us for work reasons.

All the communication issues aside though, we're both really looking forward to visiting Brazil.  I've already loaded the Kindle with as many guidebooks as were available, in addition a number of titles in paper that weren't.

Posts from the ground to follow.

*  The rhetorical rant above aside, I can run some back of the envelope numbers to figure out the costs here.  At $60 for 50 MB, you're talking about $1.20/MB.  An average graphics heavy page like the NY or LA Times is about .40 MB.  This means about 50 cents to download a page. 

Not sure if the iPhone Safari browser compresses the average web page down some or not.  Something for further research.

ON AN ACT TO REALLY PROTECT AMERICA

SHELL GAMES

This New York Times article titled "Wider Spying Fuels Aid Plan for Telecom Industry" is worth spending some time on. 

It's an eye-opening look at not just the electronic surveillance efforts by government agencies in the post 9/11 world, but also offers a glimpse at the reality of this surveillance for the past few decades.  The piece is about the efforts of the administration to gain Congressional extensions of certain provisions of The Protect America Act of 2007 that expire in February of 2008  (As an aside, don't you love how they title these things in easy to digest sound-bites for the six o'clock news?).

First, it sets up the current issue:

"For months, the Bush administration has waged a high-profile campaign, including personal lobbying by President Bush and closed-door briefings by top officials, to persuade Congress to pass legislation protecting companies from lawsuits for aiding the National Security Agency’s warrantless eavesdropping program.

But the battle is really about something much bigger. At stake is the federal government’s extensive but uneasy partnership with industry to conduct a wide range of secret surveillance operations in fighting terrorism and crime.

The N.S.A.’s reliance on telecommunications companies is broader and deeper than ever before, according to government and industry officials, yet that alliance is strained by legal worries and the fear of public exposure.

To detect narcotics trafficking, for example, the government has been collecting the phone records of thousands of Americans and others inside the United States who call people in Latin America, according to several government officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the program remains classified.

But in 2004, one major phone carrier balked at turning over its customers’ records. Worried about possible privacy violations or public relations problems, company executives declined to help the operation, which has not been previously disclosed."

Then, it looks at how the situation came to be:

"The federal government’s reliance on private industry has been driven by changes in technology. Two decades ago, telephone calls and other communications traveled mostly through the air, relayed along microwave towers or bounced off satellites.

The N.S.A. could vacuum up phone, fax and data traffic merely by erecting its own satellite dishes. But the fiber optics revolution has sent more and more international communications by land and undersea cable, forcing the agency to seek company cooperation to get access."

What's extraordinary about this paragraph is not the revelation about the changes in technology, but the tacit acknowledgment in a mainstream newspaper, that the government has been infringing on the privacy of the  mainstream population, possibly counter to existing laws, for decades.  The change in technologies merely brought the activity into the public eye.  If laws of the nation, be they right or wrong, were broken, deserves separate articles and discussions of their own.  Just like the current debates on whether immigration laws, be they right or wrong, need to be followed to the letter of the law, or be changed.

This is especially under-lined in a subsequent place in the article:

"While the N.S.A. operates under restrictions on domestic spying, the companies have broader concerns — customers’ demands for privacy and shareholders’ worries about bad publicity."

Right, the N.S.A. has long had restrictions on it's activities on the domestic front.  Yet, apparently this activity of vacuuming "up phone, fax and data traffic" via the airwaves has been going on for decades.

The shift in technologies merely places a whole host of private sector companies in the legal and PR spotlight because of a government activity that has been tacitly acknowledged by the mainstream and population for the longest time.

There are some eye-opening examples of how private sector communications firms have been working with government agencies in recent times that may be new to some...here are two examples:

"Other N.S.A. initiatives have stirred concerns among phone company workers. A lawsuit was filed in federal court in New Jersey challenging the agency’s wiretapping operations. It claims that in February 2001, just days before agency officials met with Qwest officials, the N.S.A. met with AT&T officials to discuss replicating a network center in Bedminster, N.J., to give the agency access to all the global phone and e-mail traffic that ran through it..."

"...lawsuit accuses Verizon of setting up a dedicated fiber optic line from New Jersey to Quantico, Va., home to a large military base, allowing government officials to gain access to all communications flowing through the carrier’s operations center. In an interview, a former consultant who worked on internal security said he had tried numerous times to install safeguards on the line to prevent hacking on the system, as he was doing for other lines at the operations center, but his ideas were rejected by a senior security official."

Suddenly movies like "The Conversation" and "Enemy of the State" aren't just an exercise in conspiracy fiction.

The article talks about how leading administration representatives have been urging Congress to extend this legislation in recent weeks:

"The intelligence community cannot go it alone,” Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, wrote in a New York Times Op-Ed article Monday urging Congress to pass the immunity provision. “Those in the private sector who stand by us in times of national security emergencies deserve thanks, not lawsuits.”

Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey echoed that theme in an op-ed article of his own in The Los Angeles Times on Wednesday, saying private companies would be reluctant to provide their “full-hearted help” if they were not given legal protections."

I went and looked up both those op-ed pieces (see them here for the McConnell and Mukasey pieces). 

They both justify the extension on the basis of foreign intelligence activities on post 9/11 security concerns.  Here's how the McConnell piece provocatively titled "Help Me Spy on Al Qaeda", justifies the extension:

"Before the Protect America Act was enacted, to monitor the communications of foreign intelligence targets outside the United States, in some cases we had to operate under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA, a law that had not kept pace with changes in technology. In a significant number of these cases, FISA required us to obtain a court order. This requirement slowed — and sometimes prevented — our ability to collect timely foreign intelligence."

Yet the New York Times article on the whole issue makes it clear that the Act is being used for a much wider scope of activities.

This bait and switch form of legal authorization should be disturbing to citizens from both sides of the political aisle.

Government surveillance by and itself is not the real issue here, but rather the legal frameworks with the appropriate checks and balances, being in place.

So if this wider range of monitoring has been going on for decades, then it needs to be discussed much more widely in the mainstream media and better understood before the population at large can be asked to make the right collective decisions.  And they need to go way easy on the post 9/11 hyperbole.

ON WOLVES IN SHEEP'S CLOTHING

MIRAGE

(Updated below)

Someone please check if hell has just frozen over.   Or if it's a full moon tonight.  The telcos are going crazy and acting totally against type.

Yesterday, Verizon announced that they'll make an open version of it's broadband wireless (CDMA) network available to any device and/or application by the end of next year.  The news dominated Techmeme all evening yesterday.  But there's a lot we don't know about the service, as Saul Hansell of the New York Times explained it:

"Verizon Wireless has said it will open its network to any device and any application. But it hasn’t said on what price and on what terms. These are, of course, crucial to understanding how much effect this move will have."

So we'll have to see if there's any there there.  In the meantime,  Om Malik's take on all this at GigaOm is worth a read.

And then today, CNET reports that AT&T is quietly offering "Naked DSL" to customers. 

Naked DSL, as I noted in a post about this a couple of years ago, is when a phone company offers you DSL broadband without the obligation of also taking it's phone service.  Never mind that with DSL you can have your own brand of Internet phone service. 

Here's how CNET explains it:

"Over the past month, AT&T has quietly started to offer reasonably priced unbundled  "naked" DSL
Internet service to customers around the country.

The company's website makes no mention of the service, nor do its Internet phone sales representatives offer or even discuss the service. Customers wishing to sign up will need to call a specific department at AT&T to request the secret plan.

Two tiers are offered, a 3Mbit down/1.5 Mbit up plan for $28.99 per month, and a 1.5Mbit down/768k up for $23.99. Those who opt for the stand-alone DSL service will be able to avoid paying the myriad of mandatory fees associated with a phone line.

The service is available to customers in at least the following states: AL, AR, CA, FL, GA, IN, IL, KY, LA, MI, MO, OH, NC NV, SC, TN, TX

Customers wishing to sign up for the service should do the following:

• Call the AT&T Dry Loop department directly at 888-800-4095.
• Ask to switch to "DSL direct".
• If they give you a hassle, say it's a retention offer."

Before you start thinking AT&T is turning into one of the good guys, here is what CNET adds"

"The Federal Communications Commission ordered AT&T to begin offering stand-alone DSL service as one of a handful of conditions that allowed for the merger of SBC Communications and AT&T in October 2005."

Now we understand the reason for that stealth number and the secret handshake.

Going back to the Verizon announcement yesterday, and remembering the phone companies don't do anything unless they're absolutely made to do so, let's not forget that Verizon is anticipating to be in a heated battle with Google and others for new wireless broadband spectrum auctions coming up next year.

This is the battle important enough for Verizon to take the FCC to court, no less a couple of months ago, as this piece in Ars Technica reminds us:

"When the Federal Communications Commission issued its final set of rules for the upcoming 700MHz spectrum auction, reaction was mixed. Open access proponents were disappointed that the FCC failed to include all four of Google's open access suggestions, while the telecoms bemoaned the fact that two of them were included.

Verizon is taking its irritation over the FCC's rules to the courts, asking the US District Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit to set them aside.

Under the FCC's rules, whoever wins the spectrum auction must allow consumers to use any device and any lawful application on their networks.

After the FCC's decision, Verizon quickly made its position clear. "Imposing any such requirements in the competitive wireless market would reduce the revenue the government will receive from the spectrum auction and limit the introduction of new and innovative wireless services," the company said shortly after the announcement."

Hmm, wonder what changed in the last couple of months for Verizon to have such a change of heart.  Call me skeptical, but I'm not ready to get excited about Verizon's press release yesterday just yet.

Or for AT&T's offer of naked DSL to really see the light of day in a full-blown, mainstream, public, nation-wide launch.

Update: Well, it didn't take long.  This article from DSL Reports takes a crack at Verizon's true agenda on pricing it's "open" network next year:

Silicon Alley Insider's Dan Frommer was one of only a few writers who seemed to get what this announcement was really about -- the injection of a per-byte billing model into consumer consciousness:

"Some people think this will open the door to devices running new services, like free Internet phone service or video calling. But Verizon (VZ) has no intention of turning itself into dumb pipe."

You can expect service plans for non-Verizon phones to include data-network fees based on usage -- meaning those "free" calls could cost a bundle.

Recently busted by the NY Attorney general for advertising 5GB capped service as unlimited, Verizon Wireless has been looking for an opportunity to sell consumers on per byte pricing, and this is likely it.

It's a clever play by the company, who'll get to tell critics and regulators they they do in fact support open access, while charging you a premium for it."

Now that's a telco we can all recognize.

ON THE APPLE "CELLPHONE'S DEAD" STRATEGY

JUST THE BEGINNING

Back in June, after the release of the iPhone, I asked the following question:

"Wonder how long Apple will wait before unveiling new video iPod models with the screen and touch features of the iPhone sans the phone features. 

I'll start the pool with a guess of three months, with a new line-up in time for the holiday season.  Any other takers?"

Apple didn't disappoint, despite some doubts in July, judging from their total refresh of the iPod line today, including the iPod Touch, which is an iPhone without the phone.  If you missed all the hub-bub, you can read all about it on Techmeme, and see Steve Jobs' keynote here.

The most striking moment in the keynote for me, was this slide from Steve's presentation, captured at the right moment by Gizmodo. 

While demonstrating the new iPod Touch, Steve chose to play a music video by Beck, titled "Cellphone's Dead" (click for larger image...You can watch the full music video here on YouTube).

Given that nothing in a Steve Jobs happens by accident, the choice of this video is telling. 

It subtly reminds everyone that the days of thinking of phones, be they wired or wireless, are almost over. 

Sure, Apple is committed to the iPhone and it's multi-year partnership with AT&T in the U.S., and the carriers they partner with in Europe on the iPhone next month, and Asia next year.

But in the long-term, Steve is reminding us that the iPhone is the transitional device.  He keeps reminding us that the iPhone at it's core is "the best iPod ever".

And if you think long and hard about the rich internet capabilities of the iPod Touch with it's Wifi, built-in Safari browser, and cool internet applications like the iTunes Wifi Music store, YouTube, and the Starbucks music download application, the iPod itself is transitioning into the true usable computer in a hand-held device, that's been attempted for so long over the last few decades.

As Fake Steve jobs (aka FSJ) put it eloquently earlier today, what's really going on here is,

"Multitouch coupled to disk drive coupled to WiFi coupled to Safari coupled to OS X."

Never mind that the first iPod Touch doesn't have a disk drive, but 8 to 16 GB of flash memory.  It will soon have hard disk versions of 160 GB and more, like the iPod Classic announced today.

And it's really a mini-Mac.  With mini-versions of all the favorite, core applications from the Mac like iPhoto, iTunes, Safari, etc.

It's one end-t0-end distribution channel for all types of digital content.  And it'll fuse and integrate with all types of physical environments, like thousands of Starbucks stores over the next few years.

Despite all the criticism by many of this being a closed system, companies large and small need to start to think about having a version of their application that works on the mobile Safari browser.  Just like they've been focused for the past few months on having a version of their application and/or service for the "Facebook Platform", another relatively closed system. 

Apple has an installed base of 110 million iPods around the world, which will transition into internet-enabled devices over the next few years.  Compare that to 30 million Facebook members who will also presumably transition into using a host of third-party applications (mostly widgets today), over the next few years.  And both installed bases will presumably grow from today's levels.

The iPod, and the iPhone, are both trojan horses.  It's really about a pretty unique, long-term computing platform with a number of tough to execute links.

No one else is assembling all the hardware, software and online pieces in quite the same way.  Including Google.  Even with it's rumored and anticipated GPhone.

Much of the promise of the GPhone is already here, at your nearby Apple store.  For now it's called the iPod Touch and the iPhone.

ON WHY U.S. BROADBAND LAGS (Part II)

SHELL GAMES

Alex Tolley pointed out this article in a comment to yesterday's post on the sad state competitive state for broadband provision in the U.S (Thanks, Alex!).  Here are the highlights worth noting:

"When Henry Powderly II ordered Verizon Communications Inc.'s FiOS fiber-optic service, he knew he was about to be connected to the future of telecommunications. He also got unplugged from its past. Which meant that while Powderly was gaining features, he was losing some telecommunications options..."

"Verizon's installer — without warning, Powderly says — removed the copper wires that used to carry his phone calls. For most of the world, copper still links homes and businesses, as it has for a century.

Verizon's new high-bandwidth fiber lines are fully capable of carrying not only calls but also Internet data and television with room to grow. But once the copper is pulled, it's difficult to switch back to the traditional phone system or less expensive Digital Subscriber Line service. And Verizon isn't required, in most instances, to lease fiber to rival phone companies, as it is with the copper infrastructure..."

"What's more, anyone who owns Powderly's house in the future will face higher bills with FiOS than another home with copper. Right now, for instance, Verizon's DSL plans cost as little as $15 a month. FiOS Internet starts at $30 a month."

"As it hooks up homes and businesses to its fiber network, Verizon has been routinely disconnecting the copper and, many subscribers say, not telling them upfront or giving them a choice. More than 1 million customers have signed up for a FiOS service, which is offered mainly in the suburban areas of 16 states."

Talk about burning bridges behind you.  Verizon of course, is shocked, shocked, that customers are surprised  by the copper being cut off:

"...Verizon spokesman Eric Rabe said customers should have been notified at least three times — once by the sales representative when FiOS is ordered, by the technician before copper is cut and through paperwork given to the customer. Some customers say that hasn't happened.

The New York phone company has made it clear its entire network is going to fiber-optics. Verizon has decided to spend $23 billion to make fiber available to 18 million homes by 2010. Network maintenance savings could top $1 billion a year, Verizon said..."

"...Besides limiting options down the road, the switch to FiOS can have other implications. Unlike copper-connected phone service, FiOS doesn't work during power outages once a backup battery goes out — not even for emergency calls. Home-alarms and certain other devices work best with copper..."

"An example of what Rabe describes as adequate notice is the fine print on Verizon's FiOS policy, which is printed on its Web site. It says "current Verizon Online DSL customers who move to FiOS Internet service will have their Verizon Online DSL permanently disabled after their FiOS conversion."

Here's the fitting icing on the cake of this story though:

"...While Kelm has no quarrel with FiOS itself — he pays $145 a month for TV, Internet and phone — he would like to have been told before he signed up that Verizon would cut the copper. He was counting on Verizon's clearly advertised 30-day money back guarantee in case he didn't like the service and wanted to switch back.

"I blew a gasket," Kelm said. "The 30-day money back guarantee was worthless in my opinion."

At the very least, Verizon should offer the customer the option of keeping the old copper connection in a more upfront manner. 

As a future, eager customer of FIOS as and when it's available in my area, I'd likely even pay extra to keep the old copper lines as a back-up.  That might even help Verizon defray the cost of maintaining my humble copper wire into the future.

So both Time Warner Cable and Verizon are playing it a bit fast and loose competing with each other in the trenches.

If these two items weren't enough, here's an article from PC Magazine, that takes a fresh, more pragmatic approach to measuring the broadband speeds we pay for and actually get, whether it's from the cable or the telephone company.

In a recent PC Magazine article, writer Jeremy Kaplan did a fantastic job of exposing the true Internet access speeds of the large consumer providers.

He did this by creating a speed test that measured the throughput of continuous access to popular Web sites like Google, Expedia, and many others. Until this report was published, the common metric for comparing ISPs was through the use of the numerous Internet speed test sites available online.

The problem with this validation method was that it could not simulate real speeds encountered when doing typical Web surfing and downloading operations. Plus, ISPs can tamper with the results of speed tests -- more on this later.

When I saw the results of PC Magazine's testing, I was a bit relieved to see that the actual speeds of large providers was somewhere between 150 Kbit/s and 200 Kbit/s. This is a far cry from the two, three or even four megabit download speeds frequently hyped in ISP marketing literature."

Not a relief from this reader's perspective.  Get only 150 to 200 Kbps in real-world usage when we think we're cruising along at 5 Mbps or more??

It's like being told the Porsche you laid out $70,000 for is really only as fast as a moped.

Both the articles are well worth reading, if you're really into understanding the reality of broadband access today. 

We really do have a long way to go for true broadband nirvana.

ON VONAGE'S ILL-ADVISED MARKETING TACTICS

VERY BAD FORM

To say I was surprised when I received an email yesterday from a close friend, about why he was receiving an email solicitation from Vonage on my recommendation, is an understatement (no link love to Vonage or it's programs). 

He had attached an email from Vonage that was soliciting him to subscribe to their service as part of their "Refer-a-friend" program.  It mentioned my given name "Mukesh Parekh", no less than three times in the email.

Although I've been a long-time subscriber to Vonage, I have NEVER, EVER consciously given them email addresses of my friends, or my permission to solicit them in my name.

Just to be sure, I spent an hour searching through all my electronic correspondence across all my email services on all my computers.  I've had almost no snail-mail contact with the company.

I found no record of my ever having signed up for Vonage's referral program, or given them permission to solicit my friends.

And yet there it was, a solicitation in my name, to a friend who is PARTICULARLY sensitive about spam and privacy issues, and very careful as to who he gives out his email address.

I obviously apologized profusely.

I then searched Google for the terms "Vonage, refer, friend", and found that I wasn't alone.

Vonage apparently is in litigation in some states for their aggressive harvesting of customer data for their spammy marketing campaigns.  And other folks found themselves in a similar boat.

I'm ticked off about this enough to spend however long it takes today, to cancel my Vonage service. 

I'll have to go through banks of "customer save" reps to do it.  But it's the one small thing I can do to show how much of a non-starter this is for an internet company with all the promise that Vonage once had.

Curious if anyone else out there have had this personalized spam experience.

ON SIMULSCRIBE'S ATTENTION TO CUSTOMERS

STAYING ON TOP OF THINGS

It's been about a month using SimulScribe's "Visual Voice-mail" service that I wrote about here and here. 

I've been very pleased with the service to date, and have even recommended it to others, including my wife.

In the earlier post, I'd used Fred Wilson's apt description of this service:

"THIS IS A LIFE CHANGER. What Simulscribe does is reroute your voice mails to their service which is a traditional voice mail service, with the exception that it TRANSCRIBES the voice mail and emails it to you along with the wav file so you can play the original voice mail."

In the follow-up to the post, I'd then picked one nit with the service:

"Under the default setting, SimulScribe informs all callers that their message will be transcribed by their service. 

As I described in the second postscript note in yesterday's post, SimulScribe charges AN EXTRA nickel per message on top of the $0.25 per voice-mail if the subscriber chooses to turn that default tag line off."

It wasn't a deal-breaker for me, but something that did irk me about it nevertheless.

So it was a very pleasant surprise to receive an unsolicited email from the CEO of the company, James Siminoff, yesterday.

In it, he mentions that he came upon my posts on his service, and upon review, they've decided to take off the nickel charge for users opting not to use this tag-line ad for the service.

Well, this of course earns them a gold star in my book, especially for paying attention to unsolicited feedback on their service on the web.

It makes it that much easier to recommend the service to you all.

It's been about a month using SimulScribe's "Visual Voice-mail" service that I wrote about here and here. 

I've been very pleased with the service to date, and have even recommended it to others, including my wife.

In the earlier post, I'd used Fred Wilson's apt description of this service:

"THIS IS A LIFE CHANGER. What Simulscribe does is reroute your voice mails to their service which is a traditional voice mail service, with the exception that it TRANSCRIBES the voice mail and emails it to you along with the wav file so you can play the original voice mail."

In the follow-up to the post, I'd then picked one nit with the service:

"Under the default setting, SimulScribe informs all callers that their message will be transcribed by their service. 

As I described in the second postscript note in yesterday's post, SimulScribe charges AN EXTRA nickel per message on top of the $0.25 per voice-mail if the subscriber chooses to turn that default tag line off."

It wasn't a deal-breaker for me, but something that did irk me about it nevertheless.

So it was a very pleasant surprise to receive an unsolicited email from the CEO of the company, James Siminoff, yesterday.

In it, he mentions that he came upon my posts on his service, and upon review, they've decided to take off the nickel charge for users opting not to use this tag-line ad for the service.

Well, this of course earns them a gold star in my book, especially for paying attention to unsolicited feedback on their service on the web.

It makes it that much easier to recommend the service to you all.

ON A VICTORY LAP FOR TELLME

MARATHON RUN

It's always great to see good things happen for one's friends, whether it's sooner or later.
That's why I was so glad to see today's announcement of Microsoft buying Tellme, for a sum reported to be a touch less than a billion dollars (the specific financial terms aren't being released).  There's a good discussion of the deal over on Techmeme.

From the founding team of Mike McCue and Angus Davis, to many of it's investors, employees, and board members, I have a good number of friends in all these buckets at Tellme,. 

So I'd like to convey my heartfelt congratulations to all these folks who've been part of the Tellme adventure for almost a decade.  It was a marathon in many ways.

Om Malik at GigaOm has a good post summarizing some of those good people, along with a post summarizing the highlights of today's announcement.

For those not familiar with Tellme, you've encountered their almost magical voice infrastructure services many times when a human-sounding voice answers your calls to many telephone-based information and support services.  Tens of millions have used Tellme without ever knowing they were using Tellme over the years.

It's also pretty interesting to contemplate what Tellme technologies and people will be able to contribute over at Microsoft.  This is especially important given Microsoft's increasing footprint in operating systems for mobile phones, smart or otherwise. 

As I highlighted in a post a few weeks ago, Microsoft needs something more in it's operating and application software products for mobile phones.  This despite the fact that their offerings represent some of the leading efforts in this rapidly growing market.

Perhaps Tellme can help provide that little bit extra helping of magic.

Here's wishing both companies the very best in these efforts ahead.

DISCLOSURE:  As highlighted in the post, I have many personal friends involved with Tellme over the years.  I do not have a financial interest in the company.

ON VISUAL VOICEMAIL, A "LIFE-CHANGING" SERVICE

SEEING IS BELIEVING

Well, Fred Wilson's post today pushed me over the edge and made me a SimulScribe customer.  What the heck is SimulScribe?  In industry buzzword parlance, it's a "voice-to-screen" service. 

But here's how Fred describes it:

"THIS IS A LIFE CHANGER. What Simulscribe does is reroute your voice mails to their service which is a traditional voice mail service, with the exception that it TRANSCRIBES the voice mail and emails it to you along with the wav file so you can play the original voice mail."

This was the second review on the service I'd read by someone I respect, in a couple of weeks.  David Pogue of the New York Times described the service as follows in that review:

"Two new services, SpinVox and SimulScribe, use voice-recognition software to transcribe  voice mail messages into e-mail.

Why is this a brilliant, life-changing development? Let us count the ways:"

David then goes on to give ten specific benefits of these types of services.

If all this "life-changing" stuff is starting to feel a bit familiar, think about someone else who's promising the big benefits of "voice-to-screen" technologies. 

Why, none other than Apple's Steve Jobs of course, who highlighted "Visual Voicemail" as a key, revolutionary feature of the upcoming iPhone, expected this June.

As an aside, don't you like "Visual Voicemail" more than "Voice-to-screen" as a description for the service?  Again, leave it to Apple to figure out the right words to use.

So anyway, this is a feature that's well on it's way to being introduced to mainstream audiences in force over the next few months.

But to experience it today, one can sign up with either SimulScribe or SpinVox, who currently are the XM/Sirius of the space (not necessarily in that order).  Both are trying to convert this "feature" into a hopefully robust business.

The service can get expensive, since both services charge per voicemail after a free trial period.  It can add anywhere from $10 to $40 or more to your monthly bill.  Both services will likely offer their services via your wireless carrier as an OEM provider in a few months.

In the meantime, I did sign up for SimulScribe today.  And the anecdotal experience so far has been positive.

I had it up and running in 15 minutes.  It was all automatic via email and typing in a special sequence of numbers on my Blackberry.  And I didn't have to deal with a human being especially on the Verizon customer service side.  Typing in a specific code activates or deactivates the service from your regular voicemail service with your wireless carrier.  Pretty cool.

One piece of advice though that isn't made clear on the correspondence from SimulScribe.  Make sure you've gone through all your existing voice-mails in your current service provider voice mail box, since the SimulScribe service obviously only starts to work on voice-mails going forward, NOT on unheard voice-mails already in your existing account.

Other than that, it's a pretty glitch-free experience.  The voice translation has so far been pretty cool.  The only hiccup was when I tested the service with the time-honored phrase "super-cali-fragilistic-expi-alidocious".

That came back as "Testing (garbled)".

I can live with that.  After all, it does promise to change my life, right?

P.S.  As an aside, while setting up a filter in my Google Gmail account titled "Voicemails" for my SimulScribe transcribed emails, I got a Gmail message that "system commands" cannot be used as filter tags. 

Since Google doesn't offer any voicemail services that I'm aware of, I'm wondering if they're ear-marking the "Voicemail" tag for a similar and/or other voicemail related service down the road.

Any thoughts?

P.S.2  SimulScribe charges $0.25/voice-mail beyond the 40 voice-mails per month allowed in the $10/month plan.  Currently, when a caller gets a SimulScribe subscribed phone voicemail, he/she hears a tag line that says something like "your message will be transcribed by SimulScribe.com".

As a subscriber, if you want to disable that tag, which after all is an ad for SimulScribe, you get a pop-up message that says your per message charge will GO UP by $0.05, or a nickel per call if you have the tag-line disabled.

Kind of makes you think what the value of all those free tag-lines millions of Blackberry subscribers have provided parent Resarch in Motion over the years.

You know, the ones that end every Blackberry-sent email with "Sent via my Blackberry" tag-line.  At a nickel an email, that could have added up to some serious dollars over the last few years in free advertising for Blackberry.

ON THE STATE OF MAINSTREAM VIDEO CALLS ON MACS AND PCs

SEEING IS BELIEVING

I've been doing a few more video conference calls with of late, with both business and family counterparts.  They've been more prevalent when I'm using one of the Macs than a PC, even though I have webcams and Skype video-conferencing software on both platforms. 

But as the Apple ad subtly suggest, it's just a tad more convenient to launch a video call on a Mac than a PC due to the integrated hardware and software solution.

But this post isn't a Mac vs. Windows discussion, but more about the general state of video chats for mainstream uses in early 2007.

I thought I'd share some of my anecdotal conclusions, takeaways and frustrations about the said state of video chats.   So in no particular order, here goes:

1.  Skype Video calls work more often than iChat AV video calls. This is not to set off a Skype vs. Mac debate.  But anecdotally I've found that almost half the time, I've had no success connecting via video iChat with someone after multiple attempts.   I'm not alone in this, as this forum discussion illustrates.

More often than not, one of us gets a message that the other party isn't connecting.  The problem has to do more with the port setups on the routers and firewalls at either end of the video call, and generally has a fix. 

But it takes more time and geeky effort to deal with it.  Here's a page over at Apple support discussing the possible causes and fixes. 

In the meantime, it makes ad hoc video calls via iChat as much of a crap shoot as dialing into an online service in the bad-old dial-up modem days over a decade ago (remember them?)

In almost every one of those instances, I managed to do the same call via Skype.  Again, this is anecdotal, and I've yet to see a good review comparing Skype vs. iChat on the video side.  But I think it has to do with the architectural differences between how the two services deal with routers and firewalls.

The point is that Apple is marketing video conferencing as a fairly mainstream service.  And it does not seem to have the mainstream reliability that's implied just yet.

2. Not quite there for Business calls.  Again, this is anecdotal, but I found there are several ergonomic difficulties using video chat regardless of the software used.  These are particularly exacerbated when on a business call.

The primary reason for this is that one needs to multi-task on one's computer while in the middle of a business video call.  Besides making sure you're making eye contact with your counter party, one also has the need to look at documents that are being discussed, whether in an Office document (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.), or a web page. 

Often, before getting on a business video call, I make sure I've got two computers in front of me, one for the video call and the other for the various documents needed to be discussed on the call.  That solution obviously does not work as well on a laptop while on the road.

I know there are video collaboration solutions like Webex and others that better integrated tools for this type of video collaboration.  And I've used some of them on a number of occasions of late.  But again, much of this distracts from the main task at hand, which is focusing on the problems and issues being discussed, instead drawing user cycles into twiddling this software button and that, to just operate the various elements of the video call.

These issues go away for the most part when the video call is a personal family call of course.  And one can put up with a lot more hassle for the pleasure of seeing one's kid, nephew/niece/grand-child on the other end of a long-distance video call.

3.  Miscellaneous Ergonomic Problems.  Here the issues have to do with three things.

a)  Eye Contact is difficult more often than not, because one has to look at the video conference window on the PC screen, while looking up at the camera to make eye-contact. 

There are some ingenious solutions for this as David Pogue highlights in a hilarious recent post.  But it's more stuff to manage, operate, pack and carry.

b)  Lighting issues are another factor one needs to deal with on a video call.  Most of the time, the lighting needed at the place where the PC sits is just not adequate.  And generally not worth the bother to fix that unless you're doing a ton of video calls day in and day out.

Again, there's a software solution for this in a piece of software called iGlasses (found at www.ecamm.com), mentioned recently by Walter Mossberg on a great article on video-blogging.  But again, it's yet another element to juggle in what ought to be something as simple as making a phone call.

c)  Backdrops become a factor while making a call, especially a business one.  Obviously, this includes making sure one's dressed appropriately, and the backdrop the counter-part sees behind you is as professional-looking as possible.  Again, there are various solutions here, but take the user more into the professional realm of video calls.

This list of issues is by no means definitive, comprehensive, or show-stopping, on the subject of whether one should use video calls.

And I've purposely stayed away from the issues of occasionally choppy video and/or sound on any of these platforms since they're a generic fact of life of today's internet.

Despite all of them, I'm much happier I have this capability than not.  This post is merely to document some of the minor frustrations and issues to date.  Over time, most of them will be solved with better technology and services. 

But for now, it's a brave, new world, for the first-time, mainstream user firing up the old webcam, integrated or not.