Category: Wireless
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Telcos Should Be Worried – Facebook Controls More OTT Messaging With WhatsApp Acquisition
Continue Reading: Telcos Should Be Worried – Facebook Controls More OTT Messaging With WhatsApp AcquisitionTalk about disruption… the telecom part of the media world is buzzing with news of Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp. Techmeme is currently showing MANY posts on the topic and the day is just getting started.The key point here is that WhatsApp is a prime example of what is often called an “Over-The-Top” or “OTT” application. It uses the data channel on a mobile phone to provide services. Here’s another key point from the Facebook news release:
- Messaging volume approaching the entire global telecom SMS volume.
The traditional telecom companies (“telcos”) have already seen their voice revenue seriously eroded by Skype and so many of the other OTT voice applications (such as Viber, which was just acquired) and they’ve been watching SMS traffic and revenue plateau and decline.
WhatsApp was already one of the major players in the mobile messaging space… indeed I have friends in Europe who tell me they can’t remember the last time they sent an actual SMS message because they use WhatsApp for all their messaging. Their usage, too, is not just about the “free” cost of WhatsApp messages – it’s also about the richer messaging experience they can get over WhatsApp versus plain SMS. They…
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Linphone On iOS Now Supports The Opus Codec
Continue Reading: Linphone On iOS Now Supports The Opus CodecWhen updating my iPhone this week, I was extremely pleased to see the message in the attached screenshot that Linphone now supports the Opus audio codec. Somewhat strangely, I don’t see any mention of this Opus support (or even the 2.1 release for iOS) on the Linphone news page or even on the Linphone features page, but the mention of a “Linphone Web” release does also mention Opus, so I’ll assume this is real.I’ve written before about why the Opus code is so incredibly important if we want to truly deliver a richer and better communications experience than we’ve had with the traditional PSTN and so it is great to see this support coming in to Linphone. Linphone is certainly not the first SIP softphone to support Opus – there are a number of others out there, including Jitsi and Counterpath’s Bria (and X-Lite) – but it’s definitely great to see another softphone added to the mix. Hopefully we’ll also see this Opus support move to the desktop versions of Linphone (for Windows, OS X and Linux) as well.
Congrats to the Linphone team on making this happen!
P.S. Linphone also supports IPv6, ensuring that it will continue to…
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Microsoft Buys Nokia – Was There Really Another Choice?
Continue Reading: Microsoft Buys Nokia – Was There Really Another Choice?Microsoft accomplished something today they haven’t done for a while (at least in my memory) – they dominated the main page of Techmeme and had a great amount of the tech media talking about them.
The news, of course, is of Microsoft’s purchase of Nokia’s Devices and Services business and licensing of Nokia’s patents and mapping services.
Is anyone truly surprised by this?
Consider:
- Microsoft is being beaten in the market by Apple and Google as everything moves to mobile. Their only hope was Nokia, who provided a hardware platform that would run Windows Phone.
- Nokia is being beaten in the market by Apple and Google as everything moves to smartphones. Their only hope was Microsoft, who provided a different mobile operating system for their devices that gave them a competitive angle.
Given those conditions, the marriage makes a certain amount of sense.
But… you only have to scroll down that Techmeme page (captured at 1:30pm US ET today) to realize how desperate a situation this is for both companies.
First, news is out that Apple is holding an event one week from today on September 10 where they are widely expected to announce new iPhones, including potentially a lower…
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T-Mobile Rolling Out HD Voice (Wideband) In US Mobile Network
Continue Reading: T-Mobile Rolling Out HD Voice (Wideband) In US Mobile NetworkMarking a huge step toward moving beyond the limitations of the legacy phone networks, at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) this week in Las Vegas T-Mobile announced that HD Voice is now available nationwide on its US network. This will give people the richer, fuller voice experience similar to what many of us have gotten used to experiencing while making Skype calls.There is, of course, the caveat that HD voice (also called “wideband audio”) is only available using specific smartphones:
To experience HD Voice, both parties on the call must use capable T-Mobile 4G smartphones such as the HTC One™ S, Nokia Astound and Samsung Galaxy S® III
TheNextWeb also suggests that the iPhone 5 should support HD Voice when T-Mobile makes it available on their network sometime this year.
Over on AnandTech, Brian Klug dives into a bit more detail about T-Mobile’s HD Voice, specifically naming the AMR-WB codec, and relays some of his own testing that confirmed that it is live now.
This is an excellent step forward, even with the caveat that it only works on T-Mobile’s 4G network and only with specific smartphones. As more and more people get used to the richer and better…
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Today’s VUC Call – Setting Up A Cellular Network In The Desert For Burning Man
Continue Reading: Today’s VUC Call – Setting Up A Cellular Network In The Desert For Burning ManToday’s VoIP Users Conference (VUC) call at 12:00 noon US Eastern should be quite an interesting one. Tim Panton from Voxeo Labs and Tropo will be joining the call to talk about his experience setting up a mobile network in the middle of the desert for this year’s Burning Man event.Tim recently described the experience in a guest post at TechCrunch: “What We Learned Running A Mobile Network At Burning Man” and on the VUC call will talk more about what he did. The FAQ from the Papa Legba camp at Burning Man makes for quite an interesting read. I’m looking forward to hearing more from Tim… and the call is open for anyone to join in.
You can join the live call via SIP, Skype or the regular old PSTN. There is also an IRC backchannel that gets heavy usage during the call. It will be recorded so you can always listen later.
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Alec Saunders Is A Rock Star In RIM’s Strange New Blackberry 10 Video
Continue Reading: Alec Saunders Is A Rock Star In RIM’s Strange New Blackberry 10 VideoOh… my. As anyone who knows me can attest, it’s extremely hard to render me speechless… but I admit to sitting here this morning staring at the screen with a rather uncomprehending expression on my face and with my mouth hanging open…Sometime after my friend Alec Saunders joined RIM last year as their VP of Developer Relations, I said to someone that while I admittedly did view his new mission as somewhat akin to tilting at windmills, he was perhaps just the kind of “rock star” that RIM needed. A very passionate and dynamic presenter… a very charismatic leader who could rally people… a creative guy with a theatre background… someone who thinks differently…
… never in my wildest ideas did I expect that we would be seeing Alec AS an actual “rock star” in a music video! But yes indeed, here he is with two other VPs from RIM in a remake of the famous REO Speedwagon song. (Alec is the main singer.)
Unbelievable.
My speechlessness soon gave way to laughter … and appreciation for them for doing something rather different. If they were looking for a way to be “remarkable” and memorable, they found it.
Now, somewhat…
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3 Great Posts to Read About Why Windows Phone 7 Hasn’t Taken Off…
Continue Reading: 3 Great Posts to Read About Why Windows Phone 7 Hasn’t Taken Off…Jumping online this morning I noticed this trio of great posts yesterday about Windows Phone 7 and why it hasn’t taken off. The discussion was started off by Charlie Kindel, a former Microsoft general manager:
MG Siegler weighed in on his blog with:
And Robert Scoble posted a comment on Charlie’s post that led then to his own post:
The comments on both Charlie Kindel’s and Robert Scoble’s posts are also worth reading. There were other articles on this theme, but these were the three I found most useful.
As to my own opinion, I’m definitely in Scoble’s camp (to which Siegler also agrees):
It’s ALL about the apps!
The device formerly known as a “mobile phone” is now a device to access all sorts of services, information, games, Internet sites and to send messages to people… and, oh yeah, it can make phone calls sometimes if you really want it to.
It’s all about the apps… and until Microsoft is able to truly…
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The Creepy – And Insecure – Side of iOS and Android Apps
Continue Reading: The Creepy – And Insecure – Side of iOS and Android AppsWant to see the dark side of mobile apps? Just read this great bit of research from Troy Hunt:Secret iOS business; what you don’t know about your apps
As people have noted in the comments, “iOS” (Apple’s operating system for iPhones and iPads) is purely the platform Troy Hunt did his research on… but he’s really talking about issues with mobile applications.
I’m my unfortunately sure that these type of issues will also be there on apps on Android and probably on other mobile operating systems from Microsoft, RIM, WebOS, etc.
These are application design issues.
The article starts off with the incredibly inefficient case of stuffing large images from “regular” websites down the mobile pipe to the phone… and then simply “resizing” them with “width” and “height” attributes. This is just laziness”efficiency” on the app developers part in that they are simply “repurposing their existing content” for a mobile audience, i.e. it’s too much work/effort for them to create and track a separate smaller image for a mobile environment so they will just send you the larger one and eat up your data plan bandwidth.
But Troy Hunt goes on to talk about far worse issues… he calls…
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Can Alec Saunder Woo Developers Back to the Blackberry Platform?
Continue Reading: Can Alec Saunder Woo Developers Back to the Blackberry Platform?Can he do it? Can he get developers to actually care enough about the Blackberry / Playbook platform to come and build apps?Today my friend Alec Saunders, RIM’s newly minted “VP of Developer Relations and Ecosystem Development”, took to the stage of the Blackberry “DevCon Americas” event in San Francisco to make the case to the assembled crowd. Jim Courtney passed along to me the link to the livecast of the event and I did take a moment to tune in and check it out. (Apparently a recording will be available at some point.)
Alec has a theatre background and is always fun to watch present… he has a certain dynamic energy that is good to see. In the few minutes I watched he seemed very much in his element:
Now, whether he will actually have any success is another question… despite his stats that the BlackBerry AppStore is more profitable for developers than the Android Marketplace, I don’t know if the broader world of developers will really notice. From what I see the momentum seems to be elsewhere…
I wish him the best, though… and Alec, when you read this, you can know that some of your friends…
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Awesome Comic -> The Bright Side to the Blackberry Outage
Continue Reading: Awesome Comic -> The Bright Side to the Blackberry OutageA truly awesome way to start my Monday… courtesy of RWW, this great cartoon from Rob Cottingham showing the “bright side” of the Blackberry outage:
Of course, we iPhone owners could have a similar discovery… although whether or not our phone connection would actually work is a different question… (but did any of us truly get an iPhone for the phone piece? 😉
Great comic, Rob!
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