Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Everybody seems to building applications for the Blackberry platform. Over the weekend, I’ve loaded some fun new games (when was the last time you played Asteroids…er Meteors as it is now called), the new Tello Blackberry Client (way cool… imagine Trillian with the ability to launch a call), and Google Local.  With it’s EDGE modem, the 8700R is fast enough that it’s not that much of a time sink to just go get a new app.  And on the 8700R with it’s gorgeous color screen, and increased color depth, they look great.  Check out this image, for instance, from Google Local.  That’s my backyard.

I had been considering switching away from Blackberry to a Microsoft Smartphone device, but not now.  The 8700R is just way too nice.

I’m back home, and am just now collecting my thoughts on the end of ETel.  It’s a real testament to Surj Patel and the folks at O’Reilly that this conference went off so well in it’s first year.

At the end of the day Thursday I delivered my presentation.  I had wanted to speak a little about industry trends, but so many others had that I simply showed people what iotum is building.  I used a short presentation, available in PPT or PDF, described the problem, and then gave a short demo.  And, because ETel was primarily a developer crowd, I told the audience that we had built an Asterisk implementation, and an experimental SER implementation, and committed that they would both be released to the web for others to experiment with. 

Immediately following my presentation a bunch of people wanted to chat with me.  So many so that I missed Martin Geddes’ closing remarks, which I was very disappointed about.  Nonetheless, business has to come first!

One of the folks I spoke with was Brad Templeton.  Brad has lots of ideas about the use of context to make communications relevant, and it was an engaging conversation.  He skewered me during the Q&A following the presentation because my cell phone rang during the presentation. I had given the number to Andy Abramson, who called it, rather than my iotum managed number.  Nonetheless, Brad is developing something in this space, which may or may not compete with iotum.  He was quite circumspect.  Too bad, as we would definitely welcome a collaboration.

Brad also brought his phone booth to ETel, which was fun.

One of the most interesting conversations I had at the end of the show was with Ajay Madhok of Amsoft. Ajay’s team has been developing a new service called celiberate, (although he called it Equals at the show as well).  In any case, it is an opt-in service for enabling context awareness between users.  It lets me see, for instance, that Howard is available to take an email from me but not a phone call.  Very cool stuff. 

Last thing I did was take a run up to 111 Minna for an hour to visit the Tello team for their launch party.  It was great to chat with Doug, Richard, Danielle and Alan and to say congratulations on their launch.  Naturally, part of the conversation ended up being about the misstep with respect to bloggers around their launch.  Suffice it to say, they’re aware.  Keep your eyes open — there may be a blog coming soon from someone on the management team. 

Air travel is never fun, but it’s certainly gotten a little easier with the new wireless broadband cards available from Verizon and Cingular.  Last night I pulled into a Best Western at San Jose Airport.  I don’t even know if the place had Internet.  I didn’t care.  I just powered up the old all-you-can-eat Verizon card, and I was live on the net.

This morning I jumped on the plane at San Jose, napped for an hour, and then chowed through a pile of email.  As we deplaned, I snapped the Verizon card in, threw my PC back in my pack, and let it synch email.  I had to walk all over O’Hare as they changed my departure gate, but no problemo.  The VPN link to my office stayed up, and kept on doing it’s thing. 

Over the last week I’ve sat in the backseat of a car, with a VPN connection, email and a Gizmo call up.  At the other end, you would never have known.

Bring Your Own Broadband — it’s the new road warriors tool.

I’ve been looking forward to this talk from Shirish for a while.  If you’ve read this page previously you know that the mashup of the web and voice is at the heart of the Voice 2.0 Manifesto.

Shirish has renamed his talk "Innovation at Scale".  So far it’s a discussion of how to get to scale, creating an ecosystem around platform.  Once you get to scale, you are the frontier of rapid value creation.  His thesis is that you can create a rich ecosystem of interoperable services as well.

He’s had a couple of great slides comparing business models of the telephone companies and the Web 2.0 companies.  "Tired vs Wired" is the mantra.  Woo!

The final portion of the talk is for Sylantro’s developer program.  He positions Sylantro as the company at the convergence of Web 2.0 and VoIP.  I’ve been a believer in this for a long time, but it’s a tough sell.  One VC I pitched this to two years ago dismissed it as "TAPI in the Sky".  It’s bang on, though. 

His demo is two applications — a voice driven auto-attendant, with an event driven AJAX interface for Click to Call.  He’s grovelling for data from the Google home page and using a voice interface to talk to the system.  His next application uses TTS to answer a call from Google Talk.

Phil Zakielarz, who was a student at France Telecom’s Boston Labs showed his gestural phone a few minutes ago.  Basically, he’s mounted an accelerometer and microcontroller on a cellphone, and written some browser based Java code to respond to those gestures.  It was cool.  Jump to a movie website, and then tilt the phone from side to side to scroll through the available listings.

Phil got a lot of applause when he flipped the phone over, and showed the duct tape holding the added  electronics on to the phone.