Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Fonality has stolen a page from the carriers play-book, and this morning is poised to announce that they’ve recently passed 50 million calls on Fonality based PBX’s, and are currently averaging 1.5 million calls per week.  The opening paragraph of their release (which I received last night) reads:

LOS ANGELES – November 28, 2006 – Fonality^®, a leader in open source, Asterisk^®-based IP telephony systems, today announced that PBXtra customers have placed more than 50 million calls and are now averaging more than 1.5 million calls per week across its award-winning IP-PBX platform. This rapid ramp in call volume further demonstrates Fonality’s success in the middle market and customer demand for high quality, value priced, reliable and fully supported IP telephony solutions.

This is really smart marketing.  It tells the world that their business has momentum, and provides yet another (although probably small) news pop.  More to the point, it’s something that none of the other Asterisk vendors can claim, because only Fonality’s hybrid model gives them access to this information.  Others can claim downloads, or supply shipment numbers, but Fonality can point to actual usage.

On the Etel blog this morning, Brian McConnell has published a pretty lengthy review of his experience of the Nokia N80 and the new Gizmo client.  Brian uses Gizmo with the N80 WiFi in both his San Francisco and his Argentinean offices.  It sounds like a pretty compelling experience.

What would you do with thousands of “free” MIPS?  In The Rise of “Freeconomics”, Chris Anderson notes that for about $200, you can buy an Intel Core Duo processor, capable of executing 20,000 MIPS.  To put that in perspective:

• In 1977, Digital Equipment’s Vax 11/780 was a 1 MIPS minicomputer, and the Cray-1 supercomputer delivered blindingly fast execution at 150 MIPS.
• By 1982, 5 years later, a 6 Mhz 286 had about the same equivalent processing power as the Vax. 
• Sometime in the mid 1990’s, Cray’s benchmark was finally passed on PowerPC processors, as PowerMac’s emerged benchmarked at 150 to 300 MIPS.
• A 1999 era Pentium III/500 delivered 800 MIPS of processing power.
• A year later, in 2000, the Playstation 2 pumped out an astounding 6000 MIPS.
• My 2002 vintage Athlon XP clocks in at 4200 MIPS.
• And today, for about $200, you can buy a 20,000 MIPS processor. 

Current embedded processors (like the PXA900 in my Blackberry Pearl, or the ARM 1136 in the Nokia N93 I wrote about) are capable of 2000 era desktop processor speeds — in the range of 1000 MIPS, depending on battery consumption. These devices take photographs, play music, perform reasonable quality speech recognition and much more. 

Our office runs a year 2000 vintage 700Mhz Pentium III with 256M of memory and Asterisk for our PBX. We can accomodate perhaps 6 or 8 phone calls simultaneously (there’s just 12 of us, so that’s really all we need).  In theory, my current cellphone, and my current PC-based PBX, have roughly the same processing power.  It should be possible to power an office PBX on a PDA. 

It’s 2006 now.  If the current trend holds true, and we can each carry 20,000 MIPS of processing power in the palms of our hands by 2012, what will we do with that power? Will my phone be a peer to peer media player, with advanced 3D graphics, and high definition video? The processor in my router is a 266Mhz part from Broadcom.  What will the world look like when thousands of MIPS of processing power are available at the edge of my home? Does my router become my home web page, PBX, mail server, and… who knows? PC’s will be valuable for their keyboards, but most of the interaction you have with computers will be via portable and embedded devices.

One of the biggest impacts will be on network architecture.  Isenberg’s The Rise of the Stupid Network posits that all intelligence will move to the edge.  In a world where MIPS are free, it’s simply more cost effective to distribute the decision making to the edge of the network rather than centralize it.  The implication for network service providers (especially telecommunications companies) is that the centralized applications they relied on for revenue in the past are going away.  You can already see this happening.  Why, for instance, would I ever type *69 into my handset to ask the network who the last person who called me was when my handset keeps track of the last 50 callers, and lets me punch a button to redial any of them.  When *69 was conceived of, telephone terminals were dumb.  Today, they’re not.

Only resources which must be centralized will remain so. Directories will likely remain central assets, because decentralized directories are hard to manage, as Skype has shown repeatedly.  How often have you picked up a real phone, and called a Skyper to ask if they were online, because they didn’t show up in your buddy list?  The value of a social networking application is in the relationships it represents.  Centralized servers will be required to manage these applications.  There will be tremendous value in a few key centralized services, and everything else will be decentralized. 

One thing is for certain.  When everything is connected, and processing power is “free”, today’s communications networks will seem as antiquated as steam locomotives must have been after the introduction of the automobile.  That day isn’t that far away. We will see it within the five years.

Congratulations to my friend Wendy Kennedy. Her manual for entrepreneurs, So What? Who Cares? Why You? has just been adopted by Penn State University Innovation Park. Private labelled and delivered as part of Innovation Park’s “cool blue” for innovation initiative, So What? Who Cares? Why You? is the process they use to evaluate ideas and startup company concepts. 

When Wendy told me about this, I had no idea that Penn State was such a hot-bed of entrepreneurial activity.  With 5,500 faculty and 80,000 students, it’s ranked 9th among US universities in R&D expenditures, with a particular focus on nanotechnology, biomaterials, materials research and life science. 

And if you haven’t checked out Wendy’s book previously, it’s recommended reading.

More details at Wendy’s blog.

I’m rockin’ out right now, listening to one of my favorite alt-country bands, Sixteen Horse, on the Nokia N73, “multi-media computer”… ok, it’s not really a computer… that’s what the folks at Nokia want us all to call it. In actual fact, it’s justa really really awesome cell phone.

This is, hands-down, my favorite Nokia N-Series phone to-date.

Let’s start with the installation experience. Naturally, since this is a camera / music player / phone / gaming device, it has a whack of software that needs to be installed on a PC to get the full value from it. Unlike virtually every other experience I’ve had with Nokia software, this was (near) flawless. Pop the DVD in the drive, select the items you want to install, click start… and go get a glass of wine… er, cup of coffee.

I installed everything except the Adobe Photoshop 3.0 SE. It went like clockwork. Kudos to the team who built the N73 software installer. It’s a hundred thousand times better than previous efforts.

In hand, the N73 is a marvel. From the first time you hold that brushed red shell, and gaze upon that marvelously bright screen set in the pearly front, you will fall in love. It’s small, comfortable, fits the hand, and gorgeous to look at… I did mention that already, didn’t I?

Flip it over, and the back is a wash of irridescent red and silver. Pull back on the artfully designed lens cover, and a 3.2 megapixel Zeiss optics camera is revealed. And, of course, like previous N-Series phones, when you uncover the lens, the camera software is automatically activated, making for an incredibly easy experience taking pictures.

Did I mention how pretty this phone is? Sorry… can’t help myself.

The camera is a pure joy to work with. Nokia tells me that it’s optimized for still photography. Surely it must be so. Colors pop, clarity is fabulous, and the controls are easy and intuitive to work with. It even has shutter release and zoom controls mounted on the side of the phone, so you can hold it the way you would hold an ordinary camera, and take photos with it.

It’s the perfect thing for an afternoon walk with the dogs in late November.

It takes great pictures of the neighbors houses as you’re walking down the street.

Or along the path to the park.

Or past a frozen puddle with maple leaves embedded in the ice…

Or the rocks in the park, framed by trees, blue sky and clouds.

Or the silly sign which the city has erected on top of the tobogganing hill warning of the dangers of tobogganing… what will there be next? Waivers before you can go sledding? Nutty bureaucrats…

After all, the hill is what? 30 feet high? It’s barely a pimple… heaven forbid that you construct a jump and have a little fun during your leisurely coast to the bottom…

The N73 is the perfect tool for having a little fun while waiting in line to see Casino Royale too (must see… don’t deprive yourself). With the N73 you can capture all the silly faces… hey, I’ve got five bucks… wanna share some popcorn?

Who can stretch their face into the funniest shapes? Dad’s the hands down winner!

And imagine the suprised looks when you whip this little puppy out, and casually take a photograph of your honey during the previews! Don’t worry, the people in the seat behind were only blinded for a few moments from the very bright flash that the N73 sports.

As a camera, the N73 is a blast. It takes great pictures, it’s easy to use (autofocus and auto-exposure!), and it’s small enough that you can stuff it in your pocket and whip it out whenever the mood strikes. The shutter has a pronounced lag to it, so you won’t be using it for action shots, but other than that it’s a very capable and fun snapshot camera. You’ll be very pleased with the results.

For those of you not inclined to edit on the PC, the N73 also includes a pretty complete suite of picture editing and upload tools. You can crop, adjust for white balance, color saturation, and sharpness right from the N73, and then upload your photo to Flickr using the integrated upload tool. I uploaded a few photos, but even with Edge connectivity it was a slow process, and presumably costly given the rates that Rogers charges for data. If you have an unlimited data plan, as opposed to Rogers’ slimy unlimited*** data plan, you’ll probably use the integrated upload feature a lot. If you’ve got a capped plan, you better use the PC-cable to upload your photos.

The N73 does have video capabilities, but if you’re really interested in video, you’d be better off springing for the N93. Most people will find the video capabilities of the N73 inadequate. Constrained to 15 frames per second, and 352×288 resolution , it’s clearly no match for the 30 fps 640×480 video that it’s big brother, the N93, delivers. However, the N73 is a far superior still camera to the N93.

The N73 is also a very capable phone. A true quad-band phone, it operates in GSM 850, 900, 1800, and 1900 bands, as well as offering the 2100 WCDMA band for data. You can take this phone with you anywhere and get coverage. In the Canadian market, where Rogers deploys GSM 850, that’s a real blessing.

Running Symbian OS 9.1, the N73Â sports applications including Nokia Lifeblog, an updated music player, web browser, an FM radio, and viewers for most office application document formats. Messaging capabilities, and address book round out the package.

Regrettably, the phone came with skimpy 128M storage card. I ordered a 2G micro-SD card from EBay for about $50, including shipping (minor gripe, but I wish the industry could standardize on a memory format).

Once I had the card, I loaded it up with some music, and got rocking. The N73 comes with a set of Nokia HS-23 stereo ear-buds. Sound quality is good (surprisingly rich bass for ear-buds), the fit is comfortable, and the integrated volume controller is conveniently located mid-chest. Unlike the HS-28 headset supplied with the N91, however, the HS-23 doesn’t have integrated forward / back / play / pause controls. Those functions can only be accessed from the phone itself. The HS-28 would be a nice addition to this package.

Getting music to and from the phone was not too difficult. The PC-Synch integrated music transfer software didn’t work properly, crashing whenever I tried to transcode music from the 320kbps format I use on my music server to a lower bit-rate codec for use with the phone. However, the driver for Windows Media player was excellent. Simply plug the phone into the USB port on the PC, and select media player mode when prompted. It will automatically launch Windows Media player, with the drivers pre-installed (from the initial PC install), and bring up your music library. From there, choose synch, and either shuffle (to get a random selection), or drag and drop your favorites into the synch window. Push the synch button, and wait. Not hard, and I would imagine most people will prefer Windows Media Player to whatever Nokia delivers anyway.

Gripes? As always, I loath the Nokia pop connector, and proprietary power supplies. In addition, as a dedicated Blackberry user, I would really love to have the Blackberry Synch software that’s available on the E61/62 products available. Lack of Blackberry integration is the one factor that will keep me from using this phone as my everyday phone. And lastly, it would be nice to have the WiFi capabilities now shipping in the N91 / N93 products available here also. I’m looking forward to trialling Truphone, but it will mean running on the N91 or N93.

These are minor complaints.

The Nokia N73 is a jewel, and a lot of phone for the money. It would make a perfect Christmas gift for the cell phone user in your house.