Alec Saunders SquawkBox

The team at This Hour Has 22 Minutes has a new phone coming to market… the a-Phone. With its revolutionary digital interface, music features, and sophisticated calendaring capabilities, it’s bound to be a winner!

Blackberry Cool just published a short piece on iotum Talk-Now.  Thank you guys!  They’ve been saving it to time it with the update that went out today.  For this release we focused on two areas:

1. Installation and setup.  The installation process and updates are now smoother for new users, including the contacts you invite to join Talk-Now and yourself.
• A progress dialog appears when contacts are uploaded
• Explanation and content have been added in both the setup wizard and the myiotum dashboard
• You will be prompted automatically for updates as they become available.  Talk-Now will know when it needs to be updated, and offer to do so, rather than you having to update via email. 
2. Blackberry Integration
• minor bugs have been fixed (eg. dialogue boxes not behaving properly)
• Talk-Now integrates more deeply into the call log, resulting in a more seamless experience.  Among the many things which it does is automatically offer to add a person to your Talk-Now list after a call which ends in voice mail.

We’re incredibly focused on customer input at this time.  You should expect new releases every few weeks which incorporate your feedback, and fixes for the bugs which you discover.  In the next release, for instance, you can expect more efficient data transfer, relieving both your data plan and your batteries. We are also working directly with RIM to solve some data transfer issues preventing some people from joining the Talk-Now technology preview.

And, if you’ve got a late model Blackberry and want to join the Talk-Now technology preview, head on over to www.iotum.com/blackberry.  We’d love to have you participate.

 

David Beckemeyer asks “Where are all the Voice 2.0 developers?”  Indeed. 

The PhoneGnome platform has an open API which can be used by developers to plug directly into the call-path.  TellMe has used it this way, as has iotum.  But as David notes: “We keep hearing that it’s time to sell on features rather than price but we see little evidence that anybody is really doing that.”

There is reason to be optimistic, however.  Carriers do seem to be getting the message, albeit slowly.  Just this past week I’ve chatted with one carrier who considers the application market exciting, but early.  Over the past month I’ve had several conversations with service providers who acknowledge that their future is in applications.  The difficult part is weaning the paying public off tolls, especially as the cost of carriage falls. 

From the BBHub site:

For a variety of strategic reasons, AOL is consolidating several “niche,” topic-specific blogs into some of its most popular blogs with daily readership totals that would make your eyes pop.

BBHub is one of those blogs.

Effective at the end of the day tomorrow, BBHub will cease publication of new entries. But we are not going away. The full, nearly 5,000-post BBHub archive will still be readily available at BBHub.com. Additionally, AOL will certainly will not be slacking off on our coverage of BlackBerry, the exciting new models on the way, the third-party BlackBerry software we know you are interested in, as well as what the company that makes BlackBerry- Research In Motion- is up to.

I’m dying to know more.  Where will BBHub go?

I know… working to fix it.