Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Jim Courtney questions whether the new BlackBerry 8830, combining CDMA and GSM radios into one handset should really be called the "World Edition".  See for yourself what he has to say… there's an undeniable logic.

At the Gartner Symposium yesterday, Gartner Group ran their first ever Cool Vendor Shorts program, for up and coming companies highlighted in their annual Cool Vendor Report.  According to the analysts who authored the report, Cool Vendors are innovative, impactful, intriguing.

The format of the two panels was a series of 10 minute presentations by the vendors, followed by a short audience Q&A for the panel.   

iotum was on the first part of the program.  I gave a quick presentation on New Presence, a video demo of Talk-Now, and announced our new relationship with JAJAH.  Judging by the number of BlackBerry users in the audience, and the surge in sign-ups for Talk-Now yesterday, I’d say that the presentation was impactful.

The other presenters on my panel were:

• GeoVector, who has probably the most advanced location services I’ve ever seen.  Their concept is pretty simple to understand — browse the physical world using your cellular phone as a virtual “mouse” to point at, and click-upon physical objects.  Need a restaurant menu?  Point your phone at the restaurant and click.  It will appear on the screen.  The technology is a hit in Japan, where it’s been deployed, and reportedly several North American carriers are looking at supporting the compass and GPS enabled phones it requires.
• VoiceBox, who ship a very sophisticated speech recognition system, capable of understanding context and grammar.  Targeted at mobile and infotainment applications,  the demo was mindblowingly impressive. The only way to really get a flavor for what they can do is to visit their website and watch one of the video demos on the front page. 
• RingCube/MojoPac, which has a downloadable piece of software that will allow you to carry your desktop anywhere with you on any piece of storage.  Plug the storage device into a PC, and you can access your files and your environment, directly.  Very cool. 

The second session had five additional presenters:

• me.dium, a system for combining social data with search information.  The core idea is that you can get more relevant search results by collaborating with people in your network who are searching for the same or similar things.  The concept reminds me of now defunct OpenCola, or more recently Tacit’s illumio, but augmented with a rich user interface and more tightly integrated with a web searching metaphor. 
• Hitwise, an online competitive intelligence service.  With Hitwise you can monitor a worldwide sample of 10 million Internet users, broken out by demographic, business and a whole whack more statistics.  If you want to take your Internet tracking beyond just site tracking, the Hitwise team look like they have it covered.
• Fulton Innovation… blew everyone away.  Imagine a universal power adaptor capable of providing the watts of power that a cellular phone requires, or the kilowatts necessary to cook food on an electric frypan.  Now imagine that that power is available wirelessly.  That’s right.  Put your phone down in the charge chamber on the dashboard of your car, and it will charge, right in front of your eyes.  Or, put it on the kitchen counter alongside the blender and the frypan (all powered by the same technology) and it will power there.  Lightbulbs, cellphones, appliances… all powered wirelessly.   Oh yeah… the wireless power also doubles as a network, so you can be downloading songs to your iPod, for example, while it’s charging, playing and sitting on the kitchen counter.  See the video here. 
• Sonar6 had a slick talent management system that made it possible for managers to assess the health of their organization, and created a visual language for describing the talent in the organization to other managers.  It’s a clear step forward from other systems I’ve seen like this. 
• And lastly Cogneto had a terrificly interesting biometric system that works on the premise that your mind and your thoughts are the best biometrics.  By answering some simple questions (and observing how you behave answering the questions) the Cogneto’s Unomi system authenticates users quickly (and makes the process fun) without the need for retina or fingerprint scanners.

iotum had a pretty big day yesterday.  We announced that we're teaming up with JAJAH to deliver Talk-Now to JAJAH customers, and to JAJAH enable users of the Talk-Now application on BlackBerry handsets. For iotum, this means access to a substantial and large audience of potential Talk-Now users.  And for JAJAH, it's an opportunity to satisfy growing enterprise demand for their services.  According to JAJAH's Frederik Hermann:

For JAJAH, this brings added value and functionality to our Enterprise Mobile customers. Companies have been coming to JAJAH and asking us to help them lower their telephone bills - some of which are in the millions of dollars. Now with the iotum / JAJAH solution, workgroups using Blackberry's save two important ways. First, they can tell who is available to talk just by looking at their BlackBerry screen, thus eliminating phone tag - and second their calls will only cost pennies a minute.

Frederik's comments about the benefits of the iotum / JAJAH partnership are dead-on.  With Talk-Now, adoption happens at the work-group level.  One person brings the application into their environment, and invites their circle of business colleagues to participate, setting off a wave of adoption within a specific business or social network.  Now, those workgroups have one more reason to adopt Talk-Now, which is inexpensive JAJAH calling!  

Some customers will save a substantial amount of money; especially those in places like Europe where the incoming call isn't charged, and    those who are able to purchase calling plans that provide unlimited incoming calls for a monthly flat fee, such as the Rogers unlimited incoming calls plans here in Canada.

For now, what this will mean is that later this week we will push an update to Talk-Now users that contains a simple user interface modification; when you determine that someone is available to talk, you will be able to call with JAJAH instead of the cellular network.  Then your phone will ring, and the other parties phone will ring (just the way JAJAH works today on the web), except that you will have initiated the call from your mobile handset.  Talk-Now users who aren't JAJAH customers already will have the option to sign up from within the Talk-Now application too. 

When I first chatted with Roman Scharf and Don Thorson in the spring of 2006, they were just launching their new service.  At the time, Roman was tossing out the label Voice 2.0 in his conversations, and we discovered that we had mutually arrived at a very similar vision, but from different paths. 

I had the good fortune to meet up with Frederik at the Etel conference this past February. In conversations during the subsequent weeks, our teams discussed many more presence enabled applications, including a wishlist item for many Talk-Now users, which are presence enabled conference calls.  Yesterday's announcement is just a first small step. 

Writing yesterday, GigaOM's Paul Kapustka has called this announcement a "peanut-butter-and-chocolate" matchup, which is what we both see too.  It's a win for us, a win for JAJAH, and most importantly a win for our mutual customers. Hope you all like it!

Contrary to the bloggerati's chatter from a few weeks ago, Twitter's biggest competitor is not Jaiku.    Rather, it's Facebook.  With Facebook's new ability to update via SMS, Facebook is Twitter plus:

• aggregated feeds from outside sources
• significant personal / professional profile information available from members
• large networks of friends to draw from
• events, and groups to participate in
• conversation threads
• fine-grained privacy control
• a large audience already acquired

… and the list goes on.  As others have noticed, it's a killer combination.

Yes, it's true that Facebook can't deliver updates to my IM client the way that Twitter can (or at least, I haven't found that feature yet), but I am personally about to turn that feature on Twitter off.  While it's interesting to get a real time stream of tweets from my friend, it's also a disturbance during meetings, and actually interferes with getting real work done on the mobile phone. 

Entrepreneur Brian McConnell and I have been trading mail for the last couple of months about his latest project — the WorldWide Lexicon. It’s a social network for translating web pages.  Prettty simple idea, but perhaps also very compelling.

The way it works is as follows:

1. You register your site with WWL (Saunderslog is already done)
2. You encourage your readers to help translate your site into whatever languages they speak; direct them to demo.worldwidelexicon.org. (direct friendly URLs such as saunders.worldwidelexicon.org are coming this week)
3. Bilingual readers contribute and edit translations; monolingual readers can view translations in any language that someone has posted translations for (when you go to demo.worldwidelexicon.org you’ll see a grid of two letter language codes beneath each site, all you need to do is click on the code for the language you speak and read the translations or add your own
4. Translations are published on WWL as HTML, and also output as RSS loopback feeds, so you can loop them right back into your blog. Brian plans to be doing a lot to make republishing easy for publishers and for readers.

Many large sites are obviously candidates for full translations, and even selected elements of smaller sites make sense.