Alec Saunders SquawkBox

iotum business partner and blogger Moshe Maeir says he wants to be the most expensive VoIP provider, or at least that's what he wants his customers to be buying. Radical idea?  Not really.  Moshe is simply putting new services front and center for his customers.  If minutes are going to be a commodity, then being the most expensive carrier means providing the richest selection of new services.

Rock on!

We slipped out another update to Talk-Now, last night.  And, we're particularly proud of it because it's got one of the most asked for features that we've built yet.  For the first time, Talk-Now can not only notify you when the person you wish to speak with becomes available, it can also notify that person that you are waiting to speak with them and what you want to speak about. 

The SIP standard has contemplated the idea of a Subject line on phone calls since practically its inception.  The BlackBerry, however, with its qwerty keyboard is one of the only practical devices for implementing the subject feature.  I can't imagine using even T9 input to add a subject line to call requests on a traditional 12 key touch-tone phone pad. 

In order to do this, we made some substantial changes to the UI.  The Talk-Now Notify window has been replaced with an area titled Conversations, which now has a To-Call list (the list of people you are trying to reach) and a "Waiting to Talk to Me" list, which is the list people trying to reach you.  It also allows the person trying to reach you to specify a subject for the call so that you can determine the importance of that call to you, before deciding to take it. 

Two other big changes include:

1. on install, Talk-Now can now identify other BlackBerry owners in your address book so that you can invite them if you'd like.
2. Talk-Now also automatically adds missed calls to your Waiting to Talk to Me list allowing you to queue them up for a return call.

 So go ahead, and go to www.iotum.com/blackberry to sign up.  As always, the software is free of charge. Download it, invite some friends, and start enjoying the benefits of talking to the people you need to, when you need to, rather than their voice mail.

At the Ottawa Barcamp last month the Ottawa Tech Wiki announced that they were going to have a usergroup meeting.  Well, it's happening.

 The 1^st user group meeting for the Ottawa Teck Wiki will be held: Thursday, April 26, 2007, Time: 5:30pm to 7:30pm Room 4359 Mackenzie Building, Carleton University. If you are an individual interested in helping to define the Ottawa Tech Wiki please attend the first user group meeting.  Please register here. Free Pizza will be served, and they need to know how much to order.

I'm jetting out of here tomorrow to the Gartner Symposium, invited to speak as one of their "cool vendors".  Here's what Gartner had to say about why they picked us:

Enterprise users aren't lacking in ways to communicate — with multiple phones, e-mail systems and messaging platforms, users spend too much time managing their communications systems. Presence is a solution to this problem, but managing presence is a manual process prone to error. iotum automates presence management, resulting in more accurate and easy-to-use communications systems.

What Gartner is keying off ties back to our concept of New Presence.  Except for the rare individuals who want to drink from the presence firehose — consuming everything from location to mood to status (can you say Twitter) — presence needs to be mediated to be useful.  Our ability to automate presence management is based on two elements: context and relationship.  We gather all the raw presence information from where it's being created, massage it, and present it to the requester, filtered based on the relationship the user has with the requester.  With Talk-Now it's possible to be seen as unavailable to some people, available to others, and busy but interruptable to still others, all depending on the relationship you have with the user.

And in my opinion, and Gartner's too, that's pretty cool.

RIM has been slowly expanding its footprint beyond BlackBerry devices.  The company seems to have concluded that its future is in software, and the hosted services that are attached to that software.  BlackBerry Connect is software, which exists today, and allows access to BlackBerry services via a Nokia E-series phone, such as the E-61/62.  News.com reports this morning that RIM will also provide a software suite for Windows Mobile devices later this year.  Ovum provides more detail, including that the BlackBerry suite will run as an application on Windows Mobile devices, and that it provide a "more or less complete" set of APIs which will allow enterprise applications developed for BlackBerry to run on Windows Mobile.

An interesting strategy seems to be developing.  By moving the BlackBerry suite lock stock and barrel onto the competitions devices, RIM may expand the distribution footprint of the BlackBerry software dramatically. The risk, however, is that customers may simply view this as a stepping stone in a migration from BlackBerry to another platform.  What are they really playing for?  Control of the handset, domination of the mobile email market, perhaps both?

UPDATE: more details in RIM's Press Release.  And BlackBerry lovers will get a kick out of CrunchGear's reaction: "Basically, it means your T-Mobile Dash, HTC Libra, and Motorola Q won’t suck as much anymore."