Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Truphone Anywhere wasn’t supposed to announce this morning, but gosh… it did! While we were on the line chatting with Truphone’s James Body and Tom Carter, the team at Truphone HQ was madly reconfiguring their web site and getting the latest version of the Truphone client online.

So what’s special about it? Truphone Anywhere. Truphone Anywhere is a tool that lets Truphone users access Truphone’s famous low rates … via a local dial-in, and not just WiFi. Here in Canada, I will dedicate one of the MyFive numbers on my Rogers account to Truphone, which theoretically means I should be able to trim a substantial amount off my monthly bill.

Our call had over 20 people on it, with some very good questions asked by the various callers about how the Truphone model worked and Truphone’s business. In addition to the questions asked on the phone, there was also a lively discussion on the wall (account required to view).

On the call: Jeb Brilliant, James Body, Matthew Burpee, Andy Abramson, Dan York, Jim Courtney, Willhelm Wimmreuter, Mark Hewitt, Jeanette Fisher, Dave Brown, Ian Hood, Bill Volk, Warren Bent, Peter Childs, Jonathan Jensen, Randall Howard, Mike Pruyn, Todd Spraggins, Sheryl Breuker, Tom Carter, Greg McQuay, Roland Hanbury

Enjoy the call

 

 Squawk Box May 27: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Illumio, my mainstay when it comes to keeping on RSS, just got way better. WAY better.

If you haven’t seen illumio before, it’s a tool for filtering content feeds, according to your interests, and then sharing those feeds with others. It quite literally indexes every piece of information in your world (by grovelling your hard disk) and constructs a local filter list for you. Then, when you feed it a list of interesting news sources (I simply uploaded my OPML file many moons ago), it starts to compare incoming items on those feeds with the profile it has constructed for you.

With illumio 3.0, it constructs a personalized news pagebased on those feeds. I’m currently scanning nearly 400 feeds daily. Illumio lets me find the interesting stuff in minutes. I don’t know how I could survive without it.

According to the UK site Techworld, Truphone is set to announce Truphone Anywhere, a service that lets you acccess the Truphone network from any mobile, whether on WiFi or not.

Truphone Anywhere dials a gateway on a local number, which then connects through to the destination number, saving money if it is an international call. Unlike some other services, this is transparent, with the call set-up handled automatically after the user dials the remote number. It is enabled partly by a recent Truphone acquisition, SIM4Travel, which provides cheap international calling through gateways in Europe.

This would address one of the last remaining flaws in Truphone’s offering. Currently, when I travel, I use both Truphone and Mobivox. Mobivox allows me to make outbound calls cheaply, and I use Truphone for all incoming calls and calls made from WiFi hotspots. With Truphone Anywhere, I wouldn’t need to go this convoluted route.

We’ll get the details at 11 AM on the SquawkBox. Stay tuned.

A light Memorial Day crowd turned out to be more than enough to sustain a good conversation about Facebook Platform’s first birthday. We also talked about Omnitele’s latest white paper on the topic of mobile broadband business models, and were luck enough to have Omnitele’s Pal Zarandy join us between flights in Copenhage International airport.

Unfortunately the recording bug which has been plaguing us since last week reared it’s ugly head again. We continue to work through this issue with our partner ThinkEngine, and hope to have a solution this week. However, I was only able to capture the first 12 minutes of the call.

Enjoy

 

 Squawk Box May 26 [11:18m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The last Ottawa DemoCamp before summer will be taking place on Monday May 26 at the Velvet Room down in the market.  I’ll be there, not as a demo candidate or participant this time, but as MC! 

The organizations demoing on Monday night include:

Drop by.  It’s a great opportunity to see some cool companies strut their stuff, and a fun evening socializing with local tech people.