"Slick". That’s what I said when I powered up the Polycom phone that the folks at Junction Networks sent me in order to be able to review their new My.Onsip user interface. Truly plug-and-play, the phone immediately found the Junction Networks hosted PBX, configured itself (even through my NAT and Firewall), and was ready to go in a few seconds.
As cool as it was, however, I wasn’t as interested in how easy the phone was to configure as I was in the GUI that Junction Networks announced last week. Web based, my.Onsip shows presence information for everyone in your organization, incorporates XMPP-based chat, and allows dialing from either the on-screen GUI, or the phone. You can see a photograph below (credit Lonnie Lazar’s review at Voxilla). On the left you see presence and availability information for people in your organization, and on the lower right, tabs for messaging.
So why is this so compelling? Fact: over 80% of calls end in a voice mail box today. If business can find a way to deal with telephone tag, they can boost productivity everywhere in the organization. Simply knowing the availability of the people you need to reach will help immensely. Moreover, Junction Networks has gotten the interaction model right. Today’s business phone user uses IM first, to establish that the other party is available to talk, followed by a voice conversation if necessary.
Now all they need is a mobile version for my iPhone or Blackberry.
Truphone continues to surprise. In a late afternoon call with new CEO Geraldine Wilson and founder James Tagg, the company unveiled a new set of capabilities for their iPhone and iPod Touch clients — integration with Skype calling and the Skype IM network, plus the addition of Yahoo, MSN and GoogleTalk IM. According to Ms. Wilson, "This gives Truphone users the choice of how they communicate. Very often the etiquette of calling is that the call is prefaced by a chat, or SMS, or IM before voice."
These new capabilities will be showcased at CES this week, and then released publicly next week.
It’s a very clever strategy. The iPhone platform is notoriously bad for IM support, and with Truphone it gets a fabulous suite of new features. Moreover, by embracing Skype Truphone is simultaneously tapping into the largest PC based VoIP platform in the world and creating an opportunity for themselves to partner with Skype, who have made no secret of their desire to be in mobile platforms.
My immediate thought was that this makes iPhone a competitor to the 3 Skypephone. When asked if Truphone had plans to make a phone like the 3 device, Wilson demurred observing that making phones is complex and Truphone’s specialty is software.
And what of other devices? According to Ms. Wilson, the determining driver will be the presence of an applications store. "The introduction of the iPhone AppStore this year was a defining moment for the mobile industry", said Wilson. "We’re targeting devices that include WiFi, an AppStore, and a great user experience. We don’t want to waste time on devices that require users to have a PhD in order to discover and install applications."
While stating unequivocally that the company was making no announcements about either Google Android or RIM’s Blackberry devices today, both Tagg and Wilson acknowledged that these would be logical choices. Wilson also acknowledged Truphone’s long standing support for Nokia platforms, and expressed confidence that Nokia would have a store in the near future.
All in all, this is an interesting set of announcements. As Om Malik said, "Now I have another reason to use Truphone."
Palringo makes it’s debut in North America today. It’s a cross platform multi-headed IM client for mobile devices that supports all of the popular IM services available. Plus it has a nifty voice chat feature that sounds a lot like the very popular push-t0-talk feature available on some networks. Palringo is available for Windows Mobile, Symbian and java-based handsets at www.palringo.com. it will soon be available on iPhone and Blackberry as well.
Multi-headed IM has long been controversial in the PC world where ownership of the customer has been viewed as a right by the IM cloud owners. As a result, many people run multiple clients. The situation is starting to proliferate to the mobile world, where (for example) I have run GTalk, Blackberry Messenger, and various other clients on my Blackberry. In the constrained mobile world, though, this is a disaster in waiting. Multiple background clients mean increased CPU cycles consumed affecting performance, battery and bandwidth consumption.
Palringo has the right idea, given the intransigence of the big IM cloud operators. If they can get the carriers and handset manufacturers on their side, they’ll have a decent business moving forward.
Those cagey guys at Facebook are about to do something which nobody else in the last five years has been able to do. They’re about to crown Jabber/XMPP the king of IM protocols, and in the process they may finally crack the hegemony that AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo have enjoyed in the IM market for the last decade.
Example: as I write this at 5:30 AM, I have 30 contacts online on Skype, 29 on Facebook, 6 on MSN, and 2 on GTalk. GTalk, for all its promise, is little more than a persistent twitter window for me. I started on MSN, but for a long time, Skype has been my primary IM. Skype is where the people are. Increasingly, Facebook is becoming a Skype replacement for text chat.
To place all of this in context: Skype, Yahoo, MSN, and AOL are proprietary closed IM protocols. There has been a tug of war for some time in the industry between two open standards — XMPP and SIP/SIMPLE. Neither has won out, despite the fact that the telecom industry understands that presence is a huge step forward. With Facebook’s endorsement of XMPP, however, that could all change. Their 70 million plus audience is about to become completely presence enabled in a standard way, paving the way for a true social directory for all communications networks.
And, as I wrote 18 months ago in New Presence, this is happening off network. To be valuable, a presence cloud needs to be open and exist separate from the carriers.
Users live lives outside the artificially constructed walled gardens of the network operators, and so must their presence. Therefore, New Presence assumes a user-centric model of presence rather than a network-centric model. New Presence by its nature must be an off-carrier platform as it is dependent on the ability of users to assert identity, catalog relationships, and gather contextual information across multiple networks.
![myonsip_screen2[1]](http://saunderslog.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/myonsip_screen21.jpg "myonsip_screen2[1]")
Multi-headed IM has long been controversial in the PC world where ownership of the customer has been viewed as a right by the IM cloud owners. As a result, many people run multiple clients. The situation is starting to proliferate to the mobile world, where (for example) I have run GTalk, Blackberry Messenger, and various other clients on my Blackberry. In the constrained mobile world, though, this is a disaster in waiting. Multiple background clients mean increased CPU cycles consumed affecting performance, battery and bandwidth consumption.
