Category: Technology

Since some months I’ve been looking closely to Jajah, and the whole VoIP industry. I’ve talked about ways of how the wireless internet networks could take over the cell phones and wondering how the communications would be in some years. I’ve been investigating the evolution of the different paths and I’ve get to the conclusion that “technologically” speaking, the world is yet not ready for a whole VoIP interconnected communications and Jajah has come to a solution for it.

Let’s start with two premises:
The trend goes 100% sure toward mobile: The use of fixed phones is decreasing each year. It’s neither economically (operators) nor a preferred option (people). It has become unsustainable for operators that have struggled to put video and internet on the lines to create more value.
Wireless technologies WiFi and WiMAX are not ready yet: Even if it’s the cheapest way of communications, and the trend toward deployment and development is growing, some years have to pass in order to be a reality.

WiFi and WiMAX challenges
WiFi has two limitations, the coverage and the heterogeneity. To cover an acceptable area of a city, there are needed lots of hotspots, economically unsustainable for an operator. Approaches such as FON where everyone shares the connection solve this issue in the economical matters, but the limitation is that the connection is not reliable as there’s not a direct control of the network. The second limitation is the hand over (switch from one access point to another), if you move further the coverage of the AP you are connected to, you loose your connection until you connect to the next one. There are companies such as Cisco which has solved this issue but is a proprietary protocol and there’s no standard out there.

In the other hand, WiMAX limitations are due to the high frequency it uses. It goes over the 3.4Mhz and with this frequencies, an obstacle such as a tree or a building could block the signal.

I’m for sure not saying that it’s an impossible thing to make any of this technologies work. I’m pointing out that in order these technologies to be “ready” there’s some work to be done, and some years to pass.

Jajah’s solution
Jajah is a neat VoIP platform such as Skype, Vonage, among others, that you can find in www.jajah.com where you just need to enter your phone number, the number you want to call and voila! They connect both numbers ringing first in yours and then in the destination one. The company has today stated that by the end of this year there would be ready a little application compatible with 80 different cell phone models, that would permit to start calls without the use of the internet but with the use of this little program in you mobile phone. It’s like if they had read my article “Something better than Skype?” In this article I stated that a big contra of their solution was that if it was using neither your computer nor your internet connection to talk, why should you actually use them?

Jajah has also stated today that it wanted to become “the Skype of the mobile world” If the future of communications is going to be mostly mobile, then if Jajah manages to become what it plans, for certain, it would become the leader.

Following my last post “Google earth shows us the past!”, today I found that my idea of watching some topless girls through Google Earth was not so crazy. In the beautifull country of Netherlands a girl was caught getting some sun tan. Check it out:

Click on the picture for watching it bigger.

If you want to see it by yourselves in Google Earth just try this link. Topless sunbather (You must have version 4+)

Watch out girls! Google is after you! 😛

Recently, Microsoft launched their new “live search” that is intended to be the evolution of MSN search and would try to catch a bigger market piece from its competitors. The search market is actually led by Google(49.2%) and Yahoo(23.8%)*.

This launch is really Microsoft-like (non innovative), you can judge by yourselves the similarity with Google. They copied every single thing! Maps, answers (Yahoo initiative), picture search, video, academic etc…
live.com

The only new thing is seen in the image search section, you can add the pics you like to a basket, and once you roll-over a picture, you get more useful information. The problem is that it still has a lot of bugs; it’s slow and more complicated.

This is one of the steps until VISTA’s launch. The idea of Microsoft is to have a full integration with the LIVE and Windows platform, this way gaining more users. I think that this new copy-Google approach of Microsoft is not working, products lack of personality and in the rush to add features they are making the products useless.

* According to Nielsen NetRatings on Web search engine rankings for July

Today I was surfing with the google earth tool and discovered a somehow weird thing. Looking at my neighborhood in Bucaramanga (my city), called “the beautiful city”. I realized that the image appearing in google earth was +/- two years outdated.

The places where the two right stars are, now, there is a big shopping center. In the star at the left, now there is a condominium. The construction started more or less two years ago.

I couldn’t stop my curiosity and “googled” a little bit to understand how it works. First I discovered that in fact the images can be up to 3 years old. The thing that surprised me was that my city was not available in good resolution a couple of months ago, and when it was available, the images dated more that 2 years old.

Second, I realized that my naïve idea that this sharp low altitude images where taken from a satellite was not true. The zoom-in pictures are taken from an aircraft (as Google says). When did this airplane passed over my home taking pictures? I really thought that this satellite cameras could zoom-in so much to see the time in my watch (ok! I’m exaggerating).

Before Google earth existed, it was a program called Keyhole that Google bought. In fact the South Korean government has demanded changes in the program in order not to reveal the location of their military bases to their enemies. Even though this geographical information is publicly available from different sources.

If you haven’t tried this program I’m sure that lots of owws will come out from your mouth. Will this information be available someday in real-time? This could be a nice tool for terrorists! Or maybe we could be able to see some topless girls at Ibiza’s beaches… Now you’re thinking about huh?

In my first post I talked about the high amount of competitors that Skype was gaining each day, even though they represented a threat, they were not big enough. But today I read about the huge American leader AOL getting hands on it. The offer is:

“Free inbound calling along with your own phone number with its AIM Phoneline service. For an additional $9.95 a month, you can get unlimited calling to 30 countries” (Taken from: George Ou’s Blog).

This is really a disruptive offer in price and in services, but it doesn’t affect Skype so much. AOL is a regional company and just serves the American market. Even if USA is the biggest Skype market, it just represents the 9% of its user base. I found in the EuroTelcoblog how is the Skype’s user-base distributed in the main countries. The information in parenthesis is the position and percentage 2 years ago (2004):

[1] United States – 9.13% (1, 10.3%)
[2] Poland – 7.87% (3, 8.78%)
[3] Taiwan – 7.80% (2, 9.24%)
[4] China – 6.75% (6, 5.89%)
[5] Germany – 6.06% (5, 6.18%)
[6] Brazil – 5.85% (4, 7.24%)
[7] France – 5.62% (7, 5.53%)
[8] United Kingdom – 3.50% (10, 2.94%)
[9] Netherlands – 3.47% (8, 3.50%)
[10] Japan – 3.17% (12, 2.61%)
[11] Spain – 2.64% (15, 1.82%)
[12] Israel – 2.36% (11, 2.94%)
[13] Canada – 2.22% (13, 2.46%)
[14] Belgium – 1.95% (14, 2.10%)
[15] Italy – 1.91% (18, 1.44%)
[16] Denmark – 1.73% (9, 3.07%)
[17] Sweden – 1.62% (16, 1.76%)
[18] Turkey – 1.59% (not ranked)
[19] Switzerland – 1.42% (19, 1.22%)
[20] Australia – 1.41% (17, 1.46%)

Skype made its move at the beginning and now it’s evenly distributed, different to AOL or Vonage. This new move is a hit against Vonage. In my opinion, Vonage is going to be sold or will die soon, they are over expending in marketing (as shows their income statement in their investor section of their website) and they can’t maintain their user-base with their actual prices.

I give three months for something to happen, just wait and see if I’m wrong 😉

Microsoft… A word that causes feelings to every human that uses a computer in this planet. These feelings go from anger, disappointment, a love-hate mixture, dependence, true-love and enlightenment, to a real impotence of doing anything against it. Microsoft is lining its army for the big launch of “Vista”, the new version of the Windows operating system.

Nobody doubts the enormous power that Microsoft has, but there’s one company that has managed to declare a public opposition-competition position and has make it to sustain its menace to the Bill Gates’ guys; it’s called (obviously) GOOGLE. It’s really amazing how this battle is taking place with every-day moves that make it look like a chess game.

Microsoft is known for its monopoly problems in the US, the huge fine of 280 Million EURO by the European Union commission for antitrust. It’s also know for playing dirty with its partners (for example: Netscape) and for establishing hard lock-ins to its customers. It’s a model of capitalist company but it’s playing in “shark-waters”. The objective of this post is to evidence how are this “chess-moves” going and how its main competitor Google is playing too.

Microsoft is always a second mover, is a reactor against pressure. In my point of view, the lack of initiative has been evident since it was created, but their huge power has let it (up to now) literally, to kick away the competence. They have an advertising based business model (or at least moving forward to it) as Google does, and here is what is recently happening:

Google launched the first big threat with the online spreadsheets beta test; and as Google always does, for free. This is a clear battle sign that says: “Hey, this Microsoft Office product you have, I’m going to give it for free”. It was a low punch for Microsoft, who immediately reacted with the launch of “Microsoft Live” that for the moment it only has: the Encarta Encyclopedia, MSN live and Outlook live, and it’s planning in the near future to release an internet based office.

Vista is intended, as in other Windows versions, to include embedded the Microsoft explorer with new functions similar to the Firefox, in order to recover audience. Bad move! – This plays against many companies such as: Mozilla Firefox, Real networks, Google, Adobe etc. Of course they reacted and they have created the alliance Real-Networks-Mozilla-Google to cross-promote their products, packaging the new Firefox updates embedded with Google bar and real player.

Vista won’t support OpenGL graphics standard (just as emulation with their Direct3D standard). Apple, Dell and Google joined the Khronos Group that has been working to bring OpenGL graphics to the mobile space. This is anyway a strange move of Google, since their Google-earth product recommends the Direct3D graphics mode, I think because Windows somehow makes OpenGL not to work properly. They are trying to avoid that Microsoft imposes the Direct3D as a standard. As more standards Microsoft owns, the more power it has.

Integration between MSN and Yahoo instant messaging, this was really a non expected move, since months ago Yahoo refused a partnership proposal to Microsoft in sharing the search engine power, and its CEO stated that there were no intentions of a partnership with Microsoft at all. The relations didn’t appear to be good, and that’s maybe why Google haven’t made a response, in the other hand, the messaging is not the Google’s hard brick. It seems to be a response to AOL instant messaging integration with AIM and ICQ.

There is an intense battle of the Microsoft-vs.-world type. As an advertising-based business model, I think that Google has a much cleverer approach, Microsoft advertising is annoying, people is tired of banners and Microsoft puts them all around, instead, Google’s advertisements are interesting, helpful, context based and subtle. In the other hand, unfortunately in this battle, Google has acquired some of the bad manners of its main competitor in terms of monopoly.

It seems that in the technology industry, monopolies will occur indefinitely, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, a new one… who knows, users just want to deal with one, and just time will say which, – hasta la VISTA!

In one of the papers published here “Strategy Models for the Mobile Industry with the Rise of Wireless VoIP” we talked about the high potentials that skype could have in a mid-long term. One of them was radio sindication, which is basically the re-selling of radio to users using the cost benefits of the P2P network.

Ok, I have to confess that they are always one step ahead. The Skype creators: Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis after making the world-wide successful Kazaa and Skype, got into “The venice project”. This project is being developed basically to create a cousin of SKY and DirectTV (Now 1 company under the SKY name) but this time deilvering TV content through the internet (obviously using a P2P network, as they are now used to).

Sources tell that:
“Zennstrom and Friis have assembled teams of top software developers in about a half-dozen cities around the world, including New York, London, and Venice.”

And that there are also working on negotiations with the most important TV networks to establish this time agreements of television content broadcasting. This time, they have learned the lesson, after all the sues and legal problems they had with Kazaa because of the ilegal sharing of copyrighted material.

Skype, as always, is not really a first mover, but it really knows how to mess everything around and get a massive audience in a very short time. The real innovator in this broadcasting matters is www.youtube.com that has gained a really big audience but has an advertising-based business model (as they claim in their website) different from the premium-service model of skype. Recently, the “I-can-do-all” Google lauched a similar (if not equal) initiative http://video.google.com that is also advertising based.

In just a matter of few months, we’ll see who will own this “new” internet-tv business, and also which other players will join the match. I’m just waiting the moment, when I can see my favorite Colombian-tv-shows from wherever I am, arrives. I know it would take a while, but I have big hopes!

Everybody knows that revolutionary transitions of every-day-use technologies never take place, not only because you can’t make a whole people mass to change the way of thinking, but also because technology evolves in a step-by-step way. So, to complement my past post, today I’ll approach a way how the cell-phone network could migrate in a pace transition, to VoWiFi/VoWiMAX.

This transition has a name and it’s FMC (Fixed-mobile convergence). Today, i got to read about a start-up, www.divitas.com, that has an offer of this type:

“DiVitas makes enterprise-relevant communications networks transparently available to users through a single wireless handset and Fixed -Mobile Convergence (FMC) functionality that includes multi-network roaming, seamless handoff, and secure remote access.”

They are not the only ones innovating in these matters, British Telecom with the “Bluephone project” introduced this approach and so are doing most of the Telecoms, that as a response to the decaying long-distance revenues entered into the cell phone business. Now they are trying to make their network Wireless/Fixed to appear as one.

So… you pay high cell-phone tariffs, but as soon as you reach a WiFi hotspot, your handheld device switches to fixed network and charges you fixed-phone tariffs. The high work here is the approach of the handoff, how can you still continue your conversation even if you changed to a totally different network. In fact, this issue has been resolved but partially, because if it’s true that the handoff is done, there are still a lot of handoff-blocking (Calls lost because of the change), actually lots of research centers are working in order to solve this issue.

The first step has been done, now the trend is that WiFi network coverage increase and progresively you’ll start to use more the WiFi network than the Cell-phone one.

Wait a minute… so where would be the VoIP actual players in this scenario?? As soon as the UMTS internet connection decrease in price, the handhelds would be connecting to – just to say a name – Skype, this way making transparent to the user the fact that they are connected to the internet through UMTS, WiFi or WiMAX, always seeing the same service. Cool huh?

You should know now that I’m really a fan of Skype, since I write all my posts about it. I was really thinking about changing the argument, but it seems that nowadays it’s the only company that really surprise me and push me to write about. You should also know that eventhough I’m a fan, I’m very critic and objective when I write about it. So… here I go:

Today I saw in the Skype blog, the lauch of 4 pure WiFi Skype-Phones:
* Belkin WiFi Phone for Skype (F1PP000GN-SK);
* Edge-Core WiFi Phone for Skype (WM4201);
* NETGEAR WiFi Phone for Skype (SPH101); and,
* SMC WiFi Phone for Skype (WSKP100).
The innovator here was NETGEAR who lauched first the product, but its problem is the price (around US$220). Anyway, the fact that other 3 companies (and more coming) launch also their products is a clear sign that the market trend is toward Skype-Free telephony.

If you add this to the Skype-Zones that is a service that allows you to connect to over 18.000 WiFi hotspots around the world just by paying US$7.95 a month – so you can access in airports, coffe shops, malls, hotels etc. Or to a service like FON that if you share your WiFi router you can have free access to all the WiFi routers of the members of this “club” (and there are around 80.000). Why would you use your cell phone if you can use an Skype-WiFi-Phone for much less??

Ok, it’s true that the coverage of these WiFi networks – even if they are expanding – would not beat the reliability that cell phone networks have. But with the rise of WiMAX – which coverage is in the range of Km – a whole city could be covered reliably.

The problem with the WiFi hotspot approach is that when you change from one hotspot to another you would loose your call, so you have to talk in one place. This however is being solved by different research centers, and is treated in the latest version of WiMAX (802.16e). So everything is pointing to whole-city wireless internet access (In Colombia there are already 2 cities: Bucaramanga and Cali full WiMAX covered and more going), WiMAX-Skype phones, good bye cell phones!

I knew it wouldn’t take long until Skype responded to jajah, it’s amazing the speed as they are evolving and this couldn’t be possible if they wouldn’t have made public their API (To let other companies create/sell products based on the Skype application). They don’t even have to make one line of code, all is done by the aggregates of their “ecosystem”.

Webmessenger announced today the launch of their new product “WebMessenger Mobile”. It has the approach that I mentioned in my last post, as they offer:
“The service provides real-time presence detection of colleagues, friends and family on the users’ mobile devices, enabling them to send and receive chat messages, make phone calls to other Skype contacts, receive calls through their own Skype accounts, and connect up to four participants simultaneously for on-the-go conference calling.” (taken from www.geekzone.co.nz “WebMessenger Launches WebMessenger Mobile for Skype”).

The thing that was not very coherent in jajah service was: If the whole communication is done without any software, why do you actually have to use the computer and an Internet connection? I thought about the possibility of sending an SMS to start the calls; well, WebMessenger mobile has somehow this approach with the use of a mobile device such as: RIM BlackBerry, Palm handhelds, Windows Mobile Pocket PC and J2ME Java phones installing a little piece of software that starts the calls within the Skype-out service in a very jajah-like fashion.

Now, again the problem that I see with this approach is the reach. Not a lot of people have this kind of devices, it should be very interesting that a call could be pushed just with a simple GSM phone. I’m pretty sure that Skype & Co are working in this direction, but somehow the extreme similarity with calling-cards would involve legal issues with these companies.

I hope to see more work of Skype in these matters and discuss them here.