iConverged

After 4 years of serious Blackberry 8700 and 8800 use, my wife convinced me to switch to the sexier iphone. I was pretty wary knowing it is not very good for business usage. However, my wife’s prime interest was to get me off the keypad while driving. To her dismay, I am now an expert fast typist on my iphone virtual keyboard – but I do listen to her and for my own safety don’t thumb responses to email while stopping at a light. Here are my experiences (so far) on what I did to bring my iphone closer to my needs. I have the iphone 32G 3GS. My previous phone was the wonderful, but, well not oomphy BB 8800.

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I noticed quite a flutter on several blogs and news sites on a new service from Trapcall that allows you to “see” Caller ID even if the caller blocks the caller ID.

A layman description: Jack is an agressive sales person who loves calling his prospective customer Bob with his caller ID blocked, so that Bob will be forced to pick up the phone and have a chat with Jack.  This is a good ploy, because Bob may otherwise ignore the call if he recognizes Jack’s number. (There are of course more serious situations like domestic abuse etc. reported on other sites)

So what does Bob do ? Well, Bob sets ‘Call Forwarding on No Answer’ and/or ‘Call Forward Busy’ etc. on his phone to point to a Trapcall 1-800 number. That’s all.

So what happens ? Jack calls Bob. Bob gets an incoming call without an ID. He ignores it. This makes the call route to Trapcall’s 1-800 # which does  its ‘Voodoo’ and routes the call back to Bob, who gets an incoming call again,  but this time with Bob’s caller ID !! So he can now really ignore it.

How does this work ?

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I’ve always believed the concept of location is important to an application, but it does not really define an application. Continuing that line of thought, I think many companies who join the ‘LBS is a killer Application’ idealogy have it completely wrong.

Location is NOT going to be successful as an Application. It is going to be super successful as a tool. Let me justify my stand.

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Some more goodies from HSC.

MSRP for Android and RTP stack for Android. And yeah, these releases don’t have additional documentation answering stuff like ‘how do I install’. We hope you know that already And if you need docs on how to use the stacks, please refer to the original open source efforts.

Get them here.

Hola,

continuing the “season of giving” for Google’s Android, HSC has also ported the popular java stun stack, JSTUN for the android platform. Download it here. 

Folks, my company just released an updated version of the SIP stack and UA (MJSIP) ported for the latest SDK 1.0r1. This is the same SDK that G1 uses. This is an update to this post.

The new SDK changes several things in the UI and well as some APIs. Kudos to the team lead Nitin Khanna (first.last at hsc.com) for continuing the commitment to android. 

Grab a copy of the latest version from here.

Image credit

Yahoo recently launched Fire-Eagle, which is essentially an ‘open platform’ that allows two simple things:

A) Users can update the system whenever they want with their location

B) Application Developers can access the system whenever they want to know the location of consumers and do anything with it (i.e. serve any application that can make use of that information)

Of course, ‘Users’ can explictly set permissions on who can or cannot view their location.

For a long time, I have wanted to see such an open and simple platform, where ‘executing a service based on location’ is completely independent of ‘the technology used to provide the location’. Because I believe providing individually accessible repositories of data is the key construct to building a hierarchy of innovative products. You collect data, expose it to others so they can transform your data into information. And your information, is data for the next application. So turns the wheel of the Web 2.0 circle. And a location repository is one key missing element to personalize services.

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(image credit to Engadget)

Ever since iPhone SDK got released, we have seen a lot of requests from customers wanting us to build iPhone apps. Naturally, we have loved to oblige -after all, we love hacking on new platforms.

The biggest problem, however, was not being able to run background applications, which KOed out a lot of neat things one could do, especially for location related apps. At the keynote today at WWDC, Scott Forstall said this:

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If you are in this emerging ‘applications’ market, and are in the business of building applications for OEMs/ISVs or Service Providers (yes, some Operators actively invest in R&D work), the term ‘Rapid Prototype’ is not new to you. In short, people are always looking at ‘quick and dirty’ demonstration code that shows off a cool concept which they can take to prospective customers as a viable product or service to be rolled out. Customers who ask for this are not sure if that idea will go anywhere, but are willing to test the waters with you (if you are willing). A typical software development organization follows the ‘Build Rome one stone at a time’ model whereas this particular market needs the ‘pre-fab modular home in 1 month’ model and therefore struggles with this particular market. I know of many organizations who  believe this is not an area to be in, because of the limited scope and length of such projects. The problem however, is that they fail to understand that this market is actually very attractive and profitable, but only if you look at it the right way, and approach it the right way. Last week, I was chatting up with a friend on the same issue and was sharing some insights into what one should try and institute to make this model work. He suggested a blog post, so here goes – some common problems, pitfalls and solutions:

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Update: Nov-20-2008: Updated SDK + UA for 1.0 SDK released here. Also released jSTUN port for android here.

Hi folks, as promised, HSC released the ported SIP UA including the stack. This is an update to our previous ’stack only’ release. We have overwritten the old release with this new one in our download area. You can get it from here (look for the post titled “SIP UA + Stack for Google Android).

This release includes a short illustrative manual on how to use the SIP client and some things you need to do to configure it (mostly because of the limitation of the android emulator and what it does(not) support as of the current date). We have also included a ported RTP stack with this release. Theoretically, this release is all set for a signalling + media use case. I say theoretically, because it seems the android emulator does not support audio capture, so everytime one tries to start a media conversation, the emulator crashes. Folks @ the android-dev group have confirmed this is currently not supported in the emulator (but works on their actual phone).

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