Communication Breakdown
Communications from the world of, er, communications. And other stuff.
Wednesday 31 January 2007, 5:14 PM
Fring rings in the changes
While operators rage against the dying of the light (oh alright, "hope to cling on to their revenues"), new players are starting to circle like vultures. While Skype is safely (for now) holding hands with the likes of 3, newcomer Fring - which officially launched today - allows people to use their accounts with pretty much any big VoIP player (Skype, Google Talk, er, Fring...) to make cheap calls via mobile.
I spoke with Roy Timor-Rousso, their VP of product marketing, a couple of weeks ago, and it does sound like an interesting service. Aside from being a VoIP-provider-agnostic(ish) client, it's free and should work on your bog-standard Nokia. It also - and here's the killer - allows you to make normal phone calls and send texts through the Fring interface, which should thrill the operators no end! Imports your contacts list too, so there really is no need to go back to the operator's carefully-constructed UI at all.
Quality-wise, they're aiming for "Skype over ADSL", which is fair enough for now.
"The whole user experience is it should be, as easy as making a regular phone call, to the extent that we're adding the sounds of a call going out," Timor-Rousso told me. And hey, why not throw in the operator's worst nightmare while you're at it - presence! Operators hate the idea of presence because it means less revenue from voicemails and so on, but here it is: for VoIP, IM and... normal phone calls. Yikes. It even lets you know what sort of connection the person on the other side is using - 3G, 2.5G etc - so you can know what sort of quality experience to expect.
More from the Fring guy: "Either [operators] play walled garden and become bit pipes at the end, or they can provide alternatives. We expect some offerings coming from the operators, providing the same set of features but with higher quality of service guaranteed because they are able to control the network. But they will have difficulties - operators will have limitations that we won’t have, like much longer sale and production cycles than a small company with no limitations. I also suspect they will also go with one or two types of network solution providers - our competency is providing multiple solution providers".
OK OK, so I don't want to come across all gooey-eyed over this one company, but - whether or not Fring itself takes off - it represents exactly the sort of thing that is building up to seismic changes in the mobile industry, and it's this kind of development that could very well wipe out some of the big boys in the process.
Wednesday 31 January 2007, 1:46 PM
Having a bad day?
Having just had the mother of all nightmares with my tax return (why exactly do new online self-assessment passwords need to be snail-mailed???), I appreciated this wonder-drug advert as seen on Coolsmartphone (yes, I can see this one had been around for a while, but that's where I saw it)...
Tuesday 30 January 2007, 12:41 PM
Reality comes crashing in
The NHS "Spine" seems like a very good idea. Having once been a medical secretary myself, I know how useful it will be for staff to access patients' details anywhere in the country. It saves time and, eventually, perhaps money.
However.
This is reality. Smartcards get shared. Logins get shared. What is important to clinical staff is not adherence to the trust's IT policy, but getting results as quickly as possible - patients are also rather keen on this. Hence, all the wonderful security restrictions that are supposed to keep the Spine secure don't stop the real world crashing in. And it doesn't crash in out of malice, but necessity.
So why oh why do the powers that be consider it a good idea to make these details available across Europe too?
Monday 29 January 2007, 2:37 PM
China gets 4G? Come again?
According to this Reuters piece, China is "leapfrogging" 3G in favour of, er, 4G. Say what? I know China doesn't really have to worry too much about the rest of the world due to the size of its internal market, but the rest of the world is certainly still bickering about what 4G will be, and some doubt it will even happen.
Or at least they did doubt it - is this for real? What standards are involved? Will China be leading the way here or will we end up with several "4G"s?
We'll be sure to keep you posted...
Monday 29 January 2007, 12:13 PM
Social net-shirking
Here's a very funny parody of the whole Web 2.0 start-up spiel. What's scary is how accurate this is, and how many times you have to sit there blinking at releases like this before you realise you're wasting your time...
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