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A few days ago I met Stuart Henshall, one of the minds behind Phweet, a service I wrote about a couple of weeks ago. I don’t want to repeat what I already wrote about Phweet, but I only wanted to share some interesting ideas Stuart showcased to me, in particular the concept of “smart call”.

What is a smart call? A smart call is basically a call where both caller and called party “agree” about the call itself. How many times you are bothered by others who try to reach you on the phone while you are busy? Sometimes those calls could be important but you can’t know unless you take that call, loosing precious time.

A smart call is basically a call where you receive a “message” in advance of the call. Examples of content of this message could be the following:

Example1

Caller: John

Reason: That client signed the deal

Availability: now (CLICK HERE) or in 30 Minutes (CLICK THERE)

Example2

Caller: Girlfriend

Reason: I miss you

Availability: now (CLICK HERE)

Example3

Caller: Boss

Reason: Fired

Availability: now (CLICK HERE) next year (CLICK HERE)

Those above are just some examples and could be either SMS, IMs, Twitter messages or… name one! If you click the correspondent link, a call will be made/scheduled and the system will, for example, call both people and connect the call. You can also have a dial-in number that is automatically called when you click there, according to the device you chose to receive/make calls. From the caller perspective, there could be many different ways to “generate” a smart call, IM, SMS, Twitter… again different methods.

Is it smart? Oh yes, it is. Think of how much time you might save and how you can improve your productivity. Moreover, the recipients of those messages can be more than one so that a conference call is setup. Stuart & David’s service does this already, through Twitter, but this way to look at Phweet make it clear that there are tons of potential applications that could be built on top of it.

In conclusion, I strongly believe this concept would lead to a wide number of value added applications which bring telephony, web, unified messaging together, letting you improve your productivity and make a better usage of your time.

Ops, I must go, a smart call is waiting for me…

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Technorati Tags: David Beckemeyer, luca filigheddu, Mobile, phweet, smart calls, stuart henshall, Telecommunications, twitter

Andy Abramson wrote an interesting blog post about Aircell, the new WiFi broadband internet service provided by American Airlines.

The point is that not all the applications over internet are allowed on that service and VoIP is one of them. Andy tried SightSpeed but the call was dropped after 10 seconds only, same story with Skype. I bet all other SIP-based services are blocked as well.

Andy then tried to use a service based on flash and… it worked perfectly. The service mentioned by Andy is Phweet, the TringMe-based VoIP service for any Twitter user (I already posted about Phweet last month) designed by Stuart Henshall and David Beckemeyer.

Andy points out that the interesting story here is about “thinking different”:

…all the attention was given to Skype. Skype and SIP based communications applications. There’s more to VoIP and real time communications out there, and we have to think about the best application for the situation. That’s called reasoning. Logic. Creative thinking. In my world that’s the start of Asymmetrical thinking. Look at a problem differently, and see different solutions that are already there.

In this specific case, Phweet was the solution to this problem. As an engineer, I can’t agree more. While at the University, I’ve been taught to think different if I wanted to quickly get to a solution of a problem and during my working experience I learnt that this is even more true than what I thought.

Good points Andy.

p.s. sometimes things work but you cannot really understand why. Flash VOIP is, actually, SIP based. In this perspective, it should have been blocked as well… I bet the reason is another one, that is how the call is setup on Phweet.

Technorati Tags: Aircell, andy abramson, David Beckemeyer, luca filigheddu, phweet, skype, stuart henshall, Untitled

I’m not used to read blog posts on my Nokia E61 while on the go, but yesterday there was an exception. While I was waiting for my flight I came across a post by Stuart Henshall which caught my attention more than others.

The blog post was about the ability to make an escalation from a discussion on Twitter to a real call. I read it and thought of what we did on my company’s video microblogging Hictu. On Hictu you can easily call your friends through Skype, Gizmo, Abbeyphone but, above all, through Jajah , whose button is integrated in every user profile and lets you make an excalation from a microblogging conversation to a regular phone call (an example below).

Anyway, Stuart was thinking of something different, much more integrated with twitter. When back at home yesterday evening, here is the response: Phweet . Stuart and David Beckemeyer, the PhoneGnome man, are the persons behind this interesting mashup between voice and Twitter.

The usage is very easy: you just have to insert your Twitter data on Phweet then insert the nickname of the person you want to call to (let’s say @john). An unique url is created for the call and a message is sent (through your Twitter account) to @john with the link to join the call. Here is what this looks like when I invited my friend @Muzedon:

That link points to:

You can choose your preferred method to be called: on the browser with a SIP URI or through other services like Gizmo, PhoneGnome or Free World Dialup.

All the methods above are free of course, but calling to a regular phone is not available yet. It’s clear that it’s not going to be free, but maybe it will be the most usable and quick way to get connected.

The service is in public alpha for testing purposes. I highly recommend to check it out since I believe it’s going to become more and more interesting and feature-rich as they are closer to an official public launch, due in 100 days now.

Technorati Tags: David Beckemeyer, hictu, luca filigheddu, phweet, stuart henshall, twitter