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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 met Felipe for the first time a couple of months ago in the Bay Area. He used to work for a software company in Sacramento but in his spare time he designed and developed a very cool site for travelers, YowTrip , who he was promoting during various networking events in San Francisco.

Felipe is from Brazil, so the only way to get a Vista is to work for a local US company. Unfortunately, this fact fights with his entrepreneurial ideas, who are now leading him to give up on everything he was doing in the US and move to Montreal, Canada, in order to make a crazy idea happen: The One Year NO JOB project.

In a nutshell, he choose to move to Canada and live on his own making a living through his personal projects, like YowTrip. By the way, YowTrip, developed by one guy only, is capable of competing with other more famous sites like Dopplr, which also received funding (while YowTrip never got a single cents…).

All that said, if you want to invest in a very talented guy and offer him one more chance to win, check his project out and if you are an early investor/angel, please keep Felipe in mind, he really deserves to be successful.

Good luck Felipe!

Technorati Tags: Business, felipe coimbra, luca filigheddu, Untitled, yowtrip