colin's blog

DayLight Saving Time on Motorola Linux Phones

colin — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 14:47:31 -0800

Motorola Linux phones such as the Motorola E6 and A1200/Ming have a time-of-day bug that if you set the phone time to Daylight Saving Time, any J2ME application will show the time as 1 hour behind. The reason may be that Motorola Linux phones are developed in China and China does not observe Daylight Saving Time?

Now that North America is back to Standard Time, this Motorola Linux phone bug will hibernate for the next 4 months.

Colin - EQO Founder & CTO

Incoming Call Issues with Calling Name Display on Motorola Linux phones

colin — Fri, 10 Aug 2007 16:16:29 -0700

About a week ago (August 1, 2007), I started having problems with receiving incoming calls on my unlocked Motorola ROKR E6 mobile phone. My mobile service provider is Fido and I have an unlimited local calling service plan (City Fido) for Cdn$45 a month.

At first I thought I had mistakenly changed the call forward / call divert settings. Nope. Then I did a master reset on my ROKR E6 thinking there was a problem with the phone. Nope.

Next, I put my Fido SIM into a Nokia phone. I was able to receive incoming calls. So there is nothing wrong with the call divert settings or my Fido SIM.

I then put my Fido SIM into a Motorola E680, and also tried it on a Motorola A768 and A1200/Ming. Nope. Incoming call did not work on any of these Motorola Linux phones.

I then put a Rogers Wireless SIM into the ROKR E6. Incoming calls worked just fine. So the problem had to do with my Fido SIM in combination with a Motorola Linux phone.

To ensure that there was not a problem with my Fido SIM, I went out and purchased a replacement SIM from Fido. No luck. The new replacement Fido SIM still did not work with the ROKR E6 for incoming calls. At this point, I had no choice but to put the new SIM into a Nokia phone so that I can at least receive incoming calls.

Then something mysterious happened. This new replacement Fido SIM was empty with no contacts stored on it. The Nokia phone that I was using also had an empty address book. Yet when someone called me, the caller name showed up on the call display. That was interesting because my Fido service plan includes Caller ID service feature but I did not subscribe to caller name display service feature.

I finally called Fido customer service. Sure enough Fido started a free promotional offer for the caller name display feature on the exact date that I started having problems with receiving incoming calls on my Motorola E6. It appears that incoming calls fail for all Motorola Linux phones such as A768, A780, E680, A1200/Ming, ROKR E6 on the Fido network if calling name display feature is turned on. I had to ask Fido to do me a favor and disable the free promotional calling name display feature so that I can receive incoming calls on the ROKR E6.

Colin
EQO Founder & CTO

Jajah and Intel's VoIP patents

colin — Tue, 22 May 2007 22:47:35 -0700

Jajah and Mig33 along with EQO are recent recipients of sizable new financing rounds in the hot mobile VoIP space. The success of Jajah with more than 2 million users and Mig33 with an estimated 4 million users is an early indication of the market potential for voice calling services untethered to the PC. This land grab for market share also lends itself to staking early claims on patents and intellectural property ownership on a broad range of technology areas.

As some of the recent blogs noted, the Intel investment in Jajah will provide Jajah with access to Intel’s broad portfolio of VoIP patents. Many of Intel’s VoIP patents are likely accumulated through previous investments such as Dialogic and Trillium. For Jajah, the access to Intel’s patent portfolio and distribution channels definitely gives them more options to deploy the Jajah service on more embedded consumer terminal devices. However, Intel’s softphone patent is unlikely going to have any impact on Skype or most other PC-based VoIP clients such as Counterpath’s X-Lite. A patent is only defined by its claims and Intel’s softphone patent specifically relates to desktop PC-based VoIP client used with a PBX system. Computer Telephony Integration (CTI) technologies are obviously not new as enterprise PBX vendors such as Nortel, Avaya, Cisco, Siemens Enterprise, and NEC have been deploying such solutions for a long time. With the recent US Supreme Court decision on patentability, one wonders how the Intel patent which was filed in 1999 would actually hold up in court. It would also be interesting to see how the Intel softphone patent plays out for open source PBX solutions such as my beloved Asterisk, and how Vonage will eventually settle the patent infringement case with Verizon.

Year they stopped talking about IMS

colin — Tue, 27 Mar 2007 19:16:39 -0800

For as long as I can remember, telecom vendors such as Nortel and Alcatel Lucent have been promoting the Internet Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) as the convergence platform for IP multimedia services for wireless and also for wired line networks. Each year at the CTIA Wireless event, these vendors would list the many potential services that IMS would enable such as presence, push-to-talk, instant messenging, and video call. Service providers also eagerly parlay IMS as a way to converge their service delivery platforms and to deliver “rich” IP multimedia services that end users would actually want and pay for. Well, this year at the CTIA Wireless show in Orlando, the industry seemed to finally got tired of the promises of limitless IMS application possibilities and pretty much stopped talking about IMS. Instead of positioning fixed-mobile convergence and next generation convergence services such as push-to-talk, some rather dull terms are being used such as “IP enabling IN services” and “business transformation”.

The acquisition of YouTube by Google must have also shifted the focus of the telecom industry as well. At the CTIA show, there clearly is much greater emphasis on delivering video over fixed and wireless networks. Of course the technology that service providers use to deliver such a service involves components of the IMS framework. But at least this time round, vendors and service providers are starting with the application rather than the application framework.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) mobile VoIP

colin — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 01:35:09 -0800

Three years ago, peer-to-peer technology was all the rage made popular by Skype and file sharing applications such as KaZaA, Shareaza, and BitTorrent. I too caught the P2P bug and together with two other co-founders developed a P2P-based distributed telephone switch. Coming from a telecom background in mobile network equipment and Internet Multi-media Subsystem (IMS), we thought the use of P2P for node addressing and Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) for call signaling would make for a powerful and low cost disaggregated telephone soft-switch. We experimented with several P2P protocols including Sun's JXTA, Gnutella2 and FastTrack but eventually ended up with a beta product based on the more structured Pastry P2P design. The rationale was that to have a P2P network that can match the performance of traditional telephone switches, we needed a P2P protocol that is more real-time deterministic and one that can be made practical on limited resource end-user device such as mass market mobile phones.

Nokia 5500 is a Cool Phone

colin — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 16:42:16 -0800

I have been using the Nokia 5500 Sport for about 2 months now. I have to admit, this phone looks rather dull and ordinary but it is a pretty cool mobile device. The Nokia 5500 is a Series 60 Third Edition Symbian phone (check out the phone specs here).

Simplicity is the Key

colin — Fri, 29 Dec 2006 15:35:41 -0800

During 2006, we at EQO created a great deal of technology that extends and bridges online and circuit-switched communications services to mass market mobile phones. Much of this work were extensions to patent-pending server-based distributed call management and service bridging technology that has been under development since 2003. Through out the year, we gained much valuable feedback and product input from our now quite significant user base. One of the key learnings is simplicity. This is particularly important when it comes to applications that runs on limited screen size, limited keypad, limited memory, limited computing, limited battery, and limited bandwidth devices such as mass market mobile phones.

Sony PSP and Mylo

colin — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 12:37:12 -0700

I recently received a new Sony PlayStation Portable (PSP) gaming console. To actually use the PSP, I first had to spend about $100 on a memory stick PRO Duo. I then forked out another $75 on two games: Cars and HotShots Golf. For a handheld device, the audio and graphics quality on the PSP is awesome. The two games are not bad - for my kids.

Inbound and outbound calling

colin — Sun, 20 Aug 2006 07:46:59 -0700

VoIP spam or what is commonly referred to as "SPIT" (Spam over Internet Telephony) has been discussed extensively in the press but the problem appears completely contained. If you do a search on Google for "VoIP spam", all of the top ranked articles are of 2004 vintage. Is it simply that there is far greater economic incentive for a spammer to spend a few seconds to spam millions of people using email than to waste several seconds to annoy just one person using VoIP? If that is the case, voice communications has inherent anti-spamming characteristics.

Evolving usage habits on Google and IM networks

colin — Sat, 19 Aug 2006 15:45:05 -0700

For the past six years, if I needed to find anything on the internet, I have always used Google. For news and stock updates, I have consistently used Yahoo! News and Yahoo! Finance. But lately, I noticed that my web surfing habits have evolved.

I am now on myspace

colin — Sat, 19 Aug 2006 14:26:57 -0700

I am no stranger to online communities but finally decided to join the big dog and created my profile on myspace. My new place on myspace is still pretty barren. As I was going about to "hang up" my first picture, a visitor "Sanoe" had already dropped by, requested to be added as a friend, and left a comment "You live close to my home town". Pretty cool! I just got a new "friend" simply because I happen to live in Vancouver. But I am not going to try to compete with Tom who currently has 93 million friends on myspace.

Mobile long distance arbitrage services

colin — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 08:32:41 -0700

While Skype is the undisputed leader in PC-to-PC VoIP services, its service extension onto regular mobile phones thus far has largely been the efforts of its ecosystem partners such as EQO, iSkoot, and SoonR. EQO for Skype focuses on multi-modal communications and extending Skype services onto the mobile phone, allowing users to make and receive voice calls and IM chat messages with their buddies using their Skype online identities. SoonR provides remote access to the users PCs from the mobile phone, and the SoonR Talk feature allows Skype users to initiate Skype voice calls from a mobile phone browser. iSkoot allows users to initiate voice calls from mobile phones to iSkoot's servers which then bridge the calls onto the Skype network. All of these services utilize Skype as the implicit long distance inter-exchange carrier for bridging mobile voice calls as local access calls through the traditional public telephone switch network (PSTN / PLMN).

New Features on Friendster

colin — Fri, 04 Aug 2006 06:58:26 -0700

It has been awhile since I last visited my Friendster account. Since Friendster profiles and pages were fairly static, there was not a real need for me to check back on my friends on a frequent basis. But much has changed on Friendster the last few months.

On Friendster, I can now customize my home pages, publish FLASH-based widgets, and insert YouTube videos similar to capabilities on myspace. Now there are more reasons for me to check back on my Friendster account more often. However, it is still a challenge to browse for friends and new members beyond looking at friends of friends. Also, the "grab this photo" feature on Friendster still perplexes me.

Communications 2.0 backplane

colin — Thu, 23 Mar 2006 18:14:49 -0800

Currently there is no functional voice communications backplane on the web. Google tried with GoogleTalk but the lack of service interworking with the regular telephone network and the existing limitations of libjingle limit the usefulness of recombined voice service applications based on GoogleTalk beta.

Yahoo! has just launched Yahoo! Messenger with Voice 7.0 with broader support for PC to phone calling. This service offers even cheaper per minute rates than SkypeOut as noted by Stuart Henshall of Skype Journal. With extensive network cores, Yahoo!, Google, and other leading web portals are in pretty good positions to establish themselves as competing communications backplanes. I would suspect that over time, Yahoo, Google / AOL, Microsoft Live, and possibly ...Skype will all offer varying capabilities of a communications 2.0 backplane.

Spring VON 2006 and IMS

colin — Mon, 20 Mar 2006 11:02:28 -0800

IMS (Internet Multimedia Subsystem) was all the buzz last year at Spring VON 2005. It continues to garner the attention of service providers especially fixed-line and cable operators this year at Spring VON 2006. However, there is one key change - vendors and carriers are starting to talk about integrating web services as service applications delivered over the IMS services framework.

With numerous meetings with many business partners and VCs, there was not much time for viewing the exhibits at VON. From what little time I had on the show floor, I did notice a few key changes: 1) many of the low-cost PBX vendors typically packaging open-source Asterisk are gone and replaced with a much bigger Digium/Asterisk Pavilion, 2) enhanced VoIP user terminals such as ATAs are now products than can be shipped in volume rather than demonstration units, and 3) less exhibitors are giving away freebies like useless blinking ice-cubes :-(.

Bi-Modal Mobile Instant Text Messaging and Voice Application

colin — Fri, 10 Mar 2006 00:26:00 -0800

Technorati Profile

Yahoo! recently announced Yahoo! Go which extends instant text messaging, email, and other online services onto mobile phones. Prominent technology business publications such as Business 2.0 also discussed the web 2.0 evolution of instant text messaging towards instant voice and video messaging. While the trend is clearly towards more and more online services onto mobile devices, one real challenge is how such applications can be adapted to the mobile handset form factor and usage modes while on the go. On the PC, the keyboard is definitely a more natural interface for instant text messaging compared to plugging in a headset for voice. On a mobile phone, the handset is a more natural interface for voice compared to typing long text messages via T9.

For me, instant text messaging is a great way to spontaneously interact with others online. If I am handling multiple tasks, it gives me the flexibility to interact with multiple people simultaneously without the need to make voice calls and avoid the discomfort of voice silence as I pause between tasks. However, voice calls on the other hand provide far richer interactions and get things done far quicker and there is less likelihood of coming across with the wrong tone.