The good folks at Botanicalls let you talk to your plants. Over the phone. The photo at the right is from their table at ETel07.

Sensors placed in a pot give up information

about the plant’s light and soil moisture. Ambient sensors pick up humidity, temperature, CO2/Oxygen and light. The sensors pass this to an app that stores, analyzes and presents the data.

An Asterisk server provides the phone interface. You can call or SkypeOut +1.212.202.8348 to hear ten plants speak their care and health. The plants call a local phone when they want to:

request water confirm & thank for water request more water if first watering was not enough notify of unnecessary watering notify of extreme need for water when plant is too dry

The good folks at Botanicalls let you talk to your plants. Over the phone. The photo at the right is from their table at ETel07.

Sensors placed in a pot give up information about the plant’s light and soil moisture. Ambient sensors pick up humidity, temperature, CO2/Oxygen and light. The sensors pass this to an app that stores, analyzes and presents the data.

An Asterisk server provides the phone interface. You can call or SkypeOut +1.212.202.8348 to hear ten plants speak their care and health. The plants call a local phone when they want to:

request water confirm & thank for water request more water if first watering was not enough notify of unnecessary watering notify of extreme need for water when plant is too dry

It’s an architecture, not a novelty.

It’s Moore’s Law driving down the cost of sensors, processing and communication. Right now it’s feasible to meld the Real World with metadata and our cyberspaces. We’re seeing telephony apps layered on medical, supply chain and other high value systems.

It’s quickly becoming convenience cheap, leading to ubiquity. Then disposable cheap, so fashion and whim rule. “Hi, this is your Adidas calling. Your feet are hot and smelly and you need to buy me some new inserts.” “This is Huggies calling for your baby. Time to change the diaper.”

Plants are a great case study because they are alive and interact in complex ways with their environment.

I have a gray thumb and have doomed my share of house plants. Botanicalls gives me hope.

Technorati tags: skype, voip, asterisk, skypejournal, botanicalls, botany, plants, sensors, mooreslaw

Calls to Google Talk user username@domain.com can

be placed as follows:
gtalk:username@domain.com Calls to MSN/Live Messenger user username@domain.com can be placed as follows:
msn:username@domain.com Calls to Yahoo! Messenger user username@domain.com can be placed as follows:
yahoo:username@domain.com

These destinations can be entered in the ‘Quick Call’ box or added to your on-line Contacts and called with click-to-dial or by dialing the assigned speed dial code directly on your phone (for PhoneGnome box owners).

With this exciting enhancement, the PhoneGnome free calling community now includes all of the following:

All PhoneGnome members, whether web-only, PC, or box, all over the world SIPphone/Gizmo Project Free World Dialup EarthLink MindSpring (formerly Vling) Hundreds of additional VoIP services reachable via SIPbroker Any SIP user, anywhere in the world (including Asterisk PBXes, if setup that way) Millions of numbers reachable free through our private peering relationships ISN/ITAD numbers (freenum.org) GoogleTalk (Gtalk) MSN/Live Messenger Yahoo! Messenger And, for those with the PhoneGnome box, you can even use your existing regular phone as a Skype phone to reach everyone on Skype.

Each day, we get one step closer to pure Internet free calls to everyone.

Technorati tags: skype, skypejournal, skypefind, skyeprime, prime

Confess!

And Pay for the Privilege! No sins too small, no wallet too large! Will record your confession and blog it for the world to see. Expiation through public mortification. Be brief and save. Talk fast and save more! I will listen carefully and share your pain until the next confession. Give voice to your shame. Skype now!

Call

now

FREE to Start. $150/hour later. NO CREDIT CARDS REQUIRED.

Promote your phone service with their new Skype Prime snippet generator.

What’s your idea of a service that won’t violate Skype Prime’s terms and conditions?

Better to ask: what are other options for Prime’s rate?

Quality. Discounts offered for high buyer feedback ratings weighted by dollars spent. Payout delays (120 days) drop to zero with a Gold consumer rating over 100 billed hours, for example.

Volume. Rates get better

as you have more experience. e.g 30% for your first hundred euros, 20% for your first 1000 euros, 10% above that. 

Pooling. Rates get better for services offered through a “guild”, a “gang”, a “tribe”, a “school”, or a “company.” This creates some consistency, maybe even quality, and collective volume. Each group:

Establishes membership criteria. So all members of the Gnarly Wood Workers guild are carpenter union members with two years’ professional experience. Standardizes services delivered. So members of The Food Network Academy agree to upload all recipes they share in a session to a private web page the caller can see.   Gets collective feedback. So members can see statistics for the group a whole, for the group vs. averages for the category, and for the individual vs. the group.   Governs itself.  

Liability/Insurance by Category and Country. Litigation risk is lower for music advice than medical advice. Litigation risk is much higher in the United States than in Japan. Skype can vary rates based on those odds and exposure.

Business Services. Maybe lower rate overall but a flat fee per year for collecting and reporting your national, provincial, local taxes.

Banking. Paying interest if you keep your money in your Skype account. Giving you a discount if you link your account to a PayPal/Skype credit card.

Recruiting. One month free for each seller you bring into the network who successfully bills 100 euro without customer complaint.

Mentoring. Lower rates when you help a less experienced seller by joining in a call.

Prime’s cost structure is a social engineering tool. It promotes supplier behavior that nourishes your marketplace when done well. It also discourages behavior that hurts it.

Complexity and nuance drive suppliers to game their compensation, sometimes with more effort than building new business. The virtue of today’s blunt one-size-fits-all rate is simplicity: everyone understands it and can easily choose to opt-in or opt-out and to set their prices. Now is the time for Skype to master the art of tuning the fee plan, perhaps by apprenticing with eBay?

Technorati tags: skype, skypeprime, prime, skypejournal, risk, unions, guilds, costs, economics, laboreconomics, cost, coststructure, compensation, rates, primerate, primerates, voip

Skype’s well-traveled Stephanie Robesky pointed to a BBC site’s factoid: “The premium rate phone services market in the UK is the biggest in the world, worth ВЈ1.2bn a year – that’s ВЈ20 each for every man, woman and child.” (Stephanie, does that make the UK the most psychically informed nation on Earth? And does that number include directory assistance?)

Skype Prime, the infant service launched last week,

might play a little in that space. During this testing stage, Skype holds Prime earnings for 120 days and keeps 30%.

Do you think Prime is in the premium phone service market?

Voice service providers supporting today’s premium rate phone service market (call a psychic) routinely take 30% or more. That’s partly why you might pay many dollars/euros/pounds per minute. The person talking to you on the phone actually gets around 10%-20% after the phone company, the voice service providers, the credit card company, VAT, and their employer take their cuts.

Disruptive is when you:

cut out middlemen,

make the current rate structure obsolete,

drastically improve the ability of customers to discover services and to afford them.

As a fortuneteller, could you:

talk more hours per week (with directories, referrals, and other marketing driving traffic to me),

take home substantially more money per hour (with lower costs per call, despite having lower prices than service delivered on the old model),

boost cash flow (with fast payouts on, say, return customers),

more return customers (because the experience is so much better),

more viral customers (because it is easy and there are rewards for sharing your opinion on a service),

better tools to avoid bad people (because there are some schmucks whose cannot pay you enough to take their calls),

easily band together with others to offer a service together as a pool (so you can offer a service which is always answered),

make money by sending customers to other sellers (so you can easily pass clients to people better suited to meet their needs without dropping the call, and maybe collect referral income or share your own)

protect your personal pseudonymity while promoting your business identity (so callers see they are talking to Andalusian Atmospherics although Skype knows you as Catherine Deane of Elsinby) 

have more control over your destiny as a free-agent instead of as an employee?

As a buyer, can you:

Spend less on bad services (by seeing reputation before the call)

Have more confidence you can get money back (with a straightforward dispute resolution service)

Collaborate with other buyers to share a service (four of us tossing in five quid to Rent-A-Prayer to bless Denilson before a match) 

Join in to fee-based Skypecasts (paying a pound for two hours of poker instruction)

Watch a macarena dance instructor’s lesson [note to self: don't offer this service, Phil]

Get critiqued by three experts on your bellydancing performance by turning on your own webcam

Get an mp3, QuickTime video, or text transcript of the call (so you can review what you might have missed in the excitement of the moment)

Easily re-use those records in Bebo, MySpace, YouTube or a blog; or route privately to friends.

Join a club of other customers interested in a topic where you all can chat amongst yourselves, independent of a transaction or a service provider

Start a fan club for a service (she prayed, we scored)

To win, you have to change the game. You have to be so much different and better for callers and sellers that nobody wants to use the old services if they can help it. So when they think of just “calling” a psychic, they think “ah, I’d rather Skype a psychic. Calling is so 20th century.”

Prime is a year or two away from playing competitively in this space, imho. But is this the space where you want to hang your hat?

Technorati tags: skypevideo, skypeprime, skypejournal, prime

The most popular VoIP companies out there are:

Vonage

Vonage has become one of the most recognized of the VoIP Companies. Who hasn’t caught themselves humming that catchy jingle or smiling at the stunts in their commercials? Vonage has over 150 global markers in the USA, Canada, Mexico and the United Kingdom. They were founded in January of 2001 and are based in Holmdel, New Jersey. As of December 2005 Vonage employs over 1400 people worldwide and completes over 35 million calls per week on over a million active lines.

Skype

Skype is a unique VoIP company in that it offers its download free to consumers. This allows people to make free calls worldwide using Skype peer-to-peer software. Charges are made for personalizing the Skype download by adding mobile phone services, voicemail, and access to worldwide hotspots. Skype service does require a PC platform at this time but efforts are being made to expand to mobile devices and handsets. Skype reports that over 221, 078,102 users have downloaded the Skype software.
Skype was founded by Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis, both who co-developed KaZaA, the world’s most used peer-to-peer software. Skype has offices in Luxembourg, London and Tallinn.

BroadVoice

BroadVoice, another VoIP company that is located in the United States but offers services worldwide. They were founded in Billerica, MA in December of 2003, and now provide service to 120 plus countries. BroadVoice offers a package of twenty-five basic and advanced features that are billed at a monthly rate. The company allows users to make and receive calls anywhere in the world as long as a high-speed internet connection is available. BroadVoice reports over 600,000 plus users with numbers increasing monthly.

SunRocket

SunRocket is a VoIP provider established by Paul Erickson and Joyce Dorris in early 2004. These two former MCI executives were coworkers for over 10 years prior to founding SunRocket. Offices of this provider are found primarily in North Americas – the United States and Canada. This provider offers low costs, great voice calling clarity/quality and the option of adding a free additional phone number with no additional charge. With all these options available it comes as no surprise that SunRocket is quickly gaining ground on its closest competitors.

“Cheese Doodle-Eating Surrender Monkeys?” is how Hands Off The Internet slams Skype’s bit of consumer advocacy. Skype proposes anyone

can connect a phone to the mobile phone network so long as they don’t hurt it. Basically, you shouldn’t have to buy your phone from your mobile carrier any more than you buy a home phone or PBX from your landline phone company. HOTI’s unsigned blog poster [how cowardly and deceptive, considering how much they get paid] wrote:

“what the companies pushing hardest — Google, eBay and Amazon — really want to do is freeze the market where it is now, with each at the top of their own game.”

Distortions and off-point.

If the dinosaurs innovated and delivered on their promises, the whole US would have fiber to the home by now; standard devices could connect to mobile networks the way home phones connect to the Internet and standard devices can plug-in to telephone jacks and just work.

Is this truly a level playing field? Has hands-off regulation worked? No and No. Whole regions of the United States don’t have access to broadband and where people do, not to more than one or two providers. This highly consolidated oligopoly spends more fortunes on underhanded crap artists like handsoff.org than R&D. And they are doing whatever they can to encumber innovators.

I’m not going to give any Google n. liar. A lawyer with a roving commission.
 - Ambrose Biercejuice to Hands Off The Internet by linking to them. It’s an astroturf (fake grassroots) site run for AT&T by lobbyist Public Strategies Washington. Complain to Mike McCurry at (202) 783-2596 about lying for a client. Tell him I said hello and thanks for selling out to the wrong guys after a career of public service.

P.S. I can’t believe long time Skype partner, Actiontec Electronics, makers of the VoSKY family of Skype-to-PBX gateways, lent their good name to this vile project.

P.P.S. By the way, if you think I’m wrong, speak up. We gladly publish contrary views so long as unsubstantiated ad-hominem attacks are avoided.

Technorati tags: skype, skypejournal, liars, lobby, lobbiest, handsofftheinternet, freedom, regulation, fcc, carterphone

As mentioned in a previous post, I never dial phone numbers; one of my key tools is use of the Skype Web Toolbar for Firefox. (Firefox 2 is my default browser; MSIE 7 just does not cut the mustard!) With a couple of clicks I can SkypeOut to any phone number detected on a web page. Great for Canada411 lookups.

Now Skype has enhanced its Web Toolbar to version 2.3 with three new features:

Highlighting PayPal merchants found in a Google, Live/MSN or Ask! search. Uses an algorithm guaranteed not to slow down your searches. Saving images to Skype: select an image, right click on it and select “Share with a Friend”. The image is sent as a file to the designated Skype contact. Or select “Set as my Skype Avatar”. One more nifty file transfer feature that complements previously reported file transfer features.

Highlighting PayPal merchants found in a Google, Live/MSN or Ask! search. Uses an algorithm guaranteed not to slow down your searches. Saving images to Skype: select an image, right click on it and select “Share with a Friend”. The image is sent as a file to the designated Skype contact. Or select “Set as my Skype Avatar”. One more nifty file transfer feature that complements previously reported file transfer features. But here is the most powerful feature: Call from home with Skype. Right click on a phone number, select “Call with home phone”. Skype will then call your home phone, followed by calling the designated phone number on the web page and drops out of the picture once the connection is made. It is charged as two SkypeOut calls (including two connection charges). Is this the start of Skype’s response to what Andy calls “minute stealers” such as Jajah?

Peter Kalmstrom, Skype’s Toolbars team leader, has posted details here. When updating your Firefox Skype Toolbar to version 2.3, note that you must first uninstall any previous versions. (Uninstall is one of the Options available in the Skype Web Toolbar.)

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I mean Niklas ZennstrГ¶m has his own VC firm. He’s disrupted the music, phone, and television industries. He’s on eBay’s executive leadership

team and has a stake in blog search engine Technorati. And Skype, under his leadership, launched search, advertising, and temp-work pilot projects, each of which could spin off into businesses of their own. Lawsuits kept him out of the US for years (what did he miss?). He uses Skype’s lawyers to advocate for Internet liberties. When (if?) Skype makes its key numbers this year, he might be gobsmacking rich. And he’s starting to become famous outside of tech.

Room for 80 more questions. Ask great ones, please.

Technorati tags: skypejournal, skype, joost, skypefind, skypeprime, prime, clicktocall, kazaa, technorati, zennström, niklas, niklaszennström, niklaszennstrom