BigShinyThing

The mobile phone has become the most ubiquitous symbol of our connected society, and worldwide, mobile telephony has a much broader presence than more ‘advanced’ digital technologies. But phone technology, traditionally, has been locked down and proprietary, with international calls hugely expensive — obstacles to the use of phones as tools to mobilise the global grassroots.

Two recent projects from the activist/hacker underground suggest that all that might be about to change.

Exhibit A: Blasterisk. Not only does this phone service offer global calls at local rates (from and to normal mobiles or landlines), but includes a (tiny but growing) pool of ’short-dial’ numbers which connect direct to IndyMedia news desks worldwide. Using Blasterisk, citizen reporters anywhere in the world can instantly – for the price of a local call – phone into IndyMedia with on-the-spot breaking news, updates, calls for action. And unlike email, the service is cheaply accessible to anyone with a phone — Blasterisk reaches places the Internet doesn’t, and does it in real time.

In a similar vein, Exhibit B: the Bureau of Inverse Technology’s Antiterror Line, a sousveillance tool for the collection of “live audio data on civil liberty infringements and other anti-terror events.” Anyone can call in and leave a message — a “spoken report or in-progress recording of an anti-terror attack”. The system uplinks your audio recording direct to the BIT online terror database: an “audio accumulation of micro-incidents which individually may be inactionable but en masse could provide evidence for a definitive response.” [via Textually]

Of the two, Blasterisk is clearly the most sophisticated, offering as it does both a networking tool for activists and a direct channel for media distribution (via IndyMedia). And it’s built on the industrial strength open source Asterisk telephony platform, so has plenty of scope for growth and tweaking…

“The street finds its own use for things”. Blasterisk and BIT demonstrate that it’s also finding a louder voice through creative hacking.

So here are the facts:

• Voice over internet protocol (VoIP) uses peer to peer networks to make free telephone calls between computers.
• Skype has 68 million users worldwide.
• It is currently adding 175,000 users a day.
• Skype doesn’t advertise — it uses its users to recruit their friends.

Last September, eBay bought the company for $2.6bn with the promise of a further $1.5bn subject to performance. The auction site is already using the service to provide phone calls for high value/stress transactions such as cars and property. It has also introduced ‘click to call’ advertising via Skype on the site — direct response advertising that doesn’t require a website.

Speaking in today’s Independent, Zennstrom sounds eerily like Google and Gates in their heyday,

Skype is bigger than a product. We are going to make it into the world’s largest communications company… Probably in 20 years’ time we won’t even be talking about VoIP. VoIP will be the way telephone networks are.

Want more proof that Skype are set for world domination? They’ve just signed a wi-fi deal with Google which they hope will become the biggest in the world by the end of the year.

8.1 million UK households have broadband internet access, giving them the potential to make voice calls via the Internet . All they need is a provider, and a demystifier. Companies like the recent eBay acquisition Skype are already marketing VoIP, but a huge brand like Tesco could see internet-based telephony shed its geeky image altogether. Tesco has teamed up with Australia-based Internet Telcoms company (intelco anyone?) FreshTel to provide the service, which will (like Skype and GossipTel) give customers an area-coded telephone number so it ‘feels’ like a conventional telephone service.

Tesco is the UK’s top supermarket by market share and one in every £8 spent on the UK high street goes into its coffers. By leveraging both its brand and reach, Tesco could potentially make internet-based telephone calls the norm - especially given that the landline is giving way to mobile. According to Andy Dewhurst, chief executive of Tesco Telecoms (how easy was that?): “Consumers have not yet caught on to internet calling but this is now set to change.”

Story via the BBC.

The Guardian site picked up the story from the Wall Street Journal with neither eBay nor Skype agreeing to comment on the rumours.

The paper claims that eBay is offering between $2bn and $3bn for the company. Skype is the market leader in internet telephony and has attracted interest from companies such as Microsoft and News Corporation. The firm offers free calls to other Skype software users and charges as little as 1.1p a minute to fixed line phones in the UK. It says that an extraordinary 51 million people use its free service, while two million have signed up to pay for connections to traditional phones. Its nearest rival, Vonage, which recently launched in the UK, claims to have 700,000 customers and charges £9.99 a month for unlimited national calls, with additional charges for international and calls to mobiles.

Skype’s founders are certainly channelling the Dotcom Days in their Vanity Fair feature this month. Janus Friis and Niklas Zennstrom are pictured in what looks like a Lear Jet (sadly just the interior of the Kingly Club, London). EBay had better start counting its pennies.

See also previous post: Google Talks.

This Wednesday it was reported that Google would be launching an internet telephony and messaging service. Last week’s announcement that Google was flogging off more shares sparked speculation that it was planning more acquisitions such as VoIP market leader Skype. This launch suggests that Google is confident enough in the strength of its brand to go it alone. It will also make its service an open platform for voice calls and instant messaging - this would challenge the ‘closed’ instant messaging networks run by Yahoo!, AOL and MSN.

Google took its first step into the communications business last year with the launch of Gmail - the invitation-only email that has already trounced hotmail as the address to have. Google Talk, a free service that lets two computer users talk or exchange messages, will be available only to people who already use Gmail. Google has now opened up Gmail to anyone in the US provided they give a mobile telephone number as a confirmation of their identity - this will eventually be available to people in other countries.

Google also launched on Monday an upgrade to its Desktop - the free software that allows users to launch programs on their computers. The move is yet another encroachment on Microsoft’s domination of PC desktops as the upgrade mirrors many Windows features.