Joi Ito comments on PhoneGnome, the brainchild of David Beckemeyer:
The PhoneGnome is a box that you connect to your phone line and your Internet connection and attach a phone to. The magic happens when PhoneGnome figures out your phone number and auto-configures everything so that, in the future, all calls to other PhoneGnome users go over the Internet instead of the phone line. "Auto-configure" is a non-trivial thing and is the difficulty standing between normal users and SIP/Asterisk goodness and freedom. Under the hood, PhoneGnome is open standards based and is extendable in various ways, but David has kept it EXTREMELY simple so that anyone can use it and doesn't require you to have your computer turned on. You just pick up your phone and call like you normally would.
So, Skype or PhoneGnome? PhoneGnome asserts:
It will be interesting to see how this one plays out. (I read earlier this week of the supernode problems being reported with Skype.)
In an excellent posting, Paul Golding explores the future of mobile communications:
Mobile telephony is nothing new. We already had telephones before mobiles and the transition is a very obvious step and mostly a matter of economics (i.e. making it cheap enough to do). However, everything else we are likely to do with mobiles in the future will be new. We tend to think of a progression or evolution from voice-based devices to "data" devices. However, there isn't necessarily a continuum. The future is about mobile computing, which is quite a different paradigm from mobile phoning.
… if the core of the mobile network is converted to SIP, instead of GSM (CDMA etc), then overnight the network can handle calls between any SIP-compatible devices, no matter how they implement the IP connection: over Cable, ADSL, WiFi, GPRS, Bluetooth, 3G etc. You can think of SIP like a Hotmail account. You can log-on from anywhere and then get your email. With SIP, you can log-on ("register") from anywhere and get your phone calls, voicemail etc.… the essential nature of mobile technology is connecting people. This Person-to-Person (P2P) nature will be a dominant feature of mobile computing. We need to grasp what P2P "connecting" is all about. Today, we talk to each other. But, tomorrow, we shall:
Click to play, to share, to view, to update, to invite, to compare, to tag, to consult, to message, to conference … Click to connect!… the crucial component is the user interface. Language escapes us at this point, because there is no word to describe the forthcoming SIP-based user experience. However, the missing ingredient is something called Presence. … SIP allows all the underlying connections and signalling to take place, including transfer of presence-state information. Presence, by which I really mean "buddy-centric" communication (people or object), is an essential component of mobile computing, as it really provides the "Universal client" (and metaphor) through which we shall interact with the digital world.
Mobilisation is the name of the process of folding more and more of our daily tasks into the mobile computing realm. This is a two-way process. Technology improves and produces enablers. Circumstances change, economically, socially, psychologically, that lead us to discover how the enablers might be useful to manage aspects of our changing world.
The buddy-driven presence paradigm will play a significant role in the mobilisation process, if only because it provides us with a model of the world ("world view") that we can work with through our mobile computers. Connecting with "buddies" seems a very natural paradigm. IMS allows operators to build an infrastructure that will support this paradigm.
