Full of youthful hubris, I once tried subscribing to the entire IT Conversations feed. This ended up being one or two podcasts a day, and I never caught up. The effort, however, yielded a few gigs of audio on my iPod. I hack away at them, slowly whittling down the unfiltered mess. For the most part, I listen to what Gigavox recommends for me, taking into account my previous ratings. For example, everything I’ve heard from Emerging Telephony Conference has been boring as dirt.
As I drove along home, I heard Phil Windley and Doug Kaye announce three lightning speeches from eTel and I was prepared to be underwhelmed. But before I could wind my way past the crap, I heard three amazing, five minute speeches.
Brian McConnel gave a long introduction to RadioHandi, a kind of party-line plus voice mail for the internet. With a growing list of local numbers around the world, users can call in and listen to or leave notes around anything. The first use that comes to my mind is for podcasts who want to broadcast listener comments as audio. ‘Sounds like a great way to create communities and broadcasts with phones, VOIP and/or RSS.
Second, Ajay Madhok beautiful describes AmSoft’s offering to communications: context-awareness. Depending on where we are and what we’re doing, we want different people to be able to reach us in different ways. Why can’t our phones, our email and our IM clients act like a personal assistant, screening calls to make them appropriate to our circumstances? What if we could just have one identity and not tell everyone our changing emails and numbers? Equals is the total package to do this, and I have no idea how it could possibly work!! How can they intercept your calls, email and IM, regardless of what network they’re on?!?! ‘Sounds too good to be true!!
The last presentation was on how to make your home phone better. No one who thinks about it wants their home phone to surf the web, but it would be nice if it was an alarm clock, could tie in to online chat and access your contacts. Enter Casabi, tying the web and voice together at home intelligently. I’m sure it must entail buying new hardware, but it would be nice to have home phones that are at least as useful as cellphones.
