Blog: Technology

Voicemails are very annoying. I love hearing from the people leaving them, but it takes a lot of time to listen to them compared to reading email. Worse, if I can't respond right away or deal with whatever question is raised, they're difficult to save and then manage. If I have saved voicemails, my phone gives no reminder of this, and I often forget about them until the next time I receive a new voicemail, which is usually not a time when I can deal with the old ones.

It's cumbersome to navigate among voicemails (and every carrier's system is different, meaning in the months since my switch to T-Mobile I still haven't learned how to easily jump around in them). Saving a phone number from a voicemail usually requires me to scramble to find some paper or memorize it for a minute until I can switch phone applications to write it down. They're not searchable and not saved long term.

Email, on the other hand, lends itself well to having a few messages in the inbox which need to be dealt with and whose presence is a regular reminder; makes random access to messages easy; and saves old messages in a searchable way (at least with a good service like Gmail) indefinitely. Today's New York Times examines two services, SimulScribe and SpinVox, that aim to fix these problems with voicemail. They let a customer forward voicemails to their system, which transcribes them and sends them as an email or SMS, as well as still allowing access to the original audio recordings. I just signed up with SimulScribe, which the reporter found to be better and which is the only one to attach the voicemails as audio attachments to emails. I'll report on how well this works.

Good thing I'm not on Sprint anymore - they charge a usurious 20 cents per minute to have calls or voicemails forwarded to another number.

Recently, much of the debate in telecom policy has revolved around network neutrality on broadband networks. But Tim Wu has a great new paper about how the wireless companies are far worse. Not only do they practice traffic discrimination in violation of net neutrality principles, but they go to great additional lengths to deprive consumers of useful features and innovative products.

None of these are new, but Wu assembles them into a convenient, detailed list, including:

• Preventing consumers from using phones other than those approved by the carriers
  
• Crippling phone features such as photo sharing, WiFi, Internet browsers, and even simple call timers so consumers can see how much time they are spending on the phone
  
• In the case of Verizon's BREW system, forcing application developers to go through an extensive screening process to even begin writing applications, and then another complex approval process to get the application launched
  
• Making it nearly impossible for applications to use the features the phone already possesses, especially GPS location information

Simple policy solutions could open up the wireless market to innovation without needlessly regulating the industry. Wu lists a set of good ideas. Even just the first one - ending the stranglehold carriers have to restrict which phones they allow on their networks - would go a long way. Without the ability to keep phones out of the U.S. market carriers would lose the ability to mandate that the manufacturers cripple phone features, or to impose burdensome approvals on the applications.

The FCC recently required a similar opening up of cable networks with its CableCard standard, which allowed electronics makers to build new cable set-top boxes with new features and required cable companies to let consumers connect these devices to the cable network without approval from the cable company. I'm actually somewhat surprised that the FCC, so often in thrall to the companies that made big campaign contributions to the Republicans, would

The openness created by CableCard (if it works - the cable companies are fighting it) is a perfect example of fostering competition and making markets work. There's no reason liberals and conservatives alike shouldn't embrace this kind of policy - it's only telecom industry money standing in the way.

Apple gets huge plaudits for each product it releases - sleek design, simple user interface, powerful features. But Apple's products are also built on another basic principle: do everything their way.

Apple has never played well with others. Sales of PCs surpassed those of Macs when IBM licensed the rights to build PC clones while Apple did not, and when the PC made it easier for software developers to control more PC functions than the Mac did. They only tolerate add-on products that interoperate with the iPod. And the new iPhone, despite its initial chorus of praise, looks to be one of the least flexible devices of its kind.

An article in today's New York Times, "Want an iPhone? Beware the iHandcuffs," discusses the extreme restrictions Apple forces upon its users with music they buy at the iTunes store. In fact, the article reveals, Canadian music publisher Nettwerk allows stores like eMusic to sell songs by leading artists such as Barenaked Ladies and Sarah McLachlan without DRM restrictions, but Apple keeps the DRM on for its own purposes.

Terry McBride, Nettwerk's chief executive, said that the artists initially required Apple to use copy protection, but that this was no longer the case. At this point, he said, copy protection serves only Apple's interests. Josh Bernoff, a principal analyst at Forrester Research, agreed, saying copy protection "just locks people into Apple." He said he had recently asked Apple when the company would remove copy protection and was told, "We see no need to do so."

DRM isn't the only limitation on the iPhone. Despite the ability for GSM customers generally to switch their phones from one provider to another by swapping SIM cards, Apple has apparently gone to great lengths to force buyers of its phone to use Cingular. And Steve Jobs doesn't intend to allow third-party applications on the iPhone either. Continuing the pattern of previous Apple products, it's clear that if Steve Jobs had his way, there would just be Apple and a bunch of consumers, no developers pushing the envelope of what technology can do.

How does Jobs justify this control-freak behavior? He spouts the same reliability excuses wireless companies use to keep their networks closed off - "Cingular doesn't want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up." But the Internet doesn't go down when some application messes up. It's entirely possible to design a network that's robust enough to deal with misbehaving devices. AT&T made the same argument to preserve their monopoly in phone manufacture in the early days of the telephone system.

Innovation happens most when it's easy for someone to improve a piece of an existing system, and plug that in. Since anyone can write software for a personal computer, software developers can give you the ability to do something on your computer even if the computer manufacturer didn't think of it. Many phones have the same flexibility. Steve Jobs doesn't like that world. He'd rather you just bought your devices from Apple, and they do only what Apple lets you do. I'd rather decide for myself, and many consumers will feel the same way. And many observers believe that this will ultimately cripple the iPhone's growth just as it did for the Macintosh twenty years ago.

SNL's "A Special Christmas Box" may be the Internet's hottest comedy right now. But to tickle the very geeky side of your sense of humor, there's xkcd.

I also give honorable mention to this crypto parody and this, to which I can't stop chuckling as long as it's on my screen.

I wouldn't call myself an early adopter of technology. I generally am not the guy who can't stop talking about his new tech gadget. But over the last week, with a break for electioneering, I spent a large chunk of my time purchasing a variety of digital technologies:

Internet: I signed up for cable modem access from Earthlink (via Time Warner's cable infrastructure). Previously, my only Internet connection at home was BroadbandAccess (EVDO) service from Verizon ($80/mo for unlimited). It's fast enough for email, not quite fast enough for video (when viewing YouTube videos I usually have to pause and wait for it to load, then come back in a few minutes). I got by with that for the first six months of living here, but my consumption of video is increasing, so it was time to upgrade. Plus, I disapprove of Verizon's tactics in trying turn the Internet into a walled garden, like it has with its wireless service.

TV: I don't subscribe to cable, since I don't want to watch a lot of TV. But there are a few shows I like, and I'm rarely home at the right time to watch them, so (now that I have Internet at home) I bought a TiVo. Way back when I was working for Tellme, (then) CEO Mike McCue was such an evangelist of TiVo that he bought several employees TiVos, including my roommate Mike.

Like Tellme, TiVo was a great idea that encountered some obstacles, but it's still far superior to the crappy DVRs that cable companies provide. And modern TiVos can transfer recorded shows to your computer or iPod - a great example of a feature that's terrific for consumers and scares the heck out of media companies, so much that they blocked the feature in the new HDTV-enabled TiVo Series 3.

Phone: I haven't had a landline phone since 2002; it would have been longer, but back in the foothills of Cupertino mobile phones didn't work, at least at the time. For the last two years I've had, and loved, the Treo 600, but I'm just out of contract with Sprint and so it was time to consider phone options; in addition to the many advances achieved by new phones, the Treo sound quality was deteriorating due to age. My requirements were: a phone that could be used as a modem, ideally one with EVDO, so I could dump Verizon but still get online while on the train; a phone that could use the new Gmail Mobile application, Google Maps Mobile (which did work on the Treo), and ideally the snazzy new Google Talk for BlackBerry.

I considered the Treo 700p (many reports of crashing problems, and doesn't have the Gmail app yet), BlackBerry 8703e (a little wide, some concerns about battery life), and the Sanyo SCP-8400 (maybe I don't really need a PDA phone). But I decided to stop in the T-Mobile store and loved the new BlackBerry Pearl. It has the form factor of a regular phone, but the keyboard makes text entry much easier, with a 5-key wide keyboard that has only two letters per key arranged in the same pattern as on a QWERTY keyboard (the top row is QW, ER, TY, UI, and OP, etc.) SureType technology allows you to press one key per letter, and does a remarkably good job of figuring out what word you are typing (unlike on phones with three letters per key, there are few words that are ambiguous). I was able to import my database of contacts using the sync function, getting 242 contacts into the phone in one swoop. The Gmail, Maps, and Google Talk applications work great, and I was able to set up the phone-as-modem functionality.

There are just a few downsides. Using the phone for Internet only uses the slower (2G) GPRS network instead of the 2.5G EDGE network, which is itself slower than EVDO (3G) which I could have used if I'd stayed with Sprint. (Here's a good guide to all the different G's of wireless technology.) The modem won't work over Bluetooth, at least not yet. And I can't get Google Calendar, but this is Google Calendar's fault, not the phone's, because mobile access isn't available on any phone.

Now with a fast cable Internet connection, TiVo, and a phone that can easily access email, chat, and maps as well as make quicker calls, I've got voice, text, and video zipping around everywhere!

In the early days of the Internet, there were two types of Internet access: the walled garden "online services" like Prodigy, CompuServe, and what became the most successful of them, AOL; and "raw" Internet access. The first type gave you a managed, controlled, predictable experience. In order to reach users on one of these services, the provider had to work out a special deal. That was time consuming and expensive, but ensured a certain baseline level of quality and decency.

On the other hand, the Internet itself grew to be orders of magnitude larger in the information and services available, because a site operator did not have to get permission from AOL or anyone else. With that freedom came some amount of chaos: there was no guarantee of quality, spam grew, and some even worse stuff. But ultimately, this won out. The managed online services started offering access from their services to the larger Internet, and all but AOL ultimately went out of business, unable to provide greater value than Internet itself where millions of people were creating countless Web sites and services.

Meanwhile, we have another network which is still all "walled gardens" - the cell phone network. As this anonymous entrepreneur writes, creating a service that runs over SMS on a US cell phone network requires the site offering the service to pay thousands of dollars just to have an "aggregator" negotiate with the wireless carriers on your behalf, comply with many asinine and intricate requirements, and wait months for approval. And "unmoderated chatting, flirting and/or peer-to-peer communication services" are prohibited outright by Verizon.

I can create a Web site by paying as little as $20 a month for hosting (free if I just host it on the same server as other sites I run), plus about $9 a year for a domain name. With services like Blogspot or Google Pages, it's free. And if my site doesn't make any money, that's okay. But if it's not profitable for the cell carriers, they won't allow it. When the overhead to create an SMS service and the bar to make it worthwhile are so high, no wonder we haven't had even a tiny fraction of the amount of innovation we have on the Internet.

Fascinatingly, some commenters on that article, who come from the wireless industry world, defend the status quo. One commenter writes that the decency requirements are necessary because of parents who complain to the carriers; another, that because the bandwidth is relatively low, the carriers need to manage the experience to keep out spam and satisfy customers.

It's surely true that for some customers, the purity and cleanliness of a walled-garden experience is desirable. After all, AOL is now building its business around making the Internet safe by blocking spam, viruses, and content unsuitable for children. But consumers have a choice. On the wireless networks, there is no choice. There is no carrier who allows unfettered SMS service creation or allows software developers to release software to install on their phones without restrictions.

Perhaps consumers would still opt for the safer, more managed networks, but I believe they wouldn't. After all, last time consumers has this choice, they chose the wilder but more innovative network. Let's give them the choice again and see what happens.

Sending out Evites where the name of the hosts is something that gives little to no clue as to who is throwing the party, like "Joe, Bill, and Dave" or "Super Dude and the Amazing Princess". It's hard to decide whether to come to your party if I can't figure out who you are!

I have Verizon's "BroadbandAccess" EVDO wireless service with an unlimited plan. When I started the lease on my new place, I decided to try using the Internet through Verizon when there, rather than purchasing DSL or cable.

So far? Based on my subjective experience, it's almost as fast as cable was, and noticeable patches of slowness (unfortunately somewhat common with Optimum cable modem service) area few and far between. Yesterday I downloaded some big files with BitTorrent, and they downloaded comparably quickly to cable. Latency over SSH is a little worse, which is noticeable when I code, but not bad enough to be a real obstacle.

Unless things change, it's bye bye wire-based Internet service, and one more utility company I don't need to deal with any more.