GigaOM » instant messaging

Imo.im delves deeper into voice calling with iPhone support

Kevin Fitchard — Mon, 13 Aug 2012 07:00:54 +0000

All-in-one instant messaging service imo.im is expanding beyond its text roots into the world of voice. On Monday it announced a new update for its iPhone app, supporting free VoIP calls between imo users on either cellular or Wi-Fi connections.

The iPhone update complements the VoIP calling feature it added to Android back in February. There’s no way of dialing out from the service, which only works between VoIP-enabled clients, but imo.im doesn’t face the same network effect problems of other early stage over-the-top IP communications startups. Since ex-Googler Georges Harik and his brother Ralph Harik founded the company in 2007, it has already built up a healthy customer base for its primary IM service.

Imo bridges the IM protocols of 11 different chat platforms, from Facebook and GTalk to AOL,Yahoo and Microsofts’ instant messengers, allowing customers to send text, multimedia and even short voice messages to any of those users through a single client. According to the company its app has been downloaded 4 million times on the iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry and Nokia-Symbian platforms, and it averages 700,000 ~~million~~ daily users sending a combined 50 million messages a day.

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As mobile evolves, communications app Nimbuzz tops 100M users

Kevin C. Tofel — Wed, 01 Aug 2012 15:05:26 +0000

From a few to 100 million users in five years is pretty impressive, and that’s exactly what Nimbuzz has done. The Netherlands-based mobile communications company announced on Tuesday that it just crossed the 100 million user mark with 6.5 million coming from the U.S. The company provides a cross-platform mobile app that features VoIP calls, multi-platform instant messaging and direct file sharing between users.

Our first look at Nimbuzz in early 2007 left us uninspired. But perhaps the company isn’t to blame when you consider the mobile landscape at that time. Apple’s iPhone wasn’t yet in consumer hands, Symbian was the top smartphone platform, and here in the U.S., for example, 3G data networks were still getting rolled out and adopted by consumers. Fast forward 18 months and our second look at Nimbuzz showed far more promise as the evolution of mobile picked up the pace.

Why such growth in the takeup rate for Nimbuzz as well as other related communcations services from Skype, Fring, Truphone and others? The answer already appeared above: mobile. Gone are the days where we had to be in a certain place to get a call on wired line. Instead, our calls are finding us, regardless of our location, the network we’re on, or — perhaps more importantly — whatever device we’re using.

Going cross-platform has surely helped Nimbuzz just as support for various IM networks has: Let the consumers pick their device and support it whatever that choice is. It’s a smart move and one that Nimbuzz embraced early through Symbian, Java, Windows Mobile, desktops and eventually the newer mobile platforms such as iOS and Android. Of course, it never hurts to offer a free or low-cost service that lowers the bill from your network operator too!

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How social discovery is transforming entertainment

Mark Mulligan — Wed, 23 May 2012 06:55:39 +0000

Gone are the days of traditional content recommendations, which were previously the exclusive domain of professional media outlets. Now, with the growing abundance of social networks and recommendations tools available to anyone, recommendations come from Facebook, Twitter, friends, email newsletters and countless other methods. This report examines the new world of discovery and recommendations and how their influence is creating opportunities and challenges for traditional media marketers.

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Public, private or hybrid? How to move to the cloud

Barb Darrow — Mon, 07 May 2012 21:09:40 +0000

As is often discussed at GigaOM Pro, beleaguered IT pros are the ones often left to figure out which applications and data should move first and to which type of cloud. But with more and more business leaders now turning to this topic, the questions — and confusion — are multiplying. With so much to consider, we’ve broken down the cloud discussion to help companies decide which strategy is right for their business. Let’s take a look.

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Got a Web 2.0 service? Tyntec will slap a phone number on it

Kevin Fitchard — Wed, 02 May 2012 18:27:00 +0000

Your Facebook or LinkedIn account doesn’t have a phone number, but one day it might if Tyntec has anything to say about it. The German company wants to build a virtual mobile phone into any Web 2.0 service whose primary mission is interpersonal networking. By doing so Tyntec can bridge the gap between two flourishing yet largely disconnected worlds: over-the-top IP communications and mobile.

The service is called tt.One and assigns a real phone number either temporarily or permanently to almost anything, whether it’s a social network ID, IM account, mobile app or even an online dating service profile. That phone number can then be used to make voice calls and send text and multimedia messages into and outside or the app or service.

Tyntec has been working with Web-based peer-to-peer messaging company Pinger in Europe to extend its voice and text messaging services beyond its app, allowing members to send SMS messages to any mobile phone. But on Wednesday, Tyntec announced plans to expand to the U.S. and Canada (Pinger’s U.S. SMS service is powered by a competitor). CEO Michael Kowalzik said there is a huge opportunity in North America given the sheer volume of new over-the-top communications services emerging here each year.

How it works

Tyntec’s technology sounds like a lot like Google Voice and SkypeIn, and the principles are the same. The difference is that Google and Skype have built their own vast infrastructures, something that most Web companies have neither the money or inclination to do.

Instead, Tyntec is working directly with the mobile carriers, building a parallel network of SMS centers and servers within their networks. That allows Tyntec to replicate every aspect of a mobile phone – SMS, voice, subscriber authentication, and, of course, an actual phone number – and virtualize it in an IP environment.

“In the end, we’re operating a whole separate core network within the operator,” said Kowalzik said. “Over-the-top players want to get into the legacy mobile world, and we can give them that access.”

Not all operators are willing to play ball

Why would operators allow such access when over-the-top players are the ones cannibalizing their voice and SMS revenues? The short answer is they get paid. Tyntec functions essentially like an MVNO, buying SMS transactions, voice minutes and phone numbers from its operator partners at wholesale rates. In the case of most over-the-top traffic, they see no revenue at all, except what they collect in data subscriptions. By offering up access to their networks, they share in wealth rather than just stand idly by, Kowalzik said.

But there’s a Catch-22: The ubiquity of their services is really the only thing protecting the operators from losing their SMS and voice revenue entirely. If every app or Web service could reach outside of its confines and touch 6 billion mobile devices, there would be little reason for consumers to use carriers’ voice and SMS services at all. That’s why Tyntec’s partners have been smaller operators like Germany’s E-Plus that are looking for a way to differentiate themselves from their larger competitors, Kowalzik said – they have a lot less to lose.

Kowalzik wouldn’t reveal Tyntec’s North American carrier partners, but it’s probably a safe bet they aren’t AT&T and Verizon. In Canada, Rogers has actually tried to head off the over-the-top onslaught by launching its own softphone service called One Number. It will be interesting to see if more Web companies begin to use Tyntec and other virtual number services like those offered by Bandwidth.com to take the battle even further to the operators.

Feature image courtesy of Flickr user @boetter

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SMS 2.0 could make its first appearance at MWC

Kevin Fitchard — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 20:20:39 +0000

SMS is getting a facelift at Mobile World Congress. IP services developer Mavenir Systems (see disclosure) is launching a new cloud messaging platform next week that could turn carriers’ staid old text messaging into a much more vibrant communications platform on par with services like Apple’s iMessage. But most importantly the technology preserves SMS’s most valuable asset: its ubiquity.

Let’s face it: SMS is a dinosaur. Except for the addition of basic multimedia through MMS, it’s hardly evolved in a decade. A rash of new mobile IP services have emerged to profit from SMS’s shortcomings: iMessage, BlackBerry Messenger, Google Chat and countless other IM and social networking apps. Not only do they offer more features and functions than SMS, they have the ultimate benefit of being free. Ovum estimated that, globally, operators missed out on $22.6 billion in SMS revenues in 2010 and 2011 as IP social messaging apps took over their traditional texting traffic.

The ironic thing is that operators could have lost much, much more. SMS traffic is still increasing despite the move to smartphones, and the reason is SMS has one ace in the hole: it works. I can send a text message to almost any mobile phone number in the world, and I’m virtually assured my intended recipient will receive it. Platforms like iMessage and Messenger require you to have an iOS or BlackBerry device. IM and social messaging services require you and your friends to have an account and their apps installed on your phones.

SMS has the added benefit of using the signaling channel of an operator’s network to transmit its payload, ensuring the message will go through no matter what network and what network conditions it traverses. IP services depend on having a decent data connection, which is hardly a given, no matter how far we’ve come with 3G and 4G.

Bridging the IP and SMS worlds

What Mavenir proposes is to combine the universality of SMS with the IP messaging features that SMS technology can’t support: live chat, group messaging, multimedia sharing, and network storage for shared files. But rather than tie the service to a particular device ecosystem like Apple or a particular account like Google, Mavenir’s Mobile Cloud Messenging (MCM) is tied to a phone number, just like SMS.

Mavenir’s platform isn’t standards based, which would normally be a big problem. It depends on operators running Mavenir’s network equipment and pre-installing Mavenir’s client on all devices. If your operator isn’t a Mavenir customer, then those richer features won’t work for you. At first glance, it seems Mavenir is asking us to substitute Apple’s proprietary solution for its own. But the beauty of Mavenir’s implementation is that it simply defaults to SMS and MMS if it doesn’t find its client or server at the other end of the message.

“We have enabled this whole interoperability with MMS and SMS on the backend,” VP of marketing Shubh Agarwal said. “You’re not restricted to talking to other customers on the carrier’s networks or phones with the MCM client. … It will simply use the SMS channel rather than the IP channel.”

Of course, all of those extra features go away if the message is forced onto the SMS channel, but the point is that MCM acts as a bridge between today’s new richer IP services and old reliable text messaging. Except for SMS forwarding and other gimmicky approaches to the technology, the two camps have always been isolated. MCM probably won’t stop the flood of users to free IM platforms, but by offering more features, operators could at least try to justify the SMS rates they’re charging.

Ideally, a platform like MCM becomes part of a standard, not a proprietary and closed system, and Shubh claimed that Mavenir has the exact same aim. The problem is the standards process is slow and unwieldy. The GSMA and many of the operators have backed a technology called Rich Communications Suite, which promises all of the features of MCM plus video chat and instant file sharing. RCS, however, requires a lot of network ingredients that will take operators years to find: LTE, moving voice and SMS over to LTE (or VoLTE), an overhaul of their core service delivery architectures (know as IMS), and the replacement of billions of phones’ SMS clients with RCS clients.

Shubh said Mavenir plans to integrate MCM with RCS standards as they emerge, and is already working heavily within the VoLTE standards space. But operators need to start moving SMS forward while waiting for those standard to become commercially viable, Shubh said. Otherwise, they’ll watch all of their SMS traffic disappear into the IP ether.

Disclosure: Mavenir Systems is backed by Alloy Ventures, which also backs GigaOmni Media, the parent company of GigaOM. Alloy’s Ammar Hanafi is on the board of both companies.

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Twitter not real time enough? Try adding Bonfire chat

Bobbie Johnson — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 13:00:10 +0000

You know the usual litany of complaints about Twitter: it’s full of inane ramblings; it’s stuffed with unverified information — or it’s just too much information for our poor brains to cope with.

But not everybody thinks that Twitter is too much. In fact, U.K.-service Bonfire.im wants to turn up the heat — by adding a chat interface on top of Twitter itself.

Bonfire, which has just gone live, is a browser extension that uses some smart code and clever techniques to add an instant messaging layer into the Twitter website. If another user you follow is currently on Twitter and using Bonfire, they’ll have a little green light next to their name — just click on their button and you can start up a chat session right there, without ever leaving the page.

Founder Josh Russell describes it as “Facebook chat for Twitter”, which gives you a good idea of what it feels like to use — and to some degree what it looks like, too. But it’s also more than that: it brings the idea of presence to the site too, which in many ways could end up being as important to the service as the ability to talk. After all, it’s one thing to read people’s messages; it’s quite another to be able to see that they’re looking directly at Twitter right at that moment.

If used properly Bonfire could not only be a godsend for IM and Twitter addicts — but for all the people who follow them, too. After all, think of all those times you’ve been barraged with two people chatting away publicly to each other and wanted to tell them to take it off Twitter… well, now they can do it really easily.

Of course, Twitter already has a way for people to have private conversations, through direct messaging — but it’s got an entirely different interface, it’s a long, long way from real-time and it suffers from a few interface problems. Bonfire could prove to be a smart way for — whether it’s individuals, groups of friends, or companies who use Twitter for customer service.

It’s not going to be for everyone, but with 100 million active users globally Twitter is a broad church. Russell suggests there may be a significant audience for what he’s offering — particularly for those who are already heavy IM or BlackBerry Messaging users, for example.

“Twitter is a big place,” he says. “It’s hard to nail down a typical Twitter user. But we think it’s likely that we’ll see both the BBM generation and people who get their news from Twitter being big groups of initial users.”

It’s still very early days — the team has been working on the service for just a few months, with some small seed investment — and the feature set is fairly limited right now. But ultimately, says Russell, Bonfire may consider developing further features or adding other platforms, too — but he says it’s important to avoid mission creep for what is already a potentially overwhelming product.

“We’re building Bonfire to service as many people as possible, and we have that in mind when considering every feature,” he says.

Still, for anyone who thinks that adding instant messaging is just too much to cope with for Twitter users, there’s a one-word answer: Tweetdeck. The power users’ client of choice, also based in London, is utterly overwhelming to anyone new to Twitter… and yet it was so well-used that it ended up being bought by the service itself in a deal estimated at $40 million last year.

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How to cure the common conference call

Jessica Stillman — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 13:00:02 +0000

Viewed as a necessary evil by managers, conference calls are often loathed by employees. Take ZDNet’s Jason Perlow, who recently penned a long post entitled “The Conference Call: Scourge of IT,” for example. In it, Perlow decries how much time he, as a web worker, spends on conference calls:

I’ve been having conference calls that end up resulting in additional conference calls to discuss the findings of the previous conference call, and then having more conference calls that are required with another group of people because some folks got left out of the loop either purposely or accidentally and then we have to entirely or partially re-cap them… with another conference call.

It doesn’t matter if 20 email chains go back and forth that summarize the calls, the conferences never seem to end. Effectively, each successive conference call turns into a partial repeat of the one before it, resulting in a vicious cycle of “Groundhog Day” all week long.

Do you know how I realize that conference calls are becoming a serious problem? I have three VOIP handsets that I have dedicated to my business line. It’s not unusual for me to completely chain-smoke the charging on all three handsets for a 10 or 12 hour workday, of which 70 to 80 percent of that day is dedicated to conference calls.

And it’s not just Perlow who is experiencing conference call issues. As director of business development at the Acumen Fund, Sacha Dichter is pretty far removed from the world of IT, but he has a similar complaint to Perlow — conference calls can really suck. Dichter diagnosis many of his calls as suffering from “telephonitis,” which he described as “the process whereby otherwise conversant, engaged, active people become silent in the face of a group conference call.” To fight the dread condition, Dichter offers a number of tips including:

When silence starts to set in, start cold calling people. This has two effects: making sure you’re hearing from people, and creating an incentive (for those who don’t like being called on) for people to speak up when they have something to say.

Never equate silence with agreement. It’s bad enough to do this in person. Worse still on the phone.

Marketing guru and author Seth Godin has experienced the telephonitis phenomenon as well, but he offers a different solution –- using chat in parallel with voice calls (he recommends Campfire), which he says offers three advantages:

When you put text chat in parallel with a voice conference call, magical things happen. The first is that everyone participates. If you don’t, it’s noticeable and you won’t be invited back.

Second, the voice part of the call acts as a narrative for the chat part, allowing people to highlight or respond to what’s being said.

Most of all, it creates organized, trackable chaos, which was the reason for the meeting in the first place.

In a previous WebWorkerDaily Tales from the Trenches posts, Orange Business Services’ Mark Fitzpatrick said his team had great success with Godin’s parallel chat technique. Keeping a chat log of calls and reactions to what’s been said is also one possible solution to Perlow’s complaint about time-wasting “catch-up” conference calls, allowing those that missed earlier information to read up on what they missed rather than being told over yet another call.

How does your team battle telephonitis and conference call overload?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Editor B, CC 2.0.

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Google+ bug can expose IM conversations

Janko Roettgers — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 21:00:36 +0000

Updated. A bug in the Google Talk integration of Google+ can give users under some circumstances access to the IM contacts and conversations of other users on shared computers, making it possible to eavesdrop on chat sessions in real time. Google has acknowledged the issue and said it is working on a fix. The bug can also affect users with multiple Google accounts, which suggests Google+ may need some way of linking identities across accounts.

Google+ is offering its users the ability to have IM conversations through a Google Talk integration that’s very similar to the way the service is integrated within GMail. Part of that integration is regular contact with Google’s IM servers, which seems to be the core of this particular bug. Here’s how it works:

Let’s say Peter logs into GMail and Google+, then leaves both windows open on his computer. Peter’s Wi-Fi connection goes out for a minute, causing his Google Talk session within Google+ to lose sync and wait a few minutes to reconnect. Mary now borrows his computer, logs Peter out of GMail and logs into her own GMail account. The Google Talk session within Peter’s Google+ page finally decides it’s time to call home – and then automatically reconnects under Mary’s Google Talk account.

Mary ~~logs out of her email,~~ closes the browser window she used and hands the computer back to Peter. He’ll find now that he is still logged into Mary’s Google Talk account within his Google+ page. To make matters worse, any IM message Mary sends from a different device automatically gets relayed to Peter on his machine.

A Google spokesperson told me today that this looks like a rare bug that is currently being addressed. He also said that Google generally recommends to always log out of your Google account if you share a computer. ~~However, this wouldn’t have helped Mary, since she dutifully logged out of GMail at the end of her session, unaware of the fact that her IM session persisted within Peter’s Google+ page.~~ Correction: Turns out that logging out of your GMail account actually does force the Google Talk session to disconnect a few seconds later. However, Mary’s Google Talk session will persist if Mary simply closes her browser window and Peter uses another login screen instance to access his GMail account. In fact, Peter will be able to access both his and Mary’s Google Talk account simultaneously without still being logged into her GMail account.

To be fair, it’s unlikely that many people will run into this issue — even though it happened to me yesterday, resulting in some very confused IM exchanges between me and my wife’s work colleagues before we finally figured out what had happened. But a Google+ user has told us that the same has happened to him with his own multiple GMail accounts, suggesting that Google may have to find a way to unify multiple accounts under one Google+ identity.

Google+ users have already been vocal about the inability to access the service with enterprise Google accounts, forcing users to revert back to their personal emails for Google+ usage. Google has said that it will add enterprise support to Google+ in the future, but hasn’t given a timeline for doing so.

It might be a good idea for Google to take the roll-out of enterprise access one step further, allowing people to link their personal and professional accounts under one Google+ identity. This would not only allow users to share content with contacts across their multiple Google accounts, but also simplify the discovery of Google+ users within the network, many of which now show up with multiple but separate Google accounts.

Update (08/11/2011): A Google spokesperson told me that the bug in question has since been fixed.

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Skype adds XMPP support, IM interoperability next?

Janko Roettgers — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 19:30:35 +0000

Skype has quietly added XMPP support to the most recent beta version of its Windows client, according to a report from Skype Journal. Skype for Windows 5.5, which was released last week, added Facebook integration to the VOIP service. A look under the covers reveals that this is done through XMPP, the open standards protocol that’s at the core of Google Talk and supported by a number of other IM patforms.

Skype’s most recent Windows beta allows its users to have IM conversations with Facebook users as well as integration of Facebook contacts and news feeds. The folks at Skype Journal took a closer at the application’s network traffic, which revealed that it uses XMPP to communicate with Facebook’s servers.

This type of integration could in the future be used to achieve interoperability with other IM platforms. Microsoft’s own Windows Live Messenger currently doesn’t support XMPP, but companies like Yahoo and AOL have been offering some support for the protocol. Facebook added XMPP support to its platform in 2009 to make its chat service more widely available as well.

By far the biggest supporter of XMPP is Google. Not only is the company’s IM service based on the protocol, but it’s also one of the main financial backers of the XMPP Standards Foundation. Just last week, the company announced that it was transitioning elements of its VOIP technology to Jingle, a signaling protocol based on XMPP.

Speaking of VOIP: The fact that Skype has started to support an open standards protocol doesn’t meant hat you’ll see voice or video chat interoperability any time soon. Skype has been using it own, proprietary encryption and communications protocols for its VOIP functionality, and it’s unlikely that Microsoft would abandon these technologies in favor of Google-backed open standards.

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