Calls over Wi-Fi aren’t exactly new, but I like what Truphone is doing here. The new Truphone+ concept, which blends the Wi-Fi routing service with Truphone’s app, not only adds coverage in areas with weak or no cellular service; it does so smartly. From the press release:

“Truphone+ uses “intelligent routing” to automatically choose whether to carry the call over GSM or Wi-Fi by making real time measurement of signal quality. The user needs only to ‘press call’ to make a secure connection over the highest quality link available.

With an elegant user interface designed to streamline the user experience, Truphone+ puts more control in the hands of the user. A call cost indicator displays the precise per-minute cost so the user can decide when and where they want to make a call, thereby eliminating bill shock.”

So the new app will allow the user to control the voice experience as well as automatically choose the better connection type. And that can save some serious cash on roaming or other charges. The service also allows multiple numbers for a single SIM card; handy for separating work and personal calls or for having a local number in different countries.

Truphone+ supports smartphones and tablets running Apple iOS, Google Android and BlackBerry 10 smartphones and tablets.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Connected world: the consumer technology revolution
• Mobile 2012 and beyond
• CES 2012: a recap and analysis

Anxiety presents your tasks as a simple to-do list in a small semi-transparent window that can hover over the other apps open on your desktop. It’s integrated with Apple’s other applications that posses to-do functionality; double-clicking a list item reveals the task in iCal or Mail for extended editing. Simple shortcuts allow you to see your full list externally.

It’s highly customizable, so you can tailor its appearance and functionality to match your own preferences and workflow, including toggling the application dock item and menubar item, enabling list sorting and setting the list window to disappear when inactive.

Personally, I will stick with Google Tasks for my simple task management needs, because I like being able to access my tasks from anywhere and I use Gmail and Google Calendar through my browser instead of Apple’s apps. But if you use iCal and Mail and want a very lightweight, simple to-do list manager that’s tightly integrated with them, Anxiety is worth checking out (despite its somewhat strange name).

Anxiety is a free download (donations appreciated). It requires Mac OS X Leopard 10.5+.

What task management app do you use?

Related GigaOM Pro content (sub. req.): Report: The Real-Time Enterprise

If you are Nimbuzz, Truphone, Skype or one of the many other Mobile VoIP companies, here is some good news: A UK-based research group says the total number of mobile VoIP minutes will jump from 15 billion in 2010 to 470.6 billion by 2015, thanks to the proliferation of 3G and 4G networks. Juniper Research says the biggest boost will come from the U.S., which will account for 135 billion mobile VoIP minutes by 2015. Juniper recently forecasted that there will be 100 million mobile VoIP users by 2012.

“There are several flavours of mobile VoIP,” says Anthony Cox, Senior Analyst at Juniper Research, noting that operators fear losing traffic to Wi-Fi networks most: “Wi-Fi mobile VoIP is potentially the most damaging of all VoIP traffic, as it bypasses the mobile networks altogether,” he says. “We forecast that mobile VoIP over Wi-Fi will cost operators $5 billion globally by 2015.”

While the traffic minutes are going to grow, it is still difficult to see how much money these mobile upstarts will be able to make. In my opinion, the likely winner of the mobile VoIP sweepstakes is going to be Skype, mostly because it has the biggest network, which allows the service to offer easy in-network calling. As for the rest of them, well, maybe the carriers who hate them so much will end up buying them.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): AT&T, Verizon Grudgingly Move Toward Openness

According to the FCC, Americans take more than 60 million international trips each year. Given that Verizon Wireless, the U.S. carrier with the most customers, still uses CDMA technology, it’s a safe bet that many travelers don’t have a phone that works outside of the country. Verizon does sell a few dual-mode, or “world phones” that use a GSM SIM card and radio, but most Verizon handsets aren’t usable worldwide. And even GSM phones from AT&T and T-Mobile can face compatibility issues outside of the U.S. as networks in other countries can utilize different radio frequencies.

Overall, the FCC has done a nice job with this week’s kick-off blog post and tip sheet. The post is a straight-forward overview of GSM information and roaming challenges, complete with a list of do’s and don’ts before and while traveling. And the tip sheet provides contact information for all four major U.S. carriers for research purposes, a bullet-point list of “Savvy Traveler” strategies and a brief discussion on VoIP services, including some we’ve covered in the past: Skype, Fring and Truphone. Regardless of where you stand on the FCC’s broadband reclassification and net neutrality challenges, you have to give the FCC a little credit with this week’s public awareness effort, which is perfectly timed with vacations now that the kids are out of school.

Photo courtesy Flickr user davipt.

New YouTube App for Windows Mobile and Nokia S60 Phones; the site’s new Mobile App version 2.4 adds a new interface that works well with larger screens, among other things. (YouTube Blog)

How to: Build Your Personal Brand on YouTube; changing a few settings can help you improve your branding. (Mashable)

ISPs, Publishers and Academics Voice Outrage at Digital Economy Bil; plan to disconnect file sharers from Internet causes backlash. (Out-Law.com)

Donkey-Politician Vid Keeps two Azerbaijani Bloggers in Jail; Adnan Hajizade and Emin Milli lost appeal against 2 and 2.5 year sentences that were motivated by them posting a satirical video online. (Ars Technica)

Your Interview with Prime Minister Stephen Harper; Canada’s prime minister follows Obama’s example by responding to YouTube questions. (YouTube Blog)

OnLive Streaming Video Game Service Launches in June With One Huge Catch; a $15 subscription per month on top of video game rental fees could turn many gamers off. (DVICE)

Can a Mouse Cut the Cable?; a New York Times piece on people ditching cable has analyst Bruce Leichtman musing that cord cutters are “really just a bizarre breed of people, usually in New York or San Francisco, who don’t watch a lot of television in the first place.” (New York Times)

In-Stat believes over half of those 288 million subscribers “will be associated with online mobile VoIP providers, under one-third will utilize mobile VoIP with 3G MVNOs or mobile operators, and 11 % with WiMAX/LTE operators.” Thanks to the increased availability of dual-mode phones, VoIP is becoming especially popular in the Asia-Pacific region, nudging the current market leader, Europe, aside. In the meantime, this move to mobile VoIP has prompted some to ask if we’re getting closer to an all-VoIP phone. I think so!

The carriers themselves are reluctantly embracing mobile VoIP, as we’ve previously noted. Today, Truphone teamed up with Australian mobile network operator Optus, for its Truphone Local Anywhere service. These kind of deals are going to become increasingly commonplace, taking annual sales of mobile VoIP applications to $35.2 billion by 2013, according to In-Stat. I wonder how that number would change if you included Skype.

Despite the big numbers, I bet making money isn’t going to be easy for mobile VoIP providers.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

AT&T, Verizon Grudgingly Move Toward Openness

For example, a U.S. resident could call home from the UK for 12 cents per minute on the Local Anywhere service. That same call for an AT&T customer with international roaming would cost nearly 10 times that amount. I see the benefit if you live in or travel to the initially supported countries — Truphone expects to expand the service this year across Europe, in Australia, Hong Kong and South Africa. So Truphone Local Anywhere makes financial sense — just like having a local Google Voice number geographically close to those who call you the most. But what about that MVNO business? How can Truphone succeed where so many before them have failed?

Let’s face it: With the notable exception of Virgin Mobile, very few mobile operators can even say “MVNO” without grimacing in pain. Odds are that this arrangement won’t be profitable in the traditional sense. Truphone isn’t looking to buy cellular service at wholesale and directly resell it at retail to eke out a small profit. Instead of that direct sell method, it appears to be one of indirect sales, in that Truphone hopes the arrangement will increase demand for its services and thus put money in the bank.

At the end of the day, it still looks like a standard yet slightly tweaked MVNO business model — and that’s not a model filled with optimism. In the meantime, it highlights one of the biggest challenges that Truphone and other competing services have to face: lack of control. The company may have an MVNO deal with Vodafone UK, but ultimately, who’s in control of the pipe, the data in it and pricing for it? Not Truphone.

This same lack of control is evident with the company’s VoIP offerings, too. To Truphone’s credit, the company earlier this week discussed its voice services over Wi-Fi vs. those over 3G and noted this very constraint. Karl Good, Truphone’s director of applications, put it this way:

“[U]nlike some of our competitors who have made VoIP calling available over 3G, we will not be doing so until we have developed a solution that will give our users a level of call quality that we are proud of.”

Without direct ownership and a stake in the level of call quality, Truphone simply can’t control the experience. And while I have high hopes for VoIP services — I use them myself on a daily basis — the ultimate issue is that these services are simply here ahead of their time. Voice is indeed a dying business in favor of data, as the numbers clearly show. But voice as data — on your pipe or someone else’s — is currently more advanced than the infrastructure on which it must rely. We’ll have to let history be the judge, of course, but voice isn’t the business I’d want to be in these days.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• Survey: How apps can solve photo management
• Social networks will displace business processes, not socialize them

“Thanksgiving is a day when family and friends come together to celebrate and catch up across the U.S.”, said Geraldine Wilson, CEO of Truphone. “For those people who can’t get home for the holidays, often because distance is too much, a telephone call to let them know how they are is the next best thing. With this initiative, we are allowing people who can’t be together to catch up on this special day.”

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• Where new opportunity lies in the mobile operating system space
• Survey: How apps can solve photo management

Nimbuzz has certainly come a long way. At the time of its launch, almost three years ago, we were pretty critical of the VoIP-on-mobile service because it was a me-too offering that was quite a pain to use. A year-and-a-half later, Nimbuzz introduced a new meta client for the Symbian phones. It allowed you to sign into various IM clients. In addition, it allowed some basic VoIP calling, but it wasn’t really until they introduced the new iPhone client that Nimbuzz started to see some serious traction. My previous post gives a good overview of the Nimbuzz feature set.

The company just announced a super communication client for the iPhone that allows you to communicate in many different ways. For instance, you can make free calls over Wi-Fi to your IM buddies. You can also call folks on their landlines and mobile phones with SkypeOut using any one of Nimbuzz’s 10 VoIP partners including Gizmo5, Vyke, sipgate and A1 and, of course, Skype. This is a new feature in the service, and makes Skype In/Out Services more valuable.

These services also work over 3G and are described as “Nimbuzz Dial-Up VoIP” which essentially makes it possible to call others by dialing a local access number which then connects to anywhere in the world via Nimbuzz VoIP servers.

For the past month, I have been using the pre-release of NimbuzzOut on the iPhone to place calls to my far-flung group of friends and family. The calling prices are pretty good– about 8 cents a minute to India, 2 cents to the U.S., and 3 cents to the UK. If you look around, that is pretty much what you pay with most services — Skype is a bit more expensive.

The voice call quality is on par with Skype, which is still my communication method of choice for work-related calls. NimbuzzOut is dead simple to place calls: Just hit the call button, and you are good to go. You can, of course, use other calling services, but I don’t see any reason why considering Nimbuzz is offering good rates.

NimbuzzOut has a few features I personally like — you can natively use the phone client to buy additional minutes. I also like the fact that the client uses the native address book and doesn’t create a duplicate contact list. The Symbian client actually lets you edit, add and delete contacts from your address book.

There are a few things I don’t like: If you leave the notifications on, the client will run down your battery and leave the phone pretty useless. If you are using it on an iPhone, then you have to use the Wi-Fi connection, which makes me a tad upset because you can make Skype calls over 3G. You can make NimbuzzOut calls via 3G on Symbian phones, however.

Bottom line: If you are looking for a well-designed, easy-to-use, all-in-one messaging client that also makes cheap long-distance calls, then you don’t need to look any further than Nimbuzz. I have no qualms in recommending NimbuzzOut.

P.S. There is a reward for those who read the complete post. If you are among the first 50 people who send their name and Nimbuzz username to gigaom@nimbuzz.com, the company will give you a $25 NimbuzzOut credit.

Update: This offer is now closed. Thanks for participating.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• The future of mobile: a segment analysis by GigaOM Pro
• Forecast: the converged mobile messaging market
• Could Skype in Your Pocket Beat the iPod Touch?