Saturday, November 01, 2003

Post-circuit-switched voicemail I agree with the circuit-switch issues discussed but I also believe half the problems lie in the fact that we are presently stuck in a text communication world online.  Email, IM and even blogging is centered around text.  Why? Because text communication was an obvious and easy first communication method partly because of early bandwidth issues and partly because text is where the majority lived on the standalone PC before the mass moved to the online communication world.  The text editor or text box that looks so trivial today in reality took the industry years to perfect to it's present efficiency as a text authoring tool.  Do you remember WordStar?  If you ever used WordStar you would agree a html text box is a great text authoring GUI advance. Present voice mail interfaces on the audio tool evolution chart are somewhere near the same place typewriters would be on the text tool evolution chart.  The main problem lies in the fact that I see nothing being done to improve the audio or video tool side in regards to authoring tools for the masses (I am not talking about professional tools here).  Everyone thinks that basic audio/video authoring tools should look like tape recorders or act like voice mail interfaces.  Please!!!  I really haven't seen much progress here in the last 10 to 15 years.  This lack of technology development for the masses makes text authoring seem much more efficient.  Most of the technology progress in audio/video for the masses lately has been made on the viewing/listening side.   These developments play more to the consumer broadcast mentality then to the promise of the two-way-web.  Hopefully things will change. Post-circuit-switched voicemail. Nice rant on how "circuit-switched" thinking is holding back advancement in telephony: Assume a phone call requires an (extremely generous) 3Kb per second of audio. One hour of stored audio is about 10Mb of data. This is a pretty modest amount by the standards of modern flash memeory. Your mobile phone is perfectly capable of storing all your voicemail. The network is perfectly capable of transmitting the data in a sensible amount of time. Unlike email, most voicemail is listened to -- the amount of wasted download is small... You should be able to listen to voicemails on your plane journey home. You should be able to reply to them on a store-and-forward basis, even when you're not connected to the network. And most of all, you shouldn't have to use a clunky telephony user interface to navigate a message queue. And you shouldn't be restricted to one device for accessing your own data. Link (via Werblog) [Boing Boing Blog] 3:50:47 PM  comment []    trackback []     Wirelessly beam MP3s to your car's digital audio player It was just a matter of time before someone would put WIFI and a media player together. This car digital audio player is a little pricey but I still would like to have one.  I wonder if you can set it up to look for and connect to multiple wireless WIFI networks (of course not at the same time). IMHO, I believe within a year we will see all players in the media player field with the WIFI feature/option.  The media player WIFI feature is destined to be the next major feature in the evolution of media players. Wirelessly beam MP3s to your car's digital audio player. You know how sometimes you think up a gadget but you figure that no one will ever build it? Well, the Omnifi is one of those gadgets, except that it's real. The Omnifi is a digital media player for your car with a 20GB hard drive and an 802.11b WiFi attachment which actually makes it possible (assuming your car is within range) to wirelessly beam your music directly to your car from your PC. You can also set it to automatically transmit all sorts of information to your car, like the weather, news, etc. The hard drive can also detach and be connected to a PC (sorta like the Phatnoise system) if your car is parked too far away for WiFi. Read... [Gizmodo] 2:47:32 PM  comment []    trackback []

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