It has been three weeks since our launch of the peer-to-peer communications community, fwdOUT.

It turns out that it is possible in 2005 for total strangers to form a world-wide community, get together and offer each other the ability to make a local phone call in exchange for the ability to do the same thing themselves...proving that in 2005, on the internet, in the words of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, "The Love you Take is equal to the Love you Make."

Our global fwdOUT "social communications" community experiment continues on.

Number of Registered fwdOUT Nodes: 1133
Number of Nodes Online right now: 126
Number of Routes available right now: 1241
Number of Google hits on fwdOUT: 2490

While the fwdOUT community currently has the capacity in theory to deliver 668,863 calls, there will always be a mismatch between the place a given member of fwdOUT wants to be able to reach at any given moment and the availability of a node that can deliver a local call into that specific route at that given moment.

To date, since launch, the fwdOUT network as seen the following activity:

Total Number of fwdOUT Call Attempts: 2576
Total Number of fwdOUT Answered Calls: 648

Right now, fwdOUT can deliver calls to certain cities in the following 23 countries: Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Philippines, Russia, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, UK, USA. Personally, I think this is pretty cool.

New routes and cities become available all the time. We now provide a route availability tool available for download from the fwdOUT FAQ. This application requires the .net framework to be installed.

Ed Guy is looking into hosting a fwdOUT BoF session at Spring 2005 VON to provide a place for some of our friends who are running fwdOUT nodes to get together and compare notes.

We are currently working on a version of fwdOUT for the worldwide ham radio community.

9:10:31 PM    

As much as we’d rather not drop yet another post on the HP hw6500 iPAQ Mobile Messenger so soon, details are slowly spilling out—now we have preliminary reports that the device will be announced March 17th, and will be carrier-available by Q2. It will come as no surprise that being an EDGE-enabled phone, Cingular will probably be its carrier in the states, but it wouldn’t be unheard of for T-Mobile to pick it up anyway. Oh, and those measurements we did? Well, they weren’t perfect (we quoted 4.75 x 2.86 x 0.77-0.9), but we came close enough: it should be 4.5 x 2.8 x 0.63-inches. We’ll keep you in the know!

9:05:09 PM    

You know we’re hyped on the idea of peer-to-peer file sharing coming to cellphones and other mobile devices, but Melodeo’s new Mobile Music Solution is not how we wanted things to go down. It’s an application for cellphones that lets you share songs with other people (who also have Mobile Music Solution installed), but the catch is that there is loads of DRM involved, so if you send someone a song over Bluetooth (which given Bluetooth’s bandwidth, could take a while), unless they want to pay they can only listen to a 30 second clip. They’re launching the service in Europe soon, but it sounds like the only major label they have on board is Warner Music Group. If restrictive, DRM-laden P2P didn’t rocket to success on the PC, why is it that it’ll be a success on cellphones, where the experience is bound to be even less satisfying? We understand that Lil Jon gots to get paid, but if we had to guess, we’d suspect that most people would just want to get their music on to their phone the old-fashioned way: by transferring it over from their computer. Downloading directly to the phone is going to be a distant 2nd (at least until connections speeds go up and data tariffs go way down), and some complicated system for wirelessly buying music from your friend’s phone is probably going to be even less popular than that.





[Via TechDirt]

8:55:23 PM