If you’ve looking at trying to find a cheap way to make long distance calls from your mobile phone, you might want to have a look at LowCostMob, which lays out all the various options and lets you do comparison shopping on the rates. Several favorite companies are listed there, including a few that I had never heard of.

Of course, it’s not all about price, though in these times of uncertainty about the world economy, price certainly is a concern. The one thing I don’t see in the various comparisons is call quality. Of course, that’s a highly subjective thing and subject to a number of factors anyway. However, it’s something you need to be aware of when you pick one of these services to try.

There are many books I have not read by the great Ray Bradbury, but one that I’ve heard about on and off over the years was Fahrenheit 451. The title comes from the fact that paper catches fire at 451 degrees Fahrenheit, and a lot of paper–in the form of books–are burned in this story.

Prior to reading the book, I watched the 1966 movie of the same name, which adapted the book for the silver screen. While the basic story is the same, the movie changed several critical elements of the story. While I found the movie to be good, the book was far better.

Despite the story being more than 50 years old now, it holds up surprisingly well. We’re still waiting for the mechanical hounds, televisions are as huge as walls and people walk around oblivious to the world with contraptions in their ears. There is more entertainment than you could possibly shake a stick at.

While there are several themes in this book, the one that resonated within me the strongest was the rage against conformity. Throughout the book, society was immersed in televised and auditory media designed to delight and entertain, not to provoke any serious thought. The educational system of this fictional future society reinforced this by keeping children busy with memorizing facts and activities, giving them no time to stop and think.

The reason books were burned was because they promoted independent thought–thought that might make people unhappy. This fictional society saw this as a bad thing. Books were made illegal and firemen–with a long history of putting fires out–were charged with actually starting fires–namely to burn books.

The fictional “conformed” society reminds me a bit of the blogosphere. While there are many, many voices in the blogosphere, there seems to be a lack of differing points of view. We call this the “echo chamber,” and I could not help but draw a parallel to the fictional society in Fahrenheit 451.

I think the echo chamber, among many other factors, has dampened my passion for writing. The reason I am reading actual books versus the same old stuff in the blogosphere is that I am trying to find some new ideas and reawaken some old ones. Sure, you can find new ideas online, but I think a change of venue from the computer screen to a book is part of the process.

In any case, this book is very good. Highly recommended read. Even though I am not a fast reader, I was able to finish this book in the course of a few hours. It will certainly give you something to think about

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Andrew Hay and Warren Verbanec, two of my former co-workers, along with Peter Giannoulis and Keli Hay have come together to make the Nokia Firewall, VPN, and IPSO Configuration Guide. These folks have put together a comprehensive tome covering all of Nokia’s network security solutions, though the primary focus is on Nokia IPSO and Check Point VPN-1. I also played a small role in this book by writing the foreward for it, as well as helping both Andrew and Warren with various things over the years.

Of course, since the time this book was finished, but before it was printed and bound, and available on amazom.com and other places, Nokia announced it was selling off the Security Appliance business. Even if the boxes have a different name on them, which must happen eventually as result of new ownership, they’ll still be the same high-quality systems you’ve come to know and love from Nokia.

Starting another conference. In a down economy. Are you crazy? Personally, I think not, mainly because we’re talking about our good buddy Jeff Pulver, who started the Voice on the Net (VON) conferences back before VoIP became a household–or at least a business–word.

This new conference called SocComm isn’t about VoIP. It’s about social communications. It’s about all the ways people communicate with each other. Things like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs, online games, and more.

Quoting from Jeff’s blog:

“Presence” is quickly becoming the trigger point for communication. I grew up in an era where the dial-tone on my home phone meant something to me. Today and in the future I believe that Presence is the new Dial-tone and that more and more communication sessions will happen because of presence. The evolution of presence has huge implications for a number of industries, including: advertising, media and telecom.

Let me repeat what he said: presence is the new dial-tone. I think that’s a powerful statement that has all kinds of implications. This conference will explore what exactly this means.

SocComm 2009 will be taking place February 10-11 in New York City. Jeff is looking for speakers for this event. He’ll take proposals until 5th December 2008, so if you’re interested, let him know!

I’d love to go to this conference myself, though I’m not sure how I am going to afford to make the trek. I can assure you, though, it will be well worth your time.

Image of boingo

A couple years ago, I found out they were putting WiFi on the ferries in Washington State. Being as I rarely take the ferries around here, it’s not something I’ve been tracking all that closely. However, I do appreciate how useful it would be to have–particularly on that hour-long Bremerton to Seattle run

The entire fleet of ferries and ferry terminals does not have WiFi yet, but it’s certainly expanded from when I heard about it a couple of years ago. 11 Washington State Ferries terminals and 15 Ferries offer WiFi service today.

And now, those floating WiFi hotspots are owned by the folks at Boingo. Boingo has announced they’re taking over WiFi on the ferries from Parsons Transportation Group. The most immediate thing that customers will notice, aside from the new splash page, is the price will go down to $21.95/mo from the $29.95/mo it originally was. In addition, customers will be able to use WiFi at all of Boingo’s locations throughout the U.S. and Canada for that price, not just the ferries. If you have a supported mobile phone, you can use Boingo Mobile for only $7.95/mo!

Seems like a win-win for everyone involved. Passengers get a better deal, more access, and their WiFi is now managed by people that actually know how to do it. What’s not to like?

As I’m trying to process all the email in my inbox right now, I ran across something that I thought would be cool to write about. However, the PR firm made a big mistake: they didn’t get my name right. It wasn’t spelled wrong–a problem I’ve constantly had to deal with throughout my life, thanks to whatever drugs my dad was on when he named me–but it was just flat out the wrong name.

If you can’t at least get my name right when you pitch me in email, I’m not going to write about your (client’s) products, simple as that. It’s not hard to figure out what my name is, or even how to spell it right. Getting it wrong on the first go, that’s just sloppy, sloppy PR.

Image via CrunchBase

Perhaps I am getting a bit too cynical for my own good. To me, it just seems obvious that Junction Networks OnSIP hosted PBX solution can connect up with Fring, a mobile VoIP/IM client that supports many phones, including the Apple iPhone and my beloved Nokia S60 handsets. You might, therefore, wonder why it’s worthy of a press release since it seems so obvious.

Both Fring and OnSIP speak SIP, the lingua franca of voice over IP. OnSIP allows you to use any old SIP client as an extension to the hosted PBX. Fring can be configured to talk to any SIP-enabled service. Put the two together, and you’ve suddenly extended your PBX to the mobile phone.

Of course, given the Nokia handsets I carry, I don’t even need Fring. I can just configure my Nokia handsets to talk to OnSIP directly. Of course, it’s not something that I would expect the average Joe to try and do. Fring would certainly make it a lot easier to do.

While I am a bit ho-hum about this press release myself, in general I think it’s smart PR. It’s functionality people want. It’s free functionality for both OnSIP and Fring, simply by speaking SIP and making it easy to interoperate. Letting the world know about it is the right thing.

The latest post on the CTIA blog didn’t make a lot of sense. They were arguing against spectrum caps. Of course, they did nothing to directly explain what spectrum caps are and instead chose to use a bunch of flawed analogies to describe it.

In short, there is a fixed amount of spectrum available for wireless carriers to use to provide service. All carriers. In order to ensure there are enough carriers providing service to have some semblance of competition, there are caps on the amount of spectrum a single carrier can control.

The main reason this topic of spectrum caps is even coming up is because of the Verizon Wireless/Alltel merger, which was recently approved by all the government agencies. Of course, the merger is without some conditions, one being that Verizon has to give up spectrum in over 100 markets in order to comply with spectrum caps. Makes me wonder who the CTIA is really representing here.

The first analogy the CTIA tries to draw is that the spectrum caps are a bit like “setting a computer cap based on a 1992 computer’s specs - it would be like adopting a cap of 4 MB RAM and a 40 MB hard-drive and saying that no new applications can be written requiring more than that.” Some pretty innovative computing came out of those dark ages. Sure, it requires a bit more work, but it’s possible.

The second analogy: it’s like saying no highway should be more than two lanes. Unlike a road, where cars are generally a fixed size, one can always make more efficient use of spectrum. Look at the 802.11 WiFi. The original 802.11 specification–that predates b, g or n–was 2mb/s. The current draft 802.11n can go 300mb/s. The same can be said of the mobile phone networks themselves. AMPS–the old analog spectrum–required a lot of spectrum, CDMA and GSM use spectrum more efficiently.

The final analogy they use: spectrum caps are a bit like “restricting the number of coffee shops a company could have in a given city.” This is somewhat true, but keep in mind that there is a limited, fixed amount of spectrum available for all carriers to use. What the spectrum caps do is ensure that no one carrier controls too much of the spectrum to allow multiple carriers to exist, i.e. not all coffee shops are Starbucks.

Let’s take the CTIA’s position on spectrum caps to its foregone conclusion: without any spectrum caps, a single carrier could conceivably control all of the spectrum in a given market. Given there is only a fixed amount of spectrum available for mobile telephony, spectrum caps ensure it is possible for multiple providers to provide service in any given area. So how is lifting the spectrum caps helping competition exactly?

I will agree this is not the most optimal solution, but while I tend to think universal service is important, I think that mandate can be filled without lifting the spectrum caps,thus preserving competition. What do you think?

Growing up, The Electric Company was one of my favorite shows. I didn’t realize necessarily that it was trying to teach me how to read, or that it had big-name stars acting in it. It was just a fun show to watch after Sesame Street.

While I don’t make a habit of watching kids TV, it is an occupational hazard of having kids and working at home. One day, after one of the kids shows on PBS, there was a preview for something called The Electric Company. No, it’s not what I grew up with, but the segment or two they showed had elements of what I remember.

Then I go find the site PBS has set up for The Electric Company, which is set to premiere in January 2009. While it certainly has a lot of the same educational elements, and includes lots of animated vignettes like the original, they’ve turned what used to be a daily variety show for kids into a weekly show with an actual plot.

This show is coming out in a very different time from the 1970, when the original aired. Educational TV was still a relatively new concept in America, and there wasn’t a whole lot of other choices. There certainly wasn’t computers, the Internet, mobile phones, and who-knows what else. In the early part of the 21st Century, we’ve got 500 channels on TV, a bazillion web pages on the Internet, mobile phones, and more. Much like finding this blog post amongs the infinite bits of the Internet might be a challenge, getting the word out about The Electric Company and breaking through to kids is going to be a challenge.

Why am I writing about this program here, on a technology blog? Very simple: reading is important to technology. It’s important to just about anything else you do in life as well. It’s one of those fundamental building blocks.

And maybe, if you have kids around the 7-9 age range and you happen to stumble across this post, you’ll take a look at this program on your local PBS station when it comes out in January. Maybe the kids will like it, maybe they won’t. Hard to say. Given Sesame Workshop’s past history of excellent educational shows, it’s certainly worth a try.

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Here I was grousing about not finding something to be passionate about and today, my fellow Nokians in Nokia Research Center have come up with a service called Nokia Friend View that combines social networking and location in a compelling way.

Nokia Friend View requires a client that runs on your S60 3rd Edition device. Status can be updated easily from the mobile phone. Your location can be updated automatically either with GPS, using cell phone tower location, or manually. If you’re not comfortable sharing your location, or you want to save some battery life, you can always turn this feature off as you desire.

The interface where all your friends show up on a map reminds me quite a bit of Twittervision, though unlike Twittervision, it doesn’t jump around the map. You can, however, see all of your friends on the map and scroll around to them as you see fit.

The other important thing is that you can comment on other people’s status updates. Comments are kept with the original status update so they are easy to find. Also, as people comment on a particular status, it is moved to the top of the most recent status updates list, making it easy to follow active conversations!

I had been comparing this application to Jaiku all day, which Google bought out a while ago. This seems to me like this is next logical step to what Jaiku could have become, though it seems that Google or the Jaiku guys aren’t really saying much about future plans, and certainly haven’t released a new client in quite some time!

One thing that I appreciate that the Nokia Friend View client does is allows you to add friends from the client itself. You get notified of friend requests in real time and can easily accept or reject them. It’d be nice if one could see more profile information before accepting, but it’s a step up from Jaiku!

If you are not blessed enough to have an S60 3rd Edition device, then you can also use the web interface, which offers much the same functionality as the mobile client. However, browser support for the website seems to be limited to Firefox 2.x., Internet Explorer 6.x, and Safari. Various attempts to use Firefox 3.x, Google Chrome, or nightlies of Webkit met with not having the maps load. If you try and use Internet Explorer 7, you get a message saying the browser is not supported.

The service is not perfect, of course, as the service is experimental and the client was launched through Nokia Beta Labs. The only major issue I ran into on the client was that it would crash when I received multiple friend invites and I accepted one of them. A minor issue is that it doesn’t remember the zoom level I chose between sessions.

Things I’d like the service to have include: a proper mobile-friendly version of the website and service, some kind of SMS support, and an open API that would allow integration with third party services (e.g. Twitter) or even third party clients. However, for a first release, I am very impressed!

If you have a Nokia Account (i.e. for Ovi services), you can use it with Nokia Friend View. Otherwise, signing up takes just a minute or two. Once you’ve done that, download it to your Nokia S60 device and give it a try. If you want to add me as a friend, I am phoneboy (and it is case sensitive when you add friends, as I’ve found out).

I hope that my colleagues at Nokia continue to support and develop this service, as it really shows a lot of promise!