SMS on Steroids

By: Alon Cohen

I am sure any one of us at some point or another tried coordinating a dinner or movie with few friends. Using e-mail it is relatively simple, you send a note to a group of people and hope that everyone will use “reply –all” and that the meeting time and place will converge.

However, in this day and age, kids want to do the same using SMS. Normally you can send messages to few people at once but the concept of “reply-all” has not made it yet to SMS specifically since SMS has a “from” field of only one caller ID.

The team at Phone.com decided that there is a way around it and concocted this unpublished unnamed tool that does just that and still is in alpha.

The tool enables you to create an SMS Conference (few to few) with a group where each participant can choose to see accept messages from all the others and can respond to all. The nice thing is that you do not need a special smart phone, it is wad made so cleverly that any SMS device will work. In addition, it is free.

Here is how to use it at your own risk:

To initiate a bridge you need to text to 1-973-577-6378 a list of numbers and corresponding names:

Number 1 Name1 Number2 Name2 …..(and so on)

Use this EXACT format for the phone numbers: 1xxxyyyzzzz

Use one name for each person (with no spaces in the name)

The bridge will respond on with different caller ID that will be your bridge number that you can name and keep in your address book.

Participants will have to accept a request to join before receiving any messages from the bridge.

Once on the bridge you can send “help”, to find out about few more options like how to add or remove people, how to mute people and some other fun features.

Please try it but know this: it is addictive, specifically for family members with teenagers, for students on vacation that want to keep contact and arrange parties or a movie time.

It is not that easy to start, and I know Phone.com may fix it if people will ask.

It is not twitter, as the messages are not public, it is more like a mobile chat room but different in the sense that any phone can use that without any application download.

Let me know what you think.

Our economy needs your help – here is how!

By: Alon Cohen

Whenever someone has an idea, of any sort, which is any good, the most important thing is to socialize that idea with people that can help make that happen – well unless you can do it yourself. Some ideas obviously require capital, and the more socialized they are, the higher the chance that they will be funded and see the light of day. Sometimes and more often than we want, they will just see the light.

One way to socialize ideas is to enter them into an invention contest and even better win. I usually make a point to submit a provisional patent just in case someone wants this really bad, and in case nothing happens, at least I know I created some prior art so everybody will be able to use the idea for the good of others without paying anyone else royalties.

This time I am looking at an idea that I came up with many years ago, to reduce traffic jams. The US and world economy is, as we all know, impeded by the slowness of traffic during rush hours. Reducing the traffic jams problem, on existing roads, without building major new roads can have a dramatic improvement on many aspects of our lives. It can give us the time the economy needs to recuperate.

You can read all about that simple $10 per car concept, here on the competition page of the Tech Briefs site, and see other interesting ideas as well.

The idea is to try and convert regular highly "elastic" and slow line of traffic to a more rigid almost train like line of train cars without giving up control of the car (which is expensive) and by using only our basic normal driving psychology and this low cost idea of a device.

If you want to help me win, and I ask that you do, please register to the site and vote. Every vote counts.

See this video to get more understanding of what this concept is trying to solve, and understand that by dissolving the Phantom Jams as this video names them we can make a difference.

Thanks

Alon

Phone.com, two new products that I like

Dear friends,

Phone.com listens to customers and constantly improve the user experience by adding new convenient services. It is the truth regardless of the fact that I work there.

Today Phone.com introduce two new Mobile Phone Apps:

Phone.com - Mobile Office (fo Android) and Phone.com - Mobile VoIP (for iPhone)

Phone.com Mobile Office is my favorite, it is available for all Android phone users. It can be downloaded free of charge directly from the Android Market. Calls can then be placed from your cell phone but using your Phone.com phone number.

You do not need to dial differently or do anything different with the phone i.e. seamless integration.

It is easy to miss how important and how powerful that feature is for your personal productivity and lifestyle. You no longer have to tell people your cell phone number. This is huge, not because you keep your privacy and really keep the cell phone number for emergencies, but because you now get back control over your life. You can block unwanted calls forever, this is by itself something I learned to appreciate just lately as I have started blocking calls on my Home Phone which is also part of the same Phone.com Virtual Office system.

Another feature which I like in the Phone.com - Mobile Office, is that you can do the same trick spoken above with SMS. Yes, you can send SMS from your phone without showing your cell phone caller ID. And surprise surprise, you can even be text back on the same number which is again your office number.

Among all that Mobile Office also gives easy access to your transcribed voicemail messages, Faxes and SMS messages with the click of a button.

And your own conference bridge accessible with one click.

I am now completely torn. I do not like Apple that much (too arrogant of a company for me, reminding me of Microsoft when they were on the top), but, I have to admit I like the iPhone so far (almost perfect UI even compared to the new Android phones). On the other hand I like the Android approach and the openness. After all, making the same level of application as the Phone.com - Mobile office on the iPhone with seamless integration to all the phone operations (as in the android) is just impossible on the iPhone.

One thing to note is that the Mobile Office app is not a VoIP application it uses your mobile minutes as if you made a regular call but it can sure save you on international dialing. It does enjoy all the new power of Phone.com VoIP back-end.

The app supports all Phone.com services, Virtual Office, Virtual Number and even your Home Phone Plus service.

The second Mobile app that came out today is for iPhone it is called Phone.com - Mobile VoIP

Phone.com - Mobile VoIP allows you to place calls from the iPhone using your Phone.com phone number as your caller ID. Now available at no cost from the iPhone app store the Mobile VoIP app is available to any Phone.com Virtual Office customer. Simply add an iPhone Extension within your Phone.com account, and bypass the use of your mobile minutes (data minutes will apply when using a 3G connection).

This is good when you travel, imagine making international calls from your Wifi connection in your hotel in Panama. I have done it and I can not tell you how much I saved. How about 4Cent a minute for a call from Panama to the US instead of $1.5 per minute. Simply unimaginable savings.

The nice thing is that it also work in 3G so you can mask your cell caller ID wherever you are.

Since it is an extension of your Virtual Office you can use your Phone.com number to make calls where you want to hide your Cell phone number. You can even receive calls to your Phone.com number even if the app is not running since you can make the Virtual Office call your cell as well as your iPhone extension. So all in all a different but also a very powerful tool by itself and it even works on the iPad.

However the app can not stay running in the background even with the new iPhone OS since apple is still not a real multitasking OS. The future will show if Phone.com - Mobile VoIP applications and other like it will be able to have Apple change, but I doubt it will be the case.

Ohh, the app is free to download but will cost you a whooping one time fee of $3.88 :), for the creation of the iPhone extension on your virtual office account. True value in my book.

Thanks

Alon

Inside the Studio with TMC

Alon Cohen, EVP and CTO of Phone.com speaks with Rich Tehrani, CEO of TMC

Saving the Global Economy

By: Alon Cohen

At the end of 2005, we started a journey with few partners and investors to create a nice web site to help people in the community, which are in need of human advice, and financially reward those who are willing to provide the advice.

The concept was simple but challenging in many ways. We set a directory of advisors arranged by ranking. We provided a solution to facilitate payment while evading fraud. We included a mechanism by which the advisor can chat, talk over the phone or do a video session with the client, while we measure the duration of the call and at the end, charge one user, and pay the other.

It was all good until we hit a speed bump. We found that it was hard to explain to the advisors that placing a page on a site is only the start of creating a business. It was hard to explain that an online virtual business is not much different from a physical business. I use to tell advisors that if you hang up a shiny plate on your bedroom door stating, “I am a certified consultant”, you will not get much action going. As in any other business, you have to go out and find ways to bring clients. To solve the problem, we gathered some online resources and communicated those to the advisors so they can use those tools to bring clients.

Our ranking system was a topic by itself, and the company is still perfecting it. It takes into consideration the positive and negative comments an advisor receives, but also the amount of money that the advisor made over time. We took the finical gains of the advisor as an indication that this advisor is providing a service valued by the community.

Moving few years forward and passing through a rough patch in the global economy, we noticed that the people that kept on moving up the ranks are not the Lawyers, not the Registered Dietitians, not the Travel Advisors, not the Doctors or Computer Support people. What we saw is that the most productive people are those who provide an online psychic reading. We also noticed that the bigger spenders are those who are not afraid, and that is most open to learning about the future.

Maybe Wall Street should learn from that, and use some of the advisors on the BitWine site to figure out where the things are going, and use that valuable insight to save the economy.

We did our part already and change the BitWine home page to point to our most productive people the Psychics.

Check this out you may discover something you already know.